Chapter 36
London, 2016
MAGGIE KNEW THAT HE wanted to propose, Mungo had made that very clear, but she didn’t think it would come so soon.
It was shaping up to be a busy Thursday evening at The Little Fig: they had almost sixty covers booked but the fish guy hadn’t delivered the sea bass so Maggie had been forced to scrap her special and was trying to think of something interesting to do with pollock instead.
Across the bench, Asma, her sous-chef, was chopping chives with the rat-a-tat precision of a sniper. Behind her, Suzanne and Elise were prepping vegetables. Maggie hadn’t intended to hire exclusively female chefs but this was how it had been for the past few months in the restaurant and she liked it. There was no shouting; there was no slamming of knives or pans on the hobs; there was no machismo; there was no groping. Instead, there was a calm to the kitchen. If a plate was ready, one of the women let Maggie know and she would check it before sending it through the hatch to whoever was working out front that day. It was entirely different to most of the restaurants she’d worked in.
Tonight might be hard work, though, because pollock was a wet, watery fish, which she didn’t much like using. ‘Olives?’ she murmured.
Asma’s knife paused above the chopping board. ‘We could crust it?’
‘With what?’
‘Dukkah? I can make it.’
Maggie looked down at her notepad where she’d simply written ‘olives’, followed by a question mark. ‘You have time?’
Asma nodded. ‘Sure. Suze, take these.’ She tipped the chives into a bowl and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Crust the pollock, pan fry it and send it out with … cucumber salad?’
‘Mmmmhmmm. There’s dill. And … potatoes?’
‘New potatoes. Just as.’
Maggie dug her front teeth into her lower lip while considering the maths. How many punters would go for a Middle Eastern fish dish with plain potatoes and a cucumber salad? The point of The Little Fig was its simplicity but was this too simple? And they’d have to sell it all tonight because there was no way in hell anyone would order cold pollock from the menu tomorrow.
‘I’d eat it,’ Asma said encouragingly.
She gave in. ‘Yeah, OK. You make the dukkah. El, we good on potatoes with the fish?’
‘Yes, chef,’ El replied cheerfully. She was the baby of the team, just twenty, straight out of college and, if she hadn’t wanted to cook, she was so fast with a knife she could have been an assassin.
Maggie pushed her notebook to the side, trying to do the same with the guilt she felt at letting Asma come up with another solution to the menu. It had happened multiple times in the past few weeks: she’d lean over the metal workbench, pen in hand, and try to think of something new and inventive but her head was full of fog. She was off and she didn’t know why: the restaurant was doing well. Really well. Full every night and she had nearly paid back Phil, who was already encouraging her to find another site. As was Jamie, who said she needed to look south to Peckham, where the next wave of Londoners who wanted a decent restaurant and wine list were moving. She was regularly included in magazine and newspaper round-ups of the city’s most exciting chefs. There were rumours of The Little Fig being given a rosette. So why the underlying sense that something was wrong?
‘You OK?’ Asma asked, returning to the bench with a jar of sesame seeds.
Maggie looked up. ‘Me? Yeah. Think so.’
‘Think so?’
‘No, no, I am.’
Asma tipped the sesame seeds into a bowl. ‘How’s Mungo?’
‘He’s good. Working hard but we’re planning this trip to France so …’
They were going the following month for Phil’s fiftieth birthday party. My darling, it’s going to be a RIOT , her aunt had emailed with the invitation. Dinner, drinks, dancing all night long. The biggest party the Fig’s ever seen. But do you and your gorgeous man mind squeezing into your single room as the hotel’s packed to the rafters? Or you’re very welcome to camp in the olive grove, some people are, but I thought you both might want a proper bathroom. Can’t wait to meet him!
Perhaps that was worrying her? Introducing Mungo to her aunt was a big deal, way more important than it had been introducing him to her parents. Her parents were always going to approve because he talked the right way, looked the right way and said the right things. But Phil? Maggie so wanted her aunt to like him.
‘Do you think he’s going to propose?’
Her eyes widened into moons. ‘Asma, we haven’t been going out a year.’
‘Do you want him to?’
She opened her mouth to reply. Did she want him to? She’d thought about it vaguely in the way that one did once a relationship became more serious. Could she see her life with Mungo? Could she imagine Christmas with his parents? Could she envision his parents being grandparents to her children?
She didn’t know but, on Sunday mornings, when they lay in bed together, he’d wrap his arms around her and mumble about how happy he was, and about how he wanted to do this forever. More recently, he’d started mumbling about how, ‘one day’, there might be more of them in the bed together on lazy weekend mornings.
‘You want a threesome?’ Maggie had joked, knowing what he was implying.
‘You’re all I want,’ Mungo had replied, before kissing her neck. ‘But maybe, two or three additions in due course, hmmm?’
Maggie had responded by running her nails up and down his forearm to distract him. It wasn’t that she didn’t want children, but she wanted to do more before then. More cooking, perhaps another restaurant. She could already see from her female friends that life changed almost entirely after children in a way it didn’t for their husbands. Sure, they took a week or two of paternity and bragged about changing nappies as if they deserved a prize for it, but after that their daily routine resumed while their wives were left at home. ‘Some days our most exciting outing is here,’ Lil, a friend of Maggie’s, had sighed while breastfeeding her second son in Caffè Nero a few months earlier, abandoned yet again by her husband, an explorer who was often away climbing mountains.
