Four Weddings and a White Christmas

by Jenny Oliver

  Harry had had to tie a tea towel round his head as a bandana to stop the sweat. Jemima had done the same. He worked the grill while she fixed the rolls, served the piping-hot foil-wrapped potatoes and dolloped garlic sauce onto plates of lobster.

  He looked up once and that was when a voice said, ‘You.’

  And he saw Hannah holding her white plate out for a lobster tail.

  ‘Hello,’ he said, pausing for a second before searching for the best bit of lobster to put on her plate.

  ‘I take it you’ve found something suitable to moan about,’ she said with a wry laugh and he shrugged.

  ‘The sun’s quite annoying,’ he said and she shook her head as if he couldn’t fail to amaze her, then moved on to where her daughter was waiting to give her a buttered roll.

  ‘Mummy, I’ve watched twenty lobsters die and ate an oyster. I’m going to be a chef. They get to swear a lot. Harry swears a lot, Mummy.’

  Harry watched as Hannah’s head turned slowly to meet Harry’s eyes. Her brows were raised, her tongue pressing behind her top teeth in an expression that suggested she was waiting for an explanation.

  He didn’t have an explanation. Said like that, they seemed like pretty stupid things to have shown a five year old.

  He swallowed, shrugged and pretending nothing was untoward at all, turned away from Hannah’s look and said, ‘No waiting please. Move along. Keep the line moving. Jemima, focus, there’s a lot of people to serve.’

  He could feel Hannah watching him as she stepped away. He took a quick swig of beer but didn’t look at her. He was expecting a tell-off, expecting something about how irresponsible he was and Jemima to be hauled away, but then when he finally did look he saw Hannah had turned and was already walking in the direction of the big long table under the pine tree where everyone was sitting for their late afternoon lunch. Her child still working like a demon next to him.

  As he felt his shoulders relax, he was surprised how concerned he’d been that she was about to take his little helper away. How, while adult party chat bored him senseless, he had had one of the most enjoyable mornings he could remember.

  ‘All alright?’ he asked Jemima who had paused for a sip of Coca Cola.

  She put the can down and wiped her mouth with the back of her arm. ‘Yes, chef.’

  He nodded. He’d have killed to have worked side by side on something like this with his dad when he was a kid. Hauled him up from his chair in front of the TV on the weekends and dusted off the barbecue. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Keep up the good work.’

  As the guests laughed over glasses of rosé and wiped garlicky fingers on napkins, marvelled over rosemary-skewered prawns and devoured peppery pink steaks seared to perfection on the grill, Harry and Jemima took a quick pause to wolf a lobster roll, down a bottle of water, and then move onto dessert. For the guests there were grilled figs with vanilla bourbon cream. They queued more lazily this time. Waiting to see when the line was thinning and ambling up with their drinks in their hands. To Harry’s slight disappointment, Alfonso came up to get pudding for both him and Hannah. They exchanged pleasantries about the restaurant. Alfonso congratulated him on its success. Harry nodded. Jemima watched.

  ‘You want a fig?’ Harry asked when all the guests had been served and were now sipping coffee in the afternoon sunshine.

  Jemima shook her head. ‘I’m full,’ she said.

  Harry narrowed his eyes. ‘Full? You’re too full for dessert? I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘It’s not true. What’s going on?’

  She kicked the gravel with her foot. ‘I don’t like figs.’

  ‘Well why didn’t you say?’

  ‘Because I didn’t want you to get cross with me.’

  Harry crossed his arms in front of him and then resting his hand on his forehead, he pressed his fingers into his tired, hot, smoky eyes. While no doubt nearly all his chefs felt the same way as Jemima, when said by a little girl, it made him not want to be that person. The one that was too scary to tell the truth. So he scrubbed his face with his hand and said, ‘OK. OK, here’s what we’ll do. You go inside and find some chocolate. Whatever you can lay your hands on. I’ll sort the rest out here.’

  Jemima sped off to the kitchen, clapping her hands with glee as she ran.

