by Unknown
I took an obedient sip. It was sweet, pungent, like apricots.
‘Now, some soup. Radek, soup for the lady here!’
It didn’t come in a bowl, but a tiny teacup, and was frothy like cappuccino. I drank it slowly, finishing it with a teaspoon. ‘What is it?’
‘Do you like it?’
‘It’s delicious.’
‘Artichoke.’
Lunch came in miniature portions: a sliver of sea bass with wild mushrooms, a single raviolo sitting in a puddle of green sauce in the middle of a huge bowl, a square inch of lamb on a spoonful of crisped potato, a thimbleful of rice pudding with cardamom. I ate very slowly, in a dream, while around me the bustle gradually died down as the restaurant emptied and the kitchen filled with racks of washed plates and glasses. Johnny fussed over me, wanting my approval. The mess of my life receded; in this warm space I felt I need never venture to be Ellie again.
‘I’ve never eaten like this in my entire life,’ I said, over strong black coffee and a bitter chocolate truffle.
‘Is that in a good way?’
‘I feel looked after,’ I said.
‘That’s what I wanted.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘What is it, Gwen?’
Our eyes met. For a moment, I so badly wanted to tell him the truth that I could feel the words in my mouth, waiting to be spoken. Then I shook my head, smiling at him. ‘Everyone has their sad days,’ I said. ‘You’ve cheered mine up.’
‘That was what I wanted.’ His hand was still on my shoulder. ‘Tell me something, please.’
‘What?’
‘Is there anyone?’
‘There was,’ I said. ‘For a long time there was. But not any more. That’s all over now.’
I felt so sad as I said the words. Cocooned in sadness, tiredness, food, warmth and the admiration of this nice stranger.
I let him take me home. Not to my home, of course, but his: a flat near the restaurant, up two flights of stairs and looking out on to a street market that was just packing up. It wasn’t out of desire but need, and the sheer, raw, monumental loneliness that had engulfed me: to be held as the day faded, to be told I was lovely. I shut my eyes and tried not to think of Greg’s face, tried not to remember and compare.
Afterwards, when he tried to hold me, stroke my hair, my body wouldn’t let me stay still. I got out of bed and dressed with my back to him, so I couldn’t watch him watching me. An hour later, as I opened my front door, I felt a sudden unease, as if the house itself would be angry with me for what I’d done.
Chapter Eighteen
‘What was it like with Johnny?’ asked Frances.
I looked up from some files and wondered if she could see my cheeks going red. Had he blabbed? ‘What do you mean?’
‘The food,’ she said. ‘What did you think?’
‘It was fine,’ I said.
‘Just fine? Is that all?’
‘It was good,’ I said. ‘It was really nice.’
‘Details, details,’ said Frances. ‘I need to know everything.’
Frances poured a cup of coffee for me and one for her, and I went through every dish Johnny had served me, describing its appearance, its texture. Under Frances’s intense questioning I was forced to recall the ingredients, the garnishes, the presentation. And as I talked, she leaned forward, her lips parted, as if she was tasting the food in her imagination. I suddenly saw her as a hungry woman – not just for the meals I was describing, but for intimacy, affection.
‘Mmm,’ she said, when I’d finished. ‘Lucky you. Do you think it’s stuff we can use?’
‘It might be a bit ornate,’ I said.
‘Ornate is good,’ she said.
‘Johnny never showed me a menu, but I guess it’s expensive.’
‘That’s the whole point,’ said Frances, briskly. ‘You’ve been looking through the bills, haven’t you? In the bonus season, the problem for most of our clients is finding things that are expensive enough. And that look expensive as well, without being vulgar. But you know that. What I really wanted to talk to you about was Johnny. Did you see him at work in the kitchen?’
‘That was where I ate.’
‘On a first date?’ said Frances.
‘It wasn’t exactly a date.’
