Lord Beachendon had entered Blob’s house with a sense of hope and left in a state of confusion. Blob lived in an exquisite double-fronted Huguenot mansion in Spitalfields (bought for £8 million earlier that year); the Earl had been met by an astonishingly pretty assistant (an MIT graduate) and shown into a waiting area decorated with a Rembrandt (£18 million, sold by the Earl two years earlier). The interiors had been tastefully decorated (at least £250,000 per room) and the carpet was by Aubusson (mint condition, £2 million). Minutes later, Blob’s PA, a knock-out in skin-tight black Lycra (double first from Cambridge) greeted him coolly but politely and apologised that Blob was running slightly late. She could offer a glass of Cristal (£290 per bottle) or a Lafite Rothschild 1961 (£450). What depressed Beachendon most was not the amount of money that Blob must have made from his art but that the artist and his set-up brought out Beachendon’s basest instincts and most jealous inclinations. Like many of the clients he so despised, the Earl realised that he had become just another person who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. He had not bothered to look at the Rembrandt or the carpet, he would not be able to taste the claret or admire the woman’s brain – all he could think about was what they had cost.
Those mysterious market forces had decided that Blob was ‘it’: the new wunderkind, the commander of great prices. His paintings, phantasmagorical, highly detailed visions of heaven and hell, sold for millions of pounds and the waiting lists were comprised of several hundred collectors. He was the first painter since Hieronymus Bosch to capture the essence of human depravity and virtuosity. Critics, in a rare case of unanimity, agreed that Blob’s work reflected everything that was good and bad about contemporary society, and what was more, he was, unlike so many of his peers, a beautiful draftsman and astonishingly accomplished painter. What Lord Beachendon knew was that Blob was sitting on thousands of priceless drawings and preparatory oil sketches. If the artist could be persuaded to bring these to auction, all of Earl Beachendon’s troubles would evaporate. The sale of Blob’s work would cause a financial and critical sensation. All Blob had to say was yes; all Blob said was maybe.
At exactly the time that Mimi uttered her last breath at Covent Garden, Agatha sent Annie a text with an update on the picture.
‘Annie. Discoloured varnish thinned: extraordinary transformation. White cloud is actually a clown! All very Watteauesque. Further investigation and research needed. Septimus W-T wants pic out of gall. Please pick up ASAP. Best wishes, Agatha.’
When the message came through, Annie was still at work waiting for an ‘oeuf en gelée’ to set. She had placed the egg in a mould with nasturtium petals, sprigs of dill and mustard seeds but even after six attempts the result looked messy. She gave Agatha’s text a cursory glance, her attention still on the recalcitrant starter: could she create an omelette, roll it up with salmon caviar and chopped steamed spinach to create three layers of colour and set that in aspic? Glancing at the clock she saw it was 10.30 p.m. – it would take an hour to get home on the bus or 45 minutes to bicycle against a headwind.
The painting, she thought, is too much trouble. She decided to collect it, hang it in her flat and stop this pointless wild-goose chase. Miraculous things like discovering lost masterpieces did not happen to women like her. Texting Agatha back, she wrote, ‘Thanks v much. Will come in ASAP. Best, Annie.’
Chapter 22
At 5 a.m. the following morning, the alarm bell rang. Annie lay quietly running through the next couple of hours in her head. The Winklemans were having clients to lunch and had ordered sea bass followed by stewed apple. Rebecca had made it clear that there were to be no more flights of fantasy in the kitchen, only set menus. Annie hoped to find some wild bass but doubted she could find decent apples in March. Her next problem was the certain probability of wet black jeans, which had been sitting in the washing machine since late last night. Stumbling out of her bedroom into the studio room, she chided, ‘Hurry up, whack oven on, quick shower while it warms, no time for shaving armpits, who’ll notice anyway? Black jeans nearly dry, lie on floor, pull. If not dry put them in the oven for a quick steam. Season chicken; rub butter on to skin, place breast down. Take jeans out of oven and hope they don’t smell of old beef and cheese. Timer on 65 minutes. Call fishmonger.’
