Choral Society

by Prue Leith

  ‘So you are having an affair with the American?’ His eyes were level and his voice flat.

  ‘No, he’s back in the States.’

  Voice harder now, Nelson said, ‘But you did have an affair with him?’

  Rebecca met his stare and nodded. ‘A short fling, yes.’

  ‘And before that? Your daughter implied there was more than one bee round the honeypot.’

  At any other time Rebecca would have liked the metaphor. Her fantasies frequently involved several men, all desperate for her, but right now she was having a really hard time under Nelson’s interrogation. She’d told herself she’d be honest with him but she longed not to be. He was such a great guy and she didn’t want to hurt him. And then, what good would the truth do? It could only make him think less of her.

  They were both silent, Rebecca nervous of what her confession might unleash. She watched the emotions come and go in quick succession on Nelson’s face: blank amazement, bewilderment, disbelief, hurt.

  He shook his head as if to clear it. ‘Does this mean you have been screwing around all the time we’ve—’

  ‘No, no, it doesn’t.’ Rebecca reached for his hand but he withdrew it. He put his knife and fork down and sat back in his chair. ‘In fact, I was faithful until a few weeks ago. Until after we started to sing the Messiah—’

  ‘I don’t want dates and details, please.’

  ‘OK,’ she said. Then, ‘I’m sorry, Nelson.’

  He pushed his pie away from him and took a large gulp of his beer. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  ‘Actually I do want details. I need to know the score.’

  Rebecca looked at him, her eyes full of tears. ‘Oh Nelson, you are such a lovely guy. Have you not slept with anyone else in the whole year, no, more than a year?’

  He looked stonily at her. ‘No, I have not. So. Who else have I been sharing you with?’

  Rebecca did not answer, but sat looking at the table, undecided whether to answer truthfully, lie, or get indignant about being questioned. She decided to duck the question.

  ‘But Nelson, you are not in love with me either, are you? If you were, you’d want to marry me. Be with me all the time, all that.’

  Rebecca saw Nelson’s face darken in anger. He crumpled his napkin in his hand and banged his fist, not hard but with his hand clenched so that the veins stood out along the back of it, on the table.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Nelson, ‘you don’t have to be head over heels in love with your woman to be pissed off that she’s sleeping around, do you?’

  She closed her eyes for a second. Stay silent. Don’t throw petrol on the flames. Nelson did not speak either for a minute or so. When he did, his voice was steely.

  ‘OK, just give it to me straight. Who’s been in your bed, or you in his?’

  ‘Nelson, I will tell you if you really want to know. But do you really want chapter and verse? Won’t it do to say that for the last few weeks or so I have been somehow open to offers.’

  ‘Jesus! Open to offers! Great!’

  ‘I don’t know how to express it other than that. For ages after we started going together it just wouldn’t have occurred to me to go with anyone else. I didn’t want to. I thought of little else but you. But now it’s somehow different, Nelson. We’ve slowed down and I’m back noticing other men.’ Rebecca rolled her ring round and round her finger, her eyes on her hands. She looked up and into his eyes. ‘Being faithful shouldn’t be a sacrifice, an effort of will, should it?’

  Nelson sat back in his chair, visibly deflating. ‘No, if you have to try, it’s not worth it. I suppose I just got in a bit deeper than I meant to. Male pride and jealousy I guess. I don’t want anyone else having you, even though we agreed no strings, no commitments.’

  Rebecca wiped her eyes on the paper napkin, thinking she probably had mascara down her cheeks, and went back to picking at her salad.

  ‘So what now?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll call you. Or see you at rehearsal I guess.’

  He stood up, leaving the rest of his pie and beer unfinished. Rebecca watched him putting in his PIN and collecting his receipt. And failing to respond to the pleasantries of the barmaid.

