Five minutes later she realised that scented candles were pretty and fragrant but bugger all use at providing any real light. It was possible, however, to feel her way in the dark to the vodka but hardly worth the fuss of trying to find a glass.
10.15 p.m. Betrayal? Ridiculous! This wasn't a cheesy episode of EastEnders.
10.20 p.m. This is all his fault. He's a stuck-up prig who thinks he's better than everyone else.
10.30 p.m. He is better than anyone else I've ever met. It's all my fault.
10.35 p.m. If he refuses to speak to me, I will write to him.
10.36 p.m. He'll probably tear it up and stamp on it.
10.40 p.m. I'll camp outside his bloody restaurant until he's just got to let me in.
10.45 p.m. He'll probably throw yesterday's old soup over me.
10.50 p.m. I'll die and then he'll be sorry.
Then she screamed because suddenly there was figure in the room next to her.
'What the hell are you doing in the dark with the front door wide open?' said Lydia.
'Power cut. Anyway there's enough light for me to drink myself to death by.' She squinted at the bottle. It looked depressingly empty.
'Hm, a crisis. Do you want to sober up or continue sliding towards a coma?'
'Coma, definitely.' And she told Lydia all about it.
'Look, calm down,' said Lydia briskly. 'You should have expected this. He's bound to be pissed off. He probably thinks he hates you right now, but he'll come round. He might even see the funny side.'
'And which side would that be, exactly?'
'I must say, I've never seen you in such a state over a man before.'
'That's because I've never met a man like him before. He turns my insides to jelly. I can't get enough of being with him. And do you know when I found this out? When he told me to fuck off! Oh, my God!' whimpered Kate, clutching the vodka bottle as though it was a comfort blanket, 'I'm turning into bloody Bridget Jones! I don't even know why I love him! He is unbearably picky when he's working. He makes an outrageous fuss about a tiny drop of sauce on the wrong side of the plate but he hasn't got a single item of clothing that hasn't got a hole in it. He seems incapable of shaving himself properly, or he just doesn't care, and surely no sane man would get so excited about a delivery of new saucepans? Saucepans, for God's sake!'
Lydia went into the kitchen to make coffee. Kate had to be restored to her usual sane and focused self. It was actually rather unnerving to see her like this. But when she came back Kate had fallen asleep. The lights came back on so Lydia blew the candles out. Kate would have a hell of a headache in the morning, but at least she wouldn't have set fire to her hair.
It was only when Jake was standing in his flat that he realised that he hadn't the faintest idea how he had got there. He must have done the usual things – changing gears, indicating, stopping at red lights (at least, he hoped he had) but he couldn't remember any of it. So he got into the shower, turned the cold tap on and stood there until his teeth were chattering with cold. But even that didn't seem to bring him round so he sat down on the bed, rolled himself in the duvet and gave himself up to self-pity. It wasn't an emotion he was used to, so it took him a while to work out what it was. When he did, it was quite comforting.
Just give in and give up, it seemed to be saying. You are a loser. Everyone fucks you up sooner or later. Your business is going down the pan and your love life? Well, don't get me started on that!
But it did, anyway.
Sooner or later all the women you love dump you or screw you up. Mostly, they find someone else first and you are too stupid to know what's going on. Georgia probably screwed Harry here, and you were too far up your own arse to know what was going on.
Jake opened one eye, which was enough to take in the appallingly scruffy and disreputable state of his bedroom, and was forced to admit that only a complete idiot would try to seduce a woman here. Of course Kate hadn't minded! She was busy with other agendas. And there he was thinking it was because she liked him!
Self-pity continued to whisper its poison in his ear.
You are so deluded you even thought you had a connection with this woman. Well, you did, but not in that way. She was using you. You were just a stepping stone. If you looked in a mirror you could see the marks of her footprints on your back.
