G
etting ready for my dinner with Henrietta was like preparing myself for a trip to the gallows. It didn’t help that Lucas was so excited. He was like a matchmaker, checking what time we were meeting, if I was sure I knew how to get there. Our reservation was for eight and yes, I was, I told him each time.
“Is there anything I should know before I meet her?” I asked. “Any subjects I shouldn’t mention?”
“Heavens, no. Ask her anything. I’m sure she’ll tell you if you stray into choppy waters. I’m so glad you’re having dinner with her, Ella. I know you’ll enjoy each other’s company.”
I wished I was as sure.
That morning I’d e-mailed Charlie for advice. He’d been very unhelpful.
Just stay calm. Lucas asked you to have dinner, not elope with her. If she gets too personal, give her a couple of karate chops (or lamb chops). That should shut her up. Alternatively, ask her the most insensitive questions you can and see how SHE likes it.
Henrietta was waiting in the restaurant foyer when I arrived. She looked cross. I checked the time. I was early. That must have just been her natural expression. She took charge from the moment we sat down. It was a formal room, with white tablecloths, suited waiters, classical music and leather-bound menus. She briskly called the waiter over and ordered a large predinner gin for herself. I ordered sparkling water.
“White or red wine with your meal, Ella?” she asked. When I said I was happy with water, she swiftly read the wine list, ordered a bottle of expensive burgundy and told the waiter we’d give him our food order in ten minutes.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. I half expected him to click his heels and salute her.
We’d barely taken a sip of our drinks before her questions began. “So you don’t drink alcohol?”
“Not anymore, no.”
“Do you have a problem with it?”
“I don’t like the taste.”
“Imagine.” She took a large swallow of her gin, then set it down. “It seems I may have upset you with my questions the other night. I apologize.”
I was surprised. “Thank you.”
“It’s obviously a very sensitive issue with you. Is what Lucas told me true? You’ve had no contact at all with your husband since you left him?”
I thought of Charlie’s advice. I forced myself to think of Lucas. “No, I haven’t,” I said, as politely as I could.
“That’s been your choice, not his? You didn’t try to work through it with him?”
I realized my hands were already starting to clench. “It wasn’t that simple, Henrietta.”
“No. Lucas told me the circumstances. Such a tragic accident. So much guilt for you all, for so many reasons. How is your poor sister? She’s probably the one you should really be worried about. Her guilt must be particularly horrendous.”
I answered with difficulty. “She’s fine. She’s back starring on a weekly TV show with my mother. She’s come through it without any problems.”
“Fine? I don’t believe that for a minute. She was looking after her little nephew, he dies and she bounces right back? She’d have to be inhuman not to be affected by that. Where is she?”
“In Melbourne.”
“What kind of a TV show is it?”
At last, safe ground. I seized on her question, answering in great detail. I didn’t care that she didn’t seem that interested at first, fiddling with her bread roll, glancing around. I just continued to talk and talk until she had no choice but to listen.
I started from the very beginning, telling her that Mum had been in a suburban shopping center one afternoon when she noticed a commotion on one side of the food hall. It was a TV crew inviting people to take part in what they called Speed-Cooking—the hasty assembling of six ingredients to make a two-course meal. The prize was a food processor and a guest appearance on one of the midmorning cable network chat shows. Mum put her name down. Why was a mystery. She hated cooking. She said it was because she had an hour to fill. She was on her way to meet a friend, all dressed up, her hair done, looking great, lively and bright, as always.
By the time her name was called, she’d had a bit too much of the free wine on offer. She was also a bit nervous. When Mum is tipsy and when she is nervous, she talks. And talks. And so the second she got up there on the stage with the TV crew filming and a crowd gathered, she started talking. She didn’t stop. She said whatever came to mind as she picked up each ingredient: “This spaghetti looks like a plate of carsick worms.” She put on a pirate voice and kept saying, “Sugar me timbers!” when she was measuring icing sugar for the cake decoration. The crowd started laughing. The louder they laughed, the giddier Mum got. I’ve seen the footage. She was on the manic side of funny, overwrought almost, but you couldn’t look away or not laugh. Somehow she kept cooking, making a complete mess of the spaghetti sauce and an even bigger mess of icing the cake. The woman competing against her seemed drab and dull in comparison, even though she was obviously the better cook. A producer stepped in and offered more wine. Mum practically snatched it out of his hand, held it up to the camera, winked, said, “Cheers everyone!” drank it in one swallow, gave a big smile, and then started singing “Food, Glorious Food,” from the musical
Oliver!
