The Family Way. Tony Parsons
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about the restaurant business, and a lot of what she knew about life.
So while Brigitte fed her relationship to the shredding machine, Cat stood there in patient silence, as if she might learn something.
Cat owed her career to this woman.
When she had first met Brigitte Wolfe, Cat was a twenty-five-year-old freelance journalist eking out a minimum wage by knocking out restaurant reviews for a trendy little listings magazine. Write about what you know, they all told her, and after feeding her younger sisters thousands of meals when they were growing up, what Cat knew about was food.
And by now she also knew about restaurants, because the well-brought-up public school boys she met at university had all wined and dined her before attempting to take her to bed. It was a different world from the one she knew – the restaurants she had occasionally glimpsed with her father and his actor friends had seemed more concerned with drinking than eating – but she took to it immediately. Usually the food was better than the sex. What she liked most of all was that you didn’t have to cook it yourself.
When she met Cat, Brigitte Wolfe was nearly thirty, and was the owner, accountant and head cook of Mamma-san, a tiny noodle joint on Brewer Street where young people queued out on the narrow pavement for a bowl of Brigitte’s soba and udon noodles.
Over the next ten years London would become full of Asian restaurants that were neither owned nor run by Asians – bright, funky places with menus that served Thai curry and Vietnamese noodles and Chinese dim sum and Japanese sashimi, as if that continent was really just one country, with a cuisine that was perfect for beautiful young people who cared about their diet and their looks. Mamma-san was among the first.
Cat joined the noodle queue on Brewer Street, and wrote a rave review for her little listings magazine. When she came in again, not working this time, Brigitte offered Cat a job as manager.
As the listings magazine took a very casual approach to paying its contributors, Cat took the job. The magazine went out of business soon after. Mamma-san moved up-market and out of Soho, although Cat believed that the clientele were still the same ragged-trousered kids who had queued up on Brewer Street all those years ago before going dancing at the Wag, just ten years older and, a decade into their careers, a lot more affluent. Brigitte seemed to enjoy her restaurant as much as they did.
‘A great man once said, Arrange your life so that you can’t tell the difference between work and pleasure.’
‘Shakespeare?’ said Cat.
‘Warren Beatty,’ said Brigitte.
It was love at first sight. Cat had never met anyone who could quote Warren Beatty, although her mother claimed that he had once touched her arse backstage at the London Palladium. Brigitte had more fun than anyone Cat had ever known. After the domestic drudgery of her childhood, here was life as it ought to be lived.
When most of the city was still sleeping, the two women toured the markets – Smithfield for the restaurant’s meat, Billingsgate for their fish, New Spitalfields for vegetables. Red-faced men in stained white coats shouted at each other in the pre-dawn gloom. Cat learned how to hire good kitchen staff, and how to fire the bad ones when they turned up drunk or stoned, or couldn’t keep their hands off the waitresses.
Cat learned how to talk to the wine merchant, the VAT man, the health inspector, and to be scared of none of them. Although she was only four years older, Brigitte felt like the closest thing to a mother that Cat had ever had.
Brigitte was one of those European women who seem to discover a lifestyle they like in their middle twenties, and then stick with it for ever. She had never married. She worked harder than anyone Cat knew, and played hard too – twice a year she flew off to walk in the foothills of the Himalayas or dive in the Maldives or drive across Australia.
Sometimes she took Digby with her, and sometimes she left him at home – more like a favourite piece of luggage than a man. Brigitte enjoyed her life, and for years she had been Cat’s North Star, guiding her way, showing her how it was done. This unencumbered life.
But now Brigitte selected a photograph of Digby and herself on a blinding white beach. The Maldives? Seychelles? One last look, and she fed the photo to the shredding machine.
‘What’s he done?’ Cat said.
‘He wants to be with someone who can bring something new to a relationship.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, for example, a pair of twenty-four-year-old tits.’
Cat was speechless. And outraged. Men didn’t treat Brigitte like this. She was the one who did the dumping.
‘Some well-stacked slut from his office.’ Brigitte calmly fed the shredding machine a Polaroid of Digby and herself atop a couple of drooling camels, the pyramids shining in the background. Dry-eyed, Cat noticed with admiration. Even now, Brigitte seemed in control. From the floor below they could hear the clatter and din of Saturday night at Mamma-san.
‘I just wanted to tell you there are a couple of footballers at the desk. They haven’t booked.’
‘Alone?’
‘Two women with them. They look like lap dancers. Although of course they could be their wives. What should I tell them?’
‘Tell them to call ahead next time.’
‘Could be good publicity. There are a couple of photographers outside.’
‘It’s even better publicity if we turn them away.’
‘Okay.’
Cat turned to leave. Brigitte’s voice caught her at the door.
‘Do you know what I am this year?’
Cat shook her head.
‘Forty. I am forty years old. How can I compete with a big bouncing pair of twenty-year-old tits?’
‘Twenty-four. And you don’t have to compete. You’re a strong, free woman who has seen life, and lived life, and all that kind of stuff. You don’t need to latch on to some man to prove you exist. She has to compete with you.’
Brigitte began to laugh. ‘Oh, my darling Cat.’
‘She’s not the catch,’ Cat said, warming to her theme, ‘you are!’
Brigitte stared wistfully at a photograph of Digby and herself at a crowded party – New Year’s Eve? – and then gave it to the shredder.
‘The trouble is, Cat, as women get older, the pool of potential partners gets smaller. But for men, it gets bigger.’ She fed the shredding machine a picture taken on a bridge in Paris. ‘So where does that leave women like us?’
And as the roar of Saturday night boomed beneath her feet, Cat thought, women like us?
It was his favourite moment of the week.
When the city streets were starting to empty, and the lights were going out all over London, Cat would ease her long body into his car, closing her eyes as soon as her head touched the passenger seat.
‘Boy,’ she said. ‘I’m bushed.’
‘We’ll be home soon,’ he said.
He always picked her up at the restaurant on Saturday night. By the time Mamma-san closed for business, and the last drunken customer had been decanted into a taxi, and the kitchen staff and waitresses had all been fed and watered and packed off in a fleet of minicabs, by the time Cat locked up Mamma-san, it was always the early hours of Sunday morning.
These Saturday nights and Sunday mornings were among their favourite times. They would have a drink back at his place, shower together, and make familiar lazy love before expiring in each