Toast (18 page)

‘I want to talk to you about something,' says my father ominously and with one of those smiles that somehow manages to both scare and patronise me all at once. We walk out into the garden and round the rose beds, him pretending to look closely at each pink-edged Peace rose, me silently cringing, hoping desperately he isn't about to say ‘man to man'.

‘I've asked your Auntie Joan to marry me and she's said yes,' he says in a calm no-messing sort of a way, squishing a greenfly between his thumb and forefinger as he does so and wiping it off on his trousers. ‘I think she's just like Mummy, don't you?'

I just stand there, intently examining a fully open rose, not knowing what to say. Mummy hadn't ever smoked or
said ‘bleedin'. Neither had she cleaned houses for a living or bought clothes from a catalogue. I don't think she had ever set foot in C&A let alone bought a coat from there. Mummy never wore mascara, or perfume bought from a woman who came to the door, or walked around in a quilted nylon ‘housecoat'. I had never seen Mum with curlers in her hair or putting her lipstick on at the table. Neither had I ever heard her say ‘arse'.

Mummy hadn't drunk snowballs or collected cigarette coupons, she had never cut tokens from the back of packets or stuck Green Shield Stamps in a book. Mum had never played bingo and didn't have yellow nicotine stains on her fingers. I am sure she would never have worn anything made of brushed nylon. (Mum wore mushroom-coloured clothes and had shoes and handbags that always matched. I had never seen her without a brooch. Mum always said ‘touch wood' after she had tempted fate and ‘bless you' if I sneezed or farted. She said ‘oh heck!' rather than ‘bugger, bugger, bugger'.)

Mummy never used my father as a threat to get me to do what she wanted, neither did she hug me when he was looking yet freeze me out when he wasn't. Mummy had never had a ‘blue rinse' put in her hair or clear varnish on her nails. Mummy never said ‘nigger brown'. Mummy never used air freshener.

I just keep staring at the rose, the petals, the long yellow stamens, stem, the fat red thorns, wanting to say so much. Wanting to tell him how the woman he is going to marry
nags me from the moment I get up in the morning till I go to bed; how she makes me wash up my mug the second I have finished my coffee, dry it and immediately put it away in the cupboard; how she always makes me write out shopping lists and fill in forms for her because she says, ‘I haven't got my right glasses on'; how it takes her a good five minutes to sign her name on his birthday card, leaving a gap between each letter. And how sometimes we have to start again because she gets it wrong. I am desperate to tell him how I caught her looking through the files in his desk marked ‘bank statements' and how she once said she couldn't wait to get back to where she came from, only this time ‘I'll have my own house, not one off the council.'

Most of all I want to tell him how she won't let me make toast when I come in from school, how she says it is because I will make crumbs and she has spent all day ‘cleaning his bleeding kitchen'.

I want to tell him that there is no one on this earth less like Mummy.

Dad's eyes filled with tears when he saw the wedding cake. He seemed as shocked as I was at my handiwork. We stood there, his arm around my shoulders, admiring the three layers of cake held up with eight white columns,
the perfectly flat, snow-white icing with its diamond trellis motifs and the bride and groom standing proudly on top. I had used Mum's Christmas cake recipe, still folded neatly in the bowl of the food mixer, and borrowed the largest tin from Miss Jones down the road. The templates for the swags and curls had come from a cake-decorating manual I had borrowed from the mobile library, the shell edging and the piped legend ‘Joan and Tony' were learned by practising with a piping set I had bought with my pocket money last time I went to town.

I felt like I was glowing from the inside out. I bit my bottom lip to stop the tears coming when Dad hugged me and said he had never imagined it would look so beautiful. Joan said, ‘You made a good job of that, didn't you, lad?' and promptly put a tea towel over it. She said it was ‘to keep the dust off till Saturday'.

It was a small ceremony, on a sunny spring day with daffodils and cherry blossom blooming in the register office garden, a surprisingly jolly affair considering the wave of disapproval from our side of the family. There were my uncles, Ron and Freddie, and my lovely Auntie Hilda, all in good spirits despite the occasion, brother John and Elvie, Dad's cantankerous older sister who came, one assumes, only to scoff at the hat she had given Joan as a wedding present. A vast beribboned turban festooned in trellis and petals that bore more than a passing resemblance to the wedding cake. My other brother and his wife Stevie drove up
from Cornwall in their Alfa-Romeo. Dressed coolly in blue-black suits they were more forgiving of my father's choice of wife than the rest of us, but rather less so of The Hat.

