Last Writes (15 page)

‘My wife,’ declared Mr Smith, ‘says that her lamb is overcooked. That’s right, dear, isn’t it?’

‘Lamb should be pink,’ said the lady in question, pointing to her plate. ‘Not too well done, like this one is.’

The maître d’ looked down at a properly cooked rack of lamb, pink to exactly the right hue, took a deep breath and offered to supply one that was more undercooked.

‘Not undercooked,’ said Mrs Smith. ‘Cooked just right.’

‘Certainly, madam,’ he said and shot back to the kitchen with the offending dish.

He was not well received there. ‘All right, chef,’ he said. ‘You know it’s perfect, I know it’s perfect and I’m pretty sure the Smiths know it’s perfect.’

‘I’ll eat it,’ offered the kitchen boy, putting his hand out for the dish.

‘No, you won’t,’ said the maître d’, withdrawing it swiftly.

The chef reached for his Sabatier knife and waved it about in the direction of the door to the dining room in a gesture unmistakeable anywhere in the world.

‘And you can put that away,’ said the maître d’.

‘It’ll be pretty bloody next time round,’ said the chef ambiguously.

‘Look at it this way, lads,’ pleaded the maître d’, hoping that the chef was referring to the rack of lamb, ‘think of it as being like life. It’s not what happens to you that matters, it’s how you behave when it does.’

‘I know how I’d behave to the Smiths,’ growled the chef.

‘And me,’ said the sous-chef.

The kitchen boy contented himself with drawing a finger across his throat while Giovanni muttered some Italian imprecation under his breath in which the word ‘
mafiosi
’ was the only one distinguishable.

By way of a diversion the maître d’ reported that the loving couple were feeding each other morsels of food.

‘A waste,’ pronounced the chef, a much-married man. ‘That’s no way to treat good cooking.’

Torn between the devil and the deep blue sea, the maître d’ retreated to the dining room. The four old friends were tucking in to their meal but still talking nineteen to the dozen so, unwilling to disturb either the warring couple or the besotted one, he sailed up to table seven and enquired if all was well there, too.

Miss Marjorie Simmonds smiled benignly. ‘It is,’ she said, looking round at rapidly emptying plates. ‘I’m sure they don’t eat as well as this at college, poor things.’

‘You can say that again,’ said her nephew. ‘I tell you we live on pasta and sardines there.’

‘And baked beans on toast,’ said Celia Sparrow.

‘I’m not too sorry for them,’ said Miss Simmonds, adding dryly, ‘Of course, all this rich food may have taken their appetites for a dessert away.’

There was a chorus of dissent.

‘I’ll send the waiter when you’re ready,’ said the maître d’. He had already decided that he himself would handle Mr and Mrs Smith from now on. Collecting the barely cooked rack of lamb from the kitchen, he presented it to Mrs Smith, adding smoothly that he hoped it was now cooked to her satisfaction.

It was.

Giovanni, too, ignored both the warring and the loving couples – they behaved better in Italy – and contented himself instead with taking orders from table seven.

‘Let me see now,’ said Marjorie Simmonds, ‘that’s passion fruit and orange tart for you, Celia, isn’t it?’

Miss Sparrow nodded. ‘Yes, please,’ she said, looking hard at Tristram. ‘I adore passion fruit.’

‘Cheese for me,’ said Tristram gruffly.

The other two men, who looked as if they had gone to college for the rugby, settled for steamed chocolate and hazelnut sponge pudding and brioche bread and butter pudding.

Miss Simmonds regarded the dessert menu for a moment or two and opted for the coconut rice pudding with plum compote. Then she said to the waiter, ‘Would you think me awfully awkward if I asked if we might take the menu home with us? It’s been such a lovely evening.’

‘Not at all,’ said Giovanni, adding grandly, ‘We change it every week.’

‘I’m going to get them all to sign it, you see,’ she said. ‘It’ll be a real memento of a happy evening.’

The waiter trotted back to the kitchen with the order. The maître d’ joined him there a little later bearing the
Smiths’ dessert order in his hand. ‘Madam,’ he reported, now using the term pejoratively, ‘would like the banana bavarois and sir is prepared to try our brioche bread and butter pudding.’

‘Brave man,’ said the sous-chef ironically. ‘Who knows what goes in to that?’

‘Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails,’ chanted the kitchen-boy, the youngest there, ducking back in mock fear from an imaginary blow from the chef.

‘And they want our best Sauternes with them,’ said the maître d’.

