“I can’t deny we don’t do a lot of fancy French eating here, Jean-Luc, but isn’t there anything I can do to change your mind?”
“Short of keeping Gigi at home, nothing, dear Mademoiselle. I need not leave for another two months. I think that will give you enough time to find somebody else who will suit. Perhaps an older man, someone who will be glad to be paid to sit around in great comfort and do a minimum of work, someone who will not miss the lack of challenge, perhaps.… an American?”
“Oh, really, Jean-Luc!”
“I am frank, Mademoiselle, but not unfair,” he said respectfully, and took his leave.
Provoked by Jean-Luc’s attitude, Josie searched far and wide until she discovered a young chef, twenty-six-year-old Quentin Browning, whose father owned a fine country hotel in the Cotswolds, known for the excellence of its kitchen. The Ash Grove, a venerable hostelry near Stratford-on-Avon, offered twenty bedrooms and five suites, but the key to its year-round success was its good-sized restaurant where tables were booked weeks in advance by people from the neighboring countryside as well as Londoners who made the jaunt just for the food.
Quentin Browning had gone to Rugby and then headed straight for Switzerland for schooling in the hotelkeeper’s trade. He had always known that one day he would go into the highly prosperous family business, he took a keen interest in the varied skills of hotelkeeping, and he did well in Switzerland. Afterwards he decided to train seriously as a chef. Although the Ash Grove employed a large, skillful staff in the kitchen, it was essential for him to be able to do anything the head chef could do before he was experienced enough to criticize and innovate. Unless he had that ability, he would always be at the chef’s mercy, a situation that would be intolerable.
Quentin Browning worked in great restaurant kitchens in Lyons, Paris, Milan and Rome, starting with the lowliest jobs and moving upward stage by classic stage, his success assured by hard work, talent and the powerful personal charm that has twice its normal impact when it is possessed by an Englishman, a member of that island race that does not rely on charm as a job qualification. Quentin Browning had just completed a one-year stint as assistant chef in a top French restaurant in Houston and had been offered a tempting job in San Francisco. However, he had turned it down for this opportunity to work in a large private house.
A lack of challenge, he decided, was exactly what he needed after the medieval slavery of his years of a chef’s apprenticeship. His father didn’t need him quite yet, and would never guess that his dutiful son was enjoying the equivalent of a well-paid vacation, considering the high wages that the simple job offered. Why shouldn’t he enjoy a lovely long gulp of the California lifestyle: surfboards, sunshine and his particular fancy in the female line—big, beautiful, buxom, blond broads, preferably by the dozen—before burying himself in the depths of the Shakespeare country and tackling his life’s work, Quentin asked himself, with the answer implicit in the question.
Gigi said a sad farewell to her Jean-Luc, her friend and irreplaceable teacher who had stayed on long enough to see her graduate from high school, an event attended by Billy, Spider, Valentine, Dolly and Lester, Sara the hairdresser from Sassoon, everyone who lived in the house on Charing Cross Road, and half the staff of Scruples. Vito was somewhere in the South of France, and only Gigi missed him.
To cheer herself up after Jean-Luc’s departure, Gigi decided to make a cake for the replacement who was due to arrive tomorrow. Nothing fancy, nothing showy, nothing vulgar, but a cake that would test this newcomer’s knowledge of baking as little else could. She decided to make a vanilla génoise, the basic French sponge cake, which, to be perfect, demands such invisible expertise that only another expert can judge it. His reaction to the sponge cake was the test she devised, the trap she laid for him, for she had no faith in any Englishman who made the bold claim to be a finished French chef.
“But why a sponge cake, Gigi?” Burgo O’Sullivan asked curiously as he watched her set about her work in the kitchen that was deserted on that afternoon. “Why not something more eye-catching?”
“Burgo, I know it wasn’t easy when you taught me to drive, I know you took your life in your hands when we tackled the freeways, but even you would never have the sheer reckless courage and the skillfulness of hand to attempt to make this seemingly plain cake. There are so many things that can go wrong in the process that I’d be all atremble thinking about it, if I weren’t so damn good.”
“I admire your modesty.”
