by Jane Green
Motherhood had isolated her. She loved Clemmie, loved being her mother, but she missed being out in the world; missed being defined by something other than wife, mother.
It was a year-long course. A year during which Grace wasn’t special, wasn’t valued because of who she was married to, wasn’t anyone other than another student in the class.
She loved it. She loved standing at the train station with the other commuters, her bag full of knives over one shoulder, her bag holding her chef’s uniform over the other.
She loved getting into Grand Central at rush hour and moving through the station with swarms of commuters, climbing onto the subway and taking the number 6 train to Soho.
She wore flip-flops and cargo trousers, T-shirts and no makeup, and felt twenty again, a lightness in her step, a glow on her face, a light in her eyes. She felt alive again, part of the world in a way she hadn’t done since marrying Ted and settling into married life to an older man.
Her classmates ranged mostly from Clemmie’s age to late twenties, with a few fortysomethings like her, looking for a new career for the second act of their lives, although this wasn’t going to be a career for her, she just wanted to learn how to do the one thing she had always loved.
Grace was not used to doing things wrong, or to criticism. She thought she was an accomplished cook until she got to cooking school, when Chef Z would shout at her on a daily basis because her sauce was too thin, or too cold; her beef too well done, her pastry too thick.
‘Sorry, Chef,’ she would say, ashamed, humbled, as she slunk back to her station, vowing to do it better next time.
And yet, he was her favourite teacher. He may have shouted at her, but there was always a twinkle in his eye, and every time he said something, in his thick French accent, she couldn’t help thinking of a TV show from her childhood, and it made her laugh.
It also taught her. She kept a notebook with her, scribbling down all the tips offered, everything they said that wasn’t in the manual: the tricks of the trade that would truly transform the food she made, the skills and the science of cooking. She went from being a very good cook to one who could be described as serious. A serious cook.
Now she cooks as a professional. Over the years she has had her own catering company, gaining an excellent reputation for cooking easy food that can be thrown together quickly, that nevertheless looks and tastes as if she had been cooking carefully and diligently for hours.
More recently, she had become the chef at Harmont House, a home founded ten years ago in Nyack, for families escaping abuse and addiction, helping them get back on their feet.
Ten years ago, Grace’s friend Sybil came to her and asked her if she would be interested in joining the board. Only, Grace said, if she could actually do something there. Clemmie was still in middle school, Grace counting the hours until she got home, desperate for something to relieve the boredom of having nothing to do.
She became the chef. Not just cooking for the residents of the home, but teaching them how to cook, just as, all those years ago, she herself was taught. Harmont House was now her passion, and her job, and the one place she truly considered her sanctuary.
Grace teaches them the way Lydia once taught her, and throws in the lessons she learned at culinary school: how to organize a kitchen; how to shop for food; what makes the basis of a great sauce.
Five days a week Grace, feet slipped into clogs, an apron wrapped around her, hair scraped back into a bun, cooks first in her own kitchen, then shows up at Harmont House with the ingredients for one last dish for her lesson.
She introduced the English classics Lydia had taught her to cook and that she had learned to love: toad in the hole, bubble and squeak. The cooking humbles her, but more than the cooking, more than the service she is providing, it is the relationships she has with the women, the friendships she has made, that bind her. She has the ability to make a difference in these women’s lives and they, equally importantly, are open to her help.
Her passion, her job and a way to heal the wounds of the past.
Ted will tell people he loves Harmont House, has to tell people he is supportive of the work Grace does, but in private he is jealous of the amount of time it takes up in Grace’s life. He has learned to keep this to himself, but it comes out in bitter sideways swipes.
Still. This does not change Grace’s commitment. She loves cooking for these women just as much as she loves cooking for friends. Her dinner parties, particularly since her success as a chef, are legendary, desserts more so. Anyone coming to the house to write a profile about Ted knows in advance that part of the profile will include long and loving descriptions of the delicious food that Grace provides.
