“I’m thinking about it.”
“Marcella, you’re becoming a nun here. These are your friends. Why wouldn’t you write to them?”
“It’s complicated, Julia. The world is complicated.” “How? How is it complicated?”
“Oh, I can’t tell you.”
“You should do it. Would it help if I made the decision for you?”
“It may be the only way I’ll ever do it,” I laughed.
I had not meant it as permission, but this morning my heart stopped when I saw the letter was gone.
Now I’m furious but feel my fury is unjustified. Perhaps the letter will unlock the past and stop me wondering about Benji. Maybe Julia has done me a favour by taking action. But I should have told her what was complicated. The world to her is full of emotional dangers, traumas, memories, bad parents, love affairs gone wrong, enemies of complete fulfillment. I forgot to tell her that the world is also full of real dangers: prisons, wars, murders. Now I have to wait and see which of us has the wiser understanding of the world. If she had not slept in my bed she would not have dared this.
Recently, at a faculty meeting, there was a talk on the dangers of sexual harassment charges from students. We should be vigilant, keep our office doors ajar if we were ever alone with anyone. Students should not be invited home, never touched, hugged, offered too much comfort. I blushed at the discovery of how far my foreign ways had led me from the proper behaviour for an American professor.
In London, newly in love with Benji, the sort of luck that falls into the laps of those happy, optimistic and at ease, fell into mine. He said, “I’ve got a Greek friend, a business contact. He’s giving up his restaurant in Garway Road, just off Westbourne Grove. There’s two months left on the lease and he says we can have it for nothing. Starting tomorrow. It’s all equipped. Interested?”
I thought about it, and London, and got stage fright. “Have you ever run a restaurant, Benji?”
He laughed. “Of course not. That’s why I want to do it. What’s the point of doing things you’ve already done? Anyway, you have, haven’t you?”
“Not quite. And not here in London.”
“It will be fine. It’s only a small place. We can just run it together. And it’s only for two months anyway.”
It was what Benji always liked, something new, risky, short term. But this was just the first thing; I could not know then that it was a pattern.
“Will two months be long enough to find customers?” “We’ll find out. Do you want to do it? I have to let him know.”
I did not want to put another sensible word against him. “OK, let’s try it. When can we visit?”
“I have the key.” He took a single, flat key—no key ring—from his shirt pocket and pressed it to the tip of my nose. “We can go now.”
The place was small and shabby, the lower floor of an impractically narrow house squashed between two larger buildings, a humbler enterprise than any Benji had talked of. We walked around inside. Although Dimitri’s Cafe had only stopped operating last week, it might have been from Dickens. The floor was grimy and the tables were of battered wood. Behind a curtain the kitchen was simply a corridor filled with blackened stoves and blackened cooking pots. I took a heavy saucepan from its hook and discovered that the inside was scoured to a beautiful burnished silver. I leaned on a table. Solid. It would have been at home in the Elephant Bar. Benji pulled open a jammed drawer and found knives and forks. He pressed the till open—it rang—and lifted the tray to see if any banknotes had been forgotten. They hadn’t. I went over to the window and pulled back the yellowed net curtain to see what it felt like to look out onto Bayswater as a business proprietor. A family of European tourists in sports clothes immediately transformed themselves into potential customers. I thought of the little girl who had so conscientiously carried glasses of fruit juice to customers in Zanzibar and had done her homework on the vacant cafe tables. And of Mrs F commanding the bar that was no bigger than this restaurant. This was right.
Benji joined me, put his arm around my shoulder. “So, can you help me with this?”
I nodded. “I think so.” I pulled away from him to look around. “What are we going to cook, anyway?
“Indian. Curry. What else?”
The next day I took off my shoes and socks to scrub the floor, while Benji took his old Mercedes to the cash and carry for supplies. When he returned the boot was dragging under the weight of food and drink. He already had the menu in his head, he said, and I made him sit at a table to write it down. There were four main dishes based on rice and curry. “We have to concentrate on just offering a few dishes and doing them well. We can’t compete with the menus of the bigger restaurants.”
“So cheap?” I asked, looking over his shoulder.
“We have to make it very cheap. That’s the only way we are going to get customers quickly.” Benji appeared to have all his business ideas completely worked out. “We only have to cover our variable costs to make money— that’s raw materials and us.”
“I know what variable costs are, Singapore man. You think I don’t know anything.” I sat across the table from him and helped make six copies of the menu, and a bigger version for the window. I was so absorbed by this that I did not notice the happiness
