Tess Stimson - The Adultery Club (24 page)

appalling, grief-sodden days and weeks I wished I had.

Wished I hadn’t survived the helter-skelter journey to

throw those ugly accusations at Trace as soon as he

opened his front door, to spit out the wonderful, amazing,

precious news I’d been saving and savouring, and

instead fling it at him like a gilded weapon, to wound

and hurt.

I hadn’t given him a chance to explain or defend

himself, because all the signs were there; instead, I’d run

back to my car, blinded by tears, and of course I hadn’t

even seen the slick of oil pooled in the driveway, oil from

the leak in my car that Kit had been nagging me for weeks

to get fixed. How could I ever put that right, how could I

tell my poor little nearly-baby: you’d exist if only I hadn’t

been so angry, if I hadn’t listened to my ‘intuition’, if I’d

just remembered to get the wretched car fixed—?

The front door opens and I nearly fall into a rose bush.

I’ve been watching you dithering for the past five

minutes,’ Trace says, the corners of his beautiful mouth

twitching. ‘I actually thought you were going to go back

home at one point, I was all set to come out and bodily

drag you in.’

‘Lord, don’t do that,’ I say, alarmed, ‘you have no idea

how the neighbours gossip in this village.’

Quickly I step past him, trying not to notice how good

he smi’lls, and straight into the sitting room, where Trace

has effortlessly managed to combine his passion for

angled Swedish minimalism with chintzy English country

cottage. Quite how Tudor beams and horse brasses hit it

off with a flat-screen television and black leather sofa I’m

not sure, but in Trace’s sitting room they give the distinct

impression of being more than just good friends.

Rather like Trace himself, I think distractedly; all

angles, charm and contradictions, yet such a perfect blend

of everything you ever thought you wanted-‘May I say, Mrs Lyon, how very lovely you look with

your clothes on,’ Trace drawls, closing the door behind

me. I jump at the sound like a rat in a trap. ‘Not that I

didn’t appreciate the effort you went to last time we

met; it gave a whole new meaning to the concept of the

Naked Chef.’

‘You promised1 wail, my cheeks flaming.

‘Relax. My lips are sealed. Though the glitter was a nice

touch, I have to say.’

‘Trace!’

He holds his hands up. ‘All right, all right. I’ll never

mention it again, yes, I promise. Now. Into the kitchen.

I’ve been cooking up a storm, Mrs Lyon, as instructed it’s

not been easy, let me tell you, Christ knows what

sadistic bastard invented the bloody Aga, it’s either on or

it’s off with nothing in between. I need to know exactly

what you think of my white onion risotto with Parmesan

air and espresso—’

‘You tried it!’ I cry delightedly.ŚŚ,,

‘You told me to Trace says ruefully.

I follow my nose - such a delicious smell, I hadn’t

realized until now how hungry I am; but then I couldn’t

eat at breakfast, or at lunch, far too nervous, which is so

silly, really, it’s not as if Trace and I— Of course I haven’t seen him in so long (apart from the humiliating glitter

incident, of course), not properly, not since we were

lovers, in fact, and somehow I’d forgotten quite how attractive he is in the flesh-I concentrate furiously on the kitchen. Trace’s bete

noire, a glorious French blue four-oven Aga, takes pride

of place, but everything else could have been taken

straight from the pages of Bon Appftit - all that stainless

steel, so wonderfully stylish, of course, though can you imagine the jammy handprints? - and I spin from one delight to the next like a child in a sweetshop: all-clad

sauciers, a Robocoup, a full set of Global knives (what is

it about the Japanese and cold steel?), a tilt braiser; and

oh, what bliss, an antique Griswold cast-iron skillet. He

must have stayed up half the night on eBay to get hold of

one of those.

Trace lifts the lid of a saucepan simmering on the Aga

and dips in a wooden spoon. ‘Come on, then. Try it.’

