Chapter 13 #2
‘It depends what you mean by nice,’ I said. ‘We didn’t have any tasty nibbles specially selected from local suppliers to complement it.’
He chuckled. ‘That’s where you went wrong, obviously.’
I laughed too, feeling more at ease.
‘There is a lovely looking menu in their actual restaurant. I was looking on their website,’ he said at last. ‘I thought we might go there one evening, if you like? It was just an idea.’
‘Count me in! That sounds great,’ I said, and I took a deep breath, hoping the others hadn’t overheard him. ‘But how would we get there? We don’t have a car.’
It was funny talking like this with him, using the ‘we’ word about a man again. It made me feel rather odd.
‘Local bus? Taxi?’ he said.
He turned back to his menu, and so did I.
‘Fish with purple potato salad and black garlic ketchup,’ Dennis announced loudly from his end of the table. ‘That sounds colourful. I bet you wouldn’t get that in Lower Begley.’
‘Steak and asparagus,’ Will said. ‘I like the sound of that.’
I was reminded of the mournful Fifi in the West Midlands, who undoubtedly would have blown a gasket if she had heard this.
In the end I decided that as I was wearing a black t-shirt, I was safe ordering linguini with tomatoes and clams. Undoubtedly I would splatter some of it over myself, but no one would notice.
It took a long time to take the order for our food, as people kept asking for substitutions and changing their minds when they heard what other people were ordering, but at last we were left alone with some carafes of iced water and house wine.
‘I’m not drinking this evening,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve had enough for one day and my taste buds need a chance to recover from the wine we had earlier.’
‘Good idea,’ he said, ‘me too.’
How nice that he didn’t think he had to persuade me to change my mind.
Unless I was the designated driver, Malcolm had always protested when I said I didn’t want a drink.
Calling me a killjoy or boring. Which perhaps I had been.
To me, wine had been something to do with a celebration, not just something to be knocked back.
‘Done any painting yet?’ Will asked.
I pulled one of the long, thin breadsticks out of the jar on the table and bit off the end.
‘Nothing,’ I said defiantly, and he grinned.
‘Drawing? Sketching? Creating the outline for something?’
I shook my head. ‘None of the above.’
‘Thought about it?’
‘Nope.’
He took a sip of iced water.
‘Jillian would say we are lazy.’ He grinned.
‘Not lazy, I prefer to think of it as selective participation.’
He laughed. ‘Good for you. That sounds far more acceptable. But we will be getting a very bad end-of-term report from Jillian at this rate.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said, ‘I’m just enjoying myself. Isn’t that what holidays are supposed to be all about?’
He nodded.
‘She will ask why we signed up for a painting tour when we obviously aren’t doing anything remotely artistic. So, what are you getting out of it?’ I said, suddenly bold.
He didn’t speak for a moment and was obviously thinking very carefully about what to say in response to this. It made me feel uneasy, as though I was treading on dangerous territory.
‘I haven’t had a proper holiday for a while,’ he said at last. ‘I was – well, I was away for a long time, and then when I came back I had a few issues I had to deal with.’
‘You were in a Guatemalan prison for armed robbery?’ I said with a grin.
He chuckled and his face relaxed again. ‘No, nothing like that, I can assure you. It’s just sometimes – I don’t know, one falls out of the habit of thinking of a trip abroad as an actual holiday.’
Ah, yes, I remembered, of course, the Médecins Sans Frontières years, mentioned on Wikipedia.
‘This is the first time I have enjoyed a holiday for years,’ I said. ‘I don’t know why exactly. Just the freedom to do what I like, go where I like, think what I like.’
I accompanied the last few words with a jaunty wave of my breadstick, like an orchestra conductor, and of course, it broke in two and half of it fell into his water glass with a splosh.
I looked at him, agonised, concerned what his reaction would be and wondering what I should do. I couldn’t exactly go delving into his water with my fingers and grab it. Malcolm would have been immensely annoyed, I knew that.
‘Gosh, I’m so sorry,’ I said.
‘Good shot.’ He chuckled and fished it out.
‘Shall I ask for a clean glass?’
‘No, no need for that,’ he said and took a sip of water. And then he fished another crumb of breadstick out and winked at me.
Such a silly little thing, but somehow it was important. I could do something daft and not be sneered at. It was a refreshing moment, and it made my poor old, battered heart sing.
The food arrived then, four waiters carrying our meals out from the kitchen with a lot of noise and bustle, and the head waiter came over to supervise them with a lot of theatrical gestures as he congratulated us on our choices and offered additional condiments and sauces.
It wasn’t like this back home; they seemed genuinely pleased to have us there, and happy with what they were doing.
Perhaps they weren’t, and when they went back through the swing doors, their shoulders slumped and they resumed their grumbles and arguments.
