Dead Heat - By Dick Francis & Felix Francis Page 0,5
the chambermaid each morning to serve the early morning teas to the guests in the seven double bedrooms. At first, I did this by banging on her bedroom door for five minutes until she reluctantly opened it. But after a couple of weeks the task became much easier as I simply had to push her out of the single bed that we had started sharing.
However, working in a restaurant kitchen, even at the kitchen sink, sparked in me a passion for food and its presentation. Soon I had left the washing up to others while I started an apprenticeship under the watchful eye of Marguerite, the fiery, foul-mouthed head cook. She didn’t like the term ‘chef’. She had declared that she cooked and was therefore a cook.
When my six-month stint was up, I just stayed. By then I had been installed as Marguerite’s assistant and was making everything from the starters to the desserts. In the afternoons, while the other staff caught up on their sleep, I would experiment with flavours, spending most of my earnings on ingredients at Witney farmers’ market.
In the late spring I wrote to Surrey University politely asking if my entry could be deferred for yet another year. Fine, they said, but I think I already knew I wasn’t going back to life in laboratories and lecture theatres. When, in late October the following year, Marguerite swore once too often at my mother’s distant cousin and was fired, my course in life was set. Just four days short of my twenty-first birthday I took over the kitchen with relish and set about the task of becoming the youngest chef ever to win a Michelin star.
For the next four years the establishment thrived, my confidence growing at the same spectacular rate as the restaurant’s reputation. However, I was becoming acutely aware that my mother’s cousin’s bank balance was expanding rather more rapidly than my own. When I broached the subject, she accused me of being disloyal, and that was the beginning of the end. Shortly after she sold out to a national small hotel chain without telling me, and I suddenly found I had a new boss who wanted to make changes to my kitchen. My mother’s cousin had also failed to tell the buyers that she had no contract with me, so I packed my bags and left.
While I decided what to do next, I went home and cooked dinner parties for my mother who seemed somewhat surprised that I could, in spite of reading about my Michelin success in the newspapers. ‘But darling,’ she’d said, ‘I never believe what I read in the papers.’
It had been at one of the dinner parties that I was introduced to Mark Winsome. Mark was an entrepreneur in his thirties who had made a fortune in the mobile phone business. I had joined the guests for coffee and he was explaining that his problem was finding good opportunities to invest his money. I had jokingly said that he could invest in me if he liked by setting me up in my own restaurant. He didn’t laugh or even smile. ‘OK,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll finance everything and you have total control. We split the proceeds fifty-fifty.’
I had sat there with my mouth open. Only much later did I find out that he had badgered my mother for ages to organize the meeting between us so that he could make that offer and I had fallen into the trap.
And so, six years ago now, with Mark’s money, I had set up the Hay Net, a racing themed restaurant on the outskirts of Newmarket. It hadn’t especially been my plan to go to Newmarket, but it was where I found the first appropriate property and the closeness to racing’s headquarters was simply a bonus.
At first business had been slow but, with the special dinners and lunches around the race meetings spreading the word, the restaurant was soon pretty full every night with a need to book more than a week in advance for midweek, and at least a month ahead for a Saturday night. The wife of one major trainer in the town even started paying me a retainer to have a table for six booked every Saturday of the year, except for when they were away in Barbados in January. ‘Much easier to cancel than to book,’ she’d said, but she rarely cancelled and often needed the table expanded to eight or ten.