by Will Storr
“I don’t think it’s good, to be honest,” I said, quietly. “To be talking about Max like this.”
Andy looked comically alarmed. Kathryn peered down at her plate and, with her fingernails, tried to separate some strands of spring onion that hadn’t been properly chopped through. The old Asian man was now drilling into his mouth with a toothpick with one hand and into the Stygian mines of his crotch with the other. Kathryn remained fiddling with her food, examining it intently.
“Here,” said Andy, breaking the silence. “Look what I’ve got.”
He waved an early copy of the next day’s Times that he’d picked up from a seller outside Tottenham Court Road tube as he’d walked ahead of us. “Should’ve got a Sun as well,” he said, clearing a space on the table, so he could flick through the paper. “They’ve got a story about some mystery business leader who was caught in an S&M club. Wouldn’t it be amazing if it was Ambrose?” He looked up with another rascally grin. “You know they have to have a secret code word, those lot? That they say when the pain gets too much? I bet Ambrose’s is ‘Nouvelle Cuisine’. I’ll tell you what mine would be: ‘Shipham’s Meat Paste’. That’d ruin the mood.”
We laughed, more out of politeness than anything. Kathryn was blushing. It was odd – almost as if she felt as uncomfortable in the backwash of Andy’s yabbering confidence as I did.
“Hey, what happened to that apprentice? The big one?” he continued, still turning pages.
“Gregory?” said Kathryn.
“Yeah, Max had his cunt helmet on for him this week, didn’t he?”
“He left,” Kathryn said, not meeting Andy’s eye.
“He was a nice bloke,” I said, “but he couldn’t hack it.”
Kathryn put her fork down.
“The poor man was in tears,” she said. “Didn’t you see him? He was like a cornered animal. But I suppose, yes, you’re right – he couldn’t hack it. Like the Yorkshire Ripper’s victims couldn’t hack having their brains caved in with a claw-hammer.”
“But that’s what it’s like in fine-dining kitchens,” I said. “They have to be like that, don’t they? You know – drill out the weak ones.”
“God, you sound like bloody Max,” she said.
“Not all kitchens are like this, actually,” said Andy. “King is easily the most brutal one in the country. Everyone knows it. Worst-kept secret in the business.” He looked at Kathryn with an implied wink. “You’ve only got away with it because Max so clearly wants to fuck you.”
“Piss off, Andy,” she muttered.
She turned to me, unsmiling. “Max is an absolute bastard. I don’t understand how you can defend him. If he didn’t have so many mates in the press, I swear he’d have been exposed. He’d never have got away with all that ‘gentleman chef’ bollocks that Ambrose came up with.”
“But it’s because everyone’s so loyal so him,” I said. “The brigade would do anything for him.”
Kathryn reared away from me just a fraction.
“It’s sick. It’s a disease these chefs have. It’s an infectious mental illness.”
“You don’t get three Michelin stars by letting your standards slip,” I said. “Max wants the best chefs. The toughest ones. The ones who are the most loyal. It might not be nice, but I don’t expect many people who are obsessed with excellence are worried too much about nice. Doesn’t mean they’re not good people. They’re exceptional and they have to make sure everyone who works for them is exceptional too.”
“Gregory was the best apprentice in there,” she said. “He’s twice as good as me. The reason he’s now saying he’s going to quit cooking for ever is because of their vile game of knock-down-the-new-boy. Michelin stars are nothing to do with toughness; they’re to do with talent and experience, and thanks to Patrick and your hero Max, that man is never going near a professional kitchen again. And don’t give me that bullshit about loyalty. Loyalty’s a con. It’s a bloody trick of the devil. Loyalty’s the real root of evil, not money. My dad was just like you,” she said, her tone softening slightly. “He was a soldier. He was loyal to the queen, the country and the army. He was loyal to everyone. And look where loyalty got him.”
I looked at Andy for help.
“Northern Ireland,” he whispered.
“Oh,” I said. I shifted in my seat; sat up. “Sorry. I’m sorry. But, what I’m saying is, everyone knows Max is nice. Everyone knows. I mean, it’s just…” I trailed off as the logic of my argument evaporated from my mouth. Kathryn closed her eyes. Andy reached out across the table and patted my hand.
