Kit can be such a total wretch sometimes, really he can. I flick the end of a tea towel at him, but he ducks and instead I catch the saucepan chandelier hanging over the island in the center of the kitchen, setting pans and ladles clattering against each other. I cover the telephone mouthpiece so that Nicholas won’t hear the din, and stick out my tongue at Kit as he sits there shaking with laughter and doing absolutely nothing to stop my wilful baby daughter putting the rabbit down the waste disposal.
“Oh, God, Metheny, don’t do that,” I gasp, quickly rescuing the trembling creature and steadying the saucepans. “Poor rabbit. Sorry, Nicholas, I have to go. I’ll see you at the station. Usual time?”
Nicholas yelps in my ear. “For God’s sake, Malinche, it’s William’s retirement party this evening! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten! You’re supposed to be on the five twenty-eight from Salisbury to Waterloo, remember?”
Oh, Lord. I had completely forgotten. It’s three-forty already, Liz will be dropping the girls off from school at any moment, I haven’t made their tea yet—I thought ravioli di magro would be nice, I haven’t done that for a while; a little fresh ricotta seasoned with nutmeg, sea salt, and black pepper and blended with Swiss chard and pancetta stesa, and of course freshly grated Parmesan over the top. I haven’t sorted out a babysitter, I need to wash my hair, what to wear, how on earth am I going to get to the station in time for the five twenty-eight?
“So I am. I hadn’t really forgotten,” I fib, crossing my fingers behind my back, “it just slipped my mind for a moment. Hold on a second—”
I put the receiver down and thrust Don Juan de Marco back in his cage in the scullery with a couple of wilted leaves of bok choi as consolation, firmly securing the latch with a piece of twine so the baby can’t let him out again. Metheny instantly stops what she was doing—picking up spilled Cheerios from beneath her high chair and putting them one by one into Kit’s outstretched hand—to crouch by the rabbit cage, nappy in the air, fat gold curls clinging to the nape of her neck as her chubby little fingers poke and pull at the string. I cross my fingers that the twine holds for at least the next five minutes and throw myself theatrically onto my knees on the kitchen flagstones in front of Kit, hands clasped in supplication as I try my best to look pathetic.
He ignores my amateur dramatics, fastidiously heaping the Cheerios into a small pyramid on the counter before dipping an elegant pale finger into my cake mix to taste it. I’ve flavored it with vanilla and orange and lemon zest, darkened it with cocoa, and spiced it up with candied orange peel. The meld of tangy rich scents drifts around the warm kitchen like fog on the moors.
“What?” he says sternly.
I flap my hands at him to be quiet. Nicholas knows Kit is my best friend and comes over to visit, of course he does, but he doesn’t have to know quite how often.
“What?” Kit mouths.
I intensify my importunate expression, although I suspect, from the twitch at the corner of Kit’s mouth, that the net effect is one of constipation rather than entreaty. He rolls his eyes but nods, as I knew he would. I struggle up from the floor. Dramatic gestures are all very well, but then of course you have to live with the consequences; it’s rather like having sex on the beach, not nearly as romantic as you imagine, and of course the sand gets everywhere. I scoop up Metheny in the nick of time—my delicious yummy baby, she smells like warm fresh-baked bread—and retrieve the phone. “I really must go, Nicholas—”
“You did remember to arrange a babysitter?”
“Mmm. Yes, Kit very sweetly said he’d do it.”
Quickly I ring off so I don’t have to listen to the pained silence that invariably follows any mention of Kit. I’ve spent the past twelve years variously cajoling, begging, and banging heads together, but it’s no good, the current wary standoff between my husband and my dearest friend is clearly as good as it’s ever going to get. I have the deepest sympathy for everybody at the UN if the Palestinians and the Israelis are anywhere near this bad, though of course neither Nicholas nor Kit are anything at all like that difficult man Arafat—no, he’s dead now, there’s a new one, what’s his name, I really must read the paper a bit more often. It’s all a question of finding the time, of course: I get to Saturday evening and I still haven’t worked my way through last Sunday’s papers. I used to think Nicholas didn’t like Kit because he was gay, and perhaps in the beginning—though Nicholas isn’t like that, he’s not racist or sexist or homophobic or anything, well, except in a background wallpaper sort of way, you can’t help the way you’re raised. But of course it wasn’t about that, really, not at all—
“Mal, what an absolutely delicious smell,” Liz says, pushing open the top half of the kitchen stable door. A cold blast of December air carries the scent of bonfires and rotting leaves into the fuggy kitchen warmth. She reaches in to unbolt the bottom half and steps smartly out of the way as Sophie and Evie race past her into the kitchen, throwing coats, lobbing satchels, and dropping lunch boxes. “Hi, Kit. Ooooh, yummy, chocolate and orange, are you doing something Christmassy?”
