Lunching at Laura's Read online

  The kitchen clattered and roared and hissed and Laura looked round at the great steaming chrome pans and the flaring gas jets on the ovens and hobs – Angie wouldn’t be caught dead cooking on electricity, and only grudgingly had allowed one electric oven into his domain – and the sweating red faced occupants and smiled at those who had the temerity to risk Angie’s wrath and look up and catch her eye, and left them to it. She knew better than ever to interfere where she had no right to be; the restaurant might bear her name, and be her total responsibility, but in the kitchens Angie was king and she was too much of the queen of her own part of her establishment to meddle with him. At a pinch, she could run the kitchen; once she had had to, when Angie had developed pneumonia as a result of insisting on going on working all through a flu epidemic, and had been taken, protesting hoarsely, to hospital. But that had been an emergency. If she had ever tried to do it under any other circumstances, Angie would have been deeply wounded; and rightly so. Even his beloved Mizz Horvy had no right to be in his kitchen without his consent.

  She went back through the main restaurant to the doorway on the far side that led to the stairs, and then hesitated as she looked upwards. On each side of the narrow staircase just below the cornices of the warmly panelled walls were pictures of simpering black ringletted gypsy girls in improbable dresses with tight bodices, or distant views of plains fringed by mountains, but she wasn’t looking at those. They had been put there by her great-grandfather so many years ago that no one ever looked at them any more. They had been part of her life for ever and she would no more have removed them than she would have taken off the roof. It was what lay above the staircase that made her pause, and for a moment she stood there on the bottom step, remembering.

  There had been the flat above there, when she had been small. She and Ma and Poppa had lived there in those three big rooms for so long that it didn’t seem possible that they wouldn’t be there waiting when she went up. She knew that it was all different now; that the flat had been gutted and made into the three Extras for private parties. She knew that where their small bathroom, the pride of her grandmother’s heart, had once been there was now a servery, knew that outside the door that had led to her bedroom and where there had been the set of shelves on which she had kept all her school texts and her precious collection of story books there was now a pine coat rack for guests to use; knew that all traces of the family had vanished. There was nothing left of the place that had been home for so long, yet for all that, as she stood there at the bottom looking up into the brightness at the top, she felt the weight of the years sitting on her. It was as though she were seven years old again, and coming home from school at St. Martin’s, calling ‘Ma!’ and hoping there was shredded new season’s marrow today, because it was her favourite in all the world – and again she shook her head and told herself firmly to stop being so stupidly sentimental. There was too much to do to allow such nonsense to waste her energies like this –

  The brightness at the top dimmed as someone appeared and began to run down and then stopped as he caught sight of her.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Miss Horvath!’ It was one of the kitchen boys, and he stood there so pink with shyness that he looked rather like a freshly made fondant ice set in cream, with his whites wrapped round him so tidily. The towel at his neck was damp with anxiety and she smiled at him and stood back so that he could pass her.

  ‘Mr. Angie, Miss, he sent me to fetch the big platter from the far Extra, he said he needed it for Anya Z- er – ZZ – er – your special party, Miss.’

  ‘Then you’d better take it to him,’ Laura said equably. ‘And the name is Zsuzske – I know it looks odd when it’s written down but it’s easy to say. Say treasure.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Say treasure – go on. I’ll tell you how to say her name and then you can go back and impress Angie. Treasure.’

  ‘Treasure,’ he said obediently.

  ‘Now say just the end of the word – leave off the “tre” bit – just say “jer”. Keep the “j” soft.’

  He obeyed, almost squirming with embarrassment, but she ignored that, feeling oddly that it was important he managed the pronunciation correctly.

  ‘Right. Now say it twice – “Jer Jer”. Like that. With a soft “j”, remember –’

  He tried it, reddening even more if that were possible and she laughed.

  ‘Well done! Now say cat without the “t” at the end. After you’ve said “Jer Jer” twice – so it comes out right – Zsuzske. Actually it’s the same as Susie, believe it or not. She’s my great aunt Susie. She was ninety-one yesterday and this party is to celebrate that. The whole of my family will be here. Well, almost – so it’s an important day, and an important party.’

