Lunching at Laura's

by Claire Rayner

  ‘But what about your films? Suddenly you don’t care about making films any more?’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s because I care that this idea is so attractive. Listen, Laura, I came over here to work for City because I was sick of twiddling about with the sort of commercials I was doing. I was getting awards, sure, and building a reputation, sure, but it was just commercials. It’s feature films I want to make, and decent documentaries – so what am I doing at City? I’ll tell you. When I spoke to you on the phone this morning, I was in the middle of setting up my next project. No, not my Soho film. That, says bloody Brian Crowner and even bloodier Lethbridge, has to wait. I’ve got to get this urgent commercial done. For a baby’s bubble bath, would you believe? A product called Choochieface – can you imagine? A baby’s bubble bath called Choochieface! It’d really be a wrench, wouldn’t it, to give up that sort of work? Such a blow to my artistic integrity, hmm?’

  She laughed. ‘Well, yes, I do see. Choochieface? Ye Gods!’

  ‘Precisely,’ he said grimly. ‘Ye bloody Gods! And listening to Davriosh in there, it suddenly hit me. If I could leave City and work for you as your tenant in that shop – there’s a flat over it isn’t there? – I thought so. Great, then I can live there too and that’ll save money. The rent I pay now is horrendous. So I’d live there, run the shop, get me an assistant who I could train properly, and once it’s all running smoothly, hustle some money and make my film as a freelance.’ He gave a sudden little crow of laughter and stretched both arms up into the sunshine and grinned down at her. ‘I’d feel so free! It’d be marvellous, bloody marvellous! And it all depends on you. You have to buy the shop to make it all happen.’

  ‘It would seem so odd,’ she said slowly. ‘I’ve never done it – a tobacconist’s shop –’

  ‘We’d have to change that. Smoking is getting to be a decidedly unadmired habit. I’d make it into a sweetshop.’ His smile widened. ‘They’re not good for you either, but I wouldn’t feel so bad about selling sweets. It was what my family sold, you see, and I’m used to it. I’d make that the most beautiful candy store you ever saw.’

  The excitement in him was infectious and she sat and watched him as he jumped up and went across the Yard to try to peep in between the cracks in the boards to the interior.

  ‘You won’t be able to see much,’ she called and he came back, disappointed and nodding his agreement.

  ‘Black as the pit in there. But I remember it, the time I did go in – mahogany and brass and old fittings, really beautiful old art nouveau stuff?’

  ‘That’s it –’ she said, watching him, liking the way his face was so alert and excited as he talked.

  ‘Imagine those shelves piled high with dishes of glace fruits and toffees and bonbons,’ he said. ‘And all that new health food stuff – it’s about as healthy as bags of plain sugar but what the hell, people adore it. I do too! We’d sell all those and handmade chocolates as well. There must be people who still make ’em. They’d come out after their lunches with you, Laura, feeling expansive and generous and come right into my shop to buy something delicious in a pretty box with ribbons for their wives or secretaries. Damn it, for their wives and their secretaries! I tell you, it could be marvellous –’

  ‘And special promotions for Christmas and Easter and Valentine’s Day –’ She caught fire, too, as his excitement leapt across the gap between them to fill her.

  ‘– And Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and Uncle Tom Cobleigh’s Day. Oh, Laura, please do it! It really would be great fun – and profitable, too.’

  ‘I still can’t be sure,’ she said and the excitement dwindled and lay low in her belly, like a banked down fire. Not quite gone, but far from the leaping thing it had been. ‘Like I said, I’ve never done such a thing. We’ve always been just this –’ And again she patted the wooden ledge of the window as if it were a favourite pet.

  ‘Listen Laura, I know how you feel about tradition.’ He came and perched beside her. ‘You want to keep things the way they always have been.

  ‘That’s it.’ She lit up again and turned to look very directly at him. ‘It sounds so corny, and daft, but I can’t help it. What matters to me is knowing that my father and my grandfather and my great grandfather were here before me, running it just as I do –’

  ‘Just as you do? Never!’

