Perfect Blend: A Novel (3 page)

If Brian found it hard to understand what women saw in him, Amy didn’t. Despite plumping up ever so slightly, he could still pass for a decade younger than his thirty-six years. His round fresh face, brown puppy dog eyes, and hamster nest hair made him appear boyish and vulnerable. There was a certain type of woman who loved to mother him.

Brian adored being adored. He made no secret of it. These days he was in therapy, and he had come to understand that his neediness was tied up with his parents’ deaths. They had been killed in a car crash when he was thirteen. Brian’s father had been driving them to their accountant’s office in Greenwich. They had been called in for urgent talks about their printing business, which was about to go bust. Friends and relatives suggested that they committed suicide, but the police reports ruled that out. Their deaths had been an accident. Brian received a decent insurance payout but no inheritance.

He admitted to Amy that his parents’ screwing up their business and failing to provide for him had left him angry but determined to succeed.

Amy suspected that it was the loss of his mother that had affected him the most. Even though he was now a grown man, in some ways he was still a boy looking for his lost mother. It occurred to Amy that this might be one of the reasons his sartorial choices hadn’t changed as he’d gotten older and he still dressed like a grungy teenager. Today, for example, he was wearing his usual uniform of low-slung jeans, tatty Converse with fluorescent green laces, and a zip-up hoodie over a Vandelay Industries T-shirt. Years after the series had ended, Brian remained a
Seinfeld
nut and had all the shows on DVD. One of a handful of people in Britain who had taken to the series, he had spent the whole of 1997 tagging “giddy-up” to the end of his sentences and perfecting Kramer’s style, skidding to a stop at room entrances and demonstrating his moves to his baffled friends.

Some women loved Brian’s style. Lucy—two girlfriends ago (continuous eyebrow)—confessed how much she loved smelling Brian’s hair and running her fingers through it. In Amy’s opinion—not that she had shared it with Brian for fear of upsetting him—his sweet-scented thicket needed thinning and layering by somebody other than Jack Dash of Tooting Broadway (police informant slash coiffeur), who charged clients a tenner for a cut and finish. When she looked at Brian’s locks, it was clear that Jack always got called away on police informant business before actually finishing his hair.

Having unpacked and arranged all the pastries on platters, Amy began slicing one of the lemon drizzle cakes. She swallowed as her taste buds responded to the citrus aroma. At the other end of the counter, Brian had just picked up another coffee-making apparatus: the tamper. This was a metal disk with a red-painted handle. Amy watched him press down on the coffee in the portafilter. Thirty pounds was the requisite pressure. He had practiced this maneuver so many times that she would have put money on it being precisely the correct pressure. Apparently, tamping eliminated any “voids in the coffee bed.” Amy had learned that there was a debate among baristas about whether to tap the side of the portafilter between tamps. Some believed it had the beneficial effect of dislodging a few coffee grains that may have gotten stuck to the sides. Brian, on the other hand, believed tapping could break the seal between the coffee and the portafilter. He was an impassioned nontapper and made no apology for it.

Ever since Amy had known Brian, he’d been a man of enthusiasms and passions. While other students were merely “in to” Karl Marx, Brian became totally immersed. Late into the night, Pink Floyd blasting from his room, he read and reread
Das Kapital
and
The Communist Manifesto
. He could quote lengthy sections with the zeal of a Bible-bashing evangelist. “‘Capital,’” he would proclaim to his housemates, who were usually sprawled out in the living room watching daytime soaps, “‘is dead labor, which, vampirelike, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more the more labor it sucks.’ It’s so simple. I can’t believe I never saw it before.” When he failed to get his friends’ attention beyond “Shuddup,
Quincy
’s just getting to a good bit,” he would stomp off, muttering, “Lackeys of the bourgeoisie,” as he went.

In the third year, the didgeridoo arrived. Brian had spent the previous summer backpacking in Australia and claimed that the three-foot-long wind instrument made from the hollowed-out wood of a eucalyptus tree had been conferred upon him by an aged, leather-skinned Aboriginal wise man whose family had used it for generations to summon up the healing spirit of the Light Dreaming Man. It wasn’t until years later that Brian confessed to having bought it at the airport gift shop.