  ‘Yes, Miss Horvath.’ He hesitated, emboldened by her friendliness. ‘I thought her first name was Anya, like my gran’ma. She’s called Annie. I thought Z – er ZZ – er Zsuzske was her last name, like.’

  ‘Anya means Momma in Hungarian,’ Laura said and then, suddenly in a hurry to get rid of him, jerked her chin and said crisply, ‘On your way now. Tell Angie I’ll bring the big blue and white bowl for the lecso. Cut along now – he’ll be waiting for you –’

  He cut and she ran lightly up the stairs and went from room to room, checking the tables, counting the number of covers set against the lists of names pinned to each door and making sure the flowers were all fresh and the wine ready in their coolers, if white, or sitting uncorked and gently breathing, if red. No more time for sentimental nostalgia now.

  ‘The Trust,’ she murmured as she checked the first of the Extras. Nine of them. Mrs. Capitelli and her son Giaccomo, Leo Levy and Edward Malplackett – hmm, that was interesting. Leo Levy was to be the new Chairman of the Trust, but Malplackett was to take over the secretaryship. Which meant he would in effect be running the Vinegar Trust. That could make a lot of difference; she’d have to keep an eye and ear on his activities. A nice enough chap on the surface but a shade too ambitious for other people’s good and rather keener on their cash than their comfort; and Miss Foster and Mrs. Garcia and her Friend – no one had ever found out what her name was – and Mr. Bassett the wine merchant and Mr. Olaffson from the fish shop. They were all having the spiced sausage to start with, and then the pisztra – poached pink trout and cucumber salad and new potatoes – and Angie had made them a special dobosch. She had seen it waiting on the desserts table in the kitchen, a great wheel of a cake with its scored amber toffee surface and its nut encrusted sides. She had tapped the crisp top with one finger nail for the pleasure of hearing the faint plangent sound that came back at her; drum cake – it was well named.

  Then the second biggest room; seventeen of them, from City TV in Frith Street. The Documentary Department, whatever that meant. It had always amused her that a TV company had come to that part of the street. She used to stand there sometimes on her way home from school and stare up at the blue plaque on the wall of Number 22. ‘John Logie Baird – first demonstrated television here, 1926.’ A pity they hadn’t come to the same building; it would have been so elegant a thing to have done – well, what were they having?

  Clearly someone who knew her menu well had chosen this lunch; a range of her best starters – the spiced mixed salad with sausages and the Hazi Disznosaft, the pressed boar’s head which Angie, she knew, had made with loving care yesterday evening, and the veal pancakes with paprika sauce, and then – she grinned then as she saw the next course. No wonder Angie was in such high good humour. He liked nothing better than the chance to roast a goose; he must be feeling marvellous. All the vegetables on their list were to be served too, and she grimaced as she saw that lecso was underlined. Everyone loved the spicy mixture of peppers and tomatoes and onions; well, they might have to go without in here. It was Anya Zsuzske’s favourite, too, and a shortage of peppers meant a shortage of lecso. Damn the man from Barnetts who had tried to palm off inferior goods on her. As if she wouldn’t have spotted the substitution, she who was fam
ous in all the markets for her buying and her bargaining skills; the man was a fool! But there it was – not enough lecso unless Angie’s boy had been lucky in Berwick Street market, round the corner.

  She checked the rest of the menu and lifted her brows. Good luck to them if they could manage it all; sweet cheese pancakes with chocolate sauce, and mignons, the little chocolate truffles that were so richly indigestible, and the delicate pastry shells full of chopped nuts called love letters, and then a bowl of liptauer cheese rich with paprika. They’d get no work done this afternoon after that lot, especially if they got through all the wine that Maxie had left standing ready for them. Seventeen people and two dozen bottles? How they ever got their programmes made would never cease to amaze her. They drank more like full-blooded Hungarians than Englishmen.