Whatever her passions, whatever her work, still she has time for Ted. She must make time for Ted, ensure he is the number one priority in her life. Whatever is going on in Grace’s life, and it is by no means as easy as it sounds, from the outside, her life looks perfect.
‘You look as if you have never had a hard day in your life,’ someone once said at a dinner party. Grace smiled, for she had learned to hide her secrets and shame well. She had learned to never discuss what she came from, the hell of growing up as she did, having the mother she had.
The more perfect the illusion, the more her secrets will recede. Or so she thinks.
If she just keeps running and running, keeps being the perfect wife, mother, cook, the past will surely just disappear.
BUTTERY KEDGEREE
(Serves 4)
Adapted from Delia Smith
INGREDIENTS
340g smoked salmon trout fillets
110g butter
1 onion, chopped
1 teaspoon curry powder
1 teaspoon fish sauce
200g uncooked rice
3 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
3 heaped tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Salt and pepper
Melt half the butter in a frying pan. Soften onion in it for 5 minutes.
Stir curry powder into the onion, stir in rice, and add 500ml water and fish sauce.
Stir well, bring to boil, cover, and turn down to a gentle simmer for 15 minutes, or until rice is cooked.
Remove salmon trout flesh from skin. Flake. Add to cooked rice with eggs, parsley, lemon juice and remaining butter.
Cover pan and replace on gentle heat for 5 minutes before serving.
Three
There is nothing Grace loves more than being alone in her kitchen, surrounded by food, inspirational recipes scattered on the counter in front of her as she tries out new dishes. When she is working on a book, she will use assistants, but it is during these moments, when it is just Grace, alone in her kitchen experimenting, that make her happiest of all.
The process is almost meditative. The vegetables are gathered, washed, placed carefully in a stainless-steel prep bowl to the left of her chopping board, an empty bowl at the top for the scraps to go on the compost heap, a tray with small empty bowls to the right, waiting for Grace to chop the onions, the celery, the carrots, her bay leaf, peppercorns, parsley stalks and thyme already tied up in cheesecloth for the aromatics to bring her braised short ribs with marmalade glaze to the next level.
The oven is preheated, all the knives, peelers, paring knives she will need by her board. Her apron is on, a cloth tucked into the tie around her waist, another in a bowl of soapy water ready to clean down her board.
Cooking was always something she loved, but pre-cooking school it inevitably meant chaos. The sink would gradually pile up with dirty bowls and spoons, as Grace raced around the kitchen grabbing things out of the fridge, chopping and sautéing as she went, stopping to pull the canned tomatoes from the pantry or the chicken from the fridge.
Cooking school taught her how to organize. It taught her how to prepare her mise-en-place. It taught her that if she prepares everything first, the very act of preparation becomes a joy, the cooking is made easier and more enjoya
ble.
Now, as she lines up her knives, starts to peel the carrots, her mobile phone rings. With a sigh she wipes her hands on the cloth and picks up the phone, squinting to see the name on the screen before deciding to pick up. Ellen.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘It’s fine,’ says the voice on the end of the phone. ‘I just wanted to let you know the driver will pick you up tonight at five thirty, and Ted’s tuxedo is being returned from the dry cleaner’s this afternoon.’ Ted’s recently ex-assistant is as efficient and organized as ever, even though she no longer works here.
‘You don’t have to do this,’ says Grace. ‘I’m handling all of it. Really, Ellen. You need to concentrate on looking after your mother, not on organizing us.’
‘Until we find someone to take my place, you know I’m going to keep doing it. If I left it up to you, you’d be hitchhiking.’
Grace laughs, for it is true. Organization has never been one of her strong points – hence her need for cooking school – and she had meant to organize a driver for tonight, but, as Ellen well knows, it had slipped her mind, and had it not been for their former assistant, Ted would probably have ended up having to drive himself, which would have upset him, because when he is a keynote speaker, he uses that valuable time in the back of his chauffeur-driven car to fully memorize the words.
