The Southbank stall had been given a six-foot run of counter, one induction hob that ran hot on the left ring and cold on the right, and a queue that had started forming before Luca had finished setting out his boards, which told him more about how the last two years had gone than any headline had managed.
He liked festival cooking. He had told no one this in an interview, because it sounded like false modesty from a man with two restaurants, but there was something clean about a queue that didn’t care about your investor deck, only whether the thing in your hand tasted like it was worth the wait in the cold.
The trick with an outdoor hob was heat management, not skill — he’d learned that at nineteen doing markets with his father, long before Corvo had a postcode — and by ten o’clock he’d worked out that the left ring wanted the pan lifted every forty seconds or the butter would catch, and the right ring wanted patience it would never reward, and he’d rearranged his whole running order around a piece of equipment that didn’t care what either of them wanted. He wiped the counter down between orders out of habit rather than need, squared his knife roll to the edge of the board, and thought, not for the first time, that a kitchen was just a room where you kept telling the truth about heat until the truth stopped changing.
Hattie arrived at half eleven in a coat too good for standing outside all day, which told him she’d known that and worn it anyway, on the theory that looking slightly wrong for the weather read better on camera than looking prepared. She’d read that somewhere, or worked it out herself, which was worse, because it meant she thought about the mechanics of being watched with the same attention he brought to a sauce that had six minutes left before it split.
“You’re staring at my coat,” she said.
“I’m noticing your coat is doing a job.” He wiped down the section of counter nearest him, though it didn’t need it, and set his tongs parallel to the edge of the board without deciding to. “Most people dress for the weather. You’ve dressed for the photograph of the weather.”
“Thirty-three years old and you’ve just described my entire professional life back to me in one sentence.” She said it lightly, checking the little laminated schedule Kemi had printed for both of them, appearance one circled in red. “I should charge you for the insight.”
“Add it to the invoice. I’m thirty-six, I can afford it.” He plated the first order of the queue — smoked mackerel, a shard of rye, a green sauce he’d been tinkering with since March of last year — and didn’t look up. “You’ll notice I said the first part kindly.”
“You said it accurately. Kindness was incidental.”
A photographer detached herself from the loose ring of people with festival lanyards and phones and came round the side of the counter with the particular unhurried confidence of someone who did this for a living and had already decided where the light was best.
“Could you two—“ she gestured between them, then at the counter, “—maybe you’re handing her a plate, and could you look like you mean it?”
Luca had done this dozens of times in two years, mostly with journalists asking him to look like a man who’d recovered, which he had learned to do the way he’d learned knife skills, badly at first and then so well nobody could tell the difference. He plated a second mackerel, held it out, and watched Hattie’s face do something he hadn’t specified and couldn’t have directed if he’d tried.
She looked at the plate the way she must have looked, forty-one times, at a groom about to hear his own wedding vows read back to him — a fraction of held breath, a warmth arriving a half-second before the camera needed it, entirely constructed and entirely convincing, and Luca understood, watching it happen four inches from his own face, that whatever she’d told him at Corvo about writing other people’s love stories for a living, she had never once shown him what it looked like from the inside.
The shutter went twice. The photographer said thanks, love, and moved off towards the next stall’s better light.
“You’re good at that,” he said, when she’d gone.
“I write it for a living. Turns out I can also perform it.” She hadn’t quite let go of the smile, which interested him more than the smile itself had. “I don’t love that I’m good at it. I’d have preferred it to be harder.”
“Why?”
“Because if it’s easy, I don’t know when I’ve stopped doing it for the camera.” She said it fast, the way people say the true thing when they’ve decided to get it over with before they can edit it, and then reached for the schedule again as if the laminate could do something useful with her hands. “Forget it. Occupational hazard. What’s the sauce?”
He let her change the subject, because he recognised the manoeuvre — he’d built a career on the same one, redirecting a room towards the plate whenever the conversation drifted somewhere he hadn’t planned for it to go — and telling her he’d noticed would only have proved her right about needing to know when she’d stopped performing.
An older woman near the front of the queue, waiting on her second plate, leaned in without any pretence of not listening. “How long have you two been together?”
“Twelve appearances,” Hattie said, perfectly deadpan, before Luca could answer, “which is either three months or a very specific kind of forever, depending on the day.”
The woman laughed, delighted, assuming it was a joke about long relationships, and moved off with her mackerel, and Luca found himself grinning down at the pan in a way he hadn’t managed for a camera in two years, because it was the first true sentence either of them had been allowed to say out loud all morning, disguised well enough that only the two of them would ever know it hadn’t been a joke at all.
“Green sauce,” he said instead. “Sorrel, a bit of anchovy, more vinegar than sense. Try it before you decide you don’t like anchovy.”
