They made their own entertainments too, and going by the pictures on Facebook of Adam messing about on Ski-Doos and in the snow with his new friends, he’d found a few ways to occupy his spare time.
Of course, we’d constantly emailed and chatted via Facebook, and sometimes he could call me, though not the other way round. But as time passed he seemed to become less and less interested in anything outside the base … I suppose that’s a bit like hospital, where your real world shrinks to your immediate surroundings and everything else seems remote and unimportant.
I expected that would change once he came home, even if I did feel nervous about our reunion. And there was a sticky moment at the airport, when he looked like an unshaven stranger as he came through into the arrivals hall. But when he spotted me and smiled there was that instant feeling of connection, just like the first time we’d met, and I ran straight into his arms. He’d kissed me, then said, looking genuinely startled, that he’d forgotten how pretty I was!
We went back to my flat and that evening everything was all right between us – in fact, it was more than all right. He was tired and abstracted, not helped by a call from a colleague, though what could be that urgent about Antarctic pond life I couldn’t imagine at the time. His end of the conversation was a bit terse.
I should have smelled a rat right then, because next morning it was like Jekyll and Hyde revisited: right after breakfast he suddenly announced he’d already signed up for another eighteen months in Antarctica and, moreover, he’d met someone else up there and she was going back in April, too.
Of course I was devastated and furious. I told him to get out of my flat and my life and he’d packed up his stuff and left within the hour, with my parting shot that I hoped they both fell down an Antarctic crevasse on their next tour of duty ringing in his ears.
Toto, gleefully grasping that the hated interloper was out of favour, managed to sink his teeth into Adam’s ankle at the last minute, which would give him something to remember us by till all the little puncture wounds healed up again.
It was only much later that I realised that Adam had left me a much longer-lasting and life-changing memento.
Once Stella was out of immediate danger, Celia needed to get back to her husband, four rescue greyhounds and six cats in Southport, who were all pining for her.
I would also pine for her, though she’d promised to return when Stella was finally allowed home.
Ma was staying on for a few more days, though I was sure she was dying to head straight back up north, too. In fact, I was surprised she’d stayed as long as she had.
When I was growing up in Hampstead I’d thought she’d seemed happy enough, though she was always fairly reclusive and preoccupied with her work, of course, but she sold up and moved back with alacrity to the Lancashire village where she was born after Dad died.
‘Ma’ is not some cute contraction of ‘Mum’, but a relic of her early attempts to get me to call her by her Christian name, Martha. She was never much like any of my school friends’ mothers, delegating most of her maternal responsibilities to a series of foreign au pairs, but I’d never doubted that in her way she loved me. And Anna, the final and most beloved of the au pairs, a tall, blonde, Swedish domestic goddess, had instilled my love of cooking and baking, so it worked out brilliantly for me.
I emailed Anna the news about Stella and received a warm, reassuring reply straight away: she’d always had the power to make me feel comforted, an effect that has also rubbed off onto the cakes she taught me to make.
I decided that for Stella’s first birthday I would make her a prinsesstårta, that most splendid of Swedish celebration cakes.
‘You are going to tell Adam about Stella at some point soon, aren’t you?’ Celia asked, just before she finally set off home.
‘No! Why should I, after he accused me of getting pregnant on purpose when I told him she was on the way and then suggested I get an abortion?’
‘I know he didn’t want the baby, but now she’s arrived he might feel differently,’ she suggested. Having an incredibly generous heart she was always looking for the best in everyone, even my absent ex-fiancé, Adam Scott – or ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, as Ma generally referred to him.
‘I don’t think so. Anyway, he’s changed his email address and I couldn’t phone him in Antarctica even if I wanted to, which I don’t.’
‘Facebook?’
‘I’ve blocked him.’
‘I still think he ought to know,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He has a responsibility to support you, too.’
‘I don’t want his support and I’m sure he still wouldn’t be interested – even less so in a baby with health problems, because he’s got that phobia about illness and hospitals, remember?’
‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. So perhaps you’re right, but if he hears about the baby from anyone, he may contact you when he comes back to the UK.’
‘I doubt it, and it wouldn’t be till October of next year, when Stella—’
I broke off, swallowing hard, and she said quickly, ‘Stella will be walking and saying her first words by then, you’ll see. The operation went well, didn’t it?’
‘Yes, but they made it plain they couldn’t fix everything in one go and would have to wait and see how her condition developed. She seems to be making progress.’
‘The body has great powers of self-healing,’ Celia said firmly.
I clung to that thought after she’d gone back to Southport: once I finally got her home, Stella and I would take the future one step at a time, savouring each moment like a special gift.
Long before Stella’s due date I’d stockpiled articles for my two regular publication slots: the ‘Tea & Cake’ page in Sweet Home magazine, which are quick, easy recipes, and my Sunday newspaper supplement one, ‘The Cake Diaries’, which have more complicated recipes along with some quirky background history, or stories about where I first came across a particular cake, thrown into the mix.
I usually work months in advance for magazines anyway, filing my Christmas articles in summer and my summer articles in winter, but this time I had almost a year’s worth in reserve. This foresight proved to be a very good idea, given the distractions and alarms of Stella’s first weeks, because the pieces all came out just as if nothing was going on in my life but baking and eating cakes.
Of course, I’d missed out on all the extra articles and assignments that would normally have come my way during this time, which usually put a bit of icing on the gingerbread of life. Once Stella was home, I knew I needed to get back into the groove as quickly as possible, even though this wasn’t going to be easy with a brain occupied entirely with worried thoughts wrapped in a thick fuzzy blanket of hope.
I hadn’t even lost any baby-weight, either – in fact, due to lack of activity and comfort eating, I’d put more on – so when I inadvertently caught sight of my stolid, stodgy pale nakedness in the bedroom mirror soon after Stella finally came home, I thought I looked just like a lardy cake.
Oh, lardy me!
I sat down on the bed and wept, and once I’d started I found I couldn’t stop for ages, which I expect was all the hormones still whizzing about in my system. But at least it was cathartic. It finally shook me out of the zombie trance and set me back onto the researching, experimental baking and writing