London, With Love

by Sarra Manning

Genres: Clean & Wholesome Romance; Humor & Satire

Synopsis

London. Nine million people. Two hundred and seventy tube stations. Every day, thousands of chance encounters, first dates, goodbyes and happy ever afters.

And for twenty years it's been where one man and one woman can never get their timing right.

Jennifer and Nick meet as teenagers and over the next two decades, they fall in and out of love with each other. Sometimes they start kissing. Sometimes they're just friends. Sometimes they stop speaking, but they always find their way back to each other.

But after all this time, are they destined to be together or have they finally reached the end of the line?

Praise for SARRA MANNING:

'Gorgeous' - Marian Keyes

'Sexy, heartfelt, funny and fresh' - Laura Jane Williams

'Uplifting, tender and heartwarming' - Louise O'Neill

'Uplifting and original' - Holly Miller

'Beautiful' - Lindsey Kelk

(P) 2022 Hodder & Stoughton Limited

Release date: May 5, 2022

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 432

Sample

Chapter 1

September 9th, 1986
High Barnet Station

High Barnet was the end of the line. The end of the Northern Line. Though actually it felt like the beginning of nowhere. It wasn’t even in London.

Jen, trudging up the steep slope from High Barnet station, prided herself on being a Londoner. It was an intrinsic part of who she was, like having blue eyes and not eating any vegetables except tomato and cucumber. Though her dad said that tomatoes were actually a fruit and her mum said that cucumbers were mostly water and had very little nutritional value and maybe she could just try a courgette, which was a bit like a cucumber and a valuable source of vitamin C and potassium. To which, Jen countered that if she needed vitamin C, she’d eat an orange. (Being argumentative was also an intrinsic part of who she was.)

When it came to being a Londoner, although Jen liked to think that she was a child of the mean streets of the inner city and the grimy alleys of Soho, the sad truth was that she lived in an outer London suburb. Mill Hill. It did have a London postcode, but the little 1930s semi where Jen lived with her mother and father and her hell-spawnish twin brothers was practically on the last street in London before London became Hertfordshire.

And while she might have gone to school in London, she’d actually chosen to do her A levels at Barnet College. In Hertfordshire. But Jen had decided that she wasn’t going to let that define her.

During the summer holidays, Jen had decided a lot of things and they all centred on her becoming someone new.

For instance, she’d stopped being Jennifer and become Jen.

Jen.

There was something uncompromising yet mysterious about Jen. Those stark three letters could contain multitudes (or at least Jen hoped that they might).

There had been seven Jennifers in her year at school, but they’d all been called Jenny whether they liked it or not. She’d been Jenny R to most of her classmates and Jenny the Ginge to the gang of girls who’d done their best to ensure that if your schooldays really were the best days of your life, then Jen was due a refund. Besides, she wasn’t even ginger. Her hair was auburn. Dark auburn. The same dark auburn as beechnuts or even conkers, but that wasn’t the sort of subtle distinction you could point out when five girls were dogging your footsteps along corridors that reeked of disinfectant and boiled meat, chanting your name as you stood shivering behind a towel in the changing rooms and cornering you at the bus-stop.

No wonder Jen had read up everything she could on rheumatoid arthritis and had managed to convince the head of PE that her knees were crumbling and instead of netball or rounders, her time could be put to better use in the school library with an improving book.

That was all in the past. School was a memory. A series of unpleasant incidents Jen had already started to refashion and reframe into a handful of amusing stories that masked all the pain and loneliness of her early adolescence.

Now Jen could be the person she’d tried on at weekends and within the walls of her tiny box bedroom in that little mock Tudor house where daily life was punctuated by the steady roar of the motorway at the bottom of the garden and beyond the motorway, the railway lines.

Jen had moulded her new self from every book that she’d ever loved, from Ballet Shoes to The Bell Jar, and all the songs she listened to on the John Peel show on a tinny transistor radio under the covers. But new Jen had only been fully realised a few short days ago after a shopping trip, funded by the money she’d saved from babysitting and a summer holiday job in a photocopying shop in Edgware. There’d also been a one-off clothing allowance from her parents, who knew they’d lucked out in the genetic lottery with their eldest child and only daughter. Yes, Jen was argumentative and from an alarmingly young age had specialised in flouncing out of rooms, stomping up the stairs, and slamming her bedroom door but that was the worst of it. She tolerated her younger brothers, Martin and Tim, she’d come in from school and after doing her homework, would make a start on cooking (a vegetable-free) dinner and as she’d failed to make any real or meaningful friendships at school, she rarely went out. Without any pernicious peer pressure, Jen had never drunk alcohol, smoked or hung around with boys in parks and railway stations. Or got pregnant by one of those boys.

