The Worst Case Scenario Cookery Club

by Chrissie Manby

  ‘When Jimmy told me that he used to see you here every day after school, I knew I’d found the right spot. It could be really great. I bet it was great.’

  ‘It was.’

  Alex poured himself a glass of the red wine he’d chosen with Bella in mind. ‘We should have a toast to your dad.’

  ‘To Dad,’ Bella chinked Alex’s glass. ‘He would have loved this. Here’s to your new café.’

  Bella toasted Alex.

  ‘Is it OK if I call it Bella’s again?’ he asked.

  Bella looked into her glass. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

  ‘I’ve upset you,’ said Alex. ‘You’re crying.’

  ‘I’m not upset,’ said Bella. ‘At least, not in the way you think. I know that you’ll do something wonderful here. You’ve already worked miracles with a tablecloth and some candles. It’s just that this place was so much part of my life. And my dad’s life.’

  ‘It could be part of your life again.’

  ‘How?’ Bella asked.

  ‘You said you wanted to use the skills you’ve picked up over your years in law to help people. You could do that here. I’ve got plenty of people who can wash up, lay tables and make a decent tomato sauce. You could be the business brains. You could give people legal advice when they drop in. And when you’ve done all that, you could cook.’

  ‘I promised my mother I would never go into the restaurant business,’ Bella laughed.

  ‘I promised my mother pretty much the same thing. But we only get one life. Best to make it your own.’

  ‘You’re right about that. That’s exactly what my dad would have said.’

  Bella sat up straight.

  ‘I can’t believe I’m sitting here. When I was a kid, I used to imagine that one day I would have a really grand restaurant in London, like the one Dad worked in when he first came out of the army. I would be there every night, greeting my celebrity guests, working out which of the great and the good should get the best table.’

  ‘The best table is always the one you’re sitting at,’ said Alex.

  With his heart in his mouth, Alex reached for her hand across the checked tablecloth and lifted it to his lips.

  Bella looked as though she was about to say something but the words didn’t come. They looked at each other, searching each other’s eyes for a deeper message. This was the moment. If Alex let go of Bella’s hand now, it might be gone forever.

  Suddenly Bella pulled Alex to her across the table and kissed him passionately.

  ‘Oi!’ came a shout from Jimmy in the kitchen doorway. ‘This isn’t that kind of establishment!’

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Liz was unloading the supermarket shopping when she became aware, with the sixth sense we all have that something is going on behind us, that a car had pulled up across the top of the drive. When she turned to see the white Fiat 500, Liz’s heart gave a small flutter that betrayed an awful lot about what she had been thinking. And about whom. But this Fiat 500 did not belong to Dr Evan Thomas. It belonged to Brittney The Blog Tart Blaine.

  Brittney was glaring at Liz from her place behind the wheel. Liz could almost feel the hatred shooting from Brittney’s eyes like lasers. This must be the moment, she thought. Ian must have told Brittney that he wanted out. And he must have told her where he was going.

  After what felt like a whole minute of hard staring, Brittney climbed out of the car and slammed the driver door shut, making sure to lock it as though she had arrived at Liz’s house for a friendly sort of visit and expected to be a while. Or as though she thought Liz lived in an especially bad area.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ she said as she stepped onto the drive.

  ‘OK,’ said Liz. ‘Talk away.’

  There was no point telling Brittney to F off. That would immediately shift the conversation into nuclear gear and that’s not what Liz wanted on the doorstep. Her bat sense told her that curtains were already twitching in the houses to the left and the right of her. There couldn’t have been anyone on the street who didn’t already know about the antipasti incident. Now here was an identical car. Was this the Salami Slut? would be the question on her nosey neighbours’ lips.

  Brittney stalked down the drive, twisting her ankle as she did so. She was wearing a pair of deeply impractical high-heeled trainers, which the fashion bloggers periodically declared ‘le dernier cri’ before, as Brittney was wont to do, they ended up with a twisted ankle and went back to flats.

  ‘Ow,’ said Brittney.

  That afternoon she was a far cry from the beautiful, composed eco-goddess of her website. Her eyes were red. She looked as though she had been crying for a week.