  Harry scratched his head and stood for a moment. He looked at the bunch of bananas sitting on the old outhouse sideboard that he’d brought out for his crack-of-dawn breakfast. He walked over and snapped a couple off, chucking them in the air, all casual as he went back to the barbecue. There he placed them down on the crumbling grey coals, side by side.

  Of all the things he’d learnt about food over the years, it was the power of smell that continued to fascinate him. Taste was just sweet and sour. But smell, that was flavour. That was memory.

  As the banana skin sizzled and cried in the coals, Harry breathed in and went rocketing back. His brain stopped sharp at his aunt and uncle’s Cornish holiday home – brown walls and swirling carpets, fat seagulls barking aggressively on the lawn, the hammock and the Sellotaped-together bin bags that, when drenched with the hose, became the perfect slippery slide. The two weeks of the year that his family relaxed. Where it was OK to wind down because that was the essence of the holiday’s purpose. His dad would take his watch off. His mum would paddle in the sea. They’d take a boat trip round the harbour and eat a stick of rock. And in the evening, his dad would sit in a deckchair while Harry’s uncle manned the barbecue and they’d eat burgers and hot dogs and drink ginger beer. And without fail, every year his uncle would put bananas on the barbecue at the end and his dad would shake his head and say, ‘Twenty years, twenty years he’s been doing this – picked it up on some holiday to some newfangled place – and every year it tastes disgusting. Don’t waste one on me. Cooked banana. I can’t think of anything worse.’ And every year his uncle would force his dad to eat a spoonful and he’d cough and splutter and they’d all laugh.

  Harry thought about his dad at the Christmas table last year moaning about the sprouts. It was like, as he got older, any semblance of fun had gone. Like all his ways and mannerisms had got more and more cemented until they were so set in stone that he no longer had the freedom to move.

  ‘I got the chocolate, Harry,’ Jemima said, holding up a box of what looked like pretty expensive French chocolates that someone must have bought as a gift.

  ‘Good work,’ Harry said, checking that no one had seen her.

  They sat together on their stools and watched the bananas blacken.

  ‘Are they ready yet?’

  ‘No.’

  And so they waited a little longer.

  Harry remembered his mum putting his sister to bed on those holidays. Her wailing to stay up longer while Harry would sit cross-legged on the grass, warmed by the dying embers, not speaking in case his dad remembered him and sent him to bed as well. The brothers would chat, tell long, winding stories of the past, memories loosened by brandy and cigars, and Harry would listen, entranced by the laughter.

  They would drive back on a Sunday night and Monday morning, seven thirty-three, his dad would be standing on the platform waiting for the seven thirty-five train, watch on. There would be gammon and chips for dinner, as with every Monday, and the snooker on the TV.

  ‘Are they ready yet?’ Jemima asked, her eyes blinking with tiredness.

  ‘I think maybe,’ said Harry as he picked them up with the tongs and placed one on each plate. Peeling back a strip of banana skin, he slit the flesh with a knife and packed it full of chocolates. Jemima’s smile spread as she watched them melt and turn to goo.

  ‘Why are you a chef?’ she asked after her first bite, chocolate all round her mouth.

  Harry thought about it for a moment then shrugged and said, ‘Because I like fire.’

  Jemima giggled.

  The most-coveted seats at Harry’s New York restaurant were the high stools looking across into a huge open fire where the ch
efs worked magic with flames. Critics were torn between dubbing it rustic fun or a pretentious gimmick, a cult trend or a call back to our primitive selves. For Harry it was the best and only way he knew to break free of any tradition, any expectation, any rules or schedules or regulations. It was the way he had seen the best of life.

  Chapter Ten

  The evening light was barely any different to the day. The sun hovered, waiting to fall. The music lulled the tipsy guests into barefoot dancing while the babies slept in buggies under soft blankets. Wilf hauled out an ice bucket full of champagne and went round topping up glasses with fizz that bubbled over hands and onto the grass.

  Jemima was asleep on a sun-lounger by the pool. Harry watched Hannah drape a beach towel over her and sit with her hand on her shoulder, watching as she gently snored. His eyes followed as she moved away and sat down on the edge of the pool, her skirt tucked up underneath her, and dangled her legs into the water.