  And then she came to the last of the Extras and stopped at the door, suddenly filled again with nostalgia. The whole family coming to lunch, every one of them except the small children who had to be at school; it would be like Christmas used to be in the old days when Ma and Poppa had been alive; when they had eaten roast carp and drunk too much Tokay and laughed so much that she had made herself sick and had first been disgraced and then petted till she felt better – and her eyes prickled and angrily she rubbed her nose with the back of her hand and pushed open the door. This was really getting ridiculous. Quite ridiculous. Why get into such a state because the family was coming? They had a right to be here, didn’t they? Of course they did –

  3

  ‘They’ve got a right to be considered. It’s always sons who ought to be considered. Sons and grandsons,’ Viktor said and scowled, trying not to look at her. But it was difficult because she was sitting very upright in the tall chair she had found in Caledonian market for just five shillings and of which she was so proud, because it was higher than average and when she sat in it she looked almost as big as other people.

  ‘But you have three daughters,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget, Viktor. What you have is three daughters.’

  ‘So? And don’t they have three husbands between ’em? What for should I beat my head for the three of them? I should worry about Ferenc Kiss, that one so clever he’ll cut himself one of these days? Why should I make it easier for him to swank about and tell other people all the time he knows better than what they do? Hey? And – Laszlo Balog – it’s high time Laszlo Layabout Balog got up off his toochus and started to work a bit harder for our Zsuzske and her with three babies! I make it too easy for him, and he won’t never consider his responsibilities, won’t never count up the mouths he ought to be feeding and won’t never get his nose out of his stinking books and then –’

  ‘Viktor, how often do you have to be told? It’s got nothing to do with the boys, what they do, what they don’t do. You’re wrong anyway – Ferenc is a good man, he’ll do well enough. He needs a little more time, is all – he’s been unlucky –’

  ‘Unlucky? That one? He needs time, that one? Listen Maritza, wake up already! The man’s only five years younger than I am! How much more time does he need, for God’s sake? Isn’t it bad enough our Kati marries a man so old, he’s more my age than hers, without you keep on making excuses for him?’

  ‘All the more reason we treat the girls right,’ Maritza said. ‘All the more reason. I was just glad he married her. You were too – and he’s good to her, loves her, treats her good, never throws nothing up in her face. All the more reason we treat her right. Her and the others, too.’

  There was a little silence and Viktor stared at her and then got to his feet and went lumbering over to the window to look down into the Yard. It was getting dark now, and the gaslight in the tobacconist across the way had been lit so that bars of yellow were thrown across the greasy black cobbles. A child in dirty, stained trousers appeared from beneath the archway that led out to Dean Street and went hopping through to the shop and Viktor stared down at him and remembered Istvan at that age. So short a time ago, it seemed, and now he was a married man with a pregnant wife and –

  He turned back from the window and tried glaring at Maritza again. ‘I tell you, sons and grandsons, that’s what it ought to be. That’s the way it always was in the Old Country. Property stays in the family – the ones with the family name. There’s only one Halascz – Istvan. Whoever gives money to sons-in-law? Hmm? I should give my money to that Ferenc, to Laszlo who says how he’s going to be the biggest diamond merchant in the world but spends all his time his nose in books? There’s Istvan I got to think of and his Eva – pregnant and –’

  ‘And there’s our three girls. Our Kati and our Zsuzske and our Magda. Three good girls, hard working girls every one of them. She’s down there now, Magda, with Zolly and working, working –’

  ‘Zolly! That stinking lousy Zolly!’ roared Viktor. ‘Now we have it – the truth. It’s all for that stinking heap of offal you force on me to be a son-in-law, that diseased streak of crap you found in a gutter and brought here to be the devil on my back –’ He warmed to his theme and his voice rose to fill the dim room as he let his tongue roll round every Hungarian and Yiddish curse he could think of and Maritza sat unmoved, letting him rant on; and downstairs, Zolly, chopping fish on a great wooden board in the kitchen with sharp twists of his bird-boned hands and with his pale tired face sweating in the glow of the light from the big ovens, grinned sourly. The old man was off again. If he spent even a quarter of the energy he used on cursing me in doing some of the work around here, he thought, I’d be able to get to bed before midnight sometimes –

  ‘Anya told me she was going to talk to him about money and wills,’ Magda said equably from the other side of the kitchen where she was rolling hazelnuts to a floury mass, ready to make a dobosch. ‘She’s got it in her head she’s going to die. She got a pain in her belly last week – I told her, it’s too much thinking does it to her, she’ll live longer than any of us, Poppa included. But she don’t listen.’

