Page 110 of From Notting Hill with Love…Actually
As I stood in front of Belinda’s cookbooks trying to decipher how long you marinated and how often you should stir, I highly doubted itwouldall be fine…well, the dinner party I was holding tonight anyway.
I was sure that people like Oscar and Ursula who frequented trendy London restaurants all the time wouldn’t expect to come to a dinner party and be served up my trademark dish of spaghetti bolognese. But knowing those two, I highly doubted they would complain—they were far too lovely and polite for that. And David…well, David would be surprised to find I was even cooking at all; it wasn’t usually high on my list of successful pastimes.
But I wanted to impress my mother. She might not be living in the lap of luxury at the moment, but I got the feeling from some of the stories she had told me about her life that she had sampled some of the finest cuisines in the world at one time or another.
“Oh God, what do you mean, you stupid man?” I said, staring at the pages of the cookbook, where the celebrity chef grinned smugly back at me from a tiny photo at the top of each page. “What the hell isbraise-deglaze?”
The doorbell rang.
“Oh no—who the hell is that at”—I glanced at the clock on the cooker—“at four bloody o’clock in the afternoon!”
I stomped impatiently to the door in my apron, with my cookbook still gripped tightly in one hand.
“Hello, stranger,” the person standing grinning on my doorstep said. “Long time no see.”
“Sean!” I nearly dropped the book in surprise. “What are you doing here?”
“I just heard the good news from Ursula—about your mother—so I thought I’d pop round.” He looked at my apron-clad body suspiciously. “Can I come in?”
“That depends.”
“On?”
“On whether you know whatbraise-deglazemeans.”
Sean wrinkled his forehead. “It’s a way of cooking food in liquid, until the liquid evaporates—I think.”
“You’re in then,” I said, pulling him into the house with my book-free hand.
“Whatareyou doing?” Sean asked when I’d shut the door behind him and he was following me back into the kitchen.
“Cooking—well, trying to anyway. I’m having a dinner party.”
“Oh, I see.”
“I would have invited you, of course,” I said hurriedly. “But I thought you were still in New York.”
“I got back last night—been sleeping off the jet lag since. Then Ursula phoned and told me about your mother. I can hardly believe it, Scarlett, she was right here all along.”
“I know—mad, isn’t it?”
“So how have things been between you?” Sean said, picking up an onion from the counter and casually tossing it up and down in his hand. “Are the two of you getting on all right?”
“We are now. Look, it’s a really long story, Sean. Which I really want to tell you,” I added truthfully. Ididgenuinely want to tell him. In fact, now he was here in the house with me again, I didn’t want him to go at all. “But I’m in way over my head here with this dinner party and I really don’t have the time at the moment. Maybe we could meet up tomorrow?” I suggested hopefully.
“Or maybe we could just kill two birds with one stone and I could stay here and help you cook while you tell me all about your mother.”
I smiled gratefully at him. “You can cook?”
“I’ll give it a try,” Sean said, throwing the onion on a chopping board and starting to roll up the sleeves of his shirt. “Now, how bad can it be?”
“I’ve just about managed to light the oven successfully,” I said in a pathetic voice. “But not much more, I’m afraid.”
Sean quickly took charge and the kitchen was soon filled with countless delicious aromas—suggesting to me that he might have played down his culinary talents somewhat. I ran about the kitchen like his commis chef and, in between chopping, slicing, and stuffing, I told him all about what had happened with Mum.
When I got to the part about the gifts I watched carefully for Sean’s reaction. He had his back to me stirring something in a saucepan, but I saw him pause for a moment before he continued to move the wooden spoon around again in a slow, circular motion.
“Pass me that knife, will you, please?” I asked, gesturing to a sharp knife that lay next to him on the counter. “I think this one is a little blunt.”
