Our Noble Selves

Flynn and Miss Ogilvie had been given no part to play in the blind judging of the Festival Cake. Denholm had requested their presence merely as observers—messengers who would convey the verdict back to Savoy Court. Flynn was there as the titular head (and, in fact, only member) of the Cake Subcommittee.

Miss Ogilvie, as far as Flynn could tell, had been asked simply because she was a woman. The rival confections had finally been baked and decorated at an unearthly hour by Denholm’s “suitable women” in a test kitchen lent to them by Lyons, and then ferried all the way across London to the boardroom of the Royal Society of Arts in John Adam Street. It had been a downbeat affair, held “in camera,” the judges assembling around an enormous mahogany table on which the runners and riders were displayed.

Plates and cake forks were distributed by a young waitress also borrowed from Lyons, from the Corner House on Coventry Street, who cut the cakes and handed round slices to the judges. (Both Flynn and Miss Ogilvie shied away at the nippy’s approach.) It was still early and some of them looked rather queasy. Someone murmured something about bacon and eggs being more appropriate at this time of day. The judges were a job lot, conscripted apparently unwillingly into their unpaid role–an Italian sous chef from Rules; a man in a loud plaid suit whose name and occupation were never mentioned; the authoress of a Handy Hints book; a journalist from Woman’s Realm; and a man with a strong Birmingham accent who said he wrote miscellaneous columns for the Evening Standard.

This was not the case for one—an egregious offering that dwarfed all the others, like a cuckoo in a wren’s nest. It was an extraordinarily bombastic affair, reminiscent of a cathedral dome and embellished in a baroque manner, swagged and garlanded with icing, studded with angelica and sugared almonds, and dotted with glace cherries in garish trafficlight colours. The woman who had compiled the Handy Hints book helpfully explained these technical details to Flynn, whispering in his ear like someone translating a foreign language.

The whole was topped not by a cupola or a cross but a small pennant, on which the Festival emblem had been drawn in crayons in a rather amateurish hand. The Handy Hints woman (he never did manage to catch her name) had somehow acquired the idea that Flynn’s battered face was the result of a traffic accident, and she occasionally placed her plump hand on top of his and gave it a sympathetic squeeze. More rococo extravagance was revealed when the cake was cut into by the little Lyons nippy.

It was in fact an unholy mess, not just of sponge but also meringue (the Handy Hints woman again). Raspberry jam oozed from between the layers like sticky blood. She remained impassive, the faintest trace of a sardonic smile on her lips the only clue to her thoughts.