by Will Storr
I woke up twelve hours later in the place where I’d dropped off, on the bathroom floor. The alarm was sounding down the corridor in the bedroom.
I knew, as I scrubbed my skin in a madly steaming shower, that if I was to get this right, I had to think like a grown-up; separate the personal from the professional. This was business. Max had been as good as his promise: he had not dismissed me, given up on me, even when I had erred. Surely I had proved myself. I had survived the worst of his apprentice tests. I had done enough now. I had played their game and passed it. Surely I would be offered a job as full-time ouvrier.
Leaving the house for work, I tried not to notice what I was doing as I pushed the small, quietly dying leaf deep into my back pocket.
* * *
As I worked at my basil that morning, I tried to concentrate, but found it impossible to expel Kathryn from my mind. I wondered how it would look to her if, later on that day, I was told I hadn’t proved worthy of a paid position in this kitchen. What would she think of me then? Would she think of me then?
I kept my eye on the station at which Ambrose’s lunch was usually prepared at eleven thirty each day. The moment I saw Malcolm bending into the fridge beneath it, I walked purposefully up to him.
“Change of plan,” I said. “Ambrose wants me to do his lunch today.”
For all Malcolm’s youth, he still managed to look five years younger than he actually was, with his silky blond hair on his upper lip and jaws.
“Says who?”
“Says Patrick,” I said.
“Bollocks.” He stood for a moment, holding a full steel milk jug. “Really?”
“You’ll probably get a go tomorrow,” I shrugged.
He hesitated.
“I don’t think so.”
What would Mr Mayle say if I was dismissed? What about Mark House? My mum? I grabbed Malcolm’s wrist, circling its skin with my thumb and forefinger.
“What are…?” said Malcolm, looking down, half irritated, half confused. I squeezed.
Flashes. Cigarette smoke, menthol. Steam.
“Argh!”
“Not today,” I said.
Just like your father.
“Get off!”
I squeezed it harder, pushing my nails in.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
When it comes, when it happens, you have to be strong enough to be good.
I gave Malcolm’s arm a final jerk. His milk jug dropped, clanged on the tiles and bounced once, its contents flying from its mouth in a small eruption of white and wet.
“Fuck!” he said. “You fuckin’ freak.” He rubbed at his skin. “That hurt.”
“Sorry, Malcolm, it’s just what I’ve been told.” I nodded towards my mise-en-place. “Could you give us a hand with that basil?”
As he loped off, I reached into the back of the fridge for my supplies. With them all laid before me, it was with a sense of sudden vertigo that I realised that everything depended on these modest ingredients. Everything, that onion. Everything, that bottle of sauce. Everything, that half-spent, crusty-lidded tube of tomato purée. I couldn’t risk it. I had to use the herb in my sauce, just to make sure. I had to. It was obvious.
And then, as I began to chop, it wasn’t.
I could feel her around me. There was Dorothy, as I sweated off the onions and I added the port and the tomatoes and everything else. There was Dorothy, as I felt for the herb that I had put into my pocket that morning. There was Dorothy, as I hesitated over the pan and the steel and the fire. There was Dorothy as I left the herb undisturbed and decided, finally, to be good.
33
“Oh,” said Ambrose when I arrived with his heavy silver tray. “No Malcolm?”
“To be honest,” I said, being careful not to slip on the loose, frayed rug. “It’s my last day. I just wanted to see how you thought I’d got on.”
Ambrose was leaning forward, holding a pair of half-moon spectacles between his thumb and forefinger.
“Oh, of course. Silly me,” he said. “How could I forget that it’s you who’s in charge of what I eat for my lunch?”
I noticed the size of his desk. There were little carved elephant heads on its corners and its feet were fat and swollen like an old woman’s ankles. I lowered the tray slowly and removed the cloche. Ambrose’s eyes fell disappointedly to his lunch. He sighed and put his glasses down beside it.
