Tess Stimson - The Adultery Club (7 page)

your children will greet it. Toil for hours in the kitchen

producing something nourishing and delicious that hits

all the primary food groups and they’ll push it around

their plates until it gets cold and congeals and even the

dog wouldn’t want it. Guiltily throw frozen chicken fingers

and crinkle chips in the oven and they’ll rave about

it for weeks.

I shoot upstairs to get ready. I haven’t time for the long

relaxing bubble-bath I crave - I haven’t had that kind of

time since I fell for Sophie - or indeed even to wait for the

hot water to make its leisurely way through the ramble of

furred pipes from the tank in the outhouse to the calcified

shower head in the upstairs bathroom, a journey roughly

comparable in terms of time and complexity to the Paris

Dakar rally. Instead, I whip off my clothes and brace

myself for the ice-cold scourge that passes for a shower in

this house. A six-hundrcd-year-old thatched farmhouse

in two acres of breath-snatchingly beautiful Wiltshire

countryside is romantic and gorgeous and just oozing

with history and charm, and of course as soon as Nicholas

and I saw it - house-hunting when I was newly pregnant

with Evie - we just had to buy it, there was never any

question about that. But it is not practical. Overflowing

cesspits and lethally exposed live wires are neither

romantic nor charming, and there have been times never

publicly admitted to, Nicholas would be mortified

-when I have longed for something brand spanking new

in vulgar red brick and equipped with the latest in

efficient brushed-steel German appliances.

Gasping at the freezing water, I scrape a sliver of hard

soap over my chicken skin, able to differentiate between

my breasts and goosebumps only by the fact that two of

them sport shrivelled brown nipples. I try in vain to work

up a decent lather until I realize that it is not in fact soap

I am scrubbing over my scrawny pudenda but a piece of

the ceiling plaster which has come down again.

By the time I finish washing my hair - with supermarket

bubble-bath, yuk and bugger, since wretched Sophie

has once more pinched the wildly expensive shampoo

that Kit gave me last birthday - my lips are blue, my

fingers have frostbite, and I feel like one of Shackleton’s

Antarctic expeditionaries. My dratted hair will frizz into a

hideous Afro if I use the hairdryer, and since it’s already

after five I don’t even have time to let it dry naturally by

the Aga in the kitchen - the only warm room in the house

-as I usually do. I’m going to have to venture out into

the bitter November night with my head dripping wet; I

will no doubt catch my death of cold, double pneumonia,

pleurisy and tuberculosis, but obviously this is entirely

my own fault for forgetting about the party in the first

place.

‘Don’t say it,’ I warn Kit, as I race downstairs in the

safe but dull little black dress I’ve had since I was about

fourteen, ‘no time to dither, it had to be this.’ s

‘Quite sure?’

‘Not a word, thank you.’

I dispense kisses liberally amongst the girls, fling keys

and cash and lipstick into my bag and scramble into

Nicholas’s Mercedes, then scramble back out and go

back for the monogrammed humidor I bought for him to

give Will Fisher. I hate driving Nicholas’s car, I’m always

so scared I’ll prang it or something, and although it’s so

wonderful and safe and huge - I feel like I’m driving a

luxury tank - I’m also very aware that even a tiny scrape on the bumper will set us back hundreds of pounds. I am really much happier in my old Volvo, so much more

forgiving; and every little dent along its sides tells a

story, it’s like a metal photograph album really, I know

I’m going to hate it when I finally say goodbye. But the

Volvo’s still with Ginger, so it’s got to be the Mercedes,

and actually - I’d forgotten - it has heated seats, oh what

bliss, at least now I’ll have a warm bottom when I get on

the train.

When Nicholas and I first met, I didn’t even know how

to drive. At twentyfour I was still gadding about London

on the ancient sit-up-and-beg bicycle my mother Louise

passed on to me when I followed in her shoes to Edinburgh;

although Louise didn’t actually graduate, of

course, she dropped out in her second year to go to

California and ‘find herself with her boyfriend (who

naturally made sure he got his degree before decamping

to join the flower children). The swine stayed around

just long enough to get her pregnant with my sister

before scuttling home to a lifetime of accountancy in

Esher, his brief flirtation with the unconventional firmly

over. Louise, not in the least put out by his desertion,

joined a Californian lesbian commune and gave birth to

Cleo in a pool as the sisters sang ‘Kumbaya’ in a circle

around her. She then promptly fell pregnant again a few

months later - ‘the lesbian thing never really took, you see;

when we started having our periods together the amount

of hormones swilling around was positively lethal’ - by a

newly arrived waiter from Florence, who this time did at

least offer, in very broken English, to marry her. Louise

thanked him very gently for being so kind, declined

politely but firmly, and came back home to Salisbury so

that she could have me at Stonehenge; not quite literally much

to her chagrin, even in hippy 1970 they wouldn’t let

her do that - but in a little country hospital near by.

Once, not long after I met Nicholas, I asked my mother

why she had never married after she came back home,

fully expecting some sort of Germaine Greer rant about

marriage-as-patriarchal-ownership (before she recanted,

of course, my mother has never quite forgiven her for

that) but instead, ‘You think marriage is just about you

and him Louise said, regarding me steadily, ‘but it’s not, it’s not a private romantic thing at all. You take on so many other people, too, a whole network of them, all their

problems and fears and difficulties. I never wanted any of

that. I knew I didn’t have the patience to deal with it. I

just wanted it to be us.’

I realized then that I didn’t actually know my mother

at all.

Nor, in a very literal sense, did I ever know my father.