Obediently, I open my mouth. Trace leans in, palm

cupped beneath the spoon to prevent drips, and I know

it really is the most appalling cliche feeding each other

food, so overused in cinema, I always think; but still

forbiddenly, stomach-fizzingly erotic.

Hypothetically speaking.

‘De-mm-shous,’ I mumble through a mouthful of

heaven.

‘Against all reason Trace agrees.

People always forget that cooking is a science as much

as it’s an art. All you have to do is think about the mystery

of mayonnaise: it’s the siiiuc mosl tightly packed with oil

siropli’tM, up to eighty per cent of its volume is oil, in fact;

and you can make them more-stable small droplets by

whisking a portion of the oil into just the yolks and salt to

start with, so that the salt causes the yolk granules to fall

apart into their component particles, and there you are,

no curdling. Straightforward science.

How can anyone not find molecular cooking absolutely

fascinating? It really is the next great trend in cooking.

There hasn’t been a culinary revolution like this since well,

since Escoffier, really. As I explained to Trace, and I

could kiss him for saying yes to all this, the way it works

is that to create unusual and original recipes, you analyse

the molecular make-up of the ingredients with an infrared

spectrometer nuclear magnetic resonance machine - any

synthetic chemist or physicist will have one - and foods

with similar composition just pair well together, even

when you’re sure they really, really shouldn’t, sort of like

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, if you see what I

mean. Heston Blumenthal is just so brilliant at this; his

recipes are nothing short of genius. And so-‘Bacon-and-egg icecream?’ Trace asks doubtfully the

next week, when I present him with a draft menu. ‘Sardine-on-toast sorbet and meringue cooked in liquid nitrogen

at your table?’

‘So much more exciting than crepes flambees, don’t

you think?’ I enthuse.

He reads down the page. ‘Envelopes of squid filled

with coconut and ginger butter, monkfish liver with

tomato seeds, freeze-dried foie gras shaved over consomme,

thermo minted pea soup—’

‘That’ll be hot at the top and cold at the bottom I

explain helpfully.

‘Of course. Followed by roast breast of duck with olive

oil and chocolate bonbons, and a dessert of fig and black

olive tatin with brie icecream, no doubt.’

‘It’s all about working with natural flavours rather than

adding something chemical to make it whizzy I burst

out, unable to contain my excitement any longer. ‘It’s

essentially the creation of flavours and textures that will

transport your taste buds to a happier world

‘You dippy hippy, you are your mother’s daughter

Trace grins. “Though I’m not sure what she’d say about

the snail porridge. Poor old snails.’

‘I need to work on a signature dish,’ I muse, twisting up my hair and skewering it with a pencil, so it’ll stay out of my way. ‘Pino Maffeo is famous for his seared foie gras

with a twentyfour-carat golden egg - he takes this small,

oblong meringue and dredges it in lightly whipped cream,

then dunks it in the liquid nitrogen - nearly two hundred

degrees below zero, imagine! - which flash-freezes the

cream, creating a texture like an eggshell. And then he

injects mango sauce into the meringue with a syringe, and

wraps the whole thing in twentyfour-carat gold leaf. Once

it’s cracked, it oozes with the yolk-like mango sauce—’

‘I’m the one who’s cracked,’ Trace mutters. ‘I must be,

to have agreed to this. It looks like Frankenstein’s laboratory in here, not a bloody kitchen.’

‘Oh, that reminds me,’ I add, ‘I’ll need to move some

of this stuff over to my kitchen at home. Nicholas has got

so much work on at the moment - ever since Will Fisher

retired, really, he seems to live at the office these days he’s olten back so Lite I’m nol even awake. It would be so

imii’h easier if I uuikl work on my recipes at home in the

evening, after the children are in bed, instead of having to

get a babysitter and keep coming over here.’

All absolutely true, of course (poor Nicholas, even at

weekends he’s taking calls from the office); but perhaps

not the whole truth.