“Reports on your stage have been less than satisfactory,” he said. “I’m told there’s a certain sloppiness. Tangerine pips left in pies and so on. That’s not the end of the world in itself.” He shrugged. “Could be nerves, youth… Sloppiness can sometimes be trained out of a cook your age. But, overall, Max describes you as mediocre.”
“I’m not mediocre,” I said, quietly.
“You did very well to win the Young Saucier and, I have to say, when you manage to make it properly, this sauce is good. But – ” His face took on a cold seriousness. “Chef Max tells me that there are certain questions as to its provenance.”
“What?” I said.
“He says you purloined the recipe. Stole it.”
“But I came up with this, at my aunt’s house,” I said, breathing heavily.
Ambrose gave an impatient shake of the head.
“If your thieving of the recipe wasn’t enough of a mark against your name, Max tells me you have a poor palate. Palate, I’m afraid, is like character. It’s just one of those things you’re born with. You either have it or you don’t and, it must be said, it would be highly unusual for a chap like you to have the sort of refined sensibilities that we insist upon here at King. Someone like you can have a very nice career in hotels, golf resorts, Trusthouse Fortes, that sort of thing. So,” he glanced again at his cooling plate. “Cheer up and Godspeed. And by the way, if there are any reports in the Evening Standard that arouse our suspicions over the next six months, we’ll know exactly where to direct our solicitors.”
Over the endless moments during which Ambrose had been speaking, the two images of Max that I held in my head finally corresponded. Everything Kathryn had said about him was true. And, worse than that, he hated me. Hated me. Of course he did. An ominous weight gathered in my face. I remembered that afternoon at Sports Day, when Mark House pinned me to the floor and said what he had said about the person I’d loved. I could feel it again, the swelling in my throat. The choking.
“So I’m afraid that’s that,” said Ambrose.
I touched the corner of my eye. My finger came back wet.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded.
“Well, there’s no use standing there looking sorry for yourself, I’m afraid,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do.”
Max hated me. Of course he did.
“It’s for the best, really. Stealing recipes, calling them your own. It’s the kind of professional dishonesty that’s usually an indicator of deeper troubles. Working at this level would only make them worse. Now go on, then. That’s right. Goodbye.”
I couldn’t speak. I turned to leave.
“Don’t think me cruel,” he said. “It’s just this business we’re in. You understand, we can’t have B-players like you and that girl at a place like King.”
I stopped, midway down the carpet.
“What – Kathryn?” I said. “But she was good. You gave her a job.”
“Her priorities were all wrong,” he said, adding with a mutter, “Constantly blithering on about her bloody mother.”
He picked up his knife and fork. I walked back to his desk and leaned over it to retrieve his plate.
“What are you doing?”
“Sorry, Ambrose,” I said. “I’m really very sorry. I forgot to season your sauce.”
He shrugged, his expression drenching me in contempt.
I could see my hand shaking as I placed the cloche back over his food. I ran carefully with the tray back to the kitchen. At the stove, I picked out the oval of fillet steak with my fingers and put it aside, before spooning a
s much of the sauce as possible back into a pan.
Unable to bare it any longer, I grabbed for a paring knife, pulled up my sleeve and enjoyed the tender resistance of my skin in the moments before it split. But it was too late to stop what was coming. I hadn’t cried for so long and as I stood there, with the kitchen dancing obliviously behind me, a warm snake-head of wet made its tentative way down my left cheek as generous reserves of tears gathered beneath both eyes. I continued working, adding a splash more port, half a teaspoon of purée and subtle doses of all the necessary herbs, spices and condiments in order to inflate it back to its almost-cooked state so I could bring it all back down again to the point where its disparate flavours perfectly coincided.
I reached into my back pocket for the herb and tore off the tiniest crumb, flicking it from the pad of my thumb into the pan. It was greedily taken under and, in the strange state that had overcome me, I could almost detect something about the sauce change. My vision had taken on a zoomed-in quality: I could see the entire landscape of the sauce, the cool wet peaks and the hot valleys of its shifting topography. Under the flat white kitchen light it took on an unusual luminous quality. Eddies of steam appeared to arrange themselves as gaping mouths.
