More Than You Can Say (18 page)

‘So what are your plans now you’re in London?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know.’ I looked at her. She was smiling, but a faint worry crease had appeared between her brows. ‘Spend time with you, mainly.’

‘But I work all day, Dick. Or do you want me to give up my job? Then we’ll have no money at all coming in.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said again. I stood up and went and stared out of the window of her flat. You could see Hampstead Heath from there, and the green space called to me. I wanted to go and walk in the sunshine with her. I wanted to go to bed with her. I didn’t know what I wanted. She came and put her arms around me.

‘What are we going to do with you?’ she asked.

‘I’ll be all right,’ I told her. ‘I just need a bit of time to get used to life outside the army.’

‘And now I have to go to work,’ she said. ‘Or I’ll get the sack.’

For the next couple of days I hung around Emma’s flat and read the newspapers. I bought a notepad in order to write down ideas for how I would conduct my life now that I had left the army. Its pages remained a complete blank. The fact was I had never given the slightest thought to what I would do with my life. At school I had rarely looked farther ahead than the end of the week. Then my father had told me I was going to go into the army, which was fine by me. It was what he had done when he was my age, and what his own father had done. I knew I didn’t want to go to university. And once I was in the army, my life was mainly organised by other people. Now I was out, I had to think for myself for the first time in my life. It gave me a headache.

It was Emma who cut through my doubt and confusion. She came home one evening with an air of excitement.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Tell you later. I’m going to have a bath.’

I went and sat on the edge of the bath while she lay in it.

‘Did you have a good day?’ I asked.

‘Mmm. Very. And you?’

‘Don’t know where the time has gone,’ I said. ‘One minute it was breakfast, the next minute you were back here again.’

‘Didn’t you go out for a walk or anything? Did you do the shopping I asked you to do?’

‘Oh God, sorry. I forgot. I’ll take you out to dinner instead.’

It was true. I had sat in a chair all day and my mind had gone blank. I suppose I must have been thinking about something. I don’t believe I slept. I just stared at the wall, nagged by a feeling that I ought to go outside and take some exercise, or that there was something Emma had asked me to do. Now I remembered what it was: buy stuff for supper.

We went out to a little restaurant about four streets away. It had the merit of being cheap, and when you ate the food you could forgive its shortcomings because you knew you weren’t being overcharged. I was fussy about food. I was even quite interested in it, interested enough sometimes to ask Emma what she had prepared for her boardroom lunch. But when Emma told me what was on her mind, it still took me by surprise.

‘I’ve been talking to one of the other girls at work,’ she announced, as we chewed our way through overcooked steak. ‘There’s a restaurant not far from here called Chez Angela. I don’t think you’ve ever been. I have, once or twice. It wasn’t very good.’

‘Wasn’t? Has it closed?’

‘That’s just it. Angela Bright is the girl who owns it, and the girl I know, Mary, has been doing temporary work for her in the evenings. Angela offered her the business. She says her heart’s not in it any more. I think her husband left her, or something.’

I didn’t see what was coming.

‘My friend Mary says she could never take it on and she doesn’t have the money. Angela doesn’t want much, just someone to take over the lease and pay a nominal amount for the catering equipment and whatever else she’s leaving behind. So I told her to tell Angela that I might be interested.’

‘
You
might be interested, Em? What about your job?’

‘Well, what I was hoping, Dick, was that
we
might be interested.’

I looked at her for a moment. Her eyes were bright with enthusiasm and she was smiling, her lips parted, as if she couldn’t wait to hear what I would say.

My first instinct was to say, ‘Not in a million years.’ It would never work. I knew nothing about running a restaurant. But as I looked at Emma’s face and realised how very hard she was trying to think of something that would make me wake up and take an interest in life, I hadn’t the heart to discourage her. Looking back at that moment, I wish it had been otherwise.

We left the restaurant we had been eating in and walked through the streets to Chez Angela. As we walked Emma explained that she had some money her parents had given her which might be enough to buy the business and put it back on its feet. She wasn’t sure whether Chez Angela was still making money, but it had done at one time. The staff were good, according to her friend Mary, and Mary herself would come and help out if she was needed. Emma also thought the bank would give us a loan for working capital. She had it all worked out.

