Two nights a week Tania worked and Theo didn’t, and vice versa, and the other three nights they worked together. Those were the best nights, the busy ones. Theo had never really worked in a team before, and she liked it, she really liked it. She liked pulling a perfect pint, she liked whispering things in Tania’s ear about the patrons, making her laugh.
‘You’re pretty funny, for a boring rich girl,’ Tania said to her once. She called her printsessa, but Theo didn’t mind. She had not completely grasped the magnitude of the difference between her family’s situation and others before then.
‘You’re pretty beautiful, for a man,’ she replied. Tania wore so much makeup that a customer had once told her she looked like a drag queen. Behind them, Oliver, the Australian chef, laughed on his way through to the kitchen.
‘I know,’ Tania said, and gave Theo a wet pink kiss on her cheek. At the bar, the punters were waving their hands at them, calling out for service.
‘Not as sexy as him, though,’ Theo said, and nodded her head at the door to the kitchen. She flushed with delight at her own admission.
Tania raised her pencilled eyebrows. ‘Should I tell him you said so?’
‘Tania! You wouldn’t.’
‘No worries.’
That was what Oliver said, and the rest of them had picked it up. No worries. It was true, as well. They were good days.
Theo loved the camaraderie and exhaustion when a Saturday night shift was over and the staff all huddled in the alleyway to smoke and complain about how tired they were. She learnt to drink, and to drink well. She held her liquor and didn’t get silly or sloppy or morose, she just felt like a taut ribbon that had been cut, a balloon released into the air. She danced for hours, throwing her ungainly self around, and she chatted like someone who let the words that arrived there just fall off the end of her tongue. When she was drinking, she moved her body without caution and control, dancing and weaving, and it was on one of these nights that she pressed herself into Oliver’s side and said into his ear, ‘You know, I’d probably have sex with you.’
chapter eighteen
Beth stood outside Mary’s house for a little while before she went in. They had put up their Christmas lights already and they blinked in the trees like watchful eyes. Beth could smell something familiar and delicious, garlic and onion, browned meat. Saliva filled her mouth. She would eat a piece of fruit when the others were in bed, Beth decided. Maybe with something else, a crisp, clean cracker. For fuel, just enough to keep her going.
She could hear Tom shouting at the cricket umpire on the television, and the tootling notes of one of the children playing a recorder. Doors bumped shut and footsteps plodded down the wooden floors in the hallway. Someone laughed, delighted. Mary had the radio on in the kitchen, and Beth could see her in there, stirring something, with a phone tucked between her shoulder and ear, the spotlights on the ceiling making her curly hair look like a haze of fireflies.
Beth pushed open the side door that led straight into the kitchen, and Mary dropped the phone.
‘Beth! You’re here. I was so worried, I was about to send Tom out searching for you.’
‘Sorry.’ Beth widened her eyes at Mary. ‘I’m back now.’
‘You don’t sound sorry. Beth, you can’t just disappear like that.’ Mary walked closer to her and Beth took a few steps sideways.
‘Why not?’
‘Because I’m supposed to be looking after you!’ Mary’s voice rose at the end of the sentence.
‘Are you worried about getting into trouble?’
‘No, Beth. I’m worried about you.’
‘I’m fine.’ Beth looked over Mary’s shoulder, at the door.
‘Come and sit down?’ Mary pulled out a chair for her and sat down at the other side of the table. Beth didn’t sit, but hovered at the fridge, fingering the drawings and handmade cards that were stuck on it with magnets.
‘How are you doing?’ Mary asked. ‘Have you had an okay day?’
Beth shrugged and didn’t answer.
‘I spoke with Theo today,’ Mary said.
Beth’s heart beat a little faster. When she heard her name, it was like a shutter was pulled down over her mind. Theo’s name bounced off her and pinged back to Mary.
‘I don’t want to talk about Theo.’
Mary came over to stand beside her at the fridge. ‘Beth, I understand how hard this must be. I know you’re going to need some time. But I really think –’
‘You understand?’ Beth turned to face Mary.
Mary didn’t say anything, just looked at Beth. Beth read her expression as compassion, or pity, or both. She didn’t want either.
‘Can you tell me what happened? Can you tell me about Alice?’