As I worked, my mind rebelled. Dorothy. That was it, now. I had defied her. It was done. Clearly I was not the good boy that she had believed in. But probably, you know, she was being over-protective. I was the grown-up now. Dor was mine. These herbs were mine. I would use them just this once, just to nudge me past this difficulty. They would secure me the job, which should have been mine anyway. Then, somehow, I could act to get Kathryn rehired. I would use the herbs only to do what should have been done in the first place. They would be a correction, a making-good. Yes, an act of justice.
Once the sauce was ready, I splashed water on my face to hide my crying and mounted the steps for what I realised might well be the last time.
“Here,” I said to Le Patron on my return. “Sorry about that. All done now. Just perfect.”
I turned to leave and, over my shoulder, said, “Goodbye, then. Thanks for giving me a go.”
Ambrose peered irritably down at his plate. “Fine. Fine. Yes. Okay.” He waved me away.
I closed the door behind me and waited at the top of the stairs; the music of the kitchen building exquisitely to its lunchtime crescendo without me coming from below. Nothing. I began walking down and stopped on the third step. I thought I had heard some chinking or knocking or… no.
Back at my station, I picked up my chopping board and took it to the corner sink with the pans where, despondently, I began blasting them with the hose. I thought, again, about West Kent. I wondered whether Kathryn would ever let me speak to her and, even if I could convince her of my innocence, whether she’d want to see me when I was nothing more than another shit student in a shit town in shit England.
With the noise of the water, I have no idea how I became aware that someone had walked up behind me.
“Ambrose?” I said, as I turned.
On the wall behind him was a large blue electric fly-killer. Its dense blue light fell over his neck and shoulders in a humming coating of ghostly material. Long shadows were thrown beneath his eyes, nose and chin. His parting had collapsed over his forehead. His hands hung limp by his sides, his mouth half open, his jaw moving slightly as if trembling. His chest rose and fell beneath his shirt.
“How did you make that sauce?” he said eventually.
I shrugged and glanced over at the station where I’d prepared it, as if to wake the snoozing memory.
“Just the usual way,” I said. “Port, tomatoes, paprika, Worcester, fennel. I didn’t get the seasoning quite right the last two times I made it for you. Actually, the last time, Max made me serve it to you ten minutes before it was ready so it was a bit sloppy.”
Amrbose glanced at his shoes and frowned. The insect-killer flickered and buzzed as it sent its killing charge into a stray fly.
“Did he really?”
“Was it okay?” I asked. “Your lunch?”
All the life inside him was concentrated in his eyes. They pulsed with electricity and greed and possibility. But he didn’t say anything at all. He just stood there in his red braces and his priceless white shirt. He just stood there by the sink and stared at me.
34
Up in Ambrose’s office, there was only the plate. I mean, there was everything else, of course – the obscene pictures, the stentorian desk, the mob of awards on the shelf – but the moment I walked through the door, my eyes focused exclusively on that black square of fine bone china. All that was left of his lunch was a faint ghostly brown hardness painted onto the plate’s surface with finger smears, and a steak rind that had been sucked so clean it seemed stripped naked, lying prone and trembling and ravished on the rim.
Ambrose was in silhouette, standing by the window.
“Talk me through this sauce again,” he said.
His hands were behind his back and his gaze was cast towards the roofs of central London. His legs, meanwhile, were jiggling.
“It’s just a case of treating the ingredients correctly,” I said. “Not just bunging them in at a rough temperature. Sauces, it’s more like pastry cooking. You need to be absolutely precise about your quantities, timings and temperatures. You have to know at exactly what level of heat each ingredient will yield its absolute best flavour – that’s the secret. It’s like science.” I paused, worried that I was overcooking it a bit myself. “But I have practised a lot with that sauce, obviously. It’s mostly practice.”
