After the Cameras Cut

He asked to come and see me on the Sunday, which is the day Ilé is shut, and he asked by text, and the text said: I’ve got a problem and I want your judgement on it before I do anything. Not a proposal. A problem. Sunday, any time, anywhere, and you can say no.

I said two o’clock.

He came with a cardboard folder, which was so entirely unlike him — a man who has never in his life needed a prop — that I understood before he sat down that he was frightened.

“Right,” he said. “I’m going to do this in the wrong order on purpose, because if I do it in the right order it’ll sound like a pitch and you’ll be sitting there working out how to be kind to me.”

“Go on.”

“I want to open a restaurant with you.” He said it fast and then made himself slow down. “That’s the thing at the end. I’m putting it at the front because you’ve spent six weeks watching me arrange the order of things and I’d rather you had it cold. And now I’m going to tell you why I can’t do it, and then you’re going to tell me whether the idea is any good, and I would genuinely rather have a hard answer from you today than a kind one in March.”

“What’s in the folder?”

“Three things,” said Simon, “and you’ll hate the second one.”

—

The first thing was numbers.

A hundred-and-ten-cover room with a real kitchen costs, in London, between six hundred and fifty and nine hundred thousand pounds to open, depending on the extraction and on how much of a liar your surveyor is. He had spreadsheets. He had two years of Tallow’s actual P&L with the bad quarters in it, unhidden, and a line at the bottom in his handwriting that said this is not enough and I know it.

“I’ve got two hundred and ten thousand in cash and a restaurant,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the whole of me. If I don’t sell Tallow there is no room.”

“And the second thing.”

He put a letter on the table.

An offer for Tallow: lease, fit-out, name, goodwill. Three hundred and forty thousand pounds from a group with four sites and an appetite for a fifth.

“They’d keep Bilal,” he said, “at what they’re calling a reduced package, which I have had explained to me twice and which is fourteen thousand a year less than he’s on now, for the same hours, cooking the same food, in the same room, under a name that stays on the door for about a year before they change it.”

“Have you told him?”

“I told him on Tuesday, because he is entitled to know that a letter exists.” He looked at his hands. “He said congratulations. He said it twice. He asked what the finance date was and then he went and did the fish, and he has been completely normal with me for five days, which is how I know.”

“And the third thing?”

“The third thing is why the first two hurt.”

He put a single sheet on the table. A commercial agent’s particulars, two photographs, a floor plan I recognised immediately because I had been standing in it for six weeks.

Arches thirteen and fourteen, Halliwell Yard, SE1. To let on a fifteen-year term. Available from the ninth of January.

“The production’s licence ends on the twentieth of December,” he said. “The landlord wants the whole run let as one and nobody will take two arches with a party wall in the middle. Except there isn’t a party wall in the middle any more, because in August I spent four days and about nine hundred pounds of somebody else’s money getting a cable hole turned into a doorway, for reasons I told everybody were about service flow and were about service flow and were also, if I am being completely honest with you, because I liked standing in that building.”

“The extraction’s in.”

“The extraction is in, the three-phase is in, the drainage is in, the deck ovens are owned by a hire company that would rather sell them than collect them, and the fit-out that a television company paid four hundred thousand pounds for is sitting in there with nobody to use it.” He put his hands flat on the table. “It is the best room I have ever seen in my life, it is available in January, and everything I own that could pay for it is a restaurant with Bilal Haddad standing in the middle of it. I have known all of this since Thursday and I have not slept.”

—

I sat with it for a while, in my own dining room, in the dark, with the heating off because it was Sunday.

“Sell it to Bilal,” I said.

“Ines—“

“Not to a group. To Bilal. Eighty per cent of that food is his and everybody who works in that room knows it and you have told me so yourself.” I pulled the letter across and turned it over and wrote on the back of it, because there was nothing else to write on. “He hasn’t got three hundred and forty thousand pounds. He hasn’t got forty. So you don’t sell it for three forty. You sell it to him for two hundred, and you take fifty up front, and he pays you the rest over nine years out of the profit of a restaurant that is finally allowed to be his, and you take a three per cent interest that makes your accountant stop shouting.”

Simon did not say anything for a long moment.

“That’s a hundred and forty thousand pounds less,” he said.

“Yes.”

“And it’s fifty up front instead of three forty, which means I have two hundred and sixty thousand pounds and not five hundred and fifty, which means there is no restaurant. Not next year. Not the year after.” He said it steadily, because he had obviously already done it. “It means I’d be somebody who cannot do the thing he has just told you he wants to do, for about three years, and I would be telling you that thirty seconds after telling you I wanted it.”

“I know exactly what it means.”

“Then why are you telling me to do it?”

