The Road Home

by Rose Tremain

  “Right. What about red meat?”

  “Same idea, Chef. Buy locally. Visit the hunters, like my father once was, who kill rabbits and wild boar. And fish. May be difficult at first. But above Baryn will be a new reservoir. Very, very big. In time, maybe trout and pike, salmon, freshwater eel.”

  “Okay. Excellent. Local ingredients are the best. But you can’t always be prepping and cooking and collecting poultry and listening to game hunters’ reminiscences all in the same fucking day. You’ll have to delegate.”

  “I know.”

  “So you have to factor this into your costings: what you pay other people for deliveries and all the stuff you can’t physically do yourself. Nobody will work for you for nothing.”

  “I know, Chef.”

  “What about staples? Aren’t these in short supply still? Flour, rice, butter, oil, sugar?”

  “No. You can get these. Baryn market.”

  “Regular? No hitches? Remember, a restaurant has to keep going round the year, day on day, or the clientele falls away.”

  “Yes.”

  “Right, moving on to Number four: Look. Is this a modern brasserie? Or a fuggy bistro? Is it a nostalgic old Russian tearoom? Who’s it aimed at? What bit of the city is it going to be in? Whose corner restaurant is this going to become? You’ve got to get your Look aligned with your Style. And you’ve got to know all this before you start. Which brings us to Number five, which really should be Number one: Setting-up Cost. How in hell’s name are you going to finance this?”

  “Chef, this is really why I came —”

  G.K.’s features froze. He threw down the pen. “You came to ask me for capital?”

  “No. Of course not,” said Lev. “Only to ask you, could you list for me everything? Everything I must put in before I can be running. I mean all the equipment. Then I can begin my sums.”

  G.K. ran a hand through his turbulent hair. He stared at Lev in an almost frightened way, then looked down again at the piece of paper, picked up the pen, and stuck it into his mouth. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, after a moment. “I can do this for you. Fifty covers, you said?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, two in the kitchen? You and a commis. Share all the prep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Two on tables. One nurse. That it?”

  “That’s it. And the car or truck. Secondhand.”

  “I’ll need to think about it. Get it right for you. Half the matériel I’ve got through there you won’t need. Got a name for this place?”

  “Yes,” said Lev. “I will call it Marina, after my wife.”

  G.K. smiled. He laid down the pen once more. “Right,” he said. “At least you got that settled.”

  He stood up and went to the bar. He took down a bottle of cognac, poured two shots, and returned to the table. He proposed a toast to Marina, and they drank. Lev’s heart was beating so fast that he gulped the brandy to try to still the roar of it.

  And then he and G. K. Ashe sat on. Lev smoked and they talked about the future, about the importance, in any life, of having at least one Big Idea, something you could believe in. After a while, the talk drifted to G.K.’s father, who’d wanted him to be a lawyer, had all chefs pinned down as weird, gay, or poor, couldn’t see how his son might make a profession out of that, and hadn’t been interested when he had.

  “Doesn’t he ever come to eat here, Chef?”

  “No. Never. He came to the opening, that was all. Stayed about half an hour. If I was head chef at the Dorchester, or somewhere like that, he might come, but even then, I doubt it. So I live with that. I have to. Sometimes you just have to say, ‘Fuck the parents,’ and not mind.”

  “I know this, Chef,” said Lev. “I know this very well.”

  Time passed, and next door in the kitchen Lev heard people coming in and the staff meal being prepared. He knew he had to leave soon, before Sophie arrived, but now G.K. seemed to want to keep talking. He described his mother, “a truly lovely woman,” who’d died in a car accident on the M4, and the stepmother who had replaced her, and the knowledge that this had brought him that life was “a miserable travesty of our dreams.” G.K. refilled the shot glasses. The cognac modulated his voice, brought a softer look to his blue eyes. It felt, to Lev, as though G.K. had suddenly passed from being an employer to being a friend. This friendship had a kind of radiance about it, in which it was tempting to bask.

  Then a familiar voice intruded: “What’s going on, Chef?”

