Page 5 of Kept
“I didn’t, he ordered for me, some disgusting cold white soup for starters.”
“Vichyssoise,” I nod.
“Then tiny little chickens in a grape sauce.”
“Hang on, did he call them cailles?”
“Uh yeah.”
“Quail,” I nod.
“Jesus, fuck Josie, trust you to be more interested in the food than what happened next.”
“Of course,” I roll my eyes, “because I know what you are going to tell me happened next. You slept with him; he was the best you’ve ever had…blah blah,”
“No, smartypants,” she grins and shakes her head maniacally, “I did not sleep with him. He took me out for more drinks at a small martini bar in the rich part of town and met up with some friends. We went around to their mansion, and I do mean mansion, and I watched him play cards until the early hours of this morning when he dropped me home.”
“Well, well, well,” I snigger, “don’t tell me you are actually becoming more respectable in your dating life?”
“No,” she snorts, “I would have done him in a heartbeat; he is fucking gorgeous. But he wasn’t interested in sex – he was interested in my mind.”
I burst out laughing at this, so hard, I do a little pig snort at one point.
“What? Is that so hard to believe?”
“Margarita,” I stutter between laughter, trying to catch my breath, “you know I love you – and yes, it is for your mind – no, I’m not laughing at you,” I shake my head at her angry expression, “I’m laughingwithyou.”
“I’m not laughing,” she screws her nose up and throws a handful of grated cheese at me, “but you just wait and see – this one, this one I’m thinking of marrying.”
“Oh my God,” I laugh all the harder, “you said you wouldn’t marry any man who couldn’t afford to buy you shoes every week – top-shelf shoes.”
“Well, this one,” she says conspiratorially, raising her eyebrows up and down, “can.”
3
I relax on the window seat fronting the street, the book on my lap, and sip my hot chocolate.
It is late. Margarita is out with some girlfriends tonight, her new potential husband, apparently busy. It’s Friday night, and she asked me if I wanted to go, but I’m tired from the long week of work, and I want to save my money, not spend it all on drinks. Instead, I have given myself permission to stay up later than I do on weeknights, to study.
Tomorrow I plan to spend the whole day researching recipes and practising my sauces – the small amount of cash I have saved I will blow on buying ingredients for b?chamel, velout?, Espagnole and tomato sauce, rather than on scotch and coke with Margarita’s friends.
I cast my eye over to the kitchen where I can just see the note I have magnetically pinned to the fridge. My new application to the Boufant Culinary Academy of America, the most prestigious cooking school in the country. I’ve tried for the past three years to get through those haloed doors, but never once received an interview. I crossed my fingers that this time, now that I was living in the same town as the school, my application might at least get me up their stairs.
I remind myself to stop procrastinating and post it tomorrow.
Relaxing in my seat, I once again peruse the cooking books my mother left me, running my fingers lovingly along the little red notes she had made in her neat handwriting in the margins, and between the lines of the recipes, as I decide which one to test myself on tonight. But my eye is caught by the newly found book on the coffee table and, deciding I will just take another look at the would-be writer’s manuscript, I flick it open.
I laugh again, at the first line, before continuing reading.
I celebrated my day by freeing Celeste. As she greeted me at the door I squeezed her neck until her head popped off like a champagne cork.
The surprise on her pretty face was delightful as I drained her life away, straight from the jugular, once again like a giant bottle of Dom, so to speak, although, of course, I no longer favour that tipple. Of late, there are some cheaper champagnes that I believe taste better, and unlike some, I have no compunction in drinking a brand that is not de-rigour. Let’s face it; I don’t give a damn about labels or the people who base their reputations on them, never have.
I picked up my bags and left after that, she had packed them as I ordered and I sit now, on my jet, updating this foolish journal and preparing to breathe the country air of my estate.
Celeste had been so looking forward to seeing my manor, but that was part of the problem, wasn’t it? She shouldn’t be ‘looking forward’ to anything.
Her life was to serve. I told her from the start thatI would end it when I chose. She had become complacent, comfortable, attached, as they all do. I did her a courtesy freeing her from all that.