  ‘What?’ She looked startled.

  ‘You’ve changed things! Of course you have. Didn’t you turn the upstairs rooms from a flat where people lived into the Extras? You told me yourself you’d done that – and what about the panelling work you had done? In your father’s time that was just grimy old wood, wasn’t it? Now it’s so beautiful and special there’s a preservation order on it. The way you dress the restaurant – those blue table cloths and the glass and the china – didn’t you buy all that? Of course you did! Tradition isn’t – it’s not the same as embalming, you know! It’s letting things grow and live as well.’

  ‘And buying a shop for you to run would be making my restaurant grow and live?’

  ‘If you use the Yard between us for tables in the summer it would,’ he said promptly. ‘Absolutely! And I wouldn’t object. Old Mucky – now, it’s my guess he’d have objected strongly if you’d tried to do such a thing in his time.’

  She made a little face. ‘I rather think he might,’ she said. ‘He was quite a territorial little chap. He and Angie had the odd disagreement when Angie piled fruit boxes outside the side door there –’

  ‘I’d never make a moment’s fuss,’ he said piously. ‘Anyway, how could I if you were my landlord?’

  ‘You think I can do it?’ she said. ‘Handle the money side, I mean?’

  ‘If you want to.’ He looked at her very closely and then frowned. ‘Oh, hell, am I overselling this to you? I don’t want to do that. It’s just the best idea I’ve ever had. I feel it all the way through to my middle, and –’

  ‘No one ever forces me to do anything against my will,’ she said firmly. ‘But I’d hate to be the rigid sort who isn’t open to suggestions. And you could be right. I like the idea of summer tables out here – it’s the finance that’s my worry.’

  ‘I have no right to tell you how to use your money, Laura,’ he said, sober now, his excitement at his plans carefully under control. ‘I don’t even know how much there is, and I don’t want to –’ He stopped then and looked at her and then said very deliberately, ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Want to know. I want to know everything about you. I –’ He swallowed. ‘Do you know how much – do you know how important you are to me, Laura?’

  ‘No!’ She closed her eyes. ‘I can’t cope with questions like that, I really can’t. I don’t know and I don’t want to know. I mean –’ She opened her eyes and looked appealingly at him. ‘I do like you, Joel. You’re a super friend. The best I could have had. But I’m – I’ve got a hell of a lot of bruises, one way and another. Let them fade, please. Let’s just talk about money and shops. Nothing else.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said and sat there silent and after a long pause she said as brightly as she could, ‘How much would you be willing to pay for a lease?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The best way for me to do it is to buy the freehold, and then sell you a short lease. That way I can write into it the use of the Yard as an extension to the restaurant in the summer months – maybe put up awnings too. It gets incredibly hot out here sometimes – and I wouldn’t have quite so heavy a financial burden as I would buying and renting to you –’ She shook her head. ‘You can do better than a weekly or even a monthly rental. If you’re going to run a shop, you need to put some real money into it. Can you afford it?’

  ‘You watch me,’ he said joyously. ‘I’ve got dollars sitting doing damn all in Toronto which I can call in. My family left a few bob, as they say. And I’ve always been an abstemious sort of person. I can do it.’

  ‘And you won’t stop making films?’

  ‘
I’m not making them now,’ he said. ‘Am I? Only Thrust and Choochieface commercials, God help me. I’ve a better chance of setting up a feature of my own as a freelance than I have there, at City, that’s for sure. Oh, my –’ And he smiled slowly, a broad beatific grin. ‘I can just see it. Going back there, after lunch, and telling that bastard Crowner I’m walking out and he can stuff his Choochieface. It’ll be sheer bloody bliss – total bliss.’

  ‘That’s not a good enough reason to change your life so radically,’ she said and he laughed.

  ‘Not a reason, no. But a hell of a lollipop of a reward! Come on, Laura!’ And he jumped to his feet and held his hands out to her.

  ‘What? Where are we going?’

