A Girl From Zanzibar

by Roger King

  I thought about it, and London, and got stage fright. “Have you ever run a restaurant, Benji?”

  He laughed. “Of course not. That’s why I want to do it. What’s the point of doing things you’ve already done? Anyway, you have, haven’t you?”

  “Not quite. And not here in London.”

  “It will be fine. It’s only a small place. We can just run it together. And it’s only for two months anyway.”

  It was what Benji always liked, something new, risky, short term. But this was just the first thing; I could not know then that it was a pattern.

  “Will two months be long enough to find customers?” “We’ll find out. Do you want to do it? I have to let him know.”

  I did not want to put another sensible word against him. “OK, let’s try it. When can we visit?”

  “I have the key.” He took a single, flat key—no key ring—from his shirt pocket and pressed it to the tip of my nose. “We can go now.”

  The place was small and shabby, the lower floor of an impractically narrow house squashed between two larger buildings, a humbler enterprise than any Benji had talked of. We walked around inside. Although Dimitri’s Cafe had only stopped operating last week, it might have been from Dickens. The floor was grimy and the tables were of battered wood. Behind a curtain the kitchen was simply a corridor filled with blackened stoves and blackened cooking pots. I took a heavy saucepan from its hook and discovered that the inside was scoured to a beautiful burnished silver. I leaned on a table. Solid. It would have been at home in the Elephant Bar. Benji pulled open a jammed drawer and found knives and forks. He pressed the till open—it rang—and lifted the tray to see if any banknotes had been forgotten. They hadn’t. I went over to the window and pulled back the yellowed net curtain to see what it felt like to look out onto Bayswater as a business proprietor. A family of European tourists in sports clothes immediately transformed themselves into potential customers. I thought of the little girl who had so conscientiously carried glasses of fruit juice to customers in Zanzibar and had done her homework on the vacant cafe tables. And of Mrs F commanding the bar that was no bigger than this restaurant. This was right.

  Benji joined me, put his arm around my shoulder. “So, can you help me with this?”

  I nodded. “I think so.” I pulled away from him to look around. “What are we going to cook, anyway?

  “Indian. Curry. What else?”

  The next day I took off my shoes and socks to scrub the floor, while Benji took his old Mercedes to the cash and carry for supplies. When he returned the boot was dragging under the weight of food and drink. He already had the menu in his head, he said, and I made him sit at a table to write it down. There were four main dishes based on rice and curry. “We have to concentrate on just offering a few dishes and doing them well. We can’t compete with the menus of the bigger restaurants.”

  “So cheap?” I asked, looking over his shoulder.

  “We have to make it very cheap. That’s the only way we are going to get customers quickly.” Benji appeared to have all his business ideas completely worked out. “We only have to cover our variable costs to make money— that’s raw materials and us.”

  “I know what variable costs are, Singapore man. You think I don’t know anything.” I sat across the table from him and helped make six copies of the menu, and a bigger version for the window. I was so absorbed by this that I did not notice the happiness for minutes at a time.

  We opened our restaurant, which never did acquire a name, by simply turning over the open/closed sign hanging on the door. The big pots were steaming and we had clean white cloths on the tables. A cassette player broadcast soft classical music from the top of the fridge.

  “What if no one comes, Benji? All this food.”

  “They’ll come.” He was wonderful at being reassuring. “And if they don’t come, we’ll take it over to Hereford Road.”

  A group of four Italian students from one of the language schools in Westbourne Grove pushed open the door, chattered, then nearly left at the sight of us, the nervous proprietors, and the empty tables. “Buona sera,” offered Benji, which won him a stream of questions. He replied in Italian. They sat down. In the kitchen so narrow that we touched each time we passed, he whispered, “'You never know when an Italian ex-wife might be useful.”

  Benji insisted on not charging our first customers. “They’ll be back,” he said. “They’ll bring their friends.” Our only income on the first night came from three large men arriving late, after the pubs had closed. One stumbled as he sat, but they were all fastidiously polite: “That’s wonderful, darling. That’s a treat.”

  I put out the food, tidied the table and watched them from the corner as they tried and failed to transport food from the dishes to the plates: “Will you look at that? Making a mess of the lass’s laundry.”

  “Drunken Englishmen,” I said quietly to Benji. “Supposing they get angry and don’t pay.”

  “Scots, Marcella. Don’t say English. Big mistake.” I hadn’t even guessed there was a mistake to make. I had a lot to learn.

  “Three Special Brews when you can,” one called out to Benji, and, “Will you drink with us, Jimmie? Make it four.”

  They left at midnight, leaving an untidy pile of screwed-up notes on the table. “Fifteen pounds,” I announced, “for the night.” We stretched out at one of the tables with its white cloth still undisturbed, our feet tangling.

  “It went well,” declared Benji.

  I looked at him: he was serious. “We didn’t make any money.”

  “No. In the retail business, they call it a loss leader. It’s a good start.”

  “Benji, where are we sleeping tonight?”