Gigi grinned at him. “Modesty has no place in a kitchen. It’s like a bullring, Burgo, you don’t start something you can’t finish,” she proclaimed as she beat eggs, sugar and vanilla with a whisk over hot water. “This has to exactly quadruple in volume, my friend, this mixture has to be overbeaten by ordinary standards, overbeaten with an exactitude and precision that is heart-stopping to contemplate.”
Burgo leaned back comfortably. Gigi, working with total concentration, enveloped in a starched white apron that reached almost to her ankles, with a black velvet headband holding back her bangs so that they wouldn’t get into her eyes, looked like an industrious, old-fashioned child bride, he thought, someone who should be drawn for an illustration in a Victorian cookbook. “I’m not impressed yet,” he said, “but I know it’s just a question of time. Since you’re going to tell me anyway, why overbeaten?”
“Because the secret to this potential disaster of a cake lies entirely in its supreme texture, and when I add two and a half sticks of melted butter to it, as I will in good time, the butter will deflate the batter, and might even break it down. Therefore,” Gigi pontificated, flourishing her whisk at him, “I must compensate in advance by overbeating in order to end up with a cake that’s divinely moist.”
“Makes sense,” Burgo grunted.
“Wait, Burgo, wait! If I get carried away and overbeat even the slightest bit too much, the batter will become too fluffy and the cake won’t be moist either.”
“Too much and it’ll be dry, and too little and it’ll be dry?”
“A giant crumb, Burgo, one miscalculation and that’s what it’ll be,” Gigi said with mock gloom, beginning to sift flour into the mixture, which she judged had reached its instant of immortality. “On the other hand, since I’m not using baking powder, if I don’t fold this flour into the batter in absolutely the right way to achieve an utterly smooth combination of ingredients, the cake will be heavy and sticky, not a vast crumb, Burgo, but a huge, soggy pancake.”
“Is baking always this rough? The Betty Crocker box makes it look more like fun.”
“Burgo, I’m aiming at an otherworldly cake, something that will make this new chef’s little piggy eyes pop right out of his smartass head. Betty Crocker wouldn’t do it.”
“Seems to me that you’re showing off.”
“Good cooking is always about showing off,” Gigi said imperturbably. “If it weren’t for the cooking instinct, we’d still be sitting around in a cave, eating raw meat and roots. Houses exist primarily to shelter a kitchen. There’d be no civilization without the cooking instinct.”
“I knew there had to be something to blame for civilization,” Burgo said, as Gigi poured the batter into a cake pan, put it in the prewarmed oven, and began to make the butter cream combined with custard with which she would ice the cake and spread between its three layers. “I’ve been living in this house so long,” he added, “I’d begun to think it was the shopping instinct. You got a date tonight, Gigi?”
“Naturally,” she said smugly. “We’re all going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“My gang, Burgo, you dope, my gang—Maze and Sue and Betty and some guys. Why?”
“You’ve seen it twelve times,” Burgo objected, knowing that they would probably see it twelve more times before the fad ran its course. What he really wanted to know was if Gigi had a date with any particular boy. On poker nights he occasionally questioned his friend Stan, the security guard at Un
i, about the phenomenon of group dating. Burgo thought it was high time that Gigi had a nice boyfriend of her own instead of always being part of a swarm, for after all she was eighteen—his mother had been pregnant with her second child at eighteen—but Stan, who knew far more about teenagers than Burgo, told him it was perfectly natural. “If she went steady with one rotten stud, then you’d really have something to worry about, overprotective the way all of you are,” his friend had advised him. “As soon as Gigi goes to college next fall, it’ll change and you’ll wish she were back in a nice, safe gang.”
For a time, while the cake chilled enough for Gigi to slice and ice it, the two of them sat in companionable silence.
“Burgo, look at this cake,” Gigi demanded when she had finished. “What do you think?”
“You said you wanted something plain.”
“But not boring! This is the single dullest-looking cake I’ve ever seen. It’s round and it’s white and that’s all you can say. It could be a whole Brie cheese if it weren’t the most sublime sponge cake in the world.”
“So decorate it.”
