Dinner at Mine (9 page)

What next? Eggs. Fuck, they were back by the flour. There had to be a better way of doing this. Charlotte spun her trolley round, clipping the frame of a cart carrying another small toddler in
the fold-out seat. The child started crying. Its mother looked round to see what the problem was, but Charlotte was already gone.

As she accelerated again towards the far end of the supermarket, Charlotte looked longingly down the dessert aisle. Rows of cakes, chocolate éclairs, tarts and pies stretched away towards
the tills, their cardboard packaging glistening with chiller-cabinet condensation. What was the point of doing it yourself at all? It just wasn’t efficient. Teams of dedicated people had put
years of effort into doing it for you. This whole competition was ridiculous.

Right, eggs. Six was enough. Organic? Free-range? Cheap? Fuck it, they were only bloody chickens. OK, what was the time now? Twenty past. Fuck.

Never mind the coffee. Matt would have some of that. So just chocolate to go. Don’t say that’s back at the other end . . .

But another man in a blue tunic told her that it was. She followed him past the bakery, past rows of wines, breakfast cereals and toilet paper to the aisle next to the glistening desserts.

‘There you are, madam,’ the man said with proprietorial pride, indicating a shelf of thin, foil-wrapped bars. ‘Which kind were you after? Milk, plain, white, organic, Mexican
chilli . . . ?’

‘For a cake.’

The man stared at her blankly.

‘Thanks anyway.’ Charlotte reached past him and grabbed a couple of bars of something with the word ‘Belgian’ on the front. Right, that was everything. How long did she
have to get back to Matt’s and bake the thing? Seven minutes. Hmm.

She made for the tills. The ones nearest the doors were a crush of quarrelling families with trolleys groaning under the weight of junk food. Charlotte squeezed round them, but the checkouts
beyond had long queues of giggling students with six-packs of own-brand lager and double-size bottles of Bulgarian wine. They’d probably all pay with cards, wouldn’t they?

She pushed on towards the far wall again, scanning the tills as she went. But the queues started to get longer towards the household goods sections and then stopped. The last five tills were
closed.

Charlotte stopped, swore, and looked back along the line of checkouts. She should have joined one of the queues of students. At least they weren’t buying much. She jerked the trolley
round, weaving through the growing lines.

Then she made an abrupt right-hand turn. A man with a trolleyful of lager swore at her. Charlotte ignored him, wheeling her trolley past the arrays of doughnuts and cream cakes and pausing in
front of a large chiller cabinet packed deep with chocolate puddings.

The pictures on the packets looked much nicer than anything she was going to make. One in particular caught her eye: a thick, round pastry tart, with specks of hazelnut flecking the expanse of
dark chocolate within the crisp golden crust.

Charlotte glanced up and down the aisle to see who might be watching. She looked at her watch, then at her trolley, and back to the tart.

Matt snapped on the kitchen spotlights, banishing grey dusk behind the suddenly reflective windows, and flooding the worktops with glossy yellow rays. The surfaces were clean
and bare, with a chopping board, knife and glass bowl stacked neatly on the edge of the sink.

Exactly two hours earlier, Matt had made a series of one centimetre slits all over his leg of lamb and rubbed the sumac marinade into the meat, taking care to get plenty of it in the holes he
had made. Then he had wrapped the lamb tightly in cling film and put it in the fridge to let the flavours sink in.

In the meantime, he had finalized the opening arguments for his case on Monday, had a shower, and watched an episode of
Curb Your Enthusiasm
on Sky+. Now he took the lamb out of the
fridge and set it in the corner to reach room temperature again. He put the oven on to heat, drained the farro grains he had put in to soak after marinating the lamb, and put them on to boil.

He chopped some courgette, garlic, spring onions and chilli. Matt knew he would need more chillies and some spring onions for the salsa, but he had always felt it turned out quicker if you just
followed one recipe at a time. He fried everything briefly, then took it off the heat and stirred in the boiled grains, some lemon juice and a bit of mint. That would do for the vegetarian starter.
It looked a bit too much like a side salad, so he added some more torn mint. Maybe he would serve it on individual plates, so he didn’t have to use a salad bowl. With a dollop of harissa on
the side of the plate, it would look much more like a proper course. He put it aside to cool.

