Cafe du Jour

I loved this book! I was hooked from page one. - Jane Porter, bestselling author of Flirting With Forty and She’s Gone Country

Lilian Darcy’s writing is wonderful, and the characterizations are rapier sharp. - New York Times Bestelling author Mary Jo Putney.

Café du Jour

Lilian Darcy

To my husband, for believing in me

First published 2007

First Australian Paperback Edition 2007, Mira Books Australia, a division of Harlequin Enterprises

First Electronic Book Edition May 2011, Springvale Manuscript Production

CAFÉ DU JOUR Copyright 2011 by Lilian Darcy

ISBN 978 0 987 09400 1

Smashwords Edition

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of Contents

Café du Jour

Monday, September 16

Thursday, October 3

Saturday, October 19

Sunday, November 3

Thursday, November 21

Monday, December 2

About the Author

Acknowledgements

All Dressed Up - Excerpt

Up Front, For My Sister

Karen, I started writing this a few months ago, about seven weeks after the accident, and I think it’s for you but I’m not sure. It may still be another few months before you’re ready to see it. Forgive me if it takes that long - if it takes me a while to trust that you could handle it and understand it right. Forgive me if I tell you too many things you already know, because there have been so many times when I haven’t been sure if you did know them.

It’s not quite a diary because sometimes I cheat. I go back and change and add, like this part, pasted in. I’m trying to resist doing that, because I think there is - there has to be - a journey here. From grey to black and white, from addiction to love, from what’s fake to what’s true. And if I cheat then the journey won’t be clear for either of us.

I’m inconsistent about it, though. I want to pour out some stuff now before the story even gets started. There are three crimes involved here, their threads weaving the wrong colours through my life as if they’re from someone else’s length of fabric. In the end, though, Karen, I’ve found that I just have to adopt the new colours into the pattern, because I’ve realised they’re not going to go away.

One of them was the crime against you - the hit-and-run. We’re never going to get an answer on that one. The police have said so. No answer on who… I don’t want to say ruined… who crashed your life onto its new course.

Then came the fire, and I have unanswered questions about that, too. What was I really seeing when I scrabbled frantically amongst the charred remains? Something I could have prevented? Predicted? Something I should applaud?

The final crime, yes, I should definitely have predicted. A sin, really, not a crime. A crime against my heart. Oh, but they were all crimes against my heart, Karen, all three of them. Please read this, and tell me what you think.

Monday, September 16

I’m in the kitchen at ten o’clock at night, trying to re-discover cheese - failing - when Jody walks in, eyes dry and hands cramped from driving. He’s unfamiliar. It’ll take my desire a little time to kick in. Ten minutes? An hour? A day? We haven’t seen each other since early July.

It’s raining hard, colder than it has been for most of the winter. Neil and Nonie, who own the house (but are not of particular significance in my life), have just gone to bed. The ski season has been terrible and Jody has had long stretches with minimal work. He turned in his ski school jacket this afternoon, I discover. He packed up his gear and drove without a break from Jindabyne to Sydney in four and a half hours.

He hugs me, and the familiarity begins to stir inside me like a small animal waking from long sleep.

You didn’t tell me you were coming. It’s not really an accusation.

It is.

It is! When I phoned him seven weeks ago, broke the news about Karen’s accident and told him he didn’t need to come down, he said, Okay, if that’s what you want, and he didn’t come.

It wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted insistence. Of course I’ll come.

Now, half a lifetime later, he’s here.

Yeah, he says vaguely. I wasn’t thinking. He’s talking about today, not seven weeks ago. I meant to text you…

He kisses me short but deep, and despite the other animal stirring inside me - the angry, accusing one - it feels right, a prelude to more. We hug again. Tight. Warm. You’ve lost weight, he says.

I answer, into the shirt fabric on his shoulder, I haven’t been enjoying food much lately.

He stills, and on snaps the light in his bright mind. God! He pulls back a little, and examines my face, shocked on my behalf. He’s the first person to understand, the way he so often is. That’s not good.

No, is all I can say.