  ‘To tell Davriosh he’s got a deal, after we’ve squeezed him till his pips squeak. And then to the solicitors to arrange for leases and all the rest of it –’

  She was on her feet too now, and laughing, but she shook her head. ‘No, my dear. No way.’

  ‘What? You haven’t changed your mind?’

  She shook her head again, still laughing and jerked her chin in the direction of the Frith Street archway, over his shoulder.

  ‘No, but I’ve a job to do. Here are my first lunchers. After lunch, Joel, by all means. But right now, I have work to do –’

  She had turned to the door and was standing with her hand on the knob. ‘By the way you’ve booked a table, haven’t you?’

  ‘Indeed I have,’ he said happily and made to follow her, but she shook her head yet again. ‘Not in shirtsleeves,’ she said firmly. ‘People who come here can be relaxed and comfortable of course, but I do expect jackets. Inside, that is.’ She grinned then. ‘It’ll be different when we have our outdoors section, of course. So go and get your jacket now and I’ll see you later.’

  He laughed and turned to go. ‘Don’t be surprised if I’m gone a few minutes,’ he said and looked even more pleased with himself if that were possible. ‘Because if I have to go back there, now, I’m going to give myself an appetite. I’m going to talk to City and tell ’em I’m through. Save me some lecso, Laura. I’ll have earned it by the time I get back!’

  39

  By half past one the system was running at full blast and doing it as smoothly as butter melting on a hot plate. In the kitchen Angie was roaring steadily at the top of his not inconsiderable voice as dish after dish emerged from his flashing hands to be snatched from the serving table by Dan and Janos, Miklos and Jon, and delivered to the tables in the restaurant. Leno and the rest of the kitchen staff circled and bustled, dodging and dancing to the tune of his shouting and Maxie shot in and out of his cubby hole with its wine racks beside the cold room, his corkscrew so busy it should have been red hot.

  Upstairs all the Extras were full and happy, and Laura, standing at her corner desk, looked round and had a sudden and very vivid sense of déjà vu. It was as though this day had happened before, many many times, and on each of them she had been as deeply happy as she felt now. But it couldn’t be the same, because there had been so many changes this past year or so. She looked across her full tables of laughing gossiping people to the window and out through the creepers at the Yard, and her mouth curved happily. There they all were, her summer tables, glittering with white paint, sparkling with glass and silver and surrounded by people, just as these tables in here were. Her new waiters Sid and Lenny hurried between them, their trays and dishes held high and she did a complex sum in her head, working out the extra takings those eight tables out there represented and her mouth curved even more contentedly.

  Perhaps another four tables? Or even more? They could be set across the Yard nearer to The Sweet Shop? But that might confuse the customers, because Joel too had his uses for the paving stones of the Yard.

  Outside his shop now vivid with new paint and with windows so crammed with piles of jellies and fruit drops, chocolates and lollipops that they looked like an illustration in a children’s story book, there were three benches made of rough wood, and there sat people eating ice creams out of glass dishes with small wooden spoons. He had remembered his mother telling him of the way the old Italian ice cream sellers of Soho had provided their wares in just such glass dishes, and had done careful research into their techniques, and now, on hot days like this, could count on selling several gallons of the stuff he made in the sparkling kitchens he had created out of the small back room behind the shop which had once been Mucky’s sitting room. And Laura grinned now as she remembered how excited he had been when he had managed to track down some of the old original recipes for okey pokey as well as sherberts.

  ‘For a film director,’ she had told him, ‘you make a hell of an Antonio.’ And he had laughed too and showed her the special gadgets he had ordered for making cassata ice cream so that it looked exactly the right shape. He had plans now for extending his operation and had an eye on a shop in Frith Street, at the Soho Square end.

  ‘If I can get there,’ he’d told Laura, full of excitement, ‘I can more than double my ice cream production – and I’ve got the capacity. People’ll be able to sit in the Square and eat it, you see. I could get boys to take a tray round perhaps. Shouldn’t be too difficult to get a licence. Make a mint in a good summer –’

  ‘And what happens to that Soho film?’ she had said, mischievously, and he had made a face.

