Lunching at Laura's Read online

  It was no wonder, diners would tell each other, that so many famous authors gave her copies of their books, and no wonder she displayed them so well, for they marched round the shelves that were set almost at ceiling level in serried rows, the titles and pictures of the authors all clearly lit by the discreet floodlights set into the ceiling. Each book was lovingly inscribed to Laura, some with long messages extolling her food sprawling all over the jacket, and diners waiting for dilatory guests would wander round and stare at them and marvel at how many people knew and seemed to love Laura.

  And would be grateful, too, that the books were there to beguile them, for there was no bar at the restaurant; this was not a place where one sloshed spirits or drank fashionable over-coloured cocktails, and ruined one’s palate with nuts and olives and potato crisps. This was a place for serious eating and gentle pleasure, in the evenings.

  But not at lunchtimes. Oh, never at lunchtimes. There is still no bar and no spirit-sloshing – one can order scotch or gin before lunch but Maxie makes it clear he is not impressed if you do – and there is still the serious eating, but the ambience is quite different.

  The soft dinnertime lighting gives way to a greenish glow that comes from the daylight that pours through the creepers decorating the huge window, lifting the red tiles on the floor to an even richer crimson and flattering quite outrageously the faces of the girls who sit at the window tables. (It flatters the men too, of course, a fact which many a young actor has found useful.) The sounds change, with the buzz of conversation becoming sharper and more urgent, and though the eighteen tables are cleverly scattered around the big, irregularly shaped room so that a degree of privacy can be enjoyed at each, it is still possible, if you use your ears intelligently, to pick up a good deal of what your neighbours are saying.

  That of course, is one of the most valuable things about Laura’s at lunchtime. It isn’t only important that you be seen there; it is also important that you hear there. And sometimes, talk there; many are the useful deals that have been swung as the result of a judicious leak neatly dropped between the shredded marrow with baked veal and a bowl of fresh raspberries.

  ‘You didn’t hear what he said?’ Zolly said, and wiped the table between Viktor’s elbows with so much vigour that he almost knocked the pot of toothpicks flying. ‘He said it twice, real loud. You didn’t hear?’

  ‘No I did not,’ Viktor grunted and stared at the boy from beneath his heavy brows. It was all very well to be interested in your job, but there was a point at which it got to be suspicious. This one, working all the hours he was asked and still hanging around afterwards, and always arriving first thing in the morning before any of the others; very suspicious. And now, all this confidential chat.

  Not that it wasn’t useful. The last time Zolly had come to tell him tales of things he’d overheard, Viktor had been able to get hold of a box of butter and several pounds of sugar; real prizes in 1918, the fourth year of this lousy war. If only he liked the feller; he ought to, a nice Hungarian boy like him; hadn’t his father been one of Viktor’s cronies in the good old days before the war? But this Zolly, with his pale face and drooping apology for a moustache, he wasn’t attractive like his wicked old father had been. None of the swashbuckling splendour of the old country about this child of London’s gutters.

  Viktor sighed as he stared at the boy’s fragile body and pale somewhat tubercular face and told himself sternly not to be so narrow minded. ‘So what did he say? There’s a tin of best Budapest paprika, real erös nemes coming in on the next troop train, especially for me, hmm?’

  Zolly shook his head, unsmiling. No sense of humour either, poor Zolly, thought Viktor.

  ‘No. He said as how the building on the corner was being taken over by a new firm as soon as the war’s over. And everyone knows that won’t be too long now. They’ll be employing a lot of people, he said, at least thirty workers on the upper floors. Thirty people, eating lunch every day, supper at night. Could be good for us –’

  ‘Thirty? All of them eating with us every day? I should cocoa! You know what they say in the old country? Ne igyas elöre a meduc borëve – don’t go counting no chickens.’

  ‘Even if only half of them come, it could still be good business. If we had room for them.’

  ‘Hey? Room for them?’