She was not only word perfect but note perfect, helped I’m sure by hearing Jess sing it a million times around the house. And then she sang “My Favorite Things” from
The Sound of Music
, changing the words to include all the German and Austrian food she could think of, not just apple strudel, but Wiener schnitzel, sauerkraut and pretzels. The cameras kept rolling and the crowd kept growing.
She lost the competition. The crowd booed. Two days later the network called her in for a meeting. Less than six weeks later the first episode of
MerryMakers
went to air. One of the production team coined the name. Mum had never called herself Merry—she was always Meredith—but she became Merry in public from that day on. Her personality seemed to change to suit. She became merry Merry, in and out of the studio. The show was something of a cult hit at first, particularly with hungover students: a rapid combination of recipes, gags, wine and food tips, with Mum saying whatever came to mind and singing whenever the mood took her. It went up a gear when a food stylist joined the team, and up another gear when Jess joined the show. The network put advertising and publicity behind it. Ratings improved and kept rising. A TV star—two stars, Mum and Jess, with Walter on the sidelines—was born.
I finally stopped talking, waiting for Henrietta to pour scorn on the idea of something so frivolous. She didn’t. She seemed genuinely interested. She asked me all the usual questions people asked. I gave the usual answers. Where was the program shown? Australia, New Zealand and on cable TV food networks in the US, Canada and Spain. Was Mum now famous enough to be stopped in the street? Yes. Did she actually cook the dishes beforehand or did she have people who did that for her? She had people. That was the real joke of the show. Mum still couldn’t cook.
“And do her recipes work?” Henrietta asked finally.
“If you follow the steps properly, yes. They’re nutritionally sound too,” I said. I’d heard those lines a hundred times.
“I love cooking shows,” Henrietta said as she took a final large swallow of her gin. “I can’t cook but I like watching other people do it. Your lasagna was good the other night, by the way. Thank you.”
I was more unsettled by her compliments than by her bluntness. “You’re welcome,” I said.
The waiter came back to our table. I watched Henrietta as she asked detailed questions about the sauces, the origin of the meat and vegetables, taking a long time over her choices. I ordered simply: the soup, a salad. I could feel her eyes on me, could imagine her next question—about my appetite, probably, or a comment that I was too thin. I decided to take Charlie’s advice and get in first with my personal questions.
I began as soon as the waiter left. “What does your husband do, Henrietta?”
“He’s a doctor. A specialist in immunology.”
“Have you been married long?”
“Thirty-two years.”
“And having an affair with Lucas for most of that?” This was fun, I realized. Tact was overrated.
“Yes,” she said, glancing over her shoulder for the waiter. “I wonder where he is with that wine.”
“Do you ever feel guilty?”
“At times, yes.”
“So you didn’t have children?”
“No, it didn’t turn out to be possible.”
“Why did you stay with your husband?” I genuinely wanted to know the answer.
“Because I loved him. I still love him.”
“But you love Lucas too?”
She reached for her glass of water, took a sip, put it down with precision and then gave me a long look. “I know what you’re doing, Ella. You didn’t like the questions I asked you last week, so you are asking me the most uncomfortable questions you can in return.”
“Yes, I am.” I felt a blush rising. “But I still hope you’ll answer them.”
My honesty seemed to surprise her. Her honesty surprised me, in turn.