  Sophie was standing by the bar, staring at them. They both turned and looked at her. Lev saw that her hair was shorter and spikier and her face thinner than he remembered it. Even at this distance, he believed he could catch the scent of her, the scent that still had the power to overwhelm him. He looked away and began to gather up his notes.

  “Nothing’s going on,” said G.K. “Lev was just picking my brains. He’s starting his own place.”

  Sophie gaped. Lev could hear her thinking, He’s nothing, he’s no one. How can a nobody open his own place?

  “His own restaurant?”

  “Yes. In his own country.”

  Lev didn’t look at her, but he could feel her tension diminish. In his own country. That’s all right, then. In a country far away . . .

  Lev thought he should stand up, shake G.K.’s hand, leave there and then, but some stubborn defiance in him insisted on his right to stay where he was.

  “So,” said Sophie to Lev, “you’ve decided to go back?”

  He inclined his head. This tiny movement could have been taken for a nod. But he saw that they were waiting, Sophie and G.K., for him to speak to her. He didn’t want to speak to her. He thought, All conversation with her now is like trying to scrape the dregs, the dross, out of an empty barrel—and then you scar the barrel itself.

  They both stared at him, but he didn’t open his mouth or let his glance even flicker in her direction. And it seemed she understood that he’d given her all the answer she was going to get. While he clutched his notebook, while he saw his hands tense to yellow bone, she disappeared back into the kitchen.

  G.K. waited a moment, then said quietly, “Preece leads her a dance. But he gets a lot of important people swilling at my trough, so who am I to complain? That’s the way of the bad world, I guess.”

  “Yes,” agreed Lev. “That’s the way of the bad world, Chef.”

  He found himself shivering. He took a sip of the cold coffee. He was in a kind of shock, but didn’t know what had agitated him more, G.K.’s unexpected, thrilling support for his Idea, or the unexpected, teasing sight of Sophie. He still wanted her, and that was the bitter truth of it. Just catching sight of her made him ache to fuck her. And he felt that, far into the future, he would remember her—her voice, her smell, her clothes, her laughter, her dimpled cheeks, her full breasts, her tattoo, her arse, her salty cunt—and want her still. When he imagined her making love with Howie Preece, he felt himself fall into a trance of desolation.

  It was a while before Lev was allowed to meet Jasmina.

  “She’s a very modest person,” Christy explained. “It would embarrass her to sleep with me at Belisha Road, with you in Frankie’s room.”

  “Yes? You want me to stay away, Christy?”

  “No, not at all, fella. It isn’t only that. I think she’s also frightened of Angela, of finding, like, the residue of Angela in the flat. You know? Or that Angela could turn up and whip the bed out from under- neath us!”

  Then on a Sunday evening in June, warm and dry, Jasmina invited Lev to her house in Palmers Green. He and Christy drove there in Christy’s van, with the plumber’s gear clanking and jumping about behind them, like some toddlers’ orchestra trying to assemble itself. “Ah, shut up!” Christy yelled at this orchestra a couple of times. “Can’t hear meself drive.” And when, out along the North Circular Road, a wrench came flying forward between the seats and whacked the gear lever, Christy said, “Christ Almighty, will you look at that? I’ve never been able to control me tools
. Never at all.”

  They arrived at last in a quiet road of low, semidetached houses with bay windows and tended front gardens. Christy slowed the van, said, without moving his head, “See the net curtains twitch. Everybody knows everybody’s business here. Worse than Limerick. Looked on me as a scalawag when I first started coming to visit Jasmina. But now they’re all after me to refit their kitchens. I’ve got more popularity on this street than anywhere else on earth.”

  As soon as they got out of the van, Jasmina’s front door opened and she came out into the evening sunshine with her arms held wide. Lev saw that she was a plump woman, whose sari seemed too tight for her body. Her eyes were magnified by the complicated lenses of her spectacles, but beneath these, a smile of some beauty was occurring. At the sight of her, Christy’s face blushed an all-over red. She embraced him, and Lev saw him almost disappear beneath or behind her when a gust of wind blew the loose folds of her sari round his narrow shoulders.

  He emerged from her to introduce Lev.

