a wedding cake up to a month in advance. Leon was sous chef and he took the job seriously. Even when he’d been younger there had never been a time when it had been okay to lick the bowl.
‘That is for inbreeders. If you are happy to eat the batter, why bother cooking it at all?’
His father taught him to prick the cake using the thinnest skewer, to make sure it was properly baked. The ritual was carried out with every cake, even though no cake had ever been too wet. ‘It’s all mathematic formula – like Albert Einstein,’ he would say, weighing up the ratio of flour to egg and the weight to the wetness. ‘You make a mistake and it’s only down to your own stupidity,’ sagely extracting the perfectly clean skewer, steaming hot, and fixing Leon with a look that conveyed that something of grave importance was going on.
The icing was white like light in a copper pan or the sun off the water. It burnt a flash into your eye. It was shaped into a brick and rolled out flat like a pillowcase, then folded back in on itself until it was thin and could be draped over the cake in one piece. Dressing the lady, his father called it, and he thumbed the sheet gently into the creases of the cake, like he was circling a narrow waist. Then he would line up his coloured dyes, each thumb-sized bottle with a handwritten label, every shade of colour separately explained: Buck-eye Brown – the approximate softness of antler moss; Baker’s Rose – a warm cheek; Australian Copper – flesh tone; Holiday Red – a fun-time girl’s lips.
Glancing at the notes he had made about the couple to be married and talking the process through with Leon, his father would add tiny amounts of dye to the unset marzipan.
‘She had a beautiful mouth, that young lady – almost the same colour as her cheeks, but so big, those lips.’ A single drop of red dye would spider out, an ink spot on white linen, and find its way into the creases of white sugar. Pounded with a wooden spoon, the pops and cracks of air bubbles bursting against the side of the stoneware bowl would reach the shopfront where his mother served the everyday cakes. From the blanket of white would come the hue of skin. A dot of blue and yellow produced the lawn for the couple to stand on, the earth that cemented them to their wedding day, the memory of wet grass, the touch of each other’s hands, damp from attention.
Once the marzipan had rested, his father took pinches of each colour and lined them up on the back of a hard-backed cookery book, which he would hand to Leon. He’d talk him through rolling and kneading, teaching him, not too much, but just enough – don’t make the sugar sweat.
Out of Leon’s paws came a crumbling mess, a mix of nose and hat, of shoe and skin that ran together from the heat of his palms, blending grey in the middle. Out of his father’s hands a tiny sculpture, a person in a pleated dress, with a nose like a blade, grasping her wedding handkerchief, thin as a leaf, perfectly able to stand on her own two feet. Undiluted dye picked out the lips and eyes. The black dye was used only on the man – for his hair and shoes, sometimes a moustache if his father was feeling playful. He never used black on the bride. ‘Black is black,’ he would say quietly, his face close to the statue he was working on, his eyes fixed, ‘but brown is a mixture of everything. Brown is better for a woman. When painting a woman you must dip your brush in a rainbow.’ He would look at Leon here, stop his work to ask, ‘You know who said that?’ When Leon shook his head he would go back to work, as if he’d decided not to tell him a great secret. ‘Well, whoever it was, he knew his women.’
When he was younger Leon would poke his tongue out of the side of his mouth and frown as his hand shook with the effort of stillness, and his paint-brush gave his monster bride a red slash on the head, a beard instead of eyebrows or a target on her chest instead of a flower.
His father would sit the pair next to each other, and examine