Perfect Blend

by Sue Margolis

  Given the choice, Amy would always choose hot chocolate over coffee. To her, the bitterness of coffee didn’t compare to the sweet, heady aroma of really good hot chocolate.

  Sometimes, on a damp, slate-sky winter’s afternoon, when it was too cold and miserable to go out, she would make hot chocolate for herself and Charlie. First she would melt the very best unsweetened dark chocolate with a couple of tablespoons of water so that it didn’t stick to the pan. When it was thick and glistening, she added full-fat milk and sugar. The smooth, chocolaty brew was so thick, you could almost stand a spoon up in it. Then came the bit Charlie loved best—the spraying of the whipped cream. Now that he was old enough and had the strength in his fingers to press down on the aerosol squirter, Amy let him do it on his own. They would both collapse with laughter as he inevitably lost control and the cream spurted over him, over her, over the worktop—over everything except the hot chocolate.

  After she’d wiped Charlie down, the two of them would curl up on the sofa with their mugs and a large bowl of marshmallows and watch Toy Story or Chicken Run.

  UNTIL AMY came to work for Brian, he had always refused to serve hot chocolate. He looked down his nose at any beverage that came in instant, powdered form. He even had no time for the fuller-flavored, less sweet upmarket brands of hot chocolate. On the other hand, parents kept asking for it on behalf of their children, particularly in winter. So, one morning when things were quiet, Amy went out and bought a couple of bars of her favorite French chocolate. “Okay,” she said to Brian after she’d performed her magic and turned it into a thick, velvety brew, “try this. We are talking ninety percent cocoa solids here.” After the ritual inhaling and mouth swirling, Brian was forced to admit it wasn’t half-bad.

  Amy even persuaded him to add whipped cream (he insisted on it being nonaerosol) and sprinkles and call it Bambinocino. The kids adored it, and so did their parents. To make it more sophisticated for the adults, Amy stirred in freshly ground cinnamon and nutmeg.

  As a result of Brian’s supreme effort and dedication—not to say obsession with producing the perfect espresso—people flocked to Café Mozart. Proud as he was, he freely admitted that running a neighborhood café was his plan B and that it didn’t come close to fulfilling his ultimate dream.

  Brian’s plan A was to open a trendy, upmarket coffeehouse in Soho. He’d first attempted this at the beginning of 2009, but even in a recession, leases in central London cost a fortune. Brian still had a few thousand left from the insurance payout he’d received after his parents died. The bulk of it had gone to pay for his private education and university. Brian’s gran had also left him some money in her will, a little over fifteen thousand pounds. There was no money tied up in her house because it had always been rented. The inheritance, together with his own nest egg, meant Brian could finally give up his job in logistics—which had never been a match for his talents—and set up his own business. Had the economy been booming, he would have sunk all his money into his dream, but since there was a good chance the project could go belly up, he needed to keep some money back as a buffer.

  In the well-to-do inner London suburbs south of the river, commercial property still didn’t come cheap, but it was just about affordable. So it was that in June 2009, Brian pitched his tent in Richmansworth, aka Nappy Valley, an urban village full of thrusting young bankers and lawyers (their thrust apparently undiminished even in these troubled times), their skinny blond, Ugg-booted wives, and their gorgeous straight-toothed, glossy-haired children.

  Compromising on location meant Brian was forced to do the same thing when it came to branding. Café Mozart wasn’t a proper coffeehouse. That is to say, it didn’t resemble those hardcore London coffeehouses the likes of which Brian dreamed of presiding over, where funky, edgily coiffed Japanese baristas dressed in black presented customers with a cup of espresso on a little wooden tray with a glass of water to freshen the palate and, for afterward, an exquisite froufrou pastry so tiny that it was almost invisible. A family neighborhood—even a discerning one like Richmansworth—couldn’t have sustained such a niche business. Instead, Café Mozart was a traditional café-boulangerie that served the best breads, pastries, and coffee for miles around.