She tried it before he’d finished the sentence, which he liked more than he expected to, and made a small sound that had nothing to do with any camera, because the last photographer had gone and the next one hadn’t arrived yet, and for four seconds neither of them was working.
“That’s obscene,” she said. “In the best sense of obscene. What’s it going on tonight?”
“Nothing. I made it for this. I don’t put anchovy that heavy on a menu that costs forty pounds a head, people complain.” He was already portioning the next round, hands doing the work without asking his attention for it, which left him free to notice that she’d asked what it was going on tonight as though there would obviously be a tonight, as though the day didn’t end when the cameras left. “Why. You wanting a private commission?”
“I’m wanting to know if you’re always this competent or if today’s a good day.”
“Today’s a good day,” he said, and didn’t examine, in front of her, which part of the day he meant.
Scene break
The stall closed at four. Kemi had warned them a print journalist might swing by for a quote, and none had, which left an unscheduled hour that neither the contract nor the laminated sheet had accounted for, and which Luca found himself unwilling to simply let end.
“There’s a two-ring burner in the volunteers’ tent,” he said, “and about four unused portions of everything I bought too much of. Come and eat something I didn’t make for anyone else.”
She looked at him for a second too long before she answered, the particular stillness he was starting to recognise as her doing the same thing he did with a plate — checking the whole thing over before deciding it could go out.
“That’s not on the schedule,” she said, but she was already following him.
The tent smelled of damp canvas and other people’s chip fat. He set the little burner going, cracked eggs he’d bought for a garnish nobody had used, found the last of the mackerel and the green sauce and a heel of the rye, and built her something that had no name and would never appear on a menu, because it was for one person and he hadn’t had a reason to cook for one person in two years. He hadn’t clocked that fact until his hands were already doing it — the file of the last time surfacing sideways, a stairwell, a folded piece of paper he’d read once and never taken out again — and he pushed the thought back down the way he pushed down a sauce that threatened to split, by paying closer attention to the pan.
“This isn’t festival food,” Hattie said, when he put the plate in front of her, no garnish, egg slightly too soft the way he liked it and hoped she would too.
“No.”
“What is it, then?”
“Lunch,” he said, which wasn’t an answer and was the only one he had.
She ate it slowly, in a way he found he was watching more closely than the register of his own hands usually allowed for anything that wasn’t a plate going out to a paying table, and when she’d finished she set the fork down parallel to the edge of the paper plate, which he noticed and said nothing about, because it would have meant admitting he did the same thing with cutlery that had never once cost him a thought before this exact moment.
“Kemi’s going to ask how it went,” she said. “I’m going to tell her the photographer got what she needed and the crowd was good for the group’s numbers.”
“That’s true.”
“It’s not the whole thing.”
“No,” he agreed, “it isn’t,” and neither of them offered the rest of it, and the not-offering sat between them for a moment that felt, to Luca, considerably longer than it had actually lasted.
His phone buzzed. Kemi, a screenshot: the two of them at the counter, her looking at the plate the way she’d looked at it for the camera, him not performing anything at all, underneath which somebody had written okay, actually adorable and it had eleven thousand likes climbing as he watched.
A second message landed under the first, thirty seconds later, in the clipped register Kemi used when she was pleased and unsettled by the same fact at once. This is what we wanted. Don’t overthink why it’s working this well after one appearance. He read it twice. It was good advice and he had no intention of taking it.
He turned the phone so Hattie could see it.
“That’s the good version of us,” she said, studying it with the same flat, professional attention she must give a first draft. “The one that goes out.”
“Is there a bad version?”
“There’s a true version,” she said. “I’m not sure yet if it’s the same one.”
She said it like a woman noting a discrepancy in a document, filing it for later, and Luca found himself hoping, with an intensity that startled him more than anything that had happened in front of a camera all day, that when she worked out the answer, she’d tell him before she told anyone else.
“Market walk’s a fortnight out,” she said, folding the laminated schedule back into her coat, the good one that had done its job. “Appearance two. Kemi says low-key. No stall, no burner, just the two of us pretending to have opinions about oranges.”
“I have genuine opinions about oranges.”
“Of course you do.” She was almost at the tent flap, and she paused there with the particular economy of someone who had decided to say one true thing before the day reverted to schedule. “Thank you for lunch. The real version, I mean. Not the one that goes out.”
Then she was gone, back towards the crowd and whatever car Kemi had waiting, and Luca stood over a two-ring burner in a tent that smelled of chip fat, scraping a pan he had no professional reason to have used, and thought that a fortnight was, all things considered, a very long time to wait to find out what she’d decided about the true version.