Prior Engagements

by Sarah Goodwin

  “Oh don’t take any notice – what bored stock trader doesn’t want to open a café or a bistro or a...mezzanine?” Opal said scornfully, “just look at your brother, five months he’s had that ridiculous vodka bistro and has it turned a profit? No.”

  “I believe it’s actually making a record loss,” Dorian admitted, “what with the Smirnoff debacle.”

  “I heard, was it fifteen gallons?”

  “Fifty, and a case of bison grass vodka.”

  Opal looked at Christophe with ‘what did I tell you?’ written all over her face.

  Christophe downed his drink and motioned to the waiter to bring another.

  Dinner improved greatly after that, mainly because of the amount of wine we drank. Our main courses were amazing (if so gilded that I almost chipped a tooth on some steamed salmon). Dorian and Opal talked about a friend of theirs, ‘Bulimic Beatrice’, who’d just been hospitalised with ‘severe ingrown toenails’, a ruse cooked up by her parents. Meanwhile, Christophe and I talked about cafés.

  Yes, despite my deep guilt over Will, and the apparent closure of Raspberry Bs, I couldn’t help but take the opportunity to talk about the business that I’d become familiar with over the years. We talked end tables, sugar sachets verses sugar cubes and wholesale food suppliers. Christophe had a lot of imagination, but his practical knowledge was lacking in most areas (such as his surprise that most customers would steal anything that wasn’t nailed down, from packets of sugar and teaspoons to artwork and once, memorably, a sofa – which, for the record, I had told Will not to put on wheels). After an hour of this, and just as dessert arrived (a concoction of cream and fruit that looked gold free until I reached the gold covered coffee beans at the bottom) Christophe (now quite drunk) said, “you should manage my café!”

  “What café?” I asked, quite reasonably I felt.

  “The one I’m going to open. Tomorrow!” he declared rashly.

  I was going to have to stop drinking wine, it led to too many spur of the moment decisions. First my marriage, now this (not to mention my brief experiment with bleaching my hair back in university).

  Opal leapt back into the conversation like a soldier leaping onto a grenade with a sharp, “what was that darling?” and I assumed that was the end of the matter.

  At the end of the night, Opal and Christophe bid us slurred goodnights outside as Dorian and I climbed into a taxi. Once the car was in motion, Dorian leant back in his seat with a sigh.

  “That was almost enjoyable.”

  I hummed in agreement, feeling simultaneously buzzy and cold with drink.

  Dorian sank lower in his seat and turned his tired face towards me.

  “You were exceptional tonight,” he told me, “really, I’ve known grown women to be reduced to silence and repressed tears after only five minutes with Opal, under two if she’s in a particularly bad mood.”

  I smiled, “I’ve known worse, and working in a shop, not to mention as a waitress, you learn how to smile and think ‘die bitch’ at the same time. Very therapeutic.”

  Dorian huffed a laugh. “Still, you probably outdid yourself on terms of tongue biting this evening.”

  “There were a few moments that made me consider stabbing her with a sorbet spoon, I’ll grant you,” I said, “what did you think of tonight? And, you know, her husband?” I asked, worried that he might have another attack of heartbreak like the one that had followed Opal’s wedding.

  “I think...he’s bitten off more than he can chew,” Dorian said thoughtfully, “and he’s welcome to it.”

  After a few more moments of streetlamp speckled silence Dorian turned his head and kissed my cheek, then my throat.

  “You look beautiful,” he murmured.

  I turned my body towards his, pressing myself to his warm, comforting shape and inhaling the scent of his crisp shirt. I couldn’t stir myself to feel much in the way of knicker-dropping desire, and instead I suddenly felt very tired and in want of a long, solitary sleep. But of course, my solitary bed days were behind me.

  “Do you think...” I stopped myself, realising that asking if we were heading back to England soon might make me seem as incredibly ungrateful as I felt for thinking it.

  “...we could make it an early night?” I finished.

  “Of course,” Dorian said with an easy smile, “you’ve got work in the morning after all.”

