by Alba Arikha
Later on that day I heard him being interviewed on Radio 4. He had a soft French accent and a gravelly voice, and when he spoke it was as if colours and textures floated from his lips, and it made me want to kiss him. He was gravitas and sensuality in one. I wondered whether the looks would match the words.
Now I was in the kitchen, adding last-minute touches to a gratin of aubergine and chèvre, and the man of colours and textures was about to arrive. I could hear the doorbell ring and guests coming in. I found that I was nervous, as if I too were a friend about to be introduced to the guest of honour, not the hired help with fingers coated in crushed garlic and goat’s cheese. Because there were no two ways about it: by cooking for others I had become hired help. Until now I hadn’t given it a thought. After finishing Oxford, I had abandoned academia in favour of gastronomy. It had been an agonizing decision, but I had done it. I had left my job as an English teacher and returned the advance I had been given on a book about the Victorian novelist George Moore, which I had barely started writing. I never regretted my decision. The world of food, just as it had for my mother, provided me with a profound happiness. Except that this particular evening I felt a tinge of self-consciousness – or perhaps was it frustration? – because I would have rather been mingling with Aziz Lascar, just for a few minutes, enough time to meet him and exchange a few words with him. Perhaps even tell him that I had always loved his work.
Or perhaps not, I grumbled, as the leftover contents of my chocolate pudding dropped on the floor and all over my white apron.
At the same moment, Valerie came into the kitchen looking frazzled, because the guest of honour was very late and everyone was getting hungry, and she asked if I could swiftly come up with something small to feed them in the mean time – “I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she blurted out before running off again, leaving me cursing her under my breath – “No, I won’t figure it out” – and then the doorbell rang again, and by the various oohs and aahs that followed I could tell it was him.
*
Since swapping Victorian novels for osso bucco, I had barely stopped working. A three-month stint in a Covent Garden restaurant as a sous-chef led to more jobs in other restaurants. Then, a friend asked me to cook for her engagement party. It was an unexpected success. Word of mouth spread, and my future as a private chef was sealed, so much so that I was able to give up my restaurant shifts and concentrate fully on private work. I made up my own recipes. I was paid to cook them for strangers and a small group of fans which grew swiftly in size and took me to unlikely and exciting places.
I spent time on a cruise ship and in imposing homes. I cooked a seated lunch for the family members of a polygamous African dictator. I became a favourite of a Hollywood film director who took me with him on set, and with whom I had a brief affair. I cooked for yummy mummies and their husbands, for Italian aristocrats and indolent children, for vegetarians, vegans and halal eaters, in a retirement home and a French chateau. My mind was filled with recipes. Saltimbocca alla romana. Pan-fried scallops with roasted squash. Double-baked cheese and courgette soufflé. Paupiette of monkfish and gratin dauphinois. Chocolate fondant and strawberry coulis. Increasing my clientele. Scouring corner shops and farmers’ markets. Sourcing fresh vegetables and organic ingredients. The tenderest meat. The ripest tomato. Perfecting my craft. I was enveloped in a swathe of gustatory experiments and delights, and had little space for anything else. If sometimes I felt lonely, I put it aside, as if loneliness, like one of my dishes, was something that could be sampled and assessed at a later time.
Now I was thirty-four and unmarried. I had had a fair share of men in my life, but aside from a violinist, Alexander, with whom I had lived in my early twenties, there was no one special. A few brief affairs, but not love. I blamed it mostly on the nature of my work: I never had time. When I did, I saw family and friends and sometimes accompanied them on holiday, where I would inevitably end up cooking for them. If I occasionally minded it, I kept it to myself. Then, one by one, my friends got married or had children. I became godmother several times, possibly too many. Ben seldom visited, and my mother threatened to sink into a depression. “I can’t stand Ben being away from us, when he was always so present, such a beam of light,” she said, as if she had entirely forgotten what had happened during Ben’s childhood.
And that was when my father died.
My brother came to live with me for a short while. I was worried he might relapse into a spiral of substance abuse and the modus operandi of his adolescence. We cried and laughed and talked about our father, our childhood. Their relationship had always been fraught. “But we made up. We made our peace. We reached our Higher Power,” Ben said wistfully. “If we hadn’t – man, I wouldn’t have been able to speak to him again. He had been such a prick. So was I, I guess… But we bonded, and that was awesome.” He paused. “It all started after we met up for breakfast that time, after the shit hit the fan, with Mum and Walter. Remember?”
“Of course I do.”
Ben and I had gone to a coffee shop in Notting Hill, where we had had our first meaningful conversation in years. He had admitted to having had suspicions about Walter the entire time. “All I know is that I don’t want to see Mum again,” he had said, in his fifteen-year-old drawl. “Or that little pisshead Walter. I always knew he had the hots for her. Not when I was small, but later. I saw them kiss once, in the upstairs bedroom. Mum kept telling me I was inventing things, but I’m no moron. I know what I saw.”