  But as Brian was always telling Amy, he hadn’t given up on his dream. Because it was the only decent coffee and cake place in the neighborhood and because it was in a great position, only a few hundred yards from the Tube station, Café Mozart was weathering the recession rather well. When the business had made enough money, Brian planned to leave it in the hands of a manager while he set up his new, intimidatingly trendy coffeehouse in Soho or maybe somewhere in the East End.

  “Wow, I can see it all,” Amy would tease him. “A glass and steel twenty-first-century salon, nameless save for your signature elegantly carved at the bottom of the heavy, rough-hewn wooden door, filled with writers, artists, and intellectuals composing haikus on their MacBooks while engaging one another in earnest discourse about the state of the planet.”

  “You may mock,” Brian said, smiling and wagging his finger, “but when Potter’s Coffeehouses take off in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh, you will be laughing on the other side of your face.”

  Amy could hear the certainty, the familiar determination in his voice, and decided he might well be right.

  CAFÉ MOZART was part of a row of Victorian shops that overlooked the common. Like the rest, it had an ornate fascia, which had been immaculately restored and painted. It was sandwiched between the organic butcher—catering to a clientele that even in a recession thought nothing of spending the best part of a hundred pounds on a piece of sirloin—and a gift shop specializing in Cath Kidston flowery wellies, Alessi kettles and juicers, and cashmere cardigans for newborns at seventy quid a pop.

  The café had been there since the eighties. Since then, the place had been bought and sold maybe half a dozen times, but nobody had ever changed the name. This was probably because it was such a well-known local landmark that changing it was considered bad for business. Brian had seen no reason to break with the tradition.

  Decorationwise, he had done very little to the place beyond giving the interior a lick of white paint and installing a fancy-schmancy espresso maker.

  Brian was less than keen on the interior. The last people to own Café Mozart had run it as an organic vegetarian restaurant and had decorated it in a way that reflected their wholemeal lentil ethos. He summed up the stripped wooden floors, pews, and pine dressers in one word: “hummusy.” It was all a million miles from his ultimate steel and glass fantasy. Whereas Brian couldn’t wait until he had enough money to update the interior, Amy, to her surprise, found that she rather liked it. For Amy, interiors weren’t so much a hobby as a passion. She was always fantasizing about how she would redesign and decorate her flat if only she could afford it. Her style, like Brian’s, veered toward high-tech minimalism, but every instinct told her that that wasn’t right for Café Mozart. This wasn’t Soho. This was a family neighborhood, and people were looking for a place that was warm and inviting. In Amy’s opinion, the old wood gave the café precisely that feel. She loved the mellow yellow stripped and polished floorboards, the original white marble fireplace. She saw character in the scratched and dented stainless-steel counter that ran down one side of the room. She particularly liked the mix of old wooden tables, pews, and chairs, not one of which matched. “At least people don’t feel intimidated coming in here,” she’d said to Brian. And it was true. From half past eight in the morning until five when they closed, the place was buzzing.

  Amy would get to work around eight, having dropped Charlie off with Ruby, the child minder. Ruby would take him to school, along with the six-month-old baby girl she looked after and her own children—twins who were the same age as Charlie and in his class. Ruby was an amply bosomed earth mother type who treated Charlie like one of her own. Even though Charlie adored her and loved playing with Ed and Flora, Amy hated not being able to take him to school in the mor
ning and pick him up at the end of the day.

  But she had no choice. The only way she could support herself and Charlie was by working.

  Now that Charlie was at school full time, she could have gone back into PR and earned a great deal more than what Brian was paying her, but she was adamant that she wanted a job that meant she would be home each day by half past five. That way she got to spend a full two hours with Charlie before bedtime. A couple of hours wasn’t much, but if she’d taken a job in PR similar to the one she’d had before she’d left the business, she would hardly have seen Charlie at all.

