by Jay Rayner
By which I mean our real very first night, not the actual one, of which I have no memory at all. We were at university together and moved in the same hormonally charged crowd. We must have met at some point early in our first year and become friends in the careless way one does at that age, which is to say without identifying any good reason not to be. I recall her then as imposing, though not as tall or broad. She simply seemed to fill more than her own share of space, by standing still. She was the kind of person who would always get served first at the bar, however crowded it was.
After we graduated I went to London, she went abroad for a few years, and we lost contact. She ended up working for the British Council in Prague, and when she decided to come home, returned to a position in the literature department at their headquarters near Trafalgar Square. Her job was to arrange tours of gloomy Scottish writers to places like Belarus and the Czech Republic which had done nothing to deserve the punishment. She had just started working there when we met, by chance, in a coffee shop on the Charing Cross Road. The thick black hair was longer, but other than that she was exactly as I remembered her, down to the lush lipstick and the habit of only wearing black or gray and the mocking smile. She seemed so relieved to come across someone she knew, and so enthusiastic, that I invited her for dinner the next day even though, I realized, we didn’t really know each other, not as adults.
That was our real very first night together. She sat at the pine table in the kitchen of my Maida Vale flat, the flat we would eventually share, sipped delicately from a glass of ballsy red wine (I think I was going through my Rioja phase), and asked me questions I didn’t want to answer.
“So you haven’t made like everybody else and settled down?”
“What do you mean?” I was at the stove, heating a little olive oil and butter in a roasting pan ready for a lovely fillet of Welsh lamb that I had marinated in garlic, juniper, olive oil, and a dribble of lemon juice.
“There’s no Mrs. Basset?”
The first wisps of smoke began to rise off the oil and I dropped the meat into it. It fizzed and whistled and contracted a little in shock.
“There is. Her name’s Geraldine, she lives in Northwood, and she’s my mother.”
“Very funny.”
“Thank you.”
“You know what I mean.”
I shook my head. “No Mrs. Bassets. No potential Mrs. Bassets. Never likely to be.”
“Why not?”
I swigged from my own glass of wine. “Firstly,” I said, waving my meat fork at her, “point of principle: I can’t imagine any sensible women willingly taking that name and if they wanted to do so I wouldn’t be interested in them. And secondly, a practical point which makes every other consideration academic: I have displayed a marked inability to get myself laid.”
“Unlucky in love?”
“I don’t even get to lust.”
She wrinkled her nose. “What’s all that about?”
I turned the heat down on the meat and began to spoon the hot oil and butter over the raw upward-facing side. “I don’t know,” I said, lying. “I’m just not, you know, fanciable.”
“Oh for god’s sake …”
I shrugged and turned to her. “Come on. Look at me. All of me. Women do not want…” I held my arms apart, the meat fork reaching upward to the light fixture, and looked down at myself: the enormous chest with the nipples in different time zones, the rounded belly, the heavy thighs and thick calves; the body that made shopping for clothes a nightmare, that made airplane seats a torture, that as a kid had forced me to sit alone so many times at the end of parties through “Sexual Healing” or Spandau Ballet’s “True” or something equally irritating by Phil Collins. At the overall hugeness of me.
“… this.”
“What total bollocks.”
I turned back to the stove to flip the lamb for a minute or two. The room smelled of garlic and hot, smoky butter. Perfect. “I can only tell you as it is.”
“You’re not even that big.”
“I have a forty-inch waist.”
I saw her eyebrows rise involuntarily. She rolled her glass between the palms of her hands as if warming it and said, “You don’t look it.” She slugged the wine and swallowed, quickly.
“Thank you.”
“Just stating a fact.” And then: “There must have been women.”
“Oh, sure.”
“So what happens?”
“You really are intent on interrogating me, aren’t you?”
Lynne raised her hands in surrender. “I can shut up …”
I clattered the pan into the oven. It would need about fifteen minutes if it was to stay the right side of pink within. “No, it’s all right.” I picked up my glass of wine and leaned back against the sink. “We spend one night together, maybe two. And then something happens and—”
“You can’t believe a girl fancies you so you do something to screw it up.”
“Christ. What are you like after two glasses?”
“I’m just guessing. Is that it?”
“Never been good at self-analysis.”
She drained her glass. “The way you describe it, you make it sound like a miracle you ever lost your cherry.”
“Almost was.”
“Oh yeah? How old were you?”
“You’re so smart. You guess.” Despite myself, I was starting to enjoy this. Normally there would be nothing I would like to discuss less than my heroic failures. But Lynne made it feel almost like sport, and in sport, heroic failures have virtue. It was liberating.
She wrinkled her nose again. “Obviously has to be quite late. Eighteen?”
I jutted my chin upward to say “higher.”
“Nineteen?”
“Guess again.”
“Older than that? Bless—”
“I was twenty.”
“You were at college?”
“Yup. All that time when I should have been shagging around and I didn’t sort it out until my third year.”
“Anybody I know?”
“Jesus.”
“Oh, come on. You know you want to tell me.” She grabbed the bottle and refilled her glass. I rolled a mouthful of my own wine over my tongue and swallowed.
