Of course, she was shocked too. Maybe she will make the next move, if given the opportunity. Does he want to give it to her?
Without allowing a chance to talk himself out of it, he pulls out his mobile and dials a number.
“Yes, hi, it’s Chris Baker,” he says to the bright voice on the other end of the line. “I just want to leave a message for Russell Cox. Could you please tell him I’ll do his event?”
Chapter Three
All the Delight of Unpleasant Recollections
Edinburgh smells of porridge. It’s the first thing Susan notices, as she steps outside. Is that something they do for the tourists? she wonders, bemused. It isn’t: there’s a brewery or a distillery—she can’t remember which—outside the city, and so some days the pleasant, toasty, quintessentially Scottish smell permeates parts of the city.
Chris first told her about that.
“Can’t smell it in Leith, though,” he’d added with a slightly bitter smile. “Different sorts of smells there.”
Chris. She spent the entire taxi ride from the airport trying to calm herself down and wondering what the hell he was doing in Edinburgh. Yes, he’d grown up here, but she had always been under the impression he was happy to have left. Maybe he’s just visiting friends. Or his sister—he mentioned a sister a few times. Beth.
A visit, of course. But it seems so bizarre, seeing him just after finding that album. It was as if she’d conjured him up. Maybe she had. Maybe that hadn’t been him at all, just some other man with a similar build and coloring. Scotland is full of muscular redheads, if popular culture and Highland Games are to be believed. It was seeing that photograph; it put him in her head, primed her to see him where he couldn’t be. Because, surely, if it had been him, he’d have said something?
Then again, maybe not. Not after what she did.
She grimaces just thinking about it, as she turns down Forres Street and begins the steep climb past Charlotte Square. Locked up tight now, in two months the Square will throw open its gates for the Book Festival. Every available space in the city will open itself to the grand August festival triad: Book, International, Fringe. The city will swarm with people, and no one will want for entertainment at any hour of the day or night. And they’ll all need feeding.
Strangely enough, Susan’s never been to Edinburgh for the festivals. She was meant to come up years ago. The tickets were bought, the hotel room booked. But then her grandfather died. It was just a few weeks after that picture of him and Greg and Chris was taken.
That photo! She wants to kick something in frustration. How long will she keep circling back to it? Maybe it would be better to destroy it, like banishing a bad talisman. But she can’t do that; it’s one of the last photos taken of Elliot.
She’d taken it.
It was Chris’s and Greg’s first day in the kitchen at Regent Street. Chris had only arrived the day before. Elliot offered to give him a day or two to get settled, but all Chris wanted to do was get in there and start working. He was a proper chef now, no longer a trainee, and he was eager to make his mark.
“My wonder boys!” Elliot declared, laughing as he slung a bony arm around both of them. “Come on, Susan, take one for posterity. One day, we’ll both say, ‘We knew them when.’”
Susan obliged, hoping the camera hid her blush. Greg smirked, thinking it was for him, but he wasn’t at all her type. Chris grinned, and she could have sworn he reddened just a little bit too.
A month later, Elliot was dead. Bronchitis, which he couldn’t fight off anymore. Even though he had been in poor health and they’d been steeling themselves for this for months, it still hit hard. Susan cried more than she ever thought she could. Her mother cried with her, but not the others. Her father was too busy being baffled by all the business decisions now coming his way, and Meg and Julia were never close to their grandfather.
The day of the funeral, Susan managed to hold herself together long enough to be polite at the reception. But as soon as she could, she slipped away into the kitchen, where she found Chris. He was still in his funeral clothes, with his sleeves rolled up and tie tucked into his shirt, to keep it out of the way of the enormous pile of vegetables he was reducing to mirepoix.
“I’m sorry,” he said, setting down his knife as soon as he saw her. “I just …”
“It’s okay,” she responded, joining him. She understood. He needed to stay busy. Keep his mind occupied somehow. “I thought that I might bake something.”
