The Press Junket

The photograph was taken at ten to one in the morning outside a noodle place on Kingsland Road, and in it I am laughing with my mouth open and one hand on his forearm, which I have no memory of doing and which the photograph is very clear about.

We had gone there after the week-four service because it was the only thing open and because neither of us wanted to be the one who said goodnight first, and I had eaten a bowl of hand-pulled noodles at five to one in the morning in a plastic chair and had a better time than I have had at most dinners in my life. There was nothing in it. There was, obviously, a great deal in it, but there was nothing in it that a photograph was entitled to.

The headline was RECIPE FOR ROMANCE? and the piece was four hundred words and it was not cruel. It said we had been seen leaving a restaurant together in the small hours. It said the pairing had been controversial. It quoted, correctly, the line about technical proficiency, and it said that friends of the show described the atmosphere on set as electric, and there are no friends of the show, there is a press office.

Under the main picture there was an inset: a file photograph of a green-tiled frontage in Clerkenwell with a black awning, captioned Ashworth’s restaurant Tallow, 22 Cloudesley Row.

I read it at half past seven in the morning at a hotel in Soho, in a room with six other people in it, holding a cup of coffee, with a make-up artist doing something to my forehead.

Sorrel was 22 Cloudesley Row.

—

There is a thing that happens where your body knows before you do. My hand was steady. I put the cup down with great care and said, “Sorry, could you give me a moment,” to the make-up artist, and she said of course, and went and stood by the window, and I sat in a chair in a hotel room and looked at a photograph of a green-tiled frontage with a black awning where there used to be an oak one.

Green tiles. I chose those tiles. I went to a reclamation yard in Walthamstow on a Sunday in February with a man who was supposed to be my project manager and I chose four hundred green tiles off a pallet and I paid twelve hundred pounds for them out of a budget that did not have it.

They were still on the wall.

“Chef.” Sadie, at the door, clipboard. “They’re ready. It’s eight interviews, they’re twelve minutes each, and the first one’s a radio thing so you don’t have to worry about your—“

“Who’s running the junket?”

“The network’s press team, and there’s a consultant.”

“What consultant?”

“Mr Casswell,” said Sadie. “He’s been in since week three. He does the — he sits in on the interviews and then afterwards he tells them which bits to use.”

—

He was extremely nice to me.

That is the thing I had not braced for. I had built Miles Casswell over six years as a kind of weather, and what came across a hotel carpet at twenty to nine was a courteous man of about sixty-five in a good jacket with reading glasses pushed up into his hair, who said, “Chef Adebayo. I’ve wanted to meet you for six years and I have been dreading it for four, and I’d rather say that at the start than have it sit under the day.”

I did not say anything at all, which most people cannot sit inside for more than three seconds. He sat inside it quite comfortably, which told me more about him than anything else that morning.

“You wrote a line about me,” I said.

“I edited a piece about you,” said Miles Casswell. “I’ve edited about nine thousand pieces. I remember four of them and yours is one, and I’d be lying if I said that was because of remorse. It’s because it worked.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It worked. It’s the only sentence out of that column anybody can quote, and people are quoting it this morning, on the internet, at scale, because of a photograph of you laughing on Kingsland Road.” He said it entirely pleasantly, a man discussing a barometer. “I’m not proud of it and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s the trade. I’d cut it the same way tomorrow and I’d feel about it exactly what I feel now, which is not very much, and you’re entitled to think that’s monstrous. Most people your age do.”

“Does Simon know you’re here?”

“Simon has known since week three. He came and found me in the car park and told me, very calmly, that he wouldn’t work with me and that he’d be professional about it.” Casswell smiled. “He’s been professional about it. He has walked past me six times a day for a fortnight and said good morning every time. I taught him that, as it happens.”

Then he said, “Twelve minutes on the first one, they’ll ask about the fridge, and the honest answer is your best answer,” and went away to sit at the back of a room.

—

Roz rang in the ten minutes between the second and the third.

“Four things and I’ll be quick. One: the booking system at Ilé went over at half six this morning and has been over since, and you are now taking reservations into February, which four weeks ago you were not. Two: I have had calls from three papers and a podcast and I’ve said no to all of them. Three: the network’s press office would like to know whether you’d be comfortable with the phrase close working relationship, and my answer was that you’d be comfortable with the phrase no.”

