by Paul Torday
We had a good lot of waitresses. They were competent and welcoming. Giulia, the Italian girl, was almost too friendly, verging on the flirtatious. But that did no harm. I thought she was easy on the eye and good for business.
Lunchtimes were busy, too, and we started to receive group bookings. The biggest struggle was recruiting staff to keep up with the volume of business we were getting. For the first few months we exceeded our forecasts, and managed to pay off a slice of the bank loan ahead of schedule. The staff seemed quite settled too. That was Emma. She enthused people, and led by example: no one worked harder than she did, and she would pick up the phone to take a booking, or serve drinks, or even help with the washing up if necessary. Our employees were wary of me, however. They couldn’t really understand what I was doing there. Nor could I, if I was honest. I met people at the door, and tried to make them feel welcome. I took their drinks orders, handed out menus, and then my job was done. Sometimes Emma tried to coach me.
‘Dick, darling, try not to give the customers your thousand-yard stare when they come in.’
‘What thousand-yard stare?’
‘As if you are sighting your rifle on them. Remember the warm and friendly smile?’
I practised my warm and friendly smile in the mirror. I thought it made me look deranged. If Emma noticed any change in my demeanour she did not comment. Now and then I would catch her giving me an anxious glance as I chatted to customers. Sometimes I know I was a bit abrupt. I didn’t mean to be, I just lost it.
One evening Emma took me by the elbow and steered me into the little vestibule where we hung up people’s coats.
‘Darling heart, one of the customers has just complained that you spoke to him a little sharply.’
Whenever Emma was really worried about me, or annoyed with me, or both, she spoke to me in a particular way, as if I were made of glass and might shatter if she talked too loudly.
‘I just told someone to be patient.’
‘He says you told him to ‘‘wait his bloody turn’’.’
Oh, that man. He had come in with a party of three. Spectacles, a pinstriped suit, and a pompous manner. He had called me ‘waiter’, and asked me how much longer they would have to wait for their table.
‘Sorry. I probably did say that. Shall I go and apologise?’
‘They’ve left now.’
‘Oh dear. Well, I’m sure the table will be taken by someone else once it’s free.’
‘That isn’t the point, darling. We need to talk, but not right now. Please try to keep your temper. For me?’
But we finished work late that night. By the time we got back to Emma’s flat it was after midnight. I switched on the television in the sitting room and poured myself a large whisky. I could hear Emma moving about in the bathroom, getting ready for bed, and waited for her to come back in and challenge me about my behaviour earlier in the evening. I frowned at the television and poured myself another drink. Then I heard her shut the bedroom door and knew that she had gone to bed.
A couple of weeks later, I attended a memorial service for someone I had met a few times in Baghdad. He had been working at the Coalition headquarters in the International Zone. I didn’t know him very well, but had liked him enough to want to see him off. The poor sod had died at the age of thirty-four of a heart attack in his house in Guildford, having survived God knows what in Iraq. Maybe the war had been responsible for his heart condition, but it was probably just one of those things.
After the service I bumped into a couple of people – well, four of them – I had met out there and one of them asked me what I did for a living now. When I told them I was a restaurateur, there was a lot of laughter.
‘Do they make you wear a pinny and a chef’s hat?’ asked one.
‘Always thought you would make a good waiter,’ said another.
‘It’s a bloody good restaurant,’ I said indignantly. ‘You won’t find many better places in London.’
‘We’ll come and try it,’ said the person who had spoken first, a captain who had been well known for the size of his mess bills, which often included quite a few breakages.
‘Be my guests,’ I suggested, not really thinking they would accept. The captain, in civilian life Ned Taylor, was not going to pass up an invitation like that. He took out a diary, and after consulting with the others, named an evening when they would all come. I felt apprehensive for a moment, and wondered what I would say to Emma. Then I promptly forgot all about it.
They turned up at the restaurant just over a week later.
‘Oh God, Em,’ I said. ‘It’s some old army friends of mine. I forgot to tell you. I offered them dinner on the house. I never thought they’d come.’
For once, Emma was really annoyed.
‘On the house? Darling, you must be mad. We simply can’t afford to run the place like that. And quite apart from that, once the staff see you treating your chums to free meals, they’ll start wondering why they can’t put their own hands in the till.’
‘I don’t see why they should think that.’
‘It’s just the same.’
She was very angry. I was seeing another side to Emma now: her old-fashioned, Presbyterian upbringing. I knew all about that inner toughness: it was one of the reasons I had taken to her in the first place. But I didn’t like being on the receiving end of it.
‘I’d better go and look after them,’ I suggested.
‘Yes, you better had. Go and sit with them for a while.’
The captain saw me crossing the room as he and his party sat in armchairs waiting to be given drinks and menus.
‘Waiter!’ he shouted at me in a high, whinnying voice intended as a parody of Bertie Wooster. Heads turned. I groaned inwardly. This was going to be a difficult evening. I sat down with them and waved at Charlie the barman to come and take their drinks orders.
‘How are you all?’ I asked.
‘Never better,’ said Ned. ‘Andrew has just been telling us about a friend of his who was mentioned in dispatches for being shot in the arse while running away to hide behind the wall of a house in Basra. Caipirinhas all round, don’t you think?’