He looked up at her, and she saw the puffy, reddened eyes that had been her own constant companions the past week. He, too, had loved her grandfather, a man who took a gamble on the kid who showed up at the Edinburgh restaurant one day, eager to do any work so long as he could learn. And learn he did.
She smiled at him, a gentle, sad smile of camaraderie in distress, and he responded in kind. He made a soup, and she baked Elliot’s brownies, and they sat and talked for hours with their simple feast. And that’s how it all began. A bittersweet beginning, perhaps, but that soon changed as they fell into it and into each other.
And then, oh, how sweet it was! Susan wasn’t like Julia: she didn’t have boys lining up to flatter and compete for her. She hardly knew how to react to Chris’s attention, and it bowled her over. She reveled in it—the dinners at his shabby flat, with wonderful food and cheap wine and his roommates good-naturedly teasing them. The late nights out with the kitchen brigade, drinking too much and laughing and making rude jokes. The charming little gifts and the hungry kisses that inevitably led to more. It was dazzling and dizzying, and she loved every minute of it.
And then her mother died, and everything went right to hell.
* * *
Susan hauls herself out of her memories long enough to realize she’s reached the end of genteel George Street. To the right, the road slopes down toward the Scott Monument: a bit of overblown, soot-soaked, Gothic insanity wrapped around a statue of a seated, exhausted-looking Sir Walter. With its spikes and arches, it reminds Susan of something out of Mordor. Does Sauron’s eye appear after dark?
Just ahead of her is St. Andrew Square, where a slightly more subdued statue perches on a fluted column, looking down on passersby. Susan stops for a flat white at the Costa Coffee in the square, then cuts down to Prince’s Street and onto North Bridge, one of the major conduits between the Old Town and the New(er) Town. North Bridge spans the vast glass roofs of Waverley Train Station, which nestles in the hatchet-shaped gully that splits the city. On one side, the New Town, which looks like it stepped right out of a Regency novel. Prim Georgian terraces in gray or sand-colored stone that conjure up images of ladies in poke bonnets and gentlemen on horseback strolling along.
Across the bridge: the Old Town. A fascinating jumble of genteel and sometimes overly decorative 19th-century architecture and tall, narrow, austere buildings of rough-hewn stone that seep history and untold stories.
“Oh, aye,” those buildings seem to say, like craggy old men watching the visitors wandering by. “Aye, I could tell you a thing or two, that I could. Things that’d make your toes curl. Seen much, I ’ave. Could tell you about the bonny Queen Mary and her lover, who murdered her husband right down there! Rode past me hundreds of times, she did. Oh, aye, and both the gentlemen, that fateful night. There’s been blood in these streets often enough—stabbings and battles, fights and squabbles. There’s been filth, and fine ladies and gentlemen on horses picking through it. Rough lives and soft ones. Stolen bodies, burned witches, whores, pickpockets, religious reformers—oh, I’ve seen ’em all, that I have. But you don’t want to hear about any of that. On your way, then.”
* * *
The Royal Mile runs in a steep decline from Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood Palace, drawing visitors from the craggy fortress at the top to the fairytale royal residence and the jarringly modern Parliament building at its base. The more adventurous explorers venture down the cramped, dark closes and wynds that branch off the Mile, enticed by names that hint at ancie
nt purposes: Old Tolbooth Wynd. Fleshmarket Close.
Elliot’s is about halfway down the Mile, in an area saturated with cafés and restaurants. Just across the street is a cute bakery specializing in sponge cakes and charming afternoon teas, flanked by a pub on one side and a sandwich place on the other. Just a little ways down, a Mexican restaurant faces a Turkish café that serves a confusing mix of Middle Eastern mezze and Scottish favorites.
It wasn’t at all like this when Elliot used a modest inheritance to buy his first restaurant. Back then, the Old Town was still thought of as fairly grubby, even a little dangerous. Well-heeled diners stayed, literally, on the other side of the tracks. But Elliot had been born here, and he saw the possibility. He threw himself into his little ten-seater place, doing remarkable things in the kitchen while his wife ran the front of the house. (Grandmother Emily was, by most accounts, a tough and astute businesswoman, and an excellent cook in her own right. Susan was always sorry she never had a chance to know her, but Emily died the year Julia was born.)
