“Lily! Don’t speak like that. It’s not true.”
“Of course it is.” Lily grabbed her bewildered-looking friend’s arm. At the door, she turned and spat at her mother. “You’re just too cowardly to say so. And you’re jealous.”
“Jealous of who?”
“Oh come off it, you’re jealous of them.” Lily glared at Emma, biting her lip as if she wanted to shout out something but didn’t trust herself to speak. She stamped upstairs, her friend trailing behind her.
Emma turned to me, helpless and embarrassed. “Can you decide what to eat? I always seem to get it wrong,” she asked.
“Sure,” I replied.
Later, after dinner—one of their favorite tray bakes again, this time with cod steaks—I went upstairs with the day’s laundry. Jake’s door was shut, so I left his clothes in a basket in the hall. Lily was lying on her bed, reading.
“Are you still interested in cooking something with me?” I asked. “Maybe we could do an apple crumble tomorrow, for dinner.”
“Why not?” she said, flinging the book onto the floor. “Oh, I’m sorry for being rude this afternoon. But I hate them. And I’m the legal one, not that bitch Rebecca.”
I handed over the laundry. “Did you ever think it could be more difficult for her than it is for you? Just a thought. Anyway, tomorrow we’ll have vichyssoise, roast chicken, and the crumble. Sunday lunch, except on a weekday evening. Is that so bad?”
At least I made her smile, just a bit.
It took Lily a while to learn how to peel an apple, but she got the hang of it. “You want the apples to be a bit sloppy for a good crumble,” I told her. “It was one of the things my first boss, Mavis, taught me to cook in the nursing home in Clapham after I came to London. Mavis had a lot of rules about crumble.”
“Like what?” asked Lily, scooping her peelings into the compost bin.
“Well, her first rule was that the usual mixture of butter, flour, and sugar was not good enough. She liked to add some rolled oats, or coconut and ground almonds, and she preferred demerara sugar.” I put the ingredients, already measured, into a bowl and mixed them together. “And she said you had to have a good thick layer of crumble, so everyone could get their fair share. Mavis reckoned that food was very important, that it was the first pleasure to arrive in our lives and the last to leave.”
“I’ve never thought of food in that way,” said Lily. Siggy snuffled under our feet, hopeful for crumbs. A warm breeze carried the scent of grass and blossom through the open doors.
“Were you always interested in cooking?” she asked.
“Not in an obsessive way. I sort of drifted into it after school and then grew to like it. It was like going to a party every day and getting paid for it, because as well as loving the cooking, there’s this whole subculture of misfits in restaurants and I fit right in.”
“You’re not a misfit,” Lily said. “And is that really true? About the misfits?”
“Pretty much. In fact, it’s hard to think of anyone completely sane in the catering business. First off, there was Sheila in the pub near Shaftesbury, my first job. She taught me how to pull a pint of beer and wore stilettos at all times, don’t ask me how. Sheila also had a strong whiskey or two before breakfast every day. And then there was Charlie, who owned the first London restaurant I worked in—he was keen on things like mutton tartare and nettle pesto . . .”
“Mutton tartare! What’s that?” asked Lily, layering the cooked apple in the baking dish.
“Finely chopped raw meat with bits and pieces thrown in.”
“Disgusting,” she said. “I could be sick.”
“I agree with you, and hey, here’s a funny thing. His place closed in under a year so off I went to other restaurants and chefs who knew a bit more about food.”
“That still doesn’t make you a misfit.”
“Maybe not now so much, but at your age I was. I was packed off to boarding school and I ran away—let me think now—maybe four or five times. Once I hid in the laundry truck, but the driver didn’t unload it and I was stuck there all night with everyone’s dirty sheets and towels. In the end, they didn’t take me back. You’re so lucky, coming back home every afternoon, having friends.”
Lily wiped her forehead, leaving a smear of apple above her eyebrows. “But you must have had friends? Wasn’t boarding school fun, being off on your own like in Harry Potter? Didn’t you have, you know, adventures and crushes?”
