Chapter Six The Whirlwind
James called her three days after the party.
He had wanted to call her sooner and had picked up his phone to do just that seventeen times, but each time he had talked himself out of it.
He was worried it was too eager, too desperate and obviously the behaviour of a man who had thought of nothing else since watching the woman in a red dress step into a tender and disappear into the Mediterranean night.
On the third day, I intervened.
‘Just call her,’ I said. We were in James’s flat, I was watching rugby, James was just staring at his phone on the table. ‘You’re being pathetic.’
‘I’m not being pathetic. I’m being strategic.’
‘You’re being pathetic strategically. Which is worse. What’s the worst that can happen? She doesn’t answer. She says no. You feel embarrassed for a few days and then move on with your life.’
‘What if she’s changed her mind? What if she gave me the card just to be polite and she’s hoping I won’t actually use it?’
‘Then you’ll know. And you can stop moping about like a lovesick teenager and go back to being your normal useless self.’
James looked at the business card, which had taken up residence on his coffee table and which he had been carefully not touching for three days in case he wore away the ink.
‘What would I even say?’
‘Hello. This is James. We met at the party. Would you like to have dinner. It’s not complicated.’
‘It feels complicated.’
‘Everything feels complicated to you. That’s your problem.
You overthink things that don’t require thinking.
’ I stood up, crossed the room, picked up James’s phone and thrust it into his hands.
‘Call her. Now. Or I’ll to do it for you and I will tell her about the time you got your head stuck in the railings at Buckingham Palace. ’
‘I was seven.’
‘And yet the story remains hilarious. Call her.’
James called her.
???
She answered on the third ring.
‘Anastasia Kovalenko.’
‘Hello. Yes. This is James. James Ashworth-Pemberton. We met at the party. On the yacht. The Artemisia. You gave me your card. I’m not sure if you remember...’
‘I remember.’
‘Right. Good. Good. That’s good.’ James was aware that he was sweating.
He was sitting in his own flat, in comfortable clothes, with a beer in front of him and he was sweating as if he were running a marathon.
‘I was wondering if you might like to have dinner. Sometime. If you’re free.
If you’re not free, that’s completely fine, I understand you’re very busy, doing stuff and so forth. ..’
‘James.’
‘Yes?’
‘I’d love to have dinner.’
‘You would?’
‘I would, how about next week. Thursday works for me, if that suits you.’
‘Thursday. Yes. Thursday is perfect. Thursday is ideal. I will... I will make a reservation. Somewhere nice. Do you have any preferences? Dietary requirements? Strong feelings about cuisines?’
‘Surprise me.’
‘Right. Surprise you. I can do that. I’m very good at surprises.’
This was a lie. James was terrible at surprises. He had once tried to throw a surprise party for Freddie and accidentally told Freddie about it three separate times before the event. ‘I’ll send you the details.’
‘I look forward to it.’
She hung up. James stared at his phone for a long moment, then looked up at my expression of mingled amusement and despair.
‘I said I was very good at surprises.’
‘I heard.’
‘I’m not very good at surprises.’
‘I know.’
‘She said yes, though.’
‘She did.’
James allowed himself a small, private smile. ‘She said yes.’
‘Don’t get too excited. You still have to survive the actual dinner.’
???
The dinner was a disaster.
Well, the food certainly was. And to be fair, it was all down to the restaurant.
James had chosen a place called Botanica, which had been recommended by a colleague at work as ‘absolutely the hottest reservation in London right now.’ What the colleague had failed to mention was that Botanica, which James vaguely remembered as a cosy Italian had changed hands.
Now it was ‘the place’ for sterile business deals with overpaid bankers.
It was not a cosy romantic place and as for the food, there was nothing as simple as food, it was now a ‘molecular gastronomy experience’ which James would struggle to spell let alone explain.
The food, when it arrived, contained no recognisable food.
‘Deconstructed beef Wellington,’ James read aloud, his voice carrying a note of growing alarm. ‘Comprising: essence of pastry, beef foam, mushroom air and a single pea representing the duxelles.’
‘Representing?’ Anastasia asked.
‘I think it’s meant to be symbolic. The pea is standing in for the mushrooms. Philosophically.’
As Anastasia watched James try to find the actual beef in his beef Wellington, she did something unexpected.
She laughed.
‘This is terrible, isn’t it?’
‘I didn’t want to say anything, but I genuinely don’t know what I’m eating.’
