The Saturday Supper Club Read online

  For my mum, Anne Cook

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Eve’s Supper Club

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART TWO

  Maggie’s Supper Club

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  PART THREE

  Andrew’s Supper Club

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  PART FOUR

  Ethan’s Supper Club

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Lovebird Chocolate Cake

  PART ONE

  Eve’s Supper Club

  Chapter One

  Life has a way of flinging messy, unfinished business in your face, just when you’re least expecting it. Everyone knows that. I know that. It’s an unwritten law that just when you’re sailing happily along, life socks you in the gut and leaves you gasping for air. Even so, I was absolutely not expecting it that humid Saturday evening, at the beginning of June, when I opened my front door to welcome dinner guests and found all six-foot-two of my messy, unfinished business standing on the doorstep holding a dewy bottle of Chablis and a bunch of scarlet poppies.

  ‘Oh my God!’ he gasped, rocking backwards, stumbling into the dreadlocked wisteria dangling from the trellis in soft violet blooms. ‘Eve?’

  My hand shot to my mouth. I could not believe my eyes. I blinked. My mouth fell open. It was my ex, Ethan Miller. Ethan looked at me and I looked at him. He let out a strangled laugh while I fought a sudden urge to burst into tears. I could not find any words. I just gawped at him, the air sucked from my lungs.

  But who could blame me? It had been three years since he’d upped and left without a word of warning, vanishing from my life and into nowhere like a shooting star into the night sky. Now he was here and it felt like the hands on the clock were whizzing noisily backwards, rewinding all the days, weeks, months and years since he walked away. Gathering myself, I tried to close the door, but Ethan wedged his size-eleven Patrick Cox brogue into the gap. Admittedly, I didn’t put up much of a fight. I took a deep breath and let the door swing open, holding on to the handle, gripping so hard my knuckles went white.

  ‘Christ almighty,’ he said, his eyes perfect circles. ‘I cannot believe this. It’s been nearly three years.’

  I frowned, confused and disorientated. It seemed both of us were in shock at seeing one another. My cheeks burned. I shook my head. Still, I could not speak. From behind me came the hiss of a saucepan of water boiling over onto the cooker top and a bitter smell of dark chocolate burning. My pudding, I registered vaguely, would be completely ruined.

  ‘Eve,’ he said.

  ‘Ethan,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t—’ he choked. ‘I didn’t know you lived here. I feel like I’m going to have a heart attack. Should I just go?’

  He pointed towards the street with his sad bunch of poppies. Their scarlet petals flopped listlessly, wilting in the heat. A black cab slowed down, its diesel engine noisily whirring, but Ethan turned back. He held the flowers out towards me, a tiny tentative smile on his lips, as if remembering something that was good, once upon a time.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t go.’

  And even though warning bells were ringing in my head, I did what I definitely should not have done. I let him in.

  Earlier that Saturday, a bizarre thing happened. I had found an old photograph of me and Ethan I’d thought was lost, tucked in the pages of a notebook. I had been standing, surrounded by the intoxicating smell of strawberries and raspberries, near a spectacular fruit and vegetable stall at Borough Market, riffling through the notebook looking for my shopping list to check I hadn’t forgotten anything. I was in a bad mood because with just twenty-four hours’ notice I’d reluctantly agreed to host and cook a three-course dinner party for people I’d never met, taking part in the Saturday Supper Club, a (hugely popular) dinner-party competition run by the London Daily newspaper.

  ‘I’m about to ask you a massive favour,’ my boyfriend Joe had said down the phone from his desk at the London Daily newspaper offices in Canary Wharf, where he was freelancing as a reporter. ‘Prepare yourself.’

  ‘You’re scaring me,’ I said warily, because I knew that whatever it was, I would have to agree to Joe’s request. Joe wore the badge of Nicest Man On Earth and when he asked me to do something – as long as it didn’t involve rubber gloves or galvanized chains – I did it.