‘How are you, though?’ asks Grace. ‘Really?’
‘I’m fine,’ Ellen reassures, although Grace knows this cannot be true. Ellen’s mother is now struggling with Alzheimer’s. Ellen is moving to Florida to take care of her. The strain is enormous, even though Ellen is loathe to let it show.
Ellen has been part of their lives for fifteen years. She is the kind of assistant you dream about, the kind of assistant people usually only dream about: efficient, kind, thoughtful, discreet and loyal beyond anything Grace had ever known.
Ellen can handle Ted. However bad his mood, Ellen has a way of calming him down, of making him feel that everything would be fine, and it is the loss of this, more than anything else, that has been so difficult since she stopped working for them.
She worked in the small office at one end of the barn, Ted in his large, book-filled library at the other end. All he had to do was bellow her name – no time, no patience for emails, or texts – and Ellen would appear, framed in the doorway, notebook and pen always in hand, ready to do whatever Ted wanted: research a lobbyist; fix the damned screen in the library; get rid of the yapping dogs outside before I kill them.
She headed off his moods before he had a chance to take them out on anyone else; on Grace. She masked how temperamental he had become. She had a way of calming him down, of giving him a semblance of peace.
Their author friends in New York all had assistants, but none of them were like Ellen. Everyone wanted to find an Ellen, but instead found themselves drawn to young, glamorous women, fresh out of grad school, who were starstruck and eager, unable to believe they would now be working for someone famous.
Out here, in Sneden’s Landing – it may have been renamed Palisades, but Grace and Ted have been here too long, and it will always be Sneden’s to them – the pool was smaller.
The glamorous literary chicks didn’t want to cross the bridge and work in a quiet hamlet in Rockland County, and truth be told, Grace wasn’t sure she would have particularly wanted them anyway.
The other authors they knew went through a revolving door of young, pretty assistants. However good they were, it was only a matter of time before they left to work for someone bigger, or because they were getting married, or had decided to move to Paris. All of them had landed in New York City, and that was where they were going to stay unless somewhere even more exciting presented itself.
When Grace and Ted first saw the house in Sneden’s Landing, twenty-two years ago, with Clemmie toddling around, they fell instantly in love. For eighteen months, Clemmie had been the only thing Grace could think about. From the moment the squawling newborn was placed in her arms, Grace came undone. She fell head over heels, didn’t care about anything other than being with her daughter. Even now, years later, they are bonded together, as much like best friends as mother and daughter.
Back then, when Grace was interested in nothing other than Clemmie, stumbling upon the house at Sneden’s Landing was like something out of a dream, giving Grace a focus outside of her daughter, a focus that grounded her and made her feel safe.
All Grace had ever wanted was seclusion, and water. They wanted to be close enough to get into the city for meetings with publishers, for events they were expected to attend, but far enough that they had, at least, the feeling of country, even if it wasn’t the deepest, darkest depths of Vermont, as she would have liked.
They came up for lunch with Katie and Richard Walbert, a couple they had developed a couple crush on. The friendship burned brightly and with great intensity for a year, before sputtering and dying. This was at the height of their mutual affection for one another, and the fact that Katie and Richard had a weekend house in Piermont but wanted to live in Sneden’s Landing was enough for Ted and Grace to want to be there too.
As the four of them toured the small hamlet, Grace fantasized about waking up every morning with these stunning views of the Hudson, the vibrancy of neighbouring Nyack, the quiet and privacy of Sneden’s Landing.
Katie vaguely knew the people who owned a house in Sneden’s, knew they had been talking about putting it up for sale. In a haze of excitement the four of them all showed up on the doorstep – which you could do in those days – and asked whether it might be possible to have a look around.