It was after that when Mr Smith ordered liqueurs with their coffee that the maître d’ was quite sure what was coming.

And he was right.

Much later, when all the other customers had left, the maître d’ presented the bill to Mr Smith. The man cast his eye over it for a long moment and then murmured casually, ‘Suppose we say, shall we, that tonight the drinks are on the house?’

Drawing himself up to his full height but in a voice that trembled slightly, the maître d’ said, ‘I’m very sorry, sir. I can’t agree to that.’

‘If you won’t, then you won’t, I suppose,’ said Mr Smith, tossing his credit card on the table, ‘but mark my words, man, you’ll come to regret it.’

‘Very possibly, sir,’ said the maître d’ with dignity.

‘And naturally I shan’t be adding anything on for service,’ said Mr Smith.

‘That, sir, is always entirely at the customer’s discretion,’ said the maître d’ smoothly. ‘Your coats …’

Mr Smith put his coat on so clumsily that
The Good Cooks of Calleshire
actually fell out of the pocket and onto the floor. The maître d’ picked the book up and handed it back to him with the utmost civility and opened the restaurant door for the pair. ‘A very good evening to you, sir … madam …’ he said as he ushered them out, locking the door behind them.

‘That’s blown it,’ he said, back in the kitchen. ‘Get me a drink somebody. I need it.’

It hadn’t blown it.

At that very moment Miss Marjorie Simmonds, a food writer of distinction, was penning a fulsome report to the editor of
The Good Cooks of Calleshire
, to which in due course, before posting it, she would attach the menu and the receipted bill.

Her father had been in the army and so Susan knew the difference – the important difference – between a retreat and a rout. ‘A retreat,’ the old soldier used to declare in the long, dull days of peace, ‘is something you should manage positively and, incidentally, always refer to as a strategic withdrawal. A rout is something you can’t manage at all.’ He had been evacuated from Crete after the invasion and so used to add, ‘You can’t call a rout by any other name except a bloody shambles.’

Susan was determined that her own withdrawal from Oak Tree House in the village of Almstone – her house – their house – and now his house – should be a managed retreat and not a rout. She had therefore planned her last night there very carefully. She was alone in the house, of course, and had been for some time: all the while in fact since Norman had moved out and gone to live with his new ladylove. Susan had stayed on in the house, alone and sad,
hoping against hope that she could go on living there.

It was not to be.

As her solicitor had pointed out, this was first and foremost because she would not be able to afford to do so until her divorce settlement came through. This fact had been reinforced after a time when the lighting and heating bills for the house had remained unpaid by Norman and supplies were cut off. She had found out the hard way, too, that Norman had cancelled their direct debits for all the other utilities.

‘He’s freezing me out,’ she reported to her solicitor, waving a sheaf of bills in her hand. ‘And in the middle of winter, too.’

‘I’m afraid,’ said the solicitor, a not unkindly young man, ‘that unless you move out you may find yourself in court for non-payment.’ He coughed. ‘I must warn you that some of these undertakings can be notably unsympathetic. They cite the public interest and so forth.’

‘What about my interest?’ she demanded.

‘I think,’ he said, choosing his words with almost palpable care, ‘that your best interest might be served by finding some less expensive accommodation until matters are – er – concluded.’

She had nearly broken down then and wailed. ‘But it’s my home. It’s been my home ever since we got married.’

He shook his head. ‘No, Mrs …’

She interrupted him. ‘Please call me Susan … I don’t like using my married name any more. It upsets me.’

‘I understand. Right.’ He gave a quick nod and resumed his discourse. ‘No, Susan, I think you should appreciate that it’s not your home any more. It’s just a house in which
you happen to have lived for a few years – something that will in due course form part of the value of the settlement that you will receive on your divorce. In my opinion …’

Susan drew breath to speak and then remembered that when solicitors used that expression it meant that they were charging for their time and so kept silent.

‘In my opinion,’ he repeated with some emphasis, ‘you should in the meantime move out to somewhere you can afford as quickly as you can.’

‘I thought possession was nine points of the law,’ she said obstinately.

He pointed to the bills she had brought in with her. ‘You could, of course, stay there and face eviction for non-payment of these accounts. That in my view would be a worst case scenario. Bailiffs are not nice people.’

‘I’m between a rock and a hard place, then, aren’t I?’

He let a little silence develop before he murmured, ‘These cases are never easy.’

