Six Hundred and Ten

The first stop was a service area at kilometre two hundred and fourteen, and it took eleven minutes longer than it should have because Kiki would not leave the car with the boxes in it and Raff would not leave her standing in a car park.

They resolved it by carrying the boxes into the café, all three of them, in two trips, and putting them on a table by the window, and eating extremely bad sandwiches on either side of nine kilos of wedding cake while eleven other stranded passengers from the same cancelled flight glared at them for taking a four-seater.

"You could have just moved the car where I could see it," Raff said. And Kiki said, "In four weeks of making this thing I have not once put it somewhere I could not see it, and I am not going to start at kilometre two hundred and fourteen." She looked out at the car park. "Also I am aware that this is not entirely rational and I would appreciate it if you did not point that out for another eight hundred kilometres."

He said that he had no intention of pointing it out at all, and that in his experience the things people were irrational about were usually the things they were correct about, and that he had once driven three hundred kilometres out of his way rather than let a particular box go in a removal van.

Kiki said, "What was in it?" — which was not a question about Ardsmuir and was therefore legal, and which she has admitted since was a deliberate exploitation of the letter of the rules.

Raff Oduya-Kine turned his coffee cup round twice and said, "Sheet music. Forty years of my father's teaching copies with his pencil marks in them." Then he stopped, and looked at her, and said, "That was close to the line." And Kiki said, "It was miles from the line and you know it, and I am not going to ask the next one, so you can stop bracing."

What she did not say, and what she thought about for most of the next two hundred kilometres, was that she had been braced since Vellhaven for the moment when a stranger decided that a cake was a silly thing to be this serious about — and that it had not come at the desk, or in the car park, or over a bad sandwich, and that she was starting to suspect it was not going to.

They got back on the road at twenty past six. She drove the second shift, and drove it well and fast and with an economy of movement that told him she had done a lot of hours, and at about kilometre three hundred he stopped watching the mirrors and went to sleep for forty minutes, which is the first thing that happened between them that neither of them had negotiated.

She has a bakery. That is the short version and it is the version she gives at parties, and it is accurate and tells you nothing.

The long version, which came out somewhere between kilometre three hundred and forty and kilometre four hundred and eleven with him awake in the passenger seat and the sun going down on the left, is that she took over a failing bakery in a town of nine thousand people four years ago with a loan she should not have been given, that she works from half past three in the morning until about two in the afternoon six days a week, that she has four staff and has never once been able to take a week off, and that the wedding cakes are the only part of it she does for love.

"They are the worst money in the trade," she said. "Forty hours of work for a price nobody will pay, and if anything goes wrong it is the worst day of somebody's life and it is your fault. Every baker I know has stopped doing them." She changed lanes. "I do about eleven a year and I would do more if I could afford to."

Raff asked why, which was allowed, and got an answer he did not expect.

"Because it is the only thing I make that people photograph," she said. "Everything else I make gets eaten in a car park at nine in the morning. That is fine — that is the job and I love the job — but nobody has ever taken a picture of a bloomer. A wedding cake gets photographed by a hundred and forty people and then it gets eaten, and forty years later somebody's grandchild finds the photograph in a drawer and there it is." She shrugged. "I am not making a cake. I am making the thing in the back of the photograph. It is the only part of my work that is going to outlive me and it costs me nine days of freesias."

He did not say anything for a long time, and she assumed she had been embarrassing, which she had not.

What he said eventually was, "My father tuned pianos for forty-one years," and Kiki, who is not stupid, understood that she had just been handed something at a very considerable cost, and said only, "Then he will have thought exactly the same thing about the tuning," and put the radio on for the first time in five hours, and did not look at him for eleven minutes.

The Kessock crossing is at kilometre four hundred and ninety and it was shut.

Not for weather; for an incident, which is what the signs say when it is something nobody wants to describe at eight in the evening on a Thursday, and the diversion was signed east through a series of towns and added, by the satnav's estimate, one hour and fifty minutes.

Kiki pulled into the queue and turned the engine off and sat with both hands on the wheel and said, very calmly, "Right," and then did not say anything else, and Raff watched a woman who had solved four problems in six hours arrive at the one she could not.

Because the diversion did not just cost them the time. The rooms at kilometre six hundred and ten were booked and held until eleven, the assembly on Saturday needed six hours and had been costed at six hours precisely, and — this is the part she said last and quietest — the sugar work would not survive an extra two hours in a car in June if the temperature did what the forecast said it would do overnight.

Raff got out of the car. He was gone eleven minutes and came back with two coffees and a plan he had assembled by walking up the queue and talking to a lorry driver, and the plan was that the eastern diversion was for cars and there was a second one, unsigned, for the local traffic that went west through a village and rejoined at the far side of the water, and that it added forty minutes rather than a hundred and ten, and that the lorry driver had said it in a tone which suggested that half the people in that queue would be on it within the hour.

"Why did he tell you that?" said Kiki. And Raff said, "Because I asked him," and then, because she was still looking at him: "I have spent four days in a hospital corridor. You would be amazed what people will tell you if you look like that and ask them one straightforward question."

He heard himself say it. She heard him say it. Neither of them said anything about it for another hundred and twenty kilometres, and she drove the western diversion in the dark through a village with nine street lights while a man beside her looked out of the window at nothing at all, and at the far side, back on the trunk road, she said, "Do you want to talk about the hospital or do you want to talk about anything else in the world?" and he said, "Anything else," and she talked about sugar freesias for forty minutes.

They got to the place at kilometre six hundred and ten at twenty past eleven, which was forty minutes past the hold, and it was open, and the woman on the desk had kept both rooms because Kiki had rung her from the queue at the bridge at ten past nine.

The place was a roadside hotel of the kind that exists entirely for people who are somewhere else, with a car park you can see from every window on the north side, which was the entire reason Kiki had chosen it eleven hours earlier while standing in a queue at an airport.

They carried the boxes in. There was a discussion at the desk which the woman on the desk enjoyed enormously, and which ended with three white boxes on a luggage trolley being wheeled into a walk-in fridge belonging to a hotel kitchen that had closed at nine, on the personal authority of a night manager called Osgur who had been a chef for eleven years before this and who asked to see the freesias and then looked at them for a long time and said one word, which was, "Wired?"

"All hundred and forty," said Kiki. And Osgur said, "By hand?" and Kiki said, "There is no other way," and Osgur said something to her in a language Raff did not have, and Kiki laughed, and Raff Oduya-Kine stood in a hotel corridor at twenty to midnight and understood that he was watching two professionals recognise each other and that he was not part of it and that he did not mind at all.

They had a drink in the bar, which was closed, which the night manager dealt with. They had agreed at the car park in Vellhaven that they were two people sharing petrol, and they had now done six hundred and ten kilometres, a shut bridge, an unsigned diversion and a negotiation about a walk-in fridge, and the terms of the agreement had not been formally revised and were plainly no longer accurate.

Kiki said, "I am going to break rule four." Raff said, "I know." She said, "Not tonight." And he looked at her for a second and then, visibly, let go of something he had been holding since about four o'clock that morning, and said, "Thank you."

They went up at ten past one. At the turn of the corridor she said, "Half past seven?" and he said, "Half past seven," and that was all, and Kiki Balogun-Ward lay awake for about eleven minutes doing arithmetic about a Saturday and then slept for six hours, which is two more than she had slept in a fortnight.