‘Beth, I can’t. I know very little. What I do know is that Theo loves you, she made me promise to tell you that. I also know that she had reasons for doing what she did.’
Beth pushed past her and went into the guest room, closing the door. She let herself slide down to the floor.
Theo had rarely talked about her life before Beth. It was like she had put it in a box, closed the lid and pushed it into a corner. Well, Beth was going to do the same. She was going to lock Theo up tight, in the smallest, most airless box she could conjure up. Theo would hate it in there. All the better. Beth was going to let her suffocate. She wouldn’t see her, and she wouldn’t think of her either.
She stood at the window, looking outside. Tom had spent a lot of time on the garden, Beth knew. There were numerous beds swollen with greenery and flowers sprinkled like confetti, a trellis choked with jasmine over a bench seat and a two-storey treehouse for the kids in an old oak. A tyre swing hung from the tree’s boughs. It was beautiful, but all Beth wanted was to go back to the caravan park.
Something about the park appealed to her, something made it feel right. Which was different to safe. But maybe safe didn’t matter so much. Part of the story Beth had always heard about the caravan park was that it was an unofficial halfway house, the place where people went when they were released from jail and had nothing or no one of their own to go to. Rent was cheap and the caravans weren’t hard to secure – Caleb said that all you needed to do was sign an X on the lease and one could be yours, as simply as that. Beth didn’t ask him how he knew that. In the morning, she would ask him to take her back there.
In the other parts of the house, Beth could hear Mary and Tom beginning the nightly ritual of feeding the kids. Mary would have made something that was nutritious and delicious for their dinner, whatever it was that Beth could smell in the kitchen. Her stomach rumbled. There was no way she was going to join that family mealtime party. When they had eaten, Mary and Tom would bathe their children with care, gently cleaning between each tiny toe on each tiny foot. They would dress them warmly, then read them a story, doing all the voices for the different characters. They would leave lights on, doors open a crack, they would fetch special toys and blow kisses before they left the room.
Beth would sleep now, too, she decided. Let this day end. She climbed into bed. Her eyes landed on her inhaler, on the bedside table. Propped against it was a piece of paper with her name on it. Beth opened it up.
Beth,
Phone message:
Someone called Alexander Pullman rang, he is Alice’s lawyer. He wants you to come into their offices tomorrow for a meeting with Alice. 10 am. The office is on Lynch St, behind the civic centre. You don’t have to go.
If you do want to go, I can drive you.
Mary
chapter nineteen
David returned at about eight o’clock the next morning, his hair wet and smelling of the sea. He brought coffees again, and grapes and peaches. I will save the peaches for Beth, Theo thought instantly. When she realised that Beth wasn’t there to eat them, she almost doubled over with the force of it. You stupid woman, she thought. What have you done?
‘Thank you,’ she said to David, eventually.
He followed her down the hall
way. She was slow, her early hours at the kitchen table had frozen her hips into a painful lock, and now she could only stand. It was warm already, with the sort of damp thickness in the air that promised a day of punishing heat.
‘Have you been swimming?’ she asked David.
‘I have,’ he said. ‘You inspired me. Clears the head something marvellous.’
‘Doesn’t it.’
‘Sorry.’ He smiled apologetically.
‘Don’t be.’
‘I could find out where Beth is, maybe you could go for a swim?’
‘No, no.’ Theo went to sit and then decided to lean against the kitchen bench instead. David sat at the table, and glanced at the brick before raising his eyebrows at Theo.
‘Through the glass.’ Theo waved in the direction of the shattered door. ‘Gave me quite a fright, actually.’ She studied her feet.
‘I’m not surprised,’ David said, staring at the brick. ‘Did you call the police?’
‘Of course not.’
He frowned at her and shook his head.
‘If you report a crime, then the police have to follow up on it.’ David adopted what Theo had already begun to think of as his ‘lawyer voice’, earnest and a little condescending. Just like Greta.
‘That’s what I’m afraid of.’
He picked the brick up, weighed it in his hand. ‘Do you mean you think Beth did it?’
