A Serving of Scandal

by Prue Leith

  There was silence from Chris, and Kate found anger mounting. He was obviously unwilling, which he should not be. After seven years of absence, you’d think he could stand one more single night.

  ‘Are you OK with that, Chris?’ she said, her voice hard.

  ‘He is my son as well as yours, you know …’

  ‘Yes, Chris, I know. Which is why we have to get this right …’

  ‘Right. We,’ Chris jumped in. ‘You just said it. We have to. I should be with you. I have a right as his dad …’

  Kate erupted, ‘No, Chris, you don’t. You’ve no rights at all, not with me, not with Toby. Nothing. If you want rights, go to court for them. One thing is for sure – you have no right at all to stay in my house tonight if I don’t want you to. And I don’t. OK?’ She snapped her phone shut, breathing hard. She stood for a moment, watching the bleak environs of Clapham slide past the window. What would she do if Chris was there when they got back?

  She was almost back at her seat when Chris rang back. She pressed the button without speaking. He said at once, ‘All right, all right, I’m sorry, babe, I’m over-reacting. It’s just that I was excited at seeing Toby too. I’ve been thinking of nothing else all day. I’m so sorry, darl.’

  ‘OK, I’m sorry too,’ Kate said, pacified. ‘I’ll ring you tonight after I’ve told them. And thank you, darling. It will be nice to have one night with my boy in my bed too. Before we banish him to the study.’

  Kate finally got her chance when Hank was in front of the television and she and her mother were doing the washing up.

  ‘Mum, I need to tell you something.’

  Pat looked at her sharply, ‘You are not going to marry this Oliver chap are you?’

  Kate shook her head. ‘No, Mum, no chance of that.’

  ‘Then you’ve found another man.’

  Kate smiled, a bit wobbly. ‘You are psychic, Mother! But it’s not another one. It’s the same one. Chris.’

  She watched her mother’s face, which had lit with pleasure, suddenly shut fiercely, like a door slamming, ‘No, Kate. No. No, you cannot be such an idiot. Don’t tell me that. I cannot bear it.’

  Kate felt the old indignation engulf her. ‘OK, I won’t tell you,’ she said childishly, ‘since you cannot bear it. I should have known it would be all about you.’ Dropping the tea towel on the worktop she walked into the sitting room and threw herself into the sofa next to Hank. Stony-faced, she stared at the TV, pretending an interest in the football.

  Her mother followed her, strode to the television and pressed the Off button.

  ‘Hey, folks, what’s up?’ said Hank. ‘Am I in the dog house or something?’

  ‘Sorry, honey,’ said Pat, ‘but Kate has just dropped a bombshell. She’s back with that idle layabout who fathered Toby and then beat it. That’s about the sum of it, isn’t it, Kate?’

  Kate was silent, trying not to lose her temper. And then, quite suddenly, she was trying not to cry. She bit the insides of her cheeks until they hurt, and said nothing.

  Hank moved up close to her and put his arm round her. ‘Look, your mother is wonderful, and she loves you like crazy, but she isn’t the most tactful woman in the world. I don’t know what happened in there, I was too busy rooting for Arsenal, but mothers and daughters shouldn’t scrap on their first evening together, surely?’ He gave her a hug and a little shake, trying to make her look at him.

  Pat said, ‘I’m sorry, pet. It was just such a shock, and you know I cannot forgive Chris for what he did to you and Toby. But Hank is right. The last thing I want to do is quarrel with you.’

  Kate, her voice unsteady, said, ‘It’s simple, Mum. If you can’t accept that I’m back with Chris, you’ll have to go. Stay in a hotel or something.’

  ‘Where is he now?’ asked Hank.

  ‘He’s living here with me. I just asked him to make himself scarce tonight so I could talk to you, and prepare Toby for meeting his dad.’

  As she said this, Kate felt a clutch of fear. What if they didn’t like each other? And then she thought, Oh God, I’ll have to share Toby. I don’t want to share Toby. He’s mine, no one else’s.

  As if reading her thoughts, Pat said, ‘Kate, just tell me, are you sure about this? Do you really love Chris or are you looking for a dad for Toby?’