Gradually, word spread that Elliot’s food made it worthwhile to risk the Old Town, and the right people started to come.
And then the Fringe exploded. Like Elliot, it rooted itself in the area of its birth, even after becoming famous, and so hordes of tourists began flooding the Old Town every August. That rising tide lifted the area, and Elliot’s rose too. It expanded into two adjacent buildings, and Elliot and Emily started thinking about opening new restaurants. Glasgow first, just ahead of its own resurgence. Then York. Finally, London. By that time, Bernard had come along, and the family relocated to the south, to be nearer Emily’s aging parents and the grand new flagship restaurant.
Susan pauses at the front door and takes stock of the area. Notes the knots of tourists pausing in the middle of the sidewalk to examine maps or take pictures of double-decker buses, oblivious to the glares of irritable locals just managing not to run into them. It’s lunchtime, and the cafés and restaurants are filling up, but everyone seems to be passing Elliot’s by. Susan’s work is definitely cut out for her.
Well, good. She needs a project.
* * *
“Table for one?” The perky hostess smiles at Susan, even as she hastily stashes her mobile phone beneath the podium.
“No, I’m not here for lunch. I’m Susan Napier.”
The hostess blinks a few times. “Susan …? Oh. Oh!” The smile remains, but now the eyes widen in alarm. “Right! You’re—we didn’t think you were coming in today.”
“I saw no reason to wait,” Susan explains, glancing around the dining room. There’s only one occupied table that she can see: a young couple reviewing their photos over two barely touched plates of salad that look heavy on the iceberg lettuce. “Seems slow for lunchtime,” she observes. “Is it usually like this?”
“Well … it’s a Tuesday.” The girl giggles. A high-pitched, nervous sound.
Susan smiles, hoping to put this girl at her ease, at least a little. She won’t get anywhere by alienating staff. “What’s your name?” she asks.
“Jen.”
“How many reservations for tonight, Jen?”
“Six.” There’s that giggle again.
“Six?” Unless they’re all for parties of ten, that won’t even fill a third of the restaurant. “How many covers is that?”
“Twelve,” Jen squeaks.
Six two-tops. “How many walk-ins do we usually get?”
“On a Tuesday night …” Jen’s grimace says it all.
Twelve guests. Even if they all order the most expensive food and wine on the menu, there’s no way Elliot’s will break even tonight.
Susan sighs. “I think I’ll go talk to the chef now.”
* * *
Despite being down in the basement, the kitchen, with its antiseptically white walls, gleaming metal prep tables, and bright lighting, is literally dazzling. Noisy, too, since the exhaust fan is blasting, ferrying away cooking smells. Or it would be if anything was actually being cooked.
To Susan’s left, at the bottom of the stairs, are two electric dumbwaiters for ferrying food up to the dining room. Immediately opposite them is the pass: a long, flat table with a shelf above, where food receives finishing touches before going out to the diners. During a busy service, an expediter (often the executive chef) will run the pass, ensuring everything is completed on schedule. But right now there’s nobody there. No point, really.
Just beyond the pass are two further prep tables. The sous chef, Paul, stands at one of them, sharpening his knives in a lazy, bored-seeming way. At the other, a short, stocky woman, with blonde hair tightly pulled back in a bun, fillets fish at lightning speed. Nearby, a pair of young trainee chefs chop vegetables, telling jokes about their girlfriends. One of them cackles loudly enough to startle the pastry chef, at work in a separate room with a window that overlooks the main kitchen. He scowls and bangs a warning on the window before going back to folding cream into a chocolate mousse.
Against the farthest wall, a spare, hatchet-faced chef carefully stirs what looks like a pot of béchamel sauce on the stove. Another pot of cullen skink soup bubbles gently on a back burner.
Yet another chef emerges from a passageway to the left of the stove, carrying two cases filled with eggplant. He slams them down next to the trainees, then looks into one of their plastic prep tubs and curses a blue streak about what they’ve done to the Chantenay carrots.
