The Kitchen Front

by Jennifer Ryan

  Zelda shrugged. “Top chefs have become reserved occupations, politicians protecting their lavish dinners and fancy clubs. Otherwise, they’ve found excuses to get out of conscription, a bad back, color blindness, or flat feet. A lot of them are foreign, which excludes them from fighting. They all say they’re French, even if they’re not.”

  “And so that’s why you want to win the contest.”

  Zelda nodded. “I need to win. If I’m a famous chef, restaurants will want me at the top.”

  “But what about your new baby? How can you look after the baby if you have a job?”

  The question hung in the air.

  Zelda tried to gather her wits. “It’ll stay with my relatives when I find work again in London. They’re awfully nice.”

  Audrey glanced at her curiously. “I didn’t know you had family. If they’re so nice, then why don’t you stay with them for the birth? Pregnant women and women with young children are excluded from national service, so you don’t need to stay here to do war work.”

  Zelda grappled for an excuse, saying quickly, “I-I need the money. Without a husband to support me, how am I going to live?” She focused on the pan, trying not to meet Audrey’s eyes, panicking that her lies didn’t tally up.

  Then, as if to confirm her fears, Audrey came up and took her pan off the stove. “Zelda, come and sit down. We need to talk.”

  Zelda, as reluctant as an errant schoolgirl, took a seat at the table.

  Which is when Audrey asked the question that Zelda had not been expecting.

  “Tell me the truth, Zelda. Are you actually pregnant, or did you just say that to get the room?”

  Zelda pulled back, relieved it wasn’t an inquisition about her nonexistent family. “Oh, I am, I am.”

  “Then why don’t you look pregnant? There should be a bump by now.” Annoyance had crept into Audrey’s voice. “If you lied to get into my home, I think you should leave.”

  Well, at least I can prove that part of my story, Zelda thought, and without a moment’s hesitation, she stood up, undid the corset beneath her baggy blouse and skirt, and whisked it away in her hand.

  Audrey stood up in shock.

  Zelda’s belly popped out like a small ball, round and firm. It somehow felt like a relief to expose it at last.

  Audrey was aghast. “What are you doing? Trying to flatten the baby like that! You’ll kill him—or her.”

  “I was only wearing it loosely.” Even to her own ears, Zelda sounded like an obstreperous child.

  Audrey took the corset from her as if it were something loathsome and dropped it into the bin. “I forbid you from ever wearing that thing again.” She then set her hands on the bulging abdomen, as if to soothe the child beneath. Her eyes glared into Zelda’s. “How could you do such a thing? Why?”

  Calmly taking control, Zelda swept Audrey’s hands off her and sat down at the table.

  “I had to do it in order to keep my job. A lot of women are wearing them. I read about a woman in a factory who kept her pregnancy under wraps until she gave birth—well, the bulky factory uniforms helped. She had to. As soon as they knew, she’d be out. It’s the same everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you’re married or unmarried, whether you plan to keep the baby or not.”

  “And do you plan to keep the baby?” The question was asked slowly, carefully.

  Zelda was taken aback. She bit her lips together, but in the end the truth was desperate to be spoken. “I was planning to give it up for adoption.”

  The room felt still as these words sank in. It had been the first time Zelda had said it out loud.

  Audrey nodded slowly, but before she could utter another word, Zelda pushed her chair back and stood up angrily.

  “I don’t need to answer any of your questions,” she said gruffly. “You don’t know anything about me, what I’ve been through.”

  And without more ado, she got up and strode out of the door, slamming it behind her.

  Audrey

  On the afternoon of the contest, a speckled beam of sunshine flickered through the window into the kitchen at Willow Lodge. Through a haze of condensation came the warming smell of pastry, and then the sound of a woman’s voice resounding a large “Drat!”

  Audrey was in a tizzy. Tonight was the first round of the contest, and she’d been so busy working on her pies all week that she only had that one afternoon to create a winning starter. So far, all her trials had been miserable failures.

