Too Many Cooks

by Dana Bate

  Natasha smiles, obviously tickled he took her advice. “I’m so glad you like it.”

  “Adore it. In fact, as a little thank-you . . .” He reaches into his worn leather briefcase and pulls out a small tin. “They mentioned this is a new herbal tea they just started selling over the weekend. I thought you might enjoy it.”

  “My goodness—thank you,” she says, taking it from his hand. “That was so thoughtful of you.”

  I notice how gracious Natasha is being now that Thomas is in the room, almost as if she has transformed into a different person—the Natasha I imagined working with rather than the Natasha I actually got.

  “My pleasure,” Thomas says. He looks around the room. “What a fantastic kitchen. Absolutely stunning.”

  “Thank you. We put a lot of thought into getting it right.”

  “I’ll make sure the photographer gets plenty of shots of the space to accompany the piece.”

  I crane my neck looking for a photographer, but don’t see anyone.

  “The photos happen later,” Poppy whispers in my ear, assuming—rightly—that I am a total newbie when it comes to celebrity magazine profiles.

  “I actually have something for you,” Natasha says. She grabs the bound manuscript off the kitchen counter. “An early look at the manuscript.”

  “Ah, brilliant. I can’t wait to dig in.”

  “It obviously still needs polishing, but at least you’ll get an idea.” She glances at the clock. “Anyway, I’m on a bit of a tight schedule, so we should probably get started. . . .”

  “Right. Of course. Where should we begin?”

  “With my grandmother’s Cornish hen recipe. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  She leads him to the area along the counter where I laid out all of the ingredients for the hens and throws on a crisp navy-and-white-striped apron.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she says, as she ties the apron strings behind her back. “I told my assistants, Poppy and Kelly, they could hang around for the interview.”

  “No problem at all,” he says, smiling in our direction. Poppy and I are still standing by the kitchen table, our hands clasped in front of us.

  “Good,” Natasha says. “Now, let’s start with the stuffing.”

  Thomas places a small recorder on the counter, and Poppy and I take seats at the table while the two of them start cooking. As Poppy taps away on her phone, I try not to jump in with a suggestion or a correction as Natasha sautés the onions and celery or seasons the mushrooms. It’s not that she’s doing anything wrong, but she isn’t executing the recipe the way I wrote it in the manuscript—the very manuscript she just gave Thomas to read and cook through on his own. If he tries to replicate this recipe, it will definitely taste different—possibly better, given how much testing I did, but different nonetheless.

  As they slice and sauté and stuff, they chat about Natasha’s mother, her grandmother, her favorite restaurants growing up in Philadelphia. Thomas occasionally pulls a small notebook from his pocket and scribbles in it, especially when Natasha says something touching about her mom or a particular childhood memory. Having spent a decent amount of time around Natasha by this point, I’m impressed by her ability to seem so open and forthcoming, when in fact I know she is holding a lot back. She gives just enough information to make herself seem real and rounded, but not quite enough to seem flawed. It’s masterful.

  Once the Cornish hens are in the oven, Natasha and Thomas move on to the sweet potato fries, which Natasha prepares exactly as we did yesterday, a huge relief on my part. I’d worried that, on a whim, she’d decide I’d used too much oil or not enough cornstarch and go rogue at some point during the cooking process. But unlike with the Cornish hens, which she’s made many times, she’s only made the fries with me, so she seems more comfortable sticking to the playbook.

  Thomas opens the door to the second oven, and Natasha slides the tray of sweet potato fries inside. After she’s rinsed her hands and wiped them dry, she offers Thomas a glass of Chablis, which he gladly accepts. She grabs a glass, pausing momentarily as she notices there is one red wineglass missing on the shelf above. My breath shortens as I recall the night—the night—when everything changed, right here in this kitchen. Did Hugh ever explain about the broken glass? Did he tell her he did it? Or did he forget?