  ‘Seven tables you got here, seven tables. It’s nice. Brings in customers, room for forty two every day, but it ain’t enough. You pull down that wall there, and the one between the big store room and the kitchen, and you got a bigger kitchen, because you use up the dead space, and you get in a few more tables – fours is better than sixes, you can move ’em around more easy, get more people in, and then –’

  Viktor’s face had gone a deep, brick red and he stared at the thin, white-faced boy with his eyes so wide the whites could be seen all round them. He knew he looked more than a little alarming, but Zolly seemed unperturbed and stood there turning his rag between his hands, his long apron flapping against his thin knees in the breeze from the open door, and stared coolly back at him.

  ‘So listen, already, whose restaurant is this? Yours or mine? Ez mindehen fútesz – this beats everything! Whose place is this, I want to know?’

  ‘Oh, your family’s, Mr. Halascz, no question of that,’ Zolly said calmly. ‘But I like to take an interest. Seeing as I’m going to be family –’

  ‘You’re going to be what?’ Viktor shouted. ‘You’re going to be no such bloody thing, you jumped up little piece of –’

  ‘Anya Maritza says,’ Zolly said and still stood there quietly turning his rag between his hands, the only sign he showed of nervousness, ‘yesterday she said, Magda and me. It’s all settled. As soon as the war’s over, she said. So tell me, Mr. Halascz, what do you say to my idea, hmm? We pull down the wall there, and in the kitchen, make it bigger, get in more tables, offer a discount to the new firm on the corner – we could make some money here, a lot of money –’

  ‘I’ll be dead and in my grave first!’ Viktor roared. ‘And so will you be before you marry my little Magda, you piece of horse shit! Go and play with yourself – go on, out of my sight!’

  Which was how by the time Viktor stood beside his Magda the year after the war ended, in the summer of 1919, and gave her away to her skinny husband, Zoltan Horvath, Halascz’s restaurant had grown from forty-two covers to sixty, and all of them always occupied by the office workers from the tobacco importers firm on the corner. Viktor never stopped complaining about the way Zolly meddled till the day he died, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Not with the way Zolly always managed to overhear such useful things and the way Maritza listened to him.

  ‘Women,’ Viktor would say to anyone who would listen to him, ‘women! They make a madness out of a business, the things they do, a madness. Never let ’em anywhere near business, they’ll ruin it.’ And he’d deal another hand of cards and shake his head at his cronies while Zolly got on in the kitchen. What else could a poor put-upon business man do?

  2

  ‘Bloody woman!’ the man in the calico apron muttered and picked up the tray of wrinkled yellow peppers and shoved it furiously onto the trolley, ready to push it out to his van, doubled parked in Old Compton Street. ‘You can’t do business with bloody women –’

  ‘Not if you try to give ’em rubbish when they’ve ordered and paid for quality,’ Angie said tartly. ‘You do that to anyone with any sense and you’ll get a flea in your ear whether they wear skirts or pants. Next time you try your tricks on some of the blokes down Frith Street – them you can cheat as much as you like – they’ll never notice, fools like them. But when you’ve been in this business a bit longer you’ll know you don’t try any of your nonsense here with Miss Horvath. She’s forgotten more than you’ll ever know about what’s what. Sooner you learn that the better for you. Or she won’t buy no more from your firm, and if she stops, then your boss’ll want to know why, and believe you me, you’ll be right in it.’

  �
��Oh, go and piss in your beer and get off my ear’ole,’ the man said and shoved his trolley out of Little Vinegar Yard into Old Compton Street and got to his van just as the traffic warden shoved the ticket under his windscreen wiper. He wasn’t having a good day at all.

