The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef by Marco Pierre White

Author:Marco Pierre White [White, Marco Pierre]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Cooks, Cooking, ebook, General, Personal Memoirs, book, Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781596914971
Google: VJOb898jMeYC
Amazon: 1596914971
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2007-01-02T08:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Beautiful Doll

I MET MY first wife at the fishmonger’s in the summer of 1987, some six months after the opening of Harveys. My relationship with Lowri-Ann, the onetime queen of the King’s Road, hadn’t worked out. I can’t remember how it ended—these things fizzle out—but I had removed myself and my trunk from her place in Battersea and resettled in a flat close to Wandsworth Common. The location of my new home meant that when I wasn’t sleeping in Harveys, I was at least bedding down a few hundred yards from the restaurant and my cherished kitchen.

I was living with a bloke whom I shall call Derek, who was another member of the King’s Road set. Derek had been a heroin addict and I only moved into his place after he promised me he’d managed to kick the habit. He hadn’t. Most nights I would return from Harveys, shattered, burned and cut, and walk into the flat to find Derek and his friends drugged up, lolling and slumping. I may as well have been living in an opium den. In the mornings I’d be awoken by a shaky hand knocking on my door. “Yes,” I’d say. Then one of Derek’s junkie mates would stumble into the room and ask to borrow a mirror—not to apply makeup, you understand, but to snort a line of cocaine. I got back one night to find a girl, off her face and wilting on the sofa. She asked if I could roll her a joint. “I’m sorry,” I said politely. “I can’t.” As in, I don’t know how.

“Christ,” she replied, her eyeballs swiveling. “Are you that stoned?”

Derek was unperturbed by my reluctance to take drugs. As far as he was concerned, I was a dependent just like him. “You’re an addict, Marco,” he once told me, with a junkie’s beam of confidence. “You’re an addict to the warmth,” by which he meant the stove, the cooking, the kitchen, the work.

It was all of those things that took me one morning to Johnny the Fish, who happened to introduce me to his secretary. Her name was Alex McArthur and she was like a beautiful doll, blond, blue-eyed and very pretty. She was, I later found out, a surgeon’s daughter and was as middle class as I was working class. We chatted and established a connection, the Oxford connection. She had studied there at the same time as my friend Piers Adam, and they had known each other briefly, and I had worked at Le Manoir. We said farewell and off I went with my lobster and sea bass. But when I got back to Harveys, Alex was still on my mind. Despite all my misadventures at the restaurant, I was far from self-assured and still not good with girls, but I found the courage to call Alex and ask if she fancied dinner.

“When?” she said.

“What about tonight?”

“What time?”

“Eleven,” I said, explaining, “I have to finish service first.”

That night she arrived in her little Fiat Panda and I squeezed my six-foot-three-inch frame into the passenger seat.

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