  “Welcome,” she said to Lev. “Come into the house. My God, it’s such beautiful weather, I can’t believe it. Come on, come on . . .”

  Her path was made of some granite-like material with shards of mica that glittered in the soft light. Under the curving window, fat hydrangeas were poised on the brink of a blue flowering. Her front door was bright white PVC with a brass door knocker in the shape of a lion’s head.

  From a carpeted hallway Jasmina led them into her front room, and here Christy turned to Lev and said, “Did you ever see something like this, Lev?”

  The small room had been fitted out with glass shelving, running right round it to a height of six or seven feet. The shelves were lit from above with halogen spotlights, and on the shelves stood a vast collection of colored glass bottles, jugs, decanters, vases, and vials. With the bright lamps above and with the sun still offering a restless light through the mullion-paned window, the glassware appeared to tremble in a perpetual rainbow jive. Ruby reds flashed a shimmering radiance to their neighboring snarly pinks. Farther round, the dance was muted to purples, indigo blues, sea blues, aquamarines. Turn to the left and the entire wall shone bottle green, chartreuse green, silver, and lemon. Go to the west-facing window and you were drawn into honeyed ambers and yellows . . .

  “My God,” said Lev. “Fantastic . . .”

  Jasmina was pinching and plucking at her sari, to arrange it correctly. When she had it to her satisfaction, she smiled her transforming smile and said to Lev, “I call it my ‘loneliness room.’ It’s the kind of thing women do when they’re alone for a long time: collect glass. I started with a few pieces, then, somehow, I just carried on.”

  “It’s lovely, though, Jas,” said Christy. “It was worth those years.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” said Jasmina quickly, her smile vanishing. But Christy chose to ignore this.

  “See, Lev,” he said, “it’s so nicely arranged, isn’t it? With the little hot lights, an’ all. And the way the see-through shelves reflect everything. I think it’s a work of art.”

  “Yes,” said Lev. “I would say so. A work of art.”

  “Well,” said Jasmina. “I suppose so. But it all has to be dusted. And once a month, I take every piece down and wash it and clean the shelves, top and bottom. It’s insane.”

  “I love it,” said Christy. “I utterly and completely love it. Told Lev about it, didn’t I, fella? Told you about the room of colored glass.”

  “Yes, you did. And I never saw anything like this.”

  “Oh well,” said Jasmina, “in the sunlight I suppose it looks quite pretty. Now sit down, please. I shall bring us some nibbles.”

  Christy and Lev didn’t sit, but stood in the middle of the room, still staring at the glass, shifting position now and then, like visitors at an exhibition. They didn’t speak. Lev was trying to imagine all the individual transactions that had led to a collection of this incredible size. It seemed to him that they must have taken up an entire lifetime. Felt astonishment at the idea of that much leisure, that much spare cash flying away into bottles and vials. Remembered a solitary blue glass jar he’d bought for Marina at the Baryn market and which had stood—still stood—on a table in their bedroom. Remembered Marina’s long-fingered hands shining it up with a rag, sometimes sticking flowers into it. Remembered her saying to him, “There’s something about that blue jar, Lev, that I love.”

  Jasmina came back into the room and set down a pewter tray on the coffee table. On the tray was arranged a collection of small white dishes, filled with food. Between the dishes, on the shined-up pewter, Jasmina had sprinkled white rose petals. Her plump hands rippled tenderly over the food, making her bangles clink.

  “Cocktail koftas,” she said. “Spicy cashews, quick-fried prawns, cucumber dip, spinach-and-ricotta samosas. Please help yourselves. I will get the vodka.”

  She went out again, and Christy contemplated the white dishes and the strewn petals. “She got vodka for you,” he whispered. “I told her you liked a shot.”

  Jasmina wanted to serve the supper at the back of the house, on the patio, but Christy said no, he liked to eat in here, watch the sun go down on all the restless colors. So they sat on the floor on bright cushions and Jasmina came and went with more and more dishes—enough food for ten people.

