Chapter Ten #3
They were seated by a waiter whose face promised vengeance.
Tess knew that he was going to spit in their food.
She’d have done exactly the same, but he wasn’t to know that Rochester was from the past, a book written in 1847, and he was used to being waited on by servants. You had to make allowances …
‘I’ll sit on my own,’ Gabe murmured. ‘Wouldn’t want to cramp your style.’
It was much better without Gabe being a faintly disapproving presence in Tess’s peripheral vision.
Rochester pulled out the chair for Tess, his hand glancing across her hip as she sat down and she blushed again.
It was an accident. Again, he was Victorian so he wasn’t trying to cop a feel, but neither Charlotte Bronte nor Tess’s mother would approve.
Rochester sat down opposite Tess and smiled at her, his gaze still warm as it lingered on her face.
Oh, it was slipping down to her, no, it was on her face again.
Then the surly waiter returned to take their order though they hadn’t even had a chance to open their menus.
Not that Tess needed one, when she had all her favourite items memorised.
‘Do you mind if I order for us?’ she asked.
Rochester shook his head and gestured for Tess to go ahead. ‘A woman with a healthy appetite bodes well for whatever pleasures may follow,’ he said huskily.
Tess knew what that meant. He was already committing to extending the date for drinks afterwards once they’d lined their stomachs. This was, hands down, the best time she’d had with a man in months. Years even.
‘Tell me more about your journeys abroad. I’ll bet you’ve been to all sorts of far-flung places,’ she invited, because she really did give good date, and Rochester was only too happy to oblige.
He was waxing lyrical about his many visits to the West Indies when something tugged deep in Tess’s mind.
Roused a vague memory in her that she couldn’t quite form, but then the vast amounts of food she’d ordered arrived and the moment and the memory was lost.
‘Cutlery is outmoded?’ Rochester asked as he stared down at the chopsticks by his place setting. ‘Society has gone the way of the savage?’
‘When we’re eating food from East Asian countries, we use chopsticks. It goes back to what I was saying about celebrating other cultures,’ Tess said, picking up her chopsticks and knocking them together playfully. ‘Shall I show you how to use them?’
‘I need no instruction on how to master a technique that a mere child can employ,’ Rochester said with a glance at the next table, where a family, including two small children, were happily tucking into a small feast and expertly wielding their chopsticks. ‘Damnation! What sorcery is this?’
Rochester flung his chopsticks down and glowered. Tess had wanted moody and my goodness, she was getting it. In spades. He really was a very complicated man. He had layers. So different to the one-note wonders she usually matched with.
‘Don’t give up! You nearly had it,’ she said in her most encouraging voice.
‘If you put the first chopstick between your thumb and index finger, like this, and balance it on your ring finger. Yes, like that, but relax your hand more. Then line up the second chopstick in the same position, but you’re going to balance it on your middle finger. Et voilà!’
Tess picked up a soup dumpling with her chopsticks and popped it in her mouth. Rochester tried to do the same but ended up dropping his chopsticks on the floor. And glowering again.
‘Am I to starve?’ he enquired woefully, looking around the other tables, where everyone else was managing to use their chopsticks. ‘No! I refuse to be thwarted by two pieces of wood. Boy! Bring me more sticks!’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Tess said, smiling sweetly at their waiter and trying to convey her abject apologies with her eyes.
Yes, it was a general rule of thumb that you could tell everything about someone by how well they treated people in the service industries but, again, Rochester was part of a colonial, patriarchal, hierarchal, capitalist power structure that future generations were still trying to dismantle.
Allowances had to be made! ‘Could we possibly have another set of chopsticks, please? Thank you so much!’
The waiter practically threw another pair down on the table and Tess shuffled her chair round so she was sitting next to Rochester rather than opposite him while he regarded the chopsticks as if they were his mortal enemy.
He tried several times, but it wasn’t until Tess actually positioned the chopsticks for him, her hand covering his, that he managed to pick up a piece of braised pork belly with a sticky glaze, deliver it to his mouth and chew on it ruminatively.
‘Sweet yet spicy. A thousand flavours dancing on my tongue,’ he said in wonder. Thank goodness, the date was back on track. ‘A gastronomic wonder.’
‘Try one of these leek and prawn balls,’ Tess said and because dinner was going to take hours at this rate, she fed him with her own chopsticks. ‘Delicious, right?’
‘The last thing I dined on was cold mutton pie,’ Rochester revealed once he’d finished chewing. ‘You may think me a man with plain appetites but in my younger days, I had a taste, nay a weakness, for all manner of exotic fancies.’
He stared at Tess so meaningfully that she wondered if she had sticky soy glaze on her face. She delicately dabbed her mouth with her napkin. That niggle was back. Jane Eyre herself was very plain, but she wasn’t the only woman who …
‘You are fluent in French?’ Rochester asked suddenly.
‘Not really. I know how to order a croissant and ask where the loos are,’ Tess replied, shaking off that faint feeling of foreboding.
Now they could carry on having a lovely chat about travel and discovering many other mutual interests.
‘Have you been to Paris? It’s one of my most favourite cities in the world. ’
‘I have indeed visited Paris on many an occasion,’ Rochester said, giving Tess a look that was positively incendiary.
His hand reached out to cover hers and his thumb stroked rhythmically against her knuckles, which unsettled her for reasons that she couldn’t explain.
‘I much prefer to pass the time at my villa in the south of France. On the shores of the Mediterranean. A pretty little whitewashed house where I believe you would be very happy …’
Tess couldn’t help but sigh a little. A mini-break on the French Riviera. She would be very happy there, but … ‘It sounds lovely but it’s not going to happen, is it?’
‘You object to becoming my mistress?’ Rochester’s grip on her hand was now quite firm and he tightened his fingers when Tess tried to break free. ‘Stop it! You must listen to reason, or must I resort to violence?’
‘Oh my God, what are you doing? Let go of me!’ Tess said in a growly voice that she hadn’t known she possessed. ‘We’re just having a date. One date! Dinner and drinks. I am not going to be your mistress. As if! And I’m not going to your villa in Saint Tropez …’
‘… Toulon …’
‘Whatever, mate. You live in a book.’ It was all coming back to her now.
Not just that he probably had Jane Eyre waiting for him back between the pages, there was also another woman in his life.
Ah yes, Tess could now remember the dramatic denouement of the novel in lurid and unfortunate detail.
‘I don’t get with married men. Especially not ones who have their wives locked up in an attic! ’
‘Don’t say that!’ Rochester thundered, so that the people on the next table turned to look at them. Tess took the opportunity to take out her phone to do what she should have done when she was still at the library, and google her dining companion. ‘She is not a wife but a fearful hag!’
‘If I had a penny for every man who told me that his ex was crazy, I’d have an offshore account in the Cayman Islands,’ Tess said bitterly, looking down at her phone.
‘How could I have forgotten that you had a wife? Maybe you’re the one who needs reminding.
Does the name Bertha ring any bells? Also, you have a kid. ’
‘Not my own child! A French dancer’s bastard,’ Rochester snapped, not using his indoor voice at all.
‘Dude, but still, you have your wife locked in an attic!’
‘Because she has a violent and unreasonable temper and her nature is wholly alien. What else would you have me do with such a mad creature?’ he demanded.
‘Well, I don’t think she’s mad at all. I think this sounds like textbook gaslighting,’ Tess said fiercely, because she might not have done her homework, but she could absolutely pass a written and oral exam on toxic men.
‘Look me in the eye when you talk to me. I see you’re no longer flattering me with false coquetry …’
Tess ignored him in favour of doing what she always did when she found herself on a bad date.
Texting for backup.