The Housekeeper

by Suellen Dainty

  Luckily, Anton slept like a person entombed. He always set three alarms on his phone and woke cheerful and oblivious to my nightmares and nerves. I never said anything. I didn’t want him to think I was needy, like some of his others had been, or so he said. I was determined to be bright and lighthearted.

  Outside, streaks of orange light flickered over the horizon of tower blocks and office buildings. There was the dull roar of planes queuing to land at Heathrow and the grating gear changes of early morning buses. In the bathroom, I dashed cold water on my face. The bloodstained sheet went into the washing machine. I did all the usual things to calm myself. Tea. Toast. A long shower with the water drumming on my head. I told myself that I had Anton now. He was my family. I fixed my mind on seeing him later in the restaurant kitchen, how the sight of his head bent over the enormous cooking range in the middle of the room always calmed me, like I’d come home after a long journey.

  If people didn’t say it, I knew they thought it. I wasn’t Anton’s usual type. Jude, my closest friend, told me that right from the beginning. “Don’t you mean his former type?” I snapped back. Even Anton was keen to make a distinction between me and the others. “Glamour is boring. Jolie laide, the way you are, is so much more interesting.” His former type was likely to be someone with a professional blow-dry and daytime stilettos, the kind of person whose job was more of a hobby to fill in time rather than an actual way to earn a living. Not that I’m some kitchen skivvy who only gets a glint in her eye when she’s faced with a pile of carrots to chop. There are plenty of those around and I’m not in their club. Still there’s no denying that I come across as someone more practical than glamorous. But that’s not entirely accurate. I do have lace underwear, pretty dresses, and pairs of high-heeled shoes to put on when I want Anton to think of me in a different way, as someone who’s not always chopping and slicing and tasting and stirring. I just don’t wear those things to work.

  * * *

  Spring, two years ago. “I’m not sure,” Anton said. “You’re not my usual type of employee. Most of my people have worked in France for a while, Lyon usually.” We were in his tiny office with a glass door looking onto the vast basement kitchen. He wore a crumpled blue linen shirt and baggy black trousers. A clean chef’s jacket hung on the doorknob.

  He propped his elbows on his desk, scattering piles of old-fashioned order slips held together with rubber bands. Behind him were rows of shelves crammed with books. There was a row of dog-eared classics—Larousse Gastronomique, Le Cordon Bleu, Cooking with Pomiane—and more recent books by chefs like Ferran Adrià, Thomas Keller, and Alice Waters. Right at the top were the ones that he’d written: Anton Richell’s Classics Made Simple, Beginner’s Cookery, and all the others, dating back to the time when his hair was still dark brown.

  I’d already known what Anton looked like from photographs and his television series. He wasn’t famous enough for mainstream prime time. But I’d seen him late at night on cable, cruising along French canals in a longboat, rustling up local delicacies on a makeshift stove at the end of each day. And here I was, barely two feet away from him, close enough to touch his face, to see the tiny shaving nick on his cheek, the spring of the curls in his hair.

  “Do you want me to cook something?” I asked, trying not to let my nervousness show. The night before, I’d worried about what to wear. I wanted to look neat and capable, so finally I chose a man’s white shirt over jeans and sensible thick-soled shoes. My knives, already sharpened in their leather roll, were in my bag on the floor. Most chefs carried their own knives. Anton might have thought I wasn’t a true professional if I’d left them behind. In the bus on my way to the interview, I’d worried that I’d forgotten my favorite paring knife and upended my bag onto my lap to make sure I’d included it. The woman sitting beside me flinched and glanced towards the emergency button. “I’m sorry if I scared you,” I said. “They’re for my interview—a new job.” She stood up in a rush and moved away.

  Now, perched on the edge of my chair, I shifted my bag closer to my feet. “Really,” I said. “I’d be happy to prepare anything at all.” Behind me, I heard the revving of the kitchen as it geared up for lunch. The crash of pots and the thunk of chopping, the slop of water in buckets as porters sluiced down the floors. Overlaying everything was the smell of simmering stock, the antiseptic tang of rosemary, the licorice of basil and star anise.