You can divide the world into two kinds of people - the ones who eat too much when they’re stressed, and the ones who can hardly eat at all. Put me in the second group.

And it’s not as if you had a lot to lose, he says. Bit, maybe. His usual blunt approach. Three or four kilos. But you’ve lost more than that. You’re thin, now.

We talk about it for a few minutes. I show him the cheese tasting experiment, which isn’t working. I got home from cooking at the restaurant at nine-thirty. We only did fourteen covers. Typical for a wet Monday. Julie only makes any money at all on a night like this because her overheads are so low. The crab cakes went down well. But I didn’t do the blue cheese souffles, and I should have.

This was what started me on the cheese experiment. The menu tonight was thin. Julie shrugs about things like this and forgives me more readily than my own mother would, and more readily than I forgive myself. It’s not guilt, so much. As Jody has recognised so fast, it’s fear.

Will I still have a cooking career by the time Karen is better?

Is there anything that pleasures you? he asks. He trains his blue eyes upon me, computing a solution to my problem. Chocolate? Soup?

I’m living on coffee.

Try coffee, then. Taste it like wine. Explore it. See if that brings back the joy. I brought some of mine.

Striding to where he’s dumped his things in the lounge-room (floorboards creak under the old carpet) he unpacks the coffee from his boxes of left-over food. There’s his French Breakfast Blend, his Mocha Java, his Sumatra Dark, each in its own packet, neatly crimped at the top.

He offers to make me a cup but my face folds into a blah look and I say no. Not sleeping well enough as it is. Don’t need caffeine at this hour. And his idea doesn’t feel quite right, anyhow. I don’t want to explore coffee like wine. If I’m going to explore coffee, it’ll be in a different way.

I’m hungry, he says, so we put away the King Island Camembert and the Stilton but keep out the sharp Tasmanian cheddar, with which he makes himself piles of cheese on toast.

While the last slices of it are still bubbling under the heat, he tells me what he’s been thinking about in the car, what made him forget to text me, and by the time we’re lying on the carpet in front of the two-bar radiant heater, the words are pouring out of him.

He has decided to run a workshop.

Ta-da!

It’s brilliant, he tells me.

This isn’t the mood I’d have chosen to find him in upon his unexpected return. Sometimes he’s softer. Sometimes I’m the full and total beneficiary of his focus, as I was just for those few minutes when he noticed I’d lost weight and understood how scary that was.

He tells me the whole workshop plan as far as he’s taken it at this point, after hours of driving on auto-pilot down the freeway and the M5, brain clicking away. I spread my hands over his back as I listen. His shirt is dry and hot against my palms. He hasn’t mentioned Karen yet. We’ve talked about her a lot on the phone, of course, but right now that doesn’t feel as if it counts.

You see, I’ve got to have at least another $20,000. Net. In hand. By December.

He crunches beguiling numbers. Twelve participants. $2,500 each. $30,000. Minus a few insignificant costs. Couple of weeks work, a month at most. Brilliant.

You’ve got to be in it, Susie. I know it’ll reduce the income to $27,500, but I’m going to need you.

What about the restaurant?

We’ll work it out.

And Karen.

You. My sister. The reason I’ve been coasting at the restaurant, just lately. The reason for my lost weight, the food problem, the coffee.

How is she? he asks at last.

Getting there.

I wait for more, toy with my anger a bit, wonder whether to tell him that he let me down.

But I said I’d come down and you told me not to.

I have no appetite for that dry logic tonight.

Actually, the other way to do it... He pauses. His mouth is full. The oil that has sweated from the melted cheese seams his lips. ...would be to spread it over several weekends. I’d been thinking of a total immersion for six days, but spreading it out would be better. I could charge more. $2,800? You could get Julie to bring in one of those guest chef friends of hers to cook for you, couldn’t you? Just four Saturdays between now and December?

Why do you want me in it, Jody? He’s still detailing the wrong things.

For support. Obviously you won’t say that we live together, or even that we know each other. You’ll just pretend to be a person off the street. My shill, yeah?

Your shill...