But it’s from Roberto - Louise never did catch his last

name - that I got the impossible hair and an overwhelming

desire to cook almost from the moment I could pick

up a spoon; it’s certainly not from my mother - Louise

feels overwhelmed if I ask her to open a can of beans. It’s

no wonder I’m so skinny, I was practically malnourished

as a child; learning to throw a meal together was probably

as much my survival instinct kicking in as my genetic

heritage. If I’d had my way I’d have run off at the age of

seven to become the culinary equivalent of the little drummer

boy, working my way up through the kitchen ranks

from pot-scrubber to saucier to, if I was very lucky and

worked longer hours than a junior doctor, executive chef.

And at least I’d have had enough to eat. But with typical

parental hypocrisy - don’t do as I do, do as I tell you Louise

refused to hear of me leaving school early; she

filled in the application to Edinburgh herself. Feeling it

would be deeply churlish if a second generation of Sandal

women turned down the chance of a university education,

I did actually complete my degree; though even as my

pen dutifully churned out analyses of Chaucer and Byron

and Nathaniel Hawthorne, my mind dreamed of the

perfect souffle and a hollandaise that, even in the steamiest kitchen, never broke.

. After three very dull years I finally marched into my

mother’s womb-red healing room at the top of our house

in Islington, brandishing my examination results, and

crying, ‘I’ve done it, I’ve got my First, now can I go to

culinary school?’

Louise lowered herself gracefully from full plank into

cobra, assumed the child’s pose and said, her face pressed

into her yoga mat, ‘I’ve been wondering how long it

would take you to find the courage to ask.’

However, I discovered at culinary school that I was

more my mother’s daughter than I had thought; thankfully

not in the actual cooking, that came easily - perhaps

I was a chef in a former life: Napoleon’s, maybe, or

some Eastern potentate’s, I’ve often wondered - but in

my response to the wretched rules and regulations that

hemmed you in and pushed you down and, it seemed to

me, got in the way of doing anything novel or creative.

I chafed unbearably against the restrictive syllabus

whose principal purpose seemed to be to show plump,

unimaginative young women in Alice bands and pearls

how to find their way to a suitable young man’s heart

through his stomach. After two terms I quit and moved in

with Kit and his latest boyfriend, a shark-like bond trader

with dead eyes.

Tor pity’s sake, what do you really want to do?’ Kit

demanded one night when the shark was working late

and I was driving him potty whining - yet again - about

the curdled mess I seemed to be making of my life.

‘You know what I want to do I said tetchily. ‘I’ve been

telling you since nursery school. Open my own restaurant,

of course.’

‘You were three. I thought you’d grow up and put

away childish things.’

‘So were you. You didn’t.’

‘Acting is different—’

‘I don’t see why.’

‘Put that bottom lip away and stop being such a spoilt

brat. Acting is different, as you well know, because you

oin still have a life whilst you do it. Have you any idea

what opening your own restaurant would really be

like?’ Kit demanded. ‘Three-quarters of new restaurants

fail within the first year. You’d be working at least eighty

hours a week with no evenings off, no holidays, not a

minute to call your own, in an industry which has the

highest percentage of drug addicts next to dentists—’

‘Dentists?’

He waved his hand. ‘Never mind that now. The other

kitchen staff would hate you just for being there. Half

the men in the restaurant business still think a woman’s

presence in the kitchen curdles the sauce. You’d be eating

sexual harassment for breakfast, lunch and tea.’

‘All right, all right,’ I interrupted. ‘I do know, Kit. But

you did ask—’

‘You have a First in English and you cook like an angel.

What you should be doing, my love -‘ Kit said, his eyes

alight with an evangelical zeal I knew well enough to fear,

‘I can’t imagine how we haven’t thought of it before what

you should be doing, Mai darling, is writing cookery

books, of course.’

When Kit gets hold of an idea, he’s like a dog with

a particularly juicy marrowbone. At his insistence, and

more to get him to leave me alone than anything else,

I put together a slim folder of my best recipes, illustrated

with glossy photographs - shot by the freelance

who succeeded the bond shark in Kit’s revolving-door

bedroom - and submitted them to an agent plucked

at random from the Writer’s Handbook by Kit, fully expecting

rejection with a generous side-helping of derision

by return of post. But, unbeknown to either of us, the

agent Kit selected just happened to open my submission

ten minutes after returning from lunch with a panicked

publisher who had been bending her ear for two hours

on the subject of the gaping hole in her upcoming list,

thanks to their star cookery writer - a household name

with his own TV show and flatware range - eloping to

Guatemala with his sous-chef and huge advance; and

without delivering his much-delayed, and increasingly

urgently needed, manuscript.

Serendipity really is very much underrated. My mother

always said it was better to be born lucky than clever,

‘although,’ she’d add serenely, ‘it does help to be both.’

At twenty-two, I had a three-book contract, and then a

small guest spot on a brand new satellite channel followed,

and when my first book reached number one in The Times bestseller list there was even talk of my own TV

show in a year or two. I was the Hot New Thing and

everything was going absolutely swimmingly and then I

met Trace and for a while nothing else mattered. It was

wonderful, it was beyond imagining; and then of course

it all collapsed into the darkest, most dreadful mess. It

was Kit who pulled me out and told me I would get over

it and forced me to get back to work when I just wanted

to crawl into bed and never come out again, my heart

shrivelling with misery against my ribs.

And then, of course, I found Nicholas.

I hover on the restaurant threshold, shifting my bag

to the other shoulder as I look for him, anticipating that

familiar lurch when I spot his clean, chiselled features even

now, after twelve years - that same strange jolt