Doctor Who_ Camera Obscura - Lloyd Rose [54]
‘I only –’
‘I turned thirty-three in Spain,’ he said abruptly.
‘You did?’ she said after a beat.
‘Yeah. In Guernica, actually. Bloody awful birthday.’
She wasn’t sure what they were talking about. ‘Fitz, I –’
‘I’m late,’ he said, and went down the stairs.
Anji went up to the TARDIS.
‘You’re both acting weird,’ she called from the middle of the empty console room. ‘One of you had better come and talk to me, and it can’t be Fitz because he’s got a personality transplant and gone off to some bloody science lecture. Nineteenth-century science too! He’ll have to unlearn it all!’
‘Why? He’s unlikely to apply it in any other century.’ The Doctor had appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was in his shirt sleeves with a dishtowel stuffed in the waist of his trousers and was liberally dusted with flour.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I thought I’d make a cake.’
‘What?’ She followed him into the kitchen.
‘A Lady Baltimore cake. American Southern confection. Rather complicated icing.’
There was more flour on the counters. Also eggshells and smears of butter and a large pale green ceramic bowl Anji had never seen before. She peeked in. It was full of sugar and chunks of butter.
‘I mean “Why?”,’ she corrected.
‘Why what?’ The Doctor was looking around with an absent frown.
‘Why are you making a cake?’
‘Sometimes you just have to take the time to stop and smell the flour.’ The Doctor paused, clearly pleased with what Anji thought was actually a pretty insipid pun. She maintained a neutral expression. The Doctor masked his disappointment. Casually, he turned, spotted a bottle of vanilla hiding behind the flour canister, and pounced on it triumphantly. Anji sighed and sat at the table. She watched him mess about with measuring spoons and a kitchen scale.
‘Sabbath killed that magician?’
‘Had it done.’ The Doctor began to cream the butter and sugar with a fork.
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s an ass!’ The Doctor set down the bowl a bit too heavily and ran his fingers through his hair, leaving specks of butter in it. ‘And he makes me behave like one too. I know better, but it still happens.’
‘You’re just angry,’ she said. ‘Why shouldn’t you be angry?’
‘I shouldn’t give in to it. There’s no profit there.’ He returned to the mixing bowl. ‘It won’t get me what I want.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Mmm?’ He stared into the bowl in concern. ‘Would you mind looking for the raisins?’
‘Raisins?’
‘Yes. I’m sure we have some, but I couldn’t find them earlier.’ She tried to divert the conversation back to its earlier track. ‘What do you want?’
‘Raisins. I just said.’
‘Doctor,’ she began – but now he was frowning worriedly at the cookbook.
‘You have to use the soft-ball method to test the icing. I’ve never understood that.’
‘Doctor...’
‘I mean, is it supposed to form a ball as it hits the water? And how can you tell if it’s soft or hard without taking it back out of the water? By which time, won’t it have hardened anyway?’
She was about to say, ‘You can work a time machine, surely you can figure out the soft-ball method of testing icing!’, then she remembered that wasn’t strictly true. Instead she asked, ‘Don’t you have a sugar thermometer?’
He brightened. ‘Yes. I’m sure there’s one around here somewhere.’ He smiled at her. ‘Would you mind looking for it?’
Briefly, she held her ground. ‘We’re not going to talk about any of this, are we?’
‘No,’ he said softly, ‘we’re not.’ Then he smiled again, but not his charming dazzler – a sympathetic smile, self-deprecating, even a shade rueful. ‘But we’re going to have a very fine cake.’
* * *
Chapter Twelve
On a bench beneath one of the large, leafy trees a man sat shivering. He was big and healthy-looking and well-dressed, but his face was slack with some inexpressible inner pain. Anji knew this because, though she realised it was a foolish question to a patient at an insane asylum, she had asked him what was the matter. He had looked up at her frankly and