33 West

by Daisy Goodwin

  ‘How about sushi?’ Helena suggested. Sushi was something she would want her mother to learn to appreciate.

  A few minutes later Helena made a disproportionately ‘yummy’ sound in response to what looked to Silvija like a plate of plain, steamed green beans.

  ‘They’re very nice. Edamame. And very, very healthy. Try them. Like this.’ She showed her mother how to suck the beans out and discard the skin. They were tasty, it had to be said, but Silvija would still have preferred them with some roast chicken and mashed potatoes.

  Helena looked at her mother from the corner of her eye as they ate. She’s not enjoying it, Helena thought, even though it was mostly California rolls she was having, which really is the easiest way into sushi. Maybe they shouldn’t have gone straight for sushi. Some nice smoked salmon and champagne might have been a better idea.

  ‘Shall we have a glass of champagne upstairs?’

  The idea caught Silvija by surprise. Just as she was starting to think that maybe raw fish and cold rice were not a completely misguided concept, champagne came rushing from left field.

  ‘I don’t know. What are we celebrating?’ The moment she said it she felt like she ought to be more enthusiastic.

  ‘Your visit. My new house. Your first sushi. Doesn’t matter. It’s what women do here. They shop and then they go up to the bar to reward themselves for a good days work with a glass of champers,’ Helena said, not without irony, which she thought her mum would appreciate. She hadn’t completely lost her sense of humour, even if she did begin to find some of her mother’s jokes inappropriate.

  They found a seat at a small table in the champagne bar. Helena held the menu in one hand and her Blackberry in the other and seemed to manage reading from both at the same time.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s curious how the tent-ladies are lined up at the bar in the ice-cream parlour?’ Silvija said. ‘What’s that about? Some sort of infantilisation thing?’

  ‘You can’t say that. You can’t call them tent-ladies,’ Helena protested patiently when the question sunk in.

  ‘I thought it would make you laugh.’

  ‘It’s not funny.’

  ‘It is a little. If you think about it. What are they shopping for here? Clothes? Jewelry? Underwear? Where do they wear it?’

  ‘They wear it for their husbands.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s certainly not funny.’

  ‘It’s different from… us. Doesn’t mean to say it’s wrong.’ Helena could hear her own voice sounding unconvincing. Her views on such matters used to be much more pronounced. She just didn’t seem to have the time anymore. She wished they could leisurely chat about everyday things, just a bit of relaxing, inconsequential chatter. Her mother discovered feminism quite late in the day and failed to install it in her family life, but she was a fierce opponent in theoretical debates. She also came from a place that was not too familiar with PC and found any kind of difference, in skin, habit or dress hilariously funny.

  ‘How do they eat the ice cream?’ Silvija insisted.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen them. Three, four at the counter, all with large ice-cream sundaes. How do they eat it? I mean, practically speaking. Is there a flap in the cloth?’

  ‘Oh, for god’s sake, mum.’

  There were times when Silvija protested at that tone, one third annoyance, one third contempt and remaining third split between guilt and embarrassment. Yes, many times. But not this time, she decided. Maybe, after all, she didn’t know best. Not here, in this alien world through which her daughter seemed to navigate so well.

  They drank their champagne in silence. Helena was beginning to wonder if having her mother over was going to prove to be a mistake. There have been moments in her London life which she thought of as small feats. Dotted with regular drops into doubt and despair, the curve of her life has been on a steady rise for a few years now. She would sometimes like to share it with people back home. She would sometimes like to show off in front of people back home. Her girlfriends, her dad before he died, and her mother. A night like tomorrow, when she will be cooking for twelve of Andrew’s most important partners and clients including Sir Phillip, whom even self-assured Andrew felt tongue-tied around.

  ‘It is one of those dinner parties a person’s professional fate might depend on,’ Andrew said the night before in a sort of half-jocular manner. Helena could see her mother squinting and knew subtext was being read into that statement, subtext that was not going to bode well for Andrew. ‘How much are you, Andrew, contributing to this fate-determining night?’ or something along those lines. There was a corner in Helena’s mind that defied the idea of a dinner party having that much weight. But she knew it was a coded world she lived in. And if sometimes, often even, she did not understand the codes, she knew that contesting them or worse still, making fun of them, was not the right course of action.

  In any case, a night like that, hosting a dinner party, success glistening across their long dinner table, that was what she wanted her mother to see. But sitting here after only a day of being together, Helena could already feel the draining effects of their disagreements. How on earth was she going to manage to cook for twelve in a new house and not lose her nerve?

  ‘You are cooking?’ Silvija regretted saying the words the very second they came out of her mouth.

  ‘I can cook.’