  She shakes herself out of her trance and places the glass on the counter, filling it with a crisp white wine that sparkles as it splashes into the glass. I notice she does not pour herself any, which seems a little odd, but then again, I’ve never seen Natasha drink very much. Even at the dinner in Nottingham, she only had a single glass of wine, though maybe that’s because she was still hungover from the Scotch the night before. That, or she decided she didn’t need the extra calories.

  She carries Thomas’s wine and a glass of water for herself to the other end of the kitchen table, where she and Thomas sit and carry on with the interview while they wait for the hens and fries to come out of the oven.

  “So,” he says, “we’ve talked a bit about your family’s influence on your interest in food and cooking, but what about your husband?”

  “Oh, Hugh adores food. I have yet to find a dish he doesn’t like.” She pauses. “I take that back. A friend made us kale burgers a few weeks back, and he thought they were disgusting.”

  Thomas wrinkles his nose. “Kale burgers?”

  “They’re not as bad as they sound, at least when you make them right. But this friend . . . let’s just say she didn’t. She’s actually made a few doozies, but of course Hugh is too polite to say anything.”

  My cheeks flush as I clench my jaw. Hugh loves my food. He’s told me he loves my food. He even said the kale burgers were good, even though he normally doesn’t like that kind of thing—never mind that it was Natasha’s idea that I make them in the first place.

  “Do you two ever cook together?”

  She titters. “Oh, God, no. Hugh loves to eat, but cooking . . . let’s just say it’s a good thing he leaves that to me.”

  Not true! I want to say. He made me a delicious English breakfast the morning after the Nottingham dinner, and after the fair, he cooked steaks and potatoes. He may not be Joël Robuchon, but he knows how to cook.

  “It must be difficult to find time to eat together,” Thomas says, “given that you both have such high-powered careers.”

  “It’s definitely a challenge.”

  “How often are you able to?”

  “Not as often as either of us would like.” She tosses her hair over her shoulder and sits up straighter. “But we make time whenever we can. We are both very committed to our marriage.”

  Her voice hardens in the last sentence, as if she is putting particular emphasis on this point. Is she doing that for Thomas? Or for me?

  “That’s lovely to hear,” Thomas says. “Most people with your kind of jobs would be like ships passing in the night.”

  “It can feel that way sometimes, but we make an extra effort to reconnect. A marriage requires work and attention, and we both feel really strongly that we want to put in that time.”

  “There’s talk of your husband’s becoming prime minister someday.”

  She shrugs coyly. “Talk is talk.”

  “But how would you feel about that?”

  “I’d be supportive, of course. I think he’d make a great leader. He really does love this country. Having lived here a while, I can understand why. People here are so . . . likable. And sophisticated. Just the other week, we hosted a dinner for some of Hugh’s constituents in Nottingham, and all I could think was, ‘These people care about all the right things.’ ”

  I take a calming breath, trying not to erupt in the midst of this sham of an interview. Natasha is so full of shit it’s a wonder her sparkling green eyes haven’t turned brown. Likable? Sophisticated? Since when does she think that? And what’s all this about being committed to their marriage? What a load of crap.

  “Has that not been your experience in America?
” Thomas asks.

  “Americans are just . . . different.”

  “Different how?”

  “I don’t know. Less worldly, I guess. And just generally . . . different.”

  Thomas nods and jots something in his notebook. “Two countries divided by a common language,” he says with a smirk.

  She sips her water. “Anyway, all of this is speculative. Right now, Hugh is content with his post as an MP for Nottingham and as shadow education secretary. Anything to do with Downing Street would be way, way in the future.”

  “Speaking of the future . . .” He looks up from his notebook. “Do you two have any plans for children at some point down the line?”

  Given what Hugh has told me about their relationship, I expect Natasha to shift in her seat and blush and dismiss his question with a perfunctory, Of course . . . someday. Instead, she takes another sip of water, places the glass on the table, and smiles gently.

