The Road Home (41 page)

The phone was slammed down. Lev stood in his room and stared out at the patched and tilting roofs of Tufnell Park and the sky above, streaked with vapor trails. Even the
idea
that Rudi might die made him feel panicky.

He let a few minutes go by, then called back. Lora told him she had a client arriving.

“Won’t keep you long,” he said. “Just get to Baryn, Lora, and sort out the apartments.”

“I’ll try, Lev. But the only income we’ve got now is from the horoscopes and the palm readings. I need to be here.”

“It’ll only take a morning. Get the early bus. Please do this. Leave the rest to me.”

Leave the rest to me.

How pompous that sounded! A braggart’s boast, absurdly confident. It was also tainted with a lie: the lie of implied certainty. And there
was
no certainty, only this wild dream of his, this thing he called his Great Idea, built on hope and nothing else. Lev cursed himself for even mentioning it to Lora. Could already imagine Rudi saying, “So what does he think he’s going to do? Stick his fucking finger in the dike and hold back the water, or what?”

On a Monday afternoon, Lev kept the appointment he’d had to beg for with G. K. Ashe.

“I’m not taking you back, Lev,” G.K. had snarled on the phone. “I’ve replaced you. Got it?”

“I’m not asking for my job, G.K. I swear. Got a job in a restaurant in Highgate now. Swear on my daughter’s life.”

“All right. So, what d’you want?”

“One hour of your time. I need advice, information about an idea I have. One hour of your time. Please, Chef.”

There had been a long silence. Then G.K. said, “Okay. An hour and that’s it. Out of the kindness of my heart. Come at three.”

They sat at the familiar table, near Damian’s bar, the smell of the place bringing back feelings of agony, feelings of joy. Waldo, bringing them coffee, gave Lev a weak, commiserating smile.

Lev put his notebook in front of him and opened it. G.K.’s blue eyes watched him. Lev felt like a fish in a bowl. His shaking hands clutched the two open covers of the notebook. He took a breath. Now he had to begin to make real the Thing that, until this moment, had substance only in his mind. As he spoke, he worked hard to keep his voice steady.

“This is it,” he said. “This is my Idea. I am going to open my own restaurant.”

Lev stopped. He swallowed. Waited for G.K.’s look of disdain or disbelief, but it didn’t come. So he summoned up a stronger voice and went on: “My restaurant will be in the city of Baryn, where new hydroelectric power is coming. I believe that, following from this, many businesses will come to this city, so for my restaurant, I think the time will be right.”

He waited again, looked up at G.K. Sure the put-down was going to arrive now. But all G.K. said was: “Your English has improved.”

Lev thumbed his notebook, tried to imbibe, from all the optimistic words he’d written there, a heartful of courage. “My plan is, I start with a small premises. Maybe forty covers. Maybe fifty maximum. I will be chef-proprietor. I will give my people food like they’ve never had. I don’t mean like here at GK Ashe. I know I could never —”

“Why not like here?”

“You have years of training and work, Chef. A big talent. I could never —”

“Why not aim high? You said ‘food like they’ve never had.’ If this is an expanding arena of new capitalism, it’ll be chocka with restaurants before you can say
beurre noisette.
So, how’re you going to make yours the best?”

Lev gaped. But what he liked already—what was making his heart race with joy—was that G.K. was taking him seriously.

“Chef,” he said, “of course I want this. I want mine to be the best. But in my country most people are still poor. They can’t afford high-end cuisine.”

“Okay. So what are you going to cook?”

“Chef . . .”

“Simple question. What are you going to cook?”

Lev turned to his clutch of recipes, most of which had been filched from G.K.’s menu. “I haven’t decided quite —”

“Right. Okay. Give me some paper. Let’s get some sense into this.”

Lev tore out a sheet from his notebook, and G.K. snatched it from his hand, unsnapped a pen from his pocket. The coffee stood forgotten at his elbow. He began to scribble fast in his large, unruly writing. After a while he turned the page round toward Lev. He jabbed a finger along the lines of writing as he spoke.

“Number one,” he said. “
Style of cuisine
. Decide on it. Stick to it. Pin your name to it. Keep it authentic. Right?”

“Yes.”