“The fook am I supposed to do wi’ this, eh?” he demands. “Pair o’ tits, you are. Start over.” He smacks one of them on the back of the head, sweeps the offending vegetables into the garbage, and disappears into the storage room, muttering.
“Told you ’e’d lose his shite,” says Paul, without looking up from his knives. “Did you listen? Nooooo. So after you’re done, you can go clean the fifteen pounds of sole that just came in. My gift tae you.”
The trainees roll their eyes, anticipating a long, unpleasant afternoon, elbow-deep in fish guts. The blonde chef rolls her eyes as well, as she finishes the last of her fillets, tosses it into a tub with the others, and hauls it off toward the walk-in refrigerator.
The door to the dining room opens, and a waitress comes pelting down the stairs, stopping short just behind Susan, who still hovers at the bottom.
“Javier, where the hell is the soup for table fifteen?” the waitress yells over the din.
The chef at the stove jumps, as if startled out of a daydream, and begins ladling cullen skink into a bowl.
The waitress turns her glare toward Paul. “I shouldn’t have to do this,” she sniffs before turning and clattering back up the stairs.
Paul rolls his eyes. “Yer lucky you’ve got such a nice arse, missy,” he mutters, just loudly enough to be overheard. The trainees titter and nod.
Javier wanders over to a dumbwaiter and carelessly sets the soup in it, sloshing a little over the side of the bowl and onto the presentation plate. He ignores that, closes the dumbwaiter door, and presses a button on the side. It slowly starts to rise.
Paul finally notices Susan standing there. “You lost, lass?” he asks. “Toilet’s back upstairs and to the left.”
“Thanks, but I’m not looking for the loo,” she answers. “I’m looking for Dan.”
He snorts. “I’ll bet you are.”
“I’m Susan Napier.”
He stops sharpening immediately and looks up again. “Oh. Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Dan’s in the office.” He points with a knife in the right direction.
“Thank you.” Susan crosses the kitchen and just manages to avoid being smacked in the face by the door to the walk-in when it flies open to let out the female chef.
“Oh, sorry about that!” the woman says cheerily.
“Don’t worry about it.” Susan knocks once on the office door and lets herself in.
* * *
Dan looks up from some paperwork as she enters, and unlike the others, his face indicates he knows exactly who she is.
“Hello, there,” he g
reets her, without getting up. “Didn’t expect you today.”
“I gathered that,” Susan returns, forcing a pleasant smile. She’s a bit shocked by what she’s just seen both in the dining room and the kitchen, but, as with the front-of-house staff, she’s determined to take a friendly approach.
Susan pulls up a chair and sits, continuing, “I thought it was best to plunge right in.”
“I’m sure you did.”
It’s impossible to miss the hard edge in his voice or the way his lips purse a little as she settles in. He’ll need a lot of buttering up.
“The kitchen seems really well staffed,” she comments.
“Thaaaaanks.”
All right. Buttering wasn’t going to get her anywhere.
“I wonder if it might not be a little overstaffed, for a Tuesday lunchtime,” she says. “Jen says Tuesdays tend to be slow. Is that true?”
He shrugs. “Some days are slower than others. Hard to say which ones those’ll be, you know?”
“It’s not hard, though,” she rejoins, struggling to keep her voice even and pleasant. “All you have to do is look at the receipts over time. Patterns emerge.”
“Look, I’m a chef, not a statistician.”
She wants to scream—or throttle him. Doesn’t he care? No, of course he doesn’t. This isn’t his restaurant. This isn’t his legacy. This isn’t the only good thing he has left in his life. He could pack up and go elsewhere—he doesn’t need to prove anything. If this place fails, he won’t have let down anyone who matters to him.
And he’s been spoiled, too, in the four years he’s been in charge here. He’s never had to answer to anyone. He’s gotten everything he ever asked for, every fancy bit of equipment he insisted they needed. Of course he’ll resent having someone looking over his shoulder now.
All Stirred Up Page 3