‘Whatever,’ said Frances. ‘But wasn’t it wonderful, watching him cook? I remember the first time he made supper for David and me – it was a revelation. It was like knowing someone and thinking they’re fairly normal, then discovering they can juggle or do magic tricks. He was so at home. Just the way he chopped vegetables or handled a piece of meat. I couldn’t see how he did it all so quickly and casually. Except it wasn’t casual. When I saw him cook, I thought he loved food more than he loved people.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘Preparing a meal, tasting it… I think he misses that, being management rather than spending all his time in the kitchen, hands on, getting his fingers sticky.’
‘I get your point,’ I said. I was trying to think of a way to change the subject.
‘David is one of the restaurant’s main backers,’ she continued. ‘I’m afraid it’s all very incestuous.’
‘Is that what David does for a living?’
‘Sometimes. It’s hard to explain – I don’t think I really understand it myself. David is a rather mysterious man.’ She gave a little frown, as if an unpleasant thought had occurred to her. I saw the way she plaited her hands together tightly, so her thick gold band cut into her wedding finger. ‘He buys things, changes them a bit and sells them again, usually for much more than he bought them. And he makes problems go away for people who’ve got into a financial mess.’
‘What’s that called?’
Frances laughed. ‘I don’t really know. He earns a horrible amount of money from it, though. When you met him he was on his best behaviour. I’m not sure I’d like to be in one of those companies while he’s doing the sort of things he does to them, cutting away the dead wood or the fat, whatever he calls it. Anyway, that’s what gives me the freedom to do things like this.’
‘You make it sound like a hobby,’ I said.
‘From David’s point of view it is,’ she said, a bit wistfully, I thought. ‘Not mine. But he keeps an eye on me, for what it’s worth. Matter of fact, I think he’s having lunch with Johnny today.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Frances. ‘Just to talk things over. I don’t think he’ll get to eat in the kitchen, though.’
It must have been a very long lunch because it was late in the afternoon when the two of them wandered into the office, looking very relaxed. I didn’t trust myself to meet Johnny’s eye. I wondered if he would come over and kiss me or put his arm round me, do something to suggest what had happened, but he didn’t acknowledge me at all, so far as I could tell with my head down and pretending to concentrate. Instead I heard him talking to Frances in a low voice about a party that was coming up. At the same time I detected another presence close by me. I smelled a wave of aftershave and alcohol.
‘How do you take your coffee?’ David asked.
I looked round. He was wearing a fawn-coloured suit made of a peculiar material that was probably rare, expensive and enormously desirable. ‘No milk, no sugar,’ I said.
‘That’s easy, then,’ he said, and handed me the mug he was holding.
I expected him to join the others but he pulled up a chair and sat next to me. I sipped the coffee while he leaned over my desk. He picked up a piece of paper. It was just a summary of invoices with details of what had been received and not, paid and not, but he scrutinized it with a frown. He replaced it with a grunt I couldn’t interpret.
‘Is something wrong?’ I asked.
‘Far from it,’ he said. ‘Looking at this, I can’t imagine what Frances and Milena were up to. But you’re in danger of turning this company into a going concern.’
‘I’m just tidying up.’
He gave a languid smile. ‘That’s about ninet
y-nine per cent of what it takes to run a business.’ He looked across at his wife who was huddled in conversation with Johnny. ‘You’re wasted here,’ he continued. ‘I could use someone who can do work like this.’
‘It isn’t what I do for a living,’ I said.
‘You mean you want to get back to teaching a class of young hoodlums? Let me tell you, they’re not worth it.’
I felt I ought to leap to the defence of those kids, even if they didn’t exist; even if the person who was defending them didn’t really exist. ‘I don’t agree,’ I said.
‘You like teaching logarithms and trigonometry year after year?’
‘Um – yes!’ I replied wildly, praying he wouldn’t ask me anything technical. I knew about addition, subtraction, simple multiplication and even simpler division, and that, more or less, was it.