But for us, that evening, it was delightful and somehow added to the experience.
The head waiter stood there for a few moments, with a wistful smile on his face, fretting about refilling the water jugs. Did everyone have the right cutlery? Could he do anything more for us?
My pasta was delicious, just the right mixture of sweet and spicy, and although I did leave a few splatters of sauce on the tablecloth, I don’t think any landed on me.
At the other end of the table, Dennis was telling Jillian a story that the rest of us had heard several times, about his family in India.
How a very important local dignitary had wanted to marry his mother and adopt the cherubic baby Dennis, and how his mother had refused because, after all, she was already married to Geoffrey and also had young Ronald to think about.
But the very important local dignitary didn’t want Ronald, so it all came to nothing.
And how often Dennis had wondered what might have been.
‘This tale differs every time I hear it,’ Beryl murmured. ‘If we hang around long enough it will be the Maharajah of Jaipur who wanted to adopt him. This food is absolutely marvellous, isn’t it? And yet so simple, and one almost thinks it would be possible to make it at home.’
‘Except you never cook,’ Effie said. ‘I don’t think you know how to turn the oven on.’
‘Here’s a life hack. If you don’t ever turn the oven on, you never have to worry about whether you turned it off or not,’ Beryl said. ‘I expect I could cook this if I wanted to.’
Anita thought about this. ‘But then you wouldn’t have the warm evening or the sea over your shoulder, or someone else making it and clearing up afterwards.’
‘Or the company,’ Will added.
Beryl’s eyes sparkled. ‘Yes, that’s true. And how are you enjoying yourself, Will?’
‘Very much,’ he said, turning his attention back to his steak. ‘Very much indeed.’
‘And what do you do? Are you still working?’
‘Retired, I’m glad to say,’ he said. ‘What about all of you?’
This of course neatly deflected the conversation away from himself, as people told tales of their working lives and families and how much more pleasant it was to have given up work.
I thought about what I knew – that he had, after all, been a bit of a celebrity a long time ago – and then I wondered why he was still reluctant to discuss it at any level.
After all, there were twenty times as many so-called celebrities these days.
They were always crawling out of the woodwork on television game shows, in advertisements, on reality programmes when their opinions – however ludicrous – were earnestly discussed and reported and given credence.
I looked up at one point and Will did the same, and in that moment when our gazes locked, I knew he had done this deliberately, and he knew, for want of a better phrase, that I knew too.
It made me feel somehow more connected to him, as though we shared something, a little secret, an awareness of each other.
And then he gave a little smile and looked away again, and the moment was gone.
I finished my pasta while around me the conversation had drifted away from the restrictions and responsibilities of a working life and on to what makes a good painting.
This, predictably, degenerated into a fairly heated discussion about the balance between technical skill and intellectual depth and then only more dangerous territory about whether a painting should be realistic or not.
‘I mean,’ Dennis boomed, ‘all this nonsense about modern art and blank canvases with one blue dot on them. Who wants that in their living room? Sally wouldn’t give them house room, she’s more likely to give them to the grandchildren to finish off with their crayons.
I have five granddaughters, have I told you? ’
This of course successfully opened up the conversation to grandchildren – who had the most, who had the cleverest, the cutest, the most outstanding. Everyone scrolled through their phones to pull up pictures of the little tots, and naturally Will and his past history was forgotten.
Paying the bill took a long time. There was no way the group was just going to split the bill, and so Jillian took out a notebook and pen and asked for a menu to be brought back so that she could work out who owed what.
Then there was the problem of the added things which might or might not have been shared between people, who had drunk red wine, who had ordered white.
And then there was the worry of a tip and how much were we expected to leave.
By the time Dennis had told us for the third time that it was bad manners to tip at all in Japan, I think most of us had endured enough, and I almost wished that I could have whipped out my credit card and paid for the lot so we could get out of there.
After thirty minutes of that, I pulled out some euros and put them on the table, enough to cover the cost of my meal and a hefty tip, and at the same time, Will did the same.
‘Good idea,’ Beryl said approvingly. ‘I’ve had enough of this nonsense.’
‘It’s like Daddy totting up a mess bill,’ Effie added.
‘Oh my goodness, do you remember that time he told us about Cowley Camp in Egypt…’
They pulled out their purses and added to the little pile of notes on the table, and then Anita followed suit and the five of us stood up to leave, much to Dennis’s confusion, because he thought we were doing a runner.
‘I say, you can’t just leave,’ he said.
Beryl shuffled the notes together, rapidly counted them and handed them over like a bank teller.
‘I think you will find that more than covers our share of things,’ she said sweetly.
‘Well, now we’re in a right old beggar’s muddle. Jillian will have to start again,’ Dennis grumbled as we made our excuses and left.