I had been taken aback by his confession, and we had discussed it for a long time. I couldn’t tell what had most struck me: the fact that he knew, or the clarity of his words. “The question is why?” Ben kept repeating. In the end, we had both come to the conclusion that we had no firm answer.
It would be fifteen years before we discussed it again, on our way back from my father’s funeral. My brother admitted that he had seen Walter, “standing alone and looking older”, but had refused to speak to him. “I probably should have,” he said, “but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“Maybe next time.” I ventured.
“I don’t think there’ll be a next time.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had been touch with Walter. He was remarried, had twin girls. We had met up a few times. Somehow I had found it easier to forgive him: he had been weak, distraught – which my mother was not.
“So why do you think she did it?” I asked him instead. Ben had always been defensive about my mother, and it was unlikely that had changed.
“Do you think she really did love Walter? Or was she trying to get back at Dad?”
“I dunno… I think she was lonely and just wanted sex, that’s all. She probably wasn’t getting much of it with Dad in the end.”
“I never thought of it that way… yuck.”
We both laughed.
The anger of Ben’s youth had given way to a new softness, a strong desire to, as he put it, “do good for the world”. If his banter sometimes veered towards the earnest, and if his jargon was peppered with American lingo, I didn’t mind. He hadn’t touched alcohol in five years and “without those AA meetings I’d be fucked”, he admitted. His only vice was cigarettes and the occasional joint. And even though his acting career hadn’t turned out as planned, he was convinced it wouldn’t be long before his talent was recognized. “I know I’m good. And at least my agent’s getting me auditions. Everything’s going to be cool,” he said, the morning of his departure. We were standing at the entrance to Heathrow’s security. We had just eaten a sandwich in a noisy café. A family of stroppy teenagers had argued in front of us. It had made Ben smile. “To think that was me once,” he remarked. “And that those days are long gone. Thank fuck for that.”
I hugged him hard, my tall and handsome brother. “One thing Mum and Dad have always been happy about is that we get along,” I told him.
“I know,” he said
. He had seen my mother. She had taken my father’s death very badly. I was due to visit her that day. Ben was worried about her. “You’ve got to be patient and nice to her,” he said. “Don’t freak out on her. Not this time.”
“Of course not. ’
“Remember. The Walter thing was about loneliness. Loss. All of it. Forgive her.”
“I already have,” I said, nearly believing it.
“See ya!” He walked away. I saw him queuing at security, then he was gone. There, then gone.
Unlike my father, I was going to see Ben again. But the memory of his presence moments before was nearly as painful as the death of my father who would never return: I could have hugged the sliver of space where Ben had just stood and still have felt him. I didn’t want him to leave.
I didn’t want to be alone with that sliver.
On my way back home, I suddenly remembered something else.
It was 1987. My parents had rented a house in the Pyrenees. Ben had finagled his way out of it. So we had gone the three of us. It rained the whole time, and I was lonely. I had wanted my brother to come with us. I liked knowing he was around, even if he was being intolerable. But he wasn’t there, and I was the one who ended up behaving uncharacteristically tetchily.
The night before our departure, my mother had switched on the television. “Maybe there’ll be something good on,” she had said. “Like an old French film or something.”
She flicked through the channels: the evening news, a cartoon, an advertisement for soap, a film showing a man and a woman dressed in Victorian garb. “Stop!” said my father. “Wait!”
“Why?” she asked.
He didn’t need to answer, because we saw it for ourselves. The film was L’Arrivée du mendiant, and the woman was none other than Lucie. She was wearing a white dress and speaking animatedly to a handsome actor, the one I recognized from the poster in Walter’s shop. It was night-time, and the actors were standing outside, against the backdrop of an illuminated castle. Lucie’s voice sounded different, lower than I remembered. My French was not good enough to understand everything she said, but that hardly mattered. What mattered was that she was there, alive and well, laughing in the full moon.
We watched the film for a short while, and then I suddenly couldn’t take it any more. “Turn it off! I don’t want to hear her voice – please turn it off!”
My parents looked at each other, then at me. “Of course, darling,” said my mother gently. “We understand.”
But understanding was not what I was looking for. I wanted to see Lucie beside me, sitting in a chair. I wanted to grab her from the television screen and speak to her. Thank her for saving my brother. Touch her, hug her. Her features, which had become indistinct with time, had just been resurrected. It was a painful sensation.
“Do you want to watch something else?” my mother had asked demurely.
“No. I want to go to bed.”
I rushed upstairs to my small bedroom. I changed into my nightgown, slid beneath the cold sheets and burst into tears. Something had been unleashed inside me, but for the first time in my adolescent life I couldn’t tell whether it had all been made worse or better.
*
I cut down my work schedule to four days a week from six. And, for the first time, I started thinking about children. Until now, broodiness hadn’t caught up with me. A combination of family history and my work schedule had ensured motherhood wasn’t on my radar. But even if I had given it some thought, the reality was that becoming a mother frightened me. The fear that I might reproduce the same scenario I had watched unfold at home was too much of a gamble.