  Anton shook his head. “No need, not just yet.” He propped his hands under his chin and stared at me, as if he was deciding how to test me. I prepared myself for anything he might throw at me. Rare ingredients? Unusual recipes? Cooking techniques? I was confident of my knowledge about such things. I could make proper filo pastry, each sheet so thin you could see through it. I could bone a pig’s trotter in less than five minutes. But his question, when it came, was unexpected.

  “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are.” There was a smug smile on his face. He expected me not to know what he was talking about.

  “Easy,” I replied. “Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin. Eighteenth-century French lawyer and politician. Extraordinary gastronome who said eating chocolate was good for the brain.”

  Anton erupted with laughter. “Not bad at all. In fact, pretty damn good. Now, here’s the thing.” The laughter was gone. He spoke seriously. “When someone is going to work for me, they need to taste things in the same way that I taste them. Otherwise, we don’t know what we’re talking about.”

  “I understand.” I didn’t really. I only knew that I was attracted to this man, already leaning towards him like metal filings to a magnet, as if my body was aware it was drawn to him before my mind organized that impulse into a thought. I brushed the feeling aside and reminded myself that this was the job I wanted more than any other. I’d have more chance of being hired if Anton saw me as a responsible sous-chef rather than yet another starstruck kitchen flirt.

  Besides, I really was a responsible sous-chef. I never called in sick and I never drank on the job, or took drugs, like so many others in my world. I took my work seriously and I liked it more than anyone else I knew. I liked the fifteen-hour days, the curious dialect of gestures and grunts incomprehensible to everyone but us. And I loved the magic of it all; the way I could put on my sensible shoes and my chef’s jacket and stand at the same station every day, weighing ingredients to the gram, mixing them in the right proportions and the right sequence until they were transformed into something else altogether that could change people’s lives.

  Really. It’s true. It’s not fanciful exaggeration. Businessmen and -women shake hands on deals worth millions of pounds, lovers resolve grievances, and parents bond with their children over a particularly fine lunch or dinner. Believing that I was creating a kind of magic spell pushed me through the long shifts, the aching legs, and the fatigue. It’s not something peculiar to me. Most people who work in restaurant kitchens think like that. It’s what we share in our mongrel world of Polish engineers, Afghan refugees, PhD dropouts, recovering junkies, and former Buddhist monks. Right wing, left wing, Oxford, Princeton, Cambridge, people who can barely read or write their own name. We’re a profession without borders. An empty plate is all we need for job satisfaction.

  Then there’s the wonderful science of cooking. Flour plus butter plus milk, in the correct quantities, added in the correct stages, will always make a béchamel sauce. If you fail to stir it, there will always be lumps. If you press a piece of beef or lamb, and it’s soft to the touch, it will always be pink. These things are unalterable truths.

  But how to explain all that to Anton in less than two minutes, in a way that would set me apart from everyone else who wanted this job? I knew about Brillat-Savarin, but was that enough to make him take his hand off his chin, stop appraising me with his clear brown eyes, and say yes, the position was mine, and ask when could I start?

  “Ask me anything,” I said, sitting up straight. By now, I’d gotten that uncalled-for impulse of attraction under control, althou
gh my hand itched to reach across and touch the small bead of dried blood on his cheek.

  “Do you want me to cook something? Anything at all. Do you want me to go through where I’ve worked?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ve read your CV. But it doesn’t tell me what I need to know. I need to know that people in my kitchen experience food the way people out there”—he gestured towards the dining room—“experience it. As a whole, not as a series of ingredients.” I was beginning to understand what he was talking about. “So let’s eat together.” He tucked my résumé under a pile of papers and looked at me, cool and appraising. “Then we’ll see.”

  “Sounds great,” I said. “Whenever.” I shifted in my chair and uncrossed my legs. The knives clinked in their bag by my feet. I told myself this wasn’t a dinner invitation. It was just an unusual method of interviewing. Anton probably didn’t want to discuss his tasting menu with absolutely everyone in the kitchen, but it made sense that the people who worked right by his side should share his ideas on food.