I retrieve the mixing bowl from Kit’s grasp and scrape the lovely gooey chocolaty mixture into a greased baking tin. “It’s supposed to be a birthday cake for Nicholas and Metheny tomorrow, although at the current rate of progress it’s going to end up something Christmassy.”
“Oooh, save me a slice. No, no, on second thoughts, don’t, I’m supposed to be on another bloody diet for Christmas.” She drools over the photograph on the open page of my recipe book, looking for all the world like a starving Victorian orphan with her nose pressed to a pie shop window. “Does look scrummy, though. It is nearly Christmas now, and I’m going to do South Beach in January, it’s my New Year’s Resolution. So perhaps one slice.”
“One slice for Nicholas, and one for Metheny,” Kit purrs.
Liz looks flustered. Kit seems to have this effect on women even when they know which way the wind blows for him, bedroom-wise. I haven’t yet worked out if it’s because they find him so hopelessly attractive—hard not to, with those knife-edge cheekbones and Restoration curls—or because he’s just so wickedly louche you can’t help but think of s-e-x whenever he’s around.
“I don’t know how you stay so slim, Mal,” Liz complains. “It’s not fair, you cook such jolly wonderful food and you’re as thin as a rake.”
“Family life,” I say, not entirely joking.
“Never works that way for me,” Liz sighs.
Covetously she eyes a platoon of gingerbread men, still warm, that I baked earlier for the school’s Christmas Fair and left out on racks to cool. Dearest Liz. She spends her life locked in an epic battle with temptation, for she adores food, all food, with unbridled passion, but is cruelly fated to wear every bite she eats. I love her dearly, but she’s built to last, as Kit mischievously puts it. She and I share the school run, with me dropping the children off—my older two, her lone poppy—in the morning, after I’ve taken Nicholas to the station, and Liz doing the afternoon shift so that I can get on with scribbling down a few of my recipes for the new book while Metheny has her nap. At least, that’s the theory.
“Gosh, must dash,” Liz exclaims, glancing at her hefty leather-strapped wristwatch. “Chloe’s got a riding lesson at four, it’s the gymkhana in a couple of weeks. Cheerio, Kit. See you tomorrow, girls.”
Sophie and Evie jump guiltily, their mouths full of gingerbread men whom they seem to have eaten bodily in one go, like little human boa constrictors. I whip the rest out of their reach as, unabashed, they yell an enthusiastic farewell to Liz, scattering a fine mist of crumbs and saliva across Kit’s burnt umber suede jacket and very close-fitting brown jeans. No wonder poor Liz doesn’t know where to look. You could divine his religion from the tightness of those trousers.
“Oh, God. You two infants are utterly vile,” Kit grimaces, brushing himself down.
“Serves you right for being such a peacock,” I retort.
The girls giggle. They adore Kit, who, for all his posturing, has been an extremely good godfather and will, I’m quite sure, introduce them to all sorts of delightful vices like smoking and baccarat as soon as they are old enough for him to take up to London without me.
“I found a cat today, but it was dead,” six-year-old Evie announces.
I suppress a shudder. “How do you know it was dead?”
“Because I pissed in its ear and it didn’t move,” Evie says.
“You did what?”
“You know,” she explains impatiently. “I leaned over and went ‘Pssst!’ and it didn’t move.”
Kit and I shriek with laughter. Evie looks crossly from one of us to the other, then stomps from the room in a fit of high dudgeon. At nine, Sophie may be the one with the knockout looks—thick chestnut hair, huge black sloe eyes, and tawny skin the color of caramel, a throwback to my Italian father’s roots—but I have the feeling it’s Evie’s zany interpretation of life that’s going to leave a trail of broken hearts when she’s older.