Matt liked to think he was a competent cook. Not an excellent one – he knew he didn’t have the instinctive feel to be really good, to be able to throw ingredients together and
produce complex and interesting flavours unguided – but he was very good at following a recipe.

He wasn’t too worried about the meal. The main dish was a reliable staple for when he had to entertain. It was hard to go wrong with a great big leg of lamb. Cover it with plenty of
unusual spices and you could lift it out of the ordinary without too much effort. The starter he had made before, for his last dinner party. That was over a year ago, but it had turned out pretty
well.

Next, there was more chopping to be done. Matt lined up a row of peppers, onions, aubergines, fennel, tomatoes and potatoes next to his walnut chopping board, delaying slightly the tedious
process of cutting them up. He had expected Charlotte to be here by now, and had planned for her to have done most of the vegetable chopping. This hadn’t been formally agreed, but from what
Charlotte had said about her cooking skills, it would have been a mutually beneficial compromise.

Matt began with the red peppers, cutting them into long, thin strips. Where was Charlotte? It was well after seven now, and surely it would take her at least forty-five minutes to make the
dessert. Matt decided there was no point worrying about it. He couldn’t call because he didn’t have her number. They had arranged this evening in a couple of peremptory e-mails in which
she still seemed to be smarting about the indignity of Rosie setting her up.

For dessert, he had a back-up plan of fruit salad. A punnet of peaches, a pineapple and an array of berries had been delivered by Ocado that morning and Matt reckoned if Charlotte didn’t
show up on time they would make a decent end to the meal. Possibly, on the same principle as the lamb marinade, he would douse them in some kind of unusual spirit. Maybe that stuff he had brought
back from South Africa. Certainly, he would try to negotiate compensation for having to cook single-handed. He would open the discussions at an extra five points, and probably settle for two.

Not that Matt really minded doing things on his own. It was how he worked best, just him and a stack of ring binders in the muffled quiet of his office high above Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He
had spent the morning preparing for a straightforward negligence case on Monday, and made quick progress. In the unruffled hush of the empty office, Matt worked fast. From outside, there was a
faint, soothing background rumble of lorries moving along Holborn.

The only problem Matt could foresee was the judge. The case was likely to be heard by His Honour Judge Featherston, who was known to the legal profession as an utter bastard. He was capricious
and liked to bully counsel who made arguments that he found weak. The best way to counter him, Matt thought, was to be excessively deferential, and refrain from any jokes.

He might also have to tone down his accent. It was rumoured that Featherston thought regional accents a sign of weak-mindedness. So it was probably safest to modulate it into something less
northern and less noticeable, aiming to become indistinguishable from the Home Counties tones of the rest of the bar.

Some people would find this humiliating. Some, Matt knew, would refuse to do it. Matt didn’t let such things bother him. It was just something that needed to be done to give himself the
best possible chance of winning the case. He was quite happy going the other way as well; several times in the past he had played up his northern accent, hoping to exploit the awkwardness of judges
who were uncomfortable with even the slightest hint of minority status.

After finishing his preparation, Matt had returned home confident that he was going to win. He gave himself half an hour to send three e-mails before starting on the lamb.

With the vegetables chopped, Matt began to heat some oil in the frying pan and chucked them all in. He stirred them until he could hear the gathering hiss of the oil warming up, and when it
started to spit he turned the hob down to cook them more gently, covering the pan with a high lid. At this point, without Charlotte, there was no alternative to cooking two things at the same time.
Matt went back to the board and chopped some more peppers, spring onions and tomatoes for the salsa. While stirring the paella vegetables on the right hob, he used a griddle pan to char the skin of
the chillies on the left. He soon got bored with waiting for them to blacken all over and tore them up by hand, throwing them into a bowl with the rest.

He added rice to the paella, and while that was browning he added olive oil, mint, vinegar and sumac to the salsa, roughly blending them with a hand-held food processor. He tasted a bit off the
end of the blade and added some more salt. Then he put it aside with the salad.