  Of course Silvija didn’t mean it like that. When they last spent some time together Helena had cooked her parents a Vietnamese-inspired meal and apart from the questionable use of peanuts, Silvija was very impressed. Not only did it taste good, she had also very assertively used a number of ingredients Silvija had never heard of, like lemongrass and cardamom. And then a few other ones she had heard of, mostly from TV cooking shows and Jamie Oliver’s cook book and had tried to used on a couple of occasions but had given up on, after a particularly disastrous attempt at roast fennel with ginger. She would never forget the bewildered expression on her husband’s face when he tasted it. So she went back to her good old fashion continental cuisine.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t have faith in her daughter’s cooking. But the lifestyle she caught a glimpse of in the day and a half she’d spent here led her to believe that catering would certainly be involved. Rent-a-chef or some such nonsense that surely existed in this silly world of surplus. She had not expected her manicured, pedicured, groomed beyond all reasonable expectation daughter to cook for twelve, in fact, counting her, thirteen people.

  Silvija thought of herself when she was that age. The straw-like feel that henna used to give her hair. The smell of expired make up – make-up doesn’t expire these days, she’d noticed. They both had good skin and good, white teeth. Silvija would like to have been slimmer though and Helena seems to have rid herself of the few extra pounds she carried as a very young woman. She was now as slender as a willow. And she was going to cook dinner to impress twelve unimpressionable people.

  ‘I’m sorry about the sushi,’ said Helena in the taxi on the way back. ‘It’s an acquired taste I guess. You used to like trying new things.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ said Silvija thoughtfully looking out at the magnificent architecture, ‘you don’t notice when that goes. The thirst for trying new things. You simply discover one day that you prefer not to bother.’

  As they turned into a side street behind the Natural History Museum she was struck with how overwhelming beauty can be followed immediately by how bumpy the ride was and what dreadful suspension the famous black cabs had.

  ‘But I like the idea of having tried something you like so much.’

  The kitchen was shiny and dark. Granite comes highly recommended in the kitchen world, Andrew explained last night when Silvija’s first response to seeing the fabulous new kitchen was that it was rather dark. These, apparently, were the best kitchens in the world. Silvija thought that ‘the best in the world’ was a term one could use to describe one’s mum’s pie. Or a particularly fine cup
of coffee. She thought it much too pompous to use with a straight face.

  ‘How do we know that they’re the best kitchens in the world?,’ she asked, as Helena started the espresso machine, ‘Has it been put to a vote?’

  Helena sighed. She got out of the habit of talking to her mother. This was not the way they talked around here, she thought. They nod, they make the ‘mhm’ sounds a lot, they say excited ‘ohs’ a lot, they admire other people’s achievements, and a Poggenpohl kitchen is a fucking achievement. Well… in a manner of speaking. It was annoyingly Croatian to be sarcastic about it. These people had no respect for equanimity.

  ‘They just are,’ she said resolutely.

  Her mother looked away, through the window, where rain was starting to wash over another London day. Sitting on that chair was quite a balancing act. Another impression she shared last night and didn’t get a laugh.

  ‘What are you cooking?’

  ‘Sarma,’ said Helena smiling mysteriously.

  ‘Sarma?!’

  ‘Sarma.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  Helena was silent. She vaguely felt like sulking though she wasn’t sure if it would have been justified. Is it acceptable to sulk about things someone might say or indeed, things someone was thinking?

  ‘You are going to serve all these important people a staple peasant dish?’

  Between sulking and proudly presenting a cunning plan, Helena decided to let the sulking rest for a while. After all, there is always plenty of time for sulking in life. She smiled a wide sassy smile.

  ‘It’s going to be very, very cool. Do you know they sometimes hire the best chefs in the world to cook for, say, the Oscars, and then they serve fish and chips?’

  She elaborated on how people can get tired of the fancy, complicated food that you never fill up on and that sounds like you need a degree to understand.

  ‘You know, these people actually get to a stage where they go to a two hundred pound-a-head dinner and come out saying: “If I’m honest, I’m just not that impressed.”’

  The impersonation gave a cheeky spring to her voice. Silvija smiled. That sounded more like her daughter.

  ‘So, we’ll sort of be subverting the rule, thereby making it very chic,’ she continued proudly. ‘I could slave over tuna carpaccio and it wouldn’t be like the one at Claridges. And for all the gadgets you see around here I am not actually sure how you achieve a frothy cauliflower purée.’

  ‘I don’t think I ever heard of frothy cauliflower purée and I’m not entirely sure it should be allowed.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re not. Anyway, what we are counting on is the surprise effect. And another thing we have over them is the simple knowledge of how important it is to end an evening feeling comfortably stuffed with food. This is something they don’t realise, as eating for pleasure is a relatively new concept to the British.’

  Her mother laughed out loud for the first time since she got there. They set out to make sarma: sauerkraut leaves stuffed with rice, minced meat and herbs, because sarma is always best the next day. The air around them suddenly felt lighter.

  Silvija watched as her daughter moved around the kitchen. She lightly touched a button on the front of the dishwasher; the door popped down elegantly and the inside rack came sliding out without so much as a sound. The edges of the dishwasher were lined with some undetermined soft material almost invisible at first glance. Silvija reached out to feel it.

  ‘Do you remember our dishwasher? The one in our old flat?’ Helena asked.

  It was a small flat, with small rooms and very narrow corridors. They always had far too many things and her mother was forever inventing new storage space. Behind the long curtains, underneath the windowsills. On top of wardrobes, under the beds. Their kitchen was a slightly widened extension to the narrow corridor with no windows. The light came from the adjacent dining room. Well, and the electricity. It’s not like they didn’t have electricity.