‘You get your nipples out in public though, so that’s exciting,’ Maggie had joked, trying to cheer her up. Lil had smiled glumly and Maggie had gone home knowing she didn’t want that life yet.
She frowned at Asma. ‘I don’t understand why it’s a race to the altar? We did it first, gold medal, please! Uh uh.’ Maggie shook her head. ‘Some day just … not yet.’
‘But you do want to end up with him?’
She shrugged. ‘I can’t imagine my life not with him.’
‘I wish I could say that about someone.’
‘Uh oh. What’s happened to Bryan?’
Asma was twenty-seven, and in and out of love every month. Most recently, it had been with Bryan, an Irish chef from a nearby pub; the month before that, a dog walker she’d come across in the park (she’d enquired about his availability and kept up the pretence that she had a dog until the first night he visited her flat and it was revealed that she did not, in fact, have a Yorkiepoo called Kevin); before that, a chiropractor Asma had met on a dating app who she’d only really liked because he’d manipulated her back every evening. Before that, Maggie couldn’t remember.
‘Bryan drank six pints on Sunday and threw up on my carpet. Bryan is dead to me.’
‘Plenty more of those guys,’ Maggie replied, nodding at the bowl of pollock.
That evening started off normally enough. Punters started arriving from six, for wine at the bar, before graduating to their tables. Enough people ordered the pollock. From the kitchen, Maggie heard the noise level steadily grow and felt, as she always did at around 8 p.m. in her restaurant, that this was her happiest state of being – tasting the beurre blanc , grilling off a piece of sirloin, checking the plates before Nick picked them up on the other side.
‘Service,’ she shouted, sliding a plate of lamb chop and another pollock through the hatch.
Nick burst through the door. ‘Hey, chef?’
‘Mmmhmm,’ Maggie said, her eyes flicking up from the order tickets. ‘What’s up?’
‘There’s a complaint on table four, he wants to see you.’
‘A complaint? What did he have?’ She turned her head to look at the tickets but she couldn’t see an order for table four.
‘Not sure. But he wants to see the chef.’
‘Nick, we’re mid service! Can’t you handle it? Take whatever he’s fussing about off the bill and send over some Champagne.’ Free Champagne was the quickest way of defusing a tricky customer, Maggie had learned from her aunt years earlier. Cost the restaurant relatively little; meant the customer often stayed for pudding instead of demanding the bill.
Nick’s brow creased with anxiety. ‘He’s insisting it’s you.’
‘OK, OK, fine. Asma, you all right on the chicken?’
‘Yes, chef,’ Asma said, with a thumbs up.
Maggie pushed the swinging doors open and walked around the bar, then frowned as she approached table four, a round table for two in the middle of the floor. Mungo was sitting at it, although as she got closer, he nodded to someone beyond her and instantly slid to one knee.
She heard a violinist start up and turned to see a man playing beside the bar and, behind the violinist, she could see the excited faces of her kitchen staff watching through the hatch. She’d been ambushed.
‘Mungo, what are yo—’
‘Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,’ he shouted, wobbling on his knee as he looked from one side of the restaurant to the other. ‘I’m awfully sorry to interrupt your delicious dinner, which I know will be exceptional because I’ve eaten here several times myself, but I have an important question for the chef.’
‘Mung—’
‘It’s a question I’ve wanted to ask her ever since I met her in this very spot, ten months ago, when she opened this brilliant restaurant.’
At this, Maggie heard a cheer and looked up to see their friends, Sam and Leah, sitting at a table in the window, both smiling encouragingly. On the next table, she then saw Woody and Bill, two chef friends, smiling in the same way. In front of them, she noticed, were Mungo’s parents and, right behind table four, were her own parents. Her mother, Maggie observed, looked as tense as if she was watching the climactic scene of a Scandinavian thriller.
She turned back to Mungo, now opening a small velvet box to reveal a large sapphire ring, surrounded by diamonds. ‘And that question is, Maggie, my darling, will you do me the very great honour of becoming my wife?’
She was momentarily blinded by a flash and turned to see a photographer.
So, because they were in public, and because their parents were watching, along with various friends and Maggie’s colleagues, and because Mungo was looking up at her so adoringly, she nodded. He was a kind and dependable man who made her feel safe. In that moment, it felt not just right, but also the simplest thing to do. With everyone watching, she felt like she had to say yes. And she would almost certainly have said yes eventually, anyway, so what did it matter if his proposal was sooner than she expected?
‘Oh, my darling,’ Mungo said, slipping the ring on to her finger before standing, rubbing his knee and kissing her.
Maggie could hear cheers around her, along with the rapid click of the camera and jaunty notes of the violinist who’d started playing ‘Here Comes The Bride’.
She smiled at their friends, and her colleagues, cheering from the kitchen, and her mother, who smiled approvingly back. For a moment, in fact, she had an odd thought that they all looked happier than her. It must be the shock, she told herself, as she took a Champagne glass from someone. That was why she felt so stunned.
‘To a wonderful, wonderful life,’ Mungo said, holding up his glass.
The next day, it was reported in the Evening Standard : Top chef says ‘I do’!
Veronica had the article framed and hung it in their downstairs loo.