Annie conceived the dinner as a thank you to Agatha as well as a practice run for Delores’s birthday party. She asked Jesse, hoping that he would take the invitation as a gesture of friendship only. In three days’ time, the day before the actual party, she would go to Smithfield meat market, followed by New Covent Garden market. She would buy eighteen chickens, ten pheasants, pullets, chicken livers, ten kilos each of onions, carrots and potatoes, along with armfuls of herbs and lettuce. On the morning of the dinner, 1 April, she would be at Billingsgate Fish Market by 2 a.m., stocking up on oysters, sole, crayfish and lobster. Caviar and foie gras were on order from a separate supplier.
For the practice run, Annie could only afford to prepare certain dishes and they would drink prosecco rather than champagne. At Delores’s dinner the guests would enjoy twenty courses, starting with an asparagus omelette and finishing with a tart. Tonight there would be only five. For Delores’s dinner Annie would hire a small van to drive between the different destinations; for the rehearsal, she took a bus and a train to Vauxhall, walked across main roads and side streets before arriving at New Covent Garden market.
Wandering through the rows of asparagus, aubergines, cabbages, the deep greens and ruby reds, the hard and fleshy, unidentifiable foreign variations as well as familiar cottage-garden vegetables, Annie felt a stab of joy. Each variety of vegetable suggested a story, a delicious possibility, and a recipe waiting to be discovered. Looking at a tray of quinces, Annie saw them baked, stewed or grated, imagined them with pears or lamb or cheese. Looking to her right, she caught sight of a pyramid of fennel—perhaps she could meld a few bulbs into the onion soup or create a side dish with a sauce perfumed with anchovy, or just sauté the vegetable until its gentle perfume quivered about a dish of braised chicken.
Her thoughts turned to her painting and she wondered if the artist looked at pigments and bases in the same way that she thought about food: imagining the collision of different colours, the mixing of pigments and the overall end effect. For both the chef and the painter, creating tastes or scenes from an assortment of base ingredients was a way of navigating the world. She used salt, pepper, vegetables, oils, spices, herbs and meat; he used lapis, lead white, carmine, green earth, indigo, ochre, verdigris and smalt.
On one large table there was a vast dome of aubergines, all circular in shape and heavily veined in a deep red and creamy white.
“Aren’t they beautiful? Like jewels,” Annie said to a woman who was also looking at them.
“But when we cook them, they will turn to a grey mush,” the woman replied.
Annie looked at her in amazement. How could anyone think of an aubergine in such a disparaging way.
That evening, Jesse was the first to arrive, clutching a bunch of daffodils, trying not to look too pleased to see her. He and Annie talked awkwardly about what they had been doing and events in the news, and were both relieved when Agatha arrived and Evie returned from her AA meeting. Annie gave Bellinis to Jesse and Agatha and a non-alcoholic fruit punch to her mother, and handed round some quails’ eggs balanced on tiny squares of smoked salmon and home-made bread topped with a sprig of dill. At first everyone was shy; they stood in a circle in the centre of the room around a Moroccan pouffe making small talk about the picture that was propped on the mantelpiece over the fireplace.
“It needs a better frame,” said Annie.
“It still looks lovely,” Evie said. “I knew from the first moment I saw it that it was something special.”
“What’s next for it?” Agatha asked.
“Not sure really.” Annie shrugged and went over to the painting. “I intend to live with it and admire it.”
“I told her to take it to Christie’s or one of those places—they have valuation days,” Evie said, before turning to Agatha. “You work at the National Gallery, don’t you? Maybe you could look at it?”
Agatha and Jesse looked at each other, realising that Annie had not told her mother about their suspicions.
“I just need to make a velouté,” Annie said, heading towards the kitchen units.
Jesse followed her. “Let me help.”
Annie hesitated and, smiling gratefully, handed him a bowl and a whisk. “Can you mix those up with some salt and pepper while I blanch the asparagus?”
Jesse expertly cracked the eggs with one hand into the bowl, added two twists of pepper and a generous pinch of salt and whisked them hard. Once they had turned into a frothy golden cloud he asked for the next job.
“Can you layer that Gruyère and toast on top of the bowls of onion soup?” Annie asked, making sure that her clarified butter frothed up but didn’t burn.
“Do you have some parsley I can chop?”
“Top left of the fridge in a small plastic bag.”
While Annie gently sifted the flour, teaspoon by teaspoon into the butter, Jesse chopped the parsley into a fine green mist ready to sprinkle over the top of the soup.
“You can cook.” Annie sounded surprised.
“My mother needed a sous chef.”
“Was she a cook?”
“The best I’ve ever met—she can take the simplest, dullest ingredients and transform them into something delicious.”
“That’s the best kind,” Annie agreed, folding the last of the flour into the butter.
“A roux?” Jesse asked.
“Yes, can you warm that small saucepan of stock?”
Jesse turned the heat on and, bending over the pan, sniffed. “Vegetable with mushroom?”
Annie smiled. “Very good—it’s for the sole—Louis XV liked his fish drowning in mushroom-flavoured cream but I thought this was a slightly healthier option.”
Annie took an omelette pan from the hanging shelf and wiped a trace of olive oil around its base. Placing it on a lit hob she waited for the pan to smoke.
“Shall I continue with the white sauce while you make the omelettes?”
Annie smiled gratefully. “I don’t suppose you are free on the first of April? I am cooking this grand dinner for fifty for Delores’s birthday. I have waiters and washer-uppers but would love someone who is confident in the kitchen. It’s paid—about a hundred pounds for the night.”