‘Do you know what the first sign of madness is?’ Evie asked, lifting her head over the side of the sofa.
‘Talking to oneself,’ Annie said, opening the fridge. ‘I’m sorry – I forgot you were here.’
‘Do you know what the second sign of madness is?’ Evie asked, running her hands through her hair.
‘Looking for hairs on the palms of your hands,’ Annie said, remembering an old game that mother and daughter played.
‘Funny how often people fell for that, wasn’t it?’ Evie folded away the duvet from her makeshift bed and crossed the room.
‘What are you going to do to that bird?’ Evie asked as Annie lifted the skinned cooked chicken out of the fridge and placed it on the kitchen table.
Annie was not in the mood to chat; there was too much to do.
‘I’m going to make it fit for a king,’ she said. ‘Fit for Queen Delores in any case.’
‘Who’s coming over? Someone special?’
‘I’m practising for the dinner; it’s less than a week away. Can you move out of the way?’ Evie stood in the narrow pathway between the fridge and the cooker.
‘What’s all that?’ Evie asked, sitting on the one chair without a wobbly leg and pointing to the assortment of bowls and dishes arranged neatly on the table.
‘Mum – please can you move the chair to the other side? And please don’t talk, I need to concentrate.’
Shuffling her chair away, Evie watched Annie as she carefully arranged her kitchen implements on a clean dishcloth. Knives went in order of length, starting with her prize possession, a Japanese Honyaki blade, so sharp that it could cut a dried piece of pasta cleanly in two. Next to these, Annie laid out wooden spoons, a measuring cup, two bowls and a pair of tweezers.
‘I’m sorry – it’s the first time I have done this and I’m nervous,’ Annie said, moving over to the hob where a small pan was simmering expectantly. Annie dropped an aubergine into the one with boiling water and set the timer for ten minutes. Taking a second saucepan from the rack, she mixed cream, a bay leaf and some peppercorns, and stirred it for five minutes. Then, after straining the liquid, she put that to one side.
‘Can I ask a question?’ Evie said.
‘Go on,’ Annie said as she placed pats of butter in a saucepan and waited for them to melt. Then she stirred two tablespoons of flour in to create a smooth paste. In a separate bowl she dissolved gelatine into some boiling water and combined this with her sauce.
‘How many dishes are you expected to do for this dinner?’
‘Louis XIV had at least four services with up to seven different dishes in each.’
‘How many cooks did he have?’
Annie tasted the sauce. ‘About two thousand permanent staff in his kitchens and it took up to four hundred and ninety-eight people for each dinner, including a procession of fifteen officers of the household. The really fabulous dishes had guards all to themselves and specially assigned courtiers had to bow to the platters.’
‘There’s only you,’ said Evie, incredulously.
‘I’ll employ at least ten helpers and a few of Carlo’s extras to give the occasion a bit of pomp and ceremony. The guy who played the court jester in his last movie is going to be the Principal Cupbearer. If anyone wants some more wine he will shout out, “A drink for the king or queen.” ’
Annie added half a sachet more gelatine and beat her sauce a little more, alternating fast and slow whisks. ‘I have also got the receptionist, Marsha, you remember her, to serve as the Officer of the Kitchen – it’s her job to taste the food before the guests so if I have poisoned them, she dies first.’
‘Terrifying,’ Evie said.
‘I love the s
takes being so high. These days food doesn’t mean enough. It comes in ready-made packets – few would know how to spot a potato or a leek in a garden, let alone how to make a soup or a stew. We should learn how to respect and procure it.’
Evie looked at her daughter’s shining eyes. ‘I haven’t seen you so fired up for years.’
Annie turned and faced her mother, ‘I have finally found what I really want to do with my life, Mum. It’s taken thirty-one years.’
‘I envy you,’ Evie said.
‘If this dinner is a success, maybe others will follow. Perhaps I will make it as a professional chef.’
Giving her saucepan a last stir she poured her cream-based béchamel sauce carefully over the chicken. The pale caramel-coloured liquid ran evenly over the bird turning its puckered surface glossy and golden. Carefully spooning away any excess liquid, Annie put the bird back in the fridge.
