by David Nobbs
‘Gin and tonic and a whisky and soda, please,’ said the man. ‘Make them large ones. My wife and I don’t see each other very often midday.’
‘Vairy good, sir.’
‘My husband supplies your chickens,’ said the woman, who had platinum hair and badly concealed dark roots.
‘Ah!’ said Monsieur Albert cautiously. ‘Edouard!’ he shouted, clicking his imperious Gallic fingers. ‘Edouard will bring you the menus,’ he explained.
Rodney Sillitoe gave a brief, approving glance round the restaurant. It had a tiled floor, red check tablecloths, discreet wall lights, recessed photographs of rural France. An arched wroughtiron screen led to a separate bar area, with smaller tables and soft bench seating. Rodney felt, as he sat in the bar with an affectionate arm round Betty’s shoulder, that they could spend a relaxed two hours in this place without hardship.
Then Ted Simcock entered, in evening dress, carrying two enormous menus.
All his life, when he had been in evening dress, Ted had felt that he looked like a head waiter. Now, when he was a head waiter, he felt that he didn’t look like one.
He felt that he looked like a prat.
‘Good afternoon, sir. Good afternoon, madam. Good God!’ he said.
The Gallic Monsieur Albert, pouring the drinks, gave Ted a sharp look.
‘Ted!’ Rodney’s surprise at seeing Ted was as great as Ted’s dismay at seeing the Sillitoes. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Working.’ Ted gave Monsieur Albert a brief glance. ‘It’s a very good place, and Monsieur Albert’s an excellent employer. I’m thoroughly enjoying it.’
‘Good,’ said Rodney. ‘Now what can you recommend, “Edouard”?’
Monsieur Albert handed the Sillitoes their drinks while Ted spoke. ‘Everything is excellent. Our chef Alphonse started in the household of General de Gaulle and later worked at Maxim’s in Paris.’ Monsieur Albert returned to the kitchen. Ted’s manner changed abruptly. ‘All right!’ he rasped. ‘You were my friend. You couldn’t wait to get your hot little hands on my foundry when I went bankrupt. Fair enough. That’s life. It’s a right sod, is the greed of mankind, but we learn to live with it. But.’
‘But what?’
‘I mean … Rodney! … don’t you think you’ve done enough damage without rubbing it in? I mean … calling me “Edouard”! Really!’
‘That was a bit naughty, Rodney,’ said Betty Sillitoe, who was over-perfumed as usual.
‘I’m very sorry, Ted,’ said Rodney. ‘I just couldn’t resist it. I’m sorry.’
‘All right,’ said Ted, ‘but call me “Edouard” once more and I’ll kick your ruddy teeth in for you. Or there’s the tête de veau vinaigrette à la mode de Lyon.’ Rodney and Betty Sillitoe were bemused by the swift transition, until they saw Monsieur Albert returning with a small bowl of crudités and two dips. ‘The poulet de Bresse, sauce perigordienne, is very tasty. Or if you fancy a touch of nouvelle cuisine, the lamb’s liver with lime and kiwi fruit sauce on a bed of purée of red pepper and watercress with banana garnish has its devotees. Or, for those of a more traditional bent, there’s always the cassoulet Toulousienne avec I mean it! If I see you with so much as a glint in your eyes … that’s it!’ Monsieur Albert had gone. ‘And don’t waste time deciding what to have. I mean … there’s no point. It’s all lousy.’
Ted made an angry, almost impressive exit.
Rodney and Betty exchanged dismayed looks, and raised their glasses to each other silently.
‘I wish we hadn’t come here,’ said Betty, after taking a goodly swig of her gin. ‘I bet the food is lousy.’
‘Well, it’s quiet anyway,’ said Rodney. ‘And we’re together.’
‘I’m a lucky woman. Cheers, love.’
‘Cheers, love.’ Rodney Sillitoe spluttered and almost choked. ‘“Poulet de Bresse, sauce perigordienne,”’ he read. ‘“Maize-fed French chickens …” Those chickens are as French and maizefed as my arse.’
Ted slipped out of the back door and sat beside her. She smiled. As a result of a lifelong addiction to cake, one of her top front teeth was missing. She was listening to music through her expensive headphones, which she could only afford because Ted bought all their food and drink. From the movements of her body, Ted guessed that she was listening to reggae. He was getting quite good at such deductions. Her off-duty life was one long musical orgy, from which Ted was voluntarily excluded.