Not only was he overcome with the desire to play the instrument, he wanted to play it like an Aboriginal. Among other things, this meant perfecting “circular breathing,” which enabled him to make a continuous sound without giving any indication of having taken a breath. Brian went to great lengths to find books on didgeridoo playing and spent his last year at university, when he should have been studying for his finals, honing his skills. The low blasts could be heard from the street. Passersby must have thought somebody was keeping a farting hippopotamus in the house. Brian always ignored his housemates’ pleas to pipe down. They got back at him by regularly going into Brian’s room when he was out and confiscating the didgeridoo. On his return, he would be reduced to hunting for it under beds and on top of kitchen units like a truculent five-year-old who’d been punished for vrooming his toy cars too loudly.

“My shrink says I have intimacy issues,” Brian continued now, alluding to his decision to dump Maddy. He reached for another pastry. Amy attempted to slap his hand, but he dodged her and grabbed a prune Danish. “She reckons that my parents dying when I was so young means that I’m reluctant to get close to women in case they abandon me. Instead of hanging around to see what happens, I find an excuse to end it before they leave me.”

“But your gran brought you up after you lost your mum and dad. She never abandoned you.”

“No, not until she died last year.” He took a bite of the Danish and started chewing. “As an adult it’s really hard telling people that you’re pissed off with your poor, sick old gran for dying, but I was furious with her.”

Amy nodded. “I can understand that,” she said gently. “So that would explain why your problem with women began so recently.” She paused. “Okay, how about this for an idea? Now that you know what’s causing you to end relationships before they even start, maybe you should try going on a few more dates with Maddy and see if you can get over these feelings.”

Brian swallowed. “That’s what my shrink said.”

“I think she’s right.”

“But they’re such powerful feelings. Do you really think it’s possible to overcome them?”

“Who knows? But I think you should at least give it a try.”

He wrinkled his face and shoved what remained of the pastry into his mouth. “I dunno …”

“Oh, come on. You’re being asked to spend a few more hours in the woman’s company. Nobody’s suggesting you marry her.”

He shrugged. “Okay. Why not? I’ll give it a try. I’ll carry on seeing Maddy and see how I feel in a couple of weeks.”

“Great. You won’t regret this.”

“I wish I had your confidence,” he said, latching the portafilter onto the espresso machine and switching on the pump. After a few seconds, dark viscous droplets of coffee were falling into two tiny cups.

“Just look at it … the color of a monk’s robe.”

Now he was examining the crema and smiling with approval. It appeared that the hallmark of a great espresso was as it should be: a light golden foam. He cut through it with a spoon, and it immediately came back together. He handed Amy one of the white porcelain espresso cups, optimum storage temperature forty degrees Celsius. “Taste that,” he said, triumph in his voice. “What do you think? Tell me honestly.”

She took a sip. “Um, well, it’s definitely very coffee-flavored.”

“Omigod, eight months under my impeccable tutelage and the woman still has the palate of a plankton. How am I ever going to make a barista out of you?” He brought his cup to his lips and closed his eyes. Amy watched as he swirled the liquid around in his mouth before swallowing. “Full, velvety, smooth texture, slightly acidic. No bitter aftertaste … a flavor that lingers. Truly magnificent.”

Given the choice, Amy would always choose hot chocolate over coffee. To her, the bitterness of coffee didn’t compare to the sweet, heady aroma of really good hot chocolate.

Sometimes, on a damp, slate-sky winter’s afternoon, when it was too cold and miserable to go out, she would make hot chocolate for herself and Charlie. First she would melt the very best unsweetened dark chocolate with a couple of tablespoons of water so that it didn’t stick to the pan. When it was thick and glistening, she added full-fat milk and sugar. The smooth, chocolaty brew was so thick, you could almost stand a spoon up in it. Then came the bit Charlie loved best—the spraying of the whipped cream. Now that he was old enough and had the strength in his fingers to press down on the aerosol squirter, Amy let him do it on his own. They would both collapse with laughter as he inevitably lost control and the cream spurted over him, over her, over the worktop—over everything except the hot chocolate.

After she’d wiped Charlie down, the two of them would curl up on the sofa with their mugs and a large bowl of marshmallows and watch
Toy Story
or
Chicken Run
.

