The Road Home (47 page)

“Well,” said Lev, “not so large. Fifty covers or so. What I imagine is: everything very clean and simple. Wooden floor. White tablecloths. Nice simple glassware. Perhaps a small bar. Some leather chairs here, in the bar area. Maybe a fire in winter . . .”

“Oh yes, a fire. Because your winters are cold. Good idea.”

“On the walls, some nice color. Maybe ocher color. And old photographs—like yours in your book—of our country in the past.”

“Photographs. Very good. To remember the past. It’s important for us all. But also, Lev, I’ve just thought, if a customer’s waiting for somebody to arrive, who’s late or something, she can just swivel around and have a look at the photographs, instead of sitting and staring at nothing and feeling like a self-conscious twit.”

“Yes. I didn’t think of that.”

“What about your staff? You must pick carefully. No Mrs. Viggers!”

“No, no. I want all my staff and especially my waiters very smart. You know? Efficient and polite—not like in old Communist restaurants. Everybody happy to work there, to be part of my dream . . .”

“I think it’s brilliant, Lev,” said Ruby. “I can already imagine it. I can imagine everything.”

She was smiling, and Lev noticed that a thread of color had returned to her sunken cheeks. He put out his cigarette and said, “Ruby, now let me go and get you some food. You must eat.”

“I know,” she said with a sigh. “But I just don’t feel like eating anymore. I’m sorry. I would if I could. Perhaps when I’m better—if I ever am better—I’ll go on a wild adventure to your country and come and have a meal in your restaurant and look at all the pictures on the yellow walls, while I’m waiting for my food to arrive.”

22

The Last Bivouac

AN ENVELOPE ARRIVED, addressed in Ina’s writing, but containing no letter or message of thanks for the money Lev kept sending, only a crayoned picture, made by Maya. It was a drawing of water, colored blue-green, with bright fishes swimming along and sea horses nodding in a line. At the top of the page, where the water ended and a blank white sky began, sailed a houseboat like Noah’s Ark, but the ark was smaller than the sea horses and its decks were empty. Bare words were scribbled badly in one corner of the blue-green sea: “
To Pappa from Maya
.” Nothing more. No love, no kisses.

Lev showed the picture to Christy and Jasmina. Christy said, “Look how nicely she’s done the fishes.” Jasmina said, “Perhaps that’s what your mother’s told her—that you’re going to live in an ark when the flood arrives.”

Lev propped up the picture on his windowsill. Stared at it. Tried to imagine what was in his daughter’s mind. Remembered the way she had talked to the chickens and goats and the sparrows bathing in the dust and thought, desolately, Who or what will she talk to in an apartment in Baryn?

Then he went to see Mrs. McNaughton to collect the money she owed him, but instead of leaving when she handed him the check, he told her he’d be willing to work full-time at Ferndale Heights if she hadn’t yet found a replacement for the Viggerses. Mrs. McNaughton put her hands together in an ardent prayer steeple and said, “Oh my goodness, Lev. How wonderful. That’s exactly what I was going to beg you to do!”

He’d worked it out. He’d go to Ferndale at nine in the morning and stay till three or four, after serving a hot lunch and preparing the cold suppers. Then he’d get to Panno’s at five. Work till twelve or one. Be home and in bed by two. Get up at seven. Be out at Ferndale again by nine. The hours were long, sure, but that’s all they were: hours. He could get through them. He told himself that none of them would be as arduous as a single hour in winter at the Baryn lumber yard. And he’d survived those for almost twenty years . . .

Mrs. McNaughton said Ferndale could pay him £17 an hour. With his heart pounding, he refused this offer. Reminded her this was a head chef’s job and asked for £20. Watched her hesitate, then relax and agree. With her efficiency-conscious smile, she told him she knew Ferndale was lucky to get him.

He’d done the sums. If he worked six hours at Ferndale Heights seven days a week at £20 an hour, he could earn £840: £650 after tax. The money he made at Panno’s—about £216 a week in cash— would, if he was careful, be enough for him to live on and pay rent to Christy. Getting £20 an hour at Ferndale, he could save in the region of £2,500 per month. He had only to work for four or five months to save the impossible-seeming £10,000.

The thrill of this—the realization that, after all, he needed no government help, no expensive loan, no benefactor, but could make the money himself by balancing two jobs instead of one—made him breathless.