Jake was just nodding agreement to all this when his grandmother elbowed her way into his consciousness. He could actually see her, not how she had looked just before she died, but how she was when he was a small boy and the centre of his life. She was in her kitchen, of course, and was wearing a ridiculous apron that he had bought her for her birthday when he was fourteen. It was designed to make her look like a can-can dancer, and his mother had told him off for it.
'That is a most unsuitable present for a woman of seventy-five,' she scolded but Oma had thought it was a hoot and insisted on wearing it.
She gave Jake's self-pity a withering glance. 'Bollocks,' she said. Actually it was something long and involved in Yiddish, but he knew it meant the same thing. 'So you've had a setback. What are you – a man or a mouse? I'll tell you what you are. You are a fighter, you are a survivor. Goldmans don't give in, they pick themselves up and get on with it.'
'But I loved her!' howled Jake. 'This was different; this was the real thing, except it wasn't because it was all built on lies.'
'Lies, schmise! No one is ever completely honest. It just means she isn't perfect but then she is a human being, not a doll.'
'She didn't bloody have to be perfect. I knew that anyway. She always slops the sauce over the plate when she serves food. She pretends to have given up smoking and then nicks everyone else's. She hasn't bought a new bra in two years because whenever she goes shopping she ends up in bookshops. Not that she needs a bra anyway – I should know, I – anyway . . . Her nose is always shiny at the end of a shift and one of her eyebrows is definitely crooked. I didn't care, but then I didn't know she had a crooked heart as well.'
'And of course you know that, even though you didn't give her a chance to explain –'
'Yeah, and I don't intend to. She's blown it and I never want to see her again. Go away – you're not really here anyway.' And he pulled the duvet over his head in case he had any more hallucinations.
Great Grub had become the most popular programme Lakes Television had ever made and an incredibly boring conference was arranged so they could work out why and how to capitalise on it.
A young lad on work experience in the studio's canteen could have told them. 'It was because he was honest. He spoke it like it was. Respect, man!' But he was talking to himself and an enormous pile of dirty saucepans at the time so nobody heard him.
Jake couldn't have cared less anyway. He was far too busy taking phone calls from people who had seen the programme and wanted to eat at his restaurant in the simple belief that, if the man could cook as well as he spoke his mind, the restaurant was worth a visit.
When Jake explained that he had to lay his new carpet first, several people even offered to come and give him a hand if it meant they could get a table more quickly. He also found he was a minor celebrity now. At the bakery, as he stood in the queue for the now essential staff doughnut break, someone asked for his autograph and a few people in the street stopped him to offer their congratulations. Jake hated it because it kept reminding him of the time he had stopped being happy. He didn't want to think about it. He wanted to pretend it had never happened but that was impossible because Kate's absence in his kitchen was like a gaping hole. He missed everything about her: the way she always refused a doughnut because they were bad for you and then scoffed his when he wasn't looking; her enthusiasm for every dish he cooked – she would try anything once, she said, because she trusted him – and her intelligent questions about food. Well, that wasn't surprising, he thought bitterly. She was a journalist. It was probably second nature to her and something she did with everyone. And there was him thinking it was because she was interested in him! W
ell, he wouldn't make that mistake again. He was off women for good. They only brought trouble. Of course that meant he would end up a crabby, lonely and bitter old man and would die alone, slowly, atrophying among a pile of ancient Hotel and Caterer magazines and being eaten by rats, a fitting way for an old chef to go.
Tess had warned everyone not to say anything about the Situation (she thought it was so serious, it deserved a capital letter), but it didn't matter anyway, because Jake went round with such a black look on his face nobody wanted to say anything to him. What was worrying was that he had also lost his fire. They all looked back nostalgically to those happy days of explosions over imperfect béchamel sauces or pips in the pomegranate purée. He had turned into a haggard, monosyllabic wreck and Godfrey was shaken to his very core when Jake cooked a whole meal without tasting or commenting on any of it.
'We've got to do something,' he said to Tess one afternoon when they were clearing up after lunch. 'If he cooks like this for that Restaurant Club man he's going to fuck it up completely. Do you know he didn't even wince when I dripped hot oil on him this morning? It must have hurt like hell but I don't think he even noticed it.'
