In the Kitchen (10 page)

'I don't,' said Gabriel, sounding sullen when he had meant to joke.

'They are two gentlemen. One, you might describe as corpulent. Signet ring and paisley shirt. The other is pinstriped and blond, and I feel I've seen him somewhere before, can't say where. But I see it rings a bell with you. Well, if you don't go to them, they insist they're coming into the kitchen. Shall I lead them through?'

Gabe started at the description of Rolly and Fairweather. They had been in before, to sample the food, check they were backing the right horse, but he didn't want them coming into the kitchen. It was bad enough that they were asking him to go out there. 'I'll be out in a couple of minutes,' he said. He hoped Fairweather wouldn't switch into broadcast mode. If one of the waiters overheard, by tomorrow morning the whole hotel would know that Gabe was planning to leave.

'They'll be so pleased,' said Gleeson, with a smart little click of the heels.

'Want to convey their compliments, no doubt.'

Over drinks, Gleeson had told Gabriel that he grew up on a farm in East Anglia. It seemed a tall story, less likely than all the tales that were told behind his back. With his cufflinks and shoeshine, his softsoap and sharp parting, with courtesy as his dagger and shield, it seemed that the only place Gleeson could have hatched was here, or some place like it, where you kept who you really were to yourself.

'Oh,' added Gleeson, over his shoulder. 'Mr Maddox is dining with us this evening. He's ordered the osso buco. I'm sure you'll see him. He's seated rather close to your friends.'

CHAPTER FOUR

JACQUES OCCUPIED THE GROUND FLOOR OF THE EAST-WING SEMI-circular turret that swept around from Yew Street to Eagle Place. The hotel's minimalist style had not been replicated in the restaurant; indeed, an attempt had been made to preserve or restore its old-world charm. The ceiling was high with quadrangular lacunae in the baroque fashion, the cavities hosting intricate flowers and unknown coats of arms. The walls were covered in fleur-de-lys wallpaper in a richly subtle colour somewhere between silver and beige. The colour was picked up in the carpet, and complemented by the table linen which leaned more towards pink. On the walls, at regular intervals, hung vast mirrors with rococo gilding and in the middle of the room stood a small stone fountain on which a pair of seahorses pranced. The French chandelier hid its ugliness in a blaze of light and this evening appeared to flirt charmingly with the scene below. Overall the effect was not displeasing though somewhat precariously contrived.

The restaurant was almost full. Gabriel paused at the edge of the dining room.

To his side was the entrance to the cloakroom and the lectern where Gleeson or his head waiter greeted guests. Behind him the bar ran like a throat towards the belly of the hotel, the tables fanned out ahead. The diners leaned over their candlelit carousels, and the wine and the waiters flowed. The space was intimate and convivial, offering up both illusions at once.

As Gabriel stepped forward, a party of women – polished skin, bouclé and velvet, liver-spotted hands – set down their forks and exclaimed. The chef was in the dining room. They wanted a piece of him (why have a meal when you can have a dining experience?) but Gabe walked by with only a word. He spotted Mr Maddox, wiping gravy from his chin. He looked for his business partners. There were Rolly and Fairweather, damn them, a couple of tables away.

The noise of a hundred conversations hung overhead, pressing down gently but insistently, rounding Gabriel's shoulders and quickening his step.

'Must be a wonderful feeling,' said Fairweather, 'like coming out on stage to take a bow.'

'Can we make this quick?' said Gabriel, taking a seat. 'Aren't we due to meet next week?'

'He hasn't answered my question,' said Rolly. He waved a breadstick at Fairweather. 'That's what you get from a politician. They never answer the bloody question.'

Rawlins and Fairweather made an incongruous pair. The businessman, with his paisley shirt and fat pink hands, and the politician with his Savile Row suit.

'Gabriel was just saying' – Fairweather beamed at his companions – 'that he gets a terrific buzz when he walks through his restaurant.'

'My wife,' said Rolly, and shook his head. 'My wife thinks that if I leave my socks on the floor it's a personal insult to her.' His jowls vibrated. John Rawlins had none of the usual fat-man bonhom
ie.
His eyes were small and hard, with few eyelashes, and he blinked a great deal, as though in disbelief at the entire idiotic world. 'It's genetic,' he said. 'Purely genetic. Women can multi-task. Men can't. There's scientific evidence. It's no use them trying to change us. Evolution takes thousands of years.'