  He glanced to his left and saw that Alfonso, who had a moment before gone to the bar to get drinks, had been waylaid by Wilf who was waving his champagne bottle around as he gesticulated wildly about some story or other.

  Harry took the opportunity to slip in and take Alfonso’s place. Strolling casually over to the pool he sat down about a foot away from Hannah and said, ‘He’s far too smooth for you, you know?’

  Hannah looked up in surprise. ‘Who? Alfonso?’

  Harry nodded.

  She laughed through her nose. ‘Oh right. And you’re better, I take it?’

  Harry frowned. ‘Absolutely not. I’m just keeping you abreast of my thoughts.’

  Hannah looked away with a smile, kicking the water with her foot so that it splashed in an arc of bubbles.

  In the background Harry could hear Alfonso trying to wrap things up with the drunken Wilf. He knew he only had a couple of minutes before he came over to join them, but wasn’t sure what else to say, conscious of not appearing too grumpy.

  But he was grumpy. That was his schtick.

  As he rolled through a couple of options, Jemima did a big snore on the sun-lounger and turned over, snuggling down under the towel.

  Hannah glanced across to check she was OK and then turned to look at Harry. ‘You were good with her today. She enjoyed it.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Yeah. Me too.’

  ‘Seems you’re on the same level,’ Hannah said, eyebrows raised and a quick smirk of a smile.

  Harry laughed. ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘And you said you didn’t like kids.’

  ‘Ah…’ He held up a hand to correct her. ‘I didn’t say I didn’t like them, I just didn’t want them. That’s the difference.’

  She paused before replying. Then, as she looked down at her feet gently splashing the water, she said, ‘I can understand that.’

  He narrowed his eyes, waiting for her to say more. Presuming it was a test of some sort. That he was about to get a lecture about too much choice in the world and just getting on with it. About responsibility and that he’d love it as soon as he had one.

  ‘You should only do it if you really want it. I think. I didn’t want a child either but it happened and it took me a long time to get used to it.’ She pulled her feet up out the water and wrapped her arms around her legs. ‘I wouldn’t change it now for the world but… It was really hard. So yeah.’ She glanced at him. ‘Don’t do it unless you want to. Definitely not.’

  Harry found himself frowning. This was completely different from the history that Jemima had spun. He hadn’t expected the frankness. He realised he’d liked the sugar coating. ‘But you just said that you wouldn’t change it now.’

  ‘I know, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘So then, surely you’re saying that you should do it, even if you don’t want to?’

  Hannah laughed. ‘You should do what you like, Harry. Don’t try and talk me into persuading you that you should have a child. You need to find someone you want to have a child with first. Well…’ she paused. ‘You might have already done that. I don’t know.’

  Harry didn’t reply, just shook his head about the having someone special in his life. He was confused. He didn’t think her argument stood up but she was agreeing with him so he shouldn’t care. But he felt strangely jealous that she had had something thrust upon her that she didn’t want and now that she had it, she found it infinitely precious. Harry would never make the mistake of having a baby that he didn’t want. He lived his life too controlled. He didn’t allow that kind of mistake to happen. So he would never have that risk. And, he sat back on his hands as he thought about it, yes, he was envious of that. Of the chance, of the risk, of being wrong. And the possibility of liking it.

  The thought niggled and, in a knee-jerk reaction, almost to deflect the emotion he felt back onto Hannah, he found himself bringing up what Jemima had said about her father. ‘So she said this thing about her dad being an adventurer,’ Harry said.

  ‘And?’ Hannah asked, looking him straight in the eye, almost like a warning.

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think that you’ve lied to the kid,’ Harry said and the moment he did he realised he shouldn’t have.

  ‘I didn’t lie,’ Hannah said, running her hand roughly through her hair. ‘He was. He was a kind of an adventurer.’ She paused, flicked some pool water with her feet. ‘He was a serial traveller. That’s exploring the world. What do you want me to have said, Harry?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It just seems like giving her false expectations.’