“Killian, dear,” he said. “Learn when to shut up. We’ll wait and see if you’re so loyal to the big man by the end of your apprenticeship.”
Kathryn placed her fingers over mine.
“Killian, listen, look at me.”
I did as she asked and, even in the dimness, I could make out those crumbs of green and gold.
“Do you not see, in any of the tiniest parts of your naive, starstruck brain, that Max is just a bully?”
“But – ”
“Think about it now. Don’t speak for a moment. Think about it, then tell me the truth.”
“He has to get – ”
“Whatever you say next, don’t you dare use the words ‘standards’, ‘loyalty’ or ‘stars’.”
I felt as if something critical, in my neck or eyes or head, was going to rupture.
“It’s just, his kitchen,” I swallowed. “I suppose it’s true to say that it’s not exactly what I was expecting. It’s not what you think of, is it, when you think of Max Mann?”
To my alarm, my eyes had begun to feel dangerously heavy, my throat swollen and dry.
Andy picked up the steel pot and grinned into the weirdness. “Tea anyone?” He began to pour. “Max wants his third star, that’s what’s driving him insane. He wants that more than anybody has wanted anything in the history of bloody history. He’s tormented by it. He’s getting madder and madder by the day. He can’t get through half the services without P-p-p-p-patrick.” He put the pot down and continued flicking through his newspaper. Nobody spoke. “Here you go,” he said finally. “Found it.”
I listened as Andy read out excerpts that he thought were especially amusing, such as Max waxing lyrical about the personal philosophy that’s earned him the nickname ‘Gentleman’. “Most chefs believe you simply can’t get the results if you mollycoddle staff. But I don’t call it mollycoddling. It’s more like support or nurture.”
“He’s campaigning for his OBE,” said Kathryn. “Or his next date with Wogan.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Andy continued, “listen to this – ‘and Mann’s famously benevolent management skills look as if they’re paying off: although he refuses to be drawn as to whether he thinks he’ll finally win his third Michelin star when the next guide is published in January, his face tells you what most in the industry already seem sure of: it’s in the bag. Nevertheless, the chef is not without his detractors. Many agree that Nouvelle Cuisine, the style of cooking to which he’s so firmly attached his name, is in its final throes, with predictions of its culinary death coming as soon as the end of 1986. Mann has always been a vocal critic of what he describes as traditional “fat cooking”. Some say to keep up with the vagaries of gustatory fashion, he’ll have to completely reinvent himself. Does the Gentleman Chef have what it takes?”
“I’m hearing that more and more, you know,” Kathryn said. “Nouvelle Cuisine is becoming a bit of a joke. Even George Perry-Smith’s got oxtail with grapes on his menu now.”
Andy scratched the corner of his mouth thoughtfully.
“Maybe that’s why Ambrose is planning on opening this ‘Glamis’ or whatever it’s going to be called.”
“Glamis?” I said to Kathryn.
“The new place. The bistro. That’s what it’s going to be called. Glamis.”
Andy spoke over her: “Max has got to be a shoo-in for a third star this year. It’ll be us and the Waterside Inn. Nico,
probably not, poor fucker. God, I dread to think what it’ll be like in the kitchen if Max doesn’t get it. Most of the decent chefs I know reckon he doesn’t deserve it and none of them in France would even dirty their mouths with his name. That’s what he can’t bloody stand.”
Andy began gossiping about Alain Senderens buying the Lucas Carton, the incoming (“British!”) senior chef at Le Gavroche and Bruno Loubet’s Gastronome One on the New Kings Road. But I was only half concentrating. I was aware, simply, that I’d made a mess of things. It was the first time I’d been invited anywhere. And yet I had the sense that I had ruined it. All I wanted to do, as Andy gassed happily, was disappear into a bathroom stall and busy myself with one of those knives.
And then something unexpected happened. Kathryn went to the toilet and Andy gave me the fully unrolled version of his mischievous smile.
“Who’s a lucky boy then?” he said.
I didn’t understand.