‘If anything does go wrong?’ Evie asked.
‘I shall have to fall on my sword like the chef Vatel, who failed to provide enough roast birds and fresh fish.’
‘Can I help?’
Annie hesitated. ‘It’s not a good idea.’
‘I went to an AA meeting yesterday. I am going to change. I promise.’
Annie didn’t reply. There had been too many new dawns, assurances and hope spilled pointlessly, and this job was too important.
‘I have let you down before but this time will be different,’ said Evie.
Annie didn’t answer.
Most of Annie’s childhood memories revolved around Evie’s new beginnings and her outlandish schemes to get herself ‘back on track’. Where the track had been or was supposed to be going was never explained, but each initiative, often a new career or moneymaking venture, was approached with conviction and gusto. Once Evie decided to become a landscape gardener and spent hours studying Reader’s Digest How To Grow books. Even though they only had a small window box to practise on, Evie created parklands, borders, hedgerows and vistas in her mind. For several weeks, she described and Annie transcribed her mother’s vision on to large pieces of scrap paper, vivified and coloured in watercolours and tacked to the walls of their council flat. Placing adverts in the local paper, in nearby garden centres and on the school noticeboard, Evie even won a job after convincing the vicar that she could transform his small backyard wilderness into a romantic, scented night garden, a place of calm and contemplation. Unfortunately, the vicar’s wife, who had a smattering of horticultural knowledge, put a stop to the project when Evie told her that she was going to cover the walls in sweet-smelling, vigorous, climbing chlamydia.
Another scheme had involved breeding teacup-sized Yorkshire terriers, which would sell for £50 each. The parents, Bullseye and Bullet, were brother and sister (‘No one need know’), cost £25 each and only managed to produce two pups in one year. One day Annie came home from school to be told that they had, in a tragic double accident-cum-suicide, run out into the road and been knocked down. Distraught and totally unconvinced, Annie did not speak to her mother for three weeks. Then Evie set herself up as a faith healer, then a masseuse and, finally, an aerobics instructor, but they never lived in one place long enough to build up a client base.
They travelled light. Evie had two suitcases and her vanity bag, which held a collection of significant objects, items from her past. There was a diamanté-studded tortoiseshell hair clip that had belonged to Great-Auntie Edna, a photograph of her maternal grandparents and the only thing that had belonged to her father, a copy of Larousse Gastronomique, the cookery book he had inherited from an aunt and whose recipes Annie had memorised by the age of thirteen. There was also the remnants of the bouquet Evie had carried on her wedding day and the photograph that Annie coveted most, a photograph of her father lying on a beach asleep, his trilby hat on his stomach, his arms splayed above his head like a small child.
These mementos were Annie’s only connections with another life and a wider family. She longed to meet relations and find out if her eyes come from her father or a cousin and discover who else had auburn-coloured hair. With the absence of real people, she made up stories: Granny Josephine with her gout, quick temper and love of Chopin’s polonaises; Grandpa Mortimer, who worked as a pig farmer but dreamed of being a perfumer; Aunt Alice, fed up with life on the farm, who ran away to join the local circus and is still riding elephants in Wigan. It was for these disparate relations that Annie began cooking her fantasy feasts. She imagined them all coming to visit and the food would be so delicious that they would put the past behind them, bury slights and hurts. She would have long and imaginary conversations with each, filling them in on aspects of her life.
Her guests would step out of their real lives and into another, becoming, for a few hours at least, travellers transported through time by flavour and costume to another world. Taking her admired characters in history, Annie matched food and ingredients to their particular time and interests. For Boadicea, she stuffed shanks of wild boar with nuts and dates and placed it on a bed of honey-soaked hay. She imagined preparing Elizabeth I’s first potato – mashed and served with jugged hare with root vegetables braised in mead. To keep Alexander the Great’s strength up on long campaigns, she smoked his fish and braised his vegetables lightly in a herb-infused broth. Scouring local libraries, she built up a personal index of fantastical foods and settings. They always had to be based in the past, as Annie’s present was consistently grim.
The timer on the cooker started to bleat insistently. Annie lifted the aubergine out and placed it, steaming, on to a plate to cool.