Which is that Trace is still dangerously and wildly sexy

and gorgeous, and I’m really not at all sure that being

shut up with him in this cosy little cottage cooking every

day - when, as we all know, a kitchen is a more sexually

charged environment than the Moulin Rouge - as we

have been doing all week is such a frantically good idea. I adore Nicholas, of course, absolutely smitten, no question of me ever doing anything, that doesn’t even come into it;

but the thing is, Trace is unfinished business, as it were;

and it’s all so much better if the question of tying up loose

ends never arises. For all concerned.

After I lost our baby, Trace never once reproached me;

he didn’t need to. I could do enough of that myself. It all

seems so sad and silly and unnecessary now. I should have

talked to my mother, of course; more importantly, I

should have talked to Trace. But I was barely twenty-two

years old, inexperienced and desperately naive. I could

whip up a feather-light souffle with my eyes shut, but I

knew nothing about love. How strong it could be.

I couldn’t stand even to look at my face in the mirror.

The thought of seeing in his eyes the loathing and disgust

I saw reflected each day in my own was simply more than

I could bear.

And so I refused to see Trace at the hospital, refused to

take his calls after I returned home, refused to answer the

door no matter how much he argued and pleaded and

finally - yelled at me to come out and face him. Because I

couldn’t, you see. Couldn’t face the man whose child I’d

killed through my own stupidity and lack of trust. Trace

wasn’t having an affair, of course he wasn’t; it turned out

he’d taken a second job (in the midst of the nineties’

economic recession, the fledgling cheese shop was floundering), a job he hated and despised, but needed: to pay

for an engagement ring. An agent - someone he’d met,

with bitter irony, through Kit, in fact - had offered him

obscene amounts of money to become the Face (if that’s

the right word) of a funky new jeans label: hence the new

clothes, the sudden need to keep fit, the secretive phone

calls. Trace had learned to smoulder from billboards and

newspapers and magazines and imbue a rather ordinary

pair of jeans with enough sex-by-association to have them

flying off the shelves in record numbers.

Such numbers, in fact, that they’d paid not just for

one-and-a-half sparkling carats but also for the deposit on

a flat off the King’s Road, over whose threshold Trace had

planned to carry me just as soon as I said ‘Yes’.

Which I would have done, of course. Only by the time

I knew what Trace was about, it was all far too late.

The only person to threaten my monopoly on self

loathing was Kit. He tried to fix things, of course, to

persuade me to let Trace back into my life. He didn’t

understand - neither of them understood - that this

wasn’t something I was doing out of choice. That I loved

Tnicc more than I ever had, but I knew - or thought I

knew, child-woman that I was - that our poor little baby

would always be there, a shadow between us, its loss

il,iikrnin iind souring every sweet moment, locking us

both into a grey spiral of misery and despair until nothing

was left in either of us to love. I couldn’t do that to Trace. Not after everything else I had already done to him.

Five months later, I met Nicholas.

‘It absolutely isn’t on, Trace. Not at this time of night—’

‘You weren’t asleep, were you? I can tell.’

‘That’s not the point.’

His voice is teasing. ‘I rather think it is, though. Isn’t

it?’

I put the phone down for a moment, and shut the door

to Nicholas’s study a little more firmly so as not to wake

the girls. ‘It’s ten-thirty at night, Trace. I have three small children asleep upstairs, not to mention a psychotic rabbit,

a cat and of course now four hamsters.’

‘Four hamsters?’

‘My mother gave the girls four Russian hamsters for

the Chinese New Year, one for each of them and one just

in case, and so far they all appear to be cohabiting in

homosexual bliss.’ I sigh. ‘Not one of her easier presents,

they shit like, well, like hamsters, I suppose. Though I

have to say as presents go it’s not quite as bad as the

bicycle horns in each of their stockings last year - she

must have stuffed them in when she was babysitting

during Midnight Mass. I wanted to strangle her at five

thirty on Christmas morning - but never mind all that

now, you really can’t call me this late, supposing Nicholas