  “Not exactly work,” I said, knowing that my volunteer position at the Housing Works Bookshop Café wasn’t exactly going to bring home the bacon (or even the wafer thin processed ham).

  “Better than work, you’re doing a selfless thing, and it’s incredibly good of you.”

  I felt my ill gotten dress prickle against me as I flushed with guilty sweat. Why had I volunteered? To benefit my fellow man with my single marketable skill, or to escape an apartment and a man that were (despite my attempts to convince myself otherwise) still worryingly foreign to me.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I never thought I’d be happy to receive a burn from a coffee machine, but then my expectations had proven to be dead wrong on most counts of late.

  “Fuck!” I yelped contentedly, as steam gushed over my hand, turning my thumb and index finger the colour of a sunburnt scrotum (Will, summer holiday, Ibiza 2010).

  “Unlucky,” trilled Mags, my fellow volunteer, a teenager who was grey haired by choice, and whose prior working experience was negligible, but who’d won me over with cups of tea and a broad Texan accent.

  “At this point it’s just moistening the old scars,” I said bravely, though I’d lost a few of my useful calluses since leaving Bath. There had been a time when I could take hot toasties from the oven barehanded, and care nothing for the cheese-lava dripping out of them. Sadly I now lacked the horn-like fingers of a fulltime waitress.

  “Lovely,” Mags said, wrinkling her pierced nose up, “keep your hands off anything I plan to eat, would’ya?”

  “So....everything in the whole café?” I said.

  Mags looked affronted, even though she ate like a horse (a horse that cared little about the fact that it was stealing from its place of volunteer employment) and had a particular liking for apple fritter donuts and cinnamon whirls.

  “I’ll try not to touch anything,” I told her, “but you know how much I love to caress the cheesecakes, they’re so cold and clammy.”

  Mags stuck her tongue out and made a gagging noise, turning away from me to shove a fully loaded pallet of dishes into the washer.

  I’d been working at the Housing Works Café for a week, but I’d already grown familiar with the chrome beasts that made up the kitchen (the dishwasher that hissed and leaked, the tumble dryer that steamed up the place and the stove that couldn’t reach temperatures higher than gas 5) and with the regulars who frequented the café (some of whom also leaked, issued hot air and stubbornly refused to warm up to me). My new routine had been established, and thankfully it involved a lot less walking around aimlessly and watching the world go by, and a lot more shouting at hopelessly buggered kitchen appliances, and shoving coffee at grumpy hipsters.

  I had to admit that, despite my willingness to bitch and moan at the slightest mention of work, I was happiest when I had a job to do, and a clear divide between myself and the amorphous surges of random pedestrians going about their daily business (got apron, have purpose, as they say). I had been almost afraid of becoming a blurred, forgettable face in the strangeness of Soho, and despite my frequent walks and visits to coffee shops all over the area, I’d still felt like an outsider. Not anymore. From the moment I’d walked out onto the café floor, holding a tray, I’d been in my element.

  I was getting used to the twang of American accents, the sight of yellow cabs and the silly names for things like courgettes (zucchini) and bucks fizz (mimosa). There was nothing like finding crumpled dollar bill tips to make you realise that the strange green notes actually had monetary worth, and eventually even the abandoned copies of the New York Times started to look ped
estrian. Mags was even tutoring me in diner slang, something that never failed to amuse her, talking ‘all Briddish’ as I did.

  “Say ‘over easy’ again.”

  “I’m trying to sort this bloody machine out.”

  “Just say it.”

  “Over easy.”

  Mags would then crack up and leave me alone for five minutes while I tried to tape a vital piece of equipment back together. Then she’d hunt me down and force me to say something else, or she’d impersonate my accent – making me sound like the Queen crossed with Frank Gallagher.

  My two week anniversary at the café was marked by an unexpected visit. Dorian arrived with Christophe just as the lunch rush was ebbing and I was busy scraping crumbs and sticky globs of sauce and sugary tea rings off of the tables. I also had a fresh burn on my elbow, from carelessly leaning on the toaster (I couldn’t really complain though, as Mags had singed her purple hair that morning as she bent down by the gas oven to retrieve a tray of pastries).

