Dinner at Mine (28 page)

‘He won’t want to. That’s why he’ll go. He’ll see it as a duty.’

Matt hadn’t thought of it like that. But it would explain why, when he’d texted Stephen to ask, he’d been so certain that Justin was coming.

‘All right, then. But look, if you don’t want to go, and Justin doesn’t want to go, and you’re both free tonight, why don’t I ask him to come over here?’

Barbara jerked her head up. ‘Jesus, no!’

‘OK, it was just a suggestion. We don’t have to. I just think it might be good for you.’ He leaned forward across the table and reached out a hand towards her. ‘I know
you’re feeling vulnerable at the moment . . .’

She flinched as his hand touched hers. ‘No, I’m not.’

Matt grinned at her. Barbara stared down at the table, but after a while he could see she was trying not to smile.

‘It’s entirely understandable,’ he said, keeping his hand where it was. ‘I know you needed some time on your own to think things through. But I get the sense that you
still aren’t sure what to do.’

Barbara’s smile faded.

‘But look, if you don’t want to have a heart to heart with Justin about everything, isn’t it better to see him with other people around, so that things don’t get too
deep? You don’t even need to speak to him. There’ll be enough of us there. Just come along and use it as a chance to assess things. Observe.’

‘I don’t need . . .’

‘I think it might be very helpful. Seeing him on safe territory, interacting with other people, will give you a better idea of what you want.’

Barbara looked up. ‘Yeah?’

Matt squeezed her hand then pulled back. ‘I honestly think it will help.’

Barbara studied his face. She didn’t say anything. After a few moments, she got up and walked out of the kitchen. Matt was left to put her dirty plate into the sink.

Marcus swung his shopping bag on to the kitchen table, listening to it squelch satisfyingly against the wood. The fabric of the bag settled around the domed head of its
contents, and a thin, salty dribble of seawater oozed out of the bottom of the bag. Marcus watched with pride as it collected into a briny pool by the pepper pot.

Leaving the bag where it was, Marcus chose four King Edward potatoes from the cupboard, washed and peeled them. Even the slight bluntness of the potato peeler did not dull his good mood. It was
barely eleven o’clock and the shopping was done, the finest ingredients gathered from around the city. He had cleared the rest of the day to cook, and the process was planned out step by
step. Any one of the dishes he was about to make would be the best the competition had seen; together, they were going to be spectacular. Marcus had always been confident he was going to win, but
he had now moved beyond that. He now knew that if he did not, his defeat would simply devalue the whole contest.

From the fridge, Marcus took out some salt cod that had been soaking for three days. He had always been irked by those recipes that began with instructions like ‘Take out the beans that
have soaked overnight’. Yet now he was making one, he could appreciate the satisfying pleasure of being able to retrieve something he had prepared and put in the fridge on Wednesday. Every
day since, he had changed the water it had been soaking in, getting a warm glow as he did so.

Marcus dried the cod tenderly and fried it over a low heat with the potatoes he had now mashed. It formed a thick, fishy paste, which he sampled and approved before setting it aside. Reaching
round the bulbous head in the shopping bag, he took out the quails’ eggs.

The local butcher had been selling these for years, and it had always annoyed Marcus that he never had a use for them. Now he lowered them reverently into boiling water. He gave them three
minutes, then fished them out and put them aside to cool, as instructed, in a bowl of white wine vinegar. Several cracked immediately. He tried to peel them, but accidentally ripped the first two
in half as he pulled at the shell. He slowed down, wishing he did not bite his fingernails. Chipping painstakingly at each shell, he became irritated at the fiddliness of the task, but the feeling
was outweighed by satisfaction at leaving himself so much time for it.

Even so, half of the eggs were ruined. This was a shame, obviously, but there was something about the old-fashioned wantonness of destroying quails’ eggs that somehow pleased him. It made
him feel like a particularly sybaritic French president.

The final stage owed more to
Play School
. He scooped up a wad of the cod mixture in his left hand and balled it liberally round each good egg. There we are, first dish completed. Salt Cod
Scotch Eggs. He put them in the fridge to fry later.