  ‘Next time he tries that, I’ll have his bleedin’ guts for garters,’ Angie said with great satisfaction and slammed the door shut and went padding back towards the kitchens, collecting the big punnets of mushrooms from the serving table as he went. ‘Sorry I hadn’t noticed, Mizz Horvy –’

  Finding a suitable mode of address for his employer had given Angie a good deal of anxiety in the early days, when she’d first taken over from her father. He had worked at the place for over forty years, ever since he’d been taken on as a scruffy fifteen year old kitchen boy. He had known the Old Man, her grandfather Zolly, had grieved with the family when he had died the year after his son, young Zoltan, was killed in North Africa, had worked with the only surviving son, Tibor, to keep the restaurant going through the bad years of the war and the even worse years of austerity that followed with peace, had been there when Tibor married Louisa and when Laura was born, and had seen her grow up. But now all the old ones had gone and it was her restaurant, he couldn’t call her what he had when she had been a baby; to address his boss as Lollipop would hardly have been proper. Even ‘Laura’ would, he felt, have been disgraceful. But Miss Horvath would have been too formal. He had worried a good deal before he had come up with the diminutive he now used, but it pleased him, and he regarded it as his own personal property. Heaven help any other employee who dared to let it pass his lips.

  ‘Not your fault, Angie. And he won’t try it again,’ Laura said. ‘He won’t get the chance. I’ll tell old Barnett to send a different delivery man in future. Will you be able to manage with the peppers you’ve got?’

  ‘I’ll send Freddy down Berwick Street,’ Angie said. ‘He’s the only one with any sairchel – the rest are senseless. But he’ll get me good stuff. And I need ’em for the lecso – I got enough for the restaurant but not for both the Extras as want it.’

  ‘Well, if you can’t get good peppers, then give the City TV lot more rizi-bizi instead – you’ve got enough mushrooms there for an extra pot – and do some more red cabbage for the Trust. We’d better keep the lecso for Anya’s party –’

  ‘I should think so!’ Angie said, scandalised, and went padding on his way to shout and nag at the boys in the kitchen until they were all fit to throw knives at his head. Not that they would. All chefs were temperamental – it was as essential a part of them as their white toques – and the staff at Laura’s took a deep pride in Angie’s temper when they compared notes with other kitchen boys over a drink at the Crown and Two Chairmen or the Dog and Duck on the corners of Bateman Street. It was good to be able to tell them how much worse their lot was than anyone else’s in Soho.

  Laura watched him go and then turned back to her ledger, to finish entering the morning’s market bills. No need to worry, even today with all three of the Extras in use, and one of them for so special a party. Angie would manage. He always did, and she suddenly heard her father’s voice deep in her mind.

  ‘Angelo Alzano? He’s the best bloody Hungarian chef that ever came out of Italy. He wouldn’t know a zabaglione if it bit him on the neck like Vlad the Vampire, but when it comes to paprika – phttt!’

  And the memory of that odd little sound he used to make was so vivid, even though he had been dead now for over two years, it was almost as though he was still here with her, sitting in his corner the way he had for so many years while she had run the restaurant around him.

  Poor old Poppa, she thought, he’d have loved to be here today, Anya’s party and all – and then she shook herself mentally and applied her mind to her job. The ledger had to be kept up every day, otherwise she would lose track of things. She had done the morning’s buying at Billingsgate, leaving Angie to Nine Elms and the fruit and vegetables, and Leno to Smithfield, so that she wouldn’t be too tired; usually she managed two out of the three markets on her own (and unlike many of her competitors in Soho, she insisted still on doing as her father and grandfather had, buying always from the market, never from a trade supplier), but today was to be a special day, and she needed that little extra rest, so she hadn’t got up till half past five. A rare pleasure that, on a working day.

  But it was oddly difficult to concentrate this morning and after she had filled in another column in the neat round writing that looked so very like her, she lifted her chin and looked around her.