“If you want my advice, don’t fart around with fucking fusion. I could name you ten restaurants in London that’ve gone under by flirting with cardamom pods. One foot in Paris, one in Bom-fucking-bay. And that’s a recipe for disaster, because the clients don’t know what the hell they’re meant to be savoring. Right? So, let me ask you again: what do you want to cook?”

Lev rubbed his eyes. “I suppose . . . what I imagine is . . . like here,” he said. “This kind of food. Very fresh ingredients. Meat never overcooked. Nice sauces and
jus
. Nice vegetables . . .”

“Okay, but you have to
formulate
it. A lot of my cooking was learned in France. But it’s modern. It’s even quite minimalist. This is right for London at this moment, but you have to decide what’s right for your town.”

“My town, Chef, has never known good food.”

“No, I hear you. Okay. You’ve got everything to play for. But you’re also going to have to educate people. You’re going to have to persuade them it’s worth spending real money on something that’s going to end up in the toilet in twenty-four hours. Which brings me to
Costings
.”

G.K. began to scribble again. Then he looked up and said, “Margins aren’t big in catering, except on booze. Price your food too low and you’ll be paddling backward into Debt Creek. Price it too high and you won’t get any customers. You have to judge what your catchment area can take. And you have to judge it right.”

“I know . . . and this is difficult.”

“My advice would be: keep the menu small. Don’t offer fifteen choices, offer four or five. Or three, plus one or two specials, based on what looks nice in the market that day.”

“Yes. I was thinking that, Chef. At least, to start.”

“Okay. Good. Small menu, but that brings us to Number three, the Big Number three:
Supply
. And remember, this will dictate your style of cooking. If you can’t get a game supplier, you can’t cook game. If nobody grows tomatoes, you can’t make pasta. From what I’ve heard about your country, all anybody’s eaten in the last century is goat meat and pickles, so you’ve got a free hand, but it won’t be free if you can’t get the ingredients. Have you thought about that?”

“Yes,” said Lev. He skipped hurriedly to another page of his notebook. “Supply is what I’ve worked on, Chef. Before I start, I will buy a car, or a pickup, go round very many small farms. These were once part of our national farmsteads, but now they are individual and people work very hard on them. So I talk to these people, place my weekly requirements: chickens, geese, ducks, pigs, and so forth. Also to local allotment zones, give my requirements for vegetables. Buy direct. And I know the limits of my country’s allotments. No point thinking about kiwi fruit or avocados.”

“Right. What about red meat?”

“Same idea, Chef. Buy locally. Visit the hunters, like my father once was, who kill rabbits and wild boar. And fish. May be difficult at first. But above Baryn will be a new reservoir. Very, very big. In time, maybe trout and pike, salmon, freshwater eel.”

“Okay. Excellent. Local ingredients are the best. But you can’t always be prepping and cooking
and
collecting poultry and listening to game hunters’ reminiscences all in the same fucking day. You’ll have to delegate.”

“I know.”

“So you have to factor this into your costings: what you pay other people for deliveries and all the stuff you can’t physically do yourself. Nobody will work for you for nothing.”

“I know, Chef.”

“What about staples? Aren’t these in short supply still? Flour, rice, butter, oil, sugar?”

“No. You can get these. Baryn market.”

“Regular? No hitches? Remember, a restaurant has to keep going round the year, day on day, or the clientele falls away.”

“Yes.”

“Right, moving on to Number four:
Look.
Is this a modern brasserie? Or a fuggy bistro? Is it a nostalgic old Russian tearoom? Who’s it aimed at? What bit of the city is it going to be in? Whose corner restaurant is this going to become? You’ve got to get your
Look
aligned with your
Style.
And you’ve got to know all this before you start. Which brings us to Number five, which really should be Number one:
Setting-up Cost
. How in hell’s name are you going to finance this?”

“Chef, this is really why I came —”

G.K.’s features froze. He threw down the pen. “You came to ask me for capital?”

“No. Of course not,” said Lev. “Only to ask you, could you list for me
everything?
Everything I must put in before I can be running. I mean all the equipment. Then I can begin my sums.”

G.K. ran a hand through his turbulent hair. He stared at Lev in an almost frightened way, then looked down again at the piece of paper, picked up the pen, and stuck it into his mouth. “Yeah. Okay,” he said, after a moment. “I can do this for you. Fifty covers, you said?”

“Yes.”

