‘Flavour’s good, texture and mouthfeel maintained till end of life.’
He nods. ‘Custard’s good on that lot,’ he says. ‘Approved.’
I feel like the proud mother of twenty kids, all of whom have just won the egg-and-spoon race.
‘Appletree are great with custard,’ I say. ‘Brûlées, tarts, crème anglaise …’
‘Brûlées … can you look at a microwaveable brûlée for autumn?’
‘The custard part?’
‘Whole lot.’
‘You won’t get crispy, browned sugar from a microwave, you need direct overhead heat for caramelisation.’
‘Orangy custards? Mands loves tangerines.’
‘Not ideal – citric acid interferes with the protein network, the fat globules separate at heat.’
‘Huh … what’s our margin on those trifles?’
‘38%’
‘And the cost of custard as percentage of total?’
‘Low. Bulk of cost is fruit and labour.’
‘Right, work up a dozen or so new custard-based puddings for launch next summer, margin of 40% plus. Yeah?’
I do like a challenge when there’s custard involved.
James has gone to Paris. When I left his house on Monday morning, he’d said, ‘I’ll call you on Friday.’
And he does. He always calls when he says he will, and
very rarely at any other time. Although I’ve been busy all week with Devron’s new brief and out every night with friends, I’ve been distracted, hoping he’ll call just for the hell of it, just to say hi, but that doesn’t seem to be his style.
‘I’m on the Eurostar, so it might cut out. What are you doing tomorrow?’ he says.
I have kept my Saturday free in the hope that I’ll see him, but I’m bothered by his presumption that I’ll have done this.
‘Why?’
‘Meet me at the Tate Modern at 5pm.’
‘I’m not sure if I’m free.’
‘I’ve got something for you, it won’t keep.’
‘What sort of something?’
‘Trust me, you’ll like it. The man in the shop said it’ll be okay till 6pm Paris time, so don’t be late.’
‘We could meet earlier?’ I’d like to spend a bit of the day together.
‘I’ve got some errands. Meet me at the top of the slope?’
I wear a white cotton sundress that I bought in a New York flea market for five dollars. When I bought it two summers ago it was too tight, but I fell in love with the idea of one day fitting into it, and the fact that it cost less than the Thomas Keller chicken sandwich I’d just eaten. My wardrobe has a smattering of random, very cheap clothes like this, most of which will never fit, but when I try the
dress on today it’s perfect. I put on a pair of beautiful pale pink silk French knickers. And at the last minute, I grab the large brimmed floppy straw hat that I’ve never dared wear outside of my flat. I feel French. I feel pretty and delicate and like someone in a Vanessa Bruno advert, rather than someone who spends most of her life with perpetual underarm stubble.
Today is the first proper day of spring. As I walk along the embankment from Waterloo I feel like the person I always wanted to be: happy, confident, cool. God, I wish I could make myself feel like this every day. Men stare. Fashiony girls surreptitiously look with a mix of envy and admiration. I should wear this hat more often.
There’s so much I want to do around here with James. Late night cocktails at the Festival Hall overlooking the Thames. A Sunday tea-dance at the Savoy with champagne and scones! Ice-skating, come winter, over at Somerset House. Afternoon Billy Wilder double-bills at the NFT. I browse the second-hand book stalls along the river and find a near-perfect copy of
Rapture
by Carol Ann Duffy. I’d love to buy it for James, but I suspect he’d be more comfortable with the John le Carré on the next table, or last year’s
Top Gear
annual.
I have spent too long pottering. I’m fifteen minutes late and as I approach the Tate, I see James from a distance looking at his watch with an anxious frown. God, I love the size of him. He’s so man-shaped, so masculine, so male. He’s wearing
a navy coat and his dark blue Levis. This is a man who would never countenance wearing a pair of jeans with Lycra in them. He turns his head in my direction, then does a double take. I have to order myself not to break into a run towards him.
‘Good hat,’ he says, and kisses me for a full five minutes.
‘For you.’ He holds out a box wrapped in pistachio coloured paper with a big pink ribbon. ‘I hope this kitten’s got big lungs or you’ll have one guilty conscience, Miss Klein.’
‘If there’s a dead cat in here it’s your fault for kissing me so long,’ I say.
‘You shouldn’t be such a temptress,’ he says. ‘Come on, open up before the RSPCA nick us.’