* * *
September 1991. It was still so hot. Girls pushed past me. Perfect girls with clear pale skin, shiny hair, and pearled teeth. I was conscious of the freckles across my cheeks, the nervous rash on my neck.
In the dormitories, ramshackle by comparison to the grandeur of the school’s façade, everyone unpacked her trunk, everything the same: pajamas with printed flower sprigs, silver frames with photographs of the girl’s dogs and horses, and a large-bristle hairbrush. I had none of these things and hung about with no one speaking to me until a girl with long blond hair sat down on the bed next to mine.
“Did you blub when your mother left?” she asked.
“My mother’s dead,” I said.
“What about your father then?” She brushed her hair and began plaiting it.
I swallowed. Outside the window, light was falling. “I don’t know where he is.”
“My parents are divorced,” she said, fastening her plait. “But we know where we come from. Everyone here knows that.”
A bell rang. “Fabulous!” said the girl. Her name was Millie. “Supper.” She turned to me. “Hurry up, otherwise there’ll be none left.” I thought supper was something people ate late at night. I didn’t know it meant gluey potatoes and gristly sausages at six o’clock. I missed Gran’s burned toast and her lamb casseroles.
At night I wept for my brown bedroom. I didn’t belong there. I belonged at home, with Gran and Douglas. I didn’t understand how I could be so lonely when I was never alone. I slept in a dormitory with nine other girls. I showered in a communal bathroom with only swing doors on the toilets. After school I studied in the library with the rest of my class and played lacrosse and hockey very badly. Everything was done in a team of which I was never a member. It didn’t help that I was smarter than everyone else, although I tried to hide it. The other girls called me CLS, which took me some time to work out. It stood for Common Little Swat. The only surprise was that I stayed as long as I did.
“Throwing your life away,” cried Gran. “Selfish child!” Long silences. Doors slamming then opening again. Earnest bedside chats.
“All those opportunities, gone forever,” rasped Gran, too anxious to sit down, almost in tears. “I suppose all you can think about is that boy!”
“His name is Douglas,” I shouted. “And I’ll get a job.” Alan, the publican, didn’t care that I was only fifteen. He paid me even less than the minimum wage. Every night Douglas drove me home on his moped at the end of my shift. He’d left school as well, but hadn’t followed his father into the excrement business. He plowed fields, mended fences, pulled weeds from rich people’s gardens. For two years, everything was uncomplicated. There was pleasure and a sense of purpose, like it was the beginning of something, although I couldn’t work out exactly what that something was. It was peaceful and I didn’t have to satisfy anyone’s expectations. But then Alan announced he was almost bankrupt. The pub would close in three months’ time.
“I’ll go to London and get a job,” I told Douglas. “I’ll work in a pub there, maybe cook. Sheila says I could be good at cooking. I’ll come back at weekends, all the time. I won’t miss one, I promise.”
I called him every morning from wherever I was living. The hostel in Peckham. The room in Tower Hamlets, the studios and the bedsits. Douglas told me if it had rained too much or not enough, or if the hay was better this year than last. I never really listened. I only wanted to drink in the regular beat of his life, to wait for it to wash through me and sustain me through those days and n
ights when the smell of cooking oil never really disappeared from my hair, no matter how often I washed it. It was selfish of me to expect him to wait for me, like some loyal Labrador, but I did. More than expected it, I counted on it.
One spring weekend in the cottage he’d rented for himself outside town, he lay on his back after we’d made love. I traced my fingers along his rough weather-beaten face down to the soft skin on his chest. He rolled over and spoke to the ceiling. “It’s no good, being like this. It’s not enough for me. I can’t hang about waiting for you to turn up once a week.”
My fingers ran along the calluses on his palms. I’d always admired his hands, their brute strength when he was working and then their delicate touch when we were alone. I scrambled out of bed and walked to the window. My feet stuck on the stone tiles. In the field at the end of the garden, a lamb ran along the hedge. Up and down, up and down, tossing its head, slithering in the mud and bleating in terrible broken sounds.