  “Actually, I hadn’t intended to bring this up yet, since it’s very early, but . . .” She rests her hand gently on her stomach. “Hugh and I are expecting.”

  Poppy’s head whips up from her phone, and for a moment, I stop breathing. Did she just say . . . ? No. No, that can’t be right.

  Thomas raises his eyebrows. “I—I’m sorry . . . Are you . . . you’re pregnant?”

  She beams. “I am.”

  “How far along?”

  “Still early in the first trimester, which is why we haven’t told anyone.”

  My gut churns. That can’t be right, can it? The room starts spinning. If she’s pregnant, then that means . . . No. No, she can’t be. That’s impossible. Unless it’s Jacques’s?

  “When do you plan to make an announcement?”

  “Initially we wanted to wait, but . . . well, I guess the cat’s out of the bag.”

  “So I can report this?”

  She shrugs. “Sure, why not? My publicist will probably flip, but the news will come out eventually, so it might as well be now.”

  “As you know, this profile won’t come out for many months, but if you don’t mind my filing a quick newsflash sooner about the pregnancy . . .”

  “Sure,” she says. “Go for it.”

  Thomas starts to say something, but the timer for the sweet potatoes starts blaring and interrupts him.

  “Ah, sounds like the fries are ready,” Natasha says.

  “Brilliant.” He clears his throat. “Would you mind if I . . . popped outside for a moment to call my editor? I’d like to brief her on all of this.”

  “Sure,” Natasha says. “Not a problem at all.”

  She lets him out the door to the back garden, and as she makes her way toward the oven, she glances over her shoulder, and for a fleeting instant, so brief I could have imagined it, I swear she fixes her eyes on mine and smiles.

  CHAPTER 40

  No. This can’t be happening. She can’t be pregnant. She can’t. Aside from the fact that she and Hugh allegedly never have sex, she is on birth control. Or at least she was in early May, when I helped Poppy sort through her trash. I realize birth control pills aren’t 100 percent effective, but they work most of the time. And didn’t she just have her period a few weeks ago?

  I need to talk to Hugh. That’s what I need to do. I need to talk to him and figure out what is going on. Has he been lying to me? Or is Natasha lying to all of us? What if she is pregnant with her lover’s baby? What if she isn’t pregnant at all?

  My head is still spinning when Thomas comes back inside, feverish with excitement over this latest turn of events. “I’ve spoken to my editor,” he says. “She wants to run something within the hour, but she wanted me to double-check with you first. Are you sure you’re okay with revealing your pregnancy this way? It’s . . . quite unconventional.”

  “It’s fine,” she says.

  “Okay. If you’re sure.”

  I know what he’s thinking: Are you sure your publicist will be okay with this? Are you sure your HUSBAND will be okay with this? Because even I know the answer to those questions is a resounding, NO. This is Natasha going rogue, for reasons only she knows, and part of me senses she cares less about the immediate impact on her own reputation and more about the impact on others. But whether she has me or Hugh or someone else in her sights, I’m not sure.

  “What, then, is the quote you and your husband would like to give about this happy news?”

  She bites her lip as she shovels the sweet potato fries into a napkin-lined basket. “How about . . . ‘We are thrilled that our dream of becoming parents has finally come true, and we cannot wait to meet the new addition to our family.’”

  “Lovely.” Thomas smiles as he writes furiously in his notebook. “If you’ll give me one more quick second to send this along to my editor, I’ll be back to join you for what looks like a delicious lunch.”

  She looks up at the clock. “I’m a little tight on time. . . .”

  “Not to worry. I won’t be more than a moment.”

  He steps outside again, and once he has closed the door behind him, Poppy clears her throat.

  “Shall I contact Nicole?” she asks, referring to Natasha’s publicist, who is based in LA.

  “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea,” Natasha says as she brings the fries to the table.

  “And . . . Mr. Ballantine?”

  “What about him?”