She was going to challenge him on this but then realised that to him she was just another case: another sad case of a wife being deserted by her husband, a husband moreover who was determined to make life as difficult as possible for her. One of her friends had tried to explain this complex behaviour as demonstrating guilt on Norman’s part but she hadn’t gone along with that.

Now, instead, she asked the solicitor harshly, ‘Then what’s to stop my husba … Norman, that is – having our house instead as part of the settlement?’

‘Technically there is nothing to stop him doing so provided that you are properly recompensed for your share.’

‘So what’s the difference?’ The idea of Norman making Oak Tree House a love nest for the new woman was almost too repugnant for her to bear. What had made the situation even worse was that the new woman wasn’t some young floozy – he hadn’t even been trading Susan in for a new model. The creature was practically the same age as she was. As Susan had asked herself time and again, if the new woman didn’t even have age on her side, then what did she have? Answer – even in the wee small hours – came there none.

The solicitor sighed. ‘From what you have told me, Susan, your husband – your ex-husband, that is – would be in a position to be able to afford to live there and you aren’t at the moment. Should you wish to keep the house at this point in time, you would have to buy him out and you aren’t going to have the funds do that. Not until after everything is settled and maybe not then.’

‘There’s one law for the rich and one for the poor,’ she said bitterly. ‘Always has been.’

‘I understand that he is a very successful businessman,’ the solicitor responded obliquely. ‘This, I may say, will ultimately be to your advantage – that is, when matters between you are finally settled. In the meantime …’

The meantime had amounted to Susan renting a small end-of-terrace cottage in the village of Larking. She was due to move there in the morning so tonight was her last in Oak Tree House. She might have spent it packing up her own things but these were all neatly boxed and awaiting Wetherspoon’s, the removal people, in the morning. Or she could have had a farewell party for all the friends who had been so supportive in the dissolution of her marriage but
she hadn’t wanted that. It would have seemed like a wake. The following morning would have loomed like Banquo’s ghost over them all and left them worrying what to say as they left.

So she hadn’t wanted that either and yet she hadn’t wanted to spend it wandering in a melancholy way from room to room, taking a last look at the remnants of her love and marriage. Instead she had thought of her father and decided to stage a managed retreat.

First, she planned to dine in style. Retrieving a pair of silver candlesticks – a wedding present from an aunt – from a packing case, she laid the table as carefully as if for a dinner party. The table was coming with her to the cottage but Sid Wetherspoon who was doing the removal for her had been very relaxed about leaving around what she needed until she actually left Oak Tree House.

‘Larking’s not far,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you worry, missus. Make yourself comfortable there until the morning.’

Comfortable wasn’t exactly how she would have described the chilly echoing house, packing cases everywhere, but she wasn’t going to let that spoil her last evening there. She’d chosen the meal with care. The food had to be cold – the camping stove was only really up to making hot drinks, not cooking. And the wine had to be white, the house being barely warm enough to make a red wine potable.

Fish was an obvious choice.

It was the fish that had given her the idea.

The prawns, actually.

Susan was very fond of shellfish and she decided to treat herself to prawns for her last meal in the house. She’d stood
at the food counter in the shop for a while before deciding on a smoked mackerel salad to follow and then a sinful chocolate mousse.

She was quite surprised at the relish with which she ate it. A Barmecide feast, surely that was the proper name for a pretend banquet like this? More than once from sheer habit, she started to make some comment in the direction of the chair in which Norman had sat for so long and then stopped, realising at long last with some relief that she didn’t really have anything to say to him any more.

The camping stove would run to coffee after that and then she would go to bed to keep warm.

Only she didn’t, not straightaway.

Instead, cradling her mug of coffee between her hands for warmth as much as anything else, she sat on in the cold room, casting her eyes everywhere. She went out to the kitchen briefly but soon came back and resumed her seat. It was the chandelier over the dining table that drew her back there. She’d never liked it but Norman had been pleased with it, bringing it home in triumph from some auction sale or other. It was really too ornate for the house and being made of brass didn’t go with the rest of the room but she had accepted it peaceably enough.

Now she contemplated with especial interest its octopus-like arms, some of which ended in sockets for candle-shaped electric light bulbs and others culminating in pieces of metal described in the catalogue as foliate. She had cleaned and polished it dutifully every spring since.

‘And got to know its little ways,’ she said to herself, going to the cupboard under the stairs and coming back with a pair of steps.

She had put a few prawns on one side to take with her for a snack lunch at Larking the next day but now she picked some of them up. Mounting the steps carefully, she unscrewed one of the foliate arms of the candelabra and inserted prawns into the hollow brass. Then she did the same thing again to another one. And another until the prawns had gone.