  My bed in the living room at Hereford Road was not private and, bit by bit, I was discovering that Benji had no home. He had the use of homes, but no home. There was a house in the process of being converted into flats where the owner liked Benji to stay so that squatters would not move in. Sometimes he stayed in the houses of wealthy acquaintances who were temporarily abroad. Sometimes he was someone’s guest. There was an upstairs office off the Edgeware Road that belonged to a Malaysian insurance broker he worked with, and sometimes he slept there, on the enormous white leather couch that was its central piece of furniture. There were times when he drove his car all night and napped in it. The ageing white Mercedes was the closest thing he had to a permanent home and the car phone was the closest thing to an office. I kept seeing cars like his on the TV news, being driven through places like Beirut by fighters or refugees, flags flying from their windows.

  There is one image of Benji from a later time that always returns to me. Unknown to him, I am looking down on him from the flat in Westbourne Grove. His car is parked on the double yellow lines opposite Whiteley’s, its flashers flashing. Benji, in a business suit, is leaning against its side and holding the phone to his ear. The door is open, partly blocking the pavement and netting friends and business acquaintances as they pass. Benji leaning against his car, speaking into his phone, shaking hands; he looks so happy out there. I’m sure he is not thinking of me.

  In reply to my enquiry, Benji said, “Talbot Road”— the half-converted house. “They’ve finished the glass doors for the penthouse. I’ve put a bed up there. We can see all of London without getting up.”

  I loved it when Benji was right. I counted up the occasions of his good judgement as proof against something I could not name. He was right about the restaurant and I loved him for it. Foreign students from the language schools became our regular customers and by the end of the first week I knew some of them by name. Word got around that we sold good food very cheaply. By the end of the first month, it had taken on the feel of a family: noisy, smoky, friendly, a success. My customers called out my name when they saw me in the street.

  MAYBE BELONGING IS NO MORE THAN A PLACE'Saccomodation of our habits. I started some Bayswater habits. Now I was someone, not no one, I was able to enter Le Cafe and sit on the
other side of the Arab teapots in its window. My days started late, and a croissant and cap- pucino at Le Cafe was my first appointment. I did my sums for the restaurant at their gaudy perspex tables, sitting on their brass chairs. After I had made my lists for supplies—Benji did the shopping—I allowed myself to read the newspaper. I chose The Guardian, because Geoffrey had read The Guardian and I wanted to seem serious. I sat at the window table, my accounts book closed, sipping my coffee and reading my serious newspaper. Already a Londoner, I thought.

  Benji was absent during the days, to-ing and fro-ing across London, doing his little bit of this and little bit of that, talking to people, shaking hands, making contacts for vaguely defined future purposes. I did the kitchen preparation in the afternoon, and before we opened at six I established another habit. Each day I would walk the length of Westbourne Grove to the Porchester Baths in Queensway, where I would swim for ten minutes or so before dressing for work. No one had directed me to the pool, so it seemed like my own discovery. I loved the glass roof, like a miniature Paddington Station, and the varnished wood changing cubicles with their cast-iron grills that bordered the pool and gave it a solid, old-fashioned feel. Perhaps the heavy wooden doors and stone floors reminded me of Zanzibar and that, without my being aware of it, this was comforting. You changed, then you took a single step to the edge of the water. I ignored the industrious European swimmers in their roped-off lanes in favour of a few lengths of Zanzibar dog-paddle in the open half of the pool, then a few on my back looking at the sky, and a little time just resting, wondering, before the busy evening.

  One night I told Benji of my life in Zanzibar, how the only activity that gave shape to our days had been the walk at dusk with Mrs F and my mother. He said: “So every evening you walked through the city down to the water. Now every evening you walk down Westbourne Grove to the Porchester Baths. It’s the same thing.”

  “Don’t say that,” I said. “I thought I was doing something new.”

  Bayswater was, I thought, just like me, Asian, Arab, European, African in about the right proportions. Later, during my studies at Cookham College, I discovered that, more than a century before, Bayswater was known as “Asia Minor” to Victorian Londoners. Immediately I imagined that people like me had always lived there and my affinity with the place lay in its history. This turned out not to be the case. The nickname came from the high concentration of houses belonging to colonial administrators, with their taste for Indian produce and the need to equip for their next visit to the East. Whiteley’s was the jewel in their crown. Instead of being inheritors, we new Orientals were usurpers, the tide that was pulled behind the retreating colonialists and that had now washed them from their homes.

  Benji left the accounts for our nameless restaurant to me. I liked keeping track of the money and seeing the profit increase day by day. As the time on the lease began to run out, I wondered if there might be a way to extend our restaurant’s life beyond two months, or to start another one much like it. More tables perhaps. Maybe lunch time opening? It would need a name. Benmar? Marbenj? We would need some money to start it and equip it. So far our profits were two thousand pounds, excluding the five hundred Benji had needed when an angry creditor from another deal had tracked him all the way to the kitchen. (Benji had paid up cheerfully, saying to me, “Always pay when they find you. It makes them feel foolish for not trusting you.”)

  “Benji, can’t we extend our lease?”

  “Here? No. That would be expensive. In any case we would have to be properly licensed. The health authorities would find us. This was just for fun.”