  Dishwashers were a bit of a luxury in a socialist country. Not out of reach. But not standard equipment. Helena’s family had one because they were doing well enough to treat themselves to a little bit of luxury. It broke down very soon, a few days after the warranty expired. The spare parts turned out be more of a luxury than the wretched thing in the first place, so they never quite made it to the priority list. And then the power cuts came and they had to invest in a generator and so on… The dishwasher eventually proved to be a useful storage unit and for the next several years acted as one.

  Helena could remember sitting on a stool in the kitchen, late at night, when the TV programme was over and her father had gone to bed. She had bouts of insomnia when she was a girl and her mother would let her sit in the kitchen and sometimes even eat her favourite desert, ‘winter ice-cream’, a cone filled with sickly sweet white filling and dipped in chocolate. She would lick her ‘ice-cream’ and watch her mother doing the dishes in the sink, wiping them dry and storing them away in the dishwasher. And she could to this day remember her mother’s weary face, her feet in skin-coloured tights, worn and washed a thousand times, and the way she’d swear silently when she hit her shin on the edge of the open dishwasher door.

  ‘Don’t you remember how frustrated you were with that dishwasher. Every night when you washed the dishes and it was just standing there, useless…’

  Silvija looked lost in thought, remembering the same image. The tiny kitchen, about a tenth of the size of this one and her tiny daughter curled up on a chair. She nodded vaguely.

  She couldn’t help herself but scrutinize Helena and her environment. Her mind was constantly and inadvertently substituting X with what she saw and Y with what came out of Helena’s mouth and she couldn’t work out what the result was supposed to be. What was more mesmerizing than anything else was the authority with which Helena moved around this world, how she spoke to the staff, how she handled all the sophisticated technology in the house, how she had the world worked out. At her age, Silvija remembered herself as a timid person with no-one to talk to about the increasing number of dilemmas. And yet, this woman who looks at a twenty-one thousand pound Victorian desk as if she was about to declare it fake, pricks up her ears to the sound of the front door opening. Immediately, she goes for the fridge and pours a glass of cold white wine to hand to her husband the moment he steps into the kitchen. He kisses her and smiles, has a sip of wine with his eyes closed. He sits down and sighs, ‘A long day,’ as she rubs his back.

  ‘Why does he call you Helena?’ Silvija asked, stressing the first syllable as opposed to the second which is the Croatian pronunciation of the name.

  ‘That’s how it’s pronounced in English.’

  ‘It’s not how your name is pronounced.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘It’s not a question of you minding, it’s a question of your husband getting your name right. It’s a question of minimal effort.’

  Helena sighed. Where did her mother get these… objections? Were those glasses she wore a special kind, infra-red for things to complain about?

  ‘When are you planning to go back to work?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But you are planning to go back to work, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know mum, probably. I’m not sure. I’ve taken some time because of the move and doing the house up and all that and, to be honest, there is quite a lot to do.’

  ‘The house is pretty much finished.’

  Helena could feel her blood pressure rising. ‘Yes, but I mean, there is quite a lot to do every day. And the work in the City is… relentless. And if I’m going to have a baby at some point…’

  ‘You’re going to be a mother and a housewife?’

  Helena slammed a pot on the counter a little louder than she had intended to. Surely that was not the answer to hearing one might become a grandmother soon.

  ‘Mum, what… what is wrong? What’s with the questions? I feel like you’re trying to catch me out.’

 
‘I’m trying to understand your choices.’

  ‘Why are you so suspicious? And negative? Why don’t you like this? How can you see this,’ her arms went sweeping through the air, ‘all this and… and… and me… and… not be proud and… happy with how well I’ve done?! I don’t get it!’

  She suddenly found herself ranting about ‘this country’ and how closed off it was and how difficult it was to get past a certain invisible bar, how Mars was a more feasible destination than upscale London if one was a foreigner. And here she was, about to entertain all these important people at her own table and feed them bloody sarma. How can she not be proud?!

  ‘Who are you competing with?’ Silvija asked.

  ‘What?!’ Why can’t her mother just follow the line of conversation?!

  ‘I suppose your ambitions have changed dramatically. And you never told me about it.’ Silvija paused to think about the phrasing. ‘When you left… into this complete unknown I was so scared. Every day I had to give myself a pep-talk, that you will be fine and safe and that you’re going to make a great future for yourself. And you have. And I am happy. I guess I never expected that you would take his big step only to become a housewife.’

  ‘Only to become a housewife’ rang in Helena’s head. She thought of a time, years ago, when she stood on a platform at Gatwick for an hour waiting for the second Capital Connect. A couple of young local girls had given her directions, no doubt finding it rather amusing. She often thought of that incident. It was quite funny, in retrospect, but the feeling of being made a fool of in a strange world, standing alone on the platform waiting for a train that would never arrive and the way the conductor laughed when she asked when the second Capital Connect was due – it stayed with her for years.

  ‘I like it,’ she said finally, with a rush of stage fright.