Pratt a Manger (23 page)

Before long, Henry would learn, in the most painful way, just how true that was.

In Chicago, two boys aged seven and eight were charged with the sexual molestation, robbery and killing of an eleven-year-old girl. They wanted her bicycle. The death penalty was abolished in Poland; Geri Halliwell was named cultural ambassador to the United Nations Population Fund; President Clinton called for air strikes against Iraq, citing continued refusal to permit UN arms inspectors to do their work; the warmest year on record ended, and
Hooray, It’s Henry
was published.

The book was launched with a modest dinner party at
Le Lièvre Fou
, the most expensive of Bradley Tompkins’s three expensive restaurants. Henry thought that this might work as a peace offering. In this, as in so much else, he was wrong.

The restaurant consisted of four smallish rooms, with white walls hung with discreet, tasteful abstract paintings, which looked expensive but had very little to say. Table settings were elaborate, and tables nicely spaced. It had everything, Henry felt, except an identity.

Present at the party were Henry; Hilary; Hilary’s editor, Nigel Clinton, balding now and with a slight stoop, a man aged prematurely by an excess of editing; Henry’s editor, Carmel Sloane; his house editor, an enthusiastic young woman called Imogen Clutterworth-Baines; Mohammed El Bashir; Mohammed El Bashir’s camera; and Carlton Husthwaite, the Managing Director of Impact Books, the imprint that was publishing
Hooray, It’s Henry
. Henry had wanted the party to be small. He hadn’t wanted to upstage
Hilary
in the books department, not because it would upset her, but because she was the real writer.

He knew that he had been wrong about his choice of restaurant before they even sat down. Bradley’s eyes were glittering dangerously.

‘I wasn’t coming in tonight,’ he said, ‘until I heard you’d booked. I thought, “I can’t miss Henry’s publication party. What an honour.” ’

Henry’s heart sank. The man meant,
my Bradley on the Boil
books are out of print. Nobody will ever give me a publication party again. It’s ‘Bugger Bradley’ all the way now. I’ve become the Bognor Regis of cookery.

His heart sank still further when a poncy waiter brought over a poncy basket full of poncy breads.

‘Tonight we have raisin and garlic bread, sultana and olive bread and smoky paprika bread,’ he smarmed.

Henry recalled vividly the remark he had made to Bradley in the Café. ‘Our bread today is bread flavoured.’ Bradley would have taken it as mockery.

He couldn’t win with Bradley.

The starters passed off reasonably peacefully, although Henry wished that people wouldn’t go on and on about how wonderful his book was in Hilary’s presence.

Nigel must have caught something of the same feeling, because he began to talk about how brilliant Hilary’s new book was. It was a tale of a woman who feels that her life has become impossible.

‘It has a brilliantly intriguing title,’ said Nigel Clinton, ‘
Carving Snow
.’

‘I’ve read it,’ said Henry. ‘It
is
brilliant. Rather puts my little effort in the shade.’

He was going too far. Hilary gave him a look – an affectionate look, but there was definitely dryness there too, gleaming beneath the affection. For the first time it dawned on Henry that there might be limits even to her famed lack of jealousy.

As they waited for their main courses, Carmel said, ‘Any thoughts on a follow-up, Henry?’

‘Good Lord. Don’t rush me,’ said Henry.

‘It would be wonderful if you could create a diet,’ said Carlton Husthwaite.

‘Everybody buys diets,’ said Imogen Clutterworth-Baines enthusiastically. ‘And when they can’t stick to them, they buy another one.’

‘I do have integrity, you know,’ said Henry. ‘I haven’t got a diet worked out. I don’t believe in diets. I believe food should be fun and varied and free of stress and combined with exercise.’

‘That’s a diet,’ said Carlton Husthwaite.

‘That’s a diet that anyone could stick to, even me,’ said Imogen Clutterworth-Baines enthusiastically.

‘That has integrity,’ said Carmel Sloane. ‘Good for you, Henry.’

‘ “The Pratt Diet”,’ said Carlton Husthwaite. ‘It rolls off the tongue.’

‘Just as it’ll roll off the presses,’ said Hilary. Was there a touch of dryness there too?

Perversely, despite his experience with Carmel in the Ivy – or perhaps
because
of his experience with Carmel in the Ivy – Henry tried a little joke on her.

