The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  Rebecca looked at Annie thoughtfully. There was something about her predicament that inspired compassion. Anyone could make that mistake; many did. Rebecca knew that she was also too bound up with her own family. If she fell out with them, where would she turn?

  A telephone rang on the desk. Rebecca snatched it up and her tone changed to polished unctuousness. She politely asked the caller several questions: ‘Mrs Ankelehoff . . . Suzanne . . . how are the Bahamas? And little Tommy . . . the Duccio is on reserve to another client . . . you are, of course, one of the most important collectors we work with . . . the reserve is eighteen . . . let me talk to my father . . . send my regards to Richard.’ She replaced the phone quickly and dialled her assistant.

  ‘Liora, find my father.’

  Annie picked up her rucksack and walked to the door. ‘Don’t worry, I will find my own way out.’

  ‘Wait,’ Rebecca said, ‘I will take a chance on you. I’ve no idea why.’ She let out a little laugh, bemused by this unusual act of impulsiveness. ‘Don’t let me down. Liora will show you the kitchen. We eat dinner at seven. Study the menus carefully.’ Rebecca waved her hand towards the door.

  Annie was too surprised to respond.

  ‘The pay is four hundred and fifty pounds per week net. No overtime. Six days a week, if necessary. Hours are erratic at best. Can you start now?’

  Annie nodded – it was double her present salary, enough to quiet any misgivings.

  The interview had taken less than four minutes.

  *

  Annie’s new domain was a long thin galley next to the ‘entertaining’ dining room. Opening the cupboards she found every type of kitchen equipment, most still in their protective wrappers. Annie thought of her most treasured and valuable possessions, her Japanese kitchen knives. The five sets in the Winkleman kitchen were of a quality she knew she could never afford.

  She was asked to sign a confidentiality agreement, given an iris-activated password and handed a list of menus. To her dismay, Annie saw that the routine never varied. Lunch and dinner alternated between boiled and steamed fish and vegetables. The only herbs acceptable were dill and French parsley – garlic, coriander and chilli were not to be used under any circumstances; salt and pepper only sparingly. Omelettes were to be made without yolks and every meal was to be followed with stewed apple. Ingredients must be organic and, as far as possible, locally sourced. For Annie, preparing slabs of whiteness was a kind of torture. Food for her was as much about colour, smell and presentation as taste: the experience of eating should start in the eye and the nose and then erupt in the imagination. Chewing and tasting were the climax to a sensual experience.

  On the nights that Memling or Rebecca ate in their respective homes, Annie was to hand the food to the Filipino servants, who would then leave it in a warmed serving hatch. She was not to address Memling Winkleman under any circumstances, was to avert her eyes if she met him in the corridor and only talk to Rebecca when spoken to. The most interesting meals she would prepare were for Memling’s white husky, Tiziano, which alternated between fresh rabbit, beef and chicken mixed with raw eggs and finely sliced green vegetables.

  By the third day, Annie started to compose her resignation letter even if it led to certain penury. She did not care that the fish was of peerless quality, served on Sèvres porcelain and accompanied by the finest French wines: her dream was to cook, not spend life hunched over a steamer. Part of the joy of creating a delicious meal was watching the expression on people’s faces; in this job she posted her food into a hot cupboard. Her predecessor’s stroke was surely induced by monotony. Late on Wednesday night Rebecca asked to see her. Annie took the resignation letter in the pocket of her starched white apron. Before she could hand it over, Rebecca told her to prepare a dinner the following week for twenty people in honour of an important American client, Melanie Appledore. The aim of the evening was to introduce the collector to a painting by Caravaggio called Judith Beheading Holofernes, a newly discovered version or study for the well-known painting hanging in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Annie was told that she could break from the fish regime as long as she eschewed garlic and chilli. There were to be three courses and the first was to be served at 8 p.m. sharp. Rebecca’s PA would send through a list of personal likes and allergies. Leaving her employer’s office, Annie realised that the meeting had once again taken exactly four minutes.