His first and only impulsive purchase was a set of chef’s whites. He put them on and looked at himself. He put on the toque. Didn’t care that a toque was, of itself, a ridiculous thing, that he’d once heard G. K. Ashe deride it as “wanker wear.” He paraded himself for Christy and Jasmina, and caught them smiling.

“We’re not laughing,” said Jasmina.

“No, not at all,” said Christy. “We wouldn’t laugh. We’re just dazzled by the sheer snow-whiteness.”

Lev tried to explain to them that he thought the elderly residents of Ferndale Heights might like to see their chef dressed in this old, elegant way, that theirs was a shrunken, altered world, but now, in his white-clad being, he was going to remind them they were being cared for.

“I see it,” said Christy. “I think that’s capital, don’t you, Jas?”

“Yes,” said Jasmina. “They’ll think they’re at the Ritz. Shame Miss Minto, or whatever her name was, isn’t there to appreciate you.”

The ache in his back sometimes reminded him of the time when he’d been knocked into the ditch by the hay cart. It got him late at night, when, trudging the tables at Panno’s, he found himself longing for heat and sleep. But this was nothing. Only an inevitable part of the decision he’d made. He swallowed painkillers and carried on. And, slowly, the kitchen at Ferndale Heights was being transformed. Lev and Simone had cleaned out every cupboard and drawer, scoured away all the smears and detritus of the Viggerses’ long habitation.

“You know, they was, like,
sluts,
wasn’t they?” commented Simone, as she soaked and chafed pans, scraped grease off shelves, bagged up stale packets of custard powder and soup granules. “They could of
infected
the whole place.”

It was infected. This was what Lev felt. Infected with neglect, with indifference. It reminded him of the shabby restaurants where he and Marina had gone, vainly hoping for a good meal and finding only this residue of past things, this same absence of care.

“What I’d like,” Lev told Simone, after a couple of weeks, “is to introduce
choice
into the lunch menu. Two main courses. Two puddings. Everyone can choose. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” said Simone. “But tell that to Ma McNaughton, she’ll have a seizure.”

“Why?”

“Cost, Chef. Know wha’ I mean? Choice is too whatsit—too wasteful.”

“No,” said Lev. “Not if we make menus. Give out the menus one, two days before. Everybody decides. Tells us their choice. Then we know how many chickens, how many fish and so on for the suppliers. Should be no waste.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Why not?”

“Yeah? Dunno why not. But she’ll say no.”

Mrs. McNaughton didn’t say no. She said she’d run what she called “a limited experiment for one month.” She cautioned Lev to balance the more expensive ingredients with cheaper ones each day.

When he told Simone, she said, “Right. Well, I’d better write out the menus, man. Your spellin’s atrocious, innit?”

“Yes,” agreed Lev. “You write. You give them to Mrs. McNaughton for the computer. Make every choice sound nice.”

Simone took the task home, came back with a formula she’d said she’d worked on with her mum and written out in a slow, careful hand. She showed it proudly to Lev.

YOUR MENU FOR WEDNESDAY

Wickedly lovely free-range chicken breasts

stuffed with mushrooms, shallots, and herbs,

served with a totally brilliant jus

or

Chef’s fantastic fish gratin with

zero bones and non-crap crumb

and

Choice of non-frozen broccoli or beans,

or both if you want

—

Crème brûlée jacked by Chef from a

recipe at GK Ashe

or

Watermelon sorbet with no black

seeds or rubbish in it

Lev changed nothing before he took Simone’s menu to Mrs. McNaughton. Mrs. McNaughton put on her glasses. Lev saw a smile spread across her face. “Well,” she said, “I’ll let it go. We’ll explain to everybody that Simone wrote it. There may be a few rumblings, but in the main I think it’ll amuse them. And everything that amuses them I see as moments of light in their darkness.”

So then it became one of the highlights of the residents’ day: reading out the lunch menus. The more extreme the language, the more the ancient occupants of Ferndale Heights liked it. It was as if the language already gave the dishes savor. As the weeks passed (and the costs remained stable and the month’s “experiment” was conveniently forgotten), the wording became wilder. At lunchtime Lev might hear Berkeley Brotherton announce, “I’m having the ‘bloody delicious vegetarian sausages with the non-packet-shit mash,’ ” or Pansy Adeane say sweetly, “Oh Lord, I can’t remember what I was havin’, Lev love. I think it was the ‘totally non-bull-shitting Guinness-marinated Irish stew,’ or was that Thursday?”