“I had intended it to be immaculate, a throwaway, a seemingly insignificant cake, so that this Limey creep’s reaction would be only to its quality. Anybody can decorate a cake and let the eye fool the palate. I’ll ruin its purity if I decorate it, but if I don’t, nobody will even bother to taste it. This is not how Sara Lee got rich.”
“Hey, Gigi, you’ve got an artistic problem. Do you sell out or do you stand your ground?”
“I compromise. I’m going to pipe a message on the cake in the simplest possible way,” Gigi said, inspired, as she melted white chocolate and fashioned a pointed paper cone. She poured the liquid chocolate, mixed with a dash of vegetable oil, into the paper, snipped off the tiniest bit of the tip of the cone, and on the surface of the cake wrote, “Welcome to Quentin Browning” in large, thin, flowing script, before she added an almost invisible, complicated loop design around its entire perimeter.
“That’s grand,” Burgo said in admiration. “White on white, like a gangster’s shirt and tie.”
“He’ll have to try it, if only to be polite. And when he tastes it, I’ll casually remark that I’m just an amateur hobbyist cook and baked it for kicks. Ha! Then let this Browning try to top it. Jean-Luc told me that Englishmen simply can’t bake … it’s something genetic. Now Burgo, you and I do the dishes.”
“The cook does the dishes, Gigi. Do you think I’m a complete patsy?”
“I know it for a fact. Here, you can lick the icing pan first.”
On Sunday afternoon, when Quentin Browning arrived at Charing Cross Road with his luggage, the great house lay sleeping. After Gigi’s graduation, Billy had taken off for Munich, where clothes-conscious, deutsche mark-loaded women were thirsting for the opening of a Scruples that was still not quite ready. Since most of the staff had the day off, Burgo had been delegated by Josie to greet the new arrival. He showed Quentin to his room in the staff wing. “Do you want the guided tour or do you want to get settled?” he asked.
“I’ll unpack later, thanks. I’d like to take a look at the kitchens first. When Miss Speilberg interviewed me, she didn’t have time to show me around.”
“Sure thing. I’ll make you a cup of tea if you like.”
“Thanks, I’d really appreciate that. Nobody but my mother’s made me a cup of tea for years. What else do you do around here?”
“Everything but cook, clean or garden.”
“I have an uncle at home just like you,” Quentin said, smiling in recognition. “He’s the fellow without whom the whole enterprise begins to fall apart in a few days. You’re the indispensable man, then.”
“That’s one way to put it,” Burgo said, sizing up the newcomer. For an Englishman he seemed like a regular guy. Maybe he played poker.
After a detailed inspection of the kitchens, the butler’s pantry, the storage pantries, the wine cellar, and the dining rooms for staff and family, Quentin and Burgo settled down in the breakfast room with a pot of tea and the cake, which Burgo had brought out as Gigi had instructed him. Quentin read the inscription. “Not only is this very kind, but I’m actually starving,” he admitted, pleased by the special attention.
“I just called Gigi on the intercom and asked her if she wanted some tea,” Burgo said.
“Gigi?”
“Mrs. Ikehorn’s stepdaughter. She was upstairs reading.”
“A little girl?”
“Not really little, but not big, all things considered,” Burgo said thoughtfully. “Little-ish, for California anyway.”
“How old is she?”
“Youngish. Oh, here she is. Gigi Orsini, Quentin Browning.”
Gigi shook hands automatically, smiled automatically and sat down automatically. She had never met a native Englishman in the flesh, but she was deeply familiar with them as a species, from Laurence Olivier to Alec Guinness, from Alan Bates to Sir Ralph Richardson, from Rex Harrison to David Niven, from John Gielgud to John Lennon. Englishmen in all their varieties could hold no surprises for her, she was certain. Yet somehow she’d missed seeing anyone on film who had prepared her for the reality of this particular young man. He was a tall male of the lean and adventurous type, he looked like a self-reliant explorer of the upper reaches of the Nile rather than a chef, yet his quick, slightly bucktoothed smile made her think suddenly of a schoolboy who’d just come home for the holidays. He had a long, bony nose, biggish ears, and straight blond hair neatly parted on the side, which nevertheless persisted in flopping over his forehead. He had an air of reserve, yet the expression in his gray eyes was candidly friendly.