Grace didn’t need to look around. Even as they rounded the curve of the driveway she caught sight of the old rambling farmhouse, lawns leading down to the water’s edge. There was a dilapidated barn, an old cow shed, various other outbuildings that had been left to rot; all she saw was magic. The interior of the house was terrible. Grace and Ted didn’t even have to look at each other to know this was it.
By the end of the day a deal had been made, sealed with a handshake. A month later they moved in, terrified that Clemmie, racing around in excitement, would topple into the water.
Six years later, when Ted was no longer seen as a hugely talented newcomer but had become a fixture at the pinnacle of the literary world, Grace was in Nyack, getting the food shopping, when she stopped by a noticeboard, seeing a sign for a Mrs Fixit looking for work. ‘Experienced house manager,’ it said. ‘Great with animals, kids. Will clean, organize, drive, cook. Ask and it shall be done.’
Grace scribbled down the name and number, liking the way the ad had been written, the cartoon that accompanied it, of a woman juggling children, animals, shopping bags, tools, all with a big smile on her face.
That afternoon Ellen walked in, sturdy, solid, smiling. She had an air of calm that allowed Grace, unwilling to admit she was utterly overwhelmed by all she had taken on, to finally exhale.
Ellen was the same age as Grace, and her husband Glenn ran the local garage and took care of their cars, turning out to be an excellent handyman on the side. Ellen took care of everything else, and over the years, as Ted’s star had continued to rise, it had become more and more about taking care of Ted.
Ellen updated his Facebook, Twitter, the calendar on his blog. You may think Ted Chapman was the one responding to your generous tweet, thanking you for your kind words, but in fact it was Ellen. Always.
She wrote his newsletters, responded to his fan mail, coordinated meetings with his agents, and was on first-name terms with the assistants of the biggest and most powerful agents and actors in Hollywood, not phased should Harrison Ford or Bradley Cooper phone the house.
She was able to decipher his scribbles, type up his notes, spend hours online, or on the phone, researching anything he needed, last minute, for his latest book.
She accompanied him to literary events – unless of course the invitation was for husband and wife, in which case Grace would attend – and television shows, en
suring he was comfortable in the greenroom, the cars arrived on time, he had everything he needed.
Ellen organized his book tours, arranged his travel, ensured the hotels he stayed in had the correct suite, and that he had a basket of fresh fruit, and a bottle of pinot noir, and Perrier, on arrival.
But more than that, more than any of that, Ellen was a friend. Ted talked to her, had been known to hang out in Glenn’s garage, delighting in the local gossip Glenn shared with him, in the glimpse into another world he was afforded just by knowing Ellen and Glenn.
As the years have rolled by they have come to know each other intimately. Ellen understands him as well as she understands her husband; is far better, in fact, at anticipating Ted’s needs than those Glenn has.
Grace adores Ellen. She always referred to her as Ted’s other wife, the good wife, the one that knew where everything was. Whenever Ted was away, Grace delighted in stealing Ellen away from her office in the barn and planting her at the kitchen table with a cup of tea.
Ellen leaving was unthinkable. There was no question that Ellen had to leave, that her family took precedence, but none of them could bear the thought of it. Grace kept thinking the problem might go away. Perhaps her mother wouldn’t be as bad as Ellen thought. Perhaps she would be very much worse. Perhaps the end wasn’t far away and Ellen could come home, back to work as normal. Surely Grace could pick up the slack for a few months.
Grace has been trying to pick up the slack for weeks and it has been disastrous. Her memory, never wonderful, has in the last couple of years appeared to have gone to pot.
She decided to write everything down. It seemed like a brilliant idea, except everything was written on little yellow Post-its that would end up crumpled in a pocket or at the bottom of a handbag, never to be seen again.
Grace thinks about something Ellen said yesterday on the phone. ‘I put an ad on Craigslist. For my replacement. Apparently this is where you’re supposed to advertise these days. Don’t worry. I used the anonymous email address and of course I didn’t say who it was for.’