Marcus decided to make himself a cup of coffee before moving on to the oxtail. He tamped down the Illy in the percolator to exactly the same level as usual and put it over a medium heat on the
back burner. He didn’t feel especially tired, even though he had been up for five hours already. Perhaps it was knowing that everything was going perfectly so far.

Marcus didn’t have a local fishmonger. Normally this bothered him only in an abstract sense. He’d considered phoning the one in Islington that was always in the papers, but then
thought how much better it would sound if he was able to say casually, ‘This? Yes, it should be fresh – I picked it up at Billingsgate Market this morning.’

Which was why his alarm had gone off at six o’clock and he had pulled himself out of bed with Sarah groaning semi-consciously beside him. Marcus was usually an early riser at weekends
anyway; once he was awake, however briefly, things started turning over in his mind and he could not go back to sleep. His usual Saturday ritual was to leave Sarah snoring and go downstairs to make
himself a cup of coffee and read
The New Yorker
, to which he had a subscription.

Instead, he downed a quick shot of espresso before heading out to one of the car club bays round the corner. Once he was outside, Marcus always enjoyed being up early. The peaceful, empty
streets gave him a sense of being ahead of everyone else. He let himself into a hatchback with his touch card, set up the satnav and, with almost no traffic, was pulling into the stolid shadow of
Canary Wharf in less than forty minutes.

Billingsgate Market squatted almost resentfully beneath the high, gleaming blandness of the Barclays and HSBC towers. Marcus delighted in the juxtaposition as the boxy glass buildings cast long
shadows over the market in the early morning light.

The morning’s peace was shattered as soon as Marcus entered the market, the icy air filled with shouting and the squeal of rubber on wet concrete. Marcus stopped to get his bearings. A
porter pushing a trolley of prawns barged past him, swearing under his breath. Marcus was too taken aback to respond, and even more aghast when he realized that the porter had called him a
‘fucking tourist’.

He decided to keep moving. The stalls were all the same: thick banks of white polystyrene crates laid out in long rows beneath the cavernous corrugated roof. Marcus hurried quickly between them,
not wanting to dawdle and stare at the amazing variety of fish in case he was taken for a gawper on a coach party. He was there, like everyone else, to buy some rare fresh seafood at a reasonable
price.

After a while the fish all began to look the same. Row upon row of glazed eyes set in shimmering rainbow flesh. Marcus walked up and down each row several times. Eventually he thought he saw
what he needed tucked away at the back of a stall. He craned round to look as he went past.

‘Watch where you’re fucking going!’

Marcus jerked back round to see that he was about to collide with a fat man carrying a tray of eels. He threw himself backwards as the man kept moving, staggering until he heard a loud splash
below him.

Marcus felt freezing water begin to seep over the top of his Campers. He yanked his foot out of the puddle, but too late to stop the dampness spreading through his right sock.

Somewhere off to his left he heard someone laughing.

Marcus shook the loose water off his shoe. This was good. It was real. It showed this was still a proper, working market, not just a tourist attraction.

Marcus looked at the stall again. There it was. He was right. It was definitely an octopus. The stallholder held it up for him to inspect. Close to, it was slightly wizened, and the row of
suckers down one tentacle was missing.

But that was OK, because it gave Marcus the opportunity to ask the question he had been looking forward to all morning.

‘Have you,’ he asked as matter-of-factly as he could, ‘got any of the Mediterranean double-suckered variety?’

The stallholder did not blink.

‘No, mate,’ he said, as if it was a perfectly ordinary question. ‘We had some earlier, but they all went. Got to get here early. Last of the day’s catch, this. Give it to
you half price.’

‘No, thanks.’

Marcus walked away, his success hollow. He knew he should have got up earlier. To wake up at six and still come home empty-handed because you’d left it too late would be infuriating.

He tramped up and down the stalls. Maybe he should try something else. Maybe one of the eels. He stopped in front of the stall. He could do it in aspic with paprika or something. A
Spanish-inflected version of jellied eels. That would be good. They’d have to be impressed by that. Marcus peered closer into the beast’s gaping jaw, ringed with tiny sharp teeth.

He couldn’t help being slightly intimidated by it. It looked complicated. He didn’t have a recipe for eel, and how easy would it be to find one?