‘I think that was technically the jus.’
‘I thought it was a napkin. I used to like this place,’ he said. ‘It was Italian. You could get spaghetti.’
‘What happened?’
‘Progress, apparently.’ He set down his menu.
‘Look, I’m going to be honest with you. I have no idea what any of this food is.
I made a reservation here because someone told me it was impressive and I wanted to impress you and now I’m realising that was a terrible strategy because I’m not impressive and neither, it turns out, is beef foam. ’
Anastasia looked at him for a moment. Then she laughed, really laughed, not the polite social laugh he’d heard at the party, but something genuine and unguarded.
‘Shall we leave?’ she said.
‘Can we do that?’
‘I don’t see why not. It’s a free country and I still have room to eat some actual food.’
‘Where would we go?’
‘I don’t know.’ She smiled. ‘Surprise me.’
???
They walked through the night and ended up getting takeaway fish and chips from a shop on the South Bank.
It was not the kind of place James would normally have chosen for a date.
The lighting was fluorescent. The tables were plastic.
The menu was written on a whiteboard in marker pen that had seen better days.
But the fish was fresh and the chips were hot and there was malt vinegar in squeezy bottles.
And somehow, sitting on a bench by the river with newspaper-wrapped parcels in their laps, it felt more right than any molecular gastronomy experience ever could.
‘This was the first thing I ate when I came to England,’ Anastasia said, gesturing with a chip.
‘Fish and chips. From a place near Victoria Station. I’d just arrived: no money, no contacts, nothing but a suitcase and a phone number that turned out to be disconnected.
I was hungry and I saw this shop and I went in and ordered fish and chips because it was the only thing on the menu I recognised. ’
‘How was it?’
‘Terrible. The fish was overcooked and the chips were soggy and it tasted like the oil hadn’t been changed in weeks.
’ She smiled at the memory. ‘But I sat there eating it and I thought: I’m in England.
I’m safe. I’m going to be all right. Then a seagull stole half my chips and I thought: this is a country where the biggest threat is seagulls. I can live with this.’
James found himself staring at her. At the way the streetlights caught her profile, at the way she held her chips like they were something precious, at the easy way she talked about arriving in a strange country with nothing and somehow making it work.
‘You’re extraordinary,’ he said, before he could stop himself.
She looked at him, surprised. ‘I’m not. I’m just... motivated.’
‘You keep saying that. Like it explains everything. But most people aren’t motivated enough to build a company from nothing. Most people aren’t motivated enough to start over in a new country with nothing but a suitcase. You did both.’
‘I didn’t have a choice.’
‘Everyone has a choice. You chose to survive. You chose to build something. That’s not nothing.’
She was quiet for a moment, looking out at the river. The Thames moved slowly past them, dark and ancient, carrying boats and history and the reflected lights of the city.
‘My grandmother used to say that survival is more than just a choice,’ she said finally. ‘It’s a refusal. You refuse to die. You refuse to give up. You refuse to let the world decide what happens to you.’ She turned back to James. ‘I’m very good at refusing.’
‘I believe you.’
‘And you? What are you good at?’
James considered this. ‘Finding good wine on boats. Making terrible restaurant choices. Talking too much when I’m nervous.’ He paused. ‘Being here, right now, with you. I think I might be good at that.’
She didn’t say anything. But her hand, resting on the bench between them, moved slightly closer to his.
He didn’t take it, but he didn’t move away either.
They sat there for a long time, eating fish and chips, watching the river, not quite touching but somehow closer than they had been all evening.
???
They saw each other three more times that fortnight.
I will spare you the details, partly because they are not mine to share and partly because watching a man fall in love is only charming for so long before it becomes insufferable.
What matters is that by the end of those two weeks, James had moved past nervousness and into something more dangerous: planning.
I watched all of this from the usual distance, close enough to see, far enough not to interfere.
James was happy. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy, in a way I had not seen before.
Not the manic happiness of a new hobby or a reckless bet, but the quiet happiness of a man who has found something that fits.
Whether it would last, I didn’t know. Whether Anastasia felt the same way, I couldn’t tell.
She was harder to read than James, well, everybody was harder to read than James and there were moments, even in those early weeks, when I caught something in her expression that I couldn’t quite name.
A watchfulness. A calculation. The look of someone who was happy but not yet sure she was allowed to be.
But James had a plan, James always had a plan and this one, as it turned out, involved a chateau.