  “What was I thinking, joining a competition with no money and even less time?”

  “What’s gone wrong this time?” Alexander came to see.

  “It’s an egg tart that tastes bitter and has the texture of a rubber tire.” All her real eggs had been used up, plus her reserves of isinglass eggs, which had been dipped in a concoction to make them last a few months longer. She’d had to settle for a box of dried egg powder, and now she could see why it was universally loathed.

  Alexander attempted to cut the tart with the side of a fork and had to fetch a sharp kitchen knife to hack through the tough consistency.

  “Not your finest hour, Mum!” He laughed.

  Over the last few hours, Alexander had bravely tasted a smoked-mackerel pâté without enough mackerel, an overcooked watercress and wild fennel soup, and a goose-liver terrine that smelled so odd that he refused even to touch it.

  “It’s no use,” Audrey said. “I need a first-class dish, and for that I need more ingredients and more time.”

  Movement in her peripheral vision made her turn to see the younger boys crawling into the pantry on a mission. “Out of there!” She shooed them away, then, exhausted, sank onto a chair.

  “What am I going to do?”

  Pulling over her bag, she took out the family’s ration books, her fingers flicking through the pages until she found the right week.

  “All the rations are stamped except the tea. I’ve wasted our butter, meat, eggs, sugar, and flour allowances on a series of failures. Alexander, go into the pantry and tell me how much fresh food we have left?”

  Alexander went in and called out. “There’s a rasher of bacon, although it’s got more fat than meat on it, a little milk, and…” There was a pause as he looked into various jars. “Dried haricot beans, but they need to be soaked overnight. And then there’s the stockpot in the hay-box.”

  “Oh, I’d forgotten about that. It makes a lovely, deep stock, doesn’t it?” Her face fell. “But what can I do with stock on its own?”

  “We have all those dried apples we made from the half-rotten ones last year.”

  Nothing went to waste in Willow Lodge. Every last slice of edible apple was dunked in saltwater and dried in a packed oven, along with berries and apricots. They’d been overflowing with dried apples ever since.

  “Anything else?”

  Rummaging through the pantry, Alexander called out, “It looks like that’s all we have, I’m afraid.”

  Audrey lay her head in her hands. “What was I thinking, reckoning that I could compete against the likes of Mrs. Quince? Even my ridiculous sister will beat me at the rate I’m going.”

  “You’re a superb cook, Mum.” Alexander came over and sat beside her, nudging her playfully. “Where’s your fighting spirit?”

  “It’s run out. This war, your poor father, and now these dreadful debts, they’ve drained away any oomph I ever had.”

  “There must be something.” Alexander got up and began to pace the room. He stopped by the window, looking out at the vegetable garden, and then beyond to the woods and the hills.

  Suddenly, he turned around excitedly. “What about Rosebury Wood? There’s a wealth of wild food out there. Why don’t we go foraging?”

  Ponderously, Audrey raised herself from the table.

  “Maybe I’ve been thinking about this the wrong way around.” She c
ame up beside Alexander, gazing at the lush, green wood. “It’s the one advantage I have over everyone else! If I win, it won’t be because of the everyday ingredients in here. It’ll be the ones I can find out there.”

  Alexander grabbed her basket, and within minutes they were striding through the garden to the wood, the younger boys behind them, skipping and laughing. They’d been happier since Zelda had arrived. Ben had calmed down, and Christopher had even begun to sleep in his own bed at night. Maybe it was because she liked to joke and play pranks with them, or perhaps it was because she treated them like people. Then again, it could simply be nice for them to have another adult in the house, someone to help their mum. After the corset conversation, the two women had skirted around each other politely. Audrey felt an instinctive yearning to help the pregnant woman, but unless Zelda opened up to her, there was little she could do.

  “What do you think will work?” Alexander mused as they passed oaks and elms, squirrels and birds busy gathering food. “The nuts won’t be ripe yet, but there are plenty of nettles,” he added, dodging some.