He put an arm round her soft, spongy, cake-filled plumpness.
‘It’s nearly finished,’ she said.
He kissed her on the cheek. She gave him a full, luscious, rhythmic musical kiss on the mouth.
They were seated on a step at the back of the kitchen, looking out over a yard whose untidyness would have astonished the customers. There was a jumble of crates, empty catering-size tins of rape seed oil, crumpled boxes of oven-ready chips, catering-size tins of chefs soup of the day, overflowing dustbins and black plastic bags torn open by cats with a taste for rotting remains of poulet de Bresse, sauce perigordienne.
‘Finished,’ said Sandra Pickersgill, who was wearing a traditional nineteenth-century Provençale costume. She took her headphones off.
‘Come on in, Sandra,’ he said. ‘There’s two customers arrived.’
‘I’m amazed they’re doing other dinners when there’s a wedding dinner on,’ she said.
‘Sandra! It’s other lunches, and it’s a wedding breakfast! I mean … love … get it right. I told them you were an experienced waitress, who’d worked in sophisticated places. I didn’t say you were an unemployed bakery assistant I’d met at the DHSS. I mean … did I?’ When she’d told him she was an unemployed bakery assistant he’d said, ‘I’d like to put a bun in your oven,’ and she had run the back of her hand gently over his genitals, right there in the crowded, angry DHSS. He’d hardly been able to believe it. ‘So … love … come on! It’s a posh restaurant, is Chez Albert. So … you have lunch at dinnertime and dinner at teatime and whatever time you have it, it’s a wedding breakfast.’
‘Why do things have to be so complicated?’
‘So that the ignorant can be identified, and class differences can signify.’
‘Isn’t that bad?’
‘’Course it isn’t. This is England. I mean … it’s our heritage.’
‘Do we know who the wedding party are?’ asked the cake-loving Sandra Pickersgill, who was twenty-four years old.
‘No. Monsieur Albert’s being right cagey about it.’
‘That’s another thing gets on my wick.’
‘Sandra! I mean … really! This is a high-class establishment. Things do not get on your wick. They annoy you.’
‘Well, calling Monsieur Albert Monsieur Albert gets on my wick when we all know he’s from Gateshead.’
‘Sandra! Do you think there’d be a wedding breakfast having lunch here this dinnertime if it was called Bert’s Caff or La Petite Auberge de Gateshead?’
‘Are you glad you met me, Ted?’
‘You know I am, love.’
He kissed her, running his tongue across the jagged edges of her cake-ravaged teeth, cupping in his hands her luscious breasts, which only last night he had playfully referred to as her Macaroon Highlanders. Even their love talk was dominated by cake.
They returned to the kitchen and their duties.
Rodney and Betty Sillitoe were seated at a table for two, as far as possible from the table for eleven. Their candle was lit. Behind them, a Breton onion seller was locked in a perpetual smile.
Elvis Simcock and Carol Fordingbridge made straight for the bar, and didn’t see their employer or his wife.
‘There’s Elvis and Carol,’ hissed Betty.
‘They said they were going to Neville and Liz’s wedding,’ said Rodney, craning his neck. His first thought was that they’d been lying. Then he saw the carnation in Elvis’s buttonhole. ‘My God! The wedding’s here!’
‘Bang goes our quiet lunch,’ said Betty, as Paul followed them.
‘Oh my God!’ said Rodney. ‘Poor Ted!’
Poor Ted came in from the kitchen, with a bottle of red wine which didn’t deserve its basket. He saw his two sons, standing by the bar with Carol Fordingbridge. He went rigid with shock, and scurried back to the kitchen.
The kitchen was fairly cluttered, not terribly spacious, moderately clean. It gave an impression halfway between the elegant calm of the restaurant and the squalid chaos of the yard. The ovens and grills gleamed, but the extractor fans were clogged with brown fur.
Ted hurtled in so rapidly that he collided with Sandra, who dropped a pile of plates.
‘Bloody hell, Sandra,’ said Alphonse, the scruffy young chef from Bootle. ‘You made me jump. I’ve cut me finger on this tin of pâté maison.’
‘You’re always dropping things, Sandra,’ said Ted, with affectionate and deeply unjustified exasperation, since it had been at least half his fault.