  “Shall I contact him as well?”

  “To tell him I’m pregnant?”

  “No, to tell him Vogue will be reporting the news within the hour.”

  “Oh. Right.” She pauses. “No, why don’t you stick to Nicole. You’ll have your hands full with her.”

  “I can call Mr. Ballantine,” I blurt out, before I can stop myself.

  Natasha and Poppy lock eyes with each other and then look at me. Poppy frowns. “Why would you call Mr. Ballantine?”

  “Just to, you know, cover the bases. Since you’ll be busy dealing with Nicole.”

  “You don’t think I can handle my own husband?”

  “Of course—it’s just . . . you’re having lunch with Thomas, and you still have to finish the interview. I thought I’d save you time.”

  My real motive, of course, is to speak with Hugh before the news comes out so that I can figure out what the hell is going on and what this means for me—for us.

  “Thanks, but I have this under control,” Natasha says. “And anyway, Hugh will be impossible to get ahold of today. He’s in Nottingham again, in meetings all day.”

  My stomach sinks. “He is?” I try not to show my disappointment. “When will he be back?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t. I was just curious.”

  Natasha takes the Cornish hens from the oven. “I have no idea when he’ll return. I’m going up tomorrow to meet him, and we’re spending the weekend together, and I’m not really sure when either of us is coming back.”

  “Oh.” My hand starts shaking beneath the table, and the air in the room feels thicker with each passing second. She doesn’t know when they’ll be coming back? What does that even mean? Surely Hugh has to return to London at some point because that’s where Parliament is. On the other hand, from what Hugh told me, nothing really happens in July or August. Does that mean Hugh could be in Nottingham for the rest of the summer? Would he really do that without even saying good-bye to me?

  I take a deep breath, trying to keep my composure. “We still have a lot of recipes to test for the book,” I say.

  “So?”

  “So it would be great to have you around for tastings and advice. Do you think you’ll be back within the next week or so?”

  She places her potholders on the counter. “Probably. And if not, I’ll make sure Poppy has all the information you need.”

  “Okay.”

  I can’t ask the follow-up questions I really want to ask: Will Hugh come back with you? And if not, when does he plan to return? But that’s all I really care about, and something about Natasha’s
demeanor tells me she is hell-bent on my not knowing the answer.

  Thomas reappears as Natasha places the platter of hens on the table, a big smile on his face. “All settled,” he says. “The story should appear online within the hour.”

  Natasha gently presses her hand against her stomach as she slides into one of the kitchen chairs. “I should probably prepare for an onslaught.”

  “If anyone can handle it, my guess is you can,” Thomas says.

  “Yeah, this isn’t my first time at the rodeo. . . .” The anxious edge in her voice belies the smile on her face.

  Thomas pulls out a chair across from Natasha and claps his hands together. “Right. So shall we dig in? This all looks marvelous.”

  “Please—help yourself.”

  She passes both platters to Thomas, while Poppy and I sit, gawking at the two of them from the other end of the table. When he has filled his plate, he passes them back to her, and she helps herself to one of the hens, along with a small portion of fries.

  “Better take more than that,” Thomas says with a wink. “You’re eating for two now.”

  She smiles politely and reaches for the serving fork, but as she hesitates, her hand hovering in the air as if it’s suspended in ice, the only thought running through my head is, No, she isn’t.

  Within the hour, Thomas has left, and Natasha’s and Poppy’s phones are ringing nonstop. Predictably, Natasha’s publicist, Nicole, is going apeshit, as she now has to deal with a barrage of media calls on a matter for which she has no game plan and about which she had no prior knowledge.

  “Nicole—chill,” I hear Natasha say as I help Olga tidy the kitchen so that I can continue testing this afternoon. “It’s fine. The news is out there. It’s over.”

  I hear loud screeching coming through the receiver. “Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you first, but it just sort of came out in the middle of the interview. It isn’t a big deal.”