  ‘OK, so you’ve seen the Saturday Supper Club competition in the paper, haven’t you?’ he continued. ‘The one where people cook dinner parties for strangers in their own homes, then mark each other out of ten? The winner gets a thousand pounds? Well, one of the contestants has dropped out of the competition tomorrow night . . .’

  Joe’s words trailed off almost guiltily, and I narrowed my eyes, hearing his lovely Irish accent become stronger with nerves. I could picture him exactly, his slim frame hunched over his desk while he made this private call, nervously rubbing his jaw with his free hand, blond stubble scratchy on his palm, blond eyelashes fluttering over shiny brown eyes.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘And did you, by any chance, suggest I could take this person’s place?’

  I made my voice light but inside I felt annoyed. Joe knew my life was hellishly busy at the moment. I had no time to invite my friends over to the flat, let alone cook a three-course dinner for strangers that the whole of London would read about. Sensing my bad mood, Joe cleared his throat a couple of times and lowered his voice. I had to shove the phone up against my ear to hear him.

  ‘You love cooking, don’t you?’ he said quickly, as if that was the issue. ‘You’re a brilliant cook and well, if I’m honest, if I can find someone, i.e. you, this will make me look really good. I can see myself getting a job here, Eve. I’ll soon be in my own office.’

  He paused for breath and continued in an almost-whisper.

  ‘Imagine it, though,’ he said. ‘My name in gold lettering above the door, feet up on the table, smoking cigars and barking orders at underlings—’

  He was trying to make me laugh, but there was a serious subtext. Joe had been freelancing for years on various publications and was desperate to get a full-time, permanent position on a well-respected newspaper. He wanted to prove he could be as good as his dad once was, not that he’d ever admit his motivation to anyone but me. I bit the inside of my cheek. I was going to have to agree.

  ‘And the editor says she’s happy for you to talk about the cafe and will even credit it,’ he added. ‘Publicity like that is worth a few quid, you know? This paper is read by over six hundred thousand people. What if they all came in for a coffee and a slice of cake? You’d be a millionaire!’

  I sighed. The cafe was my very raw nerve. I was supposedly opening a new place in eight weeks’ time and, financially speaking, it was becoming more of a chain round my neck than a dream come true, so th
e prospect of free publicity was undeniably tempting. Even so, the thought of having people I didn’t know round for dinner felt like a big ask. I thought of the pants and bras currently drying on my radiators, the mountain of crockery, lamps and pictures I’d bought for the cafe currently stored in boxes in my hallway, making it difficult to get out the front door.

  ‘What about all the crap in the flat?’ I asked. ‘I’ll have to spend hours clearing it up.’

  ‘Don’t bother, it’s all part of your incredible charm,’ he said breezily. ‘So, do we have a deal?’

  In the background, I heard the voices of Joe’s colleagues, a peal of laughter, then the muffled sound of his hand over the receiver while he talked to them.

  ‘What the hell will I cook?’ I asked in exasperation, not knowing if he was listening or not.

  ‘You’ll think of something,’ he said. ‘Sorry, got to go, there’s a meeting. Thanks for doing this for me. I . . . I do . . . appreciate it. I think it’s a good idea, really. In the long run I’m convinced you’ll be pleased.’

  Joe sounded so grateful, I softened. There was no way I could let him down. Maybe it would be good fun. Maybe I’d win. Whatever, it wasn’t going to change my life in any way, and if it would help Joe out, I didn’t want to say no.

  ‘I love you, Eve,’ Joe said, suddenly serious. ‘More than you know, I really do. Thank you. Bye.’

  There was a clattering as Joe put down the receiver, and I was left feeling slightly bemused, panicking about what to cook.

  ‘Me too,’ I said to the dialling tone.