“Come on, let’s try the cake,” Burgo said as Gigi sat there silently, eyes unfocused, not even sipping the tea he’d made.
“Cake?” Gigi asked, as if the word were in a foreign language.
“The cake on the table, this round white cake,” Burgo said, cutting into it impatiently. He’d been mentally tasting it since yesterday. He never should have licked that icing.
Automatically, Gigi and Quentin each tasted the cake. Burgo ate a large bite of his and thought the top of his head would come off. It was more than Gigi had promised, more than any cake had a right to be.
“It’s okay,” Gigi said remotely.
“It’s truly super cake,” Quentin said absently, looking at her and taking another transcendental bite. She wasn’t his big blond type, but he could always make an exception, and with her punk orange hair, her pointed ears and her just-about-to-smile mouth, she ranked high in the adorable category. “Your chef was an artist.”
“He was,” Gigi said on a sigh.
“I hope I can do half as well.”
“Gigi,” Burgo prodded, “Gigi, when did this cake get itself made exactly?”
“Who knows?” Gigi breathed vaguely.
“You don’t remember? Gigi? Gigi?”
“No,” she said, giving him a forbidding look.
“Do you cook?” Quentin asked, searching for something to say to this lovely, indifferent, laconic creature.
“Oh no,” said Gigi sadly, “I’ve never had time to learn, not even a minute.”
“But surely, at least the rudiments?”
“I’ve been much too busy, haven’t I, Burgo?”
“What? Oh, sure.…”
“Would you like to learn? Just the basics, that is, enough to get by?” Quentin suggested. Giving girls cooking lessons had never failed him yet.
“Hmm … I suppose so … it’s probably a good idea, just in case, don’t you think, Burgo?”
“Yeah, Gigi, in case you ever have to. On a desert island, maybe,” Burgo said disgustedly. Whatever complicated trap Gigi was now setting for Quentin had become too Machiavellian at this point for him to figure it out. The least she could have done was to notify him of her new deviltry.
“We could skip the peeling onions and carrots stage and go right on to … to scrambled eggs,” Quentin offered, anxious to take away any hint
of drudgery.
“Oh no, I’d want to do it right,” Gigi said, eyes wide and earnest. “I’d want to start at the very beginning and work my way up to eggs … not skipping a single step. I have all the time in the world and nothing else to do.… all summer long.”
“I think I’ll have another piece of cake,” Burgo said, suddenly hit by a wave of foreboding almost strong enough to take away his appetite, “since the two of you don’t seem hungry.”
That evening Gigi drove Quentin on a tour of Los Angeles, from the Santa Monica pier to Beverly Hills, from the Sunset Strip to Pink’s, the famous hot-dog shack that, like many tourist attractions, thrives on humanity’s attraction to thoroughgoing, shameless sordidness.
“Tell me more about the Cotswolds,” she asked Quentin as they stood at a counter and ordered another round of spicy hot dogs buried under chili, mustard and chopped onions.
“Look here, Gigi, you’ve been asking me questions since we got into your car, but you haven’t told me anything about yourself.”
“Oh,” Gigi demurred, looking away with a disenchanted air of mystery that only Bette Davis could have rivaled. “I don’t really know how to begin … it’s been such a complicated, cosmopolitan life, Quentin … traveling between New York and Los Angeles. I’ve had the best of two great cities, I suppose I’m considered prematurely sophisticated, and I have to admit to being unquestionably spoiled, but, damn it, it’s not my fault that I was born restless. It’s an incurable problem—forever seeking the next experience, even if it’s outrageous, forever hoping to find the next sensation, even if it’s violent. And the worst of it is that I know exactly what’s wrong with me. You’d think that at twenty-one I’d have found something I could stick to by now—don’t look so surprised, Quentin, I’ve always been cursed by these ridiculously childish looks of mine, they’ve fooled dozens of men.” Gigi shook her head with deliberately theatrical exaggeration at her own deceptively ingenuous appearance, and dismissed it with a blasé gesture. “You see, Quentin, no matter how I wander, how I experiment, something always seems to be beckoning me on, some intensity of living that lies just behind the next encounter.”
Scruples Two Page 17