  “Tonight?” Anton leaned back in his chair. It wasn’t a question, because he already knew the answer. “Not really an exam as such. Nothing serious. Just a little test.”

  I scurried back to my flat and spent the rest of the day flinging every garment I owned onto the bed in a fever of indecision and excitement.

  The plain black dress with the low back? No. I looked like a nun from the front and a call girl from the back. I was neither. The red skirt? Too tight, too obvious. The last time I’d worn it, I’d drunk too much and ended up in bed with a man I didn’t even like, a coke-sniffing American called Joe. That dress with the frill down the front? Too hippy-dippy-girly. It was almost dusk when I decided on a pair of black trousers and a white silk shirt. Smart, but safe. I would add high heels and those glittery earrings I’d bought on a whim and never worn. With a bit of luck, I wouldn’t look too much like an upmarket waitress.

  I opened a bottle of amber-scented bath oil, my last birthday present from Gran, and immersed myself in hot water. My knees and breasts emerged like pale islands above the soapy foam. I shut my eyes and lay without moving until the cooling water stirred me to jump out. From the bathroom cabinet, I took out my box of smoky eye shadows and blush-colored lipsticks and set to work. In my bedroom, I put on my clothes and slipped on my shoes, the black suede ones with kitten heels. They transformed me, those oils and lotions and pots of makeup, those pieces of lace and silk. In an hour, I was no longer the hardworking chef in the serviceable clothes. I was an excited thirty-three-year-old woman about to meet a desirable man for dinner.

  Waiting for the Uber car outside my building, buffeted by the herd of commuters heading home in their uniforms of hoodies and trainers, I felt an alien in my own neighborhood. Too coiffed, too scented. All dolled up, as Gran would have said with a sniff. But as the driver pulled away from the lines of fast-food shops and down-at-heel pubs, and crossed the series of roundabouts leading to Knightsbridge with its designer stores and jewelry shops, I felt less strange. My surroundings and my appearance caught up with each other and began to merge. By the time we reached Shoreditch, I was at ease with my other persona, the one I had put on and smoothed down when I got out of the bath. I glimpsed myself in the rear vision mirror. Men might give me a second glance. Anton almost certainly would.

  There he was at the bar, waiting for me, an ice bucket with an open bottle of champagne beside him. He was standing side on, and right away I noticed his belly. It wasn’t one of those silly little pots that middle-aged men so often try to hide by wearing their shirts hanging outside their trousers like some kind of smock. Even if I’d never met Anton, I’d have known that this was a confident man just by the unashamed high swell of that belly. It was large and round, and for a moment before I walked over to join him, I imagined how good it would feel to rest my head against it.

  The day disappeared and I entered the fantasy world of a good restaurant. This one was a mixture of an art gallery and high-end chophouse. It was seductive and I fell for it, even though I recognized the relentless front-of-house smile and knew all about the furious industry in the kitchen, the sweating and the swearing, the totting up at the end of each night before the venture broke even.

  We talked like old friends, in a meandering, inconsequential way, about the food. Was my pigeon breast a touch overdone? Did his loin of venison lack seasoning? And the cheese? Ripe enough or perhaps a little too salty? This was the way we familiarized ourselves with each other. He didn’t ask me where I’d worked or what I’d done. I didn’t ask him about the business of owning and running a restaurant. There were none of the usual interview questions about cooking techniques or the restaurants where I’d worked.

  At some point during our meal—I can never remember exactly when—Anton shifted closer to me. His hand brushed my thigh and my skin leaped at his touch. He poured more wine with his other hand and studied the label. “A Pinot Noir from Patagonia. Who’d have thought? I must order some of this for the restaurant. It’s very good, don’t you think? Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is perfect,” I replied.