  And so, after flicking through recipe books and devising a menu – fresh asparagus for starter, fisherman’s stew with homemade bread for main and a chocolate and strawberry meringue for pudding, I braved the Saturday morning crowds at Borough Market and spent a small fortune I didn’t have on fresh ingredients. But finding that photograph of me and Ethan stopped me in my tracks. It had been taken a couple of days before Ethan left and felt like another life entirely. My hair was longer then, and brown – now it was a red bob. I looked incredibly happy. We were at Reading Festival sitting in the awning of our tent, both grinning, his arm draped over my shoulders, my head turned towards him. Typical. I had never been able to drag my gaze away from Ethan, because he was so annoyingly good-looking. A jobbing actor, Ethan could have been a character in a 1940s Hollywood film noir. As it was, he’d played a drug dealer in The Bill and a corpse in Silent Witness. Tall, chiselled, dark, with unreadable eyes, Ethan seemed to have stepped right out of one of those smouldering Jack Vettriano paintings, positively oozing virility. Even when he had been up all night and had dark crescents under his eyes, which was often – he liked to party – he could’ve been on a photoshoot for Yves Saint Laurent. But it was much more than aesthetics. I loved looking at Ethan, because for the two years we’d been in a relationship, I had loved him with every cell in my body. I’d mistakenly thought he loved me back. I shook my head, bit my lip and scrunched my toes in my sandals.

  ‘Don’t even think about crying,’ I instructed myself with a loud sigh, moving away from the strawberries, my bags of shopping banging against my legs as I walked to the bus stop.

  ‘Bloody Ethan,’ I sighed. ‘Still gets to me.’

  After nearly three years apart, following two years together, the thought of Ethan shouldn’t still have upset me. But the truth was, it did. Losing him had left a void in my life that, at the time, felt nothing short of cataclysmic, leaving a hollow in my heart reminiscent of my mother’s death. Even now, when I remembered how he left, so abruptly – without a word of warning – I felt physically sick. I’d been certain, absolutely certain, that Ethan and I would be together my whole life. But I’d been proved horribly wrong. I sighed. I’d thought I’d had my quota of sadness when my mum died, but I now knew that life didn’t work like that. While some people lived without a care, others were magnets for miserable luck.

  I boarded a number 40 bus headed for East Dulwich, found a seat and stole another look at the picture. I studied Ethan’s face for clues of him being unhappy, because he must have been secretly unhappy. I searched for a hint of what he was about to do. Just as I thought, there were none whatsoever. He was holding out a plastic pint glass of beer to the camera, as if to celebrate. I rested the picture on my lap and closed my eyes. Perhaps that was the hint.

  ‘Ethan Miller,’ I muttered. ‘What happened to you? Not that I care.’

  As the bus roared along Borough High Road and through Camberwell Green, past King’s College Hospital and Denmark Hill station, images of Ethan flashed into my mind: smoking a cigarette in his concentrated manner; the easy way he slipped into Italian when talking to his parents; watching a gig in a darkly lit venue with a whiskey in hand, turning to beam at me like only we really understood; stretched out on the grass in the park staring up at the sky, laughing so hard his whole body shook; the tears I’d seen him cry, just once in two years, when he described the recurring nightmare that kept him from sleep. I curled my fingers around the picture and considered screwing it up. I’d loved Ethan with everything I had, but I needed to put him in the past and leave him there.

  Five minutes later, glancing up out of the bus window at a row of three-storey Victorian terraced houses, their doors painted red or green or blue, I realized we were at my stop at Goose Green in East Dulwich, now touted by wanky estate agents as home to artists and creative types, driving up the prices even more. Photo still in my hand, I held my finger down on the bell and the driver swerved the bus to a halt, bundling everyone standing in the aisles forward and onto each other’s toes.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said to the man near me, as I shoved my way to the exit door, the photo slipping out of my fingers and onto the floor of the bus. ‘Oops, oh shit, I’ve dropped . . .’

  The doors shut behind me, a whisker of a second after I stepped out onto the pavement. I banged on the glass with my palm but the driver took no notice. Resting my bags on the ground, I took a deep breath. I’d lost the photograph of Ethan. I told myself I didn’t care. Ethan was the past. I had Joe now and he was all that mattered. It might sound sappy, but Joe had galloped into my life and flung me onto his white stallion when I was at my absolute lowest. He deserved my complete and utter devotion. What did it matter if that picture was trampled on and ruined? My heart had suffered the same fate at Ethan’s hands. I watched the bus chug up the hill and then out of sight, leaving behind a great furl of black exhaust.

