‘Okay …’ Meg thought how best to explain her family to him and chose to start near the beginning. ‘In my family you don’t get much time to think—even as a little girl there were piano lessons, violin lessons, ballet lessons, tutors. My parents were constantly checking my homework—basically, everything was geared towards me getting into the best school, so that I could get the best grades and go to the best university. Which I did. Except when I got there it was more push, push, push. I just put my head down and carried on working, but now suddenly I’m twenty-four years old and I’m not really sure that I’m where I want to be …’ It was very hard to explain it, because from the outside she had a very nice life.
‘They demand too much.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘They don’t listen to you.’
‘You don’t know that either.’
‘But I do.’ He said. ‘Five or six times on the telephone you said, “Mum, I’ve got to go.” Or, “I really have to go now …”’ He saw that she was smiling, but she was smiling not at his imitation of her words but because he had been listening to her conversation. While miserable and scowling and ignoring her, he had still been aware. ‘You do this.’ He held up an imaginary phone and turned it off.
‘I can’t.’ she admitted. ‘Is that what you do?’
‘Of course.’
He made it sound so simple.
‘You say, I have to go, and then you do.’
‘It’s not just that though,’ she admitted. ‘They want to know everything about my life …’
‘Then tell them you don’t want to discuss it,’ he said. ‘If a conversation moves where you don’t want it to, you just say so.’
‘How?’
‘Say, I don’t want to talk about that,’ he suggested.
He made it sound so easy. ‘But I don’t want to hurt them either—you know how difficult families can be at times.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘There are some advantages to being an orphan, and that is one of them. I get to make my own mistakes.’ He said it in such a way that there was no invitation to sympathy—in fact he even gave a small smile, as if letting her know that she did not need to be uncomfortable at his revelation and he took no offence at her casual remark.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t have to be.’
‘But …’
‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ And, far more easily than she, he told her what he was not prepared to discuss. He simply moved the conversation. ‘What would you like to do if you could do anything?’
She thought for a moment. ‘You’re the first person who has ever asked me that.’
‘The second,’ Niklas corrected. ‘I would imagine you have been asking yourself that question an awful lot.’
‘Lately I have been,’ Meg admitted.
‘So, what would you be?’
‘A chef.’
And he didn’t laugh, didn’t tell her that she should know about steak tartare by now, if that was what she wanted to be, and neither did he roll his eyes.
‘Why?’
‘Because I love cooking.’
‘Why?’ he asked—not as if he didn’t understand how it was possible to love cooking so much, more as if he really wanted her tell him why.
She just stared at him as their minds locked in a strange wrestle.
‘When someone eats something I’ve cooked—I mean properly prepared and cooked …’ She still stared at him as she spoke. ‘When they close their eyes for a second …’ She couldn’t properly explain it. ‘When you ate those blinis, when you first tasted them, there was a moment …’ She watched that mouth move into a smile, just a brief smile of understanding. ‘They tasted fantastic?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wanted to have cooked them.’ It was perhaps the best way to describe it. ‘I love shopping for food, planning a meal, preparing it, presenting it, serving it …’
‘For that moment?’
‘Yes.’ Meg nodded. ‘And I know that I’m good at it because, no matter how dissatisfied my parents were with my grades or my decisions, on a Sunday I’d cook a meal from scratch and it was the one thing I excelled at. Yet it was the one thing they discouraged.’
‘Why?’ This time he asked because he didn’t understand.
‘“Why would you want to work in a kitchen?”’ It was Meg doing the imitating now. ‘“Why, after all the opportunities we’ve given you …?”’ Her voice faded for a moment. ‘Maybe I should have stood up to them, but it’s hard at fourteen …’ She gave him a smile. ‘It’s still hard at twenty-four.’
‘If cooking is your passion then I’m sure you would be a brilliant chef. You should do it.’
‘I don’t know.’ She knew she sounded weak, knew she should just say to hell with them, but there was one other thing she had perhaps not explained. ‘I love them,’ Meg said, and she saw his slight frown. ‘They are impossible and overbearing but I do love them, and I don’t want to hurt them—though I know that I’ll probably have to.’ She gave him a pale smile. ‘I’m going to try and work out if I can just hurt them gently.’
After a second or two he smiled back, a pensive smile she did not want, for perhaps he felt sorry for her being weak—though she didn’t think she was.
‘Do you cook a lot now?’
‘Hardly ever.’ She shook her head. ‘There just never seems to be enough time. But when I do …’ She explained to him that on her next weekend off she would prepare the meal she had just eaten for herself and friends … that she would spend hours trying to get it just right. Even if she generally stuck with safer choices, there was so much about food that she wanted to explore.
They lay there, facing each other and talking about food, which to some might sound boring—but for Meg it was the best conversation she had had in her life.
He told her about a restaurant that he frequented in downtown São Paulo which was famed for its seafood, although he thought it wasn’t actually their best dish. When he was there Niklas always ordered their feijoada, which was a meat and black bean stew that tasted, he told her, as if angels had prepared it and were feeding it to his soul.
In that moment Meg realised that she had not just one growing passion to contend with, but two, because his gaze was intense and his words were so interesting and she never wanted this journey to end. Didn’t want to stop their whispers in the dark.
‘How come you speak so many languages?’
‘It is good that I do. It means I can take my business to many countries …’ He was an international financier, Niklas told her, and then, very unusually for him, he told her a little bit more—which he never, ever did. Not with anyone. Not even, if he could help it, with himself. ‘One of the nuns who cared for me when I was a baby spoke only Spanish. By the time I moved from that orphanage …’
‘At how old?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Three, maybe four. By that time I spoke two languages,’ he explained. ‘Later I taught myself English, and much later French.’
‘How?’
‘I had a friend who was English—I asked him to speak