“The answer is yes, I love them both, even though the two of them couldn’t be more different. My husband is obsessively tidy. Lucas, as you know, isn’t. My husband is a workaholic, driven, committed to scientific facts and deadlines. Lucas is all thought and discussion, content to spend weeks, months even, searching for one historical detail. My husband is wealthy. Lucas has nothing to his name, his house aside. I get to take wonderful holidays with my husband. Live in a fine house. Work as much or as little as I please. Life is comfortable, easy. But when I’m with Lucas, my mind is fully stimulated. Not just my mind. In marriage—I don’t know if you were with your husband long enough to find this, Ella—but sex can become mundane. It’s never been like that with Lucas.”
I didn’t particularly want to hear those details. “But if Lucas is your soul mate—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s how he describes you.”
“Yes, I know.”
She said it so confidently. I wondered what that would feel like, to know you had that much power over another human being. I realized I did. Aidan had had that power over me. I’d had that power over him. If you loved someone, your happiness was in their hands.
The wine arrived. We fell silent as the waiter uncorked it. Henrietta tasted it and he filled her glass halfway. After he’d left, she filled it to the top, took a sip and then gave me another long look.
“You’re a romantic, Ella, I can tell. I’m a practical woman. Lucas had nothing when we met at university. I looked ahead. I knew then what I know now. Love doesn’t pay the bills.”
“But then his godfather left him the house. Didn’t that change things between you?”
“That wasn’t a house. It was a life sentence. Lucas insisted on following his godfather’s wishes to help those less fortunate. The place was overrun with students within weeks of Lucas taking ownership. The last thing I wanted to do was live there with him. I’d had enough of communal living at university. Lucas and I argued constantly about it.”
“About the students?”
“The students. The mess. The chaos. The impact on Lucas’s own study. His ridiculous selflessness. A house full of rooms and where did he choose to sleep? In the attic. An attic so small it was barely possible to stand upright in. That was about the only battle I won and only because I started refusing to go up there. Even so, it took years to get him to move downstairs.”
So I was right. Henrietta had been responsible for Lucas’s relocation into a “proper” bedroom.
Our starters arrived. The conversation turned to general subjects. A play she had seen. The guided walks I’d been taking. Since my tour of Mayfair, I’d seen Charles Dickens’s London, Jack the Ripper’s London, and walked in the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes. Over our main course, Henrietta told me about her own studies in great detail. A punishment for my detailed telling of my mother’s TV story? She specialized in Victorian literature. Again, it felt more like a lecture than a conversation, but I was happy to stay silent, nod where appropriate and feel relieved that she wasn’t interrogating me about my own life anymore. I surreptitiously glanced at my watch. Two hours had passed. I could go home soon.
We had just finished our dessert when Henrietta put down her spoon with an air of purpose.
“Ella, this dinner is opportune. I intended to speak to you privately and here is our chance. It’s regarding Lucas. Lucas and the house. I need your help in regard to a very sensitive matter.”
I noticed her voice was slightly slurred. She’d had a lot to drink tonight. “The thefts, you mean?”
“Forget those.” She waved her hand dismissively. “I still can’t understand why Lucas cares so much. A few trinkets here and there, taken from people who can easily afford a loss. You’re coming with me next time I do appraisals, aren’t you? You’ll see for yourself. More money than sense or taste, most of them.”
“But if word got out, it could be the end of not just his clients but all of his renovation plans too. He could end up having to sell his house just to make ends meet.”
“Exactly!” she said. “And the sooner it happens, the better.”
“The better?”
We were interrupted again by the waiter, offering coffee. She waited until he had gone and then leaned forward. Her gaze was intense.
“Ella, I’ll be blunt. I
want
Lucas to sell the house. I want him to sell it as soon as possible and the two of us to go and live in France together on the proceeds.” She sat back, an oddly defiant expression on her face.
“But he can’t sell it. He loves that house. It’s his life.”
“It was his life. He’s nearly sixty-five, for God’s sake. That house has been falling down around his ears for years. If he cared so much about it, he would have fixed it up long ago. The only sensible option is to sell it. The market is down, but he’d still get a very good price. More than enough for the two of us to set ourselves up. I’m about to retire myself. So should he. No more lecturing, no more research papers, no more students.”
“But he loves the lectures, the study. He cares about the students.”