Page 15 of Kept
“Stay safe, ladies,” he says, meeting my eye momentarily before turning away towards Mrs Swinstone’s door.
I shut the door and lean against it, wagging my finger and shaking my head at Margarita.
“What?” she asks, a fake innocent, wide-eyed look all over her dial, “double good news today – you have an interview, AND you clearly have the possibility of getting laid – for the first time in six months I might add.”
“You are incorrigible,” I laugh, turning towards the kitchen, my smile so wide I can barely contain my happiness inside my face.
I will spend the evening practising my sauces, and then move on to one entrée, one main and one dessert. I need meals that will showcase my skills to ensure I am prepared for whatever the interviewers want me to cook.
This week I intend to blow the budget on ingredients and practise every night, new shoes will have to wait – culinary school, here I come.
6
I smooth down my skirt and hair nervously for the hundredth time as I stand and follow the woman down the long black and white tiled hallway. It is lined with pictures of famous chefs in their uniforms, their faces serious, proud.
It is 4.45pm.
I have been waiting since 1.30 pm in a cold, austere room. The longer I waited, the more positive I had become that this was a mistake, I didn’t belong here, I wasn’t good enough. All the faces down the hallway seem to be telling me the same thing.
After what seems like an eternity, we come to one of at least half a hundred wooden doors that all look the same to me, and she opens it and beckons me inside, closing it firmly behind me.
Straight away, I start to feel my nervousness ratchet up a million per cent.
Facing me is a long, highly polished timber table, and six people. They face a lone, hard-backed timber chair sitting in the centre of the room. A chair I suddenly very much do not wish to sit in.
“Please sit,” a perfectly groomed older woman says, before looking down at papers before her. I have to assume, given how she looks, that this is Madame Boufant.
I give a fake smile and sit, ensuring my skirt is covering my knees, and my feet are together. I balance my resum? in its neat black folder on my lap and fold my hands across it to stop their trembling.
It seems like an interminable wait. All I can hear, once again, is the tick, tick, tick of a clock somewhere as I wait for them to address me. Time and again one of them looks up, frowns and looks back down, each time saying nothing.
I take the time to study them.
Three men, three women. The woman who initially spoke to me seems to be, at least to me, the powerful one. She sits in the middle, her pale blonde hair pulled back into a tight chignon. Her nose is long and perfectly straight and her high, tanned, cheekbones are evident even from where I sit. She looks like I imagine an aristocrat would look, and if she is Madame Boufant, I guess sheisan aristocrat – at least in the cooking world. She owns the most expensive and best restaurant in town and heads this academy.
The others also look proud, haughty, bored, as though even being here interviewing people is beneath them.
I’m tempted to get up and leave. I’m proud too, I don’t like being treated like a naughty and unwanted child, but that is how I feel as I sit here, miserable, waiting for them to address me.
Finally, the aristocrat looks up.
“You have applied, how many times to this establishment, Miss Bailey?”
“Four, uh, including this time.”
“Yes. I see you apply every year since, presumably given your age, you left school.”
“Yes, it’s always been my dream to…”
She cuts me off.
“And during the interim, how have you employed your time?”
“I work at a private boarding school for girls, in their canteen.”
“Indeed,” she frowns at me as a couple of the other board members tsk, tsk and shake their heads.
“You do realise, do you not, Miss Bailey, that this school is the most prestigious culinary establishment of its kind in the country?”
