‘Whatever you fancy. I’ve still got contacts at the rec centre. Just let me know what you need and I’ll get hold of it for you.’
Jess thought it could do no harm to take Shannon at her word. ‘Fish would be nice. A bit of salmon, maybe?’ She said it to tease, not imagining it would be possible to provide such a thing, but Shannon pulled out a notebook and pencil and made a note.
‘One salmon. OK. And vegies? A dessert?’
They worked out a menu together, with Jess growing more perplexed by the minute; Shannon was up to something but she couldn’t imagine what it was. She even wondered if it might be some weird practical joke, but the following Monday afternoon a United States army jeep pulled up outside the cottage and its driver unloaded cardboard boxes filled with food and two bottles of Californian wine.
She could barely believe what she was seeing as she unpacked the goodies and spread them out on the table. A whole salmon? Asparagus? A feast like this made her feel guilty, as though it were a crime to possess such marvels. How she wished she had a proper kitchen and the implements to do credit to such luxury! Never mind; the challenge was also a delight and she would do the best she could with the facilities she had.
She couldn’t help being apprehensive when Shannon arrived on schedule and they all sat down to the meal together. Travis had become an increasing burden as his condition had worsened; even now Jess had to help him with his food cut very small, but his ruined health had never been the issue. It had been Shannon’s opinion that mattered, although Jess didn’t know why, and Shannon gave her the thumbs up without reservation.
‘Wonderful! Really wonderful! I always knew you had a real talent for it. Now, there’s something else I’d like you to do for me, if you wouldn’t mind.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Please forgive me, but this meal, delicious though it was, was by way of being a dress rehearsal. What I’d like you to do now, if you’re willing, is to cook another meal for me.’
More perplexed than ever, Jess said nothing but waited for Shannon to explain.
‘The best meal you can provide. I’d like you to do it at the Regency. We’ll provide all the pots and pans and ingredients you need. I hope you’ll agree to do it for me.’
‘What are you playing at?’
‘I’ll explain later.’
‘Anything I like?’ Because the opportunity tantalised, no doubt about it.
‘Anything at all.’
Jess chewed on her thoughts, but when you came down to it there was nothing to think about. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Dinner for how many?’
‘Two. And I’m relying on you to come up with something extra special. It’s really important for both of us.’
‘And what do I do about ingredients?’
‘Same as before. Give me a list. I’ll organise it.’
Not for nothing had Shannon stayed mates with Hank Rankin.
Shannon
Crayfish bisque; roast turkey with all the trimmings; a lemon pavlova so light it almost floated away.
In the depths of winter, when even Queenslanders had been known to suffer from the cold, and in the closing stages of a six-year war, it was as though the Almighty had granted Shannon a miracle.
‘I don’t wish to be sacrilegious,’ said Arthur Nimrod, ‘but I cannot think of any other explanation.’
Even after the good meal Jess had produced the previous week, Shannon, too, was astounded. Once again she’d obtained the supplies Jess had requested by using her American contacts, who she knew from experience had essentially never heard of rationing. She’d persuaded Arthur to stay away from the kitchens during the preparation of the meal; she, too, had kept away. All she had done was make sure her sister had the assistance of the hotel’s kitchen staff, who had more experience if less natural talent at their disposal, but even she had never imagined it would be possible for Jess to produce a banquet such as this.
‘How did you manage it?’ Arthur said.
‘You’ve met my sister?’
‘Of course.’ Arthur frowning as he answered.
‘She did it.’
Arthur stared at her across the table. ‘You mean she cooked it? Cooked the whole meal?’
‘Yes.’
‘Without assistance?’
‘Yes.’
Gob-smacked was the word. ‘How old is she?’
‘Eighteen. I got her all the ingredients she wanted and she had the help of Mrs Dutton and Willa in the kitchen, but basically she did it all herself.’
‘Amazing. Truly impressive.’ Arthur leant back in his chair, which creaked under his weight, and the brown eyes studied Shannon thoughtfully. ‘I assume there was some purpose to this delightful meal?’
‘I want the Regency to take her on, initially as assistant chef. Later, when you’re satisfied she has what it takes, I want the hotel to sponsor her to spend a year or maybe two working with a top chef in, let’s say, Sydney. Or, if the war is over and it’s possible, somewhere overseas. France, perhaps?’
‘And when we have invested all this money in her? What is to stop her selling her talents to another organisation? In America, perhaps? Or London?’
‘Nothing. Except I don’t believe she will.’
‘You trust her?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Shannon. ‘We’re sisters, aren’t we? But not for that reason only. I intend to make the Regency a hotel which no one in their right mind will ever wish to leave.’
‘And what does your sister think of these grand plans?’
‘I haven’t discussed them with her yet.’
‘And will she agree?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
‘You think she should be the deputy chef? Not the top job?’
‘Not yet. There’s a lot more to being the top chef than simply cooking. She hasn’t the experience for that.’
‘So, who will fill the vacant position?’
‘We’ve struck lucky there. There’s a Frenchman, Jean Goujon, in Sydney, who answered my advert. He has excellent references, although I’ll check them, of course. He says he used to work as a sous chef at Maxim’s in Paris before the war. He’s married to an Australian woman from Perth and they plan to settle there and open their own restaurant in a year or two’s time.’