'Yeah, but we can't do anything because we're not the problem. Kate is.'
'But I can't stand it for much longer. It's like working in some hell dimension. I mean, it was hell before, of course, but I knew where I was but now it's like he just doesn't CARE!'
'You're right,' said Tess, slowly. Jake not caring about cooking was like waking up one morning to find that the sun had turned green. It just wasn't right. 'I just bloody hope that bloody Kate knows exactly how much bloody damage she's done,' she added, aiming a vicious kick at Godfrey's mop and bucket on her way out.
Kate was at her desk, wondering why this most familiar of places didn't feel like home to her any more. She could have worked on her story in her flat but she hadn't known how loud and mocking a silence can be when you have a guilty conscience. But the reporters' room of the Easedale Gazette wasn't bringing her any comfort either. Normally she loved the background of phones ringing, people talking, reporters and photographers rushing importantly in and out of the big room and sub-editors hassling her because they needed a quick, four-line story to fill a gap at the bottom of page five. She liked the fact that she could distance herself from all this and dip in and out of whatever she was working on without losing her thread. But today she didn't have a thread to lose. She had been staring at a blank screen for three-quarters of a hour and – nothing. She had played thirty-seven games of solitaire, read all her emails and even tried typing in a whole page of 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' because that sometimes worked. But not today. She had lied to the most important person in her world and God had punished her for it by taking away her ability to write. She was like Samson after his haircut.
Her phone rang.
'Some people in the front office want to see a reporter,' said the secretary.
'Well, tell Paul,' Kate snapped.
Paul was the cub reporter and it was his job to deal with members of the public because it was usually people who had come in to complain that the paper had spelled their names wrong.
'They want to see you particularly.'
Kate slouched downstairs in a sulk, convinced, now that she had been interrupted, that she had been about to write something brilliant. She nearly turned round and ran away when she saw the motley crew clustered round the front desk. They were still dressed in their cooking gear and a tantalising aroma of garlic, oil and roasted lamb wafted from them. But were they friends or foes? Were there knives concealed under those chef's jackets? If there were, she could hardly blame them. She approached warily.
'So, this is where you really work,' said Kirsty brightly.
'Have you come to bury me or praise me?'
'Eh, what?' said Godfrey.
'We've come to talk,' said Tess firmly.
'OK, but not here.' Kate didn't want the events of the last few months rehashed in front of the counter staff, who were always up for gossip and scandal. Also, people were starting to cast strange looks at the various bloodstains that adorned Godfrey's white jacket.
They adjourned to a nearby park and sat down on the grass under the shade of a huge oak tree because it was so hot. Automatically, Kate leaned forward to pinch one of Kirsty's fags, then drew back. Maybe things weren't like that between them any more.
'Oh, go on, then. At least some things haven't changed,' grumbled Kirsty.
Kate took one, lit up and drew a deep breath. 'Guys, I am really sorry. You have to believe me, I never meant for you to find out like you did.' Oh, brilliant, she thought. That little speech would really set them at their ease. Even with the nicotine flooding through her system she felt too shy to say what she really felt – that she loved them and respected them. She felt so bad that she couldn't even look them in the eye. Miserably she stared at the ground, absentmindedly pulling little bits of grass up.
'We are very cross with you.'
'I deserve it,' said Kate humbly. 'You must feel that you had a Trojan horse in the kitchen with you all this time, and maybe it was like that at the start but then everything changed. You changed me; you destroyed all my crappy preconceptions and –'
'I don't know what you mean about horses – it's about the only thing Jake hasn't made me cook yet. Anyway, it's him we have come to talk about. You've knocked the stuffing out of him – he's like a piece of wilted lettuce, he –'
Tess broke in on Godfrey as the conversation seemed to be going in ever decreasing culinary circles. 'We need to know the full story, Kate, because we only got a garbled version from Jake. When we've got the facts, all of them, then we can consider your apology and whether we are prepared to accept it.' She looked extremely fierce as she delivered this little speech.
