Last Writes

by Catherine Aird

  The maître d’, sensing a stand-off, sailed up to the table and suggested more ice in the bucket.

  Giovanni retreated to the kitchen, muttering that in Italy the craft of a waiter was held in high esteem. In a country as benighted as England a waiter was merely thought of as a postman delivering parcels of food to people too ignorant to know good food from bad.

  The sous-chef offered to put sugar instead of salt on the man’s venison.

  ‘Or vinegar instead of that red wine jus you’re always going about,’ suggested the kitchen boy. ‘He probably doesn’t know the difference.’

  Giovanni, remembering his heritage, drew himself up proudly and said, ‘I would rather be like the Borgias and serve him poison.’

  ‘That’ll do,’ said the maître d’, coming back into the kitchen at that moment. ‘Just get on with your work, all of you, while I see what everyone else wants. We’re going to be busy tonight.’

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Giovanni. ‘The woman on table three is playing up because we haven’t got any background music. I expect she wants it to cover up what she’s saying to her husband. At it hammer and tongs already, they are.’

  ‘And she’s not going to have any music either,’ said the maître d’. Music might be the food of love but at the Ornum Arms you had the food without it.

  ‘At least that means that Mr and Mrs Smith can’t complain that it’s too loud,’ said Giovanni.

  ‘They’ll find something else to moan about,’ said the maître d’, before resuming his professional smile when he left the kitchen. Table seven, he noted in passing, were now tucking in to their main course with all the gusto of hungry students.

  ‘You should come over to Ornum more often, Aunt Marjorie,’ he heard the one called Tristram say.

  She beamed. ‘It’s not every day you win the Almstone Essay Prize, my boy. It calls for a celebration so you must all feel free to have exactly what you want to eat and drink.’

  The maître d’ smiled inwardly. The words were music to his ears and the only sort of music he liked to hear in any restaurant. What he heard next was not to give him so much pleasure. A peremptory wave of an arm called him back to the Smiths’ table.

  ‘My wife,’ declared Mr Smith, ‘says that her lamb is overcooked. That’s right, dear, isn’t it?’

  ‘Lamb should be pink,’ said the lady in question, pointing to her plate. ‘Not too well done, like this one is.’

  The maître d’ looked down at a properly cooked rack of lamb, pink to exactly the right hue, took a deep breath and offered to supply one that was more undercooked.

  ‘Not undercooked,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘Cooked just right.’

  ‘Certainly, madam,’ he said and shot back to the kitchen with the offending dish.

  He was not well received there. ‘All right, chef,’ he said. ‘You know it’s perfect, I know it’s perfect and I’m pretty sure the Smiths know it’s perfect.’

  ‘I’ll eat it,’ offered the kitchen boy, putting his hand out for the dish.

  ‘No, you won’t,’ said the maître d’, withdrawing it swiftly.

  The chef reached for his Sabatier knife and waved it about in the direction of the door to the dining room in a gesture unmistakeable anywhere in the world.

  ‘And you can put that away,’ said the maître d’.

  ‘It’ll be pretty bloody next time round,’ said the chef ambiguously.

  ‘Look at it this way, lads,’ pleaded the maître d’, hoping that the chef was referring to the rack of lamb, ‘think of it as being like life. It’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s how you behave when it does.’

  ‘I know how I’d behave to the Smiths,’ growled the chef.

  ‘And me,’ said the sous-chef.

  The kitchen boy contented himself with drawing a finger across his throat while Giovanni muttered some Italian imprecation under his breath in which the word ‘mafiosi’ was the only one distinguishable.

  By way of a diversion the maître d’ reported that the loving couple were feeding each other morsels of food.

  ‘A waste,’ pronounced the chef, a much-married man. ‘That’s no way to treat good cooking.’

  Torn between the devil and the deep blue sea, the maître d’ retreated to the dining room. The four old friends were tucking in to their meal but still talking nineteen to the dozen so, unwilling to disturb either the warring couple or the besotted one, he sailed up to table seven and enquired if all was well there, too.