Last month, I overheard her doing her math homework at the kitchen table, muttering to herself, “Two plus five, that son of a bitch is seven. Four plus one, that son of a bitch is five …”
Aghast, I asked her what on earth she was doing.
“My math,” Evie said calmly.
“Is that how your teacher taught you to do it?” I gasped.
“Course. Three plus three …”
The next day I marched into the classroom and demanded to know what Mrs. Koehler thought she was teaching my child. When I explained what Evie had been saying, she laughed so much she had to sit down.
“What I taught them,” Mrs. Koehler explained, “was two plus two, the sum of which is four.”
Kit now unfolds his long, lean body from the kitchen counter as I pull an onion from the rope overhead to chop for the girls’ ravioli. “What is it exactly that I’ve agreed to ce soir?” he asks languidly.
“Only babysitting. Darling, you don’t mind, do you? Only it’s Will Fisher’s leaving do and I promised Nicholas I’d be there and then of course I forgot all about it—Metheny, no, take Uncle Kit’s lovely hat out of the rubbish—and now I have about an hour to get ready and find something to wear and catch the train—”
“Forget the crocheted pasta pillows or whatever it is you were planning,” Kit says firmly, taking the onion out of my hands, “and get your pert little derriere up the stairs and into the bathtub PDQ. I’ll sort out the girls’ tea. Sophie, Evie”—this as my middle daughter wanders back to the kitchen with Halibut the cat in her arms, tantrum forgotten already—“what would you like Uncle Kit to cook you for tea?”
“Pizza!” Sophie cries.
“Frozen! From a box!” Evie adds for good measure.
“Charming,” Kit huffs.
I have walked many a mile in these particular shoes. It’s one of those immutable facts of motherhood: The length of time taken and trouble spent preparing a meal is inversely proportional to the enthusiasm with which your children will greet it. Toil for hours in the kitchen producing something nourishing and delicious that hits all the primary food groups and they’ll push it around their plates until it gets cold and congeals and even the dog wouldn’t want it. Guiltily throw frozen chicken fingers and crinkle fries in the oven and they’ll rave about it for weeks.
I shoot upstairs to get ready. I haven’t time for the long relaxing bubble bath I crave—I haven’t had that kind of time since I got pregnant with Sophie—or indeed even to wait for the hot water to make its leisurely way through the ramble of furred pipes from the tank in the outhouse to the calcified shower head in the upstairs bathroom, a journey roughly comparable in terms of time and complexity to the Paris-Dakar rally. Instead, I whip off my clothes and brace myself for the ice-cold scourge that passes for a shower in this house. A six-hundred-year-old thatched farmhouse in two acres of breath-snatchingly beautiful Wiltshire countryside is romantic and gorgeous and just oozing with history and charm, and of course as soon as Nicholas and I saw it—house-hunting when I was newly pregnant with Evie—we just had to buy it, there was never any question about that. But it is not practical. Overflowing cesspits and lethally exposed live wires are neither romantic nor charming, and there have been times—never publicly admitted to; Nicholas would be mortified—when I have longed for something brand-spanking-new in vulgar red brick and equipped with the latest in efficient brushed-steel German appliances.
Gasping at the freezing water, I scrape a sliver of hard soap over my chicken skin, able to differentiate between my breasts and goose bumps only by the fact that two of them sport shriveled brown nipples. I try in vain to work up a decent lather until I realize that it is not in fact soap I am scrubbing over my scrawny pudenda but a piece of the ceiling plaster which has come down again.
By the time I finish washing my hair—with supermarket bubble bath, yuk and bugger, since wretched Sophie has once more pinched the wildly expensive shampoo that Kit gave me last birthday—my lips are blue and my fingers have frostbite. My dratted hair will frizz into a hideous Afro if I use the hair dryer, and since it’s already after five I don’t even have time to let it dry naturally by the Aga in the kitchen—the only warm room in the house—as I usually do. I’m going to have to venture out into the bitter November night with my head dripping wet; I will no doubt catch my death of cold, double pneumonia, pleurisy, and tuberculosis, but obviously this is entirely my own fault for forgetting about the party in the first place.
