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‘We haven’t got any, Chef!’ came the shouted reply.
For a second, the world stood still as I digested the news, then I was back in action, mechanically turning the various pieces of meat on the chargrill, checking that the three small frying pans I had on the go with yet more meat inside were all to hand, making sure that the piece of turbot protected by tinfoil under the lights on the pass wasn’t going over, getting too cooked. I was cooking fifteen meals simultaneously, and now this.
I turned to Francis who quailed under my gaze. I was very cross indeed. At five o’clock he had assured me that all the mise en place was done; well, that manifestly wasn’t the case. You didn’t run out of things in restaurants; it was unacceptable.
As was sending the hake out naked, minus its dressing as clearly stated on the menu, into the world.
I was tempted to bellow, ‘What do you mean, we haven’t got any …’ adding a string of profanities, but what would have been the use?
The hallmark of a good chef is being able to deal with crises and I am a good chef.
‘Go out to the walk-in, get me a red pepper, an onion, a fennel bulb – and hurry up …’ I snapped, suppressing the urge to scream at him.
Francis stood there rooted to the spot.
I lost my ability to suppress my urges. Time to scream.
‘Please, HURRY UP!’
He didn’t leap into action; he ambled. There are times when I would dearly like to kill Francis.
Jess came into the kitchen and saw my expression, sensed the mood in the air.
‘You OK, Ben?’ she asked.
‘I’m savouring the moment, Jess,’ I said through clenched teeth. ‘I’m very much savouring the moment in a mindful way.’
Earlier that day I had been reading an article on mindfulness. Whoever had written it had probably never worked in a commercial kitchen, but I was determined to take their comments on board, regardless.
I crashed a pan on the stove to vent some mindfulness on metal rather than Francis.
Francis returned and handed me the vegetables.
He looked stricken, his plump, red face a mask of contrition. Contrition was no good to me. I gritted my teeth and tried to enjoy the now.
Now was far from enjoyable.
So, while I cooked fifteen meals, (Francis doing the vegetables, silently, miserably, like a kicked dog) I frantically made a red pepper relish, buying time from the table by sending them some pâté and home-made parmesan and rosemary focaccia bread (chef’s compliments).
The relish is supposed to gently cook for about three-quarters of an hour – I had it ready in ten minutes, softening the vegetables in the microwave before frying them, frantically cutting corners. More by luck than judgement, it ended up just fine, but by the end of the night I was a sweaty, angry twitchy mass of nerves covered in sodden chef’s whites.
We sent the last cheque out and silence descended on the kitchen. I started turning the gas rings off on the cooker, shutting down the kitchen, tight-lipped with irritation.
‘I’m sorry, Chef, I was as much use as a chocolate teaspoon …’ Francis looked like he might cry, his lip trembling. He had taken his bandanna off and his very blond hair was plastered to his head like he had been swimming.
Francis was huge, his chef’s whites padded out with muscle.
‘That’s OK, Francis,’ I said, patting him on the back (it was like stroking a horse), ‘but please don’t do it again.’
We cleaned the kitchen down, I sent Francis home, and Jessica and I sat in the small empty restaurant and had a beer. It was becoming a bit of a tradition really, and I had come to enjoy Jess’s company since arriving in Hampden Green.
‘You look terrible,’ she remarked.
I looked at Jess. She didn’t look terrible; she looked refreshed. I wondered how she continued to look full of energy after a long day and night waitressing. Perhaps she had this mindfulness thing down? Jess gave me a look of worried concern and pushed a hand through her dark hair that she fought a constant battle against frizz with. One of the few problems I don’t have is frizzy hair – mainly because I haven’t got any.
Silver linings.
‘I was thinking exactly the same thing this morning, while I was shaving,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I should start wearing foundation.’
‘Well, you’ll need more than that,’ she said as she drank some beer, and looked at me with real concern. ‘How many hours have you worked this week?’
I did some mental arithmetic – fifteen hours a day for eight days – but I was too tired to do the sums. ‘A lot.’
‘Ben,’ she said, looking me in the eye, ‘you simply can’t go on like this – you need to hire another chef.’
I took a mouthful of beer. ‘I can’t afford to hire one – if I could, I would.’
Jessica looked unconvinced. ‘You can’t afford not to hire one. Working a hundred and twenty hours in a row—’ Jess, unlike me, was good at maths ‘—is not good for you.’
I smiled, rather bleakly. I knew that we were both right.
Jess drained her beer and stood up, reaching to pull on her coat.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow at ten,’ she said. ‘Try and get an early night.’