‘What is preventing them from doing so now?’
‘Money, I would imagine. Or lack of it.’
‘Very well. Get him up here and we’ll have a look at him.’
The weather had been bad for weeks but nobody cared because, after all the dark years, the war news at last was uniformly good.
With the Allies on the Rhine and the Russians closing in from the east, it was obvious that the Jerries were on their last legs. In the Pacific every item of information confirmed what Arthur Nimrod had told Shannon back in January, that the Japanese, too, were licked, and that the war there would also soon be over.
The photo of US General MacArthur striding through the surf at Leyte was widely believed to be a fake and that the general hadn’t gone near the beach until the fighting soldiers had made it safe for his precious hide, but even that rumour – true or false – hadn’t affected the general feeling of optimism, because the incontrovertible fact was that the Americans were ashore and the Japs were on the run.
The trouble was that, while everyone else in the world seemed to know they were licked, the Japanese themselves did not, fighting like demented rats in every battle and on every island, and never, never giving up.
‘Looks like we’ll have to kill the whole damn lot of them,’ said Edna Richards, who had taken over the book-keeping duties at the re-opened Regency Hotel. ‘You won’t see me weeping for them.’
Understandable, when you remembered that Edna’s elder brother had died on an island called Labuan off the north coast of Borneo, and another relly had been captured when Singapore fell back in February 1942 and hadn’t been heard from since.
‘I hope they hang that bloody emperor of theirs,’ feroci
ous Edna said as she entered up the ledgers.
That was good news, too, because at last there was something to enter. The first visitors had returned to the hotel and more were expected: American soldiers having a spell of what in their funny lingo they called furlough; Pommies, too; and even a handful of Aussies, eager to revisit the holiday islands of Queensland’s north.
And all of it was Shannon’s kingdom. Or should that be queendom? She didn’t know if there was such a word and it didn’t matter anyway. Thanks to Arthur, it was hers to make the most of it she could. And she would. Oh yes; she had no doubts about that. Her hotel; her future.
Best of all, she’d heard from Hal only the previous week. As far as it was possible to say anything in their letters – the anonymous censors still cutting chunks out of everything they wrote – she had the feeling that things were going well.
For the first time he had even said something of his plans for when the war was over.
I’ve been hearing of a place down south. A Yank was telling me about it. Seems he’d been there when he had some leave. Miles of beaches, good surf, a few holiday shacks. but otherwise more or less undeveloped. It sounds just the place I’ve been longing to be. With you, of course. A holiday. A honeymoon? You decide. It will be such a delight after
The scissors had descended at that point, excising the rest of the paragraph, but Shannon found it easy to guess what he had said.
It was exciting even to think about such things but Shannon warned herself not to raise her hopes too high. There would be no certainty until the last bullet had been fired and that would not be for a while yet.
She walked out into the grounds, where the landscaping was being finalised, with shrubberies tidied and choice trees planted in sheltered spots.
God, keep him safe.
She looked back at the newly painted façade of the hotel. This was what it must have looked like in its heyday. Work still needed to be done on the dining rooms – one formal, one al fresco – and on the kitchens, but at least they’d been able to make a start.
Where the money or materials had come from she had no idea but she couldn’t wait to show Hal around the hotel as it was now: pristine, elegant yet with strong links to its past glories.
All complete by the end of the year? It was a lot to hope for, but hope she did. Although the end of the year was still a lifetime away.
There would be no certainty until the last bullet had been fired.
The papers were full of the final battles that would be waged when Japan itself was invaded. Casualties would be high against a fanatical foe. Hundreds of thousands might be killed. No one doubted the eventual outcome but… Hundreds of thousands?
No, there would be no certainty until the last bullet…
‘Goddamn it all,’ Shannon said.
Even to think of such possibilities drove her mad. To survive all the horrors of war and at the last…
Hundreds of thousands dead.
God, keep him safe.
1983
Jess
That had been the start of it, Jess thought. From nowhere to somewhere in ten seconds flat. She’d thought she had no future, then Shannon had offered her the job of under-chef at the Regency. Once she’d got her head around the fact that Shannon had really meant it, she’d accepted, and within days they had moved into a posh staff suite with their own bathrooms, with Dad in a neighbouring room and a nurse who looked in on him every day. And the kitchens…
She could still remember the excitement she’d felt when she first inspected them properly. The first time she’d seen them they had meant nothing. The meal had been what mattered, the kitchens merely a means to an end, a branch upon which she’d been allowed to perch for the time it had taken her to prepare the meal. They had not been hers but now they were. Or would be, provided she could keep on the right side of the Froggy bloke who was coming to take over.
‘You’ll learn a lot from Jean Goujon,’ Shannon had said.
1945–49
Jess
And she had. From the day he’d arrived on 1 May she’d picked his brains, re-learning everything she’d thought she’d known and adding her own two pennyworth where she could.