‘We shouldn’t have chosen this place,’ he said. ‘I’m really too proud to go to any restaurant that I can get into.’

‘But in that case you’d never eat out,’ she said.

‘It was a joke,’ he explained. ‘A modern take on Groucho Marx.’

‘I’ve seen his grave in Highgate Cemetery,’ said Imogen Clutterworth-Baines enthusiastically.

‘No, that’s Karl Marx,’ said Henry.

‘Was he the dumb one?’ asked Imogen Clutterworth-Baines enthusiastically.

‘No,’ said Henry. ‘People said many things about Karl Marx, but nobody said that he was dumb.’

He wondered what they taught in schools these days. And then he thought about how young she was, and how enthusiastic she was, and how ignorant he had been in his youth, and how he had no doubt made many similar faux pas which his elders had been too kind to point out, and he smiled at Imogen Clutterworth-Baines – enthusiastically.

The main courses arrived. The portions were on the meagre side. The presentation was so artistic that it seemed a crime to eat anything, but it all certainly looked tempting.

They all began to eat. There were murmurs of satisfaction. The food was good – but there was no astonishment, no surprise, no real pizzazz.

‘Well, Henry?’ asked Carlton Husthwaite.

‘Good but not great,’ said Henry in a low voice. ‘Sound enough, but not the flair you’d expect at these prices. No love. No excitement. No intensity.’

‘Mine needs salt,’ said Carlton Husthwaite. He called a waiter over.

The waiter hurried across the room with tiny steps, and stopped rather too abruptly, as if he was being worked by a man with a remote control that he hadn’t quite mastered.

‘Sir?’

‘We have no salt,’ said Carlton Husthwaite.

‘No, sir. We don’t serve salt, sir.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘We don’t provide condiments, sir. All our food is correctly seasoned.’

‘Is Mr Tompkins around?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Could you get him, please?’

‘Er …’ said Henry. ‘Carlton? A moment?’

Carmel put her hand on Henry’s. ‘Disagreement with Carlton Husthwaite is not a good career move,’ said Carmel’s hand. She left it there after it had delivered its message. Henry slid his hand out from under hers as unobtrusively as he could. That might not have been a good career move either.

‘Henry? You were saying?’ said Carlton Husthwaite.

‘I just … don’t want to make a fuss … on my party night.’

‘It isn’t a fuss,’ said Carlton Husthwaite. ‘Just a paying customer wishing to enjoy his food. Fetch Mr Tompkins, would you, waiter?’

The waiter hurried off, slightly jerkily. The remote control really did need sorting out.

Bradley Tompkins approached their table like a lorry about to crash into a council house.

‘I understand there has been a complaint,’ he said incredulously.

‘Not at all,’ said Carlton Husthwaite. ‘Just a request for salt.’

‘With respect, sir, we do not serve salt. We do not need to, as all our food is correctly seasoned.’

‘I find that a little odd in the case of salt,’ said Carlton Husthwaite politely. ‘Pepper, perhaps, but each person needs a different amount of salt.’

‘With respect, sir, you aren’t here for medical reasons,’ said Bradley Tompkins. ‘You are here to enjoy the flavours we produce, and the balance of seasoning and flavouring is our expertise, which is what you pay for.’

‘I thought the customer was always right.’

‘With respect, sir, rarely, in my experience.’

‘With respect, people who keep saying “with respect” usually have no respect. So will you provide me with salt?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Henry, what do you say?’

Henry sighed. None of them understood how dangerous it might be to make an even greater enemy of Bradley Tompkins. None of them knew how much he, Henry, hated being hated. None of them, except Hilary, knew how much he wanted to be loved by the whole world. But these were his publishers, his future.

If in doubt, Henry, fall back on the truth.

‘The food is good,’ said Henry. ‘Inventive, original and good. I think we all feel, though, that it lacks … that final, elusive, magical intensity which we all strive for all the time but which none of us achieve all the time. In my estimation, Bradley, a little salt would work wonders.’

‘Fuck off out of here,’ shouted Bradley Tompkins, to the astonishment of the other diners. He grabbed the tablecloth and pulled it towards him. Hilary, Nigel and Imogen practically had to throw themselves out of the way to avoid the carnage. There was a flash and a click which passed unnoticed in the shock and mayhem. The carpet
was
covered in broken glass and china and red wine and food.

How Henry wished that he wasn’t attracted to facetious comments like moths to angora sweaters.