He hauls himself up. He’s full of energy for this, as he’s full of energy for everything, and he believes everything he says. You’ll have to sell it, talk it up. What amazing insights you’re getting, how much you’re growing and changing, so that the others - the real participants - the marks - know they’re getting their money’s worth.

The marks?

The people I’m - not fleecing, not scamming.

Not?

Not really. Not from their perspective. They’re going to think it’s incredible.

He goes looking for paper and a pen to write down ideas. He has notebooks full of ideas. Concepts for short films about extreme sports. A house he’s going to build one day, with his own hands, in Wales or Maine or Byron Bay. Articles to write and sell to airline magazines. Last year, he wrote three, and sold two of them. Not to mention sculpture, embroidery, quilts. He goes through periods when he can’t bear for his fingers to be idle. He scrounges left-over fabric scraps, ribbons and threads from everyone he knows who’s ever sewed. We have one of his quilts on our bed.

Occasionally, he even writes essays.

He craves more time. Doesn’t understand why everyone doesn’t have ideas like this. It’s not like I try. They just wander into his head. Sometimes they sit benignly for years, to be returned to occasionally and mulled over. Sometimes they burn and eat at him until he follows them through. He is genuinely bemused by the fact that other people are not like this.

I’m sometimes like this.

I was.

I think.

But only about food.

I have a brown cardboard expanding file of recipes upstairs in the office at the restaurant, things I’ve been collecting and tinkering with for eight years, but I haven’t added to it since July. Haven’t looked at it. Somewhere in this house, or possibly thrown away, is the last scribbled idea I wrote down the night of Karen’s accident, minutes before Dad called.

Something involving artichokes? I can’t even remember.

Jody comes back with the message book and felt-tip pen from beside the phone, which Neil and Nonie will hate. The book and pen are only to be used for messages.

I couldn’t find a decent pen.

He scribbles madly and I watch, the skin on my face going tight from the radiant heat of those glowing orange bars. I turn over and heat my back instead. A strand of hair drops into my mouth and I suck on it nervously. It tastes no worse than the cheese.

Oh, great, I’m thinking. A workshop, now. A scam-that-they-won’t-think-is-a-scam. Do I need this complication in his darting, charismatic ambitions?

It’s no good telling him I think it’s immoral. He’ll have arguments that are better than mine, to prove I’m wrong. The emotional centre of the argument will shift from the question of the workshop to the fact that I always get tongue-tied and he has no patience, talks me down. As if it’s a competition he’s determined to win, instead of an attempt to communicate constructively about our differences.

But I tell him anyway.

I think it’s immoral.

Why? I knew you’d say that. He’s energised by the fact of being right.

Because you’re ripping people off.

How? It’s not as if I’m going to take their money and then not do the workshop.

We digress into a whole argument about Ferran Adria’s Michelin three-star restaurant, El Bulli, in Spain, which some food people rave about and others think is the palate equivalent of the emperor without his clothes. Since I’ve only heard about it and haven’t eaten there, I’m not taking sides, but Jody (who also hasn’t eaten there) draws out a ruthless analogy and runs with it.

If you think you’re eating great food, then you are. Having great sex. Learning great truths. Substitute any words you like.

But you don’t believe in it. Feng Shui, and Reiki and past life therapy. I’m floundering, as usual.

But they’ll believe in it. That’s why it’ll work. Know what I mean? What’s belief, anyway? Maybe it’s belief that creates reality. It’s all relative.

Jody claims to have a degree in Philosophy from Cambridge University, and mostly I believe him, despite the lack of concrete evidence. There’s this idea in Philosophy, apparently, that the laws of gravity didn’t exist until Newton discovered them. Or something. It has been a surprise to me, since knowing Jody, how applicable this concept is to many of the events of everyday life. Tonight’s subject of discussion is obviously one of them.

What are you going to do in it, though? I ask, thinking that maybe the practical details will provide a stumbling block.

No such luck.

Tons of stuff. Massage, relaxation, trust work, games. Probably, yeah, past life therapy. He scribbles something. I’ll research it on the Net. Awakening your dragons. Crystal energy, maybe.