  And then the questions followed thick and fast. What about Australia? What happened to the wife? Were there kids? What did Chris do for a living? Could Chris afford two families? She wasn’t thinking of going to Australia was she?

  Kate felt as though she were twenty again, being interrogated by her parents about some new boyfriend. But she told herself Pat had a right to know, and her beady questioning testified to her concern as much as to her hostility to Chris. And it ended in tearful hugs and Pat’s insistence that she and Hank sleep on the sitting room sofa-bed so Kate and Chris could keep the bedroom.

  But the session left Kate feeling unsure and anxious. It would never be really right with Pat. Sometimes she seemed to love her mother more in absence than when she was around. Maybe Chris was right. Australia would be a new start for all of them.

  When she was in bed, trying but failing to shut her thoughts out with a book, Pat knocked gently on her door and came in with a cup of hot chocolate. ‘When you were little and ill I used to give you Horlicks, but I couldn’t find any.’

  ‘I remember. It was the most comforting thing. You used to tell me it would make me sleep, and because I believed you, it did.’

  ‘Hot chocolate works the same magic,’ Pat said, smiling. Kate sat up and took the cup.

  ‘Mum, the truth is I have no idea what I should do. I change my mind by the hour.’

  Pat bent to kiss her forehead. ‘Then do nothing, darling, just keep going and wait for the answer to come. It will.’

  As her mother left the room Kate had a childish desire to call her back. Mummy, can I have a drink of water? Can’t I have another story? I want the light on in the corridor …

  In September Toby went back to school and Kate started at St Thomas’s. She was only temping as a teaching assistant but she loved it. Mostly she helped with practical classes in the food rooms. St Thomas’s was a big school and Food Technology was popular. The government’s new enthusiasm for giving every child cooking lessons had meant a lot more work for the department. As well as after-school cooking sessions for the under-sixteens, there was a ‘Student Survival’ cookery club for the sixth form and a mothers’ and toddlers’ food group.

  Kate seldom stayed to help teach in these clubs because she wanted to get back to Toby, but she did most of the shopping and preparation for them, weighing out ingredients, hunting down equipment, photocopying recipes, filling in forms.

  But what she really liked were the food lessons in the curriculum. The senior food teacher, a large no-nonsense Jamaican woman called Elizabeth, was a survivor from the Home Economics days and thought it was a sad day when the subject became Food Technology.

  ‘Until very recently,’ she’d said, ‘if you really wanted to, you could teach the whole Food Tech curriculum on a computer. All marketing plans, packaging design, nutritional labelling, distribution channels, etc. Now, thank the Lord, or maybe Jamie Oliver, we have to get our hands in the flour. And children love that. I’ve been teaching for thirty-five years and I’ve never met a child who didn’t enjoy cooking. Seems to me the best way to get them to come to school is to teach them to cook.’

  Elizabeth had quickly recognised that Kate was not only a good cook but a natural teacher, and she gave her half the class to supervise. This still meant fifteen or sixteen children to worry about, but, used to a team of chefs, Kate found it exciting and satisfying rather than stressful.

  At home they had settled into a kind of routine. She dropped Toby at school early, and he went to the breakfast club. This saved her having to make him breakfast and it gave her time to get to St Thomas’s. Chris, Pat, or Talika collected him after school.

  But things were far from ideal. Ha
ving Pat and Hank’s open cases in the sitting room irritated her, though she tried not to show it. She missed the intimacy of Toby in her bed, but Toby had declared that even after everyone left, he wanted to sleep in the office, which from now on, he said, had to be his new bedroom.

  ‘I had my own bedroom in Arizona,’ he’d said. ‘And I am six and nearly-a-half, and no one else sleeps with their mum any more.’

  Having Chris around all the time irritated Kate too. She could not understand why – after all, he wasn’t doing anything that she could accuse him of. But, because he was Australian and over thirty, he could no longer claim to be a student or on work experience. He needed a work permit to do a regular job, which would be near-impossible to get.