'I love natural history programmes,' said Fairweather. 'David Attenborough and all that.' He twisted his wedding ring around.

Gabe kept watch on Mr Maddox, hoping to catch his gaze.

Rolly said, 'It's time the feminists admitted they've been barking up the wrong tree. Isn't it?' The question was appended with a slurp. There was always something moist about Rolly's speech: a touch of sibilance, a mulching of t's and d's, an abundance of saliva noisily drained.

'I think,' said Gabe, 'they're supposed to be post-feminist now.'

'Tits out for the lads,' said Rolly. 'Still bust your balls though, won't they?'

They had met several years ago on a salmon-fishing trip in the Highlands, a freebie organized by a supplier. The closest Rolly got to water was the soda siphon in the country house hotel. There was a fight. Take a fine array of single malts, one open-all-hours bar, a couple of chefs, add insults according to taste. Rolly sprayed them with the soda bottle, like a couple of scrapping dogs. Later, he sat in the billiards room with Gabriel. Above the fireplace was a stag's head. Its antlers were huge, powerful, majestic, and useless against the hunter's gun. I'm going to open up a restaurant in London, Rolly said, as soon as I've found myself a chef who can keep his cool. Gabe had looked up at the imperturbable glass eyes, the dignified head, and nodded his own.

'I agree very much with Gabe,' said Fairweather. 'On the one hand you can say we're subject to our nature, but what about raping and pillaging and all that?

We can't just say we're designed for it. Infidelity too – well, we're supposed to be programmed to spread our seed widely, in an evolutionary sense, but I don't see that going down too well with my wife, or yours for that matter, Rolly. No, we have to rise above, sometimes, but I see what you mean about difference. Different but equal, isn't that the way?'

Rolly blinked his denuded eyes. 'See what I mean? You never get a straight yes or no.'

Fairweather laughed. He had a broad, pleasant face and his ruddy complexion lent him an endearingly bashful air. 'I rather fancy presenting a nature documentary. You've given me an idea.' He mused for a while, pushing back his blond fringe, as though preparing to face the camera. 'Power in the animal kingdom and power in politics – what does one world tell us about the other?

Yes,' he said, 'yes ... I should make a note.'

Gabe wondered if he should go over to Mr Maddox. But Mr Maddox was deep in conversation and Gabe could think of no reason to interrupt. Just then, the general manager's dining companion stood and excused himself. Gabe composed his face. When Mr Maddox glanced around, as he surely would, he would see that Gabriel was relaxed and had nothing to hide. Maddox surveyed the room. He looked straight through Gabe and then turned his head away. For God's sake, thought Gabriel, what game is he playing now?

'We're sorry to barge in on you like this,' Fairweather was saying. 'Aren't we, Rolly?'

The big man shrugged. 'Not really.'

'What he means is, we felt we had to. Speak to you immediately that is, and since you always seem to be working ...' Fairweather gestured vaguely around the restaurant. 'The mountain must go to Mohammad, as it were. Jolly good, this food, by the way.'

Rolly leaned closer to Gabriel. His lips twitched. Gabriel could hear the saliva being squirted through Rolly's front teeth and sucked back into his mouth. 'Heard you mislaid one of your staff,' said Rolly. 'I think you forgot to tell us. Must have slipped your mind.'

'Read about it in the newspaper, actually.' Fairweather bowed his head and fiddled with his wedding band. 'Very sad,' he said. 'A tragedy.'

'What's the comeback?' said Rawlins. 'What sticks to you?'

'I'm clear,' said Gabriel. 'Maybe I should have mentioned it, but there's nothing that should affect our plans.'

'If there's anything I can do,' said Fairweather, as if Gabe had suffered a personal loss. 'Anything at all.'

A waitress came to top up the water glasses. She was pretty in an uninspired sort of way, a regularity of features, a sufficient spacing of eyes and nose and mouth. Fairweather fumbled with his hair. 'Now, I'll bet you're not really a waitress. Let me guess. You're between acting jobs.'

'No,' said the girl, rearranging the cruet. 'I am going to be a nurse.' She lingered a while and Fairweather flirted, teasing her about vampires when he discovered she was from Romania, asking her if she had a nurse's uniform yet.