  ‘You bitch,’ was her next gambit.

  ‘Er,’ said Liz, indicating with her eyes that they were probably being overheard.

  ‘You stole my fiancé.’

  ‘Your fiancé?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You mean, my husband?’ Liz pointed out. The divorce was still not final. ‘You can’t be engaged to someone who’s still married to someone else.’

  ‘Whatever. You’ve stolen him from me.’

  ‘I think in legal terms, I’ve merely taken repossession of my own property,’ Liz responded.

  ‘He’s nobody’s property.’

  ‘In which case, he gets to do exactly what he wants, right? Look, Brittney, I don’t think this has to be a long conversation. I don’t know what’s gone on between you and Ian, but if he’s chosen to call off your relationship, I can promise you I had nothing to do with it. I gave up trying to change Ian’s mind a long time ago. If he wants to come back here – to his house – it’s entirely of his own free will. I haven’t dragged him back here against his wishes by the use of crystals and feng shui.’

  Brittney’s eyes narrowed as Liz mocked her.

  ‘You shouldn’t want him back anyway,’ Brittney responded. ‘Not after all the things he said about you. If you knew—’

  ‘I’m sure you’re going to fill me in,’ said Liz. She had that sinking feeling.

  ‘He said you’d let yourself go,’ Brittney began. ‘He said you had a stomach the texture of porridge.’

  ‘As a result of giving birth to his child.’

  ‘He said that making love to you was like making love to a beanbag.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Lumpy and unresponsive.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Liz said.

  ‘And you’re letting him move back in after that?’

  ‘It’s still half his house,’ said Liz, attempting to keep her cool. ‘Look, is there anything I can actually do for you, Brittney? Only I need to get all this food into the freezer before it starts to thaw out.’

  ‘Ah yes. The kitchen goddess,’ Brittney sneered. ‘Not.’

  Liz raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Why he would want to come back to this,’ Brittney indicated the carrier bags on the floor by the car, ‘is beyond me. When he left you he was on the verge of becoming a diabetic.’

  ‘Then I’m grateful to you for having got him back on track.’

  ‘I cared for him far better than you ever did. I nurtured him body and soul.’

  ‘With your goddess-made connection.’

  ‘Don’t mock me,’ Brittney told her. ‘Your small-minded conventionality is what drove you and Ian apart. It won’t last, him coming back to you. It won’t last. Three weeks of food like this.’

  ‘It’s just frozen veg, which retain more of their nutrients than veg shipped unfrozen …’ Liz tried.

  ‘And sex with an unresponsive bean bag means he’ll soon be back to me.’

  ‘For wild goddess sex and mung beans?’

  Thank goodness Saskia was at the NEWTS and didn’t have to see or hear any of this, Liz thought.

  ‘Ian likes mung beans!’ Brittney roared.

  ‘Oh come on, Brittney. No one likes mung beans. Not even the Dalai Lama.’

  ‘Don’t bring him into it!’ Brittney screeched.
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  And with that, she delved into the nearest carrier bag – which happened to be one full of fresh vegetables – and pulled out an avocado. She hurled it in Liz’s direction. Liz ducked. The avocado bounced off the Volvo, leaving a visible dent. It really wasn’t ripe.

  ‘Brittney,’ Liz said in the voice that used to work on Saskia, when she was two and having a tantrum over the Petit Filous. ‘Let’s not let this get out of hand.’

  But Brittney was already reaching for her next weapon. A packet of vine tomatoes. Without taking them out of her packaging, she hurled them at Liz’s head.

  ‘Stop it!’ Liz cried as she dodged the missile.

  ‘I will not stop it!’ said Brittney, as she picked up a baking potato.

  ‘Not that,’ said Liz. ‘That could really hurt me.’

  ‘Like you’ve hurt me!’ Brittney caught Liz a glancing blow to her shoulder with the spud. Then she picked up the aubergine and Liz knew she had to take action.

  Quickly, Liz ducked down and found some ammunition of her own. As it happened, Liz had a bag full of tins. She picked up a tin of ready-chopped tomatoes. No. She couldn’t throw that. A tin was a serious missile. She didn’t want to kill Brittney. She just wanted her to stop. While Brittney rained more potatoes, the aubergine and a bag full of organic lemons on Liz’s head, Liz rifled through the nearest carriers in search of anything that wouldn’t take an eye out. She came up with a yogurt.