  “Dorian,” I said, my mouth wavering before my brain got it to quirk into a smile, “what a nice surprise.”

  (Things between us had improved a lot since I’d started work, if only because I now had something to occupy me and a new friend which whom I could indulge my carnivorous sabre-tooth. Mags was an ardent meat lover, and we’d already been out a number of times to grab burgers and steak).

  Dorian stepped forwards to kiss my cheek. “I’m sorry to bother you at work, nice as it is to see you, but Christophe insisted and...I thought it best to come with him,” he said, raising an eyebrow.

  Translation: ‘I wasn’t about to unleash this idiot on you without an acceptable buffer.’

  “Oh?” I said, genuinely perplexed. I looked to Christophe, “what was it that you wanted?”

  (I almost added a testy ‘that could not be conveyed by telephone’).

  Christophe, wearing a white shirt and some kind of brown leather waistcoat with a pair of designer shades balanced on his head, looked extremely excited.

  “I’ve come to discuss our new venture,” he said.

  “Venture?”

  “The café, Annie!” he cried (pronouncing it ‘Ani’) “the café that you are going to help me create.”

  I looked at Dorian, who looked as gobsmacked as I felt.

  “You were serious about the café?” I asked.

  “As serious as I have always been about it, only until now, I lacked the professional experience to truly realise it,” Christophe beamed, his sunglasses leaping about on his head, “but now, now I have you!”

  I thought of Will and I putting his business plan together at a lock-in held by a mutual friend (Bombastic Bertie, a disenfranchised Oxford professor of early Germanic poetry, and a champion at table football) after a pint of tequila and an inspiring re-run of ‘Allo ‘Allo on the old black and white portable set over the bar.

  “I’m hardly a professional,” I pointed out.

  “But you have worked in a café for years, and you work in one now. It is all you have ever done.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s exactly all I’ve...”

  I looked to Dorian for help.

  “It might not be such a bad thing,” he said, before turning to Christophe, “you’d like to have Annie help you as a sort of...consultant?”

  “Yes!” exclaimed Christophe, as if this was a brand new idea of such genius that he could hardly believe it.

  “No,” I said, with equal vehemence, “really, I’d be useless.”

  “Please Annie, this is my dream, and, now that I have enough money to keep myself and my wife happy (I very much doubted that ‘happy’ was the right word, ‘appeased’ fit better in my mind) I can pursue it, but only with your help.”

  I wavered. Christophe wasn’t all bad, in fact he was mostly alright, and he seemed so desperate...I couldn’t help but feel for him.

  “OK,” I said, “I’ll help.”

  Not since ‘I do’ had two words changed so much for me. The very next day and every day after that, Christophe showed up at the café with a legal tablet and a great many books, binders and catalogues. He’d spread them out on a table, order endless coffees (all flat whites, showing that his pretentious roots had not entirely shrivelled in the wake of this sudden career change) and call me over to consult on things. He even managed to charm Mags, usually so thorny towards patrons of the poncy variety. She smiled at him all the time, and took to hiding her singed hair under a succession of sequin studded bows and combs.

  While I tried to serve customers and clear away their leavings, he bombarded me with questions about literally everything.

  “What is the best kind of property to start with?”

  “Do you think these teaspoons make the cups look too...festive?”

  “Do these lamps look too spindly?”

  “What kinds of bread should I serve?”

  “Can you describe this toaster to me?”

  It was exhausting, and I felt, as the days passed and no concrete evidence of an actual premises or business plan emerged, pointless. Still, I put up with it because it distracted me whenever my mind was in danger of wandering during a mundane task. It also stopped me from wondering what Will might be doing at any given moment (I’d sent a letter to his parents to pass on to him, but had received no reply, which had left me feeling even guiltier than I had before, at the thought of his sweet parents hating my traitorous guts).