But no, it was too high risk. If you were going to serve people eel, you really couldn’t afford to fuck it up. You’d look ridiculous. Marcus walked on.

What about some of these other ones? He studied a fat, aggressive-looking fish with a pilot light above its eyes. It lay on its side on top of a crate of smaller, silvery fish as if it had
personally landed them all itself.

But who knew what it would taste like? And what was the point of buying something like that if by the time it was cooked it was basically indistinguishable from cod?

Some of the stalls were beginning to pack up now, and the waft of rotting stock began to cut through the salty freshness. Marcus twice had to jump back sharply as traders sluiced down the
concrete with buckets of water, sending heads, fins and bones skittering towards the drain.

Marcus did a last tour of the perimeter. If all else failed, he could just get some swordfish. As long as they gave him the sword, it would still look impressive enough.

Then, in the far corner of the market, Marcus found a man putting six small octopuses into a box. With a small but definite thrill, Marcus saw that they had two rows of suckers running up each
tentacle.

‘Are these Mediterranean ones?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, mate. Can’t you see their beach towels?’

Marcus grinned politely. Banter. Right.

‘Just as well I didn’t ask anything about double suckers, then!’

The man stared at him blankly. ‘Do you want them or not?’

‘How much is it for one?’

‘Six for fifty pounds.’

‘But I only want one.’

‘It’s bulk here. Six is minimum. Give them to your friends.’

Marcus looked at the tentacles laid out in the box. Could he freeze them? How often, realistically, would he feel like defrosting an octopus?

‘Come on . . . mate,’ Marcus said, tripping over the unfamiliar word. ‘You’re clearing up for the day. You’re not going to sell any otherwise. I’ll take that
fat one there.’

The man sighed. ‘Twenty-five quid for one, then. But hurry up about it.’

Marcus hesitated. Was that a lot? Should he try to bargain? Was that insulting? Or would the man think he was an idiot if he didn’t haggle? He wished he’d Googled all this etiquette
earlier. It was too late to get out his iPhone now.

‘That’s a bit steep,’ he said. ‘How about fifteen pounds?’

‘Twenty-five, mate. Take it or leave it.’

Marcus girded himself. The principle was established now. ‘Twenty, then. Split the difference.’

The man paused, nodded, picked up the octopus and held out his hand. Marcus put a twenty-pound note in it, and the man thrust the octopus at him. It dripped seawater on to the concrete.

‘Have you got anything to put it in?’

The man sighed again, but found a plastic bag, which Marcus wrapped carefully round the octopus before putting it in his canvas tote.

Walking away from the stall, Marcus swung the bag almost jauntily. The morning was a success. The squelch in his shoe didn’t matter any more, because there was an octopus in his bag. How
many other people could say that before eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?

As planned, Marcus headed for one of the cafés round the edge of the market to reward himself with breakfast. It had plastic tables with plastic chairs bolted to the floor, which normally
would have made Marcus leave immediately, but here, he decided, it counted as authenticity. He ordered some strong tea, because he felt he should, and kippers with scrambled eggs. He had been
looking forward to this bit too, hoping to be able to say to people in the future: ‘You should try it. It’s London’s version of eating sushi at Tokyo central fish market.’
So even though he actually found the kippers disappointingly greasy, he persuaded himself that this must be because they were so fresh.

Leaving just under half on his plate and his tea more or less untouched, Marcus went back to the car and drove west. There was a bit more traffic about now, but it was still before nine thirty
when he arrived in Finsbury Park.

He parked the car in a side street and consulted the scrap of paper on which he had written the address. It guided him past a row of off-licences, takeaways and bagel shops on the main road,
then along a one-way street opposite the mosque. Marcus stopped outside a battered black door. It was set in a red-brick wall with narrow windows too high to see through. There was no number on the
door. Could this be it?

Marcus consulted the crumpled piece of paper again. L&M Wholesale. 79A. It was in the right place anyway. A Spanish colleague, Angel, had told him about it. They had been talking about the
difficulty of finding good tapas in London, and Marcus had said that at least at Asturia you could pick up proper Spanish ingredients to take home. Angel had sniffed. Asturia? Yes, it’s OK,
but . . .