‘Cup of tea?’ Annie asked in a conciliatory tone.
Evie nodded.
‘So tell me about the AA meeting.’
‘It was interesting.’
‘Interesting?’
Evie nodded. ‘I don’t want to say too much – get our hopes up – but I have not wanted a drink since.’
‘You only went yesterday!’
‘Mostly I think about drinking every minute of every day,’ Evie said quietly. ‘From the moment I wake up till I finally go to sleep.’
‘What’s there to think about?’ Annie said uncomprehendingly.
‘Where I might get some, how to pay for it, how to not have too much, how to have enough. It sounds so mad – you couldn’t understand, though, what it’s like to be trapped inside the obsession.’
Annie didn’t reply – but she did understand. For months she had thought of nothing but Desmond, from the first moment she had woken to the last dregs of thoughts before falling asleep.
The timer went off again and Annie took the chicken out of the fridge and, setting it on the table, applied another layer of caramel sauce.
‘What are you doing?’ Evie asked.
‘It should look like it’s got a plasticky layer of béchamel on top and been sealed in a solid layer of golden caramel.’
‘A long process,’ Evie commented.
‘Next week I will have eight to do. All from this kitchen.’ She put the chicken back in the fridge to chill. Annie took the cooled aubergine and began to gently scoop out the flesh until only the deep-red skin remained. Taking her sharpest knife she began to cut the skin into diamond shapes. Using tweezers, she lifted each piece aside and arranged them on another plate. In the second bowl she mixed another three tablespoons of gelatine in water and one by one carefully dipped the aubergine-skin diamonds into the solution.
‘Are you going to an AA meeting tonight?’ Annie asked.
Evie nodded. ‘I want this to work.’
You are not alone there, Annie thought to herself, and opened the fridge door.
She took the chicken out of the fridge and gently nudged a leg. It had set perfectly. Taking the tweezers, she carefully began to lay the diamond strips of aubergine skin in a line from one end to the other. Joining the shapes point to point, she made another line and then another until the chicken was covered in a matrix of ruby-red diamonds on a golden background.
‘Voilà
,’ Annie said with great satisfaction.
‘It is really beautiful.’
‘It was one of Louis XV’s prized dishes, poulet au jacquard. It’s supposed to look like a glorious cake.’
‘Where did you find the recipe?’
‘In a musty old book in the London Library. Will it do?’
‘I’d eat it.’
Annie smiled gratefully.
Evie said, ‘You look lit up, different somehow.’
Annie gave her mother a spontaneous hug. ‘I’m going to be fired if I don’t get going. See you later.’
Rebecca arrived at Wiltons at exactly 1 p.m. Tiziano was sat outside but got to his feet when he saw her. She stroked the dog’s head and went inside.
‘Your father is already here, Miss Winkleman,’ said the maître d’, Mr Tonks, as he took Rebecca’s coat and led her to the table along the corridor hung with caricatures, past the plush red banquettes.
Memling sat in the far corner with his back to the wall reading a new sale catalogue from Monachorum.
‘You look pale,’ he said without looking up.
‘I’m fine,’ said Rebecca, picking up the menu. She knew every dish but hoped that concentrating on the options would calm her beating heart. It was the first time she had seen her father since her trip to Berlin.
‘I have already ordered – you needn’t bother,’ said Memling, nodding at the menu. ‘What do you think of this Bourdin coming up next week?’
Rebecca closed the menu. Once she had found her father’s insistence on ordering for her rather touching; today she found it maddening. She could feel him counting calories and cholesterol on her behalf. Did he really think his control extended to her body?
‘I was never that keen on Bourdin,’ she replied.
‘As you know, dear child, a dealer should leave personal feelings out of transactions.’ Memling used the condescending tone of voice that transported Rebecca back immediately to her younger self. The fifty-year-old woman sitting on the velvet padded banquette turned into a young child locked for eight hours in her bedroom for failing to identify a Fragonard painting. Rebecca raised her hand to attract the attention of the waitress. The woman, middle-aged, wearing a white uniform, hurried over.
The Improbability of Love Page 30