Ambrose turned towards me, rubbing the tip of his tongue repeatedly over his lower lip, as if in an attempt to dig out some leftover flavour from beneath the surface of his skin. As he spoke, he kept losing control of his eyes, which would bounce between me and the plate before he could reassert his will and point them back out towards the window.
“And you could make it again, just like that?” he said. “You could do it again and again and again? It’s consistency that marks the professional, you know. My chief concern is that you’ve made this for me two or three times now and it’s ranged from very good to horrible… and now…”
“Of course,” I said. “Of course I could. This sauce… ” I shrugged “… this is nothing, really.”
He glanced at his plate and blinked three times in quick succession. I noticed he had begun moving his lips almost invisibly against each other, like a man in the early stages of possession.
“Well, let’s see, shall we?” he said eventually. “Let’s go downstairs and make another. Come on, we’ll do it together.”
“Sure. Fine.”
In the four seconds it took me to walk to the door I must have imagined and rejected at least half a dozen ways of extracting myself from this potentially disastrous situation.
“Damn,” I said, stopping at the base of the stairs. I could see the shapes through the open kitchen door: the churn of dogs moving this way and that; the dance that accompanies the song. “I’ve used the last of the Worcester sauce. It’s not a standard kitchen supply – I brought it in especially and it’s all gone. I’ll dash out and pick some up. I’ll give you a knock when I’m back.”
Ambrose moved to speak, his face darkening with questions.
“I just have to go to Mace,” I smiled. “You’re not going to come with me to Mace?”
“No,” he said, snapping out of it. He waved me off with a fey flick of the hand. “Yes, you go.”
I waited in a corner of Stephen Mews until I was sure he’d be back in his office, before sliding back through the kitchen to begin the sauce without him. It was all bubbling heartily, just a minute or so away from being at that quiltish consistency – so essential for a good sauce – that summons up the sense memories of being cosseted and caressed and soothed on cold evenings. I reached into my pocket for the leaf.
“Fuck it,” I muttered.
I dropped in a double quantity, gave it a stir, poured the lot into a porcelain r
amekin and finished it off with a couple of pinches of freshly ground black pepper. Perfect.
“I thought we were going to do that together?” said Ambrose when I walked into his office with my fragrant gift.
I held it forward, giving the scent a chance to take him.
“Have a taste,” I said. “See what you think.”
There was something of the obedient schoolboy about how perfectly he was sitting upright. I could see him as a nine-year-old, in his cap and shorts and mittens. He took a spoonful of the sauce and sniffed it. Shadows moved across the ceiling, cast by the traffic below. He moved in his seat. Silently, he swallowed another spoonful. Then another. He groaned.
“Is it okay?”
He looked as if he was going to cry with pleasure.
“I’m not entirely convinced it’s the same as the last one,” he began. “It’s different somehow.”
“It is the same,” I said. “It’s exactly the same.”
He smiled again and moved his hand distractedly towards his crotch.
“Perhaps you’ll give me five minutes whilst I finish some things. Then we can do it again. I’m just curious to know how you’ve made this, that’s all. I’m sure you understand. My friend at the Young Saucier did tell me your concoction was good, but…” a greasy, grey toothed smile lashed out across his face. “You’ll indulge a curious old gourmand?”
I couldn’t understand it. I felt a sudden heat in my throat.
“You know, I’ve made this for you four times, Ambrose,” I said. “Either you like it or you don’t.”
He looked up at me, his eyes lizardy and fierce.
“What I mean is,” I said, “I don’t want to be rude, but I don’t work for you any more. If you give me a job, I’ll make this sauce for you as often as you like. You can serve it on the menu. It’s all yours. You can have it. I’m bored of it anyway. I’ve got much better sauces than this.”
His antique wooden chair squealed as he crossed his legs. He glanced into the ramekin and pulled it just a little way towards him.
“You’ll need to work on your consistency.”
