by Prue Leith
‘I can’t believe it! Are you saying we are to just leave her to her fate then?’
‘Precisely.’
Ruth was ready, looking elegant in a green silk dress with a low neckline. It was a long time since he had seen her wearing make-up and her pearls. And she’d had her hair done, also her nails, which were painted a soft apricot. Her fingers held a small gold bag he had brought her from India.
She didn’t smile or walk towards him, but met his gaze steadily. He returned the look, unsmiling, put his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. ‘Darling, I am so, so sorry. This is a complete fiasco, and all about nothing.’
‘Are you sure? I need to know, Oliver.’
‘Ruth, I promise you. I absolutely promise you. There is nothing between Kate McKinnon and me. Nothing.’
‘There must be something, Oliver. Something for the press to latch on to. I have been hearing endless comment on the news all day. Some of it I know is rubbish. But giving her lifts in your official car? Surely that is not nothing?’
Oliver realised that this was not going to be a quick conversation. ‘Come into the study,’ he said, guiding her with an arm. ‘I need you to understand the situation exactly as I do. Know everything I know. I understand your desire to avoid politics if you can, Ruth, but we’re in this together.’
Of course he could not be quite open with her. He did not tell her about the long conversations, about sitting in Kate’s car, about the disloyalty of discussing the necklace affair with her. But he did cover all the bases. Confessed to his practice of taking a bottle of wine in for the kitchen staff (plural, he implied) by way of thanks after events, admitted to accepting a lift from Kate one night when he’d sent Debbie home and found he was too lazy to walk, owned up to offering an empty car to bring home stranded caterers from Hampton Court, told her he had helped load her stuff into her van one night.
‘I’ve told that serpent Terry Taughton everything I can think of. Even that you and I ran into Kate at Kew, remember? At Toby’s birthday party.’
‘Toby? You know he’s called Toby?’
Oliver winced internally. He knew a lot about Toby. Even how heavy and warm he felt at midnight, sleeping on his shoulder. But so far, at least, neither Debbie nor Jim had said anything. It would never look as innocent as it was. ‘Yes. I think it’s Toby,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’
She looked down, shook her head slightly. ‘Now you remind me, yes. But it’s just that knowing her son’s name implies some intimacy. As does being prepared to go to Westminster from Hampton Court via Ealing. As does the amount you talk about her. I know the names of almost none of your department, but I know your favourite cook’s name. Why is that?’
Oliver felt genuinely sorry for her. She was trying to be calm and reasonable, but she must feel threatened, unsafe.
‘Ruth, you know why! I love food, I’m interested in cooking, and Kate is really good at it. I tell you about meals because I cannot tell you much of what goes on in the department, and anyway, you don’t want to know about politics. I talk to you about food because I want to talk to you about something, have you share my life a bit! If I was having an affair with her, I’d hardly talk about her to you, would I? You talk to me about your vet. It doesn’t mean – at least I hope it doesn’t mean – that you’re having an affair with the man, that he’s not inspecting or injecting ponies but bonking my wife!’
She looked at him then, and smiled a rather weak and watery smile. ‘OK,’ she said.
‘What do you mean, OK? OK, you believe me, or OK you love me? Because I love you, Ruth.’
Ruth was silent for a minute, thinking, her fingers idly picking at the stitching on her evening bag in her lap.
‘All right, I’ll try to tell you where I am in all this. I don’t think you do love me, certainly not as you used to. I don’t just mean in quality – of course love changes in time – but I mean I don’t think you love me much at all. And I’m not sure I love you either. Although there must still be something there, because I have discovered over the last twenty-four hours that you still have the capacity to really hurt me …’
‘Darling, I did not, do not, want to hurt you.’
‘I know. I believe that. And I believe you are not having an affair with this woman. So, whether we love each other or not, the next thing is to clear this nonsense up. And possibly the other things – the tax on the china and that bloody necklace.’
‘Nothing further has come up about those.’