‘Your poor carpet, Bradley,’ he said. ‘All that red wine. I’ve heard that salt helps.’

‘A Question of Salt’ was the all too obvious headline. None of the sub-editors could resist it.

‘A question of salt fuelled the feud between two of the regular chefs on
A Question of Salt
…’

It was Henry’s first experience of the down side of press interest in celebrities.

It wasn’t to be his last.

Mohammed El Bashir’s photograph of the carnage in the restaurant, and of the astonished expressions of the publication party, appeared in every paper, earning him a small fortune.

Henry wrote to him to express his regret and disappointment that he had exploited the situation in such a way.

Mohammed wrote back, saying, ‘I am extremely sorry – and surprised – that you are upset, but I can’t apologise. It would be hypocritical of me. For a photographer it was just too good an opportunity to miss, and, despite what I said to you last summer, on this occasion the photograph did tell the truth.

‘I must say I did not expect you to object. After all, you were the victim, not the villain. You were utterly innocent in the incident, and I believed that my photograph would therefore be most welcome to you.

‘I enjoyed working on
Hooray, It’s Henry
and will be really disappointed if we cannot continue our collaboration on “The Pratt Diet”, which is such a great idea incidentally.’

Henry wrote back. ‘Thank you for your honesty. The photo is very embarrassing for me, but you weren’t to know that, and I can see that from any neutral viewpoint I am not the villain of the piece.

‘I thought the photo was magnificent. It took one second, and one exposure. I find it hard to believe that you needed three hours and fifty-two minutes to photograph my herb and tomato mousse. Perhaps, if we work together again, as I hope we will, we could take just a little less time?’

Three nights after the Mad Night at the Mad Hare, as one newspaper put it, Henry was wakened from a deep, dreamless sleep by a sound that might have been a pistol shot. Hilary was breathing easily at his side. Then the noise came again and he realised that it was the sound of glass being shattered.

Hilary suddenly sat bolt upright, and said, ‘What the hell was that?’

‘I think someone’s broken in,’ whispered Henry.

‘What do we do?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe I’d better take a look.’

Naked chef routs burglars.

‘Be very careful.’

Tragic stabbing of naked chef.

‘I will.’

They were whispering so quietly that they could hardly hear each other, even in the deep silence of the night.

‘I’ll come too.’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘There’s no point in both of us getting killed.’

‘Oh, Henry. Maybe we should just lie here.’

‘That seems so craven.’

He crept out of bed, carefully, silently. His heart was thudding. A car engine was started. It sounded very close.

He tip-toed hurriedly to the window. He heard a car drive off but by the time he’d peered round the corner of the curtains it had gone.

‘Maybe that was them.’

He crept towards the door. Behind him, Hilary slipped silently out of bed.

‘I’m coming,’ she whispered. ‘I insist. Should we put the light on?’

‘No. We don’t want to be a target.’

They crept downstairs, side by side, naked. One of the stairs creaked. They froze.

They listened. Nothing.

They crept gingerly across the hall. Henry collided with a table, and the phone crashed to the ground. They froze again.

Nothing. Utter silence in the dark, dark house. Time passed.

‘I don’t believe there’s anyone there,’ whispered Henry very, very quietly.

‘Should we put the light on?’ whispered Hilary.

Suddenly the silence was shattered by a noise like an alarm going off. It wasn’t loud, but they jumped. Their hearts thudded even faster. Then they realised what it
was.
It was the signal the phone made to warn that it was off the hook. They breathed a synchronised sigh of relief.

The mundane explanation of the startling noise seemed to indicate that there was no longer any danger. Henry switched the light on. The brightness hurt their eyes. Hilary bent down to pick up the phone. Henry, aroused by his fear, placed a soft kiss on her left buttock.

‘Henry! Somebody might see.’

They laughed silently, childishly, hysterically, then sobered up. What had the noise been?

They examined the whole house. Nothing. A lifetime’s possessions sitting there, snug and secure.

They put on their dressing gowns and went out into the damp sodium chill of London.

Their cars were both parked outside, because their house had been built before the time of garages.

The windscreens of both Hilary’s modest Saab and Henry’s flashy new red Mercedes sports car – ‘there’s no point in having money if you don’t spend it’ – had been shattered, the air had been let out of all eight tyres, and there were deep, angry scratches right along their sides.