  “We don’t have time to shoot game or fish.” Audrey trudged on. “No, it has to be something that’s ready and waiting for us, something we can pick.”

  And suddenly, as she came into a clearing, there they were. The answer to her prayers.

  A line of mushrooms, some tall and long, others as wide as apples, squatting on a scrub of grasses. The cream-yellow texture of horse mushrooms, a slight whiff of aniseed as she picked them at the very base of their stems. Beautifully fresh, at their absolute peak, they had enough fleshy meat for a very hearty soup.

  “Now, find some sweet cicely to bring out the aniseed. There’s some at the edge of the meadow over on the other side of Rosebury Wood.” She instructed the younger boys what to look for, and off they chased.

  Then she looked around the woodland bushes, stooping to pick a few herbs. “Some marrow leaves to help thicken it, and a few sprigs of sorrel to complement that wholesome, meaty taste of the mushrooms.”

  They began to walk back to the house, when suddenly she came upon a final prize. A fallen elm tree, half disintegrated with rot, presented the perfect environment to find one of the most treasured mushrooms of all: the chanterelle.

  Taking her time, she trod carefully around, looking under fallen branches, even lifting the dissolving bark in one or two places, and just as she was thinking of giving up, she spotted them. Three perfect golden funnel-shaped hats were hidden inside a knotty hole.

  “You’ll do nicely,” she said, carefully plucking them, placing them in her basket with the others, and with a little skip in her step, she led the way back to Willow Lodge.

  “Get a small onion from the vegetable garden, would you, Alexander?” she said as she strode through the door, immersed in her imagination.

  Inside the pantry, she found the rasher of bacon and the last of the flour, bringing them to the table to begin.

  But a knock on the front door echoed through from the hallway.

  “What now?” she said, striding through, wiping her hands on her apron as she went.

  It was a man in uniform, his military motorbike behind him on the roadside.

  What was he doing there?

  “Mrs. Audrey Landon?” he asked.

  For a moment, she was speechless. Is this a déjà vu?

  The memory of that first telegram—the one informing her of her husband’s disappearance over Düsseldorf—played again through her mind like a broken newsreel.

  “Mrs. Audrey Landon?” he repeated.

  She nodded, trying to back away as he handed her a small envelope.

  It was a telegram.

  A telegram! Why am I getting another telegram?

  Her vision went hazy, and her mouth went dry.

  “Is that all?” he asked blandly.

  She forced herself back into reality. “Yes, thank you.”

  Off he marched to his motorcycle, then with a low roar of the engine, he swung it around and vanished out of the village lane, away from her, away from the telegram that stayed clutched in her hands.

  The sound of the boys fighting faded into the background, as it had that dreadful day. The countryside around her blended into gray. Only time ticked slowly on.

  Her fingers trembled as they tried to get into the envelope, which she concurrently did and did not want to open. What could it be now? He was dead—or was he? Perhaps her dreams had come true? Maybe he was alive after all, in hiding in Germany? Was this telegram about to change her life?

  She ripped it open.

  PRIORITY CC MRS. AUDREY LANDON, WILLOW LODGE, FENLEY, KENT

  THE INTERNATIONAL RED CROSS INFORMS THAT THE BODY OF YOUR LATE HUSBAND LIEUTENANT MATTHEW L. J. LANDON RVNR HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED. PERSONAL EFFECTS TO BE RETURNED.

  HARRIS, ACTING ADJUTANT ++

  She gasped, the telegram crumpling in her hand, and she reached out to clutch the doorframe to steady herself.

  A guttural cry came from the pit of her being.

  Making her way back to the kitchen, she sat gingerly at the table, cleared the pile of mushrooms to one side with a sweep of her forearm, and started to cry into her hands.

  The whole surreal memory of his death—or rather, the news of his presumed death—flooded back with a clean, prickly precision. The initial denial: He couldn’t possibly be dead, either presumed or otherwise? And then the desperate reasoning: How could a small piece of paper destroy her world? Surely a bomb or a fire or a fight, but not a series of typed letters on a slim sheet.