‘I’ve been thinking. It seems that both those things were really my fault. I lost the necklace, and I wanted that wretched dinner service and contrived to get it on the cheap. So I owe you. I think you’ve been foolish and indiscreet and probably got too close to the famous Kate. I think it could have turned into an affair if it had not been rudely interrupted, but let’s stick together, shall we? At least for the moment.’
Oliver pulled his wife out of the sofa and put his arms round her. ‘Listen, Ruth,’ he said into her hair, ‘not just for the moment. We do love each other. I know I love you, and I think you love me – you are just understandably hurt by all this.’
Ruth had stiffened at the embrace and now she pulled back and shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. Her face was serious as a judge’s. Oliver would have preferred it if she had ranted and raved, or broken down and cried. This stiff rational coolness was hard to bear.
‘Please, Ruth,’ he said, ‘give it a chance. Give us a chance. Political marriages are famously difficult to sustain, but we’re doing OK. And yes, I need you now. Your being with me will make all the difference. Not just to my career. But to us. You are right, darling, let’s stick together.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Within a week the crowd of photographers and reporters outside had gone. At least, thought Kate, I no longer have to clench my teeth and square my shoulders to run the gauntlet of taking my son to school, or walking to my van.
It was true that hardly a day went by without some little paragraph appearing somewhere. But they were only snippets, jokes, innuendos in the gossip columns. Nothing serious. But she was very tense.
And then, in the first week of June, she had an email from the Evening Standard journalist, Jarvis Stanley. When she saw his name in the sender’s box she was tempted to delete the email unread, but curiosity overcame her and she clicked it open:
‘Have you seen the piece about you and Oliver S in today’s Scandal Sheet? We need to talk, Kate. I can help you.’
Her heart banging, Kate Googled the magazine and the online version came up. The header read,
Scandal Sheet – the satirical weekly that pulls no punches
She tapped in Kate McKinnon and immediately the piece was there:
So, how the mighty have fallen. The expensively elegant Oliver Stapler – yes, him with the designer grey hair – is in trouble. The apparent heir to Labour’s leadership and currently – but for how long? – Foreign Secretary has been following his predecessor’s example and tupping the hired help. Robin Cook made an honest woman of his secretary. Will Stapler do the same for his cook?
Or will we see the brave little wife stand by her man, and the delectable Kate McKinnon disappear back to the kitchen? Scandal Sheet’s money is on the cook. Why? The Sheet’s spies tell us Kate brings flowers from her garden and home-made chocolates to garnish the great man’s table when she cooks his lunch. At government functions Stapler spends more time with her in the kitchen than with the guests. And he celebrated her son’s birthday with them at a party in Kew gardens.
Besides, if you are choosing between a wife besotted with horses and a mistress who cooks like a dream, we think it’s a no-brainer.
Kate sat at her desk, motionless. Then her resentment at Oliver’s treatment of her came flooding back and she had a moment of cruel satisfaction at his discomfiture. He would absolutely hate this. And so would Ruth.
She went back to the top and read the piece again. ‘The satirical weekly that p
ulls no punches’, she read. Too right they didn’t. Surely this was libellous?
The innuendo stung her. She’d only once taken flowers from her garden – the snowdrops she and Toby had picked in the dark – and they were not a gift for Oliver. She’d done that before she’d even met him. It was her first job for him and she wanted the lunch to go well, that was all. And the ‘home-made chocolates’ were hardly a labour of love. Talika had made them and the Foreign Office had paid a pound each for them.
But how did they get the flowers and chocolates story? Only she and Toby knew of the flowers and only Talika of the chocolates. And who knew about Oliver and Ruth being at Toby’s birthday? Surely Kew officials were not ringing the press? Maybe that piece of tittle-tattle came from Oliver himself. He must have given a full run-down of their relationship to some investigating official. And once in the department, anyone with access could have leaked it. What a nest of vipers.
Kate closed the computer with the dull realisation that the media circus would now start again. The camera lenses so thick at her car window they looked like a honeycomb, the dependence on Amal and Talika to protect her, the constant calls and emails.