‘What would I do?’ I asked her. ‘I’m not going to put on a white jacket and become a waiter.’

‘You have to put on a suit and tie every night, look nice, greet the customers, and make sure everyone’s happy. You
can help take orders and serve drinks when we’re busy. Which we will be.’

‘OK, I’ve got the picture – I’m a waiter in a suit. What will
you
do?’

‘Plan the menus, order the food, help with the cooking, recruit the staff and tell them what to do, count the stock, do the accounts and fill in the VAT returns.’

‘Sounds fair,’ I said. ‘I can help with the paperwork. I don’t mind that.’

Emma stopped in the middle of the street and looked at me.

‘Do you think we really might do it, Dick?’

‘Hang on, I haven’t even seen the place yet.’

We walked on. I could feel Emma almost vibrating with enthusiasm, as she hung on my arm. When we got to Chez Angela, it wasn’t very exciting. Inside it was dull and badly lit, with that slightly run-down feeling that places sometimes get when they are no longer loved. The menus looked a bit dog-eared. The tablecloths had been washed too often and the glasses and cutlery didn’t sparkle the way they should have done. We ordered a couple of glasses of wine and sat in the bar area, watching the ebb and flow of business. It was more ebb than flow.

But after a few minutes I began to see what Emma had in mind. With new cutlery and glasses, and new white linen, and better lighting, and more cheerful staff, and a bit of bustle, it could be an inviting place. The location was good, a street with two or three smart dress shops in it and a hairdresser’s; we might get the ‘ladies who lunch’ crowd during the daytime and we could do even better in the evening. Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a mad idea after all.

And what else was I going to do? I didn’t think I was
capable of mapping out a new career for myself. In any case, what was I good at? What I was good at would never appear on any résumé, and would likely horrify any prospective employer. Besides, I had heard that restaurants kept you busy and that it was a very demanding job. That, I thought, was what I wanted: to be kept too busy to think.

We didn’t buy the place straight away. Emma was more careful than that. It was her own capital she would be spending, a good part of the inheritance given to her by her parents plus her own savings, and I knew the idea made her nervous. If she lost the money, she wasn’t likely to get her hands on any more.

A few nights after our first visit, we had dinner at Chez Angela. We introduced ourselves to the owner, a tall, careworn woman who seemed to be close to the end of her tether. She welcomed our interest, and was disinclined to haggle when we named a very low price. A day or two later she sent us her accounts, and Emma employed her own accountant to help her put together a business plan.

I didn’t do much apart from looking through catering equipment catalogues with Emma, and helping her write lists of things she wanted to do. I didn’t bother myself too much with the details. It was her idea, and I was happy to come along for the ride. After a couple of weeks we had a plan, and the offer of a bank loan for our working capital. We called Angela Bright, and the deal was done. The restaurant was ours.

So now the idea had become reality and for a while I was as caught up in it as Emma was. She gave in her notice at work and for a week there was a whirlwind of planning: meetings with shopfitters, with catering equipment suppliers,
with decorators, with electricians. Emma interviewed staff and sometimes I sat in, but after a while she discouraged it.

‘You make them too nervous, darling. It’s the way you sometimes look at people. Go and do some menu planning instead.’

But the menus I planned weren’t very good. They cost about twice as much to cook as we could possibly have charged for them, so Emma, who was more practical, took over that side of things as well.

In the end I became an odd-job man. But I was enjoying myself too: that is to say, the listless feeling that threatened to overwhelm me most days receded a little, and the days went past quickly enough. And of course, Emma couldn’t have been happier.

‘It’s perfect for both of us,’ she said to me one night just before we exchanged contracts with Angela Bright. ‘I love cooking, and you’re keen on food and wine too. The restaurant will be a hit. I’ve arranged for lots of press releases to go out before the opening night.’

‘I don’t know why you think I’m going to be any good at looking after customers,’ I said.