Inside the box is a Jean Clement praline millefeuille: a mythical dessert. The cakes in Jean Clement are displayed like diamonds on velvet casings. They cost more than diamonds, and the praline millefeuille is the Great Star of Africa. I once had a migraine that lasted three days, and a Jean Clement millefeuille cured it. They only make ten a day and if you’re not in the queue when the store opens, you’ll just have to take my word for it that you’ll never put anything better in your mouth.
‘I had to wrestle a very determined Japanese lady with a dead fox round her neck to get you this.’
‘Oh my God. You’re a very good boyfriend.’ I kiss him and he smiles. ‘Open wide,’ I say, and attempt to feed him the cake.
He shakes his head. ‘I bought it for you, Queen of Puddings.’
‘I want you to have the first bite,’ I say. He takes a small nibble then looks at me in wonder. ‘Jesus, is that even legal?’ He takes a bigger bite and pretends he’s going to eat the whole thing. I wouldn’t even begrudge him if he did, that is how much I fancy this man.
He grabs my hand and I follow him into the gallery. ‘I read about this guy in the paper. I know how cultured you are,’ he says. I don’t know where he gets this idea from. Oh, yes – it was the fact that I mentioned a poet on the first night we met. I’m entirely not cultured, really. I like art and books and films but I can’t explain Martin Kippenberger. The thought of seeing Ewan McGregor play Shakespeare leaves me cold, and I’d rather watch
Trading Places
than a Bergman film. However, I get the impression that his previous girlfriends spend a lot of time down the gym and consider Paolo Coelho the best writer in the world, so I guess in the kingdom of the blind….
We kiss on all the escalators up to the fifth floor. If I was behind us on the escalators I’d hate us, we are so goddamned happy.
Tucked away in one of the smaller galleries is the entrance to a tiny exhibit with a grumpy security guard standing outside. A placard on the wall reads, ‘The Beauty of the World, the Paragon of Animals.’
When the guard sees my dress he shakes his head. ‘Put the boots on. And don’t spend more than a couple of minutes in there, it’s bad for your lungs,’ he says ushering us through a door into a narrow corridor, lined with wellies. He closes the door behind us and we’re in darkness, stumbling and giggling as we feel our way along the walls in ill-fitting boots, taking a sharp left, then a right. And then all of a sudden the tunnel ends and our eyes automatically shut and then slowly open against the light, and we’re standing in a room full of sparkling silver glitter. Piles and piles of shimmering dots like a disco moonscape, dazzling and beautiful, shifting softly under our feet.
James dances me to the centre of the room and my dress does a perfect 50s prom twirl, and he laughs in delight. He grabs a handful of the dust and throws it up into the air, and it falls like rainbows of light down on us and suddenly he lifts me up and we kiss passionately and before I know it he has pulled my knickers to one side and he is inside me and I am thinking this hat is going to fall off and laughing and panicking and I don’t want him to stop but I’m scared the guard is going to come in and wondering if there is CCTV in this room and thinking well if this footage ends up on YouTube at least the hat will hide my face and wondering if anyone else has done this in here and then I don’t even care if the guard comes in and finally I am not thinking anything at all.
‘I can’t believe you shagged him in public just because he bought you a cake, you are such a cheap date,’ says Pete, placing a third double gin and tonic and a packet of Tyrell’s in front of me.
‘Trust me, that cake was not cheap,’ I say, ripping open the bag of crisps. I have told Pete about the incident in the gallery because I am very drunk.
The reason I am very drunk is because I feel insecure, because I have not spoken to James since Monday morning when he left my flat, and it is now Thursday night. So I have dragged Pete to my local, the Prince Alfred, and have banged my head twice in the last hour en route to the bar, on the low wooden partitions that carve up the pub into snug little areas.
I have not told Pete about how James and I spent all of Sunday walking in Regent’s Park, holding hands and talking about our shared family values, because he will find this nauseating, and like any right-thinking person he is only interested in hearing about the sex.
I have also not told Pete about the way James looks at me – like he’s amazed and surprised that he found me. He smiles all the time. Because I have no context for him, no mutual friends, I have no idea if this means he’s specifically happy to be with me, or is generally a very happy man. Either way, it is contagious, and I find myself smiling too. Except for now, when I am not smiling at all.
‘He sent me a text on Monday,’ I say.