Caipirinhas were all the rage at the time: a cane spirit and fruit mixture that could do serious damage to your powers of reason in a very short time. I had the impression that Ned and the others might already have had a drink or two. Emma came over and they all jumped to their feet.
‘I’m Emma,’ she said. ‘You must be Dick’s friends – how nice to meet you.’
‘The pleasure is all ours,’ said Ned, taking her hand and kissing it in a way that annoyed me. Perhaps it was intended to. Emma stayed for a moment, chatting, then said, ‘I must go and look after our other guests – have a lovely evening.’
‘Smashing bird,’ said Ned, while Emma was still within earshot. ‘Well done, Richard. I never thought of you as a ladies’ man, but there you are, pulling a smart-looking piece like that.’
The menus arrived. Everybody chose what they wanted to eat, and a second round of drinks was ordered. I decided to enter into the spirit of the occasion and had another drink as well. And why not? This lot weren’t really my friends: just people I’d had some beers with a few times in Baghdad.
When their table was ready, I sat with them for a while: as much to keep an eye on them as to be friendly. I watched them being served their starters. I wasn’t eating with them as I never felt hungry in the restaurant: being around all that food all night every night put me off the idea, even though I knew it tasted very good. Wine was ordered, and then more wine when the next course arrived. The noise level at our table was becoming quite high. Andrew and Ned were the noisiest. Ned had one of those voices that penetrated the entire room, which was unfortunate because his language grew riper as the evening went on.
Eventually I said, ‘Ned, could you keep your voice down a little?’
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Oh, I see: walls have ears, don’t they? Careless talk costs lives. I forgot you used to bel
ong to a hush-hush outfit, Richard. Whispering must be second nature to you. Still, don’t want to upset the gorgeous Emma, do we?’ He started hissing at the other three in an exaggerated whisper. I decided it might be better if I left them to it.
‘I’d better go and see if Emma needs a hand.’
‘Well, if she doesn’t like yours, I’ve got a free one.’ He turned to see where Emma was, and found her a few tables away, looking at us anxiously.
‘Hey, babe,’ Ned shouted, ‘if you don’t want Richard’s hand, then come and try mine!’
The next moment he was lying on the floor, blood coming from his mouth where I had hit him. I didn’t even remember doing it, except that my knuckles were scraped where they had caught his front teeth. Ned lay there for a second, looking stunned. Then he smiled and wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand and started to climb to his feet. Andrew bent over and helped him up.
‘Well, well,’ said Ned. ‘You and I are going to have a bit of a chat about things, Dicky boy.’ He started towards me but Andrew and one of the other two – I couldn’t remember their names – held him back. He didn’t seem too steady on his feet. Someone righted his chair and he sat down heavily. The entire population of the restaurant was watching our table and every single conversation in the place had stopped. I could see Emma a few feet away, her hand to her mouth.
‘You were a bit over the top, old boy,’ Andrew told Ned.
‘I think you’d better leave,’ I said. There was no opposition to this idea. One of the other two men reached for his wallet, but I told him:
‘Forget it. No bill. Just leave, please.’
‘I’m sorry about Ned’s language,’ Andrew said. ‘He gets a bit overexcited at times. Misses the action.’
I didn’t reply. Ned was using a corner of his napkin to stem the flow of blood. He left the restaurant still holding it to his mouth, and clutching a half-full bottle of burgundy. Gradually conversation in the restaurant started up again. A waiter came across to the table. He cleared away the plates and glasses, removing any trace of the unpleasant little scene that had just taken place. I went across to Emma to apologise. She shook her head and went into the kitchen. She almost ran there. I followed her through the swing doors. Beyond them was a hubbub of noise and activity. No one in there had heard about the incident outside, but they soon would do, and then every eye would be on me.
Emma was in a corner of the kitchen, bending over a dishwasher, as if she were loading it. But she wasn’t. As I approached she turned and I could see tears on her cheeks.
‘You’d better go home, Richard.’ It was not good news when she called me Richard instead of Dick. I started to apologise but she cut me short.
‘Just go home, for Christ’s sake. Haven’t you done enough damage for one evening?’
‘Fine,’ I replied, and left without saying another word. When I got back to Emma’s flat, it was still only half past nine. The prospect of sitting there for the next two hours waiting until Emma came back, followed by yet another heart-to-heart – we seemed to be having those more frequently these days – did not appeal to me. Rather than sit in the flat on my own, I decided to go to a pub I knew, about half a mile away.
I had a couple of drinks and then walked about the streets for another hour. I told myself that I just wanted to calm down, and make sure I wasn’t angry when I talked to Emma. I was angry. OK, it was my fault for having invited those idiots to eat at the restaurant and my fault for offering them dinner on the house. They wouldn’t have come, otherwise. But then, what did she expect me to do when Ned Taylor behaved like that? Was I supposed just to stand there while he yelled offensive remarks at me, at Emma, and no doubt everyone else in the place? How could people behave like that?