“Don’t say it,” I warn Kit, as I race downstairs in the safe but dull little black dress I’ve had since I was about fourteen. “No time to dither, it had to be this.”
“Quite sure?”
“Not a word, thank you.”
I dispense kisses liberally amongst the girls, fling keys and cash and lipstick into my bag, and scramble into Nicholas’s Mercedes, then scramble back out and go back for the monogrammed humidor I bought for him to give Will Fisher. I hate driving Nicholas’s car, I’m always so scared I’ll dent it or something, and although it’s so wonderful and safe and huge—I feel like I’m driving a luxury tank—I’m also very aware that even a tiny scrape on the bumper will set us back hundreds of pounds. I am really much happier in my old Volvo, so much more forgiving; and every little dent along its sides tells a story; it’s like a metal photograph album really, I know I’m going to hate it when I finally say goodbye. But the Volvo’s still with Ginger, so it’s got to be the Mercedes, and actually—I’d forgotten—it has heated seats, oh what bliss, at least now I’ll have a warm bottom when I get on the train.
When Nicholas and I first met, I didn’t even know how to drive. At twenty-four I was still gadding about London on the ancient sit-up-and-beg bicycle my mother, Louise, passed on to me when I followed in her shoes to Edinburgh; although Louise didn’t actually graduate, of course, she dropped out in her second year to go to California and “find herself” with her boyfriend (who naturally made sure he got his degree before decamping to join the flower children). The swine stayed around just long enough to get her pregnant with my sister before scuttling home to a lifetime of accountancy, his brief flirtation with the unconventional firmly over. Louise, not in the least put out by his desertion, joined a Californian lesbian commune and gave birth to Cleo in a pool as the sisters sang “Kumbaya” in a circle around her. She then promptly got pregnant again a few months later—“the lesbian thing never really took, you see; when we started having our periods together the amount of hormones swilling around was positively lethal”—by a newly arrived waiter from Florence, who this time did at least offer, in very broken English, to marry her. Louise thanked him very gently for being so kind, declined politely but firmly, and came back home to Salisbury so that she could have me at Stonehenge; not quite literally—much to her chagrin, even in hippie 1970 they wouldn’t let her do that—but in a little country hospital nearby.
Once, not long after I met Nicholas, I asked my mother why she had never married after she came back home, fully expecting some sort of Germaine Greer rant about marriage-as-patriarchal-ownership (before she recanted, of course; my mother has never quite forgiven her for that) but instead, “You think marriage is just about you and him,” Louise said, regarding me steadily, “but it’s not, it’s not a private romantic thing at all. You take on so many other people too, a whole network of them, all their problems and fears and difficulties. I never wanted any of that. I knew I didn’t have the patience to deal with it. I just wanted it to be us.”
I realized then that I didn’t actually know my mother at all.
Nor, in a very literal sense, did I ever know my father. But it’s from Roberto—Louise never did catch his last name—that I got the impossible hair and an overwhelming desire to cook almost from the moment I could pick up a spoon; it’s certainly not from my mother. It’s no wonder I’m so skinny, I was practically malnourished as a child; learning to throw a meal together was probably as much survival instinct as genetic heritage. If I’d had my way I’d have run off at the age of seven to become the culinary equivalent of the little drummer boy, working my way up through the kitchen ranks from pot-scrubber to saucier to, if I was very lucky and worked longer hours than a junior doctor, executive chef. And at least I’d have had enough to eat. But with typical parental hypocrisy—don’t do as I do, do as I tell you—Louise refused to hear of me leaving school early; she filled in the application to Edinburgh herself. Feeling it would be deeply churlish if a second generation of Sandal women turned down the chance of a university education, I did actually complete my degree; though even as my pen dutifully churned out analyses of Chaucer and Byron and Nathaniel Hawthorne, my mind dreamed of the perfect soufflé and a hollandaise that, even in the steamiest kitchen, never broke.
After three very dull years I finally marched into my mother’s womb-red healing room at the top of our house in Islington, brandishing my examination results and crying, “I’ve done it, I’ve got my First, now can I go to culinary school?”
