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In reality, he was just as keyed-up and excited about it as she was herself, probably more so; after all, this kind of opportunity had been his most secret and protected dream ever since that moment in that small back-street eating place in Manchester—to call it a restaurant would have been an insult to the name—when Henri Fontanel had walked into the dingy, ill-equipped kitchen and offered him an opportunity, opened for him a door into a world he had never dared dream he might enter.
The simple truth was that, unlike Zoe, he was not used to trusting fate, life… and yet in many ways both had been generous in their favours to him.
As a boy his main interest in food had been the feeling it gave him when it filled his stomach; eating had been a necessity rather than a pleasure. His mother was no cook and no nutritionist either. Fast foods and takeaways, biscuits and sweets, those had been all Ben had known of food until that fateful day he had walked home with David Bernstein.
Manchester had several large Jewish communities, but the area where Ben lived was not one of them.
David Bernstein was a thin, asthmatic boy who stuck out from the rest of the class like a sore thumb and was roughly tormented by the bullies among them because of it.
Ben neither liked nor disliked him, having more important things to worry about, like collecting the baby from the babyminder on his way home from school and making sure she didn’t try to overcharge his mother, who seemed not to notice when the money she claimed was owed her amounted to more than the hours she actually minded the child. He had his other siblings to care for as well; the habit of taking charge, of being responsible had been instilled in him very early; it was an automatic habit, a reflex action, something which he neither directed nor controlled, but something which was so intrinsically a part of him that when he found David Bernstein sniffling outside the school gates, his clothes torn and blood staining the knees of his jeans—immaculately clean jeans, unlike those that most of the others wore—despite his irritation with the boy for allowing himself to be so tormented, Ben stopped beside him, chivvying him to his feet with the same brusque firmness he used towards his siblings, commanding him to ‘stop skriking’ and telling him that there was nothing really wrong.
David Bernstein seemed to think otherwise, though. He was afraid to walk home in case they attacked him again, he told Ben miserably, and, more out of irritation and impatience than anything else, and because it would not take him much out of his way, Ben announced that he would go with him.
David Bernstein lived not in the flats like Ben and most of the others, but in a small terraced house, in one of the few streets left undisturbed by the planners. His father worked in a delicatessen on the other side of the city and the house, Ben discovered later, had been left to his mother by a relative.
As he firmly marched David up to the front door, it never occurred to Ben that David’s mother would interpret his actions as those of a rescuer and protector, a saviour who had been sent specifically to guard her precious son.
Ben was a solid, determined child, independent and stoical and reserved to the point that some adults found off-putting and unsettling.
Sarah Bernstein saw none of this. When she opened the door and saw her bedraggled, precious only son being firmly pushed in her direction by a pugnacious-jawed and very obviously non-Jewish boy, her first thought was that Ben was the one who was responsible for David’s appearance; but David, who a little to Ben’s surprise proved far more adept at dealing with his mother than he was with his peers, immediately corrected her, so that, instead of being castigated for his brutal attack on her defenceless child, Ben found to his horror that he was being swept up in a smothering embrace and hauled inside the house, despite all his protests and his attempts to regain his dignity and his male supremacy.
The first thing he noticed once Sarah Bernstein had released him was the smell coming from the kitchen. His nostrils twitched, his stomach rumbling so loudly that not only did he stare down at it, but Sarah Bernstein actually stopped talking.
From the moment of his birth, Sarah had been engaged in a losing battle between her desire to nourish her child and his stubborn refusal to do anything more than peck at the food she so lovingly prepared.
To Sarah, food was love. In giving food, she gave love; and when he rejected her food David rejected that love, but now here was a child… a goy child to be sure… but still a hungry boy-child, whose eyes glistened as he smelled her soup, whose stomach advertised his need.
Before he could even think of objecting, Ben was sitting in Sarah Bernstein’s kitchen, drinking a bowl of her chicken soup, silenced not just by Sarah’s ceaseless stream of instructions and questions to her son, but also by the discovery that what he had in front of him, what he could taste in his mouth, what was right now filling and warming his stomach, bore no resemblance whatsoever to anything he had previously eaten.
That discovery was the beginning of his interest in food, and his friendship with Sarah Bernstein, the knowledge and awareness she gave him, were what fuelled and fed it.
It was from Sarah that he learned that the raw ingredients he had seen in shops but which his mother always ignored in favour of ready-prepared foods could be transformed into meals, and it was also from her that he learned too the value and importance of freshly grown vegetables, of carefully chosen meats and fish.
Once he had also discovered the difference between the meals Sarah prepared and those his mother provided, as well as their nutritional benefits, there was no stopping him.
The first time he’d served his version of Sarah’s chicken soup his mother had stared at him open-mouthed, and then she had laughed.
Ben had refused to be deterred and very soon he had taken over not just the preparation of their meals but the choosing and purchase of their ingredients as well.
With Sarah he visited the markets, learned to tell the difference between what was fresh and what was not.
There was no time when he made a conscious decision that food was to be his career; boys, young men like him did not look for careers, they simply found jobs—if they were lucky.
It was one of his teachers who suggested to him that by borrowing books from the library he could add to and extend what he had already learned from Sarah when she found him in the school yard one day, sternly berating his younger brother for selling off half of his home-made lunch to one of his friends.
Kevin was indignant and unrepentant. ‘You don’t understand. It’s not fair,’ he had accused his brother. ‘I could have sold that for fifty pence. Everyone wants our Ben’s dinners, miss,’ he had added to the surprised teacher.
Long before he was sixteen, Ben was working weekends and after school to add to the family income, hard, often poorly paid jobs which Sarah found for him through her family connections, none of them paying much; but Ben was glad of what they did pay; work wasn’t that easy to find. And it was Sarah who, when he left school, managed to persuade one of her relatives to take him on in his restaurant.
The restaurant was more of a diner really, serving hot meals both to the people who worked in the nearby market and the drivers who brought in the fresh supplies of food.
The food was cheap and hot, and the diner was always busy. Ben was paid little more than a pittance but at least he was in work, and every now and again, when Solly’s back was turned, he would alter the ingredients of whatever he was preparing, refining and experimenting.
He had become an avid reader of not just cookery books but magazine and newspaper articles as well, passionately interested in the way that food was changing, experimenting secretly whenever Solly wasn’t around.
It was the long arm of coincidence and accident which brought Henri Fontanel into his life. The French restaurateur had been on his way to Scotland to hand-pick the first of the season’s game when his hired car had broken down.
He had seen the diner from the opposite side of the road when he was telephoning for assistance and, rather than wait in th