  She did not follow him. I deserve this, she thought. And I will stay friends with him, I know. I always do stay friends with them.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lucy upended her wet umbrella in the hand basin, dumped her case on the floor and walked straight to the window. The view was spectacular but bore little relation to the sunny photographs of Pencarrick Joanna had shown them. The sky was ominous, the sea dotted with jerky white wavelets flashing on and off all over its wide expanse. In the middle distance monstrous waves swelled, and rolled shorewards to ricochet off the rocks below, swamping the jetty and boathouse. The rain and gusting wind joined forces, intent on breaching the old sash windows.

  It was June. So much for a summer of sun and sea with a bit of mild teaching thrown in.

  She turned and studied her room. It was large and square with two big windows facing the sea and one overlooking the terrace and garden. The wallpaper, a once pretty print of small pink roses, now faded and dull, was peeling away from the cornice. The ceiling sported a central chandelier (missing several crystal drops, she noticed) and a brown water stain. The bed was technically a single, but it was old-fashioned, wide and high with carved pillars each side of a mahogany bedhead.

  Lucy approached it with gloomy irritation. It would be one of those lumpy, enveloping mattresses that would give her backache. She flopped backwards onto the faded silk spread. The bed was perfectly smooth and firm. Surprised, she sat up and flipped back the bedspread to find a feather-light modern quilt between fine linen sheets and pillows to match.

  She refused to allow herself to be cheered by this, but noticed sourly that there was no bathroom, only the complicated plumbed-in washstand, with porcelain shelf and mirror above. She turned on a big square tap and an immediate gush of hot water further drenched her umbrella.

  I should like this, she thought, it reminds me of the Winchester in New York: solid, comfortable, once classy. But while she approved of the room, of the quality of the linen hand-towel, of what would be a magnificent view if the weather ever cleared, she was conscious of a gentle dread lapping round her, a fear of her students-to-be, of having to eat with them as well as teach them, of being trapped with some foodie bore giving her his grandmother’s recipe for pickled beef. Above all, she dreaded being incarcerated with people younger, livelier, happier than she.

  She should never have come. She would be useless at the teaching, forgetting the names of her students, and worse, forgetting the names of ingredients, dishes, authors, cooks. How could she have agreed to teach a food-writing course?

  She struggled to stop herself sinking. Brace up, she told her reflection, it’s not so bad. You have family, friends, and a new summer job in a lovely part of England. And there may be nothing wrong with your memory anyway.

  It was months since the disastrous incident on Paddington station and Lucy now had reason to hope it would prove a one-off, a mental aberration caused by grief. Her last visit to the Memory Clinic two months ago had supported this: all her scores were up.

  Lucy slipped off her suit jacket and covered her shoulders with a soft cashmere pashmina – another purchase engineered by Rebecca – and went downstairs.

  After a couple of glasses of wine with Joanna, feeling decidedly better and determined to deflect the conversation from Joanna’s kind but determined questioning of her state of mind (Was she writing? Seeing her daughter? Getting up promptly in the morning? Eating properly?), she gestured at her friend’s sandalled feet and long flared skirt.

  ‘Jo, you do look amazing. Quite different from the efficient, pinstriped superwoman we know so well.’

  Joanna’s smile was broad and confident. ‘I’m very happy. I love it here. Everything about it. Cornwall, this place, the people who come on courses
…’

  ‘Nothing to do with Stewart, then?’

  Lucy was teasing, but Joanna frowned. ‘I don’t know. He isn’t here, and has nothing to do with the business. But …’

  Lucy finished the sentence for her. ‘But love colours all.’ Then she added, ‘I’m happy for you. It’s wonderful.’

  They carried their drinks round the house while Joanna explained that the current dining room, with its views of the sea, would become the studio for painting classes, that the potter’s wheel and kiln were in the former stables, that canoeing, sailing and diving would run from the old boathouse on the beach, and that singing classes would be held in the old library.

  ‘Please tell me you’ve got Nelson booked,’ said Lucy. ‘If I miss the whole summer of rehearsals, Nelson will throw me out. You’re lucky, shuttling up and down to London every week. You’re still singing on Thursdays, aren’t you?’

  ‘I am, but yes, the good news is I’ve booked him for slots through the whole of August, when his Notting Hill classes don’t run anyway. He’s planning to stay down here a good bit too. It’ll be fun.’

