I can’t imagine this pristine house has ever had a sniff of a party popper, much less a crayon.
I can’t resist peering through the doorless doorways of other rooms we pass. A living room with oversized white leather sofas, grey accents, a cream carpet. A dining room with an imposing mahogany table and eight chairs. A conservatory with arguably more light coming in through its enormous windows than there is outside. They’re all decorated in the same colourless colour scheme – a thousand shades of pale, and everything looks ultra-modern. Bram seems more of a colourful vintage type, but this could be something straight from an Ideal Home brochure.
‘Tea?’ His voice floats back down the hallway. I’ve dawdled and he’s disappeared.
‘You’re not in work now, you know.’
‘Always time for tea!’ he calls in that cheery Hatter voice and I follow it to find my way. Imagine having such a big house that you have to hunt for the kitchen. I follow the sound of china clinking and a kettle boiling and come to a large arched doorway that leads into a vast room.
‘Oh my God. Now this is a kitchen.’ I intend to look around in awe, but the first thing I see is a large red fire extinguisher, deliberately placed on the marble worktop opposite the doorway. ‘Very funny.’
He laughs without looking up from the kettle he’s pouring. ‘I was trying to rig it up to open the door by itself, but you arrived before I could figure it out. Thought it might make you feel better if you knew where it was.’
The kitchen is as awe-inspiring as the other rooms. The floor tiles are shiny mirror-glazed white, the cupboard doors are white with gold handles, and the work surface around the units must be pure marble, glistening white with flecks of gold sparkling through it. There’s a fridge and a freezer side by side, both taller than me, and an oven with a screen and so many buttons that you can probably earn some sort of engineering degree just by learning to operate it.
The only bit of colour is a large rectangular magnet on the front of the refrigerator with a slogan on it in a rainbow of blocky letters. It reads ‘this kitchen is for dancing’. ‘Is it?’
‘I’m not much of a rules person, but it’s my one and only rule.’
‘I hope it doesn’t apply to me because I can’t dance.’
‘Neither can I. That’s what makes it fun.’
I suppose I should’ve known that. He can’t sing either, and that really, really doesn’t stop him.
‘So what do you think? Can you make use of it?’
‘Bram, it’s…’ I look at him. His hair is the only thing that’s colourful about him tonight, but the kitchen is so astoundingly plain. I’ve never been to any home that was more unfitting of its owner. Bram is bright in every way, but this house has been to Magnolia Town and hit every branch of the cream tree on the way back. Bram is chaotic. Colourful. Lively. Loud. His house is bland, bland, bland. Everything looks so perfectly positioned that I expect it to be superglued in place, like it belongs in a photoshoot. ‘Yeah, of course. The thing is… I make a mess when I cook.’
‘Messes can be cleaned up,’ he says with a carefree shrug as he places a mug of tea on the unit and nudges it towards me, making the tea swish-swash in the cup and come perilously close to sploshing over the edges.
‘I know, it’s just… you could perform surgery in here, it’s so clinical. Operating theatres aren’t as pristine as this.’
At first, I think he might be offended, but then he grins and says, ‘Oh, so that’s what the team of scrubbed-up surgeons were doing here earlier.’
It’s a joke, but I can’t help feeling slightly uneasy that his house is so big, you could genuinely lose a team of surgeons inside it.
‘Have you eaten?’
I had a sandwich this afternoon in work, but nothing since. ‘By the time I’d got home and showered and changed…’
‘Me neither. Would you like a blueberry flower tart that I made last night?’ He’s already crossed the kitchen floor and opened the giant silver fridge, and when I go to protest, my stomach rumbles instead.
He comes back with a cake tin and opens the lid to reveal a beautiful display of tarts. I didn’t know what a blueberry flower tart was, but it’s a normal blueberry tart where the pastry case has been carefully split into petals and cooked in the shape of a flower, decorated with a big swirl of fresh cream and has a blueberry on the top. It’s simple and yet incredibly effective.
