Only my stomach, I thought. And my pride.
“Just wondered,” I said. Ms. Milne is not going to be happy. No kitchen to inspect and no leftover food to test. I wasn’t sure whether I should be pleased or disappointed. With none of the offending material to analyze, it couldn’t be proved that my food was responsible for the poisoning. But, then again, it couldn’t be proved that it wasn’t.
“Where do you want all this stuff?” he asked, waving a hand at the row of wire cages.
“Glass-fronted boxes 1 and 2 on the second floor of the Head On Grandstand,” I said.
“Right.” He went in search of the elevator.
As the name suggested, the Head On Grandstand sat near the finish line and looked back down the track, so that the horses raced almost directly towards it. The boxes had the best view of the racing and were the most sought after. The Delafield tractor makers had done well to secure a couple of boxes side by side for their big day.
I wandered past the magnificent Millennium Grandstand towards the racetrack manager’s office. The whole place was a hive of activity. Last-minute beer deliveries to the bars were in progress, while other catering staff were scurrying back and forth with trays of smoked salmon and cold meats. The groundsmen were putting the finishing touches to the flower beds and again mowing the already-short grass in the parade ring. An army of young men was setting up tables and chairs on the lawn in front of a seafood stall, ready for the thousands of racegoers who would soon be arriving for their day out. Everything looked perfect, and normal. It was only me that was different. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.
I put my head through the open door of the manager’s office. “Is William around?” I asked a large woman who was half standing next to and half sitting on the desk. William Preston was the racetrack manager and had been a guest at the function the previous evening.
“He won’t be in ’til eleven, at the earliest,” she said.
That sounded ominous, I thought. The racetrack manager not being in until eleven o’clock on 2,000 Guineas day.
“He’s had a bad night, apparently,” she went on. “Something he ate didn’t agreed with him. Bloody nuisance, if you ask me. How am I meant to cope on my own? I don’t get paid enough to cope on my own.”
The telephone on the desk beside her ample bottom rang at that moment and saved me from further observations. I withdrew and went back to the delivery truck.
“Right,” said the man from Stress-Free, “all your stuff’s up in the boxes. Do you want to check before signing for it?”
I always checked deliveries. All too often, I had found that the inventory was somewhat larger than the actuality. But today I decided I’d risk it and scribbled on his offered form.
“Right,” he said again. “I’ll see you later. I’ll collect at six.”
“Fine,” I replied. Six o’clock seemed a long way off. Thank goodness I had already done most of the preparation for the steak-and-kidney pies. All that was needed was to put the filling into the individual ceramic oval pie dishes, slap a pastry cover over the top and shove them into a hot oven for about thirty-five minutes. The fresh vegetables had already been blanched and were sitting in my cold-room at my restaurant, and the asparagus was trimmed and ready to steam. The individual small summer puddings had all been made on Thursday afternoon and also sat waiting in the cold-room. They just needed to be turned out of their molds and garnished with some whipped cream and half a strawberry. MaryLou wasn’t to know that the strawberries came from southwest France.
As a rule, I didn’t do “outside catering,” but Guineas weekend was different. For the past six years, it had been my major marketing opportunity of the year.
The clientele of my restaurant were predominantly people involved in the racing business. It was a world I knew well and thought I understood. My father had been a moderately successful steeplechase jockey, and then a much more successful racehorse trainer, until he was killed in a collision with a truck carrying bricks on his way to Liverpool for the Grand National when I was eighteen. I would have been with him if my mother hadn’t insisted that I stay at home and study for my A level exams. My elder half brother, Toby, ten years my senior, had literally taken over the reins of the training business, and was still making a living from it, albeit a meager one.
I had spent my childhood riding ponies and surrounded by horses, but I was never struck with Toby’s love of all things equine. As far as I was concerned, both ends of a horse were dangerous and the middle was uncomfortable. One end kicks and the other end bites. And I had never been able to understand why riding had to be done at such an early hour on cold, wet mornings, when most sane people would be fast asleep in a nice warm bed.
More than thirteen years now had passed since the fateful day when a policeman appeared at the front door of our house to inform my mother that what was left of my father’s Jaguar, with him still inside it, had been identified as belonging to a Mr. George Moreton, late of the parish of East Hendred.
I had worked hard for my A levels to please my mother and was accepted at Surrey University to study chemistry. But my life was changed forever, not only by the death of my father but by what should have been my gap year and turned out to be my gap life.
I never went to Surrey or to any other university. The plan had been that I would work for six months to earn enough to go traveling in the Far East for the next six months. So I went to work as a pots-and-pans washer-upper, beer-crate carrier and general dogsbody at a country pub/restaurant/hotel overlooking the river Thames in Oxfordshire that belonged to a widowed distant cousin of my mother’s. The normal designation for such an employee is kitchen porter, but this is such a derogatory term in catering circles that my mother’s cousin referred to me as the temporary assistant undermanager, which was more of a mouthful and less accurate. The word manager implies a level of responsibility. The only responsibility I was given was to rouse the chambermaid each morning to serve the early-morning teas to the guests in the seven double bedrooms. At first, I did this by banging on her bedroom door for five minutes until she reluctantly opened it. But after a couple of weeks the task became much easier, since I simply had to push her out of the single bed that we had started sharing.
However, working in a restaurant kitchen, even at the kitchen sink, sparked in me a passion for food and its presentation. Soon, I had left the washing up to others and I started an apprenticeship under the watchful eye of Marguerite, the fiery, foulmouthed head cook. She didn’t like the term chef. She had declared that she cooked and was therefore a cook.
When my six-month stint was up, I just stayed. By then, I had been installed as Marguerite’s assistant, and was making everything from the starters to the desserts. In the afternoons, while the other staff caught up on their sleep, I would experiment with flavors, spending most of my earnings on ingredients at Witney farmers’ market.
In the late spring, I wrote to Surrey University, politely asking if my enrollment could be deferred for yet another year. Fine, they said, but I think I already knew I wasn’t going back to life in laboratories and lecture halls. When, in late October of the following year, Marguerite swore once too often at my mother’s distant cousin and was fired, my course in life was set. Just four days short of my twenty-first birthday, I took over the kitchen, with relish, and set about the task of becoming the youngest chef ever to win a Michelin star.
For the next four years, the establishment thrived, my confidence growing at the same spectacular rate as the restaurant’s reputation. However, I was becoming acutely aware that my mother’s cousin’s bank balance was expanding rather more rapidly than my own. When I broached the subject, she accused me of being disloyal, and that was the beginning of the end. Shortly after, she sold out to a national small-hotel chain without telling me and I suddenly found I had a new boss who wanted to make changes in my kitchen. My mother’s cousin had also failed to tell the buyers that she had no contract with me, so I packed my bags and left.