The Woman Who Wanted More

by Vicky Zimmerman

  This menu is going to work like a charm.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  ‘HE’S FINALLY MADE UP his mind,’ says Annalex, arching an eyebrow at Kate. ‘So are you coming to find out, or what?’

  Kate feels her throat go dry as she follows the dull thump of Annalex’s Ugg boots down the corridor to the boardroom. ‘I need more time to decide if you’re good enough’ – it was bad enough Nick basically saying that, but she’d accepted it from Nick because she loves him and besides, he didn’t really mean it. But for Devron to say it, when she’s proved herself for nearly twenty years? When she’s been a loyal and consistently high-performing employee, when she’s rated ‘Good slash Great’ on all her flipping KPIs? She must not get carried away again in a tornado of indignation.

  She settles herself opposite Devron, a sudden tightness gripping her stomach.

  Hang on a minute. Premium chocolate biscuits? Laid right there on the table? Premium chocolate biscuits are normally only dispensed for board meetings or visiting dignitaries.

  Devron rubs his hand over his jaw and blows out heavily as his eyes scan his notepad in front of him. ‘Right, so, I’ve spoken with HR and senior stakeholders, and you’ll be pleased to hear I’ve got a decision and it’s good news.’

  ‘Good for whom?’ says Kate.

  ‘Both of you,’ says Devron, giving her a wink. ‘It occurred to me after last week’s meeting that you have very different core strengths. Kate, you’re obviously happy doing creative stuff; Annalex, you’re a data-driven thinker.’ He glances at the bullet-pointed checklist in front of him. ‘It’s good to keep home-grown talent like Kate – as well as to attract the best in the marketplace. So Kate, you’re going to become Head of Copy, and Annalex will take strategic lead and become Brand Ambassador of In-store Comms.’

  ‘Can I put Ambassador on my business card?’ says Annalex.

  ‘So after all that, we’re both keeping our jobs?’ says Kate. ‘But how will that work in terms of the overall restructure?’

  ‘Still ironing that out,’ says Devron. ‘You’ll have your new contracts in December.’

  ‘OK . . . Will we be getting a pay rise?’ says Kate, suddenly perking up. ‘We haven’t had one in three years.’

  ‘You’re lucky still to have a job,’ says Devron. ‘Er, but you will get exciting creative opportunities which are far more valuable for your development.’

  That old chestnut, thinks Kate, then laughs to herself as she remembers last Christmas’s debacle, when it was discovered that Fletchers’ finest Italian chestnuts were actually Chinese, though at least that copy wrote itself.

  ‘So Kate, I’m going to ask you to get involved in the new KIPPER subgroup cluster this week—’

  ‘So, hang on, we’ll be starting the new roles now, without a new contract?’

  ‘You’re still on the old contract till December, but I thought you might like to immerse yourself in KIPPER sooner rather than later. If that’s all right with you?’

  ‘A kipper immersion. What could be finer?’ says Kate, aware she should be demonstrating enthusiasm and gratitude a little more authentically than she is currently.

  At least Kavita is delighted, and insists on taking Kate for a drink after work.

  Kate knows she should feel pleased or at least relieved – but she feels almost disappointed, and for the opposite reason to why she’d imagined.

  It’s not because Annalex is keeping her job, it’s because Kate is.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  KATE CHECKS HER WATCH subtly. She’s sitting in her first KIPPER subgroup cluster late on Friday afternoon, and so far her colleagues have spent forty minutes bickering about whether the acronym for Creativity Yields Profitable Results should be changed from KIPPER to CAPER. They haven’t even started on point one of the agenda, and Kate’s starting to worry she won’t make it to the food hall before it closes.

  The minute the meeting’s over she calls and persuades the shop to let her order and pay over the phone, so she can just swing by and collect everything, and thank goodness she does because by the time she’s shut down her computer and run most of the way there, it’s two minutes before closing. Gratefully she takes the heavy bag from the fish counter and dashes to the meat counter for the chicken thighs, which cost the same as Kate’s entire favourite curry takeaway order: not a paltry sum.