  ‘Not organic!’ she said, as she ripped off the foil and let the yogurt fly.

  She caught Brittney in the middle of the chest. Yogurt splattered all over her dry-clean only sweatshirt from Windscale’s latest collection. All one hundred and fifty quid’s worth of it, Liz knew.

  ‘You!’

  Brittney sent another potato to the side of Liz’s head. It caught her right above the ear, making her stumble against the car. Liz recovered enough to find a tub full of mini-mozzarellas. They’d do no lasting damage except to the fabric of Brittney’s silk athleisure track pants.

  ‘I hate you!’ Brittney bawled at her. ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!’

  ‘I hate you back,’ Liz assured her, fending Brittney off with a French stick as she came in for the kill with a melon. Liz sank down onto the floor next to the car. She could hear Ted going berserk on the other side of the front door. If only he really was as good at opening doors as she had lied in the veterinary surgery when trying to explain his cake-mix binge. Liz looked up at the melon, which seemed to grow to the size of the moon as Brittney raised it high above her. How ripe was that melon? Which would split first? The fruit or Liz’s skull?

  ‘Brittney! No!’ came a shout behind them. ‘Put the melon down!’

  Saskia had come home.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Brittney dropped the melon onto the drive. Liz was giddy with relief as she saw the melon bounce and roll away. Like the avocado, it wasn’t ripe. It might even have been capable of killing her. Clinging on to the side of the car, Liz got to her feet. Saskia was standing next to Georgia. Both girls’ faces were the picture of shock.

  ‘I was going to ask if Georgia could stay here tonight if that’s OK with you …’ Saskia said to Liz but as the gravity of the situation sank in – this was no ordinary food fight – Saskia turned to Georgia and said, ‘Another night?’

  Georgia made a hasty retreat, though her mother, who had dropped the girls off, took a while to pull away from the kerb.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Saskia asked. ‘Why is half the shopping splatted on the wall? Has Dad left you?’ she addressed Brittney.

  ‘For this bitch,’ Brittney jerked her thumb in Liz’s direction.

  ‘You mean my mum?’ said Saskia.

  Liz felt a huge flood of love towards her daughter for that.

  ‘Can we take this inside, please?’ Saskia said then. ‘I really don’t think you want the neighbours to see you two fighting. As if my life were not full enough of embarrassment already. I don’t know what I did in a past life but it must have been really bad to deserve ending up between you two.’

  ‘Sassy!’ Brittney protested.

  ‘Brittney, please. That’s not my name.’

  Liz and Brittney followed Saskia inside like a pair of school children. Liz was not sure how she felt about having Brittney in the house, especially since she was dripping yogurt. As far as she knew, Ian’s lover had never stepped over the threshold. Though of course it was entirely possible that they’d trysted there before Ian had the decency to leave. Ted didn’t seem that surprised to see her. He tried to lick Brittney’s knees.

  ‘So this is what he’s coming back to?’ Brittney sobbed, as she pushed Ted away.

  Liz kicked a basketful of dirty laundry under the kitchen table so that it wasn’t in view.

  ‘It’s his home,’ said Liz. She found a small mirror in her handbag and used it to examine the damage caused by Brittney’s direct hit with a potato. She was going to have a big bruise for certain. Did she really want this woman in the house? Was there any need for the conversation to carry on?

  ‘My flat is his home,’ Brittney insisted.

  ‘Not any more, it seems,’ said Liz.

  ‘Look, shut up, both of you, about where Dad belongs,’ said Saskia suddenly. ‘Just shut up and sit down. I’ve got something to tell you both.’

  ‘What?’ Liz and Brittney both snapped.

  ‘Dad has been playing you. You, Brittney. And you, Mum. Brittney, I’m afraid he really does want to leave you. He’s worried that you want too much commitment. But Mum, I don’t think he wants to come back here for the right reasons. He wants to come here to save some money while he finds himself somewhere else to live. He’s got another girlfriend.’

  ‘What?’ Liz and Brittney said at once.

