The Apology

Week three went out clean. My pass, sixty covers, last plate away at twenty-two minutes past nine, and at ten o’clock Esme Enright sent a photograph of a whiteboard in the Lewisham hall with a running total on it in marker pen, and the total was forty-one thousand and change, and nobody said anything about the forty thousand that was not on it.

We wiped down. The crew went. Deja went at twenty to twelve with her hood up, and at the door she said, “Text me when you’re home,” to me, in a voice that meant something else, and I said I would.

Then it was me and him and a kitchen with the extraction off, which is the quietest a kitchen ever is.

“Rule two,” I said. “I’m asking.”

He put down the cloth.

“Here?”

“Not here. There’s a bench on the river wall past the second arch. There’s no lens between here and it and there’s none on it, because I checked this afternoon, and if you tell me you checked it too I’m going to find that unbearable.”

“I checked it on Friday,” said Simon.

—

It was cold and there was a barge going down with its lights on and the tide was out, and the river at Bermondsey at midnight smells of diesel and mud and something older underneath.

He did not perform any of it. That is the thing I keep coming back to. He sat on a bench with his forearms on his knees and told it the way you would give a statement.

“Miles Casswell was thirty-one years at that paper and nineteen as food editor. When I was twenty-six he took a blog I’d been writing for nothing and gave me six hundred words on the last Saturday of the month and called it The Second Sitting, and for eighteen months I thought I was the luckiest man in London, and I was right, and that’s the part nobody ever believes about how these things happen. There was no conspiracy. There was a man who was kind to me and I would have done anything he asked.”

“And in the March he asked.”

“In the March he said the column had gone soft, which was true. He said, go to Sorrel, and we both knew what that meant, and you are not getting the version of this where I did not know.” He looked at the water. “I went twice. I paid both times. I wrote fourteen hundred words in four days and I rewrote the middle of it about nine times, because I could not get the thing I actually thought into a sentence.”

“Which was.”

“That it was the most technically accomplished cooking I had eaten in a room that size in two years, and that I came out of it not feeling anything, and that I could not work out whether that was the food or me.” He rubbed his face. “That’s the honest version. And what I filed was: technically proficient and entirely soulless. Which is a better sentence and a worse thought, and it is mine, and I am not going to stand here and tell you an editor made me write it. I wrote it. I was twenty-seven and I liked the noise a good sentence makes and I put a woman’s first restaurant underneath one.”

“Do you still think it?”

“No. I thought it was wrong about four years ago and I have thought it was badly wrong since about the second time I ate at Ilé.” He held a hand up before I could say anything. “That’s not a compliment and I’m not paying twenty pounds for it. It’s evidence about me. I was a good writer who could not yet tell the difference between food that wasn’t moving him and food that wasn’t for him.”

A train went over behind us.

“Say the other line,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment.

“He sent the proof back on the Thursday,” he said. “He’d taken fourteen hundred words to three hundred and forty, which is his right, that’s what an editor does. And in the second paragraph there was a sentence that had not been in anything I wrote.”

“Say it.”

“Here is a chef borrowing a grandmother she does not have.”

“And what did you do.”

“I emailed him. One email, at about half past four in the afternoon, and I said, I don’t think this line is mine and I’m not sure it’s fair. And he wrote back in four minutes and said: it’s the line people will remember.” Simon put his hands together. “And I read that, and I thought about the contract that was supposed to be signed in the June, and I did not reply, and it ran on the Saturday with my name at the top of it and my photograph next to it, and that is the whole of what I did. I didn’t write it. I let it stand. And I have had six years to work out which of those is worse and I think it is obviously the second one, because he was doing his job badly and I was doing mine dishonestly.”

“And afterwards?”

“Afterwards I got the contract.” He said it flatly. “In the June, as promised. Eight thousand a year and a page with my face on it, and for the next three years I was the man who wrote the Sorrel review, and it opened every door I walked through, and I let it.”

“You knew it had closed.”