“Kathryn,” he said. “You know, I’ve been living with that girl for eighteen months and this is the first time I have ever known her do anything even vaguely sociable.”
“Oh,” I said, uselessly.
“Well, it can’t be me, can it?” he said. “The reason for this sudden interest in acting like an ordinary, friendly, functional human being? And if it’s not me…”
22
Kathryn and Andy lived in an upstairs flat in an old terrace in Brixton, nearly an hour’s journey from the West End on the Number 3 bus. The walk from the stop was at once exhilarating and intimidating, with the drunks and the dealers and the pale faces hanging in doorways and corners, eyes skittering with dangerous intrigue over the landscape of tungsten and black. We passed a homeless man, camped out by a lamp post. He appeared to have an easel erected beneath a grimy bin-liner awning. “He’s always here,” said Kathryn, as an aside, once we’d passed him. “I’d love to know what he’s painting.”
Her front door was white and featureless – more like a fridge door – behind which a gloomy wooden staircase, cluttered with piles of telephone directories and old shoeboxes, led squeakily up two dark floors. We sat in a small lounge, on a sofa that was covered with a small Indian-looking throw. By my elbow was a brown monopedal ashtray with a retractable silver lid. There were no curtains, just lopsided office-style blinds, and a Van Gogh print with an Athena logo in the bottom corner, Blu-tacked straight onto the wall above the long-dead fireplace.
“Night-night you two,” Andy said, after re-emerging from the kitchen with some tap water in a pint glass. He had that disreputable look again and I noticed a kiss of reddish pink appear faintly on each of Kathryn’s cheeks. And then we were alone. A moment passed. Then another. I tried to think of something to say that wasn’t to do with Max or the kitchen or her new job.
“Do you ever wonder,” I asked, “what any of those extinct things might have tasted like?”
“Like a dinosaur?” she said.
“Exactly,” I said. “I keep a list of things I have to eat before I die, and it makes me sad that there are all these, you know, meats, that are lost.”
“You have a list?” she asked suspiciously.
“I do.”
Her eyes brightened.
“I have a list too,” she said.
“You have a list?”
“What, you thought you were the only one who had a list? The arrogance! At number one on mine is a giant tortoise.”
“Aren’t they extinct?” I said, laughing.
“Not sure.”
“I want to try elvers,” I said. “Have you heard of them?”
“Baby eels! What about ambergris? The most expensive food in the world. Charles II ate it on his eggs. It’s whale snot or vomit or something. I prefer the sound of this Asian dish, have you heard of it? Son-in-Law Eggs?”
“Son-in-Law Eggs?” I replied, almost coming off my seat. “I can’t believe you know about Son-in-Law Eggs. My aunt told me about them once. I’m desperate to try them. It’s Thai, isn’t it?”
“Whole eggs deep-fried in light batter and when you break into them–”
“– the warm yolk! Do you know they got their name because they’re supposed to be so good that if a woman makes them for her son-in-law–”
“– he’ll never leave her daughter.”
By now I was so thrilled that I was on my feet.
“Let’s get some now,” I said. “Where can we get some?”
“Bangkok,” she giggled. “But not London. Believe me, I’ve looked everywhere. And I’ve tried to make them. They’re impossible.”
“One day,” I said, sitting back down, closer this time, my knee almost touching hers. “One day, let’s cook them together.”
“Okay,” she said. “It’s a plan.”
When Kathryn got up to use the bathroom, I used the opportunity to examine the damage to my finger. As we’d been talking, I’d become increasingly conscious of the pain from when I’d placed it in the pan of hot sauce earlier. I gently unwrapped the bandage and winced at the sight of the white blister, pregnant with fluid, that was stuck on the end of it. I was blowing on the end of it when Kathryn returned.
“Oh my God, how did you do that?”
“Accident,” I said. “I put it in a pan that had sauce in it.”
“Bloody hell, how long for?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. I looked up at her. “I was annoyed. At Max. He said my sauce for Ambrose was finished and it wasn’t. I kind of lost it a bit.”
She sat down beside me. The room was lit only by a weak standard lamp in the corner, and its caramel light lay gently on her face.
“So, hang on,” she said. “You did that on purpose?”