‘Ooooh! Sounds interesting, Ros,’ said Lil Appleyard, the older of the two kitchen assistants. Her husband was an attendant at the art gallery. She could smell a double entendre at five hundred paces.
Ros Pennington, whose husband was a policeman, held up a shrivelled gherkin. ‘Reminds me of Fred’s on the beach at Brid.,’ she said.
‘Reminds me of Len’s all the year round,’ said Lil Appleyard.
Monsieur Albert entered from his office. He stared morosely at Sandra, as she squatted to clear up the broken plates. There was a hole in her tights just above the right knee.
‘Never mind, Sandra,’ he said, in an accent that owed more to Gateshead than Gaul. ‘No need to feel guilty about it.’
‘Oh, thank you, Monsieur Albert,’ said Sandra.
“Cos I’m stopping it from your wages.’
‘Monsieur Albert?’ said Ted. ‘Who exactly is this wedding party?’
‘They demanded secrecy, Ted.’
‘Monsieur Albert! My two sons are in there. I mean … I need to know who it is!’
‘Your sons???’ said Sandra.
‘Yes, I … er … I … er …’ said Ted.
‘Well, there’s no harm in your knowing now, I suppose,’ said the Geordie Monsieur Albert. ‘It’s a Mr Badger marrying a Mrs Rodenhurst.’
‘Bloody hell! No wonder you didn’t tell me.’
‘I didn’t tell you because they asked for maximum secrecy because, as I understand it, there has been adverse criticism of them for not waiting longer after Mrs Badger’s first husband killed himself with an overdose of anaesthetic in his own dental chair.’
Sandra dropped her broken plates noisily into the bin. Alphonse jumped again, and glared at her.
Ted peered cautiously round the door into the restaurant. He saw Jenny enter, followed by Rita and a redheaded man in his thirties, who had his arm round Rita!! He went pale.
‘Oh my God!’ he said. ‘And what has she got in tow??’ He turned to Monsieur Albert. ‘I can’t go in there,’ he said.
The cake-loving Sandra Pickersgill, another pile of plates in her arms, caught the urgency in Ted’s voice and turned to look at him.
‘You go in there, Ted, or it’s your cards for you,’ said Monsieur Albert.
Ros Pennington and Lil Appleyard listened, the garnishing for the lobster mayonnaise forgotten.
‘Albert!’ pleaded Ted. ‘Be reasonable! I mean … I’ve had an affair with the bride. I’ve been left by the bride. The bride and groom are bringing up my baby as their own.’
‘Your baby???’ said Sandra.
‘My wife is in there with some freak whom I assume to be her lover.’
‘Wife!’ shrieked Sandra. ‘Baby! Sons! Oh shit!’ she added, as the pile of plates crashed to the floor.
‘My two sons are there, plus one son’s fiancée, and the other son’s estranged wife,’ continued Ted. ‘None of them know I work here. Well … I mean … be fair … can I go in there and ask them to taste the wine, which I know they know sod all about and they know I know sod all about? I mean … can I? I mean … it’s not on. Is it? I mean!’
Lil Appleyard and Ros Pennington stared at Ted open-mouthed.
‘Wife!’ said Sandra again, and they all turned to look at her. ‘You forgot to tell me you had a wife, and sons, and a baby.’
‘Come on. You can discuss this afterwards,’ said Monsieur Albert.
‘I was going to tell you, love,’ said Ted. ‘It slipped me mind.’
‘Slipped your mind?’ The former bakery assistant was incredulous.
‘Yes!’ said Ted. ‘Absolutely! Because it’s over. Kaput. Finito. Yesterday’s cold custard.’
The mention of food set Monsieur Albert off. ‘Silly me!’ he said, his irony as heavy as his gâteau. ‘I thought this was a restaurant. How could I have been so stupid? It’s a group therapy clinic. I realize that now. So why don’t you all continue to discuss your problems while I go quietly bankrupt?’
‘Honestly,’ said Ted. ‘Over. Unimportant. That’s why I didn’t tell you.’
‘I can manage without you, Ted,’ said Monsieur Albert. ‘So, if you aren’t prepared to go in there, just leave.’
‘Go in and give them hell, whack,’ said Alphonse, the scruffy young chef from Bootle. ‘Show ’em you don’t give a toss.’
‘If she’s really that unimportant, what does it matter?’ said Sandra.
Ros Pennington and Lil Appleyard, the double act with the double meanings, held gherkins suspended in mid-air.