She clambered back down to the floor and then had another thought. ‘A bit of mackerel wouldn’t do any harm either,’ she murmured aloud and went up the steps again. ‘Not too much, though.’

Susan left the house the next morning with an equanimity that surprised Sid Wetherspoon, an old hand at moving displaced wives. She settled down quite calmly in the cottage at Larking, too, professing little interest in the titbits of information that were fed to her by old friends about the house at Almstone.

‘Norman’s back living there,’ reported one of them presently.

‘Really?’ she said. ‘Not alone, I take it?’

‘Doesn’t look like it,’ said her informant frankly. ‘They’ve got two cars outside.’

It was several weeks later before someone else remarked to her that there had been a pest-control van parked outside Oak Tree House for a couple of days.

‘Funny, that,’ Susan said. ‘I never had any trouble like that when I was there.’ She was feeling quite cheerful since she’d just had the cheque for the final settlement from the break-up of her marriage to a man with money. This included a healthy chunk for her share of the going value of Oak Tree House at Almstone.

It was a considerable while after that when an old neighbour, never a fan of Norman’s, told her that there had been a surveyor looking over the house. ‘He advised unblocking a couple of the old chimneys,’ the neighbour said. ‘I gather they’ve already had all the floorboards up.’

‘My goodness,’ exclaimed Susan. ‘Whatever for?’

‘The smell,’ said the neighbour lugubriously. ‘They don’t know where it’s coming from.’

‘What smell?’ Susan asked.

‘That’s just it,’ said the neighbour. ‘Nobody knows what it is but believe you me, Susan, it’s awful. They had me in for a drink the other evening and it nearly made me sick. Norman’s had the place practically torn apart looking for whatever’s wrong but they can’t find what it is.’

‘Well, I never,’ said Susan, adding with perfect truth, ‘there was nothing like that when I was there.’

‘I know that,’ said the neighbour robustly. ‘It was fine then.’

It was two months later when Susan spotted an advertisement for the house in the local paper.

‘The agent’s got a “For Sale” board up outside, too, not that anyone’s going to buy it with that smell,’ reported the same neighbour with that special satisfaction reserved for the trials and tribulations of unpopular others.

Going through the village herself a month or so later Susan noticed that the sale board was still there but that the house was now empty.

‘The new woman announced she was going whether Norman came with her or not,’ said another of the neighbours when Susan bumped into her. ‘Couldn’t stand the smell.’

Susan, reasonably comfortable in her little cottage at Larking, waited another couple of months before she took any action. It was when she saw Oak Tree House being advertised in the local paper by a different agent that she made an enquiry about the house. She got a guarded response from the agency.

‘The property is on the market at a considerably reduced price,’ said the agent with practised fluency.

‘Really?’ said Susan. ‘Why would that be?’

‘The owner has had to move for urgent domestic reasons,’ said the agent.

‘I see,’ said Susan. ‘Would it be possible to see over the house?’

‘Of course, although we would need a little warning before we arranged a viewing.’

This came as no surprise to Susan. When she eventually arrived there with the agent she could sense that every window in the house must have been open hours beforehand. As she entered the front door she sniffed and said, ‘Funny smell.’

The agent sighed but did not deny it.

‘The house strikes one as cold, too,’ she murmured.

‘We opened it up earlier to give it a thorough airing,’ said the agent. ‘It’s been empty and shut up for quite a while now.’

Susan wandered through the house, noting that nothing much had been done to it since she had left. Any inclination on the part of the new woman to expunge Susan’s presence by redecoration had not been implemented.

‘It is a terrible smell, isn’t it?’ she said to the agent at the end of her tour.

‘Most unfortunate,’ said the agent ambiguously.

‘It must be much worse when the central heating’s on,’ said Susan, ‘and the windows are closed.’

The agent did not attempt to deny this. He took a deep breath and said, ‘I think, madam, you would find the owner willing to accept a considerably lower offer than the advertised one on account of the – er – drawbacks you’ve mentioned. Would you like me to ask him?’

‘Please,’ said Susan, although she waited a little while longer before she made her final – and even lower – offer for Oak Tree House. Even so, she was surprised at the alacrity with which it was accepted by Norman.

Her solicitor congratulated her on a really good deal, the contract to be signed as soon as a few details were settled.

‘Details?’ Susan asked, raising her eyebrows.