drained her beer and stood up, reaching to pull on her coat.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow at ten,’ she said. ‘Try and get an early night.’
‘I will.’
She stood looking down at me. ‘Get another chef. You’re killing yourself.’
‘If a miracle happens, I will.’
I watched as she let herself out.
Miracles never happen, I told myself sorrowfully.
The next day on my morning run, I turned in to the path that bordered Ferguson’s Field (I’d been here six months, and I was gradually beginning to learn the names of places).
I was tired, I was short of money and my back ached horribly, but I ran on. I might die exhausted, penniless and in pain but at least I’d die fit and slim.
There was a sheet of blue paper, laminated against the weather and secured to a bush. It was the third such notice I’d seen. Instead of ignoring it and simply wondering what it said, as I had the first two times, I did something clever. I actually stopped and read it. It was a change of usage notification from the council for the field.
My immediate thought was that it was going to be a housing development, which surprised me. The field not only belonged to the Earl, but it also abutted on his garden. I say garden, I should have said ‘gardens’ or estate. It was pretty sizeable. Earl Hampden was well known for his opposition to housing developments, so it seemed most odd he would try to put one up next to where he lived.
I stopped and read the document properly. For three weeks in July the field would host an open-air event with licensed bars. I shrugged and jogged on – it was nothing to do with me.
I lengthened my stride and picked up the pace. It was good to be running on a day like this in the Bucks countryside. The fields bordered with neatly trimmed beech hedges looked great, the trees giving a wonderful canopy of green overhead. It beat being in the kitchen.
All too soon I was back there.
Later, during a lull in the lunchtime service, I asked Francis if he knew anything about the event.
‘Of course, everyone does.’ He looked genuinely astonished at my ignorance. He scratched his head in perplexity.
Everyone except me.
‘It’s the Marlow House Festival,’ he explained.
‘The Marlow House Festival?’
‘Opera, Chef,’ he said. Anyone else might have added this in a condescending way, but not Francis. He was condescension-free.
‘Opera?’ I repeated, somewhat stupidly.
‘Yeah, opera, singing …’ He looked at me, puzzled. I started work on a dessert cheque: a strawberry pavlova with Chantilly cream.
‘I know what opera is, Francis.’
‘Well,’ he began, walking over to the sink and starting to load plates and cutlery into the enormous Hobart dishwasher, ‘the Earl puts on a big event every year for about a fortnight. The first two or three weeks of July. There’ll be a huge marquee there, about three hundred people per night, fireworks … It’s mega.’
‘Is that the Earl’s opera event you two are talking about?’
It was Jess who had just walked in. I know very little about opera – it certainly didn’t feature much on Beech Tree FM. That was the radio station that we listened to in the kitchen, playing undemanding, uncontroversial Seventies and Eighties pop classics. Their DJs had a permanent air of sunny mindlessness and inane links. One came on at this moment, ‘… and now, here’s a song about a river, no, not the Thames, not the Misbourne, not even the Chess, it’s Pussycat with “Mississippi” …’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe we’ll pick up some custom from it.’
Jess shook her head. ‘No, you won’t – it’s fully catered. He gets a firm from London usually: steak, lobster, that kind of thing. I think that’s how he makes his money out of it.’ She scowled at the radio. ‘Who the hell is this?’
‘Pussycat,’ I said. ‘I think they might be Dutch …’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Jess. She sighed. The radio was a source of friction between us – she craved something more modern, but it was my kitchen and my radio.
‘What do they use for kitchens?’ I asked. My interest was piqued.
‘My dad says that they use the kitchens at the house,’ said Francis.
I’d forgotten that Francis’s dad was the Earl’s Head Gardener. Francis was always a reliable source of information about the peculiar character who was our local aristocrat.
‘They’re not massive,’ said Francis, keen to be in the unusual position of being able to show off his knowledge, ‘but they’re well equipped. Marlow House has always done big parties, weddings, stuff like that, particularly with the last Earl, but the new Earl isn’t so keen on people in the house. The opera lot are confined to the field and the gardens this year.’
It’s funny how your mind works. I was unable to cope with my current workload, but part of me was annoyed that the Earl, who admittedly I hardly knew, would hire these London caterers instead of me. There was no way on earth that I could have managed to squeeze in doing food and drink for three hundred people a night – the logistics would be daunting, together with running my own business – but I would have liked to have been asked.
I shook my head in irritation at myself. There I was, getting cross that I hadn’t been given something I couldn’t have coped with.
I have anger management problems that I have to constantly work on, but at least I was just cross, not furious. That was something.
A journey of ten thousand miles begins with a single step.
And news of the Earl’s opera event was like the tossed pebble that starts the avalanche.
‘Sack the bastard!’ Graeme Strickland was his usual forthright self. We were in one of Hampden Street’s two pubs. The grotty one. The Three Bells. Diagonally opposite the common from where my restaurant was. Grotty décor, grotty toilets, grotty furniture. It was a wonder we came here at all, but it was quiet and that suited us.
What the pub lacked in desirability, it made up for geographically. It was a five-minute walk from both our restaurants and as we both spend six days a week shackled to the stove morning, lunchtime, noon and night, it was a blessed relief from our respective workplaces.
Behind the bar, resplendent in a moth-eaten grey cardigan,
