The Best of Friends by Joanna Trollope Page A

accounts. He drew a lot while he thought, doodling drawings with balloons of thought drifting out of people’s heads, and played with a string of worry beads he had bought once in the harbour at Piraeus, on a brief holiday with Hilary, made of rough blue glass beads with little watchful black-and-white eyes set in each one. There was a grey marble egg too, and a wooden acorn whichunscrewed to reveal a smaller one, turned from a different wood, and a red-painted clay dragon made by Gus at primary school and then, in a row, his notebooks, battered, thumbed, scruffy with use and scribbles, the notebooks he had started when he had first said to Hilary, pregnant with George and not in the least responsive to much independence on Laurence’s part, that he was going to learn to cook.
    â€˜Where will you learn?’ Hilary had said, rubbing her spectacles clean on the hem of her red-drill maternity smock.
    â€˜Here,’ he said. ‘By myself.’
    He’d bought books, books by food scientists and food psychologists as well as books by cooks. He’d made endless lists of sensual responses to food. ‘“Smell,”’ his first notebook started. ‘“Seven main responses. Flowery, peppermint, burnt, rotting, spicy, resinous and citrus.”
Pears Encyclopaedia 1924.
’ He’d bought seven knives and practised until he reckoned that with herbs and garlic at least he could get in five or six chops a second. He bought utensils in cast iron and stainless steel and copper and bamboo and china and glass and lectured Hilary on the difference between salting and brining, and marinading and macerating, while presenting her, at the most impossible times of day, with spoonfuls of bone broth or stewed venison or lemon chutney on which he demanded her immediate opinion. He read Eliza Acton and M. F. K. Fisher and Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, covering the pages with fervent exclamations in soft black pencil, and when Adam was born he’d arrived at Whittingbourne Hospital not with flowers or champagne or the string of garnets Hilary had rather pointedly admired in a jeweller’s window in the market place, but with a cake, a vast, soft, bread-like cake of his own invention full of Maraschino-soaked cherries with Adam’s namewritten across the top in curls of crystallized orange peel.
    He had loved those years. He had felt like an alchemist, and sometimes a sorcerer, and the kitchen was all at once a temple and a laboratory and an engine room. He was perfectly happy to let Hilary do what she wanted to the hotel and, in large measure, to the boys who learned, very early, that if he was in the kitchen, their father was impenetrably preoccupied. The change came inevitably, with expansion. The hotel grew from seven bedrooms to twelve and the first of a series of Steves and Kevins had come, fresh from technical colleges, clutching their City and Guild qualifications, to do things in the kitchen at Laurence’s instruction but never, quite, to his satisfaction. They joked and smoked and played football with empty Coca-Cola tins and, quite without intending to, took away the privacy and intensity of the kitchen as well as some of its magic. After six months, most of them drifted on, certain, out of some herd instinct, as George had been, that life, whatever it was, was not to be found in Whittingbourne but only in Birmingham or London. Then Laurence had to start all over again with two new ones, two new Steves and Kevins, taught by colleges to thicken sauces with flour and to cater, rather than to cook. Most of them told Laurence they’d chosen catering because there was always work in catering; however bad a recession, people had to eat.
    In a long procession of them, Laurence thought, and not without a good deal of self-reproach, there had only been a handful who had worked with both comprehension and curiosity, one of them – a boy from a home, Laurence suspected, where the only