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. “Under duress, in my defence,” she said to Denholm.

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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. “And if there’s an obituary, then it’s me that’ll have written it.”

The cakes were mostly straightforward iced and decorated affairs, and were nothing that the man—or more likely the woman—in the street wouldn’t recognize as cake. 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’s hardly an austerity cake, is it?” Miss Ogilvie remarked to no one in particular.

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. “And marzipan,” the Handy Hints woman murmured, “there’s a surprise.”

Flynn glanced at Miss Ogilvie. She remained impassive, the faintest trace of a sardonic smile on her lips the only clue to her thoughts. The Woman’s Realm woman ushered them out of the room.

*

Apparently the judging required the kind of secrecy usually afforded a papal conclave. Flynn stood outside on the pavement with Miss Ogilvie. She refused his offer of a cigarette, but relented when he lit up and said, “Perhaps I will indulge, after all. It’s Maud, by the way. My name. Although I think we should observe the proprieties when we’re in the office.”

“Of course. I’m Harry.” “I know.”

They smoked their cigarettes down to the filter and Flynn said, “What do you think–have they sent up the white smoke yet?”

“Let’s go in and see.”

The conclave had indeed chosen its pontiff. “II Duomo,” the sous chef from Rules said. The ridiculous cathedral-like cake? The man in the loud suit made a great ceremony of revealing the name of the champion who had baked it. “Mitzi Blinkhorn.”

Had the judges lost their marbles? Why, out of all the entrants, choose this particular creation? Flynn asked the Handy Hints woman. “So festive,” she said gaily. There was general rather sly laughter at this, and it struck Flynn that for some, possibly malicious, reason, this cabal had decided to choose not the best cake but the worst one. Or as a joke, perhaps. Flynn tried to imagine housewives across the land struggling to create this monstrous concoction. His Presbyterian mother would have been appalled. She favoured the punishing plain–a gritty seed cake or a sandy Madeira.

Or was the whole thing a connivance and Mitzi Blinkhorn always destined to win, thanks to some Machiavellian manipulation behind the scenes?

“A conspiracy of some kind?” Maud Ogilvie speculated thoughtfully. “I hear that Miss Blinkhorn is a friend of Mr. Dangerfield.”

“Really?”

“Perhaps he owes her a favour.” She laughed. “Who knows what dark arts have been employed to bring about the result.”

“But it is just a cake though,” Flynn protested. Dark arts seemed rather hyperbolic to his ears. “This lot don’t seem like Freemasons or Templars.” (Evans would probably disagree.)

“Nothing is ever ‘just’ something, Harry. You must surely know that.”

The nippy, with an impish grin, said, “Here you go,” handing Flynn a piece of cake on a plate. Was she in on the plot? The kipper he had attempted at breakfast in a Kardomah restaurant on Southampton Row rebelled.

Maud Ogilvie waved the nippy away. (“Not for me, dear.”) “In my defence,” she said to Flynn, “I am a diabetic.” She was not without guile, Flynn realized. She always had a biscuit with her elevenses and another with her tea in the afternoon, and only yesterday he had watched her dip into a sample box of “Festival Fruit Gums” sent to them by Rowntree’s and brought in by the Boy. There was nothing that had escaped being stamped with the Festival’s ubiquitous emblem–sweets, cigarettes, perfume, even sandals–Specially designed to keep you cool and smartly shod for fun-loving Festival walking! Flynn had been for a drink with a girl whose job was to place adverts in the various Festival guides and brochures and who spoke mostly in panegyrics. It had been an exhausting evening of exclamation marks: (Daks—the famous comfort in action trousers!) as she listed the many companies that she had persuaded to endorse the Festival or sponsor things in the funfair (“Schweppes-a grotto!”).

Maud Ogilvie smiled amiably at Flynn, as if waiting for a challenge. “Lucky you,” he said, throwing in his hand.

“Maybe we could meet up on another occasion?” the plump-handed Handy Hints woman said to Flynn as he was leaving. “Coffee or a drink, perhaps?”

“Perhaps,” Flynn said politely.

“Women are attracted to you, aren’t they?” Maud Ogilvie said as they made their way out of the building. It sounded like a criticism.

“I genuinely don’t know why,” he said.

“Oh, don’t apologize, Mr. Flynn. Shall we walk back?”

Without waiting for an answer, she set off at an alarmingly brisk pace. Her black gaberdine was unbuttoned and flapped in the wind so that she looked as though she was about to take off Flynn had to run to catch up with her.

*

Back in the office, Evans was toiling over the pageants, covering a sheet of paper in his neat nonconformist hand, occasionally muttering in disbelief “Jousting? Jousting? They want jousting?” Or “They’re spending fifty pounds, sixteen shillings and sixpence on wigs?” He had been given no oversight on the various pageants’ spending (no official authority over them at all, in fact), but nonetheless they seemed compelled to report their expenditure to the fiscally frugal Evans.

Denholm appeared and said, “Went the day well, Mr. Flynn? Is there news on the Festival Cake front? Who took the laurels?”