“Can’t we do something about that poor animal?” I cried. The lamb slipped and fell on its side, its legs scrabbling and failing to find purchase in the air.
“The ewe is dead,” said Douglas in a flat voice. “The farmer will deal with the lamb soon enough. It can’t survive without the mother, and there’s no one with the time to bottle-feed one orphaned animal. You grew up around here. You know that.”
In the reflection of the window, I saw my mouth grimace and tears run down my face. I felt as if I were suffocating. “I won’t be in London forever,” I cried. “But there’s no work for me down here. Even Gran agrees with me on that one. I can’t lose you,” I whimpered. “I can’t be without you.”
I was only eighteen. I had no idea it would hurt so much.
* * *
I hadn’t thought about that time with Douglas, or school, since the night about a year ago when I looked up from my bench at Anton et Amis and saw two of my former classmates drunk and tittering at a table full of leering red-faced men. I didn’t have to turn my back. They wouldn’t have thought to look into the kitchen.
“Everything OK?” Lily’s question made me jump. “You were miles away.”
“Everything is fine. I was wondering where Jake is—do you think he’d like to join us?”
“He’s not here,” said Lily. “Hard to know what he gets up to after school these days.”
“He seems interested in religion—is there a school prayer group or something?” Again, I thought of the pamphlet in his room. “Or maybe he goes to a church?”
Lily snorted with laughter. “Hardly. Religion is not cool at our school, although there was one girl in my class who found God by the bus stop. But she forgot about him, or her, or it six months later. What makes you think Jake is interested in religion? If he was, it would be a first for this house.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied, deliberately vague. “Something he said maybe. I can’t remember the exact details . . . but everything is all right with him?”
“Guess so.” She handed me the bowl of crumble mixture and I spread it over the cooked apple. The counter around us was covered in a mess of apples and flour and sugar.
“Another of Mavis’s rules was that cooks cleaned up after themselves,” I said. “Start in a mess, end in a mess.”
“Got it,” she laughed and reached for a dishcloth. “Hey, this is good. Thanks.”
“It’s the wrong way round,” I said. “Thank you. You’ve been a great kitchen buddy.” I was about to tell her about Isabella’s saying of a place for everything and everything in its place, but Lily would never have heard of Isabella Beeton.
Rob might not have heard of her either, but he would argue that Isabella’s maxim applies to people as well. Rob had lots of theories about people’s behavior. There was his point-of-chaos theory, by which he meant that everyone finds a place to store their mental chaos so they can remain sane during working hours. It might be the accountant who can do tax returns in his head but can’t add up his restaurant bill, or the software engineer who can build entire digital systems but needs GPS to drive to the supermarket. He also thought people could work effectively for only three to four hours a day. The rest was just showing up or doing routine administration.
He’d say that this kitchen suited my psychological geography, another of his theories. Rob believed we have primitive responses to our environment. Some of us feel safe in the forest because there’s always somewhere to hide. The rest fear the big bad wolf behind every tree and prefer open spaces where the enemy is more easily spotted. Since coming to Wycombe Lodge, I’d worked out that I was comfortable in the middle ground, with my back to the wall and a clear line of sight in front of me. In short, well defended.
By seven o’clock, everything was ready. Emma was home from work and Theo was in the kitchen chattering to me about definitions of happiness in various languages. “Did you know that Spanish has more words for happiness than any other language? Korean and Chinese have the fewest.”
I wasn’t that fussed about Korea and China. I was more concerned about happiness at Wycombe Lodge. I wanted my roast chicken and apple crumble to create family harmony and for Emma to lose that small furrow of anxiety on her brow.
The chicken was just out of the oven when a small, buxom, olive-skinned woman strode into the kitchen followed by an adolescent elongated twin of herself, with Rob taking up the rear.