  “It’s not just fun! This is something to be proud of. Something we’ve done together. Do you even know how much money we’ve made?”

  “No. I know it can’t be much. Restaurants are a lot of work for not much money. But you’re right, it’s something to be proud of.” I was never able to make Benji angry.

  “It’s three thousand pounds in six weeks, including the five hundred you took out to pay that man.”

  “You see.”

  “Four thousand by the time we close. That’s good, isn’t it?

  “Marcella, it’s good. We made something out of nothing. But it’s not serious. People are making fortunes in London these days. It’s wide open. Eurodollars.”

  “What?”

  “Eurodollar trading. London’s the world centre for it. Or export to the Arab countries. Or Asia. Or Africa, even. Or helping the Arabs invest their money in London. Look at Adnam. He didn’t make his money cooking curry.”

  “I don’t know anything about those things. But I can do this. I’ve been doing this. You left it to me.”

  “Because you’re good at it. And I needed to think about other things.”

  “But if we’re good at something, why don’t we continue with it, make it bigger? I like us working together.”

  “No, no. It doesn’t work that way. Anyone can run a restaurant. London is full of poor immigrants working themselves to death running restaurants. You need to find something only you can do, a deal only you can put together. That’s how you get rich. Something only you can do, that can be done only by you because you are the only person who knows all the other people needed to do it. Something a bit secret that isn’t open to everyone, maybe a bit dangerous that scares some people off. Something international that the Brits won’t think of. And it has to be big, because you may only get one chance. After you’ve done it, it isn’t secret anymore. Then you’re rich and you make money just by having money.”

  We were cleaning the cooking pots at the end of the evening. I had been taking satisfaction in scouring the one in the sink. Now it hardly seemed worth my trouble. Benji was continuing to stack plates as if all he said had no implication for our current work. I turned to argue, but then I found myself quiet, enjoying the look of him, his carefulness.

  He turned towards my silence. “What’s the matter?” “I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to be very rich. Just rich enough. I like having customers. I thought we were doing well.”

  He gave a little laugh. “Our customers? There will always be customers. Just not foreign students without any money. If you can manage this, you can manage something else.”

  “But this is ours! What are we going to do with the money?”

  “You take it.”

  “I don’t want to take it. It’s ours. Half yours. I don’t want you to give it all to me, just like that. I want it to be business-like. Why do you leave all the business side to me? You haven’t got any money. Don’t pretend you have. All your credit cards are full. You have men chasing after you here wanting their money. How can you just give it to me, like it was nothing? We’ve worked for that money!”

  “Hey!” He put down the plates and squeezed opposite me, our dirty aprons between us. He was smiling and put his hands on my shoulders, which, uncharacteristically, my shoulders did not want. “OK, sorry. I didn’t mean to make nothing of what we’ve done. I love us working together. It’s just me. If I think too much about small things, I get scared that I might stop thinking about big things. I’m superstitious like that. Scared of being nothing. I just thought you needed the money.”

  He dropped his arms from my shoulders just as they were about to relent their stiffness, but could not resist adding one more item of his business wisdom: “Anyway, debt doesn’t matter. It’s future income that matters. Debt just proves people trust you. Marcella, we can do anything.”

  When the time came to ask Benji for his ideas now that the restaurant was at an end, his reply was both vague and specific. Our eyes at the time were not on each other but on the night-time view from our rooftop bed in Talbot Road, taking in all of London: the white terraces of Bayswater, the dark break of parkland, the lights of Kensington, the Thames, the orange glow of the southern suburbs. He said, “I might do something with Lord Cramp. I’ll introduce you. He’s a twig of the Churchill family tree.” Though he laughed, I could tell he was impressed. “He knows all the Ara
b royal families.”

  I took this in, puzzled in the darkness, hoping the path between this and our little restaurant would become clearer. Instead, Benji moved on. He had also been approached about exporting videos to Saudi. And a Chinese Malaysian friend, Marcos, was interested in buying investment property for nervous Hong Kong millionaires and Benji, with his background in Singapore, might help out. There was a Nigerian army officer with money to spend on procurements whom Benji had met at a party. There was more.

  The vagueness was in the way the people and proposals would turn themselves into the reality of money. I stayed silent, not liking to ask, not wanting to show doubt or ignorance. The reality that I could see was that Benji’s car was sometimes clean inside so that I knew he had used it as a minicab the previous night. Once I found the back seat full of beautiful men’s sweaters, which he told me would each sell in Italy for as much as a good suit sold in London. Then there were brochures for some sort of insurance policies—he called them financial instruments —that he sold on commission for an important-sounding British company in the City. He may have sold some or may not. He was vague about this too. On Sundays the reality was that he would be in Queensway, one of those men in suits offering luxury cars for sale on behalf of foreigners who had left London hurriedly. He said he only did that for fun too, for the contacts. I understood that Benji was struggling, though he never complained, never lost his style, and never lost the spendthrift ways of someone effortlessly in the money. I wanted to help him more than he would let me and more than I knew how. I looked around for an idea that I might make mine, that would set my brain cells marching around my head with dreamings, plannings and enticing calculations.