  Miss Marjorie Simmonds smiled benignly. ‘It is,’ she said, looking round at rapidly emptying plates. ‘I’m sure they don’t eat as well as this at college, poor things.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ said her nephew. ‘I tell you we live on pasta and sardines there.’

  ‘And baked beans on toast,’ said Celia Sparrow.

  ‘I’m not too sorry for them,’ said Miss Simmonds, adding dryly, ‘Of course, all this rich food may have taken their appetites for a dessert away.’

  There was a chorus of dissent.

  ‘I’ll send the waiter when you’re ready,’ said the maître d’. He had already decided that he himself would handle Mr and Mrs Smith from now on. Collecting the barely cooked rack of lamb from the kitchen, he presented it to Mrs Smith, adding smoothly that he hoped it was now cooked to her satisfaction.

  It was.

  Giovanni, too, ignored both the warring and the loving couples – they behaved better in Italy – and contented himself instead with taking orders from table seven.

  ‘Let me see now,’ said Marjorie Simmonds, ‘that’s passion fruit and orange tart for you, Celia, isn’t it?’

  Miss Sparrow nodded. ‘Yes, please,’ she said, looking hard at Tristram. ‘I adore passion fruit.’

  ‘Cheese for me,’ said Tristram gruffly.

  The other two men, who looked as if they had gone to college for the rugby, settled for steamed chocolate and hazelnut sponge pudding and brioche bread and butter pudding.

  Miss Simmonds regarded the dessert menu for a moment or two and opted for the coconut rice pudding with plum compote. Then she said to the waiter, ‘Would you think me awfully awkward if I asked if we might take the menu home with us? It’s been such a lovely evening.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Giovanni, adding grandly, ‘We change it every week.’

  ‘I’m going to get them all to sign it, you see,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a real memento of a happy evening.’

  The waiter trotted back to the kitchen with the order. The maître d’ joined him there a little later bearing the Smiths’ dessert order in his hand. ‘Madam,’ he reported, now using the term pejoratively, ‘would like the banana bavarois and sir is prepared to try our brioche bread and butter pudding.’

  ‘Brave man,’ said the sous-chef ironically. ‘Who knows what goes in to that?’

  ‘Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails,’ chanted the kitchen-boy, the youngest there, ducking back in mock fear from an imaginary blow from the chef.

  ‘And they want our best Sauternes with them,’ said the maître d’.

  It was after that when Mr Smith ordered liqueurs with their coffee that the maître d’ was quite sure what was coming.

  And he was right.

  Much later, when all the other customers had left, the maître d’ presented the bill to Mr Smith. The man cast his eye over it for a long moment and then murmured casually, ‘Suppose we say, shall we, that tonight the drinks are on the house?’

  Drawing himself up to his full height but in a voice that trembled slightly, the maître d’ said, ‘I’m very sorry, sir. I can’t agree to that.’

  ‘If you won’t, then you won’t, I suppose,’ said Mr Smith, tossing his credit card on the table, ‘but mark my words, man, you’ll come to regret it.’

  ‘Very possibly, sir,’ said the maître d’ with dignity.

  ‘And naturally I shan’t be adding anything on for service,’ said Mr Smith.

  ‘That, sir, is always entirely at the customer�
��s discretion,’ said the maître d’ smoothly. ‘Your coats …’

  Mr Smith put his coat on so clumsily that The Good Cooks of Calleshire actually fell out of the pocket and onto the floor. The maître d’ picked the book up and handed it back to him with the utmost civility and opened the restaurant door for the pair. ‘A very good evening to you, sir … madam …’ he said as he ushered them out, locking the door behind them.

  ‘That’s blown it,’ he said, back in the kitchen. ‘Get me a drink somebody. I need it.’

  It hadn’t blown it.

  At that very moment Miss Marjorie Simmonds, a food writer of distinction, was penning a fulsome report to the editor of The Good Cooks of Calleshire, to which in due course, before posting it, she would attach the menu and the receipted bill.