  Back at the flat, she pops the bags in the fridge, then flops down on the sofa. What a joy, to have a moment of stillness at the end of a long week. She should start cooking, but instead slips off her shoes and stretches the full length of the sofa. Apart from the noise outside of Lorna Bleecher manically hooting her Mazda horn at whichever poor sod is daring to walk near her, all is quiet. Kate wiggles her toes. She can’t remember the last time she felt this happy alone. How nice to have a peaceful, quiet home – no surly Melanie, no boundary-invading Rita – almost as nice as the prospect of sharing a home with Nick.

  Right – time to start the prep. The cakes first – and she’s making an extra one for Cecily. Kate turns on her iPod to her favourite eighties playlist – first up, INXS – and on with the cake! It’s a straightforward recipe – two sponge layers baked and left to cool, then sandwiched with strawberries and whipped cream, extra strawberries on top. Diligently she creams the sugar and softened butter, then stirs in the eggs. She inhales the aroma from the vanilla essence bottle before adding a generous swig and giving a sigh of contentment. There’s no better feeling than when she’s cooking for someone she loves. Gently she folds in the flour, then lovingly pours the batter into four separate cake tins. The baking takes less than an hour, and as the flat fills with the sweet, comforting smell of vanilla sponge, Kate turns to focus on the main course.

  Again, the chicken is a simple recipe but the slow braising will ensure the meat falls off the bone. She fries the chicken in the sizzling golden butter with finely chopped shallots, adds the cider, a fragrant bouquet garni and skinned, deseeded Italian tomatoes, then sticks it in the oven on low.

  The potatoes are a true labour of love – but that’s the whole point. Cecily’s recipe involves peeling and squaring off the potatoes, slicing them with a mandolin, soaking them in cream, layering them in a twenty-layer formation in a loaf tin with seasoning and tiny cubes of butter, slow-baking them, leaving them under a heavy weight overnight, then the next day cutting them into neat rectangles and frying them in butter and thyme – resulting in a soft, creamy, multi-layered inside and a crisp, crunchy exterior. They sound delicious, but they are hard work, thinks Kate, arranging the fourteenth layer of slices in the tin, then washing her cream-covered fingers for the fourteenth time.

  The potatoes need two hours in the oven, during which time she can relax and have a bath. As her final chore she takes the fish bag from the fridge to decant the contents. It’s heavier than she’d envisaged, they must have packed it with ice – but when she takes the inner bag from the outer, she sees with despair that London’s most expensive food hall has failed to take the prawns from their shells. She’d assumed they’d do that automatically – for the price she paid for twelve prawns they should not only de-shell them, but also come round and cook the damn things, then do the washing-up and fix Rita’s wireless-router problems.

  These aren’t tiger prawns, they’re giant crustaceans, each the length of a school ruler. She takes the cold, wet bodies from the bag and lines them up on the counter. Twenty-four shiny dead black eyes stare up at her accusingly – they will haunt her in her dreams. Fruits de mer? Fruits de nightmare more like, she thinks, then chastises herself for a pun even Annalex wouldn’t make.

  She wishes Nick was here to help – he loves fishmongery – but he’s enjoying a red-hot night fiddling with Oracle and SQL server, which he’s assured her are not strippers. She checks in Cecily’s book for the method: shell and trim the prawns; dip in batter . . . Huh – she makes it sound easy.

  Right: she puts on Rage Against the Machine to psych herself up. Oh but crustac
eans are weird – tasty, sure, but as she lifts one up she shudders. They’re like armoured slugs, those long whiskery antennae, those angular spiky joints; how anyone can cook a live lobster is beyond her.

  She googles ‘langoustine anatomy’ and acquaints herself with Nephrops norvegicus. The head bit is the head, obviously, then there’s the carapace – underneath are some walking legs and some swimming legs – ooh handy, two different sets of legs – and inside is the intestinal sac. Has there ever been a less appealing phrase in the history of cooking than intestinal sac? That would not make it onto hers and Nick’s shortlist of kids’ names.

  She googles ‘peel and devein a langoustine’. Unfortunately, it is not a straightforward process, or at least not for a squeamish person. She finds a video and starts following along, holding the first prawn down by its thorax, then squirming as she holds the tip of a knife against the centre of its back, bringing it down hard, splitting the prawn sharply in two with a nauseating crunch, snap and crack of breaking exoskeleton.