You see? What do you really know about it? When have you done massage?

When I was in Mooncalf. This is another of the previous careers he lays claim to - struggling actor in an experimental London theatre collective. Before we met.

There’s a silence, then he changes the subject. What time are you going to the hospital?

Nine-ish.

That early?

I always go for about three hours after I’ve been to the markets and set up at the restaurant.

Your parents aren’t up this week?

No, week after next.

It is a bland exchange, like so much of the dialogue between established couples, but there’s a lot beneath the surface. I can’t believe it has been nearly two months since Karen’s accident. Jody thinks I shouldn’t spend so much time with her and that my parents should spend a lot more. I agree with him on that last one, but I’m still waiting for something else, something better.

Something I can bite into.

Reassurance, or a reason to attack.

It doesn’t come.

And I’m tired so I go upstairs, leaving Jody to clean up. Turns out he doesn’t. In the morning, there’s still one slice of cheese on toast sitting there, cold and brittle on the crumb-encrusted plate, and the phone message book beside it, minus twelve pages and the pen.

The coffee experiment

If today is a cup of coffee, it has to be a big, piping hot café au lait, served in a bowl the way they often do in France. I drink it with my hands curved around the bowl for warmth - and for safety - but if I’m not careful, the corner of my mouth snags on the chip in the rim. A couple of days later, I get a cold sore, crusty and stinging, and I wonder if the chip in the rim has caused it.

Tuesday, September 17

The rain has blown out to sea and I drive to the fish markets early. A few torn clouds hang over the city, a black-hulled foreign ship waits beneath the orange cranes at the container terminal, and the cement floors of the markets are still wet from their morning hose-down. Men go back and forth, sexy and smelly, arm and stomach muscles strong, heaving grey crates of slippery fish, speaking languages I can name but don’t understand.

The garfish are beautiful today, their sides silvery-black and transparent, their tiny eyes bright and bulging. I touch a couple with the tip of my finger and the flesh springs back into place. Just right. But it’s a distant perception on my part, not fully felt.

Beautiful, says my fish man. His name is Sam. Dark accent. Creased eyes. Around fifty. I think he’s Greek. I should ask.

Too many people don’t like gar because of the bones, I answer him.

You eat the bones. He’s indignant. Eat the bones. So obvious.

I know. I do. If they’re fried crisp enough. But you can’t tell people that.

Very simple. Bread and butter and lemon.

I know. Little triangles of fresh baked wholemeal, cut very thin.

Makes me hungry.

It doesn’t make me hungry, although I’m trying.

Okay, I’ll do it, I tell Sam, as if it’s a favour to him. But I know no-one’ll order it.

The kitchen at the restaurant is quiet, shadowy and dark. Julie and the others never come in this early. It’s my meditation hour. Hate it in mid-winter when I have to turn on the lights. I parcel the seafood away, start the stock, make a marinade, pick herbs from our garden out the back, write a couple of lists, drink my coffee with a fat dollop of heavy cream, as if cream is progress.

Julie first opened the restaurant twenty-five years ago with a couple of women friends, in this terrace house in the most unfashionable block of Darling Street, which she inherited from her grandmother. It started as more of a coffee house, the result of one of those We’re drunk, we’re divorced, why don’t we open a cafe? type inspirations that could still work as a business plan in Sydney back then, if you were lucky.

They called it Whole Food Cafe. I’ve seen the old menus, and I can just imagine. Awful buckwheat cakes, everything sodden with tahini. But after a couple of years it began to change from a cafe that did bad food into a restaurant that did good coffee, and they changed the name to Whole Food Island.

Around twelve years ago, Julie bought out her friends, although they still come in to Guest Chef every now and then, and she had the sign re-painted with the words Whole Food in much smaller letters. Two years ago, she had it painted again, lost the Whole Food altogether, and now we’re just Island. Our decor features cool ocean colours and clean lighting.