  Though she drank only water, she served cold Indian beer in a tall jug, and Lev felt his mind fill up again with the sweetness of the present. He’d never tasted home-cooked Indian food before. He liked the way, as you ate, the perfume of it still visited your nostrils, the way you inhaled it as you swallowed and felt its transforming properties slide into your blood. After only a few mouthfuls, he fancied his hair was scented with coconut, his skin radiant with cumin and ginger.

  The shimmering glassware sparkled at the edge of his vision. Jasmina’s voice was melodious, her vowels idiosyncratically perfect, as though she’d learned her English from some old sequestered duchess. And Lev could see that, whatever she was talking about, Christy was entranced. For a while, as they ate a lemon chicken dish with dahl and cauliflower, what she actually talked about was her job as a mortgage adviser at the Hertford and Ware Building Society, but the look of rapture on Christy’s face, the attentiveness of his gaze, never faltered.

  “Jas does really important work,” he said. “Helpin’ people to get started on the property ladder. That’s philanthropy, I think.”

  Lev saw Jasmina stretch out a hand and lay it gently on Christy’s wrist. “It’s not really,” she said. “I saw it like that when I started, but now I think mortgages are quite bad in many ways, especially very large ones.”

  She turned to Lev and said, “We have a mountain of personal debt in this country. An Everest of debt. And every day the Hertford and Ware adds to the sum of it. I’m less and less comfortable with that, and more sympathetic toward the Muslims, whose law forbids them paying interest on loans, so they don’t go down the traditional mortgage route. I mean, on Friday I had a white couple in, trying to borrow twenty-nine times their salary. Where will it end?”

  “It won’t end,” said Christy. “People will always long for things, and you help them to realize their longings, that’s all.”

  “ ‘Loans for dreams,’ that’s what I call it,” said Jasmina. “The way I was brought up, you worked a lifetime to realize a dream. Then, at last, maybe you got it—like I’ve got this collection of glass. Now, in Britain, everybody wants it now, hurry-scurry: new house, new car, new fridge, new kitchen . . .”

  “That’s where I come in,” said Christy proudly, pouring more beer. “I could get a year’s worth of work out of this one road, couldn’t I, Jas?”

  Jasmina stroked Christy’s forehead, as she might have stroked the forehead of a feverish child. “Yes,” she said, “but not if you start drinking too much beer again . . .”

  “Look, you provided the feckin’ beer, Jas. I’m just being a polite guest and drinkin’ what you’re offering.”

  “And I hate
it when you swear, Christy. You know I do.”

  Christy seized Jasmina’s hand and pressed it to his mouth and kissed the palm. “Sorry,” he mumbled, between kisses. “I take it back. I unsay it. We’re having such a lovely time. And will you look at all the glass now, with just that last bit of sun on it, that sunbeam? Eh, Lev?”

  “Yes, I see it. Very beautiful, Jasmina.”

  “Only the mind of someone as exceptional as Jas could have contrived those colors.”

  Now Lev saw Jasmina relax and the lovely smile returned. She let Christy hold her hand next to his heart and keep it there while he tried to guide another spoonful of dahl to his mouth. Lev noticed that, behind her glasses, Jasmina’s eyes were moist.

  “You’re such a baby, Christy. Such a romantic. Isn’t he, Lev?”

  “Yes. A romantic. Yes.”

  “Who cares?” said Christy. “Does anybody care here? I mean, does anybody here care?”

  “I care,” said Jasmina. “I don’t want you to change.”

  “Listen to that,” said Christy, with a beatific grin on his face. “Isn’t that a pure peach of a thing to say? God Almighty. Will you marry me, Jasmina? Soon as my divorce becomes absolute, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”

  Now there was a sudden silence in the room. Outside, there came the sound of kids riding skateboards up and down the street: the clatter of worn wheels, echoing laughter. Lev looked from Christy to Jasmina, saw her staring at him with her mouth open. Christy still held her hand against his narrow chest.

  “Is that just something you’re saying, Christy?” asked Jasmina quietly.

  “No,” said Christy. “Or at least, I am saying it. But it’s not a just saying it kind of thing. I’m saying it, Jasmina, and I mean it. I’d like you to marry me. I mean, if you’d like to, too . . .”