‘I will.’
She stood looking down at me. ‘Get another chef. You’re killing yourself.’
‘If a miracle happens, I will.’
I watched as she let herself out.
Miracles never happen, I told myself sorrowfully.
Chapter Two (#u1a04a99c-f80d-5750-8031-f909d0a45013)
The next day on my morning run, I turned in to the path that bordered Ferguson’s Field (I’d been here six months, and I was gradually beginning to learn the names of places).
I was tired, I was short of money and my back ached horribly, but I ran on. I might die exhausted, penniless and in pain but at least I’d die fit and slim.
There was a sheet of blue paper, laminated against the weather and secured to a bush. It was the third such notice I’d seen. Instead of ignoring it and simply wondering what it said, as I had the first two times, I did something clever. I actually stopped and read it. It was a change of usage notification from the council for the field.
My immediate thought was that it was going to be a housing development, which surprised me. The field not only belonged to the Earl, but it also abutted on his garden. I say garden, I should have said ‘gardens’ or estate. It was pretty sizeable. Earl Hampden was well known for his opposition to housing developments, so it seemed most odd he would try to put one up next to where he lived.
I stopped and read the document properly. For three weeks in July the field would host an open-air event with licensed bars. I shrugged and jogged on – it was nothing to do with me.
I lengthened my stride and picked up the pace. It was good to be running on a day like this in the Bucks countryside. The fields bordered with neatly trimmed beech hedges looked great, the trees giving a wonderful canopy of green overhead. It beat being in the kitchen.
All too soon I was back there.
Later, during a lull in the lunchtime service, I asked Francis if he knew anything about the event.
‘Of course, everyone does.’ He looked genuinely astonished at my ignorance. He scratched his head in perplexity.
Everyone except me.
‘It’s the Marlow House Festival,’ he explained.
‘The Marlow House Festival?’
‘Opera, Chef,’ he said. Anyone else might have added this in a condescending way, but not Francis. He was condescension-free.
‘Opera?’ I repeated, somewhat stupidly.
‘Yeah, opera, singing …’ He looked at me, puzzled. I started work on a dessert cheque: a strawberry pavlova with Chantilly cream.
‘I know what opera is, Francis.’
‘Well,’ he began, walking over to the sink and starting to load plates and cutlery into the enormous Hobart dishwasher, ‘the Earl puts on a big event every year for about a fortnight. The first two or three weeks of July. There’ll be a huge marquee there, about three hundred people per night, fireworks … It’s mega.’
‘Is that the Earl’s opera event you two are talking about?’
It was Jess who had just walked in. I know very little about opera – it certainly didn’t feature much on Beech Tree FM. That was the radio station that we listened to in the kitchen, playing undemanding, uncontroversial Seventies and Eighties pop classics. Their DJs had a permanent air of sunny mindlessness and inane links. One came on at this moment, ‘…and now, here’s a song about a river, no, not the Thames, not the Misbourne, not even the Chess, it’s Pussycat with “Mississippi”…’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe we’ll pick up some custom from it.’
Jess shook her head. ‘No, you won’t – it’s fully catered. He gets a firm from London usually: steak, lobster, that kind of thing. I think that’s how he makes his money out of it.’ She scowled at the radio. ‘Who the hell is this?’
‘Pussycat,’ I said. ‘I think they might be Dutch …’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Jess. She sighed. The radio was a source of friction between us – she craved something more modern, but it was my kitchen and my radio.
‘What do they use for kitchens?’ I asked. My interest was piqued.
‘My dad says that they use the kitchens at the house,’ said Francis.
I’d forgotten that Francis’s dad was the Earl’s Head Gardener. Francis was always a reliable source of information about the peculiar character who was our local aristocrat.
‘They’re not massive,’ said Francis, keen to be in the unusual position of being able to show off his knowledge, ‘but they’re well equipped. Marlow House has always done big parties, weddings, stuff like that, particularly with the last Earl, but the new Earl isn’t so keen on people in the house. The opera lot are confined to the field and the gardens this year.’
It’s funny how your mind works. I was unable to cope with my current workload, but part of me was annoyed that the Earl, who admittedly I hardly knew, would hire these London caterers instead of me. There was no way on earth that I could have managed to squeeze in doing food and drink for three hundred people a night – the logistics would be daunting, together with running my own business – but I would have liked to have been asked.
I shook my head in irritation at myself. There I was, getting cross that I hadn’t been given something I couldn’t have coped with.