  Hannah blew out a breath. ‘Yeah well at the time it seemed better than: he was really good-looking, he had shitloads of tattoos, he was hilariously funny but actually, you know what, he was a liar. He was out for a good time, just like her mother. Would that have been better?’ She turned to look at him. ‘Is that what I should have said?’

  Harry found it quite hard to meet her eye. In the course of her talking he’d realised that perhaps he’d been wrong not to bring it up but to think it in the first place. Jemima had been so pleased with the story, with the aspiration. Was it so wrong to give the girl a hero?

  ‘Jesus, Harry. I don’t want her thinking that. I want her to admire him. To admire his memory.’

  He wanted to say something but his normal stubbornness and refusal to admit when he was wrong strangled his voice in his throat.

  ‘Christ, Harry, you really take the biscuit,’ Hannah said with a shake of her head. ‘You don’t think I should have lied to her…? You, who has clearly bowed out of anything more difficult than whatever happens in your kitchen, thinks he knows better about raising a child?’ She sighed and rested back on her hands, tipping her head up towards the faint outline of the moon in the still-bright sky.

  Harry swallowed. He wished he hadn’t said anything. Wished it all back into his body. Wondered how he’d managed to mess up what should have been the type of light, frothy round-the-pool chit-chat he watched other people do with such ease. He sucked in his top lip and then, after a second said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  Hannah rolled her head to look his way. ‘Really?’

  He nodded.

  She sat up, clearly a bit surprised.

  Harry shrugged a shoulder and then added, ‘I have a tattoo.’

  Hannah laughed. ‘I bet you bloody do. What’s it of? A saucepan?’

  Harry was about to show her the tattoo of a match and flame on his hip bone that he’d had done one night when he was really drunk when he heard the clink of glasses. Hannah looked up and said, ‘Alfonso.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Alfonso shook his head as he went to sit down on the other side of Hannah from Harry. ‘I got stuck with Wilf. He’s pretty drunk. Hey, Harry.’ Alfonso leant round in front of Hannah to nod at Harry. ‘Great food today, as always.’

  ‘Cheers, mate,’ Harry said, then pushed himself up to standing.

  ‘Don’t go on my account,’ Alfonso said with a laugh.

  ‘No, no, I er…’ Ha
rry pointed in the direction of the barbecue. ‘I’ve got stuff I should just, you know, clear up.’ And with a quick wave he turned and headed back to the outhouse.

  There he took a seat in the fraying wicker chair and, reaching into the now-warm water of the drinks bucket, he pulled out a beer. Amongst all the chatter of the guests he could hear the murmur of conversation between Hannah and Alfonso. He could hear her laugh.

  He closed his eyes and thought of New York. Of his lovely apartment with a sliver of view of Central Park. Of his bike. Of his books and Netflix account. Of the restaurant and his chefs and his crisp white menu and the morning meetings with the sounds of the city flooding in through the back door. Of the moment when he lost himself and then appeared again at the end of a shift. Jumped through a portal into his work with a freedom akin, he could only imagine, to flying.

  He woke up a couple of hours later just in time to see Alfonso carrying the still-sleeping Jemima up to her room, Hannah walking next to him.

  Groggy and half-asleep, Harry’s instinct told him to jump up and wrestle the kid from Alfonso, like some battle for territory in the Serengeti. But luckily Wilf appeared, blocking his view and said, ‘Off to bed now, Harry, big day tomorrow.’

  He rubbed his eyes. ‘Why, what’s happening tomorrow?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Wilf.

  Chapter Eleven

  The morning was the stillest Harry had ever known. Out the giant window in his room not a leaf moved on a tree. He leant on the sill and looked out. Above him the sky was one great stripe of blue, below the swimming pool was a Technicolor version of the same. House martins swooped in arcs across the surface to drink while a black and white cat watched from the side. Further out in the garden, under a canopy of walnut trees, Holly, Wilf and Wilf’s mum were laying out chairs. He saw Wilf carry two beaten-up leather ones out the French doors of the living room, while Holly was dragging a stack of white plastic garden chairs behind her and Diana, Wilf’s mum who he recognised from the couple of times she’d eaten at the restaurant, had picked up one rusty wrought-iron one and was carrying it in front of her like a throne.