  ‘What’s he going to teach? Will he have time to rehearse us?’

  ‘Sure, he’s only doing a few hours a day – simple blues and gospel stuff for the holiday singers, but he’s up for a bit of intensive Messiah for the three of us, and anyone else who wants to join in.’

  ‘How fantast— Hey, whoa. Did you say three of us?’

  Joanna smiled, delighted with herself. ‘I did. Rebecca’s due next month. She’s coming armed with pattern books and mood boards and all the tools of her husband’s trade. She’ll be here for half of July and all of August.’

  They moved into the kitchen. ‘All these front rooms,’ Joanna said, with a wide, sweeping gesture, ‘will be knocked together for cookery classes and eating, and the back half will be commercial kitchens for the hotel.’

  They looked at the designs pinned to one wall. In the centre would be a huge scrubbed kitchen table, where the cookery students would eat together. The windows were to be lowered so the sea could be seen while sitting down. Wide double doors would lead out from the side wall to the sheltered terrace. Magazine pictures were stapled to the plans, depicting Cornish blue pottery on a scrubbed pine table, blue and white cushions on chairs painted shabby-chic blue. Great jugs of flowers and rows of blue and white mugs adorned a painted dresser. Another picture showed a stone terrace with a long table dressed in Provençal print and a tarte aux pommes, filigree metal chairs with more pretty cushions, stone tubs of blue hydrangeas and a wooden wheelbarrow planted up with white busy Lizzies.

  ‘Heavens,’ exclaimed Lucy, ‘this looks like a Country Living catalogue!’

  Joanna laughed. ‘I know. That’s why we need Rebecca. We need it to be comfortable, and clean and fresh looking, but not quite so folksy. Forget the décor, concentrate on the plans.’

  They walked deeper into the building, away from the light, through a warren of kitchens, scullery, flower rooms, butler’s pantry and unidentifiable nooks and crannies. ‘The house is dug into the hillside,’ said Joanna, ‘so while the seaward side is ground floor, this back bit is basement.’ Lucy looked with dismay at the dingy rooms with their ill-fitting sideboards and ancient equipment, and tried to close her nose against the smell – mostly damp with a suspicion of leaky gas and stale food.

  They looked at the designer’s boards and Lucy thought, good, this looks more like it. The contrast with the prettified side of the kitchen would be startling. Where all was country comfort over there, this was to be nothing but efficient ventilation, stainless steel chillers, fridges, sinks and massive commercial ranges, with yards and yards of gleaming tabling.

  ‘The kitchen alone is going to cost four hundred thousand pounds,’ said Joanna, peering over Lucy’s shoulder, ‘so we’d better believe this makeover will pay off.’

  ‘Four hundred thousand!?’

  ‘If we’re lucky. Commercial kit, steam ovens, walk-in chillers, blast freezer, automatic dishwashing, ventilation. Even the ice-cream maker costs thousands.’

  ‘But how will you pay for it?’

  ‘The chap who owns it is super-rich. He could easily afford to do the whole refurb himself, but he lacks business skills. His money was inherited, not made, and he just let the place chunter on, getting seedier and seedier, until it finally slipped into the red. He never came here, or took any interest in it until it started to lose money. He and Innovest will be the main funders, and I might take a few shares. If nothing else, the property value is there and will soar if we fix the place up.’

  ‘So you can’t lose?’

  ‘I wish! The hospitality business is extraordinarily risky, and the property market is not much better. With the extra rooms we plan over the stable block, this will be a fifty-bedroom hotel – a big investment. But that’s the fun of it – the challenge of trying to do better than everyone expects. And I really believe in this one.’

  Lucy’s arm went round her friend. ‘You are astonishing, Jo. I’d hesitate for a year about buying a two-room cottage, but you don’t blink at an Edwardian pile with absolutely everything wrong with it.’

  Before supper, in the once-elegant drawing room, they met the assembled participants for Lucy’s food-writing course, and Lucy was relieved. Mostly women, mostly in their thirties and forties, they seemed an intelligent group, interested in food but not obsessed.