Louise lowered herself gracefully from full plank into cobra, assumed the child’s pose, and said, her face pressed into her yoga mat, “I’ve been wondering how long it would take you to find the courage to ask.”
However, I discovered at culinary school that I was more my mother’s daughter than I had thought; thankfully not in the actual cooking, that came easily—perhaps I was a chef in a former life: Napoleon’s, maybe, or some Eastern potentate’s, I’ve often wondered—but in my response to the wretched rules and regulations that hemmed you in and pushed you down and, it seemed to me, got in the way of doing anything novel or creative. I chafed unbearably against the restrictive syllabus whose principal purpose seemed to be to show plump, unimaginative young women in Alice bands and pearls how to find their way to a suitable young man’s heart through his stomach. After two terms I quit and moved in with Kit and his latest boyfriend, a sharklike bond trader with dead eyes.
“For pity’s sake, what do you really want to do?” Kit demanded one night when the shark was working late and I was driving him potty by whining—yet again—about the curdled mess I seemed to be making of my life.
“You know what I want to do,” I said tetchily, “I’ve been telling you since nursery school. Open my own restaurant, of course.”
“You were three. I thought you’d grow up and put away childish things.”
“Acting is different—”
“I don’t see why.”
“Put that bottom lip away and stop being such a spoiled brat. Acting is different, as you well know, because you can still have a life while you do it. Have you any idea what opening your own restaurant would really be like?” Kit demanded. “Three quarters of new restaurants fail within the first year. You’d be working at least eighty hours a week with no evenings off, no holidays, not a minute to call your own, in an industry which has the highest percentage of drug addicts next to dentists—”
“Dentists?”
He waved his hand. “Never mind that now. The other kitchen staff would hate you just for being there. Half the men in the restaurant business still think a woman’s presence in the kitchen curdles the sauce. You’d be eating sexual harassment for breakfast, lunch, and tea—”
“All right, all right,” I interrupted. “I do know, Kit. But you did ask—”
“You have a First in English and you cook like an angel. What you should be doing, my love—” Kit said, his eyes alight with an evangelical zeal I knew well enough to fear, “I can’t imagine how we haven’t thought of it before—what you should be doing, Mal darling, is writing cookery books, of course.”
When Kit gets hold of an idea, he’s like a dog with a particularly juicy marrowbone. At his insistence, and more to get him to leave me alone than anything else, I put together a slim folder of my best recipes, illustrated with glossy photographs—shot by the freelancer who succeeded the bond shark in Kit’s revolving-door bedroom—and submitted them to an agent plucked at random from the Writer’s Handbook by Kit, fully expecting rejection with a generous side helping of derision by return of post. But, unbeknownst to either of us, the agent Kit selected just happened to open my submission ten minutes after returning from lunch with a panicked publisher who had been bending her ear for two hours on the subject of the gaping hole in her upcoming list, thanks to their star cookery writer—a household name with his own TV show and flatware line—eloping to Guatemala with his sous-chef and huge advance, and without delivering his much-delayed, and increasingly urgently needed, manuscript.
Serendipity really is very much underrated. My mother always said it was better to be born lucky than clever, “although,” she’d add serenely, “it does help to be both.”
At twenty-two, I had a three-book contract, and then a small guest spot on a brand-new satellite channel followed, and when my first book reached number one on the Times best-seller list there was even talk of my own TV show. I was the Hot New Thing and everything was going absolutely swimmingly and then I met Trace and for a while nothing else mattered, it was wonderful, it was beyond imagining; and then of course it all collapsed into the darkest, most dreadful mess. It was Kit who pulled me out and told me I would get over it and forced me to get back to work when I just wanted to crawl into bed and never come out again, my heart shriveling with misery against my ribs.
And then, of course, I found Nicholas.
I hover on the restaurant threshold, shifting my bag to the other shoulder as I look for him, anticipating that familiar lurch when I spot his clean, chiseled features—even now, after twelve years—that same strange jolt of knowing I experienced the first moment I saw him, in Covent Garden: that absolutely electric certainty, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that he was The One. Dear Nicholas, so tall and fine and honorable; so sexy and carnal and unaware.