“Jennie Sampson.”
“Jennie Sampson? Jennie Sampson?” Beat. “Jennie Sampson! I remember her. She was gorgeous. Quiet but gorgeous. Always carried her books against her chest as if she were trying to hide behind them.”
“That’s the one.”
“Shy, though.”
“You mean you never talked to her.”
“Perhaps. So what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened? How long did it last? Was it love? Did you propose? Or did you screw that one up too?”
Oh yes, I thought to myself. I screwed that one up. Boy, did I screw that one up. “It just … fizzled out,” I said quietly.
She tipped her head to one side, looked me up and down, and said, “The only problem is you. You’re a very attractive man, my dear. Dark, big, substantial …”
I snorted with derision and stared into the depths of my glass.
“No, really. Who wants thin men with their little hips and their pigeon chests? Not me. Give me heft any day, something to get your arms around.”
“You’re being very kind.”
“Jesus Christ.” She pulled mockingly at her thick black tresses, as if trying to rip them out. “How am I going to get through to you?” Suddenly she stood up, slammed her glass down on the table, and said, “There’s only one thing for it. I’m just going to have to have sex with you. Come on.” She strode out of the kitchen and I, obediently, followed, helpfully calling in a small voice, “Second room on the left.” In the doorway to my room I hesitated. She turned to me, raised one hand to my cheek, and said, “It will all be fine.”
Afterward, when we were done, we lay on the bed and she said, “I thought about jumping you at college but I’m glad I didn’t. You’d only have d
one something childish to piss me off. Now that your secret’s out you can’t do that because I’ll always see through you.”
I sat bolt upright and shouted, “Bugger it!”
“I’m not that bad a proposition, am I?”
“No. No. It’s the lamb. I’ve ruined the lamb.” The sound of self-congratulatory laughter filled the room: our relationship had been born just as our first dinner together had died.
That was almost six years ago. We were still together, she was still saying “It will all be fine,” and I was still happily believing her. Or at least, I had been until that dark February evening in front of the television, with the last of the tobacco truffles finally breaking apart on my tongue and the screen now sitting blank in the corner. A man was dead, a little girl was without her father, and whatever my mother, my editor, or my girlfriend said about not blaming myself, I couldn’t escape feeling responsible. It was my review that John Hestridge had taped to the oven door before he climbed inside. Not pages of the Larousse Gastronomique. Not the definition of the word “chef” from the Oxford English Dictionary. My review. That surely had to stand for something.
Four
She found me in the early hours, hunched in the night darkness, my face steel gray in the glow of the computer screen.
“What are you doing, love?” she said in a thin voice, still drunk with sleep. I didn’t look at her. I kept my eyes on the pixeled words on the screen.
“Reading.”
“Reading what?”
“Me. My last piece. The Hestridge piece.”
“Marc, sweetheart, there’s a time for narcissism, and three o’clock … no, Christ … half past three in the morning is not it.”
“Funny.”
Lynne moved to the sofa alongside me and sat down in the corner, folding her feet in beneath herself. She picked up an overstuffed pillow to hug to her belly. There we sat, in the darkness, dressing-gowned and chilled.
“You couldn’t sleep?”
I shook my head and reached forward to tap the screen, as if it were the guilty party. “I thought this was so bloody funny when I wrote it,” I said. “I thought it was clever and smart and—”
“It was clever and smart,” she said. “It still is. You’re brilliant.” I heard her yawn but I didn’t turn to look. “You know that.”
“No. I know. I mean …” I swiveled around on my office chair to look at her, hiding back in the shadows for warmth. “I’ve always been confident about my writing. About my ability to turn a phrase, to keep people’s attention. Whatever. I might have my other insecurities—”
“Yeah. It’s the thing that stops you being insufferable, my love. If you were a smart-ass and you thought you were gorgeous, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Let me finish. It’s a package. I need to believe in the column, that it’s doing a good job, that it’s right, to balance the other stuff. But this Hestridge thing—”
“You can’t blame yourself. I’ve told you.”
“I wasn’t an innocent bystander.”
“You didn’t open the oven door and usher him in.”
“Lynne!”
“You know what I mean.”
“I wrote a column that was the …” I hesitated, searching for the right word. “… catalyst.”
“Can’t we talk about this in the morning? It’s so bloody late, it’s early.”
I turned back to the screen and said, more sharply than I intended, “Go back to bed.”
“Marc …”
“Just go to bed and I’ll work it out by myself. Go back to bed.”
She came and stood behind me, a hand resting on each of my shoulders. I could smell the familiar, comforting musk of bed and dressing gown and sleep-sweated skin beneath. She stroked my neck with one hot hand and I realized how cold I was. “What do you want to do about it, Marc?” she said gently.
“I want to go and see her. I want to go and see Fiona Hestridge.”
“And say what?” I looked up and over my shoulder at Lynne, my lips pursed as if they were restraining the words.
“I want to apologize,” I said. She nodded very slowly and lightly. “I’m not pretending it will make everything right,” I said. “I know it won’t. But it might make her feel a little better.”
