It was no surprise to anyone who knew the family that Issy Randall grew up to be the straightest, most conventional girl imaginable. Good A-levels, good college and now a good job with a thrusting commercial property company in the City. By the time she was ready to start work, Gramps’s bakeries were all sold: victims of his getting older and the changing times. And she had an education, he had pointed out (sadly, she sometimes thought); she didn’t want to be getting up at sparrow’s fart and doing hard manual labour for the rest of her life. She was set for better things.
But deep down she had a passion for kitchen comforts – for cream horns, balanced with the perfect weight of caterer’s cream and light, flaky pastry, set off by the crunchiest diamond crystals of clear sugar; for hot cross buns, baked at Randall’s strictly during Lent and Lent only, their cinnamon and raisins and orange peel spreading an exciting, sticky smell to half the road; for a perfectly piped butter icing on top of the highest, lightest, floatiest lemon cupcake. Issy loved all of those things. Hence her project with Gramps: to get as many of his recipes down on paper as possible, before, although neither of them ever referred to it, but before, or in case, he started to forget them.
‘I got an email from Mum,’ said Issy. ‘She’s in Florida. She’s met a man called Brick. Really. Brick. That’s his name.’
‘At least it’s a man this time,’ sniffed her grandfather.
Issy gave him a look. ‘Ssh. She said she might be home for my birthday. In the summer. Of course she said she’d be home for Christmas but she wasn’t.’
Issy had spent Christmas in the home with Gramps. The staff did their best, but it wasn’t all that great.
‘Anyway.’ Issy attempted a smile. ‘She sounds happy. Says she loves it over there. Said I should send you over for some sun.’
Issy and Gramps looked at one another and burst out laughing. Joe got tired out crossing the room.
‘Yes,’ said Gramps, ‘I’ll just go catch the next plane to Florida. Taxi! Take me to London Airport!’
Issy tucked the sheet of paper away in her handbag and stood up.
‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘Um, keep doing the recipes. But you can keep them quite, you know, normal if you like.’
‘Normal.’
She kissed him on the forehead.
‘See you next week.’
Issy got off the bus. It was freezing, with dirty ice on the ground left over from a short day’s snowfall just after New Year. At first it had looked pretty, but now it was getting a little ropy round the edges, especially poking through the wrought-iron fencing of the Stoke Newington Municipal Offices, the rather grand edifice at the end of her street. Still, as ever, Issy felt pleased to be stepping down. Home, Stoke Newington, the bohemian district that she’d stumbled upon when she moved south.
The smell of hookahs from the little Turkish cafés on Stamford Road mingled with the incense sticks from the Everything for a Pound shops, jostling next to expensive baby boutiques that sold children’s designer wellingtons and one-off wooden toys, perused by shoppers with Hasidic ringlets, or headscarves; crop tops and patois; young mothers with buggies; older mothers with double buggies. Despite her friend Tobes once joking that it was like living in the bar in Star Wars, Issy loved it all. She adored the sweet Jamaican bread; the honey baklava sitting out by the cash registers in the grocers; little Indian sweets of dried milk and sugar, or dusty slabs of Turkish delight. She liked the strange cooking smells in the air as she came home from work, and the jumble of buildings; from a handsome square of pretty flat-fronted houses to blocks of flats and red-brick conversions. Albion Road was lined with odd shops, fried chicken joints, cab firms and large grey houses. It was neither commercial nor residential but lay somewhere in between; one of the great winding thoroughfares of London that once upon a time had led to its outlying villages, and now connected its suburbs.
The grey houses were stately, Victorian and potentially expensive. Some of them remained grotty sub-divided flats with bicycles and damp wheelie bins cluttering up the front gardens. These boasted several doorbells with names crudely taped to them, and recycling boxes piled high on the kerb. Some of them, though, had been reconverted into houses and gentrified, with reclaimed oak front doors, topiary trees on the steps and expensive curtains leading to polished hardwood flooring and stripped-back fireplaces and big mirrors. She loved the area’s mix of shabby and new, traditional, rough and ready and smart and alternative, with the towers of the City on the horizon, and the tumbledown churchyard and crowded pavements … All types of people lived in Stokey; it felt like a microcosm of London; a village that reflected the city’s true heart. And it was more affordable than Islington.
Issy had lived here for four years, since she moved out of south London and on to the property ladder. The only downside had been moving out of range of the tube. She’d told herself that didn’t matter, but sometimes, on an evening like this with the wind cutting between the houses and turning noses into red dripping taps, she thought perhaps it did. Just a bit. It was all right for the posh yummy mummies in the big grey houses, they all had 4×4s. She did wonder sometimes, when she saw them out with their huge, expensive buggies and tiny, expensive bodies … she did wonder how old they were. Younger than her? Thirty-one wasn’t old, not these days. But with their toddlers and their highlights and their houses with one wall covered in smart wallpaper … she did wonder. Sometimes.
Just behind the bus stop was a little close. It was lined with tiny shops, older places that had been left behind by the Victorian development. Once upon a time they would have been stables, or costermonger’s; they were quirky, and oddly shaped. There was an ironmonger’s with ancient brushes round the door, old-fashioned toasters for sale at inflated prices and a sad-looking washing machine that had been sitting in the front window for as long as Issy had been coming to the bus stop; a telephone/wifi/internet office that stayed open at strange hours and invited you to send money to places, and a newsagent that faced on to the road and was where Issy picked up magazines and Bountys.
Right at the very end of the row, tucked into the corner, was a building that looked like an afterthought; somewhere to use up the spare stones. It was pointed at one end, where a triangular corner of glass stuck out towards the road, widening into a bench, with a door coming out on to a small cobbled courtyard with a tree in it. It looked quite out of place, a tiny haven in the middle of a village square; something absolutely out of time – like, Issy had once reflected, an illustration by Beatrix Potter. All it needed were bottle-glass windows.