It was about time to put the lamb in now. Matt unwrapped it on a roasting tray and put it into the roaring oven. No need to look at it again for an hour. He went back to the paella. This was
always a satisfactory time in preparation, Matt thought, once all the side dishes had been done and there was no need to juggle the early stages of one recipe with the later stages of another. What
was left to do involved following two simple sets of instructions, one after the other.

Matt waited until the rice had browned, then added a bit of water and a good slug of white wine. The mixture still felt a little dry when he stirred it, so, with the permission of the recipe
book, he added another large glass of wine.

Quarter past seven now. The guests were supposed to arrive in fifteen minutes. Where was Charlotte? Matt supposed he ought to be worrying. He wasn’t, though; in fact, he was relieved that
he hadn’t had to make conversation for an hour while cooking. That could have been a bit of a strain. If she turned up now, there would just be a bit of chat – she’d probably
apologize, he’d say not to worry – and they wouldn’t have to talk any more until after they had both drunk a lot of wine.

Matt wondered why Charlotte had agreed to have a go at a cooking competition. She really didn’t seem very interested in food. If she was doing it for a laugh, she hadn’t seemed too
amused last week. Maybe Rosie had talked her into it. He found it hard to imagine Charlotte being persuaded to do much she didn’t want to do.

Of course, there was another explanation. Matt hadn’t really minded the obvious set-up. He wasn’t much given to embarrassment, and if people wanted to offer women to him, that was
fine. Charlotte had seemed a bit annoyed. Perhaps she was just thrown, perhaps it was a ploy. Certainly, Matt was confident that it was nothing to do with him. Objectively speaking, he was
comfortably better-looking than she was.

Matt wondered if he would end up sleeping with her. She wasn’t too unattractive. Rosie was clearly better-looking, though. How long had that been now? Ten years, at least. In many ways she
looked better now – elegantly dressed, more stylish. She was ageing well.

It was a shame Stephen had found out what had happened between them, really. It had made him so stiff and formal. Perhaps he was angry because they hadn’t told him. Well, that would have
been Matt’s responsibility a decade ago, but ever since then it was Rosie’s problem. Stephen would probably get over it. Once he’d satisfied himself that Matt wasn’t going
to make a move. Not that Matt was thinking of it. That time had gone now, hadn’t it?

Obviously, neither Rosie nor Charlotte was beautiful like Barbara. She really was gorgeous. But yes, Charlotte had something. If it wasn’t exactly good looks, it was definitely something.
She looked like she would be good in bed. Matt thought about that for a moment. It wasn’t unpleasant.

The pineapple stood firm and reassuring in the corner by the fruit bowl. Conjuring an extra course from nothing at very short notice – that had to be worth extra points. If she
didn’t turn up at all, there was a chance he could win this thing.

Maria had been earlier, and the flat was looking tidy. Matt emptied his cutlery drawer to lay the table, giving himself the cracked and faded Donald Duck knife and fork his brother had brought
back from Disneyworld while Matt was still a student. He counted out the eight wine glasses he possessed. The two at the front of the cupboard were clean and well-used, but by the time he reached
the pair at the back there was a noticeable layer of dust. When had he last taken them out? At least a year. He had had some friends from bar school round – but that had been the Christmas
before last. There had been five of them then. Maybe he had never used the other three glasses.

He rinsed them clean and put them on the table. It looked a bit cramped and Matt regretted not thinking to get out the extension panel earlier. But it was half past seven now and they would be
arriving any minute. It was too late. Matt went back to the kitchen to check the paella, and a cloud of steam billowed from the pan when he took the lid off. It moved nicely when he stirred it.
Nearly there.

He reckoned it was probably time to start the ceviche. The snapper was thick, firm and inviting when he took it out of the fridge. This was the only ingredient of the meal he had bought in
person, at a reassuringly expensive fishmonger in Borough Market. Matt got out a new chopping board and began cutting the snapper into strips.

From the hallway, he heard the faint ringing of his mobile phone. He washed his hands and went to answer it. The phone was still in the pocket of his suit jacket, its old-fashioned ring-tone
muffled by layers of expensive tufted wool. He didn’t recognize the number.