On Joan's side was her youngest daughter Mary, the only one still speaking to her, with her husband Martin, a panel beater; her older sister Rose, more solidly built than Joan and who claimed to hear sparrows in her head, and brother-in-law Arnold, who Joan reckoned would ‘turn up to the opening of a packet of Woodbines if there was a free meal in it'.

The free meal was a dip in the ‘running buffet' at the Hundred House in Great Witley. (Cold roast beef, quiche, potato salad and more puddings than a WI cookbook.) Rose tasted her first – and probably last – chocolate roulade. Arnold politely refused the quiche as he said foreign food always upset his stomach. He made up for it with the Charlotte russe. As we drove back to the house, me sitting in silence in the back of the car, I realised I had never seen either Dad or Joan looking happier. Though I suspected each of them was happy for entirely different reasons.

‘Well, as it happens we do need a bit of help on Friday and Saturday nights,' said Wing Commander Howard, wiping beer froth from his moustache. ‘Can you start tomorrow?'

The Talbot was an old black-and-white coaching inn at the bottom of the hill and so close to the River Teme the cellars used to flood in winter. We popped in sometimes on a Saturday on the way back from shopping in Bromyard, getting there early so we could hog the polished wooden settles that framed the vast fireplace. Dad would order the ploughman's of Cheddar, cottage loaf and a tomato. Joan and I would have scampi in the basket and a ‘half' of lemon and lime.

‘How much is he paying you?' snapped a suddenly cross Joan, eavesdropping, as I told Dad I had been offered a job.

‘He didn't say,' I shrugged. ‘He just said he'd look after me.'

‘Don't worry, he'll be all right, I'm sure the old chap's as good as his word,' volunteered Dad.

Joan pursed her lips. ‘I've never heard anything like it, not telling someone how much they are going to be paid. A boy as well.'

Wing Commander Howard wasn't there when I walked into the bar; just a middle-aged woman with a soft perm and a mouth like a pickled onion. I hung around for a minute or two then walked out again and stood by the phone box in the car park, waiting to catch him as he arrived. I was too early anyway. As it got closer to seven o'clock I gave up and went round the back of the hotel and knocked on the glass door.

‘Yes, what is it?' yelled a plump, smiling woman with a pudding-basin haircut, wiping her hands on the front of her apron.

‘I'm supposed to start work in the kitchen tonight. Are you Diane?'

Diane told me she had just been promoted to head cook. ‘No, there's just me,' she replied when asked how many people worked under her, ‘and you now, I suppose.' She glanced down at my shoes, specially polished for the occasion and laughed, ‘You'd better get an apron. I'll show you round.'

‘This is the freezer where we keep the main courses.' She lifted the battered white lid of the chest freezer to reveal several open cardboard boxes stuffed with plastic pouches labelled Duckling a l'Orange, Boeuf Bourguignon and Coq au Vin, then she pointed to another, ‘That's the Veal Cordon Bleu. That's the most expensive.' The words Alveston Kitchens were printed on every packet in curly type under an outline of a chef's hat. ‘When Wing Commander or Mrs H. brings in an order you come up and get the main courses, then bring them down to me to cook. Can you manage that?' Di smiled a fat, watermelon smile. ‘I've defrosted a pâté de campagne for tonight, but sometimes we get through two. Oh, and there's the prawns for the prawn cocktail. We've only got eight booked tonight so I'll have time to show you everything as we go, unless we get a lot of “casuals” in.'

Steaks, salmon and the mixed grill (for whose vast
portions the restaurant was renowned) were the only main courses that didn't come from a plastic bag. The salmon was frozen but Diane did it herself, cleaning and cutting up a whole one and freezing it the day it came in. ‘Locals mostly, they bring it back from a day on the river. My Harry goes sometimes. The vegetables tonight are runner beans and cauliflower cheese, sometimes I do courgettes or leeks in white sauce.' I liked Diane instantly. ‘Oh, and remind me to show you how to make toast to go with the pâté.'