  ‘It’s still on the back burner. It won’t go away. But right now, I’m having more fun than I ever did behind a camera. Why didn’t anyone ever tell me how good it is to make something agreeable and watch people enjoy it and then take their money? Why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I suppose I thought everyone knew,’ she had said and he had laughed and hugged her and returned to poring over the old cookery books he had tracked down. Joel Coplin was a very happy man. And not least because of the way she looked these days. Not that she understood why his face took on that particularly happy expression when she smiled at him. She had no idea of the way her smile made a triangle of her mouth and seemed to light up her whole body, and not just her face, had no awareness at all of the glow that seemed to emanate from her. She was just happy in a way she could never remember being, and certainly had not been last summer when Philip Cord had made her excited and breathless, but certainly not happy as she was now.

  Happy, she thought, gazing out at the busy pretty Yard, and tentatively, as a sufferer from toothache explores an offending tooth with a pointed tongue, she explored her memories of Philip Cord.

  At first, when it was all over, she had been just grateful. Her restaurant had been saved and that was all that mattered. But then she had been angry, hugely incandescently angry. She had been used shamefully, indeed abused, and had not just allowed it to happen; she had cooperated with him by falling into that stupid, ridiculous infatuation. It was almost like being raped, she had thought, being lulled into false acquiescence by promises of love. And that thought had sickened her most of all.

  And then, she had been depressed, paralysed with misery as she had contemplated her own stupidity, and Joel had had to work hard and bite his tongue often as he coaxed her along from day to day. But that mood had been swept away by what happened next, and she had become joyful, wickedly maliciously joyful. For the family was suddenly set afire by the news that they all had, after all, been right. Ilona’s marriage had collapsed.

  It had been Dolly who had told her, phoning one morning just before Christmas, full of jolly chatter, and Laura, still aggrieved with her for her refusal to help when she had been in such dire need of it, had been rather sharp.

  ‘I only want to talk to you, Dolly, if you want to talk business,’ she had said firmly. ‘Are you ready to sell to me yet?’

  ‘Not quite yet,’ Dolly had cooed. ‘I’m still thinking of it, dear girl, really I am. Of course, if you could increase your offer –’

  ‘No,’ Laura had said flatly and Dolly had sighed gustily down the phone.

  ‘Well, I dare say you can’t at that. I dare say you’ll be buying Ilona�
��s share – such as it is. She’ll need every penny she can get her hands on, poor creature, no doubt. Now she’s given her husband the push. Can’t say I think she’s showing much sense, mind you. I know he wasn’t precisely a faithful – well, dear, no need to upset you by going over all that dead ground! But as I say, to be Ilona and get haughty because a man behaves like a man – she should have the sense not to chuck away her dirty water till she’s got a bucket of clean.’

  Laura had caught her breath suddenly.

  ‘Ilona’s divorcing him?’ She still couldn’t use his name.

  ‘My dear, yes! And keeping all her own money! Must have a good lawyer not to have to part with half of it, these days. Such a law! Women shouldn’t have to pay husbands, for heaven’s sake. What are husbands for, after all, but to provide? Still, there it is. She keeps it all, and he goes off with nothing, poor chap. Except his freedom of course. Being married to Ilona couldn’t have been much fun, could it? After all, she cited no less than three other women in her divorce! Imagine that – three! A man doesn’t wander from home like that without a very good reason, does he? But you’d know much more about that than I would, of course –’

  Laura had snapped the phone down on her, not caring at all for the very real possibility that an offended Dolly could start all the fuss again, and try to force a sale of the restaurant on her. Actually she knew there was no real risk of that, not while the restaurant was doing so well and bringing her such handsome dividends for such small effort.

  Ilona, divorcing Philip, she had thought, standing in the restaurant and looking out into the Yard where the men were at work in the grey afternoon, refurbishing Mucky’s old shop; Philip without her money to lean on? Philip with no power ever again to hurt her through her beloved restaurant? And she had laughed aloud, and run out across the Yard to the shop to tell Joel, who was busy supervising the creation of his new domain, how good she felt about the news.