It’s such a relief to be inside, out of the cold. Where is Nicholas? The train from Salisbury was freezing, and the cab from Paddington Station wasn’t much better. I can’t imagine why Louise ever left California—
A waitress thrusts a glass of white wine at me, mumbling something about my shoes. Where can Nicholas have got to? The train was a bit delayed, thankfully, or I’d never have caught it; but it wasn’t that late, he can’t have left yet. He must be here somewhere. Unless I’ve got the name of the restaurant wrong, of course. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I scrabble in my bag for the envelope I wrote the restaurant down on, scattering half the contents across the floor. The waitress is still pressing her glass of wine at me so I have no choice but to take it; still fumbling through my bag, I end up spilling most of the wine on myself. Thank God nothing shows on this dress and after three babies it’s seen far worse. For heaven’s sake, where is Nicholas? Oh, Lord, that wasn’t a clean tissue—
“Your shoes,” the girl hisses again.
I finally look down and discover that Kit has, quite deliberately, let me walk out of the house in my pink slippers. He is an absolute swine. I will hang him by the neck until he is dead and then cut him down and eviscerate him while he is still conscious before burning his intestines in front of him … or no, I will allow him to babysit Metheny at his house.
I can’t bear to let this stunning girl—clearly not a waitress after all; her shoes are far too expensive and far too high—see how mortified I am. She is so pretty and smart and clean, and I’m already well aware that she’s written me off as barely a fingertip away from senile dementia.
I summon an insouciant smile. “Oh, yes. Well, at least the rain hasn’t ruined them.”
I shove the slippers nonchalantly into my bag as if I do this all the time. Which, of course, I do: not wear pink slippers to retirement parties in London—this is a landmark snafu even for me—but get caught in the crush as my two worlds, nurturing earth mother and career wife, collide.
Although there is less of the career thing now, of course, which is absolutely natural when you have three children, absolutely to be expected; somehow the book deadlines seem to slither through my fingers like egg yolks. I didn’t realize how hard it was going to be just to keep up.
Nicholas abruptly materializes, white-faced and agitated. “Malinche, where in heaven’s name have you been? It’s eight-thirty; Will’s been asking for you for the last hour! What kept you?”
“Traffic,” I say, surprised by his twitchiness. I’m not that late.
“I told you to allow—oh, never mind. Now that you’re here, you’d better come and be sociable.”
“I was, darling, I was talking to this gorgeous girl here—such a lovely suit, I hate chartreuse itself, of course, the drink I mean, but that’s simply a delicious color, especially with that corn gold hair, how clever of you—what did you say your name was?”
“Sara Kaplan,” she supplies.
She really is a very striking girl: not conventionally pretty, the nose sees to that, but she has something about her, a sensuality, an earthiness. She must be absolutely freezing in that flimsy outfit, the silly girl, but then she’s still too young, of course, to realize that when someone is as lovely and vital as she is, she really doesn’t need to wear tons of makeup and short skirts to get attention; she could turn heads if she walked in wearing a dustbin liner and a porkpie hat.
I smile. “Of course, Sara, well, Nicholas, I was being sociable—as you can see, I was talking to Sara, she very kindly got me a drink, I was just about to come and find you and Will, and then here you were—”
I can feel the tension coming off Nicholas in waves. I can’t imagine what has got him so distraught, it can’t just be me, it must be something to do with work; but it’s not like him, he’s usually so self-contained. It’s one of the things that drew me to him in the first place, his assurance, his total certainty of who and what he is—not always right, of course, but certain nonetheless. There are more layers to Nicholas than even he knows, aspects of him I had rather hoped would come to the surface as our marriage went on; but never mind that now, we are still the best of friends, of lovers, so much luckier than most couples these days.
I take his arm and guide him toward his colleagues, chatter soothingly about absolutely nothing in his ear, stroke him emotionally and mentally and even physically as we stand talking and laughing with Will, and finally he pulls me against him and I feel him relax beside me; though not quite enough to totally erase that distant stirring of alarm.
I realize that now really isn’t the time to mention that Trace is moving back to Salisbury.