This was fair, though. Kate took another deep breath, pulled up a dandelion and started at the beginning. Succinctly she filled them in, without sparing herself: her arrogance, her preconceived ideas, the exposé story she thought she was going to write and how she'd come to realise that she couldn't because it wasn't true.
'A lot of people don't think cooking is a proper job and in a sense it isn't because most people wouldn't be allowed to work under the conditions you do – sweaty, scared and permanently knackered.'
'That's true. My sister is always giving me a hard time about when I'm going to get a proper job. She thinks I spend all day flouncing around with a whisk,' said Godfrey. 'And people watching cookery programmes on television can't feel how hot it gets in a busy kitchen, and they never get to see the mountain of clearing up you have to do at the end of a shift.'
'They think any dimwit can be a waitress, but it's not that easy, is it?' said Kirsty.
'They watch Jamie Oliver and they think all chefs are rich,' said Tess, thinking about how Jake had to juggle any minuscule profit he made to cover all his bills.
'Exactly!' said Kate eagerly. 'I am a good journalist; I am certainly better at it than I am as a waitress –'
'We wouldn't know – we never have time to read a paper.'
'Well, I am. We are not all tabloid hacks. I have integrity, though I know I might have squandered the chances of you believing that. I don't write lies. I don't have to. The truth is much more interesting. But by the time I realised that, I was in a bit too deep and I thought that if I waited until you could see what I had written you might be more prepared to forgive me for telling one or two fibs.'
'Well, I think it was worse than a few fibs, but I believe you meant to do the right thing,' said Tess, and looked round at the others. They all nodded.
'But you've missed something out, haven't you? You've avoided mentioning Jake in all this. How does he fit in?'
Blimey, she was sharp, thought Kate admiringly. She had hoped they wouldn't notice she had kept Jake out of it. But they weren't going to let her off that easily.
Nervously she started making a daisy chain. She'd had no practice in telling people she
was in love with someone because it hadn't happened before. Trust her to screw things up the one time it did.
'That's when it all got really complicated. I, er . . . oh God, this is difficult. I fell in love with him, hook, line and sinker, the whole caboodle, hearts, flowers – the whole lot. And I'm pretty sure he quite liked me too, when he thought I was a struggling writer. How is he really, by the way?'
'Well, we think he needs therapy but we can't afford to send him. You see, he can't sort the fact from the fiction and it's making him crazy, which is why we are here.'
'Oh God!' wailed Kate, and buried her head in the flowers.
'We were pretty sure you weren't the complete bitch he is making out you are,' said Kirsty kindly. 'None of you have ever probably met one, but I have. My sister was going out with this guy once – actually, that's quite funny 'cos he really was called Guy – anyway his best mate at school had a sister who you wouldn't believe –'
'Kirsty, you are a great girl, but if you don't shut up this second, I may have to sit on your head. Good. I knew you could do it. Right. Back to the Problem. The trouble is that he is hurt and he's stubborn, which is not a good combination. Life has been hell since you left,' said Tess frankly. 'And the question is: what are we going to do about it?'
'Tell me first: am I forgiven?'
'Oh, well, I suppose so, as long as you don't write about that time Jake told me to flower the tomatoes and I thought he meant put flour on them when what he wanted was me to cut them in the shape of a flower, which was a mistake anyone could have made and –'
'Shut up, Godfrey, but yes. He speaks for all of us, minus the verbal diarrhoea.'
'Thank you. You don't know what that means to me, guys.'
'Well, hopefully it means you can stop digging up the park before we get chucked out for vandalism. The park attendant has been past three times and he's starting to look nasty,' said Kirsty.
'I keep trying to ring Jake but he just tells me he doesn't want to talk and then he puts the phone down. I think I'm just making things worse.'
Recipe for Disaster Page 29