by Will Storr
I knocked on his door and when, upon his cheery “Hello”, I pushed it open, I couldn’t work out what he’d actually been doing in there. With his blinds pulled down and his standard lamp on, he blinked at me from behind his desk, looking like a startled mole. If I had had to guess, I would have said he’d just been sitting by himself, quite happily.
“You’d better sit down,” he said.
He took off his glasses and leaned on his elbows with a sympathetic downward smile.
“Where have you been?” he said. “We’ve been trying to get hold of you. I heard from Ambrose…”
I pulled the plastic seat back and sat down. Mayle’s office was completely unlike that of any other teacher’s room I’d been in. It wasn’t just the paperbacks or the biscuit tin or the dusty, tassel-fringed standard lamp; the room’s aura was such that it could only have come from his long years of treating it, not as a place of work, but as an extension of his home.
“We’ve had a few family problems,” I said. “My aunt. She passed away.”
The words felt too big for my throat.
“Sounds like you’ve had a rough time,” he said.
There had always been something reassuring about Mr Mayle; something that made you want to confide all your most secret frailties. He had these masculine, hairy wrists poking out from his cuffs, small sideburns and his hair was a rich biscuity brown. He’d wear smart mock-tweed suits and tan brogues and yet there was always a comfortably scruffy air about him – an unironed wrinkle in a collar; a reminder scrawled in biro on his hand; his consistently odd socks – that loosened any implied rigidity.
“Pretty rough,” I said.
“Overdue for the boils, eh?” His smile became broad and warm, like an arm around my shoulder.
“Sorry, sir?” I said.
“Job,” he said. “Book of Job. Did you do any RE at school? ‘There was a man in the land of Uz and his name was Job and that man was perfect and upright’?”
I felt suddenly unpleasant, as if a cloud had passed over the room.
“It rings a weird kind of bell,” I said.
“You should have a read. I think it’s your kind of book. Anyhow, Mr Lone, I need to talk to you about a very important decision you have to make.”
He folded the arms of his glasses and placed them neatly on the desk in front of him. Meeting my eyes in a sustained way for the first time, he said, “Is this really what you want? To spend the rest of your life in a professional five-star kitchen? I think you can hack it, Killian, I really do. You’re tough, there’s no doubt about it. It’ll take a lot of perseverance and hard work but I think you’ll get there. It’s not the talent I’m worried about.” He gave a small, reluctant sigh. “You know, Killian, personalities are quite infectious. Do you know what I mean by that? We think our characters are fixed – that we are who we are and that’s it. But it’s not true. We’re porous. We absorb the world around us. The company we keep, the people we look up to – eventually, it becomes us. You know, fine dining, it’s… it’s not a kind world. And if there’s anyone I’ve ever met that could benefit from a spot of kindness, it would probably be you.”
“I can hack it,” I said.
Mayle drummed the fingers of his left hand once along the tabletop.
“You’re a decent guy, Killian,” he said. “You’re very bright and you’re probably the most naturally talented young cook I’ve ever come across. But to get to the level of someone like Max Mann, there’ll be sacrifices. The long hours and low pay, I’m sure you’ll be fine with. The work is the easiest part. It’s the other sacrifices. If you want to be in the top one per cent… Well, it’s rather like serving on the front lines in a war. Nobody survives with their hearts in one piece. Believe me, I’ve been around. I’m not convinced it’s worth it. You might be surprised to hear this, but I could have been in that one per cent. I decided I didn’t want it. I know it’s not always obvious, but I’m very happy teaching. I enjoy it. And I like the fact I get to go home at night and spend time with my wife and daughter. We cook, me and my family. We’re happy. If I’d pursued all my youthful dreams, I’d be up there, executive chef of somewhere like King. But I’d have none of what I’ve now got, which may seem very dull and pedestrian to a hungry young man like you. But when you get to my age, believe me Killian, it’s everything.”