“I read it in a trade email on a Tuesday. Fourteen months, and it closed, and there were two lines about it under a piece about a burger chain expanding into Leeds.” He looked at his hands. “I told myself it was the lease, or the money, or a partner, because those are the things that close restaurants. And then I did nothing at all for three years, which is the only genuinely inexplicable part of this, and I have talked to one professional about it and I still can’t give you a better answer than that a man can be ashamed of something and go on being paid for it every month at the same time, quite comfortably, for a long while.”

“What stopped it?”

“A piece I couldn’t file.” He shifted on the bench. “Small place in Margate, run by two people in their sixties, forty covers. It was not good. It was not good in a way that would have made an extremely funny eight hundred words, and I sat in the car afterwards in the car park and I could see one of them through the window doing the till, and I drove home and I rang Miles and said I wasn’t going to write it, and he said, fine, write me the one about the Italian on Charlotte Street instead. And I said no, I mean I’m not going to write any of them.”

“How did he take it?”

“Beautifully,” said Simon. “He said I’d lost my nerve and that I’d be back inside a year and that he’d keep the slot warm. He still says it. He said it in August.”

—

Here is what I said, eventually, with my hands in my sleeves, watching a barge.

“I agreed with the first line.”

He turned his head.

“For about two years,” I said. “Not immediately. Immediately I wanted to break something. But by about the November I had read it enough times to start believing it, and I thought: he’s right, I’m a very good technician and there’s nobody home. And I rebuilt everything. That’s what Ilé is. Ilé is a restaurant designed from the ground up by a woman trying to prove one sentence wrong, and it is the best work I have ever done, and I will never be able to entirely separate it from you, and I hate that more than I hate anything else that came out of that Saturday.”

“Ines—“

“I’m not finished.” I made myself say the next part in order. “The second line is different. The second line is not a bad opinion. The second line went round. It was funny, you see. People repeated it. It was repeated to me, at a party, in the November, by a man who thought he was being sympathetic. And within four months I had been asked twice by people offering me work whether I was going to do the Nigerian thing again, in inverted commas, with their voice doing the inverted commas, and I said no both times.”

He said nothing at all, which was correct.

“My father’s mother died seventeen years before I was born,” I said. “I never met her. I don’t have one recipe from her and I never claimed I did. My grandmother is a woman from Bilbao called Inés who taught me to soak salt cod in her sink and who I am named after, and none of that is anybody’s business, and it was in a national newspaper as a joke about whether I was allowed to cook my own father’s food.”

“I know.”

“You don’t, though. You know it as a fact.” I got up, because I could not sit down any longer. “I stopped cooking it. Do you understand what I’m saying? For four years I did not put one dish of my father’s on a menu, anywhere, because I had been told by a paper with a circulation of four hundred thousand that it would look like borrowing. I cooked French. I cooked British produce and I let people say restrained about me for four years, and I built a reputation on restraint, and I was extremely good at it, and every single bit of it was a man’s sentence wearing my whites.”

Simon stood up too. He did not come any closer.

“I’m not going to forgive you,” I said.

“No.”

“And I’m not going to tell you it’s fine, or that you were young, or any of the other things that would let you put it down. You don’t get to put it down. You asked me for a room with no lens in it and this is what’s in the room.”

“I didn’t ask you to take it off me,” he said. His voice had gone, slightly, and he let it. “I have never once asked you for that. I wanted you to have all of it, because you had three hundred and forty words and I had the other side, and it seemed to me the least I owed you was the whole file.”

“Then you’ve delivered it.”

“Then I’ve delivered it.”

We stood on a river wall at ten past one in the morning, two feet apart, not touching, with everything said.

“Thursday,” I said.

“What about Thursday?”

“Week four menu. I’m changing the third course.” I picked up my bag. “My father cooks a party rice — smoked, over wood, forty minutes of him standing over a drum in a church hall car park with a piece of roofing tin for a lid. I’ve watched him do it two hundred times and I have never put it on a menu in my life. It’s going on this one, and it’s going on with his name on it, and you are going to help me build a way to smoke thirty kilos of rice in a railway arch with an extraction system designed by a television company.”

He looked at me for a long moment.

“That’s going to set the fire alarm off,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Repeatedly.”

“Yes.”

“Right,” said Simon Ashworth, and he was smiling, and I walked off up the river path before I had to decide what to do about that.