  He worked when he could, temping illegally for kitchens not too fussy about the law. Kate secretly disapproved of this, but told herself she was being po-faced. What else was the poor chap to do? She had refused to give him a ‘yes’ about Australia and was taking her mother’s advice to just keep going and let the decisions make themselves.

  Chris, she admitted, was more than willing to do the shopping, cook the supper, dig the garden, generally carry his weight. And Kate was grateful. But he took up so much space – sprawled on the sofa, legs apart and stretching halfway across the room. In their previous life together Kate had never been irritated by beer cans on the floor, clothes all over the bed, crumpled tissues everywhere, wet towels on the bathroom floor. I guess, she thought, the years of being a caterer, where being organised is more important than being able to cook, have changed me into a control freak.

  But there were moments when she thought Chris blowing back into her life would somehow save her. He seemed to want her so much, to be so determined to persuade her to marry him, go home to Oz with him, let him back into her life as if he had never left.

  And the sex was good. They had to be quiet because they were directly above Pat and Hank, but somehow the need to bite her lip and be silent was something of a turn-on. Chris could be a wonderful lover, demanding, sometimes forceful, but able to feel by instinct what she wanted. The only time it did not work was when she was reluctant – too tired or anxious – and then he would be offended, and roughly turn his back to her. And then she would feel bad, and stroke his back, and work doubly hard to make things better, and finally they would make love and everything was fine.

  But it wasn’t peaceful. If we went to Australia, she thought, maybe we would have more room, less stress, and all these niggles and doubts would just disappear. I’m thirty-five, damn it, what do I want? A fairy tale prince?

  The October sun still had some heat in it and one day Kate was sitting with her mother outside, drinking tea. ‘Darling,’ said Pat, ‘I want to talk to you about something.’

  Kate was instantly wary, ‘What about?’

  ‘OK, it’s like this. The reason we have stayed on in London this week is because I needed to see your dad’s old lawyer. Your brother and I have agreed that you should have this house, now, rather than have to wait until I kick the bucket. I’d always intended to leave it to you, darling. Arthur doesn’t need it, he’s doing well.’

  Kate was so astonished, she could not absorb the information. She stared uncomprehending at her mother’s face. She noticed how delighted her mother looked, and she started to smile back. ‘I don’t understand. You wouldn’t even borrow any money on it for me. Why would you? Why would you want me to have it? The whole house?’

  Pat put her hands, one of them warm from her mug of tea, each side of her daughter’s flushed face and just held them there.

  ‘Darling, I have a good reason, and I don’t think you’ll like it, but I can’t help that.’

  Kate frowned at her and Pat took away her hands. ‘So, hear me out, no interrupting, OK? Promise.’

  Kate, still frowning, nodded. Pat took a sip of tea. ‘It’s like this. You know I don’t approve of Chris, and I don’t think Toby likes him. But I sense that you are being drawn to this idea of going with him to Australia because your business has foundered and a teaching assistant’s salary will not give Toby the life you want for him.’

  Kate wanted to protest that of course Toby liked Chris, he was just not used to a second parent and it was hard for him to adjust. But she had promised to hear her mother out, so she just shook her head slightly and said nothing.

  Pat continued. ‘I accept that if you really love each other then you should get married and either live here or in Australia. Giving you the house just loads the dice a bit in favour of England, though not much. But your friends are here, like Amal and Talika, and the security of the house might make you feel less inclined to decamp with Chris.’

  ‘But, Mum—’

  Pat put her hand up. ‘Hey, you said you’d hear me out. If you decide to stay together and in England, Chris could, once he was married to you, get a legal, decent job and you could stick with training to be a teacher. You could borrow some money on the house to tide you over. Either way Toby would not be uprooted.’

  Kate was still more puzzled than pleased. ‘But Mum, I still don’t see why you’re doing this. If you want me to dump Chris, surely this just helps us stay together?’

  ‘Sure, it’s a risk. You might sell the house and still go to Australia. But I’m banking on your good sense. And making it possible for you to take your time.’

  ‘Oh, Mum.’