“So, two in the kitchen? You and a commis. Share all the prep?”

“Yes.”

“Two on tables. One nurse. That it?”

“That’s it. And the car or truck. Secondhand.”

“I’ll need to think about it. Get it right for you. Half the
matériel
I’ve got through there you won’t need. Got a name for this place?”

“Yes,” said Lev. “I will call it Marina, after my wife.”

G.K. smiled. He laid down the pen once more. “Right,” he said. “At least you got that settled.”

He stood up and went to the bar. He took down a bottle of cognac, poured two shots, and returned to the table. He proposed a toast to Marina, and they drank. Lev’s heart was beating so fast that he gulped the brandy to try to still the roar of it.

And then he and G. K. Ashe sat on. Lev smoked and they talked about the future, about the importance, in any life, of having at least one Big Idea, something you could believe in. After a while, the talk drifted to G.K.’s father, who’d wanted him to be a lawyer, had all chefs pinned down as weird, gay, or poor, couldn’t see how his son might make a profession out of that, and hadn’t been interested when he had.

“Doesn’t he ever come to eat here, Chef?”

“No. Never. He came to the opening, that was all. Stayed about half an hour. If I was head chef at the Dorchester, or somewhere like that, he might come, but even then, I doubt it. So I live with that. I have to. Sometimes you just have to say, ‘Fuck the parents,’ and not mind.”

“I know this, Chef,” said Lev. “I know this very well.”

Time passed, and next door in the kitchen Lev heard people coming in and the staff meal being prepared. He knew he had to leave soon, before Sophie arrived, but now G.K. seemed to want to keep talking. He described his mother, “a truly lovely woman,” who’d died in a car accident on the M4, and the stepmother who had replaced her, and the knowledge that this had brought him that life was “a miserable travesty of our dreams.” G.K. refilled the shot glasses. The cognac modulated his voice, brought a softer look to his blue eyes. It felt, to Lev, as though G.K. had suddenly passed from being an employer to being a friend. This friendship had a kind of radiance about it, in which it was tempting to bask.

Then a familiar voice intruded: “What’s going on, Chef?”

Sophie was standing by the bar, staring at them. They both turned and looked at her. Lev saw that her hair was shorter and spikier and her face thinner than he remembered it. Even at this distance, he believed he could catch the scent of her, the scent that still had the power to overwhelm him. He looked away and began to gather up his notes.

“Nothing’s going on,” said G.K. “Lev was just picking my brains. He’s starting his own place.”

Sophie gaped. Lev could hear her thinking, He’s nothing, he’s no one. How can a nobody open his own place?

“His own restaurant?”

“Yes. In his own country.”

Lev didn’t look at her, but he could feel her tension diminish. In his own country. That’s all right, then. In a country far away . . .

Lev thought he should stand up, shake G.K.’s hand, leave there and then, but some stubborn defiance in him insisted on his right to stay where he was.

“So,” said Sophie to Lev, “you’ve decided to go back?”

He inclined his head. This tiny movement could have been taken for a nod. But he saw that they were waiting, Sophie and G.K., for him to speak to her. He didn’t want to speak to her. He thought, All conversation with her now is like trying to scrape the dregs, the
dross,
out of an empty barrel—and then you scar the barrel itself.

They both stared at him, but he didn’t open his mouth or let his glance even flicker in her direction. And it seemed she understood that he’d given her all the answer she was going to get. While he clutched his notebook, while he saw his hands tense to yellow bone, she disappeared back into the kitchen.

G.K. waited a moment, then said quietly, “Preece leads her a dance. But he gets a lot of important people swilling at my trough, so who am I to complain? That’s the way of the bad world, I guess.”

“Yes,” agreed Lev. “That’s the way of the bad world, Chef.”

He found himself shivering. He took a sip of the cold coffee. He was in a kind of shock, but didn’t know what had agitated him more, G.K.’s unexpected, thrilling support for his Idea, or the unexpected, teasing sight of Sophie. He still wanted her, and that was the bitter truth of it. Just catching sight of her made him ache to fuck her. And he felt that, far into the future, he would remember her—her voice, her smell, her clothes, her laughter, her dimpled cheeks, her full breasts, her tattoo, her arse, her salty cunt—and want her still. When he imagined her making love with Howie Preece, he felt himself fall into a trance of desolation.