  ‘Forget about it,’ I told myself. ‘OK, I really need to hurry up.’

  I checked my phone. It was four p.m., which left me just three hours until my Saturday Supper Club dinner-party guests were due to arrive. I had so much to do. Sweat burst onto my brow. The thought of cooking dinner for strangers, against the clock, felt terrifying.

  ‘You owe me one, Joe,’ I muttered, my mind drifting to the lost picture of Ethan as I walked. I’d shredded most of our photos in a drunken rage soon after he left, then, of course, immediately regretted it and tried, pathetically, to stick them back together. That wasn’t the worst of it, either. I cringed at the memory of the reams of poems I’d penned in my diary, furiously dark and angst-ridden. Thank God I’d never sent them to him or shown them to a living soul. I still had them – a stark reminder to be careful with my heart.

  I heaved the bags up into my arms and turned into Elsie Road, where I lived in a very small garden flat in a Victorian conversion, which reminded me of a dolly mixture, because the previous owner had had the wherewithal to paint the exterior a charming shade of pale blue and the window frames white. I say garden, but really it was more of a postage stamp with two flourishing pots of lavender in it and a solitary apple tree, but I loved living there, with my cat Banjo. In the last two years, from the window boxes planted with mint, chives and thyme, to the brass Deco doorbell with ‘press’ embossed on it, I had made it my home. Unusually for London, I knew several of the neighbours, too, mostly young families whose living rooms were stuffed full of baby paraph
ernalia. I held my breath as I passed an overflowing dustbin that never seemed to be emptied, its contents stinking in the heat. Finally, boiling hot, my bare arms speckled with horrible black thunder flies, I arrived at my flat and unlocked the door.

  ‘Hello!’ I called out to Joe, kicking off my sandals and pushing open the door of my kitchen, heaving my shopping bags up onto the counter. ‘Joe? Where are you?’

  I looked around the kitchen and my spirits instantly lifted. My favourite room in the flat, it was very small, but perfectly formed and stashed with all my favourite things. Today it was refreshingly cool, with clean white walls and a built-in dresser, shelves bowed under the weight of my beloved cookbook collection, cupboards groaning with kilo bars of the finest chocolate for those moments I felt like making a stash of chocolate chunk cookies, copious bags of flour and sugar for baking and a fridge bursting with ripe, melting cheeses for swiping on crackers and guzzling with a glass of red wine late at night. Then there was the beaded curtain that I liked to burst through in the style of Beverley from Abigail’s Party, which led through to my walk-in larder. That larder had sold this flat to me. Cool and dark, it was now lined with jars of jams, pickles and condiments. I liked to stand in there, just looking. If I could choose where to spend my final hours, it would be in there, alone with a freshly baked, warm, soft French baguette stuffed with crisp, fine, dark chocolate.

  ‘Joe?’ I called, stepping into the hallway, tripping over a box of crockery and into an enormous bunch of white lilies that was taking over the entire telephone table. Must have cost a fortune. I frowned. I’d never much liked white lilies. Their overwhelming smell reminded me of my mother’s funeral. At the time I didn’t know what lilies represented and couldn’t understand why people had chosen white flowers for such a colourful person.

  ‘Joe?’ I said again, pushing his shoes out of the way with my toe.

  Since I’d started going out with Joe, his possessions had popped up in the corners of my flat like wild mushrooms, the edible ones. He had his own place in Kentish Town, but his guitar was a permanent fixture as was his uniform of Worn Free T-shirts, Lee jeans, white Vans and his vintage mustard-coloured MG Spider that lived on the street outside and attracted blokes like bees to honey. My older sister Daisy had vowed to save up for one herself, convinced it was a great way to meet and bag an eligible bachelor.