  A week later, the letter had arrived. It was from his base, his flight commander, and it explained that his plane had come down over Germany, witnessed by an accompanying bomber. No parachutes were seen, and the plane descended from such a height that there could be no survivors.

  “What if he fell into a soft bush?” Christopher had suggested, almost pleading it to be true.

  “He could be hiding away in the woods,” Ben continued, “living off tree roots and cooking squirrels to stay alive.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” she had said, and yet deep down, in her heart of hearts, she couldn’t help but yearn for it to be true. Maybe he did survive the fall. Maybe he was alive, perhaps wounded, staying hidden, and silently, slowly, making his way back to the English Channel.

  Maybe she had never let go of that hope.

  Maybe she had felt him to be alive, somewhere, somehow.

  Maybe—this was the end of maybes.

  He was dead. There was no more denying it, no more pretending it was a mistake, a dream, a wrong presumption. And now his few belongings would be making their way back to her.

  “Who was that at the door?” Alexander came up behind her, and she shuffled the telegram over to him.

  He unfolded it, read it. “Oh, Mum!” he uttered, putting an arm around Audrey. She was flooded with the familiar wince of regret that she relied too much on Alexander, had treated him more as a friend than a son since Matthew’s death. He had grown up too fast, gallantly trying to step into his father’s shoes to save the day.

  “What are we to do?” Audrey mumbled.

  “Oh, Mum,” Alexander said again, gently. “There isn’t anything we can do. We’ll get through this together.” He hugged her, and she gratefully fell into his arms and remained there for a few minutes.

  The other boys came in, and Alexander showed them the small sheet, bringing them into the circle.

  “Whatever happens, Mum, you’ll always have us,” Ben said. “We’ll do the best we can to help you.”

  Alexander pulled away, glancing at the mushrooms on the table. “And the first thing we need to do is win the first round of this contest.”

  The telegram lay on the table.

  “I don’t think I can, not after all this…” She reached for the right
word. “News.”

  “It’s the best thing you can do.” Alexander fetched a fresh chopping board from the cupboard under the dresser, sliding it onto the table and scooping the mushrooms onto it in readiness. “It’ll take your mind off it all. We can get ourselves ready for bed.”

  Audrey took a deep breath. “Why don’t I simply tell Ambrose about the telegram. I’m sure he’ll let me off. He was Matthew’s friend, after all.”

  “You can’t do that, Mum!” Alexander begged her. “If you end up winning, everyone will say it’s because of favoritism. If anything, you’re going to have to work harder than everyone else, prove you deserve this.”

  “But—”

  “You need to win the contest even more now, Mum. Show the world what you’re made of! I have faith in you. We all have faith in you.” The other two looked at her with big, pleading eyes. This was their future, too.

  “Your food is always delicious,” Christopher said quietly, slipping his hand into hers. “All you have to do is cook one dish.”

  After a moment, Alexander peeled the other two away, and giving Audrey a final, imploring look, he took them upstairs.

  She was alone at the table.

  The mushrooms were right there, so succulent and fresh. She remembered how happy she’d been to find them.

  That had been less than an hour ago.

  She picked up a crumpled dishcloth and used it to wipe her eyes. What a mess her life was.

  How she ached for Matthew to be there, just for a moment, to feel his arms around her. How she yearned for him, his soft, slender form and his smooth, large hands. Not just to hold him, but to hear his voice, to laugh with him, to feed him, to touch him, for him to reach inside her heart and warm the frightful chill that had taken hold of her.

  Slowly, she began to brush each mushroom, looking at their shapes, the varied ways that they grew toward moisture, away from the light. Placing them on the board, she took her vegetable knife, so sharp it would slice the skin off your fingertip without you noticing. One by one, she sliced through each cap and then used a larger knife to rapidly chop the stalks, forming a mound of finely diced mushroom. The texture was firm but fresh and springy, the smell peaty and mature.