UNTIL AMY
came to work for Brian, he had always refused to serve hot chocolate. He looked down his nose at any beverage that came in instant, powdered form. He even had no time for the fuller-flavored, less sweet upmarket brands of hot chocolate. On the other hand, parents kept asking for it on behalf of their children, particularly in winter. So, one morning when things were quiet, Amy went out and bought a couple of bars of her favorite French chocolate. “Okay,” she said to Brian after she’d performed her magic and turned it into a thick, velvety brew, “try this. We are talking ninety percent cocoa solids here.” After the ritual inhaling and mouth swirling, Brian was forced to admit it wasn’t half-bad.

Amy even persuaded him to add whipped cream (he insisted on it being nonaerosol) and sprinkles and call it Bambinocino. The kids adored it, and so did their parents. To make it more sophisticated for the adults, Amy stirred in freshly ground cinnamon and nutmeg.

As a result of Brian’s supreme effort and dedication—not to say obsession with producing the perfect espresso—people flocked to Café Mozart. Proud as he was, he freely admitted that running a neighborhood café was his plan B and that it didn’t come close to fulfilling his ultimate dream.

Brian’s plan A was to open a trendy, upmarket coffeehouse in Soho. He’d first attempted this at the beginning of 2009, but even in a recession, leases in central London cost a fortune. Brian still had a few thousand left from the insurance payout he’d received after his parents died. The bulk of it had gone to pay for his private education and university. Brian’s gran had also left him some money in her will, a little over fifteen thousand pounds. There was no money tied up in her house because it had always been rented. The inheritance, together with his own nest egg, meant Brian could finally give up his job in logistics—which had never been a match for his talents—and set up his own business. Had the economy been booming, he would have sunk all his money into his dream, but since there was a good chance the project could go belly up, he needed to keep some money back as a buffer.

In the well-to-do inner London suburbs south of the river, commercial property still didn’t come cheap, but it was just about affordable. So it was that in June 2009, Brian pitched his tent in Richmansworth, aka Nappy Valley, an urban village full of thrusting young bankers and lawyers (their thrust apparently undiminished even in these troubled times), their skinny blond, Ugg-booted wives, and their gorgeous straight-toothed, glossy-haired children.

Compromising on location meant Brian was forced to do the same thing when it came to branding. Café Mozart wasn’t a proper coffeehouse. That is to say, it didn’t resemble those hardcore London coffeehouses the likes of which Brian dreamed of presiding over, where funky, edgily coiffed Japanese baristas dressed in black presented customers with a cup of espresso on a little wooden tray with a glass of water to freshen the palate and, for afterward, an exquisite froufrou pastry so tiny that it was almost invisible. A family neighborhood—even a discerning one like Richmansworth—couldn’t have sustained such a niche business. Instead, Café Mozart was a traditional café-boulangerie that served the best breads, pastries, and coffee for miles around.

But as Brian was always telling Amy, he hadn’t given up on his dream. Because it was the only decent coffee and cake place in the neighborhood and because it was in a great position, only a few hundred yards from the Tube station, Café Mozart was weathering the recession rather well. When the business had made enough money, Brian planned to leave it in the hands of a manager while he set up his new, intimidatingly trendy coffeehouse in Soho or maybe somewhere in the East End.

“Wow, I can see it all,” Amy would tease him. “A glass and steel twenty-first-century salon, nameless save for your signature elegantly carved at the bottom of the heavy, rough-hewn wooden door, filled with writers, artists, and intellectuals composing haikus on their MacBooks while engaging one another in earnest discourse about the state of the planet.”

“You may mock,” Brian said, smiling and wagging his finger, “but when Potter’s Coffeehouses take off in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh, you will be laughing on the other side of your face.”

Amy could hear the certainty, the familiar determination in his voice, and decided he might well be right.

CAFÉ MOZART
was part of a row of Victorian shops that overlooked the common. Like the rest, it had an ornate fascia, which had been immaculately restored and painted. It was sandwiched between the organic butcher—catering to a clientele that even in a recession thought nothing of spending the best part of a hundred pounds on a piece of sirloin—and a gift shop specializing in Cath Kidston flowery wellies, Alessi kettles and juicers, and cashmere cardigans for newborns at seventy quid a pop.