  Unable to access any of Monsieur George’s records, Annie had little idea what was expected from the ‘Caravaggio’ dinner. The Winklemans’ head butler Jesu and his wife Primrose said that the evenings started with a soup and the main course was invariably fish. The last large dinner Annie had cooked was a surprise birthday party for Desmond and fifty of their friends in Devon. He wanted mojitos, hamburgers and toasted marshmallows – ‘none of that fancy shit’ – but Annie hoped that the banquet would win him round. It was late summer and his fortieth, and combining the theme of harvest festival and his golden years, she suspended ears of corn, dahlias and chrysanthemums from the ceiling of a friend’s barn to create an inside hanging garden. Trestle tables groaned with pumpkins, apples and corn dollies, while the guests, asked to wear red or gold, sat on bales of straw. She had made vats of spicy pumpkin soup and spent all day roasting a hog under an apple tree; for pudding there was blackberry and apple crumble and thick Devonshire clotted cream. She had made a crown of barley for Desmond to wear, but he tossed it into the barbecue and nearly ruined the evening by sulking.

  With little money for presents, Annie always offered to cook parties for her friends or their children. Some joked that they had more offspring or got married just to enjoy her feasts. Her parties were legendary: towering jelly mounds in vibrant colours, life-size dogs and sheep made from cake covered with realistic fur and tails fashioned from icing and marzipan. For one friend, a professor of anthropology who spent half the year in a remote village in Cambodia, Annie re-created a tribal feast. For another friend, Pernilla, who had been born in a small town north of Stockholm, Annie made a traditional Swedish dinner with blood soup, wind-dried duck, and red berries as pudding. Although every scrap was eaten Desmond said that it was the most disgusting and inedible dinner he had ever had the misfortune to sit through; little wonder that Pernilla had fled from her home country.

  Annie went to look at the painting, which was already hanging in the main vestibule of the gallery. It was an unappetising image: a man’s throat cut, the blood spurting over a white cloth, his life ebbing away with each heartbeat; the perpetrator a beautiful black-haired woman looked at the viewer triumphanthy, holding a bloody blade in her hand, watched by a wizened old hag. Fingering her letter of resignation, Annie decided there was little to lose by preparing a fantastical feast: at least she would be fired for something she was proud of.

  Scouring the Internet during her lunch hours, Annie found out that between his birth in 1571 and his untimely death in 1610, Caravaggio was almost as well known for his bad behaviour as for his painting and his technique was as spontaneous and pugnacious as his temper. Caravaggio was known to have killed a man in a fight; little wonder then, Annie thought, that the blood gushing out of Holofernes’ neck was so convincing. Unable to control his appetites or temper, the painter spent most of his life on the run from the authorities. He was damned for his ‘vulgarity, sacrilege, impiousness and disgust’ but his talent and ‘dark spirit’ inflamed collectors’ desires. Annie wondered how to introduce this element of danger and brio into her menu. The painter lived in post-Renaissance Italy between Rome, Naples, Malta and Sicily – four different regions with distinctly different types of food.

  The food that Caravaggio subsisted on – bread, wine, scraps of pig and cheese washed down by young local wine – was hardly suitable for Rebecca’s guests, so Annie researched the banquets eaten by his patrons: cardinals, popes and noblemen. She discovered that sugar, a newly discovered commodity, was a sign of great wealth and was lavishly used for visual and symbolic effect, spun and twisted, used
as frosting and glazing. At one dinner given by Don Ercole, the son of the Duke of Ferrara, for a group of noblemen, a life-size sugar model of Hercules and a lion, coloured and gilded, was commissioned as the central table piece and flanked by miniature models of the goddesses Venus and Cupid. Some dinners, running to ten courses, featured pastry castles and pies filled with live birds, gilded roast chickens, swans and peacocks, roasted and then re-dressed in their plumage. Guests could wash their hands in individual fountains of orange-blossom water and a musical accompaniment punctuated each course.

  Lost in research and unable to face Evie, Annie spent a third night on a camp bed in the office, washing herself and her underwear in the galley kitchen.

  The following morning Evie turned up in the front entrance of Winkleman Fine Art. She made it through the front door but the security officers were reluctant to let this bedraggled-looking woman into the inner sanctum. Annie was called from a staff meeting to front reception.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ Annie asked, looking up at the CCTV camera and hoping that none of her colleagues would see that her mother had a swollen eye, which had turned from deep purple to a swirl of yellow tinged with apricot.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Evie said petulantly.

  ‘Working.’ Annie took her mother’s arm and led her firmly towards the exit.