“I’m going to win the Young Saucier,” I said. “Did Ambrose tell you? I’m going to win the Young Saucier of the Year.”
He smiled, flatly, and picked up his glasses again, opening one of the arms and staring at the hinge. “He did tell me,” he said. “And I’m delighted for you. I couldn’t be more delighted. I’m delighted for me too. I never thought, in all my years, I’d watch one of my students accepting an award like that. It’ll be the proudest moment of my teaching career, it really will, when I accompany you to the ceremony. You’ve got that under your belt, no matter what you decide.”
“I want it,” I said. “I really do. It’s the only thing I’ve got. I don’t have anything else but this.”
He turned his telephone around and pushed it towards me.
“Very well,” he said. “In that case you should call Ambrose.”
I watched him flick through his notebook to find the number. My right foot tapped violently as I dialled. One ring, two rings, “Ambrose Rookwood.”
“Hello,” I said. “It’s Killian Lone. The apprentice. I –”
“Yes,” he said. “I’d like you to come and see me.”
“When?”
“Well…” He sounded rather insulted. “Now.”
16
I rushed through the machine, with its blue, white and steel shades and its pots, smells and blades, hoping that nobody would notice me. The chefs were as silent as the job demanded, and as focused. Lifting, chopping, boiling, peeling, never looking up unless necessary, never talking, only communicating – an essential distinction, as I was to discover. As I passed through, I thought I glimpsed something bizarre over by the fish station. A slightly overweight cook, working over lighted burners, who appeared to be naked from the waist up. Convinced I must have been mistaken, I looked away and, as I did I caught sight of her working with her usual intensity. She turned in my direction and, I swear, as soon as she saw it was me, she stopped what she was doing for just a moment, and stared.
Upstairs, outside Ambrose’s office, I tried to get comfortable on the springs that were straining beneath the papery leather of the aged chair, whilst watching the passing waitresses, who were arriving in preparation for service. They were famous, these women. Max was oft-quoted as saying he wanted his wait-staff to be “terrifyingly beautiful” and to achieve this effect he clothed them identically in skin-tight black dresses that ended high at the thigh. They wore their hair stretched back into ponytails, their eyeshadow black and heavy, their lips full, red and glistening under the restaurant’s smartly recessed spotlights. There had been grumbles about these uniforms by feminists in the Evening Standard, but as I sat there, I couldn’t make sense of their logic. These were the least subservient-looking waitresses I’d ever seen. They radiated a kind of alien power, taller than was human and almost insectoid, the sheer dark fabric like an exoskeleton, the eyes swollen huge in the inky kohl, the lips glowing a warning colour. Yes, they were terrifyingly beautiful, but to this young man, they were mostly terrifying.
“Sit down, sit down,” Ambrose said when I was finally summoned. As I approached his mahogany desk, I almost slipped on the worn rug that lay loose on the floorboards. I wondered, fleetingly, if it might be some sort of test for the apprentices who brought up his meals, and this, in turn, made me wonder what he’d ended up eating for lunch on the day that I disappeared.
“You’ve been admiring the parade,” he said as I sat. He didn’t pose it as a question but announced it as fact. The thing his eyebrows were doing made me wonder if I might be missing something about the waitresses: perhaps the feminists had a point after all. I smiled meekly in response and s
at forward in my chair. Ambrose was in a bow tie today, his red braces tight over one of his perfect white shirts. His ashtray was perilously full, a recently discarded butt still glowing orange at the edges. There were no paperbacks in this room, I noticed, or homely standard lamps or biscuit tins. In fact, the whole feel of this office was completely unlike that of his old business partner Robert Mayle. I was sure Ambrose felt just as comfortable in this space as Mayle did in his, but with its chandelier resembling a petrified spider’s web, its shelf of awards, its sexual etchings and its framed photos of the occupant himself with powerful businessmen (I recognised two from the newspapers as Robert Maxwell and Tiny Rowland), it wasn’t a room that was much concerned with making visitors feel safe.
