Same Time Tomorrow

Chapter One: The Hours Nobody Wants

The city of Bath slept badly, Elise Marchant had decided, and she liked it better for that.

At one in the morning the cobbles on Fennimore Lane held the last of the day's rain, and the streetlamps laid down long yellow smears that the puddles refused to keep still. Somewhere beyond the crescent a taxi door slammed. A gull argued with a bin. Otherwise the lane belonged to her, and to the narrow blue-fronted shop with gold lettering that read CAPET & CO. — PÂTISSERIE, EST. 1994, and to the warmth breathing out of the kitchen vent above the back step.

Elise unlocked the rear door, hung her coat on the hook that had been hers for six months, and turned on the lights one bank at a time, the way she always did. She liked the kitchen to wake up slowly. First the prep counter, its marble slab pale as a moon. Then the ovens, which took forty minutes to come to temperature and hummed like something large and patient sleeping. Then the proofer, then the mixer bay, then, last, the awful strip light over the sink that made everyone look like a corpse.

She tied her apron. She washed her hands until the water ran too hot. She took the butter block out of the walk-in and set it on the counter to lose its edge.

This, she thought, was the whole of her happiness now: a room with no one in it.

It hadn't always been. Two years ago she'd have said happiness looked like a Sunday roast with someone's arm along the back of her chair, like being known. Peter Blackstone had been very good at knowing her. He had known what she'd eaten, and who she'd texted, and why she was late by four minutes, and which of her friends were bad influences, and what she really meant when she said she was tired. He had known her so thoroughly that by the end there had been nothing left of her that he hadn't handled, turned over, and put back in a slightly different place.

Six months ago she had put her things in three bin bags and a suitcase and moved into Pippa Greenlaw's spare room in Larkhall, and the following week she had asked Françoise Ravet whether the overnight shift was still going, and Françoise had looked at her over the top of her glasses for a long moment and said, "It is going. It has been going for a year and nobody wants it."

"I want it."

"Of course you do," Françoise had said. "You have the face of a woman who wants to be left alone. I will leave you alone. But eat something occasionally, or I will start feeding you, and I am French, so you will not survive it."

So: midnight to seven. Elise mixed the doughs and laminated the butter, folding and turning and resting, the slow arithmetic of croissants. She weighed and proofed and shaped. She listened to the radio at a volume just above hearing and sang along badly to songs she didn't like. Around five the first tray came out gold and shattering and the smell filled the room until it seemed to press against the windows, wanting out. At seven she washed down the surfaces, wrote the day's notes for the front of house, and cycled home along the river with the sun coming up over Pulteney Bridge and the rowers already out, and slept till three in the afternoon with a pillow over her head.

It was a punishing schedule. That was rather the point. Nobody could reach her inside it. There were no colleagues to make small talk with, no invitations, no birthdays, no one saying you look tired, are you all right, you've got so thin, have you thought about — She had a kitchen and a bicycle and a flatmate who let her be silent at breakfast, and the slow, restoring monotony of work done well with her hands.

Tonight she made the croissant dough, then the pain au chocolat, then a tray of financiers that were technically Françoise's recipe but which Elise had been quietly improving for four months by browning the butter twice. She was piping frangipane at half past four when she heard the front door and stiffened.

"It is only me," Françoise called. "Do not stab anyone."

Françoise Ravet was sixty-eight and built like a garden wall, small and immovable, with a grey bob and half-moon glasses on a chain and rings on four fingers. She came into the kitchen already talking, unwinding a scarf the colour of aubergines.

"You are wondering why I am here at this ridiculous hour."

"I assumed the shop was on fire."

"Worse." Françoise put a folded brochure on the marble, in the one clean spot, which Elise noted with pain. "I am going to enter the Southwest Artisan Baking Showcase."

Elise wiped her hands. She picked up the brochure. Glossy paper, photographs of trestle tables and rosettes, a picture of a smiling man holding a lemon tart as though it had recently rescued him from drowning.

"Bristol," she said. "Ten weeks away."

"Nine and a half. The winner and the runners-up are given contracts with a distributor. Regional at first. National, if they like you." Françoise's chin came up. "Do you know what that would mean for this shop?"

Elise did. She knew what the till was doing; she knew Françoise had renegotiated the lease twice and lost both times; she knew there were three chain bakeries within a ten-minute walk selling croissants that had been frozen in another country and reheated by a teenager.

"It would mean," said Elise carefully, "that you'd need a lot more oven capacity."

"It would mean I could die owning something." Françoise waved a hand at Elise's expression. "Do not look like that, I am extremely healthy, I intend to be a nuisance for another thirty years. Now. Listen. The entry is a portfolio. Twelve original recipes, developed as a collaboration — they are very insistent about this, they want to see two hands, they want the philosophy of the kitchen, all the usual pretentious nonsense. Twelve, presented live on the day, with a written development record."

"Twelve," said Elise.

"Twelve."

"Original."

"Original."

Elise looked at the tray of frangipane. She thought about the black sesame she'd bought on impulse three weeks ago and hadn't used. She felt something in her chest turn over, hungry, and distrusted it immediately.

"I can do the doughs," she said. "Laminated, brioche, choux. Custards. I'm not a decorator, Françoise. I can't do sugar work. I can't do the — the pretty parts."

"I know. That is why I have hired someone."

The room got very quiet. The ovens hummed.

"Hired," said Elise.

"A pastry chef. Days. He starts Monday. His name is Tom Wareham and he has come back from London, from a restaurant with a great deal of tweezers, and he is very good and he is not expensive because his mother is having a hip replaced and he needs to be here." Françoise said all of this in one breath and then folded her arms, defensive. "He will finish and decorate what you build. You will build in the night. He will finish in the day."

"And when do we speak to each other?"

"You don't." Françoise smiled. It was not entirely innocent. "You will keep a notebook. On the counter. You write what you have made and what he must do with it; he writes back what he wants from you tomorrow. Weights, temperatures, ideas. Everything in the book."

Elise put down her piping bag. Relief moved through her so plainly that she was ashamed of it. Not a person. A book. A book she could handle.

"Fine," she said.

"You are not going to argue?"

"You've already hired him."

"Yes, but you usually argue anyway." Françoise picked up a financier from the cooling rack, bit it, and paused. Her eyes narrowed. "You have changed my recipe."

"I brown the butter twice."

"Hm." Françoise ate the rest of it. "Do it in the portfolio."

She left. Elise stood in the empty kitchen with the brochure in her hand and the smell of almonds around her, and admitted, in the privacy of four in the morning, that she was excited, and that this frightened her more than the work did.

At six-fifty she wiped the marble, laid out the day's trays, and found, in the drawer under the till, a school exercise book with a soft grey cover. Someone — Françoise, in her enormous looping hand — had written on the front: LE CAHIER. RESPECT IT.

Elise took a pencil. She thought for a while.

Then she wrote:

Mon. Croissant dough (3 turns, rested), pain au choc, brioche in the cold retard bottom shelf DO NOT MOVE IT. Frangipane in the blue tub. Sesame paste in the door of the walk-in is mine and is for an idea, please leave it.

She considered adding something friendly. Welcome, perhaps. Looking forward to working with you.

She looked at the words she'd already written, closed the book, and went home.