The Guildford Letter

Roz rang at ten to nine on the Monday and said, “I’m going to read you a letter and then I’m going to shut up,” which is not a thing she has ever said to me.

It had come to her office on Friday, on paper, from a firm in Guildford, on behalf of a Mr Gregor Pyne.

Dear Ms Adebayo,

You will not remember me except as a name on a document. I held forty per cent of the company that opened Sorrel and I withdrew from it in the spring of 2020. Mr Simon Ashworth came to see me at my home in August of this year, and again on the fourth of this month, and on both occasions he asked me to set down in writing an account of why I withdrew. I refused twice. I am doing it now, and I am doing it to you rather than to him, because it is your business and not his, and because I have thought about very little else for six weeks.

I instructed my solicitor to serve notice of withdrawal on the twelfth of March 2020. Mr Ashworth’s review was published on the twenty-first. The decision was therefore taken nine days before it appeared and had nothing whatever to do with it.

My reason was a schedule of dilapidations served by the landlord in the February, together with a drainage survey that put the liability for the rear stack and the party wall on the tenant. The figure my surveyor gave me was one hundred and forty thousand pounds. I was sixty-two years old and I did not want it.

I never corrected the record. I should have. I did not, because within a month of the closure everybody had settled on the explanation that a critic had ruined you, and that explanation suited me very well. It is easier to be a man who was unlucky than a man who walked away from a chef of twenty-four over a drain.

Mr Ashworth offered to meet my legal costs in drafting this. I have declined. I would not like you to think this letter was bought.

I am sorry. It is thirty years too late in the sense that matters and six years too late in every other.

Yours sincerely, G. R. Pyne

Roz did not say anything for a while, which was decent of her.

“He’s had it since Friday at the earliest,” I said.

“He’s had the content of it since August,” said Roz. “Read it again. He went in August, Ines. That’s before you started filming.”

—

He came to Ilé at twenty past ten. I had rung him and said four words, which were: “Come here. Now. Please.” I have wondered since whether the please made it worse.

He came in and looked at my face and stopped in the doorway.

“She’s written to you,” he said.

“He. Gregor Pyne wrote to me. On Friday, on paper, to my agent, because he thought it was my business and not yours, and he is sixty-eight years old and a stranger and he worked that out in six weeks.” I had the letter on the pass. I did not give it to him. “August.”

“August.”

“Say it properly.”

“I got the press release on a Tuesday in August like everybody else,” said Simon. “I read your name on it. And I did not sleep, and at about four in the morning I thought: before I stand in a room with her I would like to know exactly what I did. Not what people say I did. What I did. So I went and found the three investors, and two of them wouldn’t see me, and Pyne saw me on the second Sunday of August in a house in Surrey with a dog in it, and in the first twenty minutes he told me what’s in that letter.”

“And then?”

“And then I asked him to write it down, and he said no, and I went back on the fourth of October and asked him again, and he said no.”

“And you were going to tell me when?”

He did not dress it.

“After the finale.”

“After the finale.”

“Yes.”

“Simon, I took you to my father’s hall yesterday.” I heard my own voice go somewhere I do not let it go. “You stood on a chair in front of two hundred people because my dad’s ovens went off. You met my mother. And then you stood in a car park and told me a lie about a fish supplier, on a Sunday, and you did it well, and I did not notice for three miles.”

“That was Pyne’s solicitor,” he said. “Ringing to say the letter had gone.”

“I know that now.”

“I know you do. I’m not — “ He stopped. He put both hands on the back of a chair. “I’m not going to tell you that was a small lie. It was the whole thing in four seconds and you saw it.”

—

Here is what I said, in order, standing in my own kitchen with the fridges ticking.

“You didn’t do it for me. In August you had never had a conversation with me. You did it because you were about to stand in a room with a woman you had wronged and you wanted to know the size of it before you walked in, and that is a perfectly human thing and I would probably have done the same, and it is not a gift and you have never once called it what it is.”

“All right.”