So there’d been only mild dissent from her mother at what Jen considered an essential college wardrobe. A prized pair of Levi’s 501s, turned up twice to show to better advantage her new eight-hole, black Dr Martens boots, two stripy T-shirts, a collection of garish patterned skirts and dresses from charity shops, which her grandmother had taken up for her so they came to that sweet spot between the knee and mid-thigh. There was also a huge baggy Aran cardigan purloined from her dad’s wardrobe along with the Crombie coat he’d worn when he was a teenager. Completing the transformation was a full collection of Seventeen make-up from Boots (no more using the Marks & Sparks palettes that she got every Christmas) along with the usual back to school kit: pencils, pens, notebooks and folders.

Jen was wearing her DMs, Levi’s and a Smiths T-shirt with the cardigan today and lightly perspiring as she walked past a chip shop, past the Courthouse, past a newsagent’s. Early September was too warm for a very hairy, very heavy wool cardigan but Jen had wanted to make a great first impression. Because today truly was the first day of the rest of her life. School was behind her. Ahead of Jen was the freeform, organic life of college. There were no timetables, nobody taking the register or shouting at you for running down the corridors.

It was a whole new beginning. Or it was meant to be, except an hour later, as the A level English literature class gathered in a first-floor room in the main college building, Jen felt like she might just as well be invisible. No one seemed to notice her at all, even though she’d purposely placed a copy of Bonjour Tristesse in the original French on the table in front of her. She’d found it in a charity shop in Paddington and though she’d got a B for her French O level, she was struggling to make much sense of les travailles de Cecile. But what was the point of pretending to read Bonjour Tristesse in French if no one was there to see Jen do it and think to themselves, Oh my God, that girl is so mysterious, so fascinating, so cool? I must become friends with her immediately.

Unlike school with its old-fashioned desks with inkwells and lift-up lids arranged in serried rows, the tables and chairs were arranged in a haphazard horseshoe with their tutor (no teachers here) at the front. There were twenty students, two to a table – Jen was sharing hers with Miguel, a strapping, biracial boy with an easy, drawly American accent, who had angled his chair away from hers so he could trade insults with his friends at the next table.

Jen kept her eyes down and focussed on the other book she’d brought with her, a copy of Longman English Series: Poetry 1900 to 1975. In the orientation pack that had been posted out, they’d been instructed to choose a poem from the anthology that spoke directly to them.

Jen rested her chin on her hand as she listened to most people rattle through the rhymes and rhythms of John Betjemen’s verse. ‘A Subaltern’s Love Song’ was proving particularly popular. One boy, Rob, a raw-boned, sultry-lipped youth with a quiff, insisted on reading ‘This Be The Verse’ by Philip Larkin even though it wasn’t one of their set poems ‘because they’ve fucked me up, my mum and dad.’

Jen’s hands twisted anxiously under the table as a pretty girl across the room read out ‘The Fire Sermon’ from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in a breathless, compelling voice suggesting she was probably part of the Theatre Studies gang – the gang that Jen felt a particular affinity with, though she’d rather have rectal surgery without an anaesthetic than stand on a stage proclaiming.

‘Jen? What have you got for us?’

It was Jen’s turn to scrape back her chair and stand up in front of nineteen utterly disinterested students and the long-suffering gaze of Mary. Mary was their twenty-something tutor who had a nice line in flowy, flowery dresses, had already overshared about her boyfriend and was just the kind of quasi authority figure that Jen could really respect.

‘I’m going to read “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath.’ In her head Jen could orate with the best of them; outside of her head she just wanted to get through the poem as quickly as possible in a sub-audible monotone. Especially when Mary pressed her lips tight like she was trying to flatten the smile, which matched the glint in her eyes. As if every year, there was a bookish girl who didn’t mix well with others and had decided that Sylvia Plath spoke to her and only to her. As if Jen wasn’t special at all.

But still ‘Lady Lazarus’ was Jen’s favourite poem from her favourite poet and as she read, spitting out words like feathers, her voice grew louder and clearer, throbbing with the emotion of not just the poem written by a woman who was so wronged and beaten down that she’d take her own life a few months after writing it, but of all the emotion and energy it took just to be a sixteen-year-old girl. Also, Jen had red hair and, like, Sylvia Plath, she too cut a tragic figure.

There was silence for seven seconds (because Jen counted them in her head) and then Mary said, ‘Very nice,’ and pursed her lips as if she was hiding another smile. Jen collapsed into her chair then tried to collapse in on herself, hunching over the desk, all her weight resting on her elbows, her face mostly obscured by her hands.

Jen didn’t eat men like air, not at all. Also, why would you even want to? But she did capture a strand of her hair between her fingers, so she could chew on it, a nervous habit that she still hadn’t grown out of.

There was just one more poem to be read aloud, by someone called . . .