Theo shrugged. Why not Beth? If not Beth, then who? Anyway, why shouldn’t Beth throw a brick through a window or two? Theo ought to be glad that it was just a brick. Maybe she deserved much more than a broken door and a sleepless night. Today, Theo was having trouble summoning the righteousness that had gotten her through the previous days, awful as they had been. Now all she felt was fury at herself, for causing the sort of pain that would make her beautiful daughter pick up a brick and heave it at her mother’s house with all her might.
When Theo had first propositioned Oliver, that drunken night of dancing, he had laughed. Then he had taken her upstairs and put her to bed, alone. But that was still where it began, for Theo, at least. Oliver was a man with a mission. He had been to London, and then had come to Manchester, he said, to work with the best chefs in the UK. He had done that and now was honing his own style of cooking, channelling all the influences he had been exposed to into an oeuvre of his own. When he felt ready, he would return to Australia and open a restaurant. He expected it to be the first of several. He was so matter-of-fact about his ambition, his plans, that rather than finding him arrogant, Theo found him inspiring, and exciting. He was someone on his way up, and he was disarmingly secure in his ability to get there.
He was certainly different to anyone else she had dated. Not that she was dating Oliver, per se. Just falling in love with him. She hadn’t been in love before, not even close. Greta, who had fallen into and out of love many times, told her that being in love made you want to crawl out of your own skin, the joy of it expanded you that much, but prior to Oliver the men and boys Theo had been with had made her feel not giddy, or joyous, just a bit bored, and guilty about that.
Oliver, on the other hand, made her feel more awake than she had ever been.
A few months passed at the pub. The town baths were just down the road and Theo swam every day. The only time she wasn’t thinking of Oliver was when she swam. Tania cut Theo’s hair, long since she was a girl, into a pixie crop. Theo found she had quite a nice chin and jawline. That was something. Oliver winked at her over the pass sometimes. When they passed in the hallways, she had a harried internal dialogue about whether to look at him and blush freely, or look away and appear rude, or some strange combination of the two. Often she just ended up babbling something and skipping past as though she was in a great hurry, fanning her face as though her pink cheeks were due to the heat.
Despite her awkwardness when it was just the two of them, all the staff had a good time when they were together in a bunch. That period of her life, living at the pub, was the happiest Theo had ever known. Out of her family’s big, lonely house, away from those people who had seemed so baffled by her presence and free of her mother’s unimpressed custodianship, Theo ‘came into her own,’ as Greta said. She’d never seen Theo so content, she told her, and thought she should probably never leave the Egg and Spoon. Often, Theo thought that she never wanted to. Her mother made snide comments on the phone about Theo ‘slumming it’ and dismissed it as just a phase. Theo didn’t bother responding.
When the tourist season was in full force at the Egg and Spoon, Kelvin didn’t let Oliver ‘faff about’ with the menu too much. The customers expected certain things, he said, and paid for them accordingly. But in the off-season Oliver experimented. At some point he decided that Theo was the best subject to sample his recipes. Tania had a tongue like sandpaper from years of smoking, and Kelvin and his sons winced as though someone was twisting their testicles when any dish contained any more than the barest hint of spice or heat. Esther had no time for his ‘fancy eats’. But Theo, with her upbringing, would have valuable insight, Oliver suggested. Theo tried to tell him that her family had not been interested in food, but he didn’t care. She probably had an innate sense of quality, regardless, Oliver said. The discernment that came with exposure to all things fine and beautiful. Theo thought it was funny, and she was flattered, and tried hard to understand what he was trying to do when he cooked and why. Over time, she learnt more about flavour; how to isolate phases of taste and distinguish ingredients to refer to when they talked about the food. She never said something was good if it wasn’t. Sometimes, despite herself, she pulled involuntary faces of disgust and then crucified herself as Oliver’s face fell and he emptied their bowls into the bin. But it was important that she always be truthful, Oliver said. So, she was.
He spoke often about ‘the Australian palate’ when he talked about the restaurant he would open there. Theo pictured a giant gaping mouth filled with sunshine and white sandy beaches, palm trees for teeth, segueing into a throat of red desert dirt. That was how she thought of Australia, as either beach or desert, nothing in between. When Oliver told her he’d never been to the desert she’d thought he was making fun of her.
‘Not many people have,’ he said. ‘It’s just space. Vast, empty space.’
‘Sounds lovely,’ Theo said, and she meant it.