He sat back and folded his hands beneath his chin, the red ruby in his ring dulled and waxy on his thumb.
“Following your dismissal on Monday,” he began, “another apprentice – that girl – finished your sauce.” The light slid across his thickly lacquered hair as he dipped his head to look down his nose at me. “It was very good indeed. Contemporary, imaginative, really very promising, for a cook your age.”
I lowered my head and bit my cheeks until the urge to smile faded.
“I heard about your incident with Chef Patrick. It is unfortunate, I have to say – your decision to leave so quickly. But I assume by your presence here now you that would like a second chance. Well, I have been informed as to what happened and I have to tell you, we simply do not accept that sort of behaviour here.”
As he’d said the word “behaviour”, he appeared disgusted, as if he could detect a faint odour of vomit in the air.
“You do not undermine your superiors. This isn’t some Derbyshire colliery. This is a two-Michelin-starred fine-dining establishment in the centre of one of the greatest cities in the world. We abide by certain rules here. We have a way of doing things that has operated since the time of Escoffier.”
He didn’t move, as he spoke. In fact, the only movement in the entire room was that of his jaw beneath his pale skin which, in the light that was coming through the sash window behind him, looked dry and withered, as if it had been hung for years in a forgotten smoke-house.
“One might feel, when one works in the brigade’s lower orders, that things aren’t fair. But if one excels, one very quickly comes to appreciate the absolute necessity of the way we work. A great many lesser kitchens may concern themselves with rights and wrongs and romantic notions of fair play and so on. But you won’t be surprised to learn that here at King we don’t regard ourselves as a lesser kitchen. Our goal is not merely filling stomachs and cash registers. We’re going to earn our third star when L'Inspecteur return this year. We have achieved this preeminent standard by eliminating all traces of this sort of thing from the kitchen. We’ve inhibited our own petty and irrelevant needs and wants in service of what we’re here for. The pursuit of perfection.”
A thin, paternal smile.
“L’amour du travail bien fait,” he said. “The love of perfect work. At King, this is our minimum requirement.”
“Yes,” I said. “I understand.”
“If you want to concern yourself with rights and wrongs may I suggest you join the social services where your needs will be richly served every moment you spend tramping around the sink estates of Lambeth and Wandsworth, attending to the needs of the illegitimate children of Negroes and the lesbians?”
He leaned forward and spoke in a hush.
“But we know better than that, don’t we, Killian?” he said. “So this is your opportunity to tell me. Are you with us? Or the lesbians?”
“I’m with you, sir,” I said.
His smile dropped and all warmth left the room.
“Good,” he said. “Then let’s have you back in tomorrow, first thing.”
“Tomorrow?” I said. “It’s my aunty’s funeral tomorrow, sir. In the morning.”
His expression didn’t alter. It was as if I hadn’t said anything at all.
“I’ll let Chef Max know to expect you at seven a.m. sharp.”
17
A meaty arm blocked my exit through the corridor.
“No, it’s okay,” I told its owner. “I’ve just seen Ambrose.”
He looked at my shoes, at their ragged laces and scuffs and the place where the sole had split from the leather. When his head raised up again, there was that leering, tonguey smile on his tiny pink mouth.
“He said I can start again tomorrow,” I told him. “He said it was fine.”
“We don’t do second chances here, pal,” he said. “This isn’t Space Invaders. You don’t get three lives.”
“But he said because of the–”
His smell was still there.
“Your award? Yeah, I know about that,” said Patrick. “Doesn’t mean shit in here. Mate, you’re not coming back in my kitchen and that’s that.”
Salami.
“No, my sauce. I think that’s why. He liked my sauce. He said it was imaginative and contemporary and I think, well, I could make it for you if you like, I think you’ll – ”
He scowled me into silence.
“No one comes back. Once you’ve walked, you’ve walked.”