  She lifted her head and stopped thumping her hazelnuts for a moment and then shook her head admiringly. ‘You have to hand it to him. He can go on like that for hours, and still find a new way to badmouth you.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ grunted Zolly and went on chopping his fish. Whatever happened in the row upstairs, whoever won, it would make no difference to him. Without him and his efforts there would be no Halascz’s restaurant, no money to talk about, no need to discuss wills. His parents-in-law knew it as well as he did, but there, the old man had to pretend he didn’t.

  ‘I’m going to change the fascia next month,’ he said suddenly and Magda lifted her head and stared at him, puzzled, her face red in the stove light and gleaming with sweat. ‘It’s time my name was on it, Horvath’s not Halascz’s.’

  She shook her head. ‘Do me a favour, Zolly. The way Poppa is, it’d drive him out of his mind. You got some cash in hand? Spend it on electric light in here. Gaslight’s all right for the restaurant, maybe, but in here we need electricity. It’s time –’

  And he made a face and returned to his fish. She was right of course; she always was. Ten years they’d been married now, ten years and two small boys and still she was part of the business and still she was always right about everything, just as the old man upstairs was always wrong. One of these days, he promised himself, and thumped the fish even harder to underline the promise, one of these days I’ll get the recognition I’m entitled to. One of these days this place’ll be called Horvath’s, not Halascz’s. The old devil will have to give in and do it right.

  ‘I tell you, Maritza, it just ain’t right.’ Viktor had begun to quieten down. ‘Sons and grandsons and –’

  ‘Zolly’s and Magda’s two boys too? Little Zolly and Tibor, you’d give them the same as Istvan and his boy? If that Eva has a boy.’ Maritza sniffed then. ‘She don’t look no great shakes to me, that one. No better made than I was at her age – worse. She’ll have girls, just like I did. Just you wait and see.’

  Viktor stared at her, furious, robbed of words by his own anger
and then threw both his hands up in the air in an exaggerated gesture of renunciation. ‘I wash my hands of the whole affair. My hands are washed, you hear me? You talk to this bloody lawyer you’re so fond of, you make the arrangements. Me, I don’t care. I try to do the right thing, keep the property where it belongs – in the hands of the man, the one who understands, the man who is entitled because he has the name, the family name. Istvan. I try to do it right, and all I get from you is mouth, mouth, mouth. I’m sick of it. I’m going over to Rupert Street. I’m going to play a bit of klobiosh with Ruby Perlman and his brother, get a bit of intelligent company. I need it, on account you’re driving me meshuggah. I’ll be a crazy man fit for Colney Hatch, I stay here another minute with you. Do as you like – only don’t expect me to sign nothing.’ And he went clattering down the stairs and across the dark restaurant to stamp out of Little Vinegar Yard, well pleased with himself.

  He’d stood up to her. He’d made a point. He’d won an argument by the simple method of not staying to hear her have the last word. What was more, he’d got out of working this evening and actually told her he was going gambling. And if he chose to play poker instead of klobiosh tonight she couldn’t say a word, not a word. Let her idiot of a Zolly do the work. He, Viktor, had better things to do.

  And Maritza, sitting in her high backed chair in the dark room above the restaurant, smiled at the window and nodded her head. She’d arrange it tomorrow with that fancy new solicitor who’d come to the restaurant last week and told her what a good service he could give with such things as wills and family affairs and money in general. A nice young man, who understood when he’d met a business woman. She’d go and see him, and make the arrangements. And Viktor would do as she told him and sign papers, and she could die easy, knowing she’d done the right thing by her girls. They had a right, didn’t they? Of course they did.