“You must be the wonderful Anne.” The woman bustled to the sink and held out her hand. I’d never seen a woman in her late forties with eyebrow piercings before, but she got away with it. “I’m Christine and this is Rebecca. Rob told us all about you. I have to say I’ve never smelled anything so delicious in this house in all the years I’ve been coming here. Lucky Rob!” Her voice was loud, yet husky. “And, naturally, lucky Emma!” Behind her, Theo rolled his eyes and made a funny face, like a nodding clown. I went to the sink and turned on the tap to hide my smile.
You could tell Christine was confident about her looks, the way she didn’t wear any makeup and had let herself get plump, wearing a dowdy top and too tight jeans. Good-looking women were sometimes arrogant like that, regarding their beauty with the same nonchalance as rich women regarded their expensive clothes, like they were throwaway rags stitched together instead of designer fashion.
I saw it all the time in the restaurant. Oh, this old face, I’ve had it forever, can’t think what to do with it. Christine pretended not to care, but she knew perfectly well that from the shoulders up she was an exact incarnation of those smoldering French actresses, all almond-shaped eyes, sharp cheekbones, and hair chopped like the cat had been at it, her looks accentuated rather than marred by such a savage haircut.
Emma stopped lighting candles and rushed to greet Christine and Rebecca, stumbling over the hem of her skirt and almost falling into Christine’s arms. Her fine blond good looks paled before Christine’s forceful confidence and the bloom in her olive complexion. I thought of the face serums and creams beginning to multiply in Emma’s bathroom.
“Wonderful to see you both,” Emma exclaimed. “And Rebecca, don’t you look lovely in that color!” Rebecca wore a sleeveless flimsy red gypsy-style top and jeans, with a skin-exposing gap in between. From her neck to her waist, the effect was cheery, almost festive, at odds with the scowl on her face.
“Where are those divine children of yours?” cried Christine. “Hiding away in the attic?”
Towering a full head above her, Emma pursed her lips. “They’ll be down in a minute, probably just finishing their homework or something.”
She had lit extra candles, so many that the dining room resembled an altar. Everyone gathered around the table. Lily passed soup plates, and Jake, returned from some unexplained outing, slid about in his chair, unable to take his eyes off Rebecca, who declined the vichyssoise because of the carbohydrates. After some hesitation, Lily did the same. The only sound came from the scrape of spoons on plates until Christine began rabbiting on about her job as a community worker, teaching te
enage mothers how to look after their babies.
“It never ceases to surprise me,” she said, “how the maternal instinct somehow always kicks in, even with the young ones, the thirteen-year-olds. But then, they’re so much more physically mature than their mothers were. Some of the girls I deal with have been sexually active since they were about twelve.” She made this sound like an admirable athletic achievement, like running a hundred meters in record time.
Rob snorted. “Don’t you think it would be a better idea to hand out condoms at the school gate? A child with a child—never a good idea.”
Christine’s eyes narrowed. Her eyebrow ring glinted in the candlelight. “How very middle class of you, Rob, and how very prejudiced. It’s a totally different world where Rebecca and I live. Not all of us aspire to the protection of fee-paying schools for rich kids. If I had my way, private schools would be banned. They’re simply not necessary. They do more harm than good.”
“I’m sure Rob didn’t mean to offend,” Emma chirped. The furrow between her eyebrows had deepened. “Gosh, this soup is good!”
Lily stood up and brought the bowls over to the counter. Soup slopped onto the marble, pale and slimy. She pulled her gray sweatshirt down to cover her thighs and picked up the bowl of carrots and beans.
“Oh, Rebecca could have helped,” said Christine. Rebecca scowled, but Christine plowed on. “So lovely this, all of us here together.” She raised her glass and everyone dutifully followed suit. I carried the chicken across to Rob.
“Ah,” he said, determinedly hearty. “At last. The magnificent bird!” He picked up a knife and began hacking. He gouged out pieces of breast meat, waving each piece in the air, allowing it to go cold before tossing it onto a plate. Then he tore at the legs and wings, elbows raised to his shoulders with the carving action of a chain-saw killer.
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