That night I went home having sliced runner beans, been shown how to garnish a slice of pâté with an orange twist and a sprig of parsley, how to tell a frozen coq from a frozen duck when the label comes off by feeling the shape of the leg through the plastic, and how to cut a slice of lemon so that it hooks neatly on to a wine glass of prawn cocktail. I knew how to pipe a swirly rosette of cream on the side of a slice of fruit pie, how to tell if an avocado is ripe and how to defrost prawns really quickly when you have forgotten to take them out of the freezer (put the bag in the sink and run the hot tap over them).

‘I hope he paid you,' said Joan curtly when I bounced in at eleven-thirty, bursting to tell them everything I had done on my first night. He hadn't, but would at the end of the week he said. Frankly, I didn't care if he never paid me. I had never enjoyed myself so much in my life. Even Joan's snipe of ‘Go and have a bath, you stink of frying' just bounced off me like water droplets off a cabbage leaf. I had made prawn cocktail (three actually), piped a whole
tray of duchesse potatoes and put chopped parsley on the duckling à l'orange exactly at the moment that Diane had squeezed the leg and its glossy marmalade-scented sauce from its hot plastic sachet. I had made fingers of toast for the pâté and defrosted a Black Forest gâteau (though no one had actually had any). Bugger Joan, bugger Daddy, bugger everyone. At last I was a chef.

I stomped up the stairs to my room, hot, sticky and excited, and stood with my back against the cold wood of the bedroom door. I almost didn't hear Joan shouting from the bottom of the stairs, ‘And don't forget to put your dirty clothes in the Ali Baba.'

‘Fillet's a bit more tender,' said Di, on whose every word I now hung. ‘Rump's more interesting. We get through a lot of fillet on a Saturday night. It's the Gin and Jag set, they won't touch rump. More money than sense, of course.'

Di was teaching me more in two evenings a week than Miss Adams had managed in a whole year of domestic science lessons, or home economics as they had recently decided to call it. I was working Sundays too now, when there was a choice of three roasts on the menu – a rolled rib of beef the size of a tree trunk, chicken, lamb and occasionally pork – and the odd night during the week.
Di's Yorkshire pudding was as high as I had ever seen, even more billowing and cloud-like than Joan's. The first time I saw it I couldn't wait to get home to mouth off about it.

Di taught me how to make gravy so that it shone and roast potatoes that were golden and crunchy outside and melting within. One Sunday lunch, when the Howards weren't around she taught me how to grill rump and fillet, ‘they might ask you to do it on my night off', and how to do the onion rings in the deep-fat fryer to go with them. ‘Flour, salt, pepper and straight into the bubbling oil. You can't have a steak without onion rings.'

‘The people on table four are going to be the new owners, go on, have a peep,' said Di one Saturday evening towards the end of term. ‘They came in earlier and introduced themselves to me. Doreen and Ken. I don't know how they're going to get on here, they've never had a restaurant before, but they seem keen enough. They're used to running a farm.' Doreen Beckett, slim, red hair, freckles, as unlike a farmer's wife as you could ever imagine, took over the running of the restaurant and the rooms, keeping a firmer eye on the expenses and waste than had the Howards. Her jockey-sized husband Ken took root in the public bar and never budged again. Their son Stuart was either at drama school or at the Royal Ballet School, depending on which one of his parents you asked. In fairness to Mr Beckett, not many of his farming mates can have had a son at ballet
school. He's so beautiful, announced Doreen, he'll be a star one day.

The more time I spent with Doreen and Diane and the less with Joan the happier I was. During the summer holiday I worked both lunch and dinner, staying put in the afternoons polishing the silver and laying up the dining room. ‘I don't know why you don't take your bed down there,' snarled Joan one night when I came in sticky and smelly from grilling steaks. ‘You might as well bleedin' live down there.'

