first night he’d made love to her he’d thought their bodies seemed to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle, but sadly now there was a corner piece missing and he didn’t know how to find it and put it back together again.
“Maybe I should have tried to explain about Julie but I just felt so hurt and angry when she obviously believed the worst of me straight away and I figured making excuses would have made me look even guiltier?” he said to Luke while they were squatting on the lounge floor with cans of lager. He’d arrived an hour ago and had dumped his case, bags, and rucksack on the floor while they’d flopped down to have a drink and catch up.
Luke rested back on his rucksack. “Yeah, but why feel guilty, mate? I mean, its ages since you two split up and officially you’re a free agent.”
“I know, but funnily enough even though I know it’s all over between us I just can’t bear the thought of her disliking me?”
Luke got up on his knees and clapped a friendly hand on Tim’s shoulder. “I’ll get this lot put away in the bedroom,” he said, and then stared at him through his rimless glasses. “Do you want her back, Tim?”
Tim looked up at his friend, slowly nodded, and said wistfully, “I’d give anything I own to have her back…”
The next day in the restaurant Jack appeared in his office with exciting news. A food critic was coming to the restaurant the following week to taste Tim’s new Victorian dishes and his comments were going to be included in an article in The Telegraph advertising the royal wedding banquet. Jessie was just about hopping up and down on one leg with excitement when he told them about it.
Tim looked seriously at her. “Jessie, they say that a messy kitchen is a happy kitchen but I don’t even want to see a smile on this kitchens face.”
Jessie looked dumbly at him and Simon said to her, “Duh …he means the kitchen has got to be spotless!”
“Oh right,” she said sheepishly. “You can count on me, Tim.”
“And get some agency help booked because I want every cupboard and chiller turned out and scrubbed, and the use-by-dates on all the spices and condiments, in fact, on everything double checked.”
She sighed heavily at the amount of extra work but then he put an arm along her shoulder. “Thank God, I’ve got you two because quite frankly I couldn’t manage without you both,” he said sincerely and she flushed pink cheeked with pride
And then it was time for Simon’s face to beam with pleasure when Tim asked him to concentrate solely on the new dishes with him, and leave the everyday menu to the other two chefs.
“One chef,” Jessie corrected him.
Tim looked blankly at her and raised an eyebrow in confusion. “One?”
“Yeah, Geoff, the oldest guy is touring India on holiday for two weeks, he leaves this Friday. Didn’t you know?”
Tim couldn’t believe it and after getting to the bottom of the story he found out that Jack had honoured his holidays at the interview but of course hadn’t told him about them. Great, that’s all he needed, he raged, one chef down for the important visit, but it was do-able he’d just have to be especially well organised and hopefully Simon would work some extra hours.
At the beginning of the following week disaster struck when his other new chef was involved in a car accident. Jessie told him the news that he had a fractured pelvis and was on six weeks bed rest in the hospital.
Sitting at his desk Tim put his head in his hands and groaned, “Christ, it’s two steps forward and bloody three steps back at the moment.”
“We’ll be OK,” Jessie said positively. “We’ll just have to get an agency chef to help?”
Flipping open his diary to look for telephone numbers, he said, “I’ll start to ring around now and see who’s available. I’ve got five days to find another chef.”
By the end of the lunch time service he still hadn’t found anyone and had heard the same excuse over and over again that all the good chefs were tied up and he was trying desperately not to panic.
Could they do it, he wondered? Could he and Simon cope with the set lunch time menus and the new Victorian dishes too? He was determined to talk to Jack later to see if he could get a pay rise for Simon because