Oliver was amused. ‘One day I’ll take you to the desert, Theo,’ he said. ‘And you tell me how lovely it is then, when I’ve plonked you down smack-bang in the middle of nowhere and there’s nowhere at all for you to swim, not even for a bird to take a dip!’
If she had been Tania, Theo would have said, ‘You can plonk me down wherever you like,’ but because she was Theo, she just blushed and mumbled something about the poor birds, how hot they must be.
Oliver laughed again, but gently, without malice, and took a pinch of her short hair between his fingers.
‘Nice hair, Theo,’ he said, soft and low, and she was mute, a lump of coal burning in the pit of her belly.
All afternoon she dissected those wonderful sentences, hands deep in bi-carb and vinegar, cleaning out the wine cellar. And she relived that palest whisper of touch over and over again, his fingers at her temple, the rasp of her hair in his fingers. She was warm then cold, molten, an icicle, paralysed, electric. When Tania found her, Theo was absentmindedly picking at the labels on a box of wine, a pile of shredded paper at her feet.
‘And so it begins,’ Tania said. Theo smiled so hard that her cheeks hurt. Tania patted her arm and passed her a dustpan and brush.
Tania didn’t talk about Russia or her home, but about the British royal family. She was scathing, but also very well informed about them. After they’d closed the pub, she’d get out her magazines and tell Oliver and Theo the various happenings and gossip, and they drank and passed merry judgement and derided them all. Oliver gossiped just as much as the girls and even helped Tania cut out pictures of Princess Di for her scrapbook, where she recorded all the outfits she wore thro
ughout the year. Tania felt Princess Diana was a sad and lovely figure, mistreated by her upright, unfeeling husband and superseded in her children’s affections by their nannies (‘not even her children are her own!’). Theo thought she was a bit of a sap, with her hangdog expression and breathless giggle, the sort of girl her brothers would have dated and her sisters would have trampled on. Oliver sided with Theo, but admitted that, if given the opportunity, he would happily have his wicked way with her.
‘On a bed with goose-feather pillows of velvet and silk,’ Theo suggested.
‘Any bed whatsoever,’ Oliver replied.
Theo thought of her bed upstairs in her room, sheets brought from home, daisy chains on crisp white cotton, and blushed. Tania looked between the two of them and smiled to herself.
Oliver’s food began to do well. So well, in fact, that Kelvin hired another chef to do the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding trade so Oliver could concentrate on his food. He went slowly at first, knowing he had to win over the regulars. A duck ragout, a few mild game birds, venison, wild mushroom risotto, nothing too foreign but no longer just the standard pub fare. The girls did their part. Theo raved about their specials to the customers, and Tania told them they were stupid if they ordered fish and chips. ‘You can get them anywhere,’ she said, and waved her hand dismissively.
One evening a food reviewer from the Telegraph came back to the kitchen to say that he’d send them a copy of the paper when his review of the Egg and Spoon was out and ‘they might want to have the frame ready’. Oliver twirled his apron around his head and kissed Theo in the storeroom. ‘Theo. I can’t thank you enough. I couldn’t have done this without you,’ he said to her, his eyes shining in the dimness.
That night, Theo was on closing. By the time she’d finally finished, everyone else had gone to bed. In the bathroom, Theo brushed her teeth, scrubbed her face and ran her fingers through her cropped hair. She looked at the mouth that Oliver Watts had kissed, at her eyes, at her flushed cheeks that he had cupped with his hands. Good things come to those who wait, she said to herself, allowing a small private squeal to escape into the empty room. She winked at her reflection, at her smug beaming face. Greta would be beside herself when Theo told her Oliver had kissed her. Tania would cackle and make lewd noises but she would be happy for her too. In fact, Tania might still be awake – Theo would stick her head in if the light was on, she decided. She just wanted to tell someone, to make it real. It was just a kiss, but Theo had never wanted to be kissed by someone as much as she had wanted Oliver to kiss her. The days that had gone by, the number of times she had imagined it. She’d be mortified if anyone knew the bodice-ripper level of her fantasies. Or even the tamer domestic daydreams she’d had about furniture shopping with Oliver, Oliver cooking a meal for her parents and knocking their socks off, going to the library with Oliver. Pathetic.
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