  Kate’s pretty sure she’s never bisected a once-living creature’s head before. She squints at the pale grey insides – an undignified end. She wonders if Cecily created this task to test the strength of her readers’ devotion. But no, of course . . . this is what Cecily cooked for Samuel, and she secured an engagement out of it a few weeks later: onwards!

  Bloody hell – now Kate has to remove the veins. She takes a pair of tweezers, almost retching as she digs into the slippery flesh and pulls the prawn’s glistening veins out. She should have gone to Iceland – two for a fiver on frozen scampi and Nick wouldn’t have noticed the difference.

  She looks down at her finished prawn halves with a touch of satisfaction before realising that each half is still firmly in its shell, which would make for pretty crunchy scampi. She presses play on the video and curses the presenter as he explains that these prawns are now ready for the barbecue, and he’ll move on to demonstrate an entirely different process for deep frying.

  She stares at the kitchen wall. She loves Nick, she does, but really, this much? She sighs. It’s not even about Nick anymore: it’s Kate versus prawn. She restarts the video and after much wrestling, wriggling, cursing and further vein detaching, she finally surveys the dozen scampi tails before her, then piles the spoils of her war into the fridge. She washes her hands in scaldingly hot water for as long as she can stand, then sniffs her fingers gingerly. They smell intensely of prawns. She scrubs, then scrubs again. Lucky she made the cakes first or those strawberries would have a distinctly fishy taint. On the plus side, in the time it’s taken her to eviscerate the prawns, the chicken has cooked, as have the potatoes, and she can now go to bed.

  As her weary head hits the pillow she commends herself on learning a new skill. Also, next time, she’ll ensure she asks more clearly for what she wants in the first place – that’s a valuable life lesson. And finally, if Nick can’t proclaim his eternal love for her after the effort she’s put in, she’s going to eat his share of the scampi and find a man who can.

  Chapter Forty

  KATE SITS IN RECEPTION at Lauderdale, fanning herself with a copy of The Lady. Outside it’s a crisp October day, almost scarf weather; inside it’s tropical, and today there’s a faint suboptimal smell of bleach and boiled white fish.

  She looks down proudly at the layered strawberry shortcake balanced on her lap. It’s beautiful, a kaleidoscope of heart-shaped strawberry slices resting atop the luscious thick whipped cream.

  Mrs Gaffney is finishing in her office with a visitor, and as she emerges Kate sees it’s the same man she’s noticed in reception a couple of times before – the one with blue eyes and sandy hair. He smiles in recognition and she automatically smiles back. Something about his long, straight nose looks rather familiar.

  He heads over to a heavily made-up sulky young woman in platform heels who’s been taking endless selfies three chairs down from Kate. The girl stands and pouts, and he puts his arms on her shoulders and talks to her in a low voice. Kate has a flashback to the old man at the doughnut stand. It always makes her a little queasy when a man is old enough to be his girlfriend’s dad. Kate smooths out her frown; it’s entirely none of her business.

  Cecily is looking immaculate today in a navy-and-camel-checked cardigan, listening to the radio. She’s looking thoroughly miserable, but seeing Kate her expression brightens before her brow furrows. ‘You’re a day early.’

  ‘I happened to be passing. I brought you a treat, and I thought I could persuade you to come to the Matisse talk. It’s on in twenty minutes. We could have a quick cup of tea first?’

  Cecily looks confused. ‘I told you I didn’t want to go. Why would I have changed my mind?’

  ‘I know,’ says Kate gently, taking a seat. ‘It’s just that you were telling me about the galleries you went to in Europe. You have all these art books on your shelves. I just thought if you were bored—’

  ‘I’ve been bored for a decade. I wouldn’t be less bored in that lecture, I’d simply be sitting on a different chair.’

  ‘Mrs Finn, what would make you happy?’

  ‘Death, quick and painless, without further loss of dignity,’ says Cecily, who is eyeing up the Tupperware resting on Kate’s lap. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I made you one of the cakes from the book – it’s more cake than it is icing. The American strawberry shortcake,’ she says, taking the cake out to show Cecily.