I’ve been cooking here since just after the most recent decor change. I wanted to try a small kitchen, because when I - if I ever - open my own place, it will be small. The money is not great, but then I know Julie’s profits aren’t, either. Twice now, she’s said to me that I’m the daughter she never had, and I’ve bitten my tongue not to say in return, And you’re the mother, because... because...

Don’t actually know why. My mother wouldn’t think to thank me for the courtesy, and yet it’s her influence at work. We’re not the kind of people who go in for multitudes of honorary family.

Julie does have a son. Chef. Overseas.

As a business woman, she lurches from inefficiency to disaster and back again, on a regular basis. We’re still quirky, still an undiscovered gem in the crowded Sydney food scene, and our specials board is headed, What we felt like cooking today. How cute is that?

It’s cute, but it’s a lie, right now. I don’t feel like cooking anything. I just go through the motions, every night. I’m lucky to be Julie’s daughter, working for the family rate, or I might not be working at all.

When I’ve done enough advance prep at the restaurant, I close up and drive to the hospital. Same route as always, through the narrow, tangled back streets of Lilyfield and Annandale. Same route through my thoughts, too.

How much longer is Karen going to be in the hospital? Wouldn’t it be better if she could be somewhere else? In a garden. Helping. If I could have her at the restaurant in the mornings. Make breakfast. Coffee, even if I had to lift the cup for her. Talk, like we used to.

Karen, I miss you!

The hospital swallows me as soon as I step into its maw. The rest of the world cuts out. I breathe in its smell. People say this hospital smells different to any other hospital in Sydney. Sweetish, like gangrene - don’t they say the odour of gangrene is sweetish? - mingled with the smell of clothes that have lain folded in a cupboard for a long time, and the smell of something laboratorial, possibly formaldehyde. At certain times of the day, there’s also a powerful surge of custard, canned fruit and bad stew. I’ve changed the timing of my daily shower because of these smells.

I pass through a concourse, a lift bay, the lift, a corridor, a turning, a forbidding door that wheezes when it opens and shuts, and reach the nurses’ station.

You’re a bit late this morning, Susie.

I’m this predictable? It’s embarrassing.

She’s already gone down to hydro.

Has she? Okay.

The door wheezes, the lift clunks, I traverse a subterranean passage. An orderly smiles at me.

God, you’re here again? You’re obsessed!

He doesn’t say it, but his eyes do. Orderlies are cynical. They shunt wheelchairs and stretchers back and forth all day as if they worked in a supermarket cold store. They shunt Karen like this, and Karen giggles at their terrible casual teasing as if it is fiercely original and funny.

I pass through the gym and one of the physiotherapy orderlies is singing, Knees Up Mother Brown. An old lady giggles the same way Karen does. From beyond the gym, I hear the sound of gushing water as the Hubbard tank is filled…

Can I write about this yet?

Only if I keep my distance.

Seven weeks ago, when I went in to see Karen for the first time, it was the first time I’d been in a hospital since visiting a school-friend with appendicitis at the age of twelve.

Karen had the accident at ten o’clock at night. She was on her way home from a function at the high school where she taught science. It was a Tuesday. The roads were quiet and she took the backstreets. It was a clear, bright night, the moon was half full, and there hadn’t been rain. It was the height of winter, not the season for parties and drunkenness. There were no breathalysers set up on a nearby main street, forcing drunk drivers to take another route. Karen always looked after her motor-bike, she wore the right helmet, and she kept to the speed limit.

No-one saw the car until after the accident. On hearing the screech of tyres, the crash of metal and the awful dragging and bumping, a man named Kevin Saxon rushed out of his house just in time to see the car before it disappeared. Sections of its bodywork appeared badly damaged, and it zig-zagged all over the road. From his silhouette, it was most likely a young male driver at the wheel. The police found the vehicle two days after the accident, abandoned miles away. It had been reported stolen a week earlier, and the driver was impossible to trace.

Karen, do I have to tell you (could I express it if I tried) how much I hate that driver?

Kevin Saxon scanned the street for a moment after he lost sight of the car, and saw nothing else of note. He turned to go inside,