I suddenly stopped in the middle of the street. I knew why people behaved like that. They were sick in the head. I was sick in the head. We had all seen things we should never have had to see, done things we should never have had to do. And all of us, when we came back from Iraq or Afghanistan, were constantly being reminded, every time we opened a newspaper or switched on the television, that we had done it for a cause the grateful public did not believe in any more, if they ever had. In the old days, it was ‘my country right or wrong’: when things happened that seemed to cross every boundary of human morality or decency you could always tell yourself, I suppose, that you were serving your country. But we had fought in wars that few people at home really cared about. No wonder some of us behaved badly.
By the time I got home, Emma had put herself to bed. There was a note on the kitchen table. It said: ‘Sorry I was cross – love you. xxx’. She was sorry. I was almost angry with her for being sorry when everything was so very much my fault.
The next morning Emma woke me with a cup of coffee. She was wearing her dressing gown.
‘You slept right through,’ she said cheerfully. ‘No bad dreams. Isn’t that good?’
I took the coffee from her and sipped it.
‘Look, about last night …’ I said.
‘I understand about last night, darling. It wasn’t your fault. Those men behaved abominably.’
‘It was my fault for asking them.’
‘You weren’t to know.’
There was another pause. I knew there was more to come.
‘Only, one bit of not so good news, darling,’ said Emma. ‘Michael has handed in his notice.’
‘Michael? Our chef?’
‘Yes. He said he couldn’t afford to work for employers who got themselves into fistfights with the customers. He said that sort of thing gets around the trade pretty fast, and much as he liked working for us, he thought it would be better if he moved on.’
I was silent for a few moments. This news wasn’t just ‘not so good’; it was very bad indeed. A lot of our customers came to us because of Michael and for no other reason. With him gone, business would fall off and who knew when, if ever, it would recover.
‘Where’s he going?’ I asked. ‘Some bastard has doubled his salary, I expect.’
‘He doesn’t have a job to go to,’ said Emma. ‘But he won’t change his mind. You know what he’s like.’
After a pause I said, ‘I’d better not come in for a day or two, let things calm down.’
‘I was just going to suggest that, darling.’
‘And you don’t suppose, if you rang Michael …’
‘No,’ said Emma. ‘It wouldn’t do any good.’
Business did fall off at the restaurant after that. The change wasn’t dramatic at first – the occasional empty table on a Friday evening, when normally we would have been full – but after a while it became more noticeable. The restaurant no longer had that indefinable ‘buzz’ about it and we had difficulty getting a permanent replacement for Michael: we had to make do with a series of agency chefs, some of whom were adequate, but some of whom were mediocre. None was a patch on Michael.
I went into the restaurant less frequently. At first it was just because I felt I ought to keep a low profile. Then it was because there really wasn’t that much for me to do. Instead I used to sit and worry about the numbers. There was a big slug of loan repayment due at the end of the quarter. A month ago, repaying it had seemed quite straightforward; now it looked like a challenge. It wasn’t just that we had fewer customers: the kind of customers who were coming in now spent less on wine and drinks.
Emma was worried, too, and I wasn’t much help. The truth was, I had never been that interested in the restaurant. It had just seemed like a good idea at the time. Now it was becoming a drag. There was no chance that either of us could take a half-decent salary from it with business the way it was.
Emma’s answer was to work even harder. She let one or two staff go, to cut down on our outgoings, and tried to do their jobs as well as her own. She would come back to the flat late and too tired to speak. Then she would be up early the next morning in order to go to the markets to buy fresh produce and meat for the restaurant because without Mi
chael she could no longer trust anyone else to do the job properly. Her good temper, which was close to saintly, began to fray around the edges.
One afternoon, before she went out to work, I suggested she take a break.
‘We’ll go out to supper somewhere,’ I said. ‘Someone else can serve you for a change, rather than the other way around.’
‘Oh no, I don’t think we can do that. We’re very short-staffed tonight. I had to let another of the waiters go: the Romanian one. We couldn’t afford him and I’m not entirely sure he was honest.’
‘We used to have three waiters on weekdays,’ I said. ‘You can’t expect to do everyone else’s job as well as your own.’
‘Well, do you have any bright suggestions?’ said Emma fiercely. ‘You’re not much help yourself, you know.’
There was a silence, then, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you, Dick. Only …’
‘Only I’m not much help.’
‘Well, if you want me to be honest, you aren’t. You seem to think waiting and washing up are beneath you. But we wouldn’t be in this fix if you knew how to keep your temper and be pleasant to people.’
‘I knew you’d bring that up again,’ I said. ‘What did you expect me to do when that man started shouting obscenities at you?’
‘You didn’t have to hit him. But it isn’t just that. You don’t seem to be able to get on with people, darling. I can’t understand it. You used to be so easy with everyone. Now all you do is bite their heads off.’
I could feel my face setting into a grim mask. I knew this was the moment to say something conciliatory. Instead I said:
‘This whole bloody restaurant was your idea in the first place. Neither of us knew anything about running a restaurant, and now it shows.’
Emma looked very hurt.
‘The point was to find something we could do together,’ she replied. ‘You know that. How can you be so unkind?’
She burst into tears. I didn’t feel like comforting her. Instead I stared at her until the sobbing had stopped.