  As a senior PR executive at Dunstan Healey Fogg, one of the country’s top public relations firms, Amy had earned a six-figure salary, plus a commission on the new accounts she brought in. For that she put in ten-hour days and attended after-work dinners, launches, and events, one or even two of which happened most nights. Even on the weekends she was going to parties and networking in an attempt to land juicy accounts. It wasn’t unusual for her to get home from an awards do at midnight on a Friday and be on a flight to Nice first thing the next morning. A few hours later she and a hundred other guests would be sipping Cristal on some oligarch’s yacht that looked like it had been interiored by Paris Hilton and Liberace’s ghost. The following day, having charmed the pants off a dozen CEOs, she and her BlackBerry would be on a flight home, ready to start the whole process again on Monday morning.

  When she was a teenager, Amy’s plan had always been to get her degree and then find a job with a charity. When she and her sister were growing up, their parents had always impressed upon them the importance of “giving something back.” Amy’s mum did her bit by volunteering a couple of afternoons a week at a local charity shop and gave it up only when she started working full time. Even now, one Saturday a month, her dad stood outside Marks & Spencer on the High Street and shook a Save the Children Fund charity box. Amy couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t aware of Third World poverty and hunger.

  When she and Brian were students and he was going through his Marxist phase, she frequently would accuse him of ignoring the fact that many of the people dying from hunger and dirty water lived under so-called Marxist regimes. That was a red flag to Brian’s Marxist bull. Suffice it to say that he didn’t take kindly to her analysis.

  After graduating, Amy started looking for a job, but it seemed that money was tight and few of the big charities were taking on new staff. She applied for anything that came up, only to be told over and over that there were twenty applicants for every job and most of them had previous experience, even though none was required. She didn’t get a single interview.

  Then a friend from uni who had a job in PR told her that Dunstan Healey Fogg was looking for a junior account executive. The job appealed to Amy because the company had several charities on its books, for which they acted pro bono. At her interview it had been made clear that if she was offered a job with DHF, they would allow her to assist with some of those accounts. Two years after starting work with the company, that still hadn’t happened. When she asked why, her bosses said that since she was showing huge promise, they weren’t about to waste her talents on accounts that generated no revenue.

  Instead they used her talents to counsel apparently happily married male celebs who had been caught in bed with a couple of rubber-clad rent boys with pink ostrich feathers sticking out of their G-strings on how to handle the media. When she wasn’t doing that, she was planning the launch of another Hollywood A-lister’s insipid new fragrance or exercise DVD.

  She often thought about leaving, but it was hard. It wasn’t the money, although she had to admit to her shame that she had grown accustomed to expensive haircuts and being able to buy a pair of shoes or a bag simply because it took her fancy. The real reason she found it difficult to leave was that she was very good at her job and enjoyed the praise that came with that. What was more, the job involved writing, and that was something she had come to love.

  Until she came to DHF, Amy had no idea how good a writer she was. While she was at Sussex, she’d penned several pieces for the student newspaper on famine and the need to abolish Third World debt. After each piece appeared, students and tutors alike complimented her on her clear thinking and well-constructed arguments, but nobody mentioned the actual writing. Then, when she started work at DHF and hard-nosed journalists who usually made a point of binning press releases on receipt began seeking her out at press launches to congratulate her on her witty, attention-grabbing missives, it occurred to her that she might have a flair for writing.

  She also had a flair for coming up with wacky, offbeat ideas for media campaigns and launches. Amy’s “blue-sky thinking” was legendary at DHF. Pretty soon, she was rising through the company at a rate her bosses all agreed was extraordinary.

  Then DHF got into financial difficulties. One of the directors started taking out huge loans, which he used to invest heavily in the stock market. That wouldn’t have been a problem had he not used his shareholdings in DHF as security. No sooner had he been sacked than three of the fledgling companies he’d backed went bust. This meant that the bosses at DHF were forced to honor their former partner’s bank loans to the tune of several million pounds. It was inevitable that redundancies would be made. Since Amy was one of their most highly favored employees, they held on to her as long as they could, but in the end she was just too expensive and they had to let her go.

