Читать книгу The Happy Home for Ladies: A heartwarming,uplifting novel about friendship and love - Michele Gorman - Страница 11

It’s thanks to my lucky stars that June hired me. Otherwise I’d have had to leave our little home town to find work after the bistro closed down.

The bistro was my first job out of catering college. It wasn’t overly fancy, at least not when I first started working there. It teetered somewhere between a builder’s caff and someplace that served food au jus. Set in the old town fishmonger’s shop, its walls were tiled white with a pretty Victorian green border running around the whole room. We only had seating for twenty-eight, with the open kitchen behind the old fish counter. Jen, my boss, kept as many of the original features as she could. Pale green ironwork surrounded the huge plate-glass front windows and door, which rattled awfully in winter, so we had a heavy velvet curtain in front to keep the customers from blowing away whenever someone came in.

There were fishy touches all over the restaurant: some of the original adverts for jellied eels and pilchards in old money, weighing scales with their enamelled dish on the battered sideboard. Fishhooks hung from the ceiling and the old barrel by the door held customers’ wet umbrellas. We even used the display counter – once upon a time piled with ice and seafood – for our desserts.

Jen had upmarket ideas when she hired me. Best of all, she believed in me. But, being fresh from catering college, I had yet to believe in myself.

I don’t mean that I didn’t have the skills. I knew my pâté from my parfait. I just didn’t have the confidence. Yet there I was, the new cook in a newly reopened bistro – Jen had the word ‘café’ prised off the front of the building, and ‘bistro’ just fit, though it always looked squashed together. I got to have complete say over the food we served. Once I got over the shock and stopped panicking, I started to love the job. Every week Jen and I sat down together so I could tell her what I was planning. I didn’t have to ask permission for my menu. My catering school friends were gobsmacked when I told them that. Most of them were prep cooks, waking at 5 a.m. to chop mountains of onions, and there I was, designing my own menus.

Jen was thrilled and so was I. Finally, finally, I was an actual cook, just like I’d always planned. I don’t want to paint it as the perfect job, because the hours were punishing and it was sweaty and nerve-racking. Still, it felt like my dream had come to life.

Within a few months we were gaining a good reputation around the town, and people had to book for dinner on weekends. And sometimes even for lunch. But no matter how packed the bistro got, my parents still weren’t convinced. ‘What do you want to do next?’ Mum asked every single time I visited, like I was working behind a McDonald’s counter instead of running my own restaurant.

‘This is what I want to do,’ I always answered. ‘Why else would I have gone to catering college?’

‘I still have no idea,’ she’d say, ‘when you could have gone to university. Though I suppose this could be a leg up the ladder, if you leverage it. But darling, you’ve got the brains to be on your way to the boardroom, not doing dishes in a kitchen.’

Maybe I shouldn’t be bringing this up now that Mum’s gone. After all, it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead. But it was harsh, so there’s no use pretending that she was a saint. You may as well know what she could be like.

Mum always followed up with her main objection to my career plans: I should be challenging myself to do more than even my parents had. They were entrepreneurs with a successful building firm, but Mum always saw corporate jobs as better than what they had. That’s where you could really get a leg up the ladder. She and Dad did what they could without any education or family money. She wanted more for me.

The problem was that every time they told me I could be more, all I heard was that I was less. That’s hard to accept at any age. I was still a teen. Meanwhile, my brother did everything they wanted. Maybe his aspirations really did align with theirs, or maybe he was brown-nosing. Whatever the case, he made them happy while, as long as I worked in a kitchen, I wasn’t going to measure up to Mum and Dad’s dreams for me. No matter what I was doing there, no matter how perfectly it matched what I wanted to do. Even after I’d been head chef for six years and built the bistro into a restaurant with a waiting list for reservations, and won awards for my cooking, they weren’t as convinced about my success as I was.

The more they harped on about all the ways I could be doing better, the more I tried to ignore them. After all, I was happy with my progress. I was doing exactly what I’d set out to do. Their criticism couldn’t hurt me. At least, that’s what I thought.

Now I’m not so sure, because Mum’s not here anymore, and still there’s a nagging little voice in my head. It’s not paying me many compliments.

‘You’re miles away,’ June says, pushing my hand towards the glass of Pinot Noir she’s just poured. ‘Do I dare ask?’

‘I’m just thinking about Mum.’ We’re sitting at a corner table in our local pub. We’ve been coming here ever since we got each other dodgy fake IDs for our sixteenth birthdays. We’d never have got away with that in such a small town if the man who took over the business hadn’t been from outside the area. And short-sighted and desperate for business.

Even without the early memories, this is still my kind of pub: full of old wood panelling and mismatched tables and chairs, with soft lighting and no fruit machines or TVs showing football. Just lots of familiar faces and the happy buzz of conversations going on all around us.

I’m in my chef whites as usual, but June looks nice. She always wears smart trousers that suit her slender figure, and trendy tops – sometimes floaty and sometimes, like tonight, with cutaway shoulders, depending on what’s hot in Glamour – and she wouldn’t be caught dead in my clogs or with her hair scraped back in a ponytail. I probably embarrass her with my checked trousers and overuse of dry shampoo.