I have anger management problems that I have to constantly work on, but at least I was just cross, not furious. That was something.
A journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step.
And news of the Earl’s opera event was like the tossed pebble that starts the avalanche.
Chapter Three (#u1a04a99c-f80d-5750-8031-f909d0a45013)
‘Sack the bastard!’ Graeme Strickland was his usual forthright self. We were in one of Hampden Street’s two pubs. The grotty one. The Three Bells. Diagonally opposite the common from where my restaurant was. Grotty décor, grotty toilets, grotty furniture. It was a wonder we came here at all, but it was quiet and that suited us.
What the pub lacked in desirability, it made up for geographically. It was a five-minute walk from both our restaurants and as we both spend six days a week shackled to the stove morning, lunchtime, noon and night, it was a blessed relief from our respective workplaces.
Behind the bar, resplendent in a moth-eaten grey cardigan, Malcolm, the taciturn landlord with the very red face, stood tall and silent, the grotty lord of all he surveyed. He was a discouraging presence. There was no hint of welcome or eagerness to serve, to spring into action should a customer appear; it was more as if he were guarding the bar from anyone who might be rash enough to try to get a drink.
It really was a horrible place.
Strickland was on a split shift from his restaurant and was allowing himself two pints. Theoretically he should have been working ten a.m. until three p.m., six p.m. until ten p.m. In reality it was more nine a.m. to three p.m., five p.m. to midnight. Six days a week. He had his own way of coping with the endless hours. He’d just come back from his third visit to the toilet. He might have had bladder problems, but his suspiciously wide eyes and frequent sniffs, as loud as they were frantic, told a different story.
His restaurant, the King’s Head, was the other pub in Hampden Street. It had been turned into a restaurant and Strickland had firmly dragged it by the scruff of its countrified neck, from pork pies, filled baps and ploughman’s lunches into the world of fine dining. He was highly successful. Now, if you wanted to eat there it was a three-week wait, unless there was a cancellation.
We tended to choose the Three Bells, first off because it was no threat to either of us. Malcolm’s food ran to crisps and sometimes, if he’d been on a gourmet spending spree, pork scratchings. The second reason was that the Three Bells was round the corner and therefore the perfect place to grab a quick drink mid-shift. There had been an article on the Michelin system of awards in the trade press the other day. This was a sore point. Strickland was aggrieved as he’d just narrowly missed out on his coveted Michelin star. He still had his four rosettes but boy, did he want that final accolade.
‘French bastards!’ he’d said when last year’s annual results had been announced and he had been ignored.
The Charlie was not mellowing his mood. I had stupidly moaned to him about Francis’s lack of ability. It was not only stupid, it was unfair too.
It wasn’t Francis’s fault.
I had hired Francis as a kitchen porter, a person who washes dishes, not as a chef. It wasn’t as if he had misrepresented himself to get a job. He had never said he was a chef. He never wanted to be a chef.
In the old days I would have raged at Francis, screamed and shouted and got rid of him. Now, courtesy of the Tao Te Ching, which I read daily to help with my anger management, I was working on my personality rather than his. The way of the Tao. I decided not to share this with Strickland – he would have thought I was mad.
‘Well, I can’t really do that,’ I said, taking a sip of my drink. ‘I can’t fire Francis.’
Before Strickland could say anything, I changed the subject. ‘And how about you – how are things at the King’s Head?’
He frowned. ‘I’ve got this sodding awful restaurant manager. He keeps harassing my waitresses.’
‘Sack the bastard!’ I said, parroting his advice to me. At least I just had an amiable oaf.
He took a mouthful of lager, and shook his head regretfully. ‘He’s very clever, it’s either when no one’s looking, wandering hands sort of stuff, or verbal, or it’s just creepy behaviour, like staring down a blouse, that kind of thing. But it’s never that bloody obvious.’ He sniffed loudly and stared at me through coke-crazed eyes. ‘Perhaps you could beat him up for me, Ben.’
‘I don’t do that sort of thing!’ I protested.
‘Course you don’t …’ There was polite disbelief in his tone.
Serve time for GBH and people, understandably, think you’re violent. A reputation is a hard thing to shake. Particularly in a village. Strickland continued, ‘Anyway, one of these days he’ll go too far. Probably grab a customer – I wouldn’t put it past him, he’s a sick bastard.’
‘Why’d you hire him?’ I was genuinely interested.
Strickland looked at me. He was a small, dapper, good-looking man, never a hair out of place.
‘He came highly recommended, glowing CV.’
