“True,” Adam says, popping a puff into his mouth. “The Cotswolds are overrated.”
“Adam!” Gemma says with mock outrage. “They are gorgeous, Mebs. They’re like little fairy-tale villages. I live there, actually. You have to go.” She turns to Alain. “You can take her next time you go.”
“Aiya, no, he has better things to do,” Mebel mutters, shooting Alain an apologetic look while at the same time glaring at Gemma.
Alain laughs. “Better things to do than showing a beautiful woman around a beautiful town? I think not.”
The straightforwardness of Alain’s words makes Mebel almost choke on her food. She quickly takes a gulp of wine to keep herself from coughing, and when she looks up, Alain has excused himself from the table and the next course is being served.
My goodness, her mind warbles.These Western men are—are incorrigible!
Unfortunately, as her mind spits out the wordincorrigible, another part of her mind whispers:Exciting!
She barely tastes the smoked mackerel dish, though judging from the reactions of her friends, it seems to be life-changingly good.
“It’s the cream of cauliflower for me,” Bella says. “It’s like they took the soul of cauliflower and concentrated it and crushed it and—god, how is cauliflower this good?”
“It’s just roasted pureed cauli,” Bruce says with a shrug. “Nothing to it. I bet I could re-create it.”
This, at least, snaps Mebel back to the present moment. Nothing quite like a pompous comment from Bruce to snatch one’s attention. Mebel takes a smidgen of the pureed cauliflower, and it is indeed life-changingly good, precisely because she’s never once given a second thought to cauliflower. As far as vegetables go, it’s one of the most unassuming, neither slutty like artichokes nor fashionable like the broccolini. But to take such a humble vegetable and turn it into what can only be described as something this sensual? My god. Mebel’s loins are shivering with excitement, and Mebel doesn’t even know what loins are and has been unconvinced, up until now, that she is in possession of any.
As the meal goes on, Mebel is surprised to find that she’s actually enjoying the company of these youths. Even though they are a third of her age, they possess an unexpected amount of wisdom and self-assurance that Mebel definitely did not have at their age. Hell, she’s not sure she even has it now. Part of her is jealous of their confidence. Mebel has only ever been confident of one thing: that she was raised to be a trophy wife and therefore things like her interests and her sense of humor won’t be defined until she finds her husband, who will shape them for her. But here, Gemma and Bella chat with as much passion as the boys do, their faces lit up and animated, full of passion as they touch on everything from politics to family life.How refreshing, Mebel thinks.
“Mebs, what about you?” Bella says.
Mebel blinks. “What about me?”
“Well, while you’ve been sitting there dissociating,” Adam says, “we’ve been talking about why we’re here. I’m here because I’ve wanted to be a chef ever since I watchedRatatouille, and Bella wants to be a chef—”
“Since I won my county’s baking competition at age nine,” Bella says with a confident grin. Mebel winks at her. She likes Bella. Bella’s smile widens before she turns to Bruce. “And Bruce here wants to be a chef because he didn’t make it into uni.”
Bruce, wineglass at his lips, sputters. “That is not true! I’m here because I want to learn how to cook.”
They all give him incredulous looks.
“What?” Bruce says.
“The number of times you’ve called cooking ‘menial labor’…” Adam muses.
“I’ve heard you calling chefs ‘the help,’ ” Bella says.
Bruce looks like he’s about to say something he’ll end up regretting. Had Mebel been in her twenties, she would’ve gotten on the anti-Bruce ride, but as she watches Bruce’s face turning red in the dim lighting of Le Provençal, all she sees is an insecure, scared kid. She sees Sammy at Bruce’s age, his cheeks still retaining much of the buccal fat of youth that makes him look like a little boy. She recalls the terrifying sensation of free-falling that comes with graduating high school and not having a clear direction of where to go next. In a way, Mebel had been lucky precisely because she’d been prescribed such a clear goal that she’d only been too happy to comply with. Without one, she isn’t sure how she would’ve turned out. And now, here is this young person flailing in an ocean, probably filled with self-doubt and wondering where the hell to go from here.
“Why you like cooking, Bruce?” Mebel says.
For a moment, it looks as though Bruce is about to argue or come up with some other response to save face. Mebel keeps her face earnest, hoping she is channeling motherly concern and zero traces of judgment. She sees the fight leak out of him. He sags a little, then says, “I don’t know. I didn’t do well enough on my A levels to get into any decent uni, and I didn’t want to go to a technical school, so…” He shrugs. “I know it’s not a great reason to go.”
“Well, is better than my reason,” Mebel says. “Mine is to win back my husband from our chef.”
“What?” they all say in unison.
“Okay, there is so much to unpack here?” Adam says. “You need to tell us from the beginning.”
Even Bruce looks like he’s listening intently, his expression a cross between concern and curiosity. And so Mebel does tellthem, going as far back as when they first hired Wendy. Mebel had been the one to find Wendy, and had been so proud of her decision to hire her. Wendy had gone to culinary school in Thailand and was adept at cooking everything from Asian food to Middle Eastern kabobs to lasagnas, and Mebel had been so happy with Wendy’s dishes, had thought that hiring Wendy was yet more proof that she, Mebel, was the best wife that any man could hope for. “I thought maybe because I cannot cook, so okay, I hire someone who can,” Mebel says, running the tip of her index finger along the stem of her wineglass. “But then turn out she can do more than cook.”
“Shit, Mebel,” Gemma says after a long pause. “That sucks.”
“Yes, it does,” Mebel says.