  A MANAGED RETREAT

  Her father had been in the army and so Susan knew the difference – the important difference – between a retreat and a rout. ‘A retreat,’ the old soldier used to declare in the long, dull days of peace, ‘is something you should manage positively and, incidentally, always refer to as a strategic withdrawal. A rout is something you can’t manage at all.’ He had been evacuated from Crete after the invasion and so used to add, ‘You can’t call a rout by any other name except a bloody shambles.’

  Susan was determined that her own withdrawal from Oak Tree House in the village of Almstone – her house – their house – and now his house – should be a managed retreat and not a rout. She had therefore planned her last night there very carefully. She was alone in the house, of course, and had been for some time: all the while in fact since Norman had moved out and gone to live with his new ladylove. Susan had stayed on in the house, alone and sad, hoping against hope that she could go on living there.

  It was not to be.

  As her solicitor had pointed out, this was first and foremost because she would not be able to afford to do so until her divorce settlement came through. This fact had been reinforced after a time when the lighting and heating bills for the house had remained unpaid by Norman and supplies were cut off. She had found out the hard way, too, that Norman had cancelled their direct debits for all the other utilities.

  ‘He’s freezing me out,’ she reported to her solicitor, waving a sheaf of bills in her hand. ‘And in the middle of winter, too.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ said the solicitor, a not unkindly young man, ‘that unless you move out you may find yourself in court for non-payment.’ He coughed. ‘I must warn you that some of these undertakings can be notably unsympathetic. They cite the public interest and so forth.’

  ‘What about my interest?’ she demanded.

  ‘I think,’ he said, choosing his words with almost palpable care, ‘that your best interest might be served by finding some less expensive accommodation until matters are – er – concluded.’

  She had nearly broken down then and wailed. ‘But it’s my home. It’s been my home ever since we got married.’

  He shook his head. ‘No, Mrs …’

  She interrupted him. ‘Please call me Susan … I don’t like using my married name any more. It upsets me.’

  ‘I understand. Right.’ He gave a quick nod and resumed his discourse. ‘No, Susan, I think you should appreciate that it’s not your home any more. It’s just a house in which you happen to have lived for a few years – something that will in due course form part of the value of the settlement that you will receive on your divorce. In my opinion …’

  Susan drew breath to speak and then remembered that when solicitors used that expression it meant that they were charging for their time and so kept silent.

  ‘In my opinion,’ he repeated with some emphasis, ‘you should in the meantime move out to somewhere you can afford as quickly as you can.’

  ‘I thought possession was nine points of the law,’ she said obstinately.

  He pointed to the bills she had brought in with her. ‘You could, of course, stay there and face eviction for non-payment of these accounts. That in my view would be a worst case scenario. Bailiffs are not nice people.’

  ‘I’m between a rock and a hard place, then, aren’t I?’

  He let a little silence develop before he murmured, ‘These cases are never easy.’

  She was going to challenge him on this but then realised that to him she was just another case: another sad case of a wife being deserted by her husband, a husband moreover who was determined to make life as difficult as possible for her. One of her friends had tried to explain this complex behaviour as demonstrating guilt on Norman’s part but she hadn’t gone along with that.

  Now, instead, she asked the solicitor harshly, ‘Then what’s to stop my husba … Norman, that is – having our house instead as part of the settlement?’

  ‘Technically there is nothing to stop him doing so provided that you are properly recompensed for your share.’

  ‘So what’s the difference?’ The idea of Norman making Oak Tree House a love nest for the new woman was almost too repugnant for her to bear. What had made the situation even worse was that the new woman wasn’t some young floozy – he hadn’t even been trading Susan in for a new model. The creature was practically the same age as she was. As Susan had asked herself time and again, if the new woman didn’t even have age on her side, then what did she have? Answer – even in the wee small hours – came there none.