“But you–”
He spoke over me, “I’ll be watching that door tomorrow and if I see you in it, I’ll push you right back out of it, into the fucking road, do you understand me?”
A shape filled the doorway at the end of the corridor. I stared over Patrick’s arm, which was still preventing me from moving. There was light and noise from the kitchen and this great black silhouette. I knew it. I knew the curve of the skull. I knew the line of the neck.
“Do you understand me?” said Patrick, with increasing insistence. “Don’t worry about what Ambrose said. You’re not coming in tomorrow. You’ve gone. You walked. You’ve lost.”
It was him! How could he have been present in the building without me sensing it? How could the ceiling not grow taller or the light burn brighter or the walls not bend out with the force of his extraordinary presence? How could the laws of nature treat him as if he was human, when he was Chef Max Mann?
He turned and he walked towards us. It would be fine, now, all this misunderstanding. Everything would go back to normal.
“Patrick?” he said.
And he was there, just there, talking to Patrick about a cod delivery. So close that I felt I could lick his breath right out of the air. I was shocked at how lifelike he looked. Exactly the same as he did on television, except somehow more compact and concentrated; drawn in startling detail. He had his name stitched onto the chest of his whites and the effect, perhaps perverse, was to imply humility; as if anyone needed to be told. His eyes appeared to have been planted right at the sides of his head, as if keeping out of the way of the great oaken nose that sprouted down the centre of his face, this magnificent organ that gave the impression of having such a history of extraordinary scents drawn up it that it had reacted by bolstering itself with layers of regrowth like new skin on a worn heel. As large as his eyes seemed to be, they had no particularly distinguishable colour; they just seemed watery, glassy and in a vaguely fishlike state of constantly searching for something; on the hunt for danger in the tiniest of details. His mouth was small, thin, and vertical creases lined both of his lips, as if he’d spent too many years sucking everything in his path onto that world-famous palate.
But there was one discomfiting way in which his real image varied from his famous one – the bags beneath his eyes, so leaden and swollen it was as if they were struggling to contain all the shadows that were seeping out of him. Taken in combination with his grey stubble and cropped hair, they gave his presence a crackle of dark instability that I wasn’t expecting. Strangely, however, this didn’t alter the central fact of Chef Max Mann. He seemed to have achieved that ultimate level of self-confidence in which every look, thought and movement is possessed of a perfect singularity of intent. There was no doubt, question or confusion in anything h
e did and that, of course, is as rare a quality in a man as it is attractive.
I couldn’t suppress the loony grin that spread across my face. It didn’t matter. I was with him now.
“I’m so pleased to meet you, Chef,” I said, when they had finished.
He addressed Patrick.
“Who’s that?” he said.
“An ex-apprentice,” said Patrick. “He was here for about half an hour before service last week.”
“Half an hour?” said Max.
“Forty minutes, tops. Then he walked.”
Max grinned.
“A record!” he said.
“But I didn’t walk,” I said, being sure to smile. “That’s okay, though. It doesn’t matter. Ambrose said I can have another go. I can come in tomorrow, he said – ” Max’s face darkened. “He said I could come back.”
Max blinked. He looked at me. He blinked again.
“Come back?”
“Not because of my award, because of the Young Saucier which I think you already know I’m going to win, it’s because of the sauce that he tasted and I wanted you to know that I’m a hard worker and that you’ll be pleased with me.” My jaw was shaking. “I’m not disloyal. I’m probably the most loyal cook you’ll ever work with, I can absolutely promise you that, Chef, all my life I have prided myself on being loyal and I’ve always wanted to be a cook, I’ve always felt most at home in a kitchen, actually I feel more at home in a kitchen than anywhere else and if there’s one thing I am more than anything it’s obedient, I’ve been training myself to be obedient all my life, Chef, and I know we’ll work well together and I know, it’s funny to say, but I’ve always thought we’re a bit the same, you and me – ”