  Kate looked into her mother’s face, and saw in her something she recognised. Poor Mum, she thought, she loves me exactly like I love Toby. She’ll put up with anything, do anything, to make me happy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  In October, the parliamentary recess over, Oliver faced what he hoped would be a final hurdle. He must return to the House of Commons as an ordinary backbencher, knowing all eyes would be upon him.

  He had hoped his resignation in July and the subsequent interview on the Today programme would lay the Limoges and Necklace affairs to rest. But the Daily Telegraph, which for months had been running a gleeful series of revelations about MPs cheating on their expenses, had had a ball with his misdemeanours while skilfully glossing over the time-lapse and his lack of evil intent. When Oliver had been in France, he’d followed the story on the Telegraph website and the temptation to respond was almost irresistible. But he had resisted, and ignored the messages on his mobile phone. Since then, the matter had resurfaced periodically when journalists needed padding to buttress some other MP’s expenses scandal. He flinched at the thought of commiserations to his face and gossip behind his back.

  But in the event it was fine. He’d managed to get a reasonable office on the top floor and he spent his first morning working in it on constituency business. The rooms were nothing like as grand as he’d had at the Foreign Office, of course, but his former status still seemed to cut some ice with the Serjeant-at-Arms and he had not been confined to a shared cubby-hole.

  At noon his telephone rang. It was Lord Brampton, whom Oliver had not seen since he’d consulted him about his troubles.

  ‘Oliver, glad you are in. Do you want some lunch?’

  ‘How very nice of you. Is there a reason?’

  ‘I thought you might like to escape your colleagues, for whom you will be an object of too much interest for a day or two.’

  ‘Well, that is kind, and it’s tempting.’ Oliver was indeed tempted, and he hesitated. ‘But I think I’d better stick around to be stared at, and get it over with. But how about a drink? It would be good to see you.’

  He ate lunch alone in the section of the canteen reserved for MPs. Colleagues nodded and smiled, a few who knew him said welcome back, and he found himself discussing the dire quality of the catering. No one mentioned his resignation or the expenses scandals.

  That evening he and Brampton had a drink at the bar of the Athena in Millbank. Oliver nodded to several people among the crowd of politicians, civil servants and journalists.

  The double whisky Brampton bought him was very welcome. As was his non-Westminster chat: Bramp
ton reminisced about student days with Oliver’s father, and Oliver told him of his pending divorce from Ruth. He was, Oliver thought, a wise old bird. Non-judgemental, interested, reassuring.

  At seven-thirty Brampton had to go to a dinner and Oliver decided to stay on and have something to eat. He walked to the bar, consulted the menu on the wall, and tried to order his supper.

  The barman had his back to him, and seemed determined not to turn round. Oliver tapped his glass on the counter, politely trying to make his presence known, but without result.

  There was something familiar about the man, thought Oliver. ‘Excuse me. Could I order …’

  The barman turned round. It was Dennis, the Government Hospitality butler. His expression was a mix of surprise and dislike.

  ‘Good Lord, Dennis,’ said Oliver. ‘Are you moonlighting?’

  ‘Certainly not, Sir.’

  Something’s wrong, thought Oliver. The man has changed. Where is the obsequious, almost fawning, creature he was used to?

  And then he realised. Of course. He was no longer Secretary of State. Not worth fawning for.

  ‘You’ve left the service then?’ he asked. ‘I’m astonished.’

  Dennis frowned. ‘Of course I’ve left. I had no option, thanks to you.’ His tone was petulant and rude.

  ‘Thanks to me? What do you mean, Dennis?’ Oliver was more puzzled than angry. ‘What on earth is the matter?’

  But Dennis was rapidly becoming angry. ‘I got the sack, that’s the matter. And all because of you and that cook you could not keep your eyes off. Or your hands, I bet.’

  Customers at the bar were staring in horror and fascination, and Oliver realised that they were heading for just the sort of scene he had been dreading all day, only infinitely worse.

  ‘Dennis, I am sitting in the corner over there,’ he said, his voice icy calm and very quiet. ‘I would be glad if you would order me a plate of hummus, taramasalata and olives. And I would prefer it to be brought by another waiter, please.’