  Opal accompanied her husband on only a handful of occasions (possibly because of the way Mags glared at her from the kitchen, and accidently-on-purpose added cream and extra-extra sugar to all her drink orders – even a diet Pepsi). Opal always appeared tanned, well groomed and wearing the skinniest of jeans or the shortest of shorts, and she refused to talk to anyone, even Christophe, and instead openly sighed, rolled her eyes and sulked over the expense of his new obsession.

  I found that, having been exposed to Opal previously, I was more tolerant of her than Mags (almost as if Opal in her current form was akin to smallpox, and I’d been afflicted with a less lethal strain in preparation for this epic plague of sulk) and she no longer made me want to bash my head (or hers) against the wall (Though she did make me want to lie down and whistle until she went away).

  I kept my mum up to date on the goings on at the café and with Christophe. There wasn’t a lot to say about me and Dorian, save that we still existed in the same space, ate together, discussed our days and occasionally had sex (something that I would never EVER tell my mum about, because we were old-fashioned like that, and had never spoken about sex, even when I was a teenager, and she’d found my poster of a shirtless Orlando Bloom wrapped around a Sainsbury’s basics cucumber under my bed).

  Mum had told me about a ‘very strange woman’ who had called her and asked herself round for ‘afternoon tea’. Apparently Fifi had decided that she wanted to see the plastic butterflies of far-flung Twerton first hand.

  “What did you make of her?” I asked.

  There was a long pause.

  “She’s not a bit like her brother,” Mum said, which was absolutely true, “we’re having lunch tomorrow,” she continued.

  “Why?”

  “She is my daughter-in-law, and a very nice girl to boot.”

  “That’s not quite how marriage works,” I said.

  “Well, I’m going anyway.”

  And that was pretty much the end of that.

  Two months after I made the move to New York, Christophe arrived at the café (dressed in a cream caftan beaded in bronze) with Opal and Dorian in tow (Opal looking pointedly bored, Dorian looking nonplussed and uneasy).

  “Annie, you must come with us,” Christophe announced to me (and the two dozen café patrons seated around me).

  “Where?”

  “He has a surprise,” Opal said, uttering the word ‘surprise’ as distastefully as she might have said ‘a case of genital warts’, “we don’t know where we’re going either, it’s really becoming very tiresome.” (Opal
had lost some of her scathing, scalpel like wordsmanship since she’d sunk back into teenager levels of sulkiness. Even Elizabeth Bennet would have been hard pressed to come across as witty and clever if she spent that much time pouting and stamping her foot).

  Mags appeared at my side, sporting a pink tutu and a miniature sequinned tophat on a hair clasp. “I’ll cover you, go on.”

  I smiled gratefully at her and allowed Christophe to usher me outside, where, to my surprise (and Opal’s huff of derision) we ignored the taxi that had brought them to the café and walked up the street.

  The further we went, the more confused I became, surely Christophe was not so bound by my opinion that he had...

  “Here we are,” he announced, stopping in front of a building so familiar to me that I could have drawn it from memory (OK, it would have looked like a wobbly stack of pancakes, Duplo and dog innards, but the mental picture would have been entirely accurate). The building that I had sat in front of months ago (and many times since) thinking it would make one hell of a café.

  And it had, I realised as he opened the door and motioned to us.

  “Come inside.”

  Inside all of our apparently aimless talks had borne fruit – which is a fancy way of saying that every tasselled pillow, and every teaspoon that I had chosen had a place amongst the coloured finery of Christophe’s café. The tables were the painted antique ones that I’d chosen on eBay, the multi-hued lamps and cushions matched their catalogue pictures exactly, and the menu, hanging on the wall in a frame, cross-stitched onto pale yellow cloth, was the same menu we had deliberated over for four entire days.

  “The kitchen is as you specified, including the Magi-mix, and the pass table, no heat lamps, I promise.”

  Opal sniffed and looked around her critically. “It looks...very nice.” (This small compliment appeared to be genuine, and I could see it had cost her a lot, so I accepted it as ample praise.)

  “Absolutely superb,” Dorian said, putting his arm around me, “everyone will be talking about...” he looked at Christophe, “what have you decided to call it?”