He ran his fingers through his thick, greying hair as if it was an architectural feature he was quietly proud of.
‘Johnny was talking about you at lunch. No, don’t worry,’ he said quickly. Perhaps he noticed an expression of alarm on my face. ‘He’s very impressed with you. He says you’ve got a flair for the job and that Frances was lucky to find you.’
I didn’t reply. Like so many conversations I was having in that office, I didn’t want it to go any further, any deeper. I did worry and, more than that, I didn’t like the idea of being discussed over lunch by those two men, as if I was a specimen. And I didn’t like the way that Johnny had brought David back to the office, as if they were going to look me over together, or so that Johnny could show off his latest conquest.
‘You’re an enigma. That’s what Johnny says. We lose Milena suddenly and tragically, and you appear like a white knight. It’s Fate.’
I snatched at the opportunity to push the conversation in a different direction. ‘It’s strange for me,’ I said. ‘Milena feels so present here, and absent as well. What did you make of her?’
‘You knew her, didn’t you?’ His tone was curt.
‘Not well,’ I said. ‘Were you close to her?’
I expected David to smile and make a joke but his face took on a stony expression.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t say I was close to her.’
‘But she was a remarkable character, wasn’t she?’
He allowed himself a very small, very forced smile. ‘In some ways, yes.’
‘You don’t sound as if you liked her very much.’
“‘Liked” is rather a tepid word when talking about someone like Milena. People either found her whole act appealing and attractive, or… well, they didn’t.’ He looked at me more closely. ‘It’s funny to think of you as connected to Milena because you’re as opposite from her as it’s possible to be.’
And yet, I thought, she’d been involved with my husband. Perhaps that was what he had been looking for: someone as different from me as it was possible to find.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘You’ve got me changing the subject. You’ve got me talking about Milena, when what I want to talk about is you. Milena would have liked that. She wanted to be the centre of attention. She would have liked the idea of us talking about her even after she was dead and buried. Or dead and scattered, in her case. To get back to you, what Johnny said is that he thought very highly of you – as I’ve said – but he couldn’t make you out. Reserved, mysterious, those were the words he used about you.’
I tried to force a laugh. I felt I was being backed into a corner. ‘There’s nothing mysterious about me,’ I said. ‘I wish there was. I’m really just a glorified cleaner here. I wanted to help Frances, that’s all.’
‘Why?’ said David. ‘Why did you want to help her? From a general love of humanity? A religious calling? Do we have a Good Samaritan here?’
‘It’s nothing complicated,’ I said. ‘When I was little I used to like clearing up my room, putting things in piles and arranging them. When I saw the mess this office was in, I wanted to sort it out. When the job’s done I’ll return to my old life.’
David glanced at me more sharply. ‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘I reckon you’ll find it harder to walk out on this than you think.’
He had used a silky, detached tone that made it difficult for me to decide whether he was paying me a compliment or threatening me. He moved away and I tried to continue working but he poured himself a cup of coffee and returned to my side. He looked at the receipts, letters and invoices with me, made comments and suggestions. He was helping but it felt as if he was assessing me at the same time for a test I didn’t know how to pass because I didn’t know what the questions meant.
After a few minutes I felt a hand on my shoulder and Johnny pulled up a chair. I muttered a greeting without meeting his eye. I needn’t have worried about looking awkward because the two men chatted casually as if I wasn’t there. They were talking about another restaurant they were planning to revamp. Then they wandered around the room, making phone calls, drinking coffee, chatting until it was five o’clock. As I stood up to go, David said, ‘Do you fancy coming for a drink with us?’
‘I can’t,’ I said, deliberately not making an excuse, something that could be argued with.
Johnny stepped forward. ‘I’m about to drive in your direction,’ he said. ‘I could drop you.’
I shrugged, and he led me outside. We sat in his car.
‘I thought you needed rescuing from their clutches,’ he said.
‘I can look after myself,’ I said.
