Recipes for a Perfect Marriage (18 page)

James found living with my father harder than I did. When someone loves you, you can see yourself through their eyes. I know that James never recovered from knowing that my father had hit me, nor from knowing that he had not been there in that moment to protect me. Until Daddy lost virtually all movement in his legs, it crucified James to leave me alone in the house with him each day. He was generous and polite to Daddy always, but he made it clear it was for my benefit and not his.

Daddy was not an easy patient, nor always a polite one. I cannot look back on the nine years he was with us and pinpoint moments of joy or familial revelation or intimacy. Even his playmate, Niamh, in time withdrew from him. My father had a way of pushing people away, especially those who loved him. In his lifetime I had watched him come to despise those who loved him as much as he despised himself, as if their love was never genuine but a cruel joke they used to taunt him. I was at pains to discourage my daughter from investing too heavily in her grandfather’s affections, arranging for her to spend more time with her cousins and form closer friendships with children her own age. In fairness to my father, he never abused her or said anything to hurt Niamh, but the close tie they formed during his first stay didn’t return once it wasn’t encouraged by me.

My father grew weak and quiet, but I would never say he mellowed. Mellow would be too kind a description for the silence he gradually applied to his anger. There were times in those years keeping and cleaning and caring for my father’s body when I was fraught, frustrated, disgusted even. I endured it because I had to, and I was able to because James was by my side. Every emotion, every hardship is endurable except fear.
What
we fear is endurable, it is usually the fear itself that is insufferable. I was never afraid of my father again after that day. When you have known real fear, to live without it can be a luxury; but you have to
know
when you are one of the lucky ones. That suffering is the destiny of some and the birthright of many.

I was spared my mother’s suffering and that could be said to be due to one thing only: my marriage to James.

Complacency is the enemy of love.

Porter Cake

I have been making this porter cake for as far back as I can remember. It’s heavy with fruit and makes an ideal Christmas cake. Take 1lb and a quarter flour and mix in a bowl with one quarter teaspoon baking soda and whatever spices you have to hand—nutmeg, cinnamon, mixed spice—adding a flat teaspoon of each. Set aside. Mix up 4 eggs in a bowl and set aside also. In a heavy saucepan put the following: 1 bottle Guinness, 1lb rich brown sugar, 1lb each raisins and sultanas, 4oz mixed peel, and a half pound Stork margarine. Allow it to boil for five minutes then turn to a low simmer for a further ten. Five minutes into the simmer, add 4oz glacé cherries. Leave to cool until a good deal cooler than lukewarm. To the cooled mixture add your flour, and then the eggs— gradually and with great caution to avoid curdling. Pour the mixture into a nine-inch tin that has been lined with greaseproof paper. Cook in a slow oven for between two and a half and three hours.

You should never take old favorites for granted in cooking. About the time a recipe becomes automatic and fail-safe is when it will let you down in front of an audience.

You’ve got to feel for these people who get dragged in as studio audiences. The sun is shining outside, yet they have been lured by the hollow promise of “entertainment” into a windowless, cavernous space with uncomfortable tiered seating to watch a nervous food writer panicking over a sunken fruit cake.

“I don’t know what happened.”

“Did you put in the raising agent?”

Great—my director bakes.

I did not dignify him with a reply, just said, “We’ll have to do it again.”

“I can’t keep these people here any longer. They’ve already sat through two broken flans. They’ll riot.”

And charming, too.

This recipe was so simple, I had been doing it since I was, literally, seven years old. I had learned how to count measuring the ingredients out for my grandmother: one, two, three, four eggs; four, five, six pounds of butter.

When my agent called to say that I had been selected to screen test for a show on a cable cooking channel, I was pretty excited. If it worked out, that meant I could sell a lot more books, and get more TV work, and, well—suffice to say this was something I had hoped was in the cards for me and finally I seemed to be getting my moment in the sun.

Except I hadn’t banked on the possibility that maybe television just wasn’t quite the glamorous ride I was expecting.

The whole thing felt like an experiment in minor-celebrity humiliation. I had been plonked in front of a tired, rented audience, who for their ten-dollar paycheck and free lunch had already endured three hours of “oohing” and “ahhing” in front of Shelly, “the nail-care systems expert,” before being subjected to me breaking two custard flans and almost causing fatal injury to a cameraman, thanks to his sliding on an undiscovered goose giblet.

It had not been my finest hour.

I was terrified of failing at this and had chosen Grandma’s traditional Christmas cake because it is magnificent in an earthy, old-fashioned way. Fruit cake is substantial, no delicate confection liable to deflate with the slightest breeze through the oven door. So the collapse was a humiliation. People will forgive a deflated soufflé, but I could see them looking at me thinking, “How the hell did she do that?”