“Mitzi Blinkhorn.”

“Oh, God,” Denholm said. “She was the one they chose. Really?”

“‘Fraid so,” Flynn said.

“She’s an awful woman.”

“Who is?” the Boy asked, perking up at the idea of awfulness.

“Mitzi Blinkhorn,” Maud Ogilvie said.

The Boy gave a snort of disbelief “Bloody hell. What kind of a moniker is that?”

“Don’t swear,” Evans said.

“You know her?” Flynn asked Denholm.

“Everyone knows Mitzi.”

“I don’t,” the Boy said.

“You don’t count,” Evans said.

“Why did you include her in your list of suitable women if she’s so awful?” Flynn asked.

“Me? God, no, no, not me,” Denholm protested. “I think her name was added later. By Dangerfield, probably.”

“Did you bring some cake back with you, Mr. Flynn?” the Boy asked.

“No. And be grateful I didn’t.”

Denholm glanced at his watch and said, “Speaking of the devil, I’ve got lunch with Dangerfield over in Simpson’s. He’s very keen on punctuality. You’re late if you’re on time. But he’ll be delighted with the result.”

“Not that it’s of any interest to anyone, least of all me,” Evans said when Denholm had melted away, “but I’ve been given a list of ‘pageantmasters,’ which is a job I never even knew existed until recently. Ede, Paine, Swinson, Gwen Lally–she’s rather frightening. Here’s a Mr. Gilmore from Brighton, who was ‘formerly pageantmaster to the King of Siam.’ If Mr. Gilmore could handle the King of Siam, then perhaps he could manage Guildford.” (Guildford, for some reason, was problematic.) “Let’s hope they’re interested in a bit of social history, but I expect we’ll get the usual corn dollies and fair maidens skipping round maypoles. This kind of stuff feeds us a version of history that makes us feel good about ourselves. There’s no future for us, so they’re making one up out of the past.”

“Who’s ‘they’?” the Boy asked.

“The Establishment. The Powers That Be.” Evans shrugged. “Who knows? Not thee and me, anyway.” He ran out of polemic and lit a Woodbine.

“What else do you make the future out of, if not the past?” Flynn puzzled.

“And why shouldn’t we feel good about ourselves?” Badger added. “And what’s more, I’m rather partial to fair maidens skipping round maypoles. If only they were partial to me. We need more maypoles, in fact. They’re so gloriously phallic.”

“What does that mean—fallick?” the Boy asked.

They all looked to Evans in his role as the Boy’s mentor. After some consideration he said, “It’s the same meaning as mythic-miffic—but it’s a bit of a stupid word. If you use it in public, people will treat you like an idiot.”

The Boy laughed. “I won’t be using it, then.”

“Well played, Mr. Evans,” Maud Ogilvie murmured.

“Oh, and here you go, Flynn,” Evans said, perking up. “I take your Mitzi Blinkhorn and raise you one Major Lawrence du Garde Peach. He sounds like he was born to be a pageantmaster.”

*

Flynn abstained from lunch, still bilious from the morning’s cake, and instead spent the hour wandering through Chancery, braced by a chill spring wind that had blown away the morning’s rain. He ended up in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The daffodils here were almost finished, apart from one little patch of stragglers still flowering on heroically against the odds. Why would you want to confine them to poetry? One of the entrants for the Festival Poems had been a sham Wordsworthian hymn to the poor flowers. They had “faces of gold” and “swooned in the warm arms of the zephyr” and so on. Could a daffodil swoon? It seemed unlikely.

Lifting his own pale face to the weak sun, Flynn found himself not swooning but thinking unexpectedly about how in the school holidays at the merest hint of fine weather he and his brother would jump on their bikes and race out of town as if an advancing enemy were on their heels. They would cycle for miles with a youthful stamina that Flynn could barely imagine now, straining to the top of Sutton Bank before freewheeling back down, screaming like maniacs at the speed they could achieve. It was amazing that they didn’t kill themselves. They went all over–Pocklington, Hutton-le-Hole, even as far as Scarborough sometimes, where they ate hot salty chips on the pier. Otherwise, it was water from a stream, or a bottle of ginger beer and two slices of roughly cut bread slapped around a slice of ham, and a couple of hard-boiled eggs that they peeled and dipped in a little twisted paper of salt. On one magnificent occasion, never to be forgotten, they had an extravagant high tea at the Black Swan in Helmsley, paid for by Charlie’s paper round (gammon and fried eggs, buttered tea loaf, scones warm from the oven with clotted cream and strawberry jam).

They were not particularly close growing up–their characters were too different–but they were the best of friends during these madcap excursions. Perhaps if Charlie had survived the war they would have grown more attached to each other over time, although the opposite seemed more likely. Flynn would never know now. He felt keenly the loss of something he had never had.

When he heard Big Ben chiming the hour, he rose from the bench and left the daffodils behind to an afternoon unmolested by poetry.

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From Our Noble Selves: A Novel by Kate Atkinson. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Kate Costello Limited.