“Because it’s right,” I said, “and because you already knew it was right and you came here to have somebody else say it so that it wasn’t you being noble at your own expense in front of the woman you’re trying to impress, and I am not going to let you have that either.”

He laughed. It came out of him badly, halfway to something else.

“God,” he said. “You’re an exhausting person.”

“Yes.”

—

And then I said the rest of it, which took me four goes, and I am putting it down here in the shape it finally came out in and not in the three false starts.

“Here is what I want, and I’m going to say it in a straight line, because I have spent thirty years being extremely good at making sure nobody ever finds out what I want, and it has cost me a sous chef, a father I see four times a year, and six years of cooking in a way that was designed to answer a man in a newspaper.

“I want the restaurant. Not in place of Ilé — Ilé is thirty-four covers and it is mine and it will stay mine and Deja’s old station is going to somebody in January. The other thing. A hundred and ten covers, a room with a doorway in the right place, and a pass that somebody is standing at who knows what a table is doing at nine o’clock. I have wanted that since about eight o’clock last Sunday night and I have known it for four days and I have not said it out loud to anybody, including my mother, who asked me directly.

“And I want you. That is a separate sentence and I am not going to run them together, because they are not the same want and you deserve to have them handed to you separately so that you can answer them separately.

“And there are two conditions and they are both real.

“One. I am not doing any of it if you are settling a debt. Not a shred of it. If any part of this is a man making something good happen in a room to square a thing he did when he was twenty-seven, then I would rather have nothing, and I will know, Simon. Within a year I will know, and so will you, and it will poison every service we ever cook.

“Two. You don’t decide things for me. Not ever again, not kindly, not at four in the morning with a spreadsheet, not because you’ve worked out what I’d say. You come and you say it to my face and I get to refuse you, and you have to be able to survive being refused. That’s the whole of it. That’s the only thing I have ever wanted from anybody and I have never once asked for it, because asking for it means somebody could say no.”

The heating ticked in a cold room.

“I’m going to answer the second one first,” said Simon, “because it’s easier and I want to get it out of the way and be honest about the fact that it’s easier.”

“Go on.”

“Yes. And I’ll be bad at it. I’ll be bad at it for about two years and you will have to keep catching me, and the only thing I can promise is that when you catch me I won’t be charming about it.”

“And the first one?”

He was quiet for a long time.

“The debt’s gone,” he said. “It went on Sunday morning at seven o’clock and I did that deliberately and I knew exactly what I was doing while I did it. That piece cost me a column and a book and a festival and about forty thousand pounds and it bought me one thing, which is that there is now nothing left that I owe you. It’s all been said in public with my name on it and there is no ledger any more.” He looked up. “So there is nothing standing between you and me except that I would like to cook in a room with you for the rest of my life and I have been in love with you since about two o’clock in the morning in the first week of October, which was the night you put a bowl of soup in front of a man you had every reason to leave standing in the rain.”

“That is a stupid detail to have kept.”

“It’s the one I’ve got.”

I got up and put the kitchen light on, because it had gone properly dark and because I wanted to be able to see his face for the next bit.

“One more thing and then we’ll go and walk about,” I said. “You keep saying I have got two hundred and sixty thousand pounds, as though the sum has one name in it.”

“Ines—“

“Ilé has four years of audited accounts, a lease with six years to run and a covers list that has not had an empty Friday since August. Roz has had three approaches since October and has said no to all of them without asking me, because that is what I pay her for and because in October I would have said no too.” I leaned on the doorframe. “I can raise the other half. Not all of it, and not by Christmas, and it will mean a personal guarantee that frightens me. But I can raise it.”

He did not say anything.

“Which means the room is half mine,” I said, “and on the thing I said in a railway arch in September about having final say on anything with my name on it — that stops. Not as a favour. In writing, on the day we sign, because a restaurant with two names over the door and one person who can overrule the other is not a partnership, it is a job with better manners.”

“You’re sure.”

“No,” I said. “Ask me again in January and I’ll still say no, and I’ll still sign it.”

—

We walked back to mine because it had stopped raining and because neither of us said we were going to.

At the door I got my keys out and did not put them in the lock.

“I am going to ask you in,” I said, “and you are going to hear the whole sentence before you answer it, because I have had six weeks of watching you say yes to people inside four seconds.”

“I’m listening.”

“Come in. Stay. And at seven o’clock tomorrow morning you are going to have to ring Bilal Haddad and offer him a restaurant for two hundred thousand pounds, from my kitchen, with me standing there, and I am not going to be tactful and go into another room.”

Simon Ashworth looked at me on a doorstep in Camberwell at ten past six on a Sunday evening in October.

“Yes,” he said.

I put the key in the lock.