They’re small so I take two and he does the same, and it feels like he’s waiting for my verdict when I bite into one, and they taste as good as they look. The tartness of the blueberry filling perfectly balances the sweetness of the sugared cream and the pastry is buttery and melt-in-the-mouth.
The noise I make must convey how good it is because he bites into his own with a look of satisfaction. He seems so quiet tonight, everything about him is a world away from his usual exasperating self.
He invites me into the living room, but given the colour of his carpets and my unrivalled ability for staining light-coloured things, it’s best to stay put with tea and blueberry tarts. He reaches over to pull up a blind, revealing a window that looks out onto the park-like grounds and greenery surrounding his house, and leans on his elbows, looking out.
There’s nowhere to sit, so I do the same. The light is on inside and it’s getting dark outside, so the reflections block a lot of the view, but I can see neatly mowed grass and flower borders filled with waving daffodils, and a lawn with crocuses growing in it. A bird feeder with birds flying back and forth to it, and a pond in the distance with a trickling water feature. The only thing it’s missing is a few grazing fawns and wandering peacocks to make it into a real country park.
‘It’s not mine, by the way.’
‘What?’
‘The house. If you were wondering how a magician can afford a place like this. It’s my father’s property. He bought it years ago, spent a lot of money making it over, intending to sell it for a huge profit, and then the market crashed and it wasn’t worth selling. People are less likely to break in if it’s occupied, so I live here as a burglar deterrent. I was living in a really run-down hellhole of a block of flats. There was one too many stabbings in the stairwell and my mum took pity on me and persuaded my father that it made sense for me to move in here so the place wouldn’t be standing empty.’
I didn’t realise how relieved I’d be to hear that. ‘Thank God for that. This house is so not you. It’s so scarily different from you. I was starting to think you’d stolen the place from an IKEA catalogue. That makes so much more sense. I knew you wouldn’t voluntarily live somewhere so un-colourful.’
‘I think there’s a compliment buried in there somewhere.’ He tries to hide his grin behind taking a sip of tea. ‘My ex thought I was an embarrassment for being basically a glorified housesitter.’
It’s the first time he’s mentioned an ex or a relationship of any sort, and I can’t help being intrigued by what sort of person Bram would date. ‘I live in a rusty, leaky caravan on my friend’s driveway. I judge no one when it comes to living quarters. Whatever it takes to get through each day, right?’
‘Right.’ His eyes flick to mine and he gives me a small smile that’s full of understanding, and I like how different he is without his Mad Hatter walls up.
When we’ve finished eating, he puts the empty plates and mugs into an under-counter dishwasher, and pushes himself up to sit on the kitchen unit.
My veins are thrumming with nerves. I couldn’t bake in Marnie’s kitchen by myself the other night. Surely trying to do anything in an unfamiliar kitchen with Bram watching can only end in disaster.
There’s a couple of bookshelves on one wall, packed with beautiful recipe books, and he’s put out a pile of baking equipment, from mixing bowls to spatulas and measuring cups and cupcake cases, baking tins and oven trays, and keeps telling me to help myself to anything.
I brought a recipe with me, because I’m determined not to fail this time. A recipe for a batch of basic fairy cakes. The kind of recipe that can’t go wrong. Children make fairy cakes. I made fairy cakes with my mum when I was about six. I cannot have been better at baking at six than I am at thirty-four.
‘It must’ve been nice to grow up with a family tearoom…’ It’s clearly a leading sentence, and I’m sure he can sense my nerves and is trying to distract me.
I’m not sure how to answer him, but I measure out butter and sugar and cream them together, and the noise of the electric whisk convinces me that he won’t be able to hear what I’m saying anyway. ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Mum hosted an Unbirthday party for me – ironically on the day it actually was my tenth birthday. She invited all my school friends to the tearoom, and she’d made a real Unbirthday cake, exactly like the pink one with blue flowers the Mad Hatter gives Alice in the animated film. When I blew out the candles, I made a wish that life would always be as magical as it was then and that I’d be like my mum when I grew up too. That was the last birthday before she left and life changed drastically.’