  The tables were all ready, set early this morning by Dan and Janos, Miklos and Jon, with Maxie fussing round them like an old hen, and she looked at them with pleasure. Quite why she had chosen to dress her tables as she did she was never to know, but there it was; she had selected old fashioned bone handled cutlery, even though it meant it all had to be hand washed and couldn’t be done in the great dishwasher that stood at the back of the kitchen, and the thick, white, fluted china even though that too looked old fashioned, just because she liked it, and she had been right. It looked so exactly as it should, with the heavy crystal – it had gone a little against the grain to buy Czechoslovakian rather than Hungarian, but the fact was they made better glass – and the blue and white patterned tablecloths. The high backed chairs with the pretty rush seats stood neatly four square at each table and she counted the covers with her eyes; every one of them booked since eleven o’clock this morning – and even as she thought it the phone rang again and she picked it up and said, ‘Hmm?’ and then, ‘So sorry – we’re full today. Call me tomorrow,’ and cradled the phone and smiled; Poppa would have sat there so proudly today, to see his restaurant so busy and so successful.

  Outside in Little Vinegar Yard there was a clatter of heels and she looked through the lattice of the creepers to see Mucky go by, and smiled again. He too was a part of the restaurant, even though he hardly ever came in – only on his birthday, and every Christmas Eve – but he had always been there in the Yard, and always would be, just like herself. She could see his shop clearly with its windows full of dumpy cigarette packages that had been there for over thirty years to her own certain knowledge, and the fascia board, with its indecipherable legend on its shabby blistered paint, and shook her head, amused.

  That anyone as dapper and neat as Mucky always was should keep premises as dilapidated and dusty as his shop looked was an absurdity, but there it was; it amused him to leave the exterior looking as it did. Inside it was quite different, of course; she went in sometimes for the sheer pleasure of seeing the way the wood of the vast fitting that occupied the wall behind the high mahogany counter glowed with polish, and to enjoy the satiny gleam of the brass fittings on the myriad drawers that embellished it. Mucky stocked every kind of pipe tobacco and cigarette and cigar that had ever been invented, as well as a range of beautiful pipes that brought customers from miles around, and, though Laura didn’t smoke, her father had, and the scent of Mucky’s lovely little shop always reminded her of the way he used to take her with him whenever he went to buy his own special Dutch cigars, small and dark and singularly fragrant – and again she shook herself.

  She really was being absurdly sentimental today, wallowing in memories. Stupid; there was too much to do to indulge herself like this, and she watched Mucky disappear into his shop and then bent her head again to her ledgers and set briskly to work. The Extras had to be checked and the kitchens visited yet, and it was already almost twelve. Wasting time like this was a luxury she could never afford, and certainly not today.

  She closed the ledgers at last, and with one more look round, and a tweak at a dead leaf in the pot of primroses which stood on her desk, went briskly to the door that led to the kitchens. She’d start there and then go upstairs to the Extras, making sure Angie was happy, for unless he was, nothing would go right.

  Angie was indeed happy. The meat his assistant Leno had brought him back from Smithfield was exactly what he would h
ave bought himself – though he would have died rather than admit as much – and already the beef for the goulash of the day was simmering in its fragrant stock and the pork cutlets were marinading in wine and garlic on their big white platters. The most junior of the kitchen boys was pushing veal through the mincer while Leno kept an eye on him at the same time as trimming the small steak medallions for the Sistergös Lecsos Ermek, one of Angie’s specialities; the whole place was richly fragrant with the redolence of roasting food and the scent of onions and garlic, peppers and cucumbers, while the heat from the great ovens shimmered around the busy white figures. Angie himself was slicing duck’s liver into strips with dazzling speed while shouting instructions at everyone else at the top of his voice in an apparent fury. But no one was fooled. Angie was happy and it showed.

  ‘I forgot to tell you – I got the first of the fresh marrows, Mizz Horvy!’ Angie roared as he saw her. ‘I’ll do an extra pot for you. Just for you. First of the season always had to be yours, ever since you was little.’

  Angie would never tire of making sure all his staff knew how long he had been part of the place. ‘Doing it now, we are – Henry, you great lump of tripe, what the hell are you doing? Get on with those potatoes – Leno, look at that bloody fool – he’ll mince his fingers as well as the veal if you don’t watch him. I don’t want my meat polluted, for God’s sake – watch what he’s doing – Dan, get out of here – I got enough with my own people, without you bleedin’ waiters under my feet –’