  ‘I guessed that something was going on when he got all weird about his phone again. The way he was when he was getting ready to leave Mum for you,’ Saskia told Brittney. ‘And then he started having to work away from home all the time.’

  ‘He’s been given the south-west area manager’s job,’ said Brittney.

  Liz agreed.

  ‘No he hasn’t,’ said Saskia. ‘Honestly, the pair of you can be so gullible. Dad’s got a girlfriend. In Totnes.’

  ‘Totnes!’

  Liz at once pictured Kat, the ex-girlfriend, in her Birkenstocks and her cheesecloth dress.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Brittney asked.

  ‘Dad didn’t know how to get to the NEWTS theatre from Exeter so he asked me to put the address in the sat nav. And the last place he’d visited was an address in Totnes, which was not a dental surgery. I checked it on my phone. It’s a little terraced house and it’s registered to one Katherine Newton.’

  ‘The cheesecloth girl. Have you thought about becoming a private detective?’ Liz asked.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ said Brittney. ‘There are all sorts of reasons why he could be going to see someone in Totnes. There’s a bespoke jeweller there,’ she said significantly. ‘Perhaps she’s called Katherine.’

  Liz tutted. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I overheard him on the phone,’ said Saskia, ‘and he definitely wasn’t taking an order for dental whitening products.’ In one line she delivered the coup de grace to Brittney’s dreams and confirmed Liz’s worst suspicions.

  ‘Bastard,’ muttered Liz.

  ‘So there’s no point the two of you arguing over him. He doesn’t care that much about either of you.’

  ‘I knew it,’ said Liz. ‘When he said that he wanted to come home but thought it would be fairer on me if he didn’t move back into the master bedroom. And he pre-empted the whole having to sneak out all the time thing by saying he had that new job. Ah well. Good job he hasn’t moved his stuff back yet. Totnes. I knew there was unfinished business there.’

  Brittney was taking it altogether more badly. She sank to the floor dramatically and appeared to faint. When he saw what was happening, Ted rushed over to revive her by licking he
r face. And more of the yogurt off her sweatshirt. That soon brought Brittney round. But because she had chosen to faint under the kitchen table, when she sat up to avoid Ted’s ministrations, she cracked her head, which made her howl, which made Ted even more determined to comfort her. Utterly defeated, Brittney lay back down on the floor and let Ted take off all her make-up with his exfoliating tongue.

  Liz and Saskia looked down at their visitor. Saskia shook her head and murmured, ‘Sad.’

  ‘I know how you feel,’ Liz told Brittney. ‘I really do.’ She offered Brittney her hand. Brittney refused it.

  ‘Oh, get up, Brittney,’ said Saskia. ‘It really isn’t that bad.’

  ‘I’ve got a blog post about summer weddings all ready to go,’ Brittney wailed. ‘It’s being sponsored by the Bridal Fayre at The Majestic.’

  ‘I can see how that might be embarrassing,’ said Liz.

  ‘Ooooh.’ Brittney sat up. She covered her face with her hands. Ted was still desperately trying to comfort her. Finally Brittney buried her face in his fur and snorted. ‘I’ve made such a fool of myself.’

  ‘Use this as a learning experience,’ said Saskia, treading dangerously close to being annoying.

  ‘Let me get you a cup of tea,’ said Liz. ‘Though I’m afraid I haven’t got any macadamia nut milk or whatever it is you bloggers drink.’

  ‘Semi-skimmed is fine,’ said Brittney in a very small voice.

  It was not how Liz had expected to be spending her evening. She thought she would be getting the spare room ready for Ian’s arrival the following day. Now that she knew he was probably in Totnes and not in Bristol, as he had claimed, she didn’t feel inclined to change the linen. She felt inclined to open a bottle of Chardonnay. With Brittney.

  Liz would never have guessed that she would ever have Brittney sitting at her kitchen table. She would have been downright flabbergasted if anyone had told her that she would be holding the woman’s hand across the checked cloth, watching her cry big snotty tears about the man they’d both loved and lost.

  ‘It gets better,’ Liz assured her. ‘I promise you, right now you may think you can’t live without him but you totally can.’