  ‘There’s nothing in the fridge. You don’t even have a TV.’ Evie hesitated then added, ‘I’ve come to take you out to lunch.’ She looked vulnerable, like a small child.

  ‘I have so much work – I really can’t.’

  ‘It’s the twenty-second of January – my birthday,’ Evie said in a small voice. ‘You forgot.’

  ‘Oh, so it is,’ Annie responded with as much grace as she could muster.

  ‘I want to go to the Wallace Collection.’ Looking left and right around the lobby to check that no one was watching, Evie opened a large plastic bag she was carrying to reveal the picture.

  ‘Walk around the corner to the mews entrance and wait for me. I need to get my coat and purse.’

  A few minutes later, Annie emerged.

  ‘Why don’t we go to the National Gallery?’ Annie suggested. She had no desire to return to the Wallace, the scene of the singles night where she had met Robert.

  ‘It’s my birthday and I want to go to the Wallace,’ Evie said.

  The Wallace was a half-hour walk from the office and with luck, Annie calculated silently, she could get her mother there, give her a sandwich and be back at her desk in less than an hour. Luckily, Rebecca and her father were in Paris and not expected back before supper.

  ‘You are wearing my best dress,’ said Annie, looking at her mother.

  ‘The only decent thing you have in your wardrobe – and it’s only Zara, very high street.’

  ‘It might be off the peg but it’s still my only good one so please don’t borrow it,’ Annie said crossly.

  ‘You should have worn a scarf,’ Evie told her. ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘I am not a child,’ said Annie, striding along the cobbled street. I was never allowed to be a child, she thought.

  ‘Why don’t you have a radio or any music system in your place?’ Evie asked. ‘You used to listen to music all the time.’

  Annie had stopped listening to music. It was too evocative and she found it easier not to live with unexpected emotional stimulants. ‘I just haven’t got round to getting one,’ she lied.

  ‘It’s not normal to live without music,’ said Evie.

  They walked along Curzon Street and dipped through a tiny garden behind a church in Mount Street. Along a sheltered wall, red and white camellias were just starting to bloom and the blossom – clinging to fragile green branches – swayed pendulously in the breeze. Annie looked at the garish flowers and realised that her beloved Dartmoor would still be barren, brackenless and soggy. She’d loved walking at this time of year across its lunar landscape, leaning into the gusty winds that shot up the valleys from Cornwall. Many locals avoided the moor in winter; fogs as thick as wet cotton wool could descend without warning. Every year walkers got lost; some died. One rider, lost all night in freezing foggy conditions, killed and slit open his horse’s stomach in desperation, hoping to find shelter inside the warm bloody guts. Two days later he was found frozen inside the animal’s belly.

  ‘You have not heard a word I’ve been saying, have you?’ Evie tugged at her sleeve.

  ‘I’m sorry. I was miles away.’

  ‘Did I tell you that Stanley and I have separated?’ Evie said.

  ‘Who was Stanley?’

  ‘I thought he was different.’

  ‘You always do.’

  They crossed Oxford Street and turned down a small mews to avoid the lunchtime shoppers. Evie was right: Annie wished she had worn a scarf.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Evie asked in a false, bright, conversational tone.

  ‘I have been living in a make-believe debauched, overindulgent world of post-Renaissance banqueting.’

  ‘That beats Shepherd’s Bush.’

  ‘Rebecca wants to give a dinner for clients to celebrate a painting. I am tempted to do a themed dinner – but I know that’s not what she has in mind.’

  ‘You could make anything taste delicious. You have a real talent.’

  Annie slipped her arm through her mother’s. ‘Unlike their last chef, I am untrained and out of practice.’

  Evie stopped in the street and turned to her daughter. ‘I dare you.’

  Annie laughed. It was a game that mother and daughter used to play. I dare you to eat your supper. I dare you to get dressed. I dare you to love me.

  ‘If it goes wrong I’ll lose my day job.’

  ‘Do you think a man offered a big break would worry about his day job?’

  ‘That’s hardly relevant.’

  ‘It is, Annie. You have to take a risk.’

  Annie stopped and turned to face her mother. ‘Don’t you think I am longing to take risks but if I lose my job, who will fish you out of jail? Where will you go?’

  Evie looked at the ground. ‘Are you avoiding home because I am there?’

