Under a Mackerel Sky
Page 28
Sas was divorced in 2003. Her children, Zach and Olivia, were much younger at the time of the break-up than my children. I’ve been in their lives since they were too young to remember, and I strive to be a good stepdad to them.
It took me seven years to propose to Sas, which I did sitting in a rented car next to a rubbish bin outside a computer shop in Puglia in southern Italy. It all came out in a rush. I didn’t even know I was going to say it. And afterwards, typically, I was anxious about what I’d done. But I needn’t have worried. We were married in 2011, and I’ve loved every minute of it since. The wedding was at a register office in Sydney. We told no one – not her children, nor mine. In other words, we eloped.
Subsequently, we threw parties both in London and in Mollymook – and called them our elopement celebrations. At both parties, I found myself very emotional because it had been a hard time for many reasons but I felt that everyone was, at last, pleased for us. After so many difficult years, I could quote Mrs Patrick Campbell, ‘Wedlock is the deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise-longue.’
These days, I swim whenever I can. It stems from a growing realisation that we all ought to take some sort of exercise. I was walking with Sas through Hyde Park early one morning when we saw a number of gentlemen – generally rather elderly like myself – swimming among the ducks and swans. Sas said, ‘Why don’t you do that, Ricky? It’d be good for you.’ I started to swim in the summer months – and in the warmth of Mollymook. But now I swim right through the year. The colder it is in Cornish waters, the more scared I am of the extreme shock and the vulnerability of a warm human body in a vast freezing sea. But I am driven to seek affirmation of being alive, and I relish the feeling of ruddy good health afterwards.
Last summer, near high tide, something drove me to swim from Mother Ivy’s Beach across to the cove on Trevose Head where my father died. As I swam closer, I became increasingly uneasy; the waves seemed bigger, the sea deeper and darker. I almost felt I had to turn back. There’s no path down from the top, and I remembered that they had to launch the lifeboat to recover his body from the sea so there would be no easy way out.
But as I got to the strip of sand still left from the incoming tide, I realised that the cliff looks different from below. From above it’s a perilous drop. I couldn’t tell the exact spot where – a lifetime ago – he had dashed himself on to the rocks. It all looked much less threatening. I started to relax. Was this really the fatal spot? Maybe I had started to realise that it no longer matters exactly what happened.
AFTERWORD
I’m driving down to Mollymook with Sas and Zach and Olivia. It’s a great time: we are going on holiday. We always stop at the McDonald’s in Albion Park. I order a Grand Angus Burger. Zach says he doesn’t want anything. He doesn’t approve of McDonald’s. He’s 16 and very serious. But at the last minute he too orders a Grand Angus. I know that the reason Zach has relented is because it’s traditional. Once a year we have McDonald’s, once a year he says no, and always he changes his mind and says yes.
As we resume the journey going south I say, ‘It’s much better driving to Mollymook these days because Olivia’s not being sick all the time.’
‘Yes Olivia,’ says Zach, teasing her. ‘We were always having to stop on the freeway.’
I catch her in the rear-view mirror looking a bit embarrassed: she’s cross and beautiful.
‘I was always sick in the car when I was little,’ I say.
My son Jack used to call these times his ‘black and white feeling’. Special times. Times like family Sunday lunch at Trevone.
I’m very lucky. Zach and me and Olivia get on very well. They came to Edward’s Finals sculpture exhibition of the work he’d done at the City and Guilds College in Kennington in London last summer. Charles came too, and Henrietta and her husband Philip, and William my nephew, and our good friend Anita who we’re lucky to see as she was going crazy working for a company selling merchandise at the Olympic Village. It was a precious time for me. I was very attracted to Edward’s work, which included a perfect sphere in blue-black Cornish granite with a teardrop design hand-carved and an alphabet, which I bought there and then. His wife Kate couldn’t come as she was looking after my grandson, Hugh, who is the most beautiful and perfectly formed baby I’ve ever seen. It was a moment to realise that my children and stepchildren like each other. Sas really gets my family. We come from the same sort of background which, I guess, was what attracted me when I first met her. She also has a sympathetic understanding of people and I’m happy that she’s started to write. She gets on well with the staff at Bannisters and, above all, she understands and likes chefs who, she realises, are often difficult but underneath are creative people with good hearts. She persuaded me to write this book and may or may not admire what I’m writing now. She’s a little controlling of me, which I like. She’s always been loved and confident and can afford to share it around.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my wife Sas for her tireless support during the writing of this; without her it wouldn’t have happened. Thanks to Penny Hoare, who assisted me in turning a draft which rambled a little into something much more organised. Thanks to Fiona MacIntyre, Managing Director of Ebury Publishing, for supporting this book before I had written a word; our initial discussion was in the Hilton Hotel at Paddington station, formerly the Great Western Hotel, in whose basement I had my first kitchen experiences as a raw teenager.
I love the look of the cover, and thanks for this is due to David Eldridge.
After the process of editing, a lot of people, whom I would have loved to have mentioned and acknowledged, have, of necessity, been sadly left out. Friends, relatives, colleagues, staff of The Seafood Restaurant – past and present – you know who you are, and I hope that you all realise how very much you have meant to me.
And lastly, I love to show off with where I wrote this. My cottage in Padstow; Neutral Bay in Sydney; my holiday house in Mollymook, NSW, Australia; my flat in Chelsea, London; Il Convento di Santa Maria Marittima, Puglia, Italy; the Malabar House Cochin, Kerala, India; The Dylan Hotel, Amsterdam; The Ritz Hotel, London and my friends Tim and Nicky’s house in St Tropez.
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