‘Nick?’ Mary queried. ‘You weren’t at orientation last week.’

‘I wasn’t,’ Nick agreed.

Jen had been so busy worrying about reading out loud and hunching in on herself and sucking her hair that she hadn’t even noticed him. But now he was all she could see. Like every other person in the room had ceased to exist. They were just filler. Background noise.

Nick was tall and skinny, lanky arms folded, long legs stretched out in front of him. He was wearing a leather jacket, a proper leather jacket, like James Dean was wearing on a postcard which Jen had stuck to her bedroom wall, tight jeans and pointy-toed boots. His dark hair was long enough that he could push it back from his face with his fingers, to reveal cheekbones like geometry as Lloyd Cole sung in ‘Perfect Skin.’ He had a beauty spot above his mouth, on the right. Just one brief but all-encompassing glance was enough for Jen to know that she wanted to press her lips against it until the end of time.

Jen looked away, face aflame, not that anyone was staring at her; they were all staring at him. Nick. Because he was equal parts beauty and danger and because he was arguing with Mary, even though she was a figure of quasi authority.

‘What if a poem didn’t speak directly to me?’ he demanded, holding the book up to his ear, like it was a shell and he wanted to hear the sound of the sea.

‘Well, then I’d say that you’re not trying hard enough,’ Mary said. Jen felt slightly vindicated that she was pursing her lips again, as if this too – a beautiful, bolshy boy arguing about the set text – was something she had to put up with every year. Maybe she played student bingo with the other lecturers during lunch. Yes, I had Sylvia Plath girl, five points to me. ‘What about some Louis MacNeice? One day, years from now, you’ll appreciate what a work of . . .’

‘But it isn’t years from now.’ Nick put the book down and reached from under the desk to lift up a ghetto blaster. ‘There’s other kinds of poetry. I’m going to plug this in, yeah?’

He didn’t wait for Mary’s reply, an amused ‘knock yourself out,’ but got up and looked around for the nearest socket. It was right behind Jen, who forced herself not to turn around even though the rest of the class didn’t have any problem with swivelling around, craning their necks to unabashedly stare as Nick crouched down to plug in his equipment.

Jen couldn’t even begin to imagine what might speak to this boy’s soul. Maybe something by Allen Ginsberg? No! He was more of a Rimbaud type. Or Baudelaire might be his thing. In which case, why couldn’t he just read it out loud like the rest of them?

There was a decisive clunk as he pressed down the play button. A crackle and hiss, a tambourine tapping out a beat, familiar, delicate chords that Jen knew so well, then a woman singing in a strong Germanic accent. ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror.’ Third song on the second side of The Velvet Underground & Nico. It was a love song. A song about someone seeing all the things that you hid away from the world and loving them, loving you . . .

Jen turned round in her chair to see Nick still crouched down, marking the beat on his knee, his hair obscuring most of his face, and Jen sighed a little. He looked up, as if that tiny gust of expelled air had reached him, dark eyes locking on to Jen’s face, and she couldn’t look away until Miguel sitting next to her shifted position and thumped his elbow on the edge of the table.

Miguel swore, the song finished, Nick raised his eyebrows at Jen in what seemed like a challenge and the moment was gone.

Jen wished it had never started.

‘That’s it for today. I want you to write me two pages on your chosen poem by Thursday,’ Mary said, as people gathered up papers and pens and shoved books in bags. ‘Rob, Nick, that would be two pages on a poem from your set poetry book.’

Jen scuttled for the door, then for the safety of the girls’ loos. It was busy in the gap between lessons but it emptied out quickly enough so she could stare at herself in the mirror. She’d been experimenting with a green correction stick to tone down the red in her complexion but she could never blend it in properly so she always had a faintly bilious tinge to her face.

Nothing that some powder wouldn’t fix. Jen dabbed at her cheeks with the whitest powder Boots had to offer but still her ruddy moonface stared back at her. She added more eyeliner, more mascara, still not sure of what effect she wanted to achieve, only knowing that she hadn’t achieved it yet.

As she carefully applied Miners frosted lilac lipstick, the door opened and the girl who’d read from The Waste Land walked in. Or rather she caught sight of Jen and paused as if Jen’s presence in the loos, at the mirror, was something she hadn’t expected. Then she nodded at Jen, who waited for her to go into the cubicle then ran the cold tap so neither of them would be embarrassed.

Jen planned to leave immediately but she was delayed by a smudged streak of mascara and a voice from the cubicle. ‘So . . . what did you think of all that?’

It seemed wrong to be starting a conversation while you were having a wee. Whenever Jen went Up West with her grandmother, she was always shouting to Jen from the next cubicle in John Lewis and it was always mortifying.

‘Think of what?’ Jen asked, over the sound of the toilet being flushed.