  We shared a pot of mint tea. By the time we left, and by the time we reached Mayfair, we both knew that I would spend the night with him. I forgot that I would have to wake in the early hours and go back to my flat, so the staff wouldn’t spot me when they came into work. Until then, I had him beside me. I was protected by his bulk, the food he had fed me for the past three hours, the wine he had chosen for me to drink. Afterwards, I lay awake and watched him sleep, hypnotized by his steady breathing, regular as a metronome.

  * * *

  I was so in love with Anton, entwined with him in a way that would have been impossible if we weren’t working together as well as sleeping with each other. After that first meal together, we spent every day side by side in Anton et Amis’s basement kitchen, finishing each other’s sentences, knowing the state of each other’s moods by a gesture or a look. Mayfair playboys on the street above us revved their Ferraris so loudly that the wineglasses trembled on their shelves. Nothing shook us as we snatched exchanges and checked our timings. The whole kitchen worked as a team, but Anton and I worked as a pair. But now I worried that we were drifting apart.

  2

  All of us love and laugh sometimes and all of us hurt sometimes. And it’s no fun! But if you’re brave enough to examine that hurt and learn from it, you will be a wiser person because of it.

  —Emma Helmsley, “Taking the Moment,” January 29, 2016

  I hopped down the basement steps to the kitchen, already thinking about the small change I wanted to make to our tarte tatin. It was one of the restaurant’s better-known dishes, but I thought it needed updating with a smidgen of star anise or black cardamom. Recipes don’t stand still. They ripen and mature, like wine or cheese. They need tweaking every now and then.

  In the locker room there was that familiar smell of last night’s wine and food mingled with the freshness of the early deliveries of mushrooms and strawberries, parsley and basil. Unusually, the room was empty, and I stood for a minute, appreciating the silence before the beginning of my working day. I was shaking out the creases from my jacket, about to put it on, when I heard footsteps, then laughter.

  “She has to know by now.” I recognized the voice. It was Ed, the kitchen porter, the one who was always smirking. “I mean, the whole of London knows about Anton and . . .”

  I slammed the locker door shut and wheeled around to face him. Two others were behind him, looking surprised. “Knows what about Anton?” I slipped one arm into my jacket, then the other. It took longer than usual to button it up.

  “Knows what about Anton?” I repeated.

  “Nothing,” mumbled Ed. He glanced away. A flush crept along his cheeks. “It’s nothing. Just stupid gossip, that’s all. Forget I said anything.”

  I jammed my hands into my pockets. I tried to think of a clever retort and couldn’t. All the tired clichés of deceit that I’d r
efused to recognize for the past few months flashed into my mind. That flicker of annoyance on Anton’s face. The nights he said he couldn’t see me because of business meetings, or saw me only briefly. The mumbled phone calls. That smell of vanilla on his clothes in the laundry basket. The sharp tone in Jude’s voice whenever she spoke about him. She was trying to tell me and I wouldn’t listen. Everything whirled and flashed like knives in the air and settled into the inescapable fact that Anton had someone else. The air disappeared from my lungs like the aftershock of a silent bomb blast.

  “It’s late,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so steady and clear, ringing out around the room. “I need to get started.” I brushed past them and strode into the kitchen. I tied an apron behind my back. There was a fierce desire to lose myself in the routine of work. If I made one unfamiliar move, I would fall apart, sugar on the floor.

  The day passed in a numbed haze. I sensed, rather than saw, Anton enter the kitchen an hour later, and I forced myself to look up and give a cheery smile. He looked surprised and smiled back. I returned to the painstaking job of filleting and boning a large turbot. It wasn’t my usual job, but we’d been short-staffed all week because of a particularly vicious strain of flu. I was grateful that the task required so much concentration that there was no time for thought.

  All around me were the noises of a busy kitchen gearing up for service. This was the time of day when I found comfort in the low chatter, the sound of meat sizzling, and the steady rhythm of bubbling pots of stock. I felt like I was a member of an orchestra about to perform in front of an appreciative audience. But as I slipped my knife along the spine of the fish and felt along its length, as I pulled away each fillet with one clean movement and checked it for bones, I knew I was an outsider now. I was the one who was the last to know, the one they would joke about when I left the room.