Working with Jean Goujon was like entering an unknown city with occupants whose names she had never previously known. Names like Escoffier, Carême and La Varenne. These signposts marked the highway to all that was finest in French cooking, yet Jean Goujon emphasised that in the world of cuisine, as in all art, there could be no national barriers.
‘The true artist acknowledges no such restrictions,’ he observed. ‘While for Frenchmen the true highway must be the cooking of France, there are many by-ways and side streets that lead off it, and as international artists it is our duty to explore them all. The cooking of the east, of China and French Indo-China, are classic examples of this.’
With Goujon’s help Jess travelled these by-ways, too. She discovered that there the names were different. Names such as Lu and Chuan and Yang. These led in turn to other names, such as Chiuchow, Jiangxi and Aristocrat, shining like lanterns through the maze of Chinese history.
‘Culinary art,’ said Jean Goujon, ‘is the road to international understanding. You wish for a classical French dish? I will provide it. You wish a banquet in the Chinese style? I can provide that, too. This knowledge is the heritage of all nations, not of one. And great culinary artists are like musicians: they claim no particular nationality. They belong to the world.’
For the Frenchman, proud though he was of his culinary heritage, the fact that France had been freed from German occupation was of less consequence than the fact that normal life, which for Jean meant the life of the kitchen, could be renewed. This would take time – the devastation of war could not be made good overnight – but Jean Goujon was indifferent to time. With his dreams of becoming the first true internationalist of cuisine, he saw himself as existing outside time and wanted Jess Harcourt to join him there. But Jean Goujon was a dreamer and in his way a philosopher; Jess was neither and immune to his fantasies. She respected his skills and his passion and would pillage his treasury of knowledge but, like Shannon, Jess Harcourt had been raised in a hard-scrabble world. She appreciated the importance of money because she had seen at firsthand how its absence could destroy lives. She accepted that true cuisine was an art more than a science and would do everything she could to become a worthy artist. She had a powerful drive to create but her secondary concern was not international understanding – she’d leave that to the politicians – but to make herself rich. She’d had enough of poverty.
There was something else she did not want enough to do anything about. She had enjoyed the time she’d spent with Luke Makepeace. One pleasant evening in Mackay together: they had known they lived too far apart for there to be more.
Now that had changed. It was no distance from Airlie Beach to Shute Harbour, where Luke was based. If she contacted him there would no doubt be more pleasant evenings, but that was not what she wanted. She wasn’t ready for a serious relationship. She had enjoyed what they’d had so briefly together. He had provided solace when she’d needed it and she had nothing but good memories of him, but she had a career to build and no time for distractions; let the past bury the past.
Shannon
It was 8 May. It was hard to believe but the news was unequivocal: Germany had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. Thousands of miles away, the European war was over at last. It was news that people had waited almost six years to hear. Millions dead, including both Arthur Nimrod’s sons. Half a dozen more Shannon had known, or whose families she knew. Half a dozen out of all the millions, yet in many cases they had meant the world to those who had lost them. Thousands of miles away, indeed, yet as vividly present as though they’d never left Australia.
She’d expected a night of celebration, of fireworks and dancing in the streets, but that didn’t happen. There was a sense of relief but also of uncompleted business. Germany had surrendered but not Jap
an. Japan was still fighting and until that country, too, laid down its arms, the war was not done with. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of soldiers, prisoners and civilians would still die. No, Germany’s surrender did not mean the war was over, although Jean Goujon, who’d been in the job a week, prepared a special dessert for the handful of guests to mark, as he put it, ‘this important step towards the winning of the war’.
The dessert was an elaborate confection made from limited ingredients and as far as possible was based, or so he claimed, on one that had been prepared for Françoise d’Aubigné, second wife of Louis XIV of France.
Jess complained he’d allowed her no hand in its preparation but permitted her to watch while he worked.
‘That’s all you need,’ Shannon said. ‘Watch everything he does, then write it all down so you don’t forget.’
That was what Jess did. ‘It was an eye-opener,’ she told Shannon afterwards, ‘to see the delicacy and confidence of his work. If I learn nothing else I’m determined to do everything I can to copy his skill in these two areas. If I’m up to it.’
Shannon wasn’t going to listen to that sort of talk. ‘If you’re up to it? Of course you’re up to it. You’ve the makings of a great chef, so let’s hear no more nonsense about it. OK?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Jess said.
The way things worked out, she learnt much more from Jean Goujon than how to make a fancy dessert. Shannon watched her all the time and it soon became obvious that what the Frenchman was doing, deliberately or otherwise, was laying the foundations of Jess’s culinary career.
If May had been a month of triumph, July was one of more victories – Wewak and Tarakan – but also of tragedy, with the death early in the month of Prime Minister John Curtin. Most people thought he’d done a fair job and it was a shame he hadn’t lived to see the victory most now thought inevitable – after what nearly everyone was dreading: the slaughter that would be inevitable during the invasion and eventual subjugation of Japan itself.
‘They’ll fight,’ said Lou Harris, who spent her days as custodian of the general store but whose true vocation was to be the harbinger of catastrophe. ‘They’ll fight like demons. After all, that’s what they are, innit? Demons, every last one of them. Well, if we gotta kill ’em, kill ’em we will, I suppose.’
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