Somehow she would have to find the strength to battle through again without saying a word. She certainly wasn’t going to talk to Jarvis Stanley. That would only add fuel to the fire.
By mid-June Kate was doing odd agency jobs to keep body and soul together: a day’s work in a confectioner’s, cheffing at the weekend for a hotel, even covering for a sick sandwich hand in Pret a Manger.
It was easy work. The other staff were generally friendly, she didn’t have to think, and she could go home when her time was up. It made her realise just what a lonely business being a small caterer was: doing all the thinking, planning and selling single-handed, and then doing nearly all the cooking alone.
It bugged her that so many of the kitchens she worked in were, to her mind, unprincipled: using cod from unsustainable fisheries, never trying to buy veg locally or in season, not bothering to recycle anything, employing illegal immigrants and underpaying or overworking them. She was slightly ashamed of her ability to simply shut her mind to such issues. And on the whole, she enjoyed the work and the temporary holiday from responsibility.
She was offered a permanent job in a conference centre kitchen in which she’d helped out, and for a moment she was tempted. She knew she could do a better job than most of the cooks there, but the pay was appalling. She knew she couldn’t have survived on a nine-to-five cooking job unless she got to the top and became a head chef or something. And then she’d be back to working fifteen-hour days.
Survival was her only objective right now. The Oliver scandal had put paid to all her government work and the recession had pretty well halved the rest. It was astonishing to think that two months ago she was doing so well she was barely able to cope. Now she was no longer even earning enough to be registered for VAT. In some ways this was a relief because filling in the VAT returns was a pain, but it meant no reclaiming VAT on anything.
Kate had had to ask the hire company to repossess her brand-new van because she couldn’t afford the payments on it. She was without a vehicle of any kind, though Amal lent her his van when he could. Sometimes she had to hire a taxi to take food and equipment to jobs, which meant adding the cost to her prices. But there was no other way.
She had kept the new blast chiller, because the penalty for default was almost as much as the price of the thing. At least she’d been able to renegotiate the terms – the supplier didn’t want the chiller back anyway, since no one was buying, and he’d have to collect and store it.
There were still some loyal customers, and they still had parties, but they drank supermarket cava, not champagne, and ate fish pie, not lobster. But she was grateful. With thousands more out of work every month she knew how lucky she was to have a rent-free house, and to work in an industry which meant she and Toby would never be hungry; indeed they could eat really well.
Not that her molly coddled young son thought so. One day he said, ‘Mum, why can’t we have food like everyone else? Mary’s mum gives us ice-cream from the supermarket and white bread and proper sausages. Not home-made stuff.’
Not for the first time, Kate explained the benefits of healthy food. ‘I know,’ said Toby, ‘but I like proper food from the shop. So does everybody.’
‘Is that really true, darling? You like fruit, don’t you? And vegetables, and the curries that you have at Sanjay’s house.’
‘They’re OK. But I like chips better. And burgers.’
One Saturday, Nothing Fancy was doing the sort of job that was now extremely rare, a no-expense-spared wedding in a magnificent country house near Esher. It had been booked a year before the banking collapse and Kate had feared it would be cancelled, or that Lord Suskind would decree that he could no longer afford such extravagance. But no, it seemed the Suskind riches were beyond the reach of recession and Kate hoped to make enough money on this one day to get her through the month.
It had rained all night and the ground was so soggy they could not set up tables in the open air as planned. The chair legs would have sunk deep into the lawn as soon as anybody sat down, and so would the high heels of the female wedding guests. The best Kate could do was have the porters roll up the sides of the big marquee. It had stopped raining now and at least the guests, safe on the matting floor of the tent, would be able to see the dripping peonies and roses in the garden, and beyond that, the manicured lawns, the park, the woods and fields. It was a magnificent setting, surrounding a perfect Georgian mansion. No wonder Lady Suskind wanted her guests outside.