  ‘I see,’ says Cecily, raising her eyebrows in disgust. ‘And was this from last night’s “Dinner for an Undeserving Cretin”?’

  ‘Er, no.’

  ‘Tonight, then. I should never have given you my book. I want it back tomorrow.’

  Kate feels a little stab in her chest, but nods. ‘Was this a recipe you picked up on your trip to California?’

  ‘You won’t get a story from me today,’ says Cecily, folding her arms tightly.

  ‘Did you sleep badly?’

  ‘No more so than every night. My arm’s giving me pain,’ she says, rubbing her right elbow. ‘The last time I fell it broke in three places. That idiot child-doctor did a botched job – it’s never been the same since. Also my stomach’s a little acid, God knows what that banshee put in my porridge, unspeakable texture.’

  ‘A piece of cake always makes things better, don’t you think?’

  Cecily grudgingly takes a forkful before wrinkling her nose. ‘You’ve used butter, not lard?’

  ‘I thought you couldn’t taste properly?’

  ‘I can tell from the texture.’

  ‘You can never go wrong with butter, surely?’

  Cecily shrugs her disagreement. ‘And for your information, I didn’t cook Samuel the chicken that night.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I made him lamb, his favourite. But if you’re really looking to impress, you should have made Gigot de la Clinique in the Toklas.’

  ‘The Toklas?’

  ‘Alice B. Toklas, she took the recipe from Pierlot, who took it from Guegan,’ says Cecily, pointing wearily to one of the shelves. ‘Though it takes a good eight days.’

  ‘Days or hours?’

  ‘Leg of mutton marinated in a good Burgundy for eight days, turned twice a day and injected with syringe-fuls of cognac; I wish they’d inject me twice a day with cognac,’ she says grumpily. ‘Over those eight days at least you might have seen sense. Take this cake to the kitchen, they can eat it after the Matisse. I’m out of sorts. My stomach is upset, I have a sharp pain. What else did you put in that cake?’

  ‘It’s exactly as per your recipe, apart from the lard. Should I fetch the nurse?’

  ‘No, I hate a fuss. I want to be alone.’

  ‘All right, Greta Garbo, I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Go away, vulgar girl.’

  Fine. If Cecily’s going to be like that, Kate’s delighted to have an extra hour of her day back.

  *

  Kate is in Harlesden, part way through her manicure, hoping the manicurist
won’t discover any lingering prawn flesh under her nails, when her phone rings. For a moment she panics that it’s Nick cancelling, but when she fishes the phone from her bag with her free hand she sees it’s Lauderdale and her throat goes dry.

  ‘Kate? It’s Bernadette here, from Lauderdale. It’s about Mrs Finn.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ says Kate, gesturing apologetically to the manicurist that she needs a minute.

  ‘She’s had a funny turn.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Kate, her heart sinking. ‘What kind of a funny turn?’

  ‘She had acute stomach pains and felt faint.’

  ‘Oh. Can you put me through to her?’

  ‘She’s resting, but she asked me to call.’

  ‘How can I help?’

  ‘She needs some soup.’

  ‘She wants me to make her some soup?’

  ‘Not make it. I don’t know why she can’t have the tomato soup on the menu here, it’s delicious, but no – it’s a very specific Jewish soup, apparently, from a place – have you got a pen? From a place called Steiner’s in Stamford Hill.’

  ‘Stamford Hill?’

  ‘It’s the chicken soup with the dumpling things in.’

  ‘How unwell is she?’ says Kate, looking at her watch. Cecily had been complaining of a bad stomach earlier, but it hadn’t seemed serious. Not Stamford Hill serious.

  ‘She’s called for the nurse twice.’

  ‘OK . . .’ says Kate, trying to remain objective. Stamford Hill will involve multiple buses and horrendous traffic; there are always roadworks around Holloway and she absolutely has to have a bikini wax, she hasn’t had one since France. ‘Bernadette – could she wait until tomorrow, do you think? I’m seeing her then anyway.’

  ‘I’m only passing on the message. Normally she lacks the humility to ask for help, so perhaps she needs it. She did stress it was urgent, but I can’t make your decisions for you.’