The director was not sympathetic to my being a nervous novice. This was a man who had been shooting pilots and screen tests for too long, and was obviously being paid a set rate to finish the job, so he wasn’t running over on hours.

“I’m sending this crowd home. There’s a fresh batch due into studio four at seven. We can prep now then film in there when the real chef is done.”

Like I said. He was a charmer.

“What about continuity?”

I hated this director, and directors hate their integrity being questioned. As do I.

“The set’s not exactly the same, but then, hey—you’re not exactly Martha Stewart, are you?”

Except, it seemed, for this one, who had no integrity at all.

I wanted this day to be over.

In twelve hours I had gone from believing I was on the cusp of an exciting career breakthrough to the shattering realization that I was a lousy TV cook. Lousy cook, period, was what the director’s face said.

The cake was finished by eight and came out perfectly, but the day wasn’t over.

Just as I was finishing up, who did I see out of the corner of my eye but the “chef”? The one I had been seeing just before I met Dan? The one who had passed me over for a model? Well, his name is Ronan Robertson and though I had my eyes firmly trained on the camera, I could feel his eyes burning the back of my neck.

I somehow managed to close the show in one take and if the audience was pleased, and the director relieved, I didn’t notice. As I turned and saw Ronan still standing there, staring, this rush ran through me. Something bad was going to happen, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

“Ronan.”

I walked over to him and I could feel my limbs start to weaken. It was as if my body had gone into recall about how much I had wanted him that one night we had slept together. The formality of our meeting through work, then suddenly being naked and intimate. My physical senses were in anticipation of reacquainting myself with him, without the permission of my brain.

“Tressa.”

He was looking at me in a quizzical, intense way and— oooh—the deep, grumbling voice. That was how he had gotten me into bed. That and a lot of alcohol.

“I need a drink,” I said, “how about you?”

It was OK, safe to flirt. I was an old married lady after all, despite what my body was signaling. Just glad of the opportunity to let this egotistical jerk know what he had missed out on.

*

It was all so different from how I thought it would be. Ronan was subdued, not the consummate charmer who had seduced and then dumped me. I suggested we go uptown. He shrugged, “whatever,” and there was an awkward silence in the cab that I broke with, “Are you sure you want this drink, Ronan? You’re very quiet.”

He shook his head and gave me a strange look.

“You are some piece of work, Tressa Nolan.”

Though curious, I didn’t ask what he meant because the mystery of his statement felt good. For the first time since we had got into the cab I looked at him properly and instantly regretted it. Ronan was no pin-up, not nearly as conventionally handsome as Dan, but there was a quality about him that I found hard to resist. I couldn’t pinpoint it in what we said or his sense of humor or what we had in common, although educated, erudite, witty chef just about sums up his credentials for me. But Ronan feels familiar to me, almost a soul mate. I slept with him more or less a few hours after we first met and it didn’t feel sluttish, or wrong—it felt destined. As if he had always been there.

We had made love like we were in love. Afterward, while I lay folded around his body, was a night of understated emotion, of comfort in just being with him, like hearing a sad song for the first time and feeling like it was written about you. It sounds crazy, but I had such a strong, instant connection with him that I almost believed we had been together in a past life. The funny thing is that I was sure that he felt it, too.

Then he didn’t call and started publicly dating a model, so I pegged him as an arrogant pig.

I didn’t think back on the night we had together or how special it had felt or how “different” or how “meant to be” it had all seemed. “All men are bastards” may be an old cliché, but sometimes you just need a line that works.

So here we were again.

His shirt was a faded blue, the same shade as his eyes by happy accident, his hands scrubbed like a good chef’s should be.

“You never called.”

Him, not me. I couldn’t believe my ears.

“You never called
me”
I blurted out.

“You said
you
would call
me,
Tressa. You were like, don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

“That is just not true, Ronan. You said you would call me.”

“Other way around.”

Then he gave me this big broad grin and shook his head again. His eyes were sparkling, he was suddenly filled with light, and somehow I knew I had done that to him.

“What’s going on here, Tressa? We’re, I don’t know...”

“A couple of bickering kids?”

He leaned his elbow on the door window, put his fingers to his forehead, and shook his head some more. Then he looked up from under his palm, his eyes full of happy mischief, and said, “More than that, Tressa. I don’t know what’s going on with us. It’s crazy, I just feel like—I don’t know.”

I didn’t know either. Except of course I did. I just didn’t want to say it. I was married now, so I said, “I need a drink.”

We stopped the cab uptown and went to the nearest bar. Touristy, noisy, somewhere neither of us had been before. I ordered tequila shots, although I rarely drink hard liquor. I guess I was trying to pretend I was someone else, someone who was free to fall in love. The tequila was to help raise the stakes on the already intoxicating blend of adrenaline and emotion I was experiencing. Or perhaps it was just something to help me forget I was married.