Chapter 7 At Luigi’s
At Luigi’s
“Still working?” Miss Ogilvie asked Flynn as this hellishly long day stuttered to a close. They were the only two remaining in the office.
“Trying to find a rag rug for a lower-class Kitchen.”
“Come, come,” she said, buttoning up her coat. “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof and so on. Let’s decamp.”
“Decamp?”
“Have you eaten at all today, Harry? Apart from the cake—which hardly constitutes food. Come with me, we can try that ‘caff’ that Badger frequents.”
“Luigi’s?”
“Have you ever been?”
“No.”
“Neither have I. And you’ll be doing me a favour. My cupboards are bare. But I have to tell you that I shan’t take no for an answer.”
He had no desire to enter into a contest of wills with someone he would have bet on, so Flynn laughed and said, “Well, if you insist.”
“Good, get your coat, then. We’ll go Dutch.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
—
The eponymous Luigi was both proprietor and chef and had decked out the place with the apparently de rigueur uniform of red-and-white-checked cloths and old Chianti bottles dripping with candle wax.
The décor did little to alleviate the dingy atmosphere.
The gloominess of the dim interior was matched by the mood of the waiter, who sidled out resentfully from behind a chenille curtain, a grubby tea towel folded over his arm.
“Shall we order wine?” Maud Ogilvie said to Flynn. “Did you think I was a teetotaller?” She laughed when she saw the expression of surprise on his face.
“You have an abstinent air about you, Miss Ogilvie.”
“Oh, please—Maud. We’re not in the office. It’s true, I am a daughter of the manse, where temperance is bred in the bone.”
“But not any more?”
“No. Not any more.” She didn’t elaborate.
They ordered wine, and once it arrived (the ubiquitous Chianti, there was no choice) and was opened and poured, Flynn said, “What shall we drink to?”
“Are you familiar with the Peninsular Toasts?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“The Army has a toast for every day of the week. One of my brothers was in the Army, which is how I know. I’m not sure why they’re so called—I expect they date from the Napoleonic War and the Peninsular Campaign—the battles of Corunna, Cuidad Rodrigo and so on, you know.
” (Flynn didn’t.) “Anyway, Monday is ‘Our Men,’ Tuesday is ‘Our Women,’ Thursday is ‘Our Swords’ and so on. And today, being Wednesday, the toast is ‘Our Noble Selves.’ ” They chinked glasses. “An excellent toast, don’t you agree?”
“I do.”
They were the only people in the restaurant, yet the food was extraordinarily slow to arrive.
There was evidence of a heated altercation taking place behind the chenille curtain, punctuated occasionally by the clashing of pots and pans.
Flynn wondered what it was about kitchens that seemed to make people so volatile.
His mother had often reserved the kitchen to vent her frustrations with her lot, and Ivy Shears had been prone to prolonged emotional complaints in the Wealdstone kitchen—dark mutterings about how she was forced to skivvy for other people when she had already been on her feet all day, working.
Stranded together at the dining-room table, the young Veronica would roll her eyes at Flynn, which was the closest they came to a friendly exchange in the whole short time he had lived there.
“They seem very emotional,” Maud Ogilvie said. “Italians do have that reputation, don’t they? Not like the British. Unless you call nostalgia an emotion. I expect one day we will even look back on the war with affection.”
“I never shall,” Flynn said.
“Nor I. Burma? The Railway? Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. Thank you.”
The wine began to do its work, encouraging an exchange of harmless personal histories while they waited to see if the food would ever arrive.
Flynn learnt that Maud Ogilvie was one of several children whose father had been a Church of Scotland minister on Mull.
She had left the island life thinking she might train as a missionary, but then had been “seduced” by clerical work and taken a job in the Ministry of Defence and then later in the War Office.
“We were relegated to the basement. I hardly saw daylight during the war. Fun in its own way. But enough about me. Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Harry. ”
The food arrived before they had got much further than Flynn’s account of his schooldays.
Before they had reached his London years and the News Chronicle, the waiter reappeared with their meatballs and spaghetti.
After silently depositing the plates in front of them, he returned to his kitchen lair, where the argument with his invisible boss continued.
Flynn wondered what Badger saw in this place. It certainly couldn’t be the ambience.
“I think he rather likes the déclassé nature of it,” Maud Ogilvie said. How did she always know so much about people? Flynn wondered. If she teamed up with the Boy, they could run MI5. What did she know about himself?
“I’ve never had Italian food before, have you?” she said.
“Before the war.”
“Oh, really? Do tell.”
“A cycling holiday. Camping. France, Switzerland, Italy.”