Jesse leant over the sauce, whisking hard; he didn’t want Annie to see his cheeks blush red with pleasure and the face-splitting grin.
Annie read his silence the wrong way. “I’m so sorry. I should not have asked.”
Jesse turned to her smiling. “I was just trying to remember what I was doing this Thursday. Actually, I think I’m free and would be delighted to help. Perhaps we should meet sometime before to go over the menus and timings? Maybe tomorrow?”
“That would be fantastic.” Annie smiled gratefully.
Looking at Jesse’s back as he stirred the sauce, she saw him as if for the first time. She liked the way that he navigated the cramped kitchen, moving gracefully in the small space between the stove and the fridge. She liked his rhythmic stirring, beating and whisking, the way the muscles in his wrist and his right arm flexed.
“Can you pass the asparagus?” Annie asked. Carefully, Jesse passed the uncooked spears to her. Placing them on the table, his hand accidentally brushed against hers and they both felt a tiny current pass between them. Annie looked down at his long fingers with pale freckles sprinkled over the backs of his hands. She tried to imagine his caress.
Jesse looked at Annie, at the soft pale down that started just below her right ear and ran to the nape of her long neck. Through her T-shirt he could see a shoulder blade and an elegant right arm. Would her skin feel soft beneath that T-shirt, would she shudder slightly if he ran his hand down her spine to the base of her back? Would she like the back of her neck kissed?
Annie sprinkled salt on the boiling water and tipped in the asparagus. She could hear Jesse’s breath, shallow and slightly irregular. Glancing upwards she saw his mouth and almost feminine lips, pale pink, slightly parted, showing straight, white teeth. What would that mouth feel like, she wondered, as the asparagus tossed in the bubbling water.
Jesse was caught up in his own fantasy and, tasting the sauce to test for seasoning, he imagined running his tongue down between Annie’s breasts towards her legs.
He continued to beat his sauce, never taking his eyes off the back of Annie’s neck. Aware that his breathing was uneven and shallow, he took two deep breaths.
“I think that’s probably okay,” Annie said, without turning to face him.
“I got carried away—do you think it’s done?” Jesse held out the saucepan.
Annie looked at the pale whipped sauce, and then, dipping a little finger into its glossy depths, she licked it slowly and looked at him.
Jesse swallowed, willing himself to stay upright, willing himself not to take her into his arms and kiss her.
“It’s good,” Annie said. She turned back to the asparagus and, spearing one with a sharp paring knife, decided that they were perfect, al dente. Taking the saucepan, she stepped over to the sink and drained the asparagus. The steam rose and covered her face in a gentle mist. What was she doing flirting with this man? She knew he had feelings for her—was she being unkind or had something changed?
Forcing herself back to the task in hand, Annie put a small frying pan on to the stove and, folding freshly chopped chives, thyme and parsley with a splash of cream into the batter, she gave her omelette mix a last whisk. Then Annie lined her large bowl of onion soup with wafer-thin slices of baguette covered with Gruyère, mozzarella and parmesan and placed that under the grill for a few minutes.
“Supper in five minutes exactly,” she called out.
Jesse took four plates out of the oven and set them on the table.
Pouring the eggs into the smoking pan, Annie waited till tiny golden bubbles formed before gently arranging the asparagus on the batter, making acid-green chevrons against the deep-yellow base. The recipe suggested flipping the omelette over, but Annie decided to leave it flat and at the very last moment quickly chopped a ruby-red chilli and sprinkled tiny diamonds of fieriness over the surface.
During dinner she was glad that Jesse sat diagonally opposite her and it was not possible to touch him or even look at him too closely. Cutting the omelette into four pieces, Annie put each slice on a plate. There was silence as each took their first mouthful. The creamy egg, the hot chilli and al dente asparagus were in perfect harmony. Annie thought the next course was not quite right—the onions in the soup were a tiny bit sweet—but Jesse thought that they complemented the melted cheese. There was applause for the jacquard chicken and its checked deep-red-and-white jacket. Though Evie promised she couldn’t eat another mouthful, she finished her sole Colbert in silence, not wanting to waste the collision in her mouth of soft pillowy layers of sole surrounded by breadcrumbed crust perfumed with the sauce. Agatha moaned slightly as she bit through the crispy outer layer of fish and felt the warm butter ooze into her mouth.
“This is better than…” She blushed a deep red when everyone laughed with her.
Later, when they had polished off a pie made with poached fruit, raisins, pine nuts and candied lemons topped with whipped sugared cream, Annie and her guests sat around the table nursing Louis’s favourite, a hot chocolate, so thick that Evie ate hers with a spoon.
“Anyone who can make food taste this good should be tied to a stove,” Agatha said.
“That would be my dream,” Annie admitted.
Later, Annie offered Evie her bed, saying she was happy to sleep on the sofa. Secretly she wanted her mother behind the only door in the apartment so that she and Jesse could be left alone. Agatha left to catch the last train, Jesse stayed to help wash up. When the last dish was done, he gently took Annie’s face between his large freckled hands and kissed her on the mouth.
“I am going to go now,” he said. “But not for long.”
Picking up his jacket and scarf, he let himself out of the studio and Annie listened as he took the stairs in great bounds.
Unable to sleep, Annie sat at the kitchen table and, laying her face sideways on the scrubbed wooden surface, closed her eyes and concentrated on the feeling of the grain of the wood pressing into her left cheek.