“And four?”

“Four is the one I don’t enjoy.” Roz never softens anything, and she softened this, which is how I knew it was coming. “Are you sleeping with him?”

“No.”

“Right.”

“That’s it? Right?”

“That’s it, because that wasn’t the question I needed answered, it’s just the only one I’m allowed to ask.” Somebody said something to her and she said two minutes away from the phone. “Ines. There is a version of the next fortnight where you are a chef who raised a lot of money for a food charity, and there is a version where you are half of a photograph, and the second one is worth more to everybody in that hotel than the first one, including the people who like you. I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you which way the floor slopes.”

My mother rang twice during the same ten minutes and I did not answer, and at eight minutes past nine she sent a photograph of the newspaper spread open on her kitchen table with her hand in the frame, and no text at all, which from my mother is roughly four paragraphs.

—

I did four interviews.

I did them well, which is the part I am least proud of. I said the true things in the shape that was easiest to print. I was funny twice. I said that the Larder Trust needed forty-one thousand pounds more than it needed two chefs liking each other, which got written down in four notebooks and was, at the time I said it, entirely sincere and also a line.

In the fifth one a very pleasant man from a Sunday supplement said, “So — Tallow. You’ve eaten there?”

“No.”

“You should. It’s a beautiful room. He’s kept all the original tiling from the place that was in there before, which I always thought was—“

And I stood up.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to make a phone call. Genuinely — this isn’t a thing, I’m not walking out on you, I’ll do the rest of it, I need four minutes.”

I got as far as the fire stairs.

He was there inside ninety seconds, which meant somebody had gone and got him, and he came through the door already talking.

“Ines—“

“Is Tallow in Sorrel’s room?”

“Yes.”

Nothing else. No preamble. He stood on a concrete landing in a hotel in Soho with his hands at his sides and did not try to arrange it for me, and I found that I hated that almost as much as I would have hated the other thing.

“Three years,” I said.

“Three years in June.”

“You took the lease on my room.”

“I took the lease on an empty A3 unit in Clerkenwell that had been empty for twenty-two months and that four other people had turned down because the extraction needed forty thousand pounds spending on it.” He said it steadily. “That’s the true sentence and it is also a coward’s sentence, because you are asking me a different question and I know exactly what it is.”

“Then answer it.”

“There were nine sites,” said Simon. “I looked at nine over fourteen months. Two of them were better. One of them was cheaper and better. And I took that one, and I told my accountant it was the extraction, and I told Bilal it was the room, and I have never in three years said out loud to one living person why I actually did it, including to myself, at four in the morning, when I have had quite a lot of opportunity.”

A door went two floors up and somebody’s phone rang and stopped.

“Say it now,” I said.

“Because I could not leave it alone.” His voice did not do anything dramatic. “Because I had ended a restaurant in three hundred and forty words and then got a career out of it, and the room was standing empty with the tiles still on the wall, and I thought — and this is the part where you are entitled to think very badly of me — I thought that if I made something good happen in it, that would be a kind of repair. And it isn’t. It’s a man buying the scene of the accident.”

I put my hand flat on the cold wall of a fire stair and breathed for a moment.

“Have you changed the tiles?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because they’re the best thing in the room,” he said, “and because I wasn’t going to be the man who took them down as well.”

Somewhere above us Sadie’s voice said, very carefully, “Chef? They’ve got you for six more minutes and then there’s a break,” and I said, “Tell them four,” and she went.

I looked at him.

“Tonight,” I said. “After close. Yours. I want to stand in it.”

“Ines, you don’t have to—“

“I’m not asking your permission, I’m telling you when I’m coming.” I pushed off the wall. “Half past midnight. Don’t cook me anything. Don’t put a candle on anything. If I walk in there and there is one single arrangement in that room I will turn round and go home and you will never get another chance at this.”

“Half past midnight,” said Simon. “Nothing arranged. Understood.”

Then I went back in and did four more interviews, and I was good in all of them, and I could not tell you one word I said. At the end of the last one Miles Casswell stood up at the back of the room and put his reading glasses on and wrote something down, and did not look at me while he did it.