“How adventurous. On your own?”
“With a friend.” The “friend” was a lean, long-limbed woman called Cora with whom Flynn had almost been in love.
He could still recall Cora’s shapely tanned legs in their khaki shorts.
And the dry heat that radiated from her body as she wrapped herself around him at night beneath the stifling canvas of their tent.
(Perhaps not a memory to be shared with a daughter of the manse.) They had eaten ripe figs, picked from a tree growing wild by the side of a deserted, dusty road, the sticky juice running between their fingers.
Flynn had believed that the future was a promise, but it turned out to be a curse.
“Well, buon appetito, as I believe the Italians say.” She launched herself gamely at the mound of spaghetti in front of her, digging her fork in and twirling the strands awkwardly around her fork.
“This is quite fun, isn’t it? Come on, tuck in, Harry.
It tastes better than it looks, although the meatballs are rather rabbity. ”
Flynn winced at the amount of food confronting him. (“Rabbity” didn’t help.)
“You have a sensitive stomach, I think.”
He shrugged it off with his usual excuse—“an ulcer”—as it was hardly the right occasion to talk about starvation, and instead of elaborating, Flynn poured them both more wine and they clinked their glasses.
They ate in silent resolution for a while, until he became aware that she had put down her fork and was regarding him rather intensely.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, Harry?”
“What happened? Where?” (Hadn’t they agreed not to talk about the war?)
She leant forward and her spectacles glinted with the reflection of the candle flame. “To acquire that black eye,” she said. She seemed very keen to hear his answer, almost as though, like Badger, she was hoping for a confession.
“The honest truth? I don’t remember. I had a blackout. The whole night’s a blank.”
“Goodness. The whole night? You remember nothing at all?”
“Nothing.” Did he see the briefest expression of relief on her shrewd features?
Or had his imagination been primed into over-activity (some might say paranoia) by that black hole in his memory?
Badger had planted doubt in his mind with his talk of being in hot water, and now Maud Ogilvie had pumped it, rather successfully.
“Shall we order another bottle?” she said.
—
Dessert was grudgingly offered and willingly refused. No more diners had joined them, and Flynn realized they had spent so long talking that it was late. The waiter must be cursing them for keeping him from his bed, or whatever it was that he did after he left here.
The bill was summoned and when it eventually came it was brought by, as it turned out, Luigi himself.
Once out of the kitchen, all arguments behind the scenes forgotten, Luigi assumed the role of a congenial ma?tre d’.
Flynn could have sworn that he gave Maud Ogilvie a little nod of recognition.
If he did, it was not returned, and with admirable speed she took the bill before Flynn had a chance to do so himself.
They were going Dutch, he reminded her, but she said, “Ah, I’ve changed my mind.
And anyway, it was me that invited you, remember.
My treat. Next time you can return the favour. ”
Flynn watched her count out money carefully from her purse. He couldn’t help but be amused at her duplicity. She was a wily old bird. She had intended to pay all along, hadn’t she?
“A receipt?” she said sweetly to Luigi, who produced a little pad of paper and scribbled on it before handing the page over.
Maud Ogilvie glanced briefly at it, then folded it neatly and slipped it into her purse.
She claimed to have never been here before and yet there was an odd air of practised ritual about this silent exchange.
She turned to Flynn and smiled. “Ready to go, Harry?”
There was a smattering of rain in the air—not enough for umbrellas, but enough for them to hurry towards Charing Cross and Maud Ogilvie’s bus stop.
They didn’t have long to wait. As the bus heaved towards them, she shook his hand and said, “Thank you for this evening, Harry. I had a very nice time.”
“Likewise,” he said.
Flynn watched her as she stepped on to the platform of the bus and was swallowed up inside.
As the bus pulled away, he was surprised to see the now familiar figure of Archie Blinkhorn on the opposite side of the street.
Blinkhorn didn’t notice Flynn, as his attention was all on his female companion.
He had just succeeded in hailing a cab, and as he leant in to tell the driver his destination, Flynn caught a glance of the woman.
It was Jane Pargeter, the pre-Raphaelite beauty who had caught Badger’s eye in the Savoy.
The way Blinkhorn’s hand rested on the beauty’s back as he helped her into the cab suggested to Flynn that the evening was not over yet for either of them.
What on earth did a woman like that see in a man like Archie?
Money, perhaps, certainly not looks. Perhaps she was in the same profession as Leonora Kane.
She was wearing a blue evening dress. Norman Hartnell would not have approved. Neither, Flynn supposed, would Mitzi.
Archie caught sight of him and saluted. Even from this distance it looked ironic.