When June pulls her mouth into the sympathetic I’m-listening pout that she uses whenever one of the residents has a whinge, the guilt sweeps over me. She’s mistaking my words for nice, normal, missing-Mum-now-that-she’s-gone thoughts.

‘It will get better,’ June says. ‘It has only been a few months.’

I take a deep breath. ‘I wish it was that easy.’ But when she reaches for my arm, I say, ‘No, it’s not what you think. I’m really pissed off with her.’

‘For dying? That’s normal. It’s one of the stages of grief, remember the notes?’

She gave me a packet of papers after Mum died. June likes to be prepared for everything. With handouts. ‘Yeah, but that’s not why I’m angry. Which means it’s not normal and I’m some kind of freak of a daughter.’ Even though I hate admitting that, in a way it feels good to get it out. It feels so good that, once I start, I can’t stop myself. Even though June knows all this, she’s happy to listen.

I knew I wasn’t cut out for uni years before I breathed a word to my parents. I’m not like my brother, Will. By which I mean I’m not academically-minded or completely afraid to go against our parents. He was making plans for uni while he was still in primary school. But I’d discovered cooking by the time I was that age, and I loved every bit of it. Even the tedious prep work and the cleaning up. The idea of turning a bunch of ingredients into something completely different seemed like magic. It still does.

‘Everyone’s parents drive them bonkers, right, even though we love them?’ June nods at my question. ‘I mean, sometimes I couldn’t stand Mum when she was being so judgmental. Especially after the bistro burned down.’

One minute I was running my own kitchen, feeling like all the hot and sweaty work, awful early hours and miserly pay cheques were worth it. More than worth it. I was on top of the world.

And the next minute it was all gone. I was no longer a chef.

The worst part was that it wasn’t my fault. I hadn’t poisoned any critics or passed off horsemeat burgers or even taken our success for granted. Every single dish that came out of the kitchen was made with the same love and commitment. Then one stupid wiring fault put half a dozen people out of work, ruined a business and my career for a while.

That’s when I really needed the support, but Mum acted like the fire was the best thing that could have happened to me. She thought her daughter might finally make her proud. Now I could get a proper job, she’d said. That place was holding me back, she’d said.

We argued, Mum and I. A lot. That place was where I’d built my chef career. That place was where I was happiest. So, when Jen decided that she wasn’t going to bother to rebuild it, or find another building to reopen… well, you can imagine.

It was all well and good that she and her boyfriend were going to move to France. Hurrah for amour and all that. She’d been less interested in the restaurant since they’d started going out anyway, but what was I supposed to do now?

Mum and Dad thought they had the answer. I could buy out Jen and own the bistro myself. It might not be as good as being a banker like my brother, but it was a start. At least I’d be a businessperson instead of just a cook.

They wouldn’t accept that I love being a cook. This is what I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve got no interest whatsoever in being a businessperson, even when that business is a restaurant. I’d watched Jen struggle with all the paperwork and worry about hiring and firing. The taxes and business rates and marketing. No, thank you. I just want to cook food that people love to eat. That’s why I went to school, not to end up a business owner who also cooks.

I think that was the last straw for my parents.

‘You never got a break,’ June agrees. ‘And it was unfair because of the way they treated Will, like he was the golden boy who could do no wrong. That would have pissed anyone off.’

‘It still does,’ I say. ‘But what am I supposed to do about it now? I can’t yell at her, can I? Or make her realise she was wrong, that I love what I do. I’m perfectly happy. I missed my chance to make her understand, and now I’m stuck with all this… stuff. Where’s it all supposed to go?’

‘Honestly, I don’t know,’ June says. ‘Would it make you feel better to yell at her grave? I’d go with you, so at least we’d both look deranged.’

That’s a true friend. We both laugh at the idea. It feels good.

She glances at her phone as it vibrates on the table. ‘Please tell me you’re seeing Callum soon,’ I say. I can tell by her smile that it’s his text. ‘When are you going to stop torturing the poor bloke?’

She giggles. ‘Believe me, this hurts me more than it hurts him. I’d jump on him every second of every day if I could.’

‘You can,’ I remind her. ‘Speaking as someone who hasn’t done any jumping in ages, why wouldn’t you?’

It’s a rhetorical question. We’ve been over June’s entire strategy a million times, but I let her tell me anyway. ‘Because the more I keep him at arm’s-length, the keener he seems to be. I can’t suddenly throw myself at him now. He’d run a mile.’

‘But June, don’t you want someone who throws himself back at you when you do that? If he’s only interested because you’re acting like you don’t care, then that’s not an honest relationship. Don’t look at me like that,’ I say at her hurt expression. ‘I’m not saying that’s why he likes you. I’m saying he’d probably be insanely nuts about you anyway so you don’t have to pretend. Then again, I’m the last person who should be giving you relationship advice.’

‘It does no good to keep beating yourself up, you know,’ she says. ‘You made one error in judgment. Nick’s not holding a grudge, so you shouldn’t, either.’

‘I’m not.’

‘I mean a grudge against yourself, and you are. Let it go. You’re just as close as you ever were and I’m sure he doesn’t even think about it now.’

I shake my head. ‘I’m sure he does still think about it and it wasn’t an error in judgment. It was a massive foul-up.’