  What the directors at DHF never knew was that Amy, while by no means delighted to have been sacked, wasn’t quite as devastated as she might have been. Her substantial payoff combined with her savings meant she could put her plan into operation. She could have a baby.

  She moved to a cheaper part of town and bought a ground-floor garden flat in a Victorian house. At the same time she started cutting back on expensive clothes and luxuries. By doing this, she had gotten by for over six years.

  By the time Charlie started school, she had set her heart on becoming a journalist. Time and again she wished she had gone into the profession straight from university, but back then she’d had no idea that she could write.

  If she hadn’t been so set on getting pregnant, she would have tried breaking into journalism after leaving DHF. Back then it wouldn’t have been so hard because she still had all her media contacts. In the last half dozen years they had disappeared. The journalists she once knew had moved on or lost their jobs in the recession. There was nobody to schmooze over lunch and ask if he’d put in a good word for her with his features editor.

  She realized that without contacts it would be well-nigh impossible to get her foot on the journalistic ladder. On the other hand, she had nothing to lose by trying.

  After Charlie started school, she spent the first few months scouring the local papers for stories that might interest the nationals. She followed up articles on dodgy time-share deals and Spanish property developers conning people by selling them nonexistent apartments on the Costa Brava. She wrote a piece about debt collectors terrorizing the ill and the elderly, who it often turned out weren’t even in debt. This piece had been based on her elderly neighbor Mr. Fletcher, who had spent months trying to convince British Gas that he didn’t owe a preposterous two thousand pounds for three months’ worth of gas. Despite letters going back and forth from poor old Mr. Fletcher to British Gas, the company had “sold” the debt to a firm of debt collectors, and he was now being pursued and threatened by, as he put it, “shaven-headed yobs built like brick shithouses.” The fear had taken its toll, and he was taking pills for his nerves.

  The Mr. Fletcher story almost made it. The Daily Mail even sent a photographer to take his picture. Then a weather girl Amy had never heard of gave birth to quads, and Mr. Fletcher was forgotten.

  She carried on pitching ideas. Some editors replied to her e-mails. Most didn’t. The ones who did usually said she was thinking along the right lines. The only reason they weren’t using the piece was that they had covered the story a few weeks earlier. Then Amy would fee
l stupid and kick herself for not keeping herself up to speed with what was appearing in the papers. Occasionally they paid her for a tip or idea but refused to let her write the piece. The Daily Mirror, for example, loved her idea for a feature on the pros and cons of breast-feeding but insisted it be written by some woman who had recently given birth on Big Brother.

  Occasionally, when she submitted an on-spec piece, an editor would get back to her to say how well written it was. This at least made her feel she hadn’t lost her touch writingwise. Then came the “but.” “But families living on the breadline is so boring.” “But the whole antifur thing just is so 2001.”

  She was earning nothing and her savings were dwindling, as was the romantic image she had of herself as a freelance journalist who spent school hours penning meaningful pieces on social injustice.

  When Brian mentioned that one of his staff had just left and asked if she fancied coming to work for him, she practically bit his hand off. The hours were perfect, the traveling time was minimal, and with what remained of her savings she could just about manage on the money Brian was paying. She decided that she would continue bashing away at the journalism in her spare time.

  ZELMA ALWAYS got in at the same time as Amy. Their first job was to unpack and put out all the pastries, cakes, and breads, which were delivered fresh every morning from Konditorei Wiener, along with thick, rich deli-style pizzas and savory French tarts. Next they would start filling baguettes and ciabbatas. Ripe fig and Gorgonzola was Amy’s favorite filling, closely followed by farmhouse pâté and cornichons.

  Each morning until eleven, pots of homemade jam, marmalade, honey, and organic butter were left out on the counter so that customers could help themselves. Since the café was self-service and there was no hot food to prepare, the three of them could cope. Brian was the full-time barista, but when things were quiet, he would happily pitch in with Amy and Zelma, serving food, clearing tables, and loading the dishwasher.