Kate was running late, but forced herself to behave as if they had all the time in the world. Nothing upset a client more than the caterer panicking: the whole point of caterers, she reminded herself, was to take the stress out of the occasion.
She walked fast into the kitchen tent. ‘Joan,’ she said, ‘why isn’t the buffet laid up?’
‘Nearly there,’ said Joan. There was something in her tone that alerted Kate to a problem.
‘What’s up?’ she said. ‘It’s nearly two. We need to be ready before they go to the church or the poor woman will spend her daughter’s wedding wondering if we know what we’re doing.’
‘I can’t find the tablecloths for the buffet. The ones for the round tables, thirty of them, were there OK, but no long ones. Are you sure you ordered them?’
‘Of course, eight three-metre cloths plus undercloths, and slip cloths for the tiered back. And a smaller one for the wedding cake table.’
‘I’ve got the undercloths. Tommy is putting them on now. But no linen.’
‘Hold on, I’ll look.’ Kate hurried to her briefcase, fished out the papers and found the hire order. ‘Yes,’ she called, ‘they’re on the order. Didn’t you check the order?’
Joan closed her eyes briefly. ‘I’m so sorry, Kate. Of course I should have, but the rain meant the hirers dumped everything in the garage at the front of the house. It took ages to lug it all over.’
Kate’s mind was racing. ‘If the cloths are not in the linen box, they’re not here. We’ll have to get others from somewhere.’
‘We could ask the client. She must have some in a big house like this.’
‘Absolutely not,’ said Kate. ‘We don’t want her knowing we’ve screwed up. You’ll have to drive into Esher and see if you can beg, borrow or steal some. A hotel might lend us a few, or you might have to buy them if you can find a department store. Or get sheets, or curtain material. Anything. Preferably white or cream. OK?’
Joan said, ‘I’ll have a go. Don’t worry, love, I’ll find something.’
Kate pulled a fat roll of ten pound notes – the cash with which to pay the casual staff – out of her handbag, and thrust it at Joan. ‘Quick. Go,’ she said. ‘We need a total of about twenty-five metres of cloth.’
Suddenly Adrian, the florist, was at her elbow. Oh God, she thought, we are now going to have histrionics from
the artist. Adrian was hugely talented but he considered himself a genius, and he had a temperament to match.
He didn’t waste time on preliminaries. ‘For God’s sake, Kate, how am I meant to decorate four buffet tables and a backdrop in ten minutes?’
‘Hello, Adrian,’ said Kate calmly. ‘The tables look sensational, well done.’
‘Fuck the tables, how am I to do the buffet if you can’t have a few trestles ready?’
Kate looked beyond him to see Lady Suskind, now in a pink silk suit and feathery hat, teetering across the wet lawn towards them. Kate looked squarely at Adrian.
‘Adrian,’ she hissed through clenched teeth, ‘if you say one word of complaint, or contradict me in front of the client, if you give the tiniest indication to her that we have a problem, then this will be the last job you do for me.’ She didn’t wait for an answer, but moved swiftly through the tables to intercept Lady Suskind on the other side of the tent, far away from the unmade buffet tables.
‘You look wonderful, Lady Suskind,’ she exclaimed, ‘such a pretty colour.’
‘Thank you, Kate.’ Lady Suskind looked round the marquee, at the thirty round tables for ten, covered with cloths of cream and silver brocade; at the swags of orange blossom and ivy round their skirts; at the arrangements of white lilies, jasmine, and cream roses exploding from the top of tall silver stands, variegated ivy and silver ribbons trailing to the table; at the silver-painted chairs with silver and white cushions and huge white bows at their backs, and at the sparkling glasses and carefully laid places.
It was, thought Kate, as traditional as you could get. But it was certainly pretty.
Lady Suskind exclaimed over the little packets of sugared almonds, tied with silver ribbon. ‘It looks very nice, doesn’t it?’ she said, ‘but what about the buffet? I particularly want to check the buffet.’