  ‘That has something to do with it.’

  Evie wiped a tear from her face. ‘I’d like a few more days to sort myself out. Would that be too much to ask?’

  Annie felt it was far too much to ask; the thought of spending even one more night under the same roof as her mother made her feel utterly desperate.

  ‘Mum, it’s just that—’

  ‘It’s just that I am frightened and lonely and you are the only thing I have.’ Evie burst into tears.

  Here we go, Annie thought. Back on the endless merry-go-round of solipsistic self-recrimination. Annie knew she should shake off her mother’s arm and walk away; instead she took Evie’s hand and steered her silently across Manchester Square and into the Wallace Collection.

  ‘You can stay for a few days.’

  Evie’s face lit up like a child’s. ‘Your dad and I used to come here,’ she said to Annie.

  ‘You told me.’

  ‘I was happy then.’

  ‘You told me that too.’ Annie marched up the grand staircase, wishing the museum had a policy of compulsory silence.

  ‘Wait for me. I’m not as young as I used to be,’ said Evie, panting.

  Annie didn’t wait but walked ahead through the galleries. The pictures passed in a blur as she thought about possible recipes. Would they like a hippocras jelly made from gallons of wine, cinnamon, nutmeg and ginger? First recorded in the 1530s, it was created forty years before Caravaggio’s birth but would perfectly match the blood spurting from Holofernes’ neck. She longed to try and make one of the 250 recipes from On honourable pleasure and health, said to herald modern Italian cookery, collated in 1465. The author, Platina, left humorous instructions: cook for the ‘length of two Lord’s Prayers’ and cut lard to the size of dice, meat into the size of fists and stew in a ‘dainty broth’.

  ‘I know when y
ou are thinking about food,’ said Evie, tugging at her daughter’s shirt. ‘You get that odd faraway look. Come and look at this one – it was another of your dad’s favourites.’

  Annie, her reverie broken, saw Evie pointing at a painting of a man with a twirly moustache and a rather supercilious smile. Moments later, her view was blocked by a group of Japanese tourists in smart trench coats. Their guide, Annie decided, was their sartorial nemesis. His shapeless suit, made from a deep-plum-coloured corduroy, patched at the elbows with different fabric, looked as if it had been made for someone larger, his father perhaps, or picked up from a charity shop. He wore a tie, an awful knitted concoction, a gift perhaps from a maiden aunt, and its knot was definitely off-centre. Annie noticed that the guide’s dark hair was unbrushed, a little too long and very messy.

  ‘Here,’ he explained, ‘is a picture by Frans Hals called The Laughing Cavalier.’ He spoke in short sentences punctuated by lots of arm movements and with such genuine enthusiasm that Annie and Evie stopped bickering and started to listen.

  ‘As you can see, the Cavalier is neither laughing nor even smiling and he certainly isn’t a cavalier,’ he continued. ‘The name was given to the picture much later in the nineteenth century, over two hundred years after it was painted in 1624. It’s likely that this portrait was a betrothal gift for a young lady.’

  ‘Betrothal?’ a Japanese lady questioned.

  ‘An engagement.’

  ‘Engagement?’ She was still confused. The guide fished around for the right description and happened to catch Annie’s eye. Without thinking, Annie pointed to her ringless engagement finger.

  Thank you, he mouthed.

  ‘Marriage! This man would send this picture to a lovely young lady and if she liked what she saw, she would agree to marry.’

  This time the translation worked and the Japanese lady nodded.

  Jesse looked back at the young woman with the plaited auburn hair. He thought her eyes might be green, maybe blue; they caught the light, danced with humour and understanding. He noticed a smattering of freckles on her cheekbones and wondered idly if there were more sprinkled across her breasts. He tried to guess how old she was – looking at the tiny crinkles around her eyes he guessed late twenties. Her face was slightly too long, her mouth slightly too wide for her to qualify as a classic beauty. She had an ethereal dreamy quality, as if she wasn’t quite grounded but floating above earthly matters. Her clothes were eccentric – stripy trousers and a white smock – maybe she was a chef or someone who liked the garb. Her shoes, scuffed at the edges and her handbag, the handle mended with orange string, suggested that she was not well paid, or thrifty. The woman locked eyes with his for a second too long, blushed and looked away.