The girl affected an urbane tolerance, narrowing her eyes and smiling tightly, but by the time she left the table Gabriel could see something beautiful about her and credited Fairweather with the transformation. Fairweather was possessed of the kind of easy warmth that, from a distance, could seem suspicious and up close was impossible to resist.

They were an unlikely pair, Fairweather and Rawlins, but a pretty good team.

Their egos didn't clash because they grew in different directions and Gabriel was grateful for that. Five years ago, when he'd tried to set up a business with a trio of experienced restaurateurs, it was like three chafing boils which finally erupted, leaving nothing but a big infected mess. After that, Gabe had decided he would only go it alone. No bank, it turned out, was prepared to advance the necessary amount of cash. He would have been looking at a greasy spoon north of Watford had he not found alternative private finance. The savings he'd built up, around sixty grand, would go in with Rolly's and Fairweather's contributions and his name would hang, finally, over the door of a fine central London restaurant. Looking at his backers now, Gabriel felt a constriction in his throat. Here, he thought, is my chance.

Forty-two years old and he needed a break. He'd expected his name above the door before now. But he made the plan when he was, what, fifteen, sixteen, and what did he know then? More than his father anyway, stuck as fast to Rileys as a shuttle caught in the loom. Fifteen he was when he planned his career and hadn't he pushed on through? My God, it made him shiver to think of some of the places he'd worked. That sadist in the brasserie in Lyon who pushed Gabe's face down to the pan of boiling mussels, so close the skin peeled back from his cheeks. The hotel in Scarborough where he'd spent nine months, the saddest place on earth; where the staff and even the guests were prone to sudden fits of weeping and where he shared a room with a deaf mute, a fellow trainee who had a passion for Pelmanism and hard-core porn. Of course he hadn't done the stint at a three-star. Hadn't needed to or wanted to, beyond the age of sixteen. As a kid he'd had a dalliance with patisserie, spinning sugar cages two feet high and entering competitions and, at the least, getting placed.

He'd come to his senses, thank goodness, before condemning himself to life in the pastry kitchen, with the depressives and obsessive-compulsives, among the pink icing and chocolate mice.

'Are you all right?' said Fairweather.

'Wind, I should think,' said Rolly. 'Chefs have bloody terrible diets.'

'Do they really?' said Fairweather. 'It's a wonder no one's made a programme about that.'

'The Pimlico site is a goer,' said Rolly. He drained a water glass and poured some red wine which he pushed across the table to Gabe. 'Gentlemen, shall we toast?'

'Not here,' said Gabe, checking on Mr Maddox, who chose that moment to look straight back at him.

'Discretion is the better part of valour,' said Fairweather.

'My boss is over there,' said Gabe, shifting in his seat.

'Only one possible hitch with the Pimlico site,' said Rolly. He waved a pink paw at Fairweather. 'Fly-by-night here's thinking of getting out of Westminster. I mean, what's the point of setting up in Pimlico if he doesn't get all his MP buddies along?'

I'm going to get sacked, thought Gabriel. The restaurant won't happen either.

Fairweather is going to pull out. Or Rawlins. They're both going to change their minds. Forty-two years old and going nowhere fast. He picked up the glass of red wine and knocked it back.

Fairweather laughed. His laugh seemed to trumpet down his nose. 'I'll still have friends. I may only be a very, very junior minister but I don't think I'll be forgotten all that quickly. And, you know, I might make some new friends. We fly-by-night types usually do.'

Gabe dragged himself back from the future, which seemed to have run away from him, to the present, over which, as far as he knew, he still exerted some control. 'Are you going to resign?' he said. 'You don't want to be an MP any more?'

'I won't stand again,' said Fairweather. 'I think the only respectable way out mid-term is in a wooden box.'

Gabriel looked round for a waiter. To his immense satisfaction, three started towards him at once. He ordered a 1962 Chateau Moulinet Pomerol and said it was on the house.

'Good man,' said Fairweather.

'Have you stopped enjoying it?' asked Gabe. 'Being an MP?'

Fairweather sighed. 'It's been such a privilege to serve. People complain about the caseloads from their constituencies but, you know, if I can help someone with their problems, however mundane they may be (I'm not denying they can be very, very mundane) it gives me profound satisfaction.' He gave a wistful smile and repeated the phrase. 'Profound satisfaction. Really and truly it does.'

Rolly snorted. 'Noisy neighbours, leaking roofs? I'll bet they give you a kick.'