‘All right,’ said Ted at last. ‘To hell with them!’
‘Right,’ said Monsieur Albert. ‘You open the champagne, Ted. I’ll go and greet the customers.’
But the customers were destined to wait a little longer. The phone rang, and Monsieur Albert almost forgot to use his French accent as he answered it. It was a booking for three, name of Thoroughgood. The gentleman wanted something special. He waffled on about prodigal daughters and fatted calves. ‘You vant veal?’ asked the Gallic Monsieur Albert. ‘No, no,’ said the Reverend J. D. Thoroughgood. ‘We’re against veal on moral grounds. I spoke figuratively.’
Monsieur Albert groaned. A wedding party was being seriously neglected, and he’d got some berk who was against veal on moral grounds, and spoke figuratively.
‘What do you mean, “it slipped your mind”?’ persisted Sandra, as Ted wrestled with the champagne. ‘You must have remembered you were married when we talked about us getting married?’
‘When did we talk about that?’ said Ted, alarmed.
‘When I told you –’ Sandra lowered her voice to a whisper, ‘– that I’d been sacked from the bakery because me pearls all fell into the mix for this wedding cake, you said to me, “you are the only pearl I want around our wedding cake, my luscious Victoria sponge.” I thought that was lovely. I went gooey all over.’
Ted grimaced. It was awful having your love talk quoted back at you in cold blood. He vowed never to use cake imagery again.
Elvis, Carol Fordingbridge, Paul, Andrew Denton, Arthur Badger, Jenny, Rita and Gerry Lansdown were standing in a purposeless huddle by the bar counter. Behind the bar there was a photograph of a French bar counter, manned by a burly character in striped jersey and beret. Nobody was manning the bar of Chez Albert.
At last, Liz and Neville Badger made their entrance. There was a communal ‘Aaaah’ of welcome.
‘Well, we’ve done it,’ said Liz.
‘Congratulations,’ said Rita.
‘Thank you. I think we ought to congratulate you too,’ said Liz. ‘You seem to have made quite a catch.’
‘I’ll second that,’ said Gerry Lansdown, and there was forced laughter, which didn’t quite drown the loud bang from the kitchen.
‘Either that’s a bottle of champagne being opened, or the chefs shot himself,’ said Paul.
‘Don’t mention suicide,’ whispered Carol Fordingbridge.
Paul went scarlet.
‘Isn’t that the Sillitoes over there?’ said Neville Badger.
‘They’ve seen u
s,’ hissed Betty Sillitoe.
‘We’ll have to congratulate them,’ mouthed Rodney.
‘It’ll look as if we’re angling to be invited,’ whispered Betty.
‘We can’t not. That’ll look as if we’re upset because we weren’t invited.’
‘Oh Lord.’ Betty waved and called out a cheerful ‘hello’.
‘Hello,’ echoed Rodney, craning his neck.
The wedding party turned en as much masse as they could muster.
Betty and Rodney raised their glasses.
‘Congratulations,’ they cried.
‘Thank you,’ said Neville and Liz Badger.
‘They must be having lunch here,’ mouthed Liz.
‘Surely not? Won’t they be waiting for a plane to Istanbul?’ said Andrew Denton.
The almost immaculate Arthur Badger glared at his son-in-law.
‘Joke,’ explained Andrew Denton.
‘Well, we did decide that as we were a small party it might be more relaxing if there were other customers,’ said Neville.
‘Yes, but I never thought there’d only be two other customers, we’d know them both, and they’d be lifelong specialists at getting drunk in public,’ said Liz.
There was another bang from the kitchen.
‘What’s going on in there?’ said Neville. ‘Where is everybody? I heard this place was very good. Apparently the eponymous M’sieu Albère …’ His French accent was immaculate. No uncompromising flat Yorkshire ‘Monsieur Albert’ for him. ‘… was the manager of Maxim’s in Paris, and his chef, Alphonse, is said to be the illegitimate son of General de Gaulle.’
‘Don’t mention illegitimate children,’ whispered Liz, just loud enough for Rita to hear.
‘Did you arrange for two vegetarian meals, Uncle Neville?’ said Jenny.
‘Oh Lord!’ said Neville Badger. ‘I forgot.’
‘Uncle Neville isn’t Uncle Neville any more, Jenny,’ said Liz. ‘He’s your father now.’