‘That’s probably true.’ There was a pause. ‘I meant it about driving you, though. Where shall we go? My place or yours? I’d like to see where you live. I’d like to learn something about you.’
The idea of Johnny prowling round my house trying to learn about me, about the real Gwen who wasn’t Gwen, was unbearable.
‘Let’s go to your place,’ I said.
He watched me as I undressed, as if seeing me naked was a way of seeing me as I really was. But even with my clothes off, even when we were entangled in his bed, I tried to make myself believe I wasn’t really there.
Afterwards, I lay with my back to him and felt his fingers running through my hair, down my spine.
‘This doesn’t mean anything to you, does it?’ he said.
I turned to face him. Suddenly I felt hard and cruel. I had spent too long trapped in my own misery, behaving as if I was the only one who was real and everybody else just a supporting actor in my drama. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But – well, I am in the wrong place. Wrong place, wrong time. Working for Frances was meant to be an interlude. I need to stop it and get back to my own life.’
Johnny raised his hand and ran a finger down my nose, my cheek, the side of my jaw. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘What’s this if it’s not your life?’
That wasn’t a question I could answer. ‘I feel I’m filling in for a dead woman and it’s not right.’
‘That’s crap.’
‘Milena was the one the company was built round, she’s the one everybody talks about. She needs to be replaced, and that’s not something I could do, even if I wanted to.’
Johnny laughed. ‘You mean you’re not a drama queen. You’re not chronically disorganized. You’re not totally self-centred. You’re not manipulative. You know she thought she looked like Julie Delpy, the movie actress?’
‘I think I’ve seen her in something.’
‘She didn’t at all, of course. It was about wanting to be French and Bohemian. You’re not unreliable. You’re not dishonest.’
‘Reliable. Organized. Unselfish. Lovely. It sounds like I should get a Girl Guide badge.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that.’
I leaned forward and kissed him, but only on the forehead. ‘I’ve got to go.’ I climbed out of the bed and began to pull on my clothes, with my back to him so I couldn’t see him watching me.
‘There was one thing, though,’ Johnny said. ‘She didn’t leave in the middle of the night.’
I looked r
ound sharply. Knowledge coursed through me, bitter and toxic. ‘You didn’t?’ I said, though of course I knew he had – and how had I not understood before? Milena had got into everyone’s lives, and was still there now, as powerful dead as she had been alive. ‘Tell me you didn’t.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘Milena?’
‘Milena.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You mean, tell you about an affair with someone who’s not alive any more and that happened before you and I knew each other?’
I pulled my sweater over my head. ‘You should have told me,’ I said.
‘Why would it have made any difference? It was before we met,’ he repeated, pulling on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, then following me downstairs and out on to the street. We stood in silence until the taxi arrived and he handed me in. Being angry, even unfairly angry, made it easier to leave.
The next morning, as soon as I arrived, I opened Milena’s computer and clicked on the email. When the window appeared asking for a password, I typed ‘juliedelpy’. I was in.
Chapter Nineteen
‘Was it a dream? A mistake? Shall we do it again? J xx.’
I pressed the semi-circular arrow beside Johnny’s message to see what Milena had written in reply: ‘Tonight, 11.30 p.m. your place. Light the fire.’
The following day: ‘You left your stockings. Next time, can’t you stay?’
And Milena replied: ‘Maybe you’ve forgotten that I’m a married woman.’
Two days later: ‘I can’t leave the restaurant at 10, I’m afraid. Later any good? Thinking of you every minute of the day, J xxxx.’
And the reply, a terse ‘No,’ to which Johnny responded, ‘OK, OK, I choose you over the crême brûlée. 10 then.’
Three emails she didn’t answer. The first was anxious: ‘Why didn’t you come? Has he found out? Please tell me.’ The second beseeching: ‘Milena, at least tell me what’s going on. I’m frantic.’ The third angry: ‘Fuck you, then.’