But the death of my father made me aware of my own mortality. I wanted something of him to be transmitted to the next generation, and unless I overcame my fears that would never happen.
I had to stop being so wary. So worried about being infected by the virus of my own history. I wasn’t like my mother or father. I had no desire to emulate them in any way. I was my own person with my own quirks and patterns and desires. I needed to be braver. It didn’t follow that because my mother had destroyed our family unit I would too. On the contrary: I would do everything I could to preserve it. Wasn’t that the way it worked? Ensuring that the pattern would not repeat itself?
I had recently read a book in which the main character mentioned that everything in life was a rehearsal for something later. I couldn’t tell where I stood. Still in rehearsal, or had I reached the later stage? And if so, what stage was it?
Still in rehearsal, I decided, as Aziz Lascar walked into Valerie’s kitchen. He was on his way out of the loo and had taken the wrong turn. “This house is too big for dyslexic people,” he grinned. “Which way is the dining room?” I pointed him in the right direction. He looked at me, and I hoped he wouldn’t notice my stained apron – then again, how could he not? It was covered in chocolate.
He smiled and introduced himself. “I love your work,” I gushed, then wished I hadn’t.
“Thank you,” he smiled again. “What’s for supper?”
He was short, shorter than me. His hair was dark, streaked with grey. His eyes had flecks of green, the colour of moss. His face was strong. Not handsome, but seductive. Sexy. There was something slightly coarse and earthy about his chiselled features that reminded me of waves crashing onto rocks. He was older than I thought. Then I remembered that he was ten years older than me. I had looked him up. He had no idea how much I knew about him. It was embarrassing, really.
I listed the menu. “Aubergine-and-goat’s-cheese gratin. Salt-baked sea bass with sweet-potato mash and grilled fennel. Chocolate fondant for pudding. See my apron for details,” I added, pointing at the smudge.
He smiled. “Sounds delicious. Including the apron,” he added.
We began to talk. He told me about his Algerian mother, who was a great cook. When I asked him how come his English was so good, he explained that he had moved to London fifteen years ago and did not intend to return to Paris. He had a daughter here, he said, who lived in Kensington with her mother. They were no longer together, he added, as if he wanted me to know.
“How old is she?”
“Eleven. Stéphanie.”
I wanted to pry further, but didn’t dare. He asked me about my background and how I had become a chef. We discussed his upcoming exhibition, which featured droplets of water and butterfly chrysalides, as well as a series of people seen through windows. “It’s the title of the show,” Aziz said. “Behind Windows. I use a special technique, so everything looks like it’s floating in space. I love that effect.”
He added that his work featured people, but also what they leave behind. “The interaction of memory, time, forgotten objects, nature.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s very interesting.” I stopped myself from elaborating further.
Ever since that afternoon at the beach, when my mother and I had stood on the pebbly shore waiting for the lifeguards to find Lucie, I observed nature differently, searching for ancient clues in the quiet of its beauty, but also in the untamed bosom of the natural world. In a furious wind. In the orange glow of a harvest moon.
After my father left the house, the search spread beyond ancient landscapes to synchronicity: the connection between occurrences. Messages waiting to be deciphered. I paid exaggerated attention to coincidences, to dreams and unexpected encounters. As a child, the outside world had seemed tantalizingly larger than my inner one. I longed to understand its secrets, but an invisible barrier restricted my movements. After Lucie died, that barrier crumbled, as did its protective layer, and pain altered the world as I knew it. I understood that in order to move forward I had to set my own parameters. But I was not going to share those thoughts with Aziz Lascar. So all I ventured was that I was interested in why and how things happen.
“Like chance encounters?” He smiled. “Come to my opening tomorrow evening,
” he added. “And come to the dinner too. We can discuss it further.”
“I’d love to,” I answered, trying to keep my voice steady. “I heard you on the radio this morning,” I added. “Describing the show. It sounds great.”
Then I suddenly remembered: Ailis, my father’s last girlfriend, and probably his greatest love since my mother, owned a photograph of his. We had even discussed it when I had gone to visit her. How could I have forgotten? A portrait of a couple somewhere in South America, holding hands in a café.
I mentioned it to Aziz. “I don’t know Ailis. But Leon Karalis was your father? I loved the man, he was a great director. I wish I had met him.”
My eyes welled with unexpected tears. Why? I barely knew Aziz, and it was hardly the first time since his death that my father’s name had been invoked with love. And yet, the connection reverberated somewhere inside me.
Then Valerie walked in. “Az? Oh, there you are. Hannah, is everything all right?”
“Yes, sure, we were talking. Let me know when you’re ready for the first course.”
“We’ve been ready for a while,” she stated.
“You should have told me—”
“It’s my fault,” Aziz interrupted, placing his hand on Valerie’s shoulder. “Entirely my fault for distracting her. We were talking about her father.”
“He was a good director,” said Valerie. “And his daughter’s a good chef.” She smiled at both of us – a coy smile. His to her was colder.