“And then you got the answer, and the answer was less than you thought, and you have carried that around for two months like a man holding a plate he can’t put down, and every single day you decided not to give it to me. Through the rice. Through the tiles in that room. Through a kiss I asked you for out loud at half past one in the morning, which I would not have asked for if I had known you were standing there holding the fact that the last six years of my life were partly a story I had made up.”

“It isn’t partly a story you made up—“

“Don’t.”

“It is not.” He came off the chair. “He wrote a letter about a drain. He did not write a letter about four job offers that stopped, or about the word borrowing going round rooms you had to walk into, or about you not cooking your father’s food for four years. I did that. All of that is still mine and the letter doesn’t move one inch of it, and if you think I have been sitting on that paper enjoying being let off then you have got me entirely—“

“Then why didn’t you give it to me?”

And he said, “Because I thought that the day you read it you would have no further use for me.”

The fridge cycled.

“Say that again,” I said.

“You heard it.” His voice had gone flat, which is what happens to him when it is true. “The whole of what we are is built on a thing I did to you. I know what that makes me. I’ve known since about week three. And I thought — I actually sat in a car and thought this, so I may as well say it out loud — I thought, if I hand her that letter, the debt goes, and if the debt goes she has no reason to be in a room with me, and I would rather owe her for another fortnight.”

“That is the most cowardly thing anybody has ever said to me.”

“Yes,” said Simon. “It is.”

“And it isn’t even the worst of it.” I had started, and I was not going to be able to stop, and some cold part of me at the back was watching and taking notes. “The worst of it is that for three years you have been apologising to somebody who isn’t me. You built a woman. You built a chef of twenty-four who got ruined by a sentence, and you have carried her around and taken her to Surrey and put her in the room at Cloudesley Row and kept her handwriting on a cupboard door, and she is very easy to be decent to, Simon, because she doesn’t answer back and she doesn’t have a bad lease and she never says anything you’d have to disagree with.”

“Ines.”

“And then the actual one turned up in a railway arch in September, and within four days you had started managing her. Butter in my low fridge. Cardboard on a cold floor. A safety officer talked round for two hours so I wouldn’t have to. All of it good, all of it kind, all of it arranged, and not one single thing you have done for me since the eighteenth of September have I asked you for.” I could hear the rain on the flat roof over the dry store. “You don’t give people things. You give them the version of the thing that means they can’t say no to you.”

He stood in my kitchen with his hands at his sides.

“That’s fair,” he said.

“Don’t do that either.”

“What?”

“Say yes to everything I accuse you of inside four seconds. It is the same move as the butter, Simon. It costs you nothing and it takes the room off me.” My hands were shaking and I put them flat on the bench. “Be angry. You have got about six things and I can see every one of them from here, and you are going to take all six home and be reasonable about them on your own, because that is what you do.”

—

And then he said the other thing, and he had every right to, and I have needed a long time to be able to write it down.

“Ines. You have spent six years being a chef who was wronged.”

“Get out.”

“No, because you would say it to me and you’d be right to.” He did not raise his voice. “You are one of the four best cooks in this country. And at twenty-four you signed a ninety-one-thousand-pound lease on fifty-one covers in a street with no trade, with a finder taking a fee off both ends, and it would have closed, and you have never once in six years said that sentence out loud, because the other sentence is better. The other sentence has a villain in it. And I have been the villain and I have been glad to be, because it was the only thing I had that you wanted.”

Somewhere in the restaurant a delivery man knocked and went away.

“My father said the room was wrong,” I said. “Yesterday. At a sink.”

“I know. He said it to me in the car park while you were loading the trays.”

That is the exact moment I stopped being able to be in the room.

“Here is the only thing I am going to ask you for,” I said, and I was very calm, which frightened me more than shouting would have. “You do not do one more thing on my behalf that I have not asked you for. Not a letter, not a phone call, not a word to a journalist, not a quiet arrangement with a producer, not a kindness. If you think something needs doing, you come and say it to my face and I decide. That’s it. That’s the whole condition.”

“Ines—“

“Say yes or say no.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll hold it.”

“Good,” I said, and I picked up the letter off the pass and went out through my own back door into the yard, and stood with my hands on the bins in the rain, and by the time I came in he had gone, which is the only thing either of us got right that morning.