“And you too?”
I looked back at the screen and shrugged, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to me before. “Perhaps.”
She turned me about on the chair so that my face brushed against the soft, underwashed toweling of her dressing gown and the rise and fall of her breast beneath. She held my face in her hands. “Marc Basset apologizing?” she said quietly as she looked down at me. “It must be serious.”
I nodded. “It is.” We looked at each other in silence through the backlit darkness. “I’ll turn off the computer now,” I said eventually.
“You do that,” she said, and she stooped to kiss the top of my head.
Hestridge at 500 sat on a cluttered, scrubbed stretch of London’s Fulham Road, guarded on one side by antique shops selling things that probably weren’t, and on the other by interior design shops selling things nobody needed. It was a street of fakery and superfluity and at its nexus was a restaurant that, according to my review, was a celebration of both. I stood a little distance away on the other side of the road so nobody within could see me before I wanted them to, and stared at the frontage through the clatter of the London traffic. The look of the place still infuriated me: the frigid glass and brushed aluminum facade, sounding an overture for the brushed aluminum and concrete interior that I had compared unfavorably in my review to a public parking lot:
… only less useful. This is a part of town that could really do with a public parking lot. Here they have built one, and yet—by mistake? by design? who knows with these people?—they have filled it with ugly tables and chairs for the serving of ugly food. Every time I drive past it in future I will have to restrain myself from steering my knackered Volvo straight through the frontage, out of some desperate desire to put it to its proper use.
That was all irrelevant now; my review was superfluous too. I took a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then stepped out to cross the road. It was a little after eleven in the morning, and as I pushed open the door, chairs were being stacked on tables by a busboy who was vacuuming the polished wood floor. I asked for Mrs. Hestridge and he nodded back toward the hard, gloomy depths of the room. I found her sitting at the farthest table, just in front of the back bar (six girders stacked one on top of another and topped with polished granite). She was surrounded by ring binders full of papers and was staring at a ledger, the mass of unruly curly hair that she had bequeathed to her daughter falling down over her eyes. There was a glass of sparkling mineral water on the table, and a cup of coffee, a plate of cookies, a bowl of olives, and a dish of dark chocolate petits fours, all untouched, as though someone had been trying to feed and water her, unsuccessfully. I emerged quietly into the pool of light around her table, dropped from the pinprick track lights up above, the only ones that were illuminated here in the restaurant’s lower reaches.
“Mrs. Hestridge …”
She started at the sound of my voice and looked up, squinting, as if my face were half-remembered. “Yes,” she said tentatively.
“Marc … Basset. I’ve come to …” But my words died as she dropped back in her chair and looked me up and down.
“I know who you are.”
“Yes. I imagine you would.”
We stared at each other in silence for a few seconds until I gestured at a chair by the table and said, “May I sit down?”
“I’m not sure,” she said coldly. She looked at the mass of papers surrounding her. “Are you any good at accounts?”
I shook my head. “I’m terrible with numbers.”
“Only good with words?”
“I’m not even sure about that anymore.”
“No?” Suddenly distracted, she looked back past me, at somebody else who had entered the roo
m. “Charlie, it’s all right. You can come out of the shadows. My daughter Charlotte, Mr. Basset. Charlie, this is—”
The little girl emerged on the edge of the pool of light.
“I know who you are,” she said in a small voice. “I saw you on the video with Mummy. Mummy says you’re the dickhead who made Daddy kill himself.”
“Charlotte!”
I closed my eyes and put one hand up to silence her mother. “No, really. It’s all right.”
“It isn’t bloody all right, Mr. Basset. I don’t want my six-year-old daughter using language like that.”
“But you were the one who said he was a dickhead, Mummy.”
“Please, Charlie!”
“Anyway, what does dickhead mean?”
“Charlie, go back upstairs and I’ll come and see you in a minute when Mr. Basset—”
“No. Hang on,” I said. “Just a moment.” I turned to Charlie and got down on my haunches so I was at her level, so that my knees creaked and my ample thighs stretched the thin material of my trousers. “It’s okay.” I looked at her straight on. Maybe this was the way to do it. Say the words to the daughter. If I could say it to the little girl, get it out there, it would be more real, more meant, more true. I would have played my part and I could go. I chewed my bottom lip for a moment. Charlie stared back at me from beneath her bangs.
I spoke slowly and deliberately. “I am so sorry that the things I said about your daddy’s restaurant made him go away—”
“He didn’t go away,” she said sharply. “He killed himself. In the oven. Back there. In the kitchen.” She pointed to a swing door in the corner.
I closed my eyes, sniffed, and tried to recover myself.
“Charlie!”
I raised my hand again to silence her mother. “No, really, it’s okay,” I said. I paused again and took a deep breath. “Charlotte, I’m really sorry your daddy killed himself after he read the things I wrote.” I felt something cold and wet slip down the side of my nose and drop off toward the smooth floor below. Charlotte frowned at me and then looked up and over my shoulder.
“Mummy, this man’s crying.”
“That’s all I need,” Fiona Hestridge said, “another weeping male. I’ve had a kitchen full of them this week.”