‘Please try. You can be so nice when you want to be. Remember, the customers are paying our wages. At least, I hope they will be.’

‘I’ll do my best to be nice to everyone. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

‘It will be wonderful to work together, won’t it?’ Emma looked at me, almost pleading. ‘It’s not as if we’ve seen that much of each other over the last few years. You won’t get bored of being with me all the time?’

‘I won’t get bored,’ I promised her. The truth was, I didn’t really know.

The plan was that for the first year Emma and I wouldn’t take any money out of the business. We could just about afford to do that, because we both had modest incomes from other sources and I had just qualified for my army pension plus a cash grant. But it would mean no holidays and no new flat. I didn’t mind. If Emma was happy, she could look after me, and then in time I felt sure I would be happy too. It’s just that I’d forgotten exactly what that word ‘happy’ meant.

Meanwhile the new restaurant took shape. Emma planned an entirely different table layout, which meant we could seat a few more people, yet had extra space between the tables so that you didn’t risk putting your elbow in your neighbour’s soup while you ate. New linen, glasses and cutlery were ordered and new menus were designed and printed. The wine list and the drink stock were changed and expanded so that the bar became a place where people might want to drop in for a drink rather than just a waiting area for diners. Emma was clever with the lighting, too. The whole place sparkled and there was a bright, cheerful feel to it.

Then came the opening-night party.

We served drinks and plates of tapas. Sample menus and wine lists were scattered around. The champagne flowed. I certainly wasn’t drunk – I don’t really drink that much – but I’d probably had more than I usually do. Everything was going swimmingly and I was working the crowd: ‘Hello, I’m Richard. What do you think of it all? Marvellous. Thank you for saying so. Hope we’ll see you here in the future.’

I thought I was doing quite well. Occasionally I caught glimpses of Emma through the crowd – it was amazing how many people we had crammed into a not very large space – and she gave me a brilliant smile. Once we found ourselves next to each other. She was talking to the restaurant critic
from the
Evening Standard
so I thought I’d better leave her to it, but she reached behind her back, found my hand and squeezed it. I could see she was enjoying herself and I felt proud of her. I turned away and bumped into a girl standing behind me. I didn’t recognise her. I must have caused her to spill some wine, because she gave her glass to the man standing next to her and started wiping her hand with a tissue.

‘I’m sorry. Did I do that?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said briefly. She took her glass back from her companion. She was a tall red-haired girl, with blue eyes.

‘I’m Richard Gaunt.’

‘Oh yes. Emma’s boyfriend.’

She didn’t sound especially friendly. I didn’t blame her. I smiled encouragingly.

‘You’re the soldier, aren’t you?’

‘I’m a restaurateur now,’ I replied, still smiling.

‘I remember Emma telling me. Iraq and Afghanistan. Did you ever think about what you were doing there, or did you just believe what the politicians told you?’ She turned and addressed her companion, a chubby man wearing a dark blue suit with receding black hair. ‘How anyone could believe shooting and bombing all those innocent people was going to bring back democracy is beyond me.’

The chubby man removed his horn-rimmed spectacles and wiped them. He was smiling at me in a nervous, ingratiating way.

‘Griselda’s terribly anti-war, aren’t you, Grizzle?’

I smiled back at him and said, ‘It wasn’t quite like that.’

‘Well, what was it like, then?’ asked Griselda. I thought for a moment before answering her. I was about to come out
with the usual platitudes: ‘The people of Afghanistan are grateful we are there’ or ‘We liberated them from the Taliban’ but the words that came out were not what I expected.

‘I don’t know why we were there,’ I told her. ‘But I know we paid for it. I once picked up a friend and found he had no legs. There was just the trunk of his body left. He’d lost an eye, too. That was an IED. Roadside bombs. And all you fucking people do when we come back is lecture us about human rights, and upsetting the Muslim world. We’re just soldiers. We do as we’re told. And then, when we get home, we have to put up with people like you.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ said the balding man. Griselda had gone deathly pale.

I said, ‘Since you brought the subject up, that’s how it was.’