Lunchtime was noisier now. People ate more, talked more, lingered longer at the table. “If you ask me, it’s a ruddy miracle,” Lev heard Douglas observe one early afternoon. “We eat better here now than down the pub.”

“We do,” said Joan, “but you can bet it won’t last.”

“Why won’t it last?”

“Nothing does. Nothing good does.”

“Well,” said Douglas, “sufficient unto the day. The non-packet-shit mash might well outlive us.”

Only Ruby Constad played no part in any of this. Word went round Ferndale Heights that she had stomach cancer and would soon have to be moved out.

“Moved out where?” asked Lev.

“To a . . . whatever it is they call those damn places,” said Berkeley Brotherton. “The last bivouac.”

Ruby lay in her bed, staring at her furniture. Sometimes she listened to an old tape of Gregorian chant. Her frail hand would hold out the box of Matchsticks toward Lev, but he noticed that even these she couldn’t eat anymore.

One day he found two middle-aged people sitting silently beside her. “These are my children,” said Ruby quietly. “This is Noel and this is Alexandra.”

They didn’t move from their chairs or hold out their hands, only nodded at him. It was hot in the room, but he noticed that the son, Noel, was still wearing his lightweight overcoat. The daughter, Alexandra, had a gray waterfall of hair and wore a long denim skirt and sandals. The flesh of her legs was pale and dry.

“Do you work here?” she asked Lev.

“Lev is our chef,” said Ruby proudly.

“Oh, right,” said Alexandra.

“Ma can’t eat proper food anymore, can you, Ma?” said Noel.

“No,” said Ruby. “I can’t. But I know the meals have become wonderful since Lev took over. Tell about the menus, Lev. It will amuse my guests.”

My guests.
This was how she referred to her son and daughter. Lev hovered by the door, noted a bunch of cheap carnations, still in their paper, resting on one of the Indian tables. “Well,” he began, “it’s silly, really. In our new menus we try to describe how everything is fresh —”

“Yes, but you’re not saying it right,” said Ruby. “You see, Simone, the girl who helps Lev in the kitchen, writes the menus and she deliberately puts in outrageous words, so we get, say, ‘non-crap homemade crumble’ or ‘sorbet recipe jacked from a famous chef’ and lots more fun like that.”

The “guests” smiled weakly, wearily. Ruby’s face on the pillow was the color of suet. “Don’t you think that’s funny?” she asked her children.

“Not really,” said Noel. “Not if you can’t eat any of it.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Ruby. “It’s cheered everybody up. That’s what matters.”

Ruby lay back on her pillow. She’d told Lev that talking tired her, that she liked to lie there, dreaming about the past, feeling that she wasn’t anywhere solid or real—certainly not at Ferndale Heights— but in a land of her own imaginings, where the sky could be any color she chose. “I see wonderful things,” she’d said. “I see white vestments blowing about on a washing line; I see elephants being sprayed with water by their mahouts; I see vultures perching on enormous rocks . . .”

Lev knew that the “guests” were waiting for him to leave. He offered to find a vase for the carnations, but Ruby said, “No, no, I’ve got plenty of vases. Alex will do it. Won’t you, darling?”

“Sure,” said the daughter, Alexandra.

But she didn’t move from her chair. It was, thought Lev, as though standing up on her pale, dry legs was a private act, something she refused to let a stranger witness.

Now Lev and Marina were in a large room, and the sun fell in rectangles on a scented floor that was carpeted with sawdust. Together they were brushing away this sawdust to reveal some solid parquet blocks underneath. “This is the space,” Marina kept saying. “This is the space.”

Then she told him that the sunlit room had once been a piano shop. Until recently it had been crammed with musical instruments and cases full of sheet music. “Elgar used to live here,” she said, “before he was famous.”

The dream was pleasant, with no sad edge to it. Little by little, the sawdust was swept away into a far corner and the wood underneath it began to shine. And Marina kept extolling the virtues of the empty piano shop. “It’s full of light,” she said, “and there’s a fireplace— look, Lev. I think you can get fifteen or sixteen tables in here and still have room for your bar.”

Lev wanted to ask her where his kitchen was going to be.

He understood that there was another room, behind the piano shop, where Elgar had once lain in a narrow bed, hearing music stir in his brain, but Lev dreaded to find this room dark and cramped, with the composer’s coffin in it, so he let the door to it remain shut and never mentioned the kitchen. But the sweeping of the beautiful room went on, and the
snick-snick
of the brooms was a gentle sound . . .