The kitchen looked out on to the gravel car park and then to the wide field that led down to the river. ‘No children in the bar' meant exactly that and they would often sit in the car park with pint glasses of lemonade while their parents drank in the lounge bar with its wood panels and hunting prints. There was one girl, older than the others, with piercing violet eyes and dark hair that straggled down over her shoulders, who would sit in the passenger seat of her parents' Humber Hawk for hours, sometimes reading, other times just staring out at the other kids. No one ever brought a drink out to her. Whenever the smoke of the grill – ‘new order, table six, two rumps, one fillet and one mixed grill' – became unbearable I would stand in the car park with a lime and lemonade, or sometimes a shandy, and she would look up from her book and smile.

Whenever drinks were poured by mistake they were brought into the kitchen for the staff. By the end of the evening we had swigged our way through a rum old mixture
of sweet Martini that had been mistaken for dry, cider poured from a bottle when the customer wanted draught and, best of all, gin and tonics when the customer just suddenly disappeared. In the sweat and smoke of the kitchen anything that came our way was welcome. Mr Beckett, ever under his wife's beady eye, would sometimes bring in a brandy and Babycham for Di, claiming it was a mistake. Funny there was always one about the same time each night.

One night a tray of drinks arrived in the kitchen – the result of someone doing a ‘runner' – with only Diane and me to drink them. I took a couple of them out to the girl in the Humber, who received them with a smile that was cheeky, quizzical. She knocked them back like I had only ever seen anyone do on televison. Later, when I overcooked a steak and I hadn't got time to eat the evidence, I ran out into the car park with it, wrapped up in napkin, and gave her that too.

I started to watch out for Julia, at least I knew her name now if nothing else, and started cooking bits of fillet specially for her; the tail end perhaps, or a slice that had been cut too thin. ‘Don't cook it so much next time,' she'd would say, with the same cheeky grin.

‘I think someone fancies you,' said Diane one particularly sticky evening in late July. ‘Your friend has been peeping at you all night.' And then, ‘Go on, go and see her, I'll be all right if any orders come in.' I didn't like to tell Diane she was probably just looking for her supper.

And so it went on for three weeks, me sneaking drinks and medium-rare steaks to Julia in a soggy napkin, taking my breaks leaning against her car door, she talking to me through the open window while she tore off bits of steak.

Nights off were long, silent, intolerable. I would sit at home in the cold dining room, Joan watching
The Golden Shot
or
Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased),
Dad out at one of his Masonic ‘dos'. Only now it was the summer holidays and there was no homework, no excuse to be anywhere but sitting with her, or her and him, festering, while he sat in the chair in front of the telly, she on the floor snuggled between his legs. One night I lied about having to go to work, then walked down the hill to stand and talk to Julia all evening.

‘Why don't we walk down to the river?' she asked. We walked, side by side and without speaking much, clambered over the stile and through the paddock towards the river and the oak tree whose roots came up through the mossy soil like a tangle of serpents.

We sat there, our backs flat against the trunk of the tree for an hour or more. Saying nothing much, picking up the odd acorn and chucking it at nothing in particular. At one point we said nothing for a good ten minutes. Welcome washes of cool breeze would come from nowhere, then disappear again leaving the air hot and heavy as lead. Still we said nothing. I wasn't sure what, if anything, I should be doing. In the lay-by I had seen more shagging than you could shake a stick at, but I wasn't sure what was supposed
to happen before. I hadn't bothered to watch the cars where nothing much seemed to be going on. Then quietly, almost matter-of-factly, Julia just said, ‘You'll have to hurry up. I've got to get back soon.'

We spent the remaining weeks of the summer holidays in a sort of steak-for-sex deal that seemed to suit both of us. Everyone called her my girlfriend, but she wasn't. It was just steak, snogging and shagging. Same place, same time. Life was pleasingly neat, tidy, predictable. I grilled steaks, stuffed prawn cocktails into wine goblets, defrosted coq au vin and learned to make Irish coffees, a thick layer of cream floating magically on the sweet, black, whiskey-laden coffee. I got into the habit of deliberately getting one wrong, the cream swirling down through the coffee just so I could have one before going off with Julia. I stashed away every penny of my wages in an old cigar box hidden behind my collection of the
Children's Encyclopaedia.
I saw Dad and Joan only long enough to walk through the sitting room on my way upstairs to bed and to pick up my perfectly ironed clothes from the airing cupboard. Neat, tidy, predictable. And then Stuart turned up.