  That night, when she snuggled down into her high firm bed with the feather duvet, blissfully light after her grandson’s Thomas the Tank Engine one, Lucy rolled on her side and drew her knees up to slip her arms round them. It was a position she’d used since childhood when happy or excited, like the night before an exam or a gymkhana. As an adult she found herself doing it before a job interview or a big journalistic assignment. Teaching a lot of amateur writers, she said to herself, could be fun.

  The next morning was warm, still and sunny and they held their workshop round the terrace table, under a giant umbrella. Lucy talked to her students about the elements of a good cookbook: good writing; a distinctive authorial style; a coherent theme – and recipes that work.

  Occasionally you might see a cookbook published without one of the first three – a book with no real writing, or a recipe collection from a variety of chefs or celebrities, or an eclectic cookbook with no apparent cohesion. You might forgive any of these, but you will never forgive a recipe that doesn’t work: a bad recipe means frustration, maybe even humiliation, for the cook, and sometimes expensive ingredients in the bin. So let’s start with making sure you can write a faultless recipe.’

  Some of the students, expecting a more literary or romantic approach, muttered. But Lucy knew what she was doing. She wrote the ingredients for a lemon meringue pie on a flip chart, deliberately listing them in random order.

  ‘OK, I want you to use these to write the recipe in any style you like.’

  When they were finished and their papers handed to her, she got them started on a recipe for gazpacho while she read through their lemon pie recipes.

  ‘Right,’ she said, when her reading was done, ‘shall we stop a minute and I’ll go through these and then you can go back to the gazpacho, having gathered, I hope, a few tips from this one.’ She smiled at each student as she handed back their recipes, and repeated their names in an effort to learn them. Most of them smiled back at her. They were beginning to enjoy themselves.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to name and shame anyone. The mistakes in these recipes are ones that are really common, even in published recipes. So don’t despair. The pitfalls are easy to avoid if you just do the checks.’

  She flipped the chart over to a clean sheet and wrote:

  Check ingredients against method

  ‘I haven’t had time to do a detailed analysis of your recipes, but there are some obvious problems with some of them. For example, some of you have correctly listed all the ingredients at the top, but in writing the method you’ve omit
ted to use an ingredient. Which would leave the cook wondering what was meant to happen to the sugar or the vanilla. You need to run down your finished recipe and check that all the ingredients get used. Can you just take a few minutes to do that now?’

  The students bent their heads and almost immediately there were sighs and groans and a cry of, ‘Oh God, it’s me.’

  Lucy smiled. ‘Next, you need to check in reverse.’

  She wrote Check method against ingredients on the flip chart. ‘Since all the ingredients were on the flip chart for you, I don’t think any of you fell into this trap. But you should always check through the method, making sure all the ingredients you have told the reader what to do with are actually in your list at the top. Nothing is more maddening for a cook than to be told to “Add the sugar” and to think “What sugar? There isn’t any sugar!’”

  They then discussed ingredients not listed in the order used so the reader becomes muddled and cross; instructions in the wrong order, for example, making the meringue before the pastry; instructions omitted, like failing to rest the pastry before cooking or not telling the reader to preheat the oven; instructions not detailed enough, like not specifying the finest gauge of the grater for the lemon rind which leaves the cook in danger of grating the bitter pith with the rind, or assuming the reader will know to let the pie cool and stiffen a bit before trying to lift it out of the tin.

  They kept going for two hours, and Lucy enjoyed the class as much as the students did. At the end, the students actually clapped her.

  Back in her bedroom, putting her papers away, Lucy took a deep breath and made an effort to shake off the emotion she’d felt at such appreciation. David had been dead for over a year and a half, but she still over-reacted. This time yesterday she’d been miserable and insecure, then Joanna had infected her with confidence and excitement, and today a bit of praise had her pathetically grateful. I’m a mess she thought, but I’m less of a mess than before.

  *

  The following Friday Joanna returned from her weekly trip to Wakefield and London with the news that she’d hired Orlando Black to teach a fortnight’s practical cookery later in the summer.