  The solicitor sighed. ‘From what you have told me, Susan, your husband – your ex-husband, that is – would be in a position to be able to afford to live there and you aren’t at the moment. Should you wish to keep the house at this point in time, you would have to buy him out and you aren’t going to have the funds do that. Not until after everything is settled and maybe not then.’

  ‘There’s one law for the rich and one for the poor,’ she said bitterly. ‘Always has been.’

  ‘I understand that he is a very successful businessman,’ the solicitor responded obliquely. ‘This, I may say, will ultimately be to your advantage – that is, when matters between you are finally settled. In the meantime …’

  The meantime had amounted to Susan renting a small end-of-terrace cottage in the village of Larking. She was due to move there in the morning so tonight was her last in Oak Tree House. She might have spent it packing up her own things but these were all neatly boxed and awaiting Wetherspoon’s, the removal people, in the morning. Or she could have had a farewell party for all the friends who had been so supportive in the dissolution of her marriage but she hadn’t wanted that. It would have seemed like a wake. The following morning would have loomed like Banquo’s ghost over them all and left them worrying what to say as they left.

  So she hadn’t wanted that either and yet she hadn’t wanted to spend it wandering in a melancholy way from room to room, taking a last look at the remnants of her love and marriage. Instead she had thought of her father and decided to stage a managed retreat.

  First, she planned to dine in style. Retrieving a pair of silver candlesticks – a wedding present from an aunt – from a packing case, she laid the table as carefully as if for a dinner party. The table was coming with her to the cottage but Sid Wetherspoon who was doing the removal for her had been very relaxed about leaving around what she needed until she actually left Oak Tree House.

  ‘Larking’s not far,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you worry, missus. Make yourself comfortable there until the morning.’

  Comfortable wasn’t exactly how she would have described the chilly echoing house, packing cases everywhere, but she wasn’t going to let that spoil her last evening there. She’d chosen the meal with care. The food had to be cold – the camping stove was only really up to making hot drinks, not cooking. And the wine had to be white, the house being barely warm enough to make a red wine potable.

  Fish was an obvious choice.

  It was the fish that had given her the idea.

  The prawns, actually.

  Susan was very fond of shellfish and she decided to treat herself to prawns for her la
st meal in the house. She’d stood at the food counter in the shop for a while before deciding on a smoked mackerel salad to follow and then a sinful chocolate mousse.

  She was quite surprised at the relish with which she ate it. A Barmecide feast, surely that was the proper name for a pretend banquet like this? More than once from sheer habit, she started to make some comment in the direction of the chair in which Norman had sat for so long and then stopped, realising at long last with some relief that she didn’t really have anything to say to him any more.

  The camping stove would run to coffee after that and then she would go to bed to keep warm.

  Only she didn’t, not straightaway.

  Instead, cradling her mug of coffee between her hands for warmth as much as anything else, she sat on in the cold room, casting her eyes everywhere. She went out to the kitchen briefly but soon came back and resumed her seat. It was the chandelier over the dining table that drew her back there. She’d never liked it but Norman had been pleased with it, bringing it home in triumph from some auction sale or other. It was really too ornate for the house and being made of brass didn’t go with the rest of the room but she had accepted it peaceably enough.

  Now she contemplated with especial interest its octopus-like arms, some of which ended in sockets for candle-shaped electric light bulbs and others culminating in pieces of metal described in the catalogue as foliate. She had cleaned and polished it dutifully every spring since.

  ‘And got to know its little ways,’ she said to herself, going to the cupboard under the stairs and coming back with a pair of steps.

  She had put a few prawns on one side to take with her for a snack lunch at Larking the next day but now she picked some of them up. Mounting the steps carefully, she unscrewed one of the foliate arms of the candelabra and inserted prawns into the hollow brass. Then she did the same thing again to another one. And another until the prawns had gone.

  She clambered back down to the floor and then had another thought. ‘A bit of mackerel wouldn’t do any harm either,’ she murmured aloud and went up the steps again. ‘Not too much, though.’