“No,” I said. “God, no!” I laughed, and thought, I’m saying “no” too much. “No, I’m not mad. No, no. I was using my finger to taste it. No, I think I was just so annoyed that I wasn’t really feeling the pain. That’s how it is when you get angry, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” said Kathryn, frowning quizzically.
She fetched an old grease-stained first-aid kit from a drawer in the kitchen and began to wrap a bandage around my finger. So that she could see what she was doing, she took a bobble from her pocket and tied her hair into a ponytail. I could see the full stretch of her high, almost Nordic cheekbones. She had exposed, too, more of her birthmark than I had seen before. I looked at it. I wanted to touch it.
Holding my hand over her lap, she pulled the thin white material over the burn with the same purposeful delicacy with which she julienned mangoes. The stretching of my arm pulled my sleeve up a little, exposing a thrill of thin, crumbling needle-ish scabs from cuts on my wrist. I moved closer, so that my shirt covered them over. Our thighs, on the sofa, were touching.
“I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing about Max earlier,” I said.
“You can say what you like about him. Your little crush on Max is nothing to do with me.”
I took a moment to gather the courage to continue.
“I don’t understand why he made me serve my sauce when he knew it wasn’t ready,” I said, carefully. “It seemed like… I mean, why would he do that?”
She smiled as she opened up a small safety pin and, with great care, leaned in and pierced the material. “You’re an odd boy.” She paused and smiled again. “You’ll get it, though.”
I looked at her neck, at the way the hem of her T-shirt lay over her collarbone and the dark canyons of shadow that fell down beneath it. As she held the end of the bandage in place in preparation for pinning it down, I tried to think of something else to say.
“I had a good time tonight,” I said. She was nibbling the edge of her lip in concentration. “I can’t remember the last time I went out for a meal. I never go out much.”
She closed the pin and held my finger in hers for a moment.
“Billy-no-mates, are you?” she said.
I put my hand in my lap, curled my bandaged digit back into my palm and squeezed it as hard as
I could.
“Me too,” she said. “I think it’s kitchens. They attract people like us. Things make sense when you’re cooking, don’t they? If you’re good at your job, everyone likes you. If you’re not, they don’t. It’s straightforward. Understandable. Not like out there.” She waved dismissively towards the window.
“Were you moving about all those army bases when you were young?” I asked. “With your dad and everything? Is that why you didn’t have many mates?”
“It wasn’t to do with that, really,” she said. “It was… I don’t know.”
It didn’t seem possible that everything that was Kathryn was taking up the small space in front of me. The idea of her seemed so vast, and yet there she was. Just there.
“I don’t usually talk to anyone either,” I continued. “I find it hard, people. I don’t know what to say to them so I mostly just don’t say anything. Then they think I’m being arrogant or aloof or something.” I braced myself. “For some reason,” I said, “it’s not so difficult with you.”
She looked down at her lap. She was smiling. It was a good smile, I think. Self-conscious, definitely, but happy. A strange quiet fell over the room.
“You and Andy…” I said.
“This is his flat,” she said. “And there’s another girl here too. Jenny. She’s a barmaid. Australian. We don’t see much of her. She’s still operating on Toowoomba time. Do you want a drink or something? Jenny’s got some beers in the fridge.”
Kathryn left to organise the drinks and I stood and browsed absent-mindedly through the pine bookshelves. I pulled out a tattered travel guide to Britain belonging, presumably, to the Australian. I’d just looked up Herstmonceux Castle when Kathryn returned with two cans of Hoffmeister, which she put down on the coffee table.
“I’ve got a house here,” I said. I sat down beside her, and pointed to a black-and-white illustration of Herstmonceux. “A cottage. Well, sort of here. It used to be part of the grounds of the castle. Been in the family for hundreds of years and it’s been left to me. It’s a weird place. Dor Cottage, it’s called. There was a witch lived there, once, they reckon. I’m going on Sunday – I’m moving in. It belonged to my aunt. My parents are pretty angry about me getting the place. My mum – at this rate, I don’t think she’s ever going to speak to me again.” I turned so I could watch her closely. “Can I ask you something? You mentioned your mum, the other day…”