‘So what’s your problem?’ says Pete, who it’s fair to say, is neither the paranoid nor the romantic type.
‘It said “I had a wonderful time with you”.’
‘And?’
‘Something’s not right.’ Laura says he must be hiding something.
‘Women are so neurotic. He’s saying he had a great time, what more do you want?’
‘I want to know when I’m seeing him again. We’ve been seeing each other for nearly two months, this isn’t normal.’
‘Look, Soph, this guy is not Nick. Nick didn’t have a job.’
‘Nick’s a musician.’
‘Which is basically the same as being unemployed, so he had loads of time to sit around writing you faggy romantic emails. This guy runs a business, plus he’s older. He’s busy. I hate it when girls text me all the time.’
I’m not texting James ‘all the time’. At all, in fact. I am being very careful not to treat him like I treated Nick. I’d text Nick to tell him the filling of my sandwich because I
was fundamentally bored in my old job, and because Nick was also bored pottering around our flat. Eventually we bored each other and then we split up.
I can be guarded and I can be cool and I can hold back, but at the same time today I saw a man on the bus with a moustache that was so long it curled round his ears and I would like to tell James about this moustache because it would make him laugh, and yet I feel I can’t. And that is why I’m not happy.
‘He’ll call. Now tell me about the bit with the glitter again.’
I wake early the next day, hung-over. Outside the sky is already bright and from my bedroom window I can just see a patch of daffodils pushing through, down by the banks of the canal. I consider going for a walk to clear my head – past the colourful boats and vast white stucco houses – then think better of it and climb back under my duvet to replay last night’s conversation.
According to Pete, there’s nothing untoward about James’s behaviour. My instinct tells me something is strange, but I can’t put my finger on it.
When James is with me, he’s highly attentive.
He notices everything. If I apply lip balm when he’s popped to the loo, he’ll notice as soon as he walks back in. Not gloss. Clear lip balm. Nick wouldn’t have noticed if I’d grown a Salvador Dali moustache and started speaking Aramaic, as long as I was still padding around the flat.
If I leave the room, James asks where I’m going.
When I’m cooking a meal, he’ll watch me, try to impress me, touch me.
When we’re in bed he is generous and energetic and passionate. He has the libido of a man half his age.
Afterwards we lie for hours having iPod shuffle conversations, flicking from time travel to Bernie Winters to why mosquitoes don’t get AIDS. We should be sleeping. Our combined age is seventy-eight, we both have work in the morning. It’s 3.47, 2.48, 4.15am. Neither of us ever wants to stop the conversation. Eventually we fall asleep, my hand curled around his fingers.
But when he’s not with me, I feel like ‘we’ don’t exist. The randomness of meeting someone in a bar, of having no mutual friends, of having entirely separate lives, is brought home. He could disappear and I would never cross paths with him again. Sometimes I wake up and wonder if he’s even real.
On days when we don’t speak, I feel laden down with the things I didn’t get to share with him. He won’t call for two, three days. Then, it’s like he has a CCTV on my psyche, and at the precise mid-point between when I’ve done a deal with the devil so that he’ll call, and the point at which I think fuck you, James Stephens, this is not acceptable, he’ll ring. My anxiety will be punctured, he’ll come round and we’ll carry on mid-conversation where we left off, and I’ll realise I am a paranoid, silly woman.
Come on, paranoid, silly woman – get out of bed. Go to work.
It’s four in the morning on Good Friday. James and I are at his house, lying in bed, facing each other. My head is resting on his arm. Everything feels so entirely natural and comfortable and right. I think we are falling in love. He looks at me intently. ‘What’s wrong with you, Sophie Klein? There must be something.’
‘Plenty.’
He shakes his head.
‘I’m impatient,’ I say. ‘I’m not very thoughtful. I never remember birthdays. I forget to send my godchildren cards at Christmas. I’m greedy. I’m sarcastic. Sometimes I get a bit depressed and can’t shrug it off.’
He shakes his head again. ‘No, you don’t. You’re generous. You’re a good woman.’ Why does that sound so church-y?
‘What’s wrong with you, James Stephens?’
He pauses and shrugs. He doesn’t answer. He will never show a weakness. He is a master at evading questions.
‘Say something.’ I mean say something nice. I feel like I’m trying to force a compliment out of him and I know this is bad but he’s looking at me like he adores me, but nothing is coming out of his mouth.