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‘They can, but something’s got to be wrong for their chef to have left in the first place.’
‘Mmm… Shall we see if we can find out what?’ Zoe suggested, glancing over her shoulder towards the deserted bar and the teenager behind it.
It took her less than half an hour of skilful questioning to elicit the full story.
There had apparently been a clash of objectives between the chef and the hotel owner. The chef had been under the impression that he had full control in the kitchen, and this apparently included control of his own budget. The hotel owner had had other ideas, ideas which apparently consisted of budget-cutting to an extent which meant that the chef was having to make do with poor quality produce and was therefore unable to produce the kind of meals on which he had based his reputation. The kind of meal which had earned the restaurant its award, Ben commented wryly to Zoe.
The hotel owner had also apparently disapproved of the unusual sauces and flavourings the chef wanted to use, and had insisted on sticking with a nouvelle cuisine-type menu. ‘Small portions, you see, and therefore cheaper to produce,’ the boy told them.
‘The chef, Armand, didn’t want to do that, though. He said that nouvelle cuisine wasn’t nouvelle any more and that it certainly wasn’t cuisine either,’ he told them with obvious relish at having remembered this part of the quarrel he had obviously overheard.
‘He said that people, discerning people, were tired of nouvelle and wanted wholesome, nourishing food, food whose origins they could check, food that was wholesomely grown. He prided himself on his sauces being free from additives and fat. He said that if people wanted to clog up their arteries with cholesterol, they could do so over breakfast.’
The boy gave a small shrug. ‘Mr Patrick, the owner, said afterwards that he had intended to sack him anyway, but he hasn’t managed to replace him yet.
‘The underchef is having to do the food for the conference and that means that there isn’t anyone to run the kitchen properly. The food in the restaurant is just bought-in freezer stuff. In fact I think some of it was here when Mr Patrick took the place over… Ella, my girlfriend… she works in the kitchen, she said some of the stuff is so encrusted in ice that they’re having to run the packets under the hot tap before they can find out what’s in them.’
‘I warned you not to have that St-Jacques,’ Ben whispered to Zoe as she winced.
* * *
Four hours later, when she had got out of bed for the third time within an hour to be violently sick, he followed her into the bathroom, dealing as efficiently with her nausea and consequent weakness as she suspected he must once have done with his siblings’ childhood illnesses, but at the same time he couldn’t resist crowing triumphantly.
‘I knew it… I knew that fish was off.’
‘Thanks,’ Zoe told him weakly, but she shook her head when he asked her if she would like him to ask the hotel to get hold of a doctor.
‘It isn’t that bad,’ she told him.
‘Bad? It’s wonderful!’ Ben corrected her with a grin. ‘My God, I can hardly believe our luck. Food poisoning… Let’s hope you aren’t the only one to get it. They’ll close this place down, and if it really is our closest competition…’
‘It is,’ Zoe assured him, adding triumphantly, ‘See, I told you not to worry, didn’t I? I told you everything was going to work out… that nothing…’
She gulped as another wave of nausea hit her, and as he waited for the spasm to leave her, Ben grinned down at her and told her, ‘All right… so you were right. Nothing is going to go wrong. Nothing can go wrong. We’re unstoppable… and we’re going to succeed beyond our wildest dreams… I believe you. All right?’
‘All right,’ Zoe agreed weakly, wincing as she told Ben, ‘Stop making me laugh. It hurts…’
Physically she might feel dreadful, she acknowledged, but mentally, emotionally, she was on the kind of high that made her feel giddy with excitement. She had never seen Ben in such a positive mood, so full of his own excitement, pushing all his doubts and caution aside, for once being the one to buoy her up instead of the other way around.
It was all working out perfectly, she acknowledged tiredly as Ben helped her back to bed.
Perfectly, perfectly, perfectly, and Ben was right. She was right. Nothing could stop them now. Nothing!
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘AH, FERN, my dear, do come in.’ Lord Stanton beamed at Fern as Phillips, his butler, showed her into the library.
Lord Stanton and Phillips; impossible to imagine one of them without the other, Fern acknowledged. Phillips at seventy was Lord Stanton’s junior in age, but in many other ways he was, if not his mentor, then certainly his guardian; not in any custodial sense of the word, for Phillips’s guardianship of his employer had nothing of that about it; it was more that one could not see the two of them together without being aware of how seriously the butler took his responsibilities towards the older man. There was certainly more to their relationship than that of employer and
employee, although Fern had neither seen nor heard either of them ever abandoning the correct and sometimes quaintly old-fashioned manner they had of addressing and communicating with one another, both of them always rigidly correct in their etiquette. Without Phillips to ensure that his household ran smoothly, Fern doubted that Lord Stanton could survive, and she also suspected that, without Lord Stanton to take care of, Phillips would lose the sense of purpose that motivated his own life.
‘How delightful of you to call,’ Lord Stanton added as he ushered her towards a chair.
The library was large and old-fashioned, essentially a man’s room, with a huge pedestal desk, and two large fireside chairs complete with footstools, their covering of green velvet worn smooth on the arms, like the patches in the Turkish carpet which showed the familiar pathways of Lord Stanton’s peregrinations from desk to window and back to the fireside again.
‘You asked me to call so that we could update the list for the children’s party,’ Fern reminded him gently, shaking her head when he offered her a glass of sherry, knowing that despite the fact that she could see the decanter and glasses on the silver tray within arm’s distance of her chair Lord Stanton would still ring for Phillips to come and perform the small task of pouring it for her, and that the butler would then be despatched to the kitchen to fetch a plate of the small sweet macaroon biscuits which had been Lady Stanton’s favourite and without which Lord Stanton felt it was impossible for any woman to enjoy her sherry.
‘Ah, yes, so I did. It’s my age, I’m afraid, my dear,’ Lord Stanton told her ruefully. ‘One tends to find it far harder to recall the present than one does the past.