‘That boy. Nick.’ The door was unlocked and opened and the girl caught Jen’s eyes in the mirror again. ‘So pretentious. What was that song anyway?’

‘ “I’ll Be Your Mirror.” It’s by The Velvet Underground. It’s on the album with the banana on the cover,’ Jen explained.

The girl shook her head like that simply couldn’t be true. She was elfin thin in black and white stripy top, black 501s and black monkey boots. Her glossy black hair was pulled back in a swingy ponytail and her deep brown eyes didn’t need massive amounts of mascara and liner to make them huge and doe-like; they did that all on their own.

‘Never heard of them,’ she said dismissively of the band that all the other bands interviewed in NME always namechecked. Jen had expected them to be noisy, dense and without any proper tunes, but when she’d risked dropping a five-pound birthday record token on that album with the banana on the cover, she’d found eleven songs that spoke directly to her soul. Or maybe only ten on account of the fact that one of the songs was called ‘Heroin’ and she was firmly in the just say no camp. ‘I’ll ask Rob. Rob’s really into music. He says that he never misses the John Peel show.’

I listen to John Peel! Jen’s subconscious screamed. Jen just nodded.

‘So, you never said what you thought of him? Of Nick?’ the girl prompted. She had an eager look on her face as if Jen’s opinion would clarify everything.

Jen thought back to him brushing behind her chair. The slight displacement of air. How she couldn’t look at him, but had been so painfully aware of him. Already she’d memorised the exact placement of that tiny, devastating beauty spot on his upper lip, the curve of his cheekbones, how his fringe obscured his eyes but when he’d swept his hair back, she wanted to drown in their depths.

‘He’s not for me,’ she blurted out because it was the truth. He looked older than the rest of them and while Jen understood and recognised Rob’s scrubbed good looks and the semiotics of his quiff and Smiths T-shirt, Nick put the fear of God into her. ‘Boys like that. They’re not . . . I don’t think . . .’

‘Pretentious?’ the other girl persevered, but it wasn’t just pretentious, though actually playing a Velvet Underground poem in an English literature A level class instead of reading out a sonnet by Siegfried Sassoon was the very definition of pretentiousness.

It wasn’t even that Nick was out of her league.

It was his carelessness, his casualness, callousness. Boys like that would hurt you. Jen didn’t have any experience of boys like that; she didn’t have any experience of boys at all.

But she had plenty of experience of people who didn’t care what other people thought of them. The girls at school who’d made the last five years of her life low key terrible. Sue, from across the road, who said what was on her mind, even though what was on her mind was usually unsubstantiated gossip about the other people who lived on their little stretch of suburban street. Her grandfather, Stan, who said the most devastating things without ever thinking about the damage they wrought. When Jen had been five and parading about a Southend beach in her first bikini, Stan had said that she looked like a right little porker and hadn’t backed down even when Jen cried, even when his own wife and daughter had stood up to him for once. Rarely did anyone stand up to Stan; life was easier that way. But to this day, whenever Jen tried something on for the first time and stared at herself in the mirror, she always asked herself if she looked like a right little porker in it. Sadly, the answer to her jaundiced eye was usually yes.

So, Jen knew a thing or two about careless people and how they could hurt you, which was why she’d already decided to stay out of Nick’s line of fire.

‘He’s just not someone I would ever be friends with,’ she said firmly.

‘Me too!’ The girl gave Jen a good, hard look, frowning slightly as her gaze came to rest on the frosted lilac lipstick. Then she nodded. ‘I’m Priya. You can hang out with us. Come on!’

Jen picked up her black canvas haversack adorned with badges and hefted it over her shoulder, while Priya held the door open for her with an air of impatience as if usually someone was holding the door open for her.

‘Who’s us?’ Jen asked.

Us was Priya, Rob and George, a lesser version of Rob, still with the quiff and the Smiths band T-shirt but pudgier yet weedier, a smile on his broad open face as he pulled out the chair next to him in the college canteen.

‘Your three favourite Smiths songs?’ he asked eagerly, catching sight of the badges on Jen’s bag as she sat down.

It was everything that Jen had dreamed college might be as she and George debated their favourite Smiths songs and why The Queen Is Dead was a better album than Meat Is Murder. Rob had given Jen a tight, not altogether friendly, smile when she first sat down but soon he joined in. Only Priya was quiet though Jen kept trying to pull her into the conversation.

‘So, new friend, what’s your name?’ Rob asked, when it was time for Jen’s French A level class while the three of them planned to hang out in the canteen for a while longer.

‘I’m Jen,’ she said firmly, as if no other versions of herself had ever existed.

*

And just like that, Jen had friends. What she hadn’t achieved in five years at secondary school, she’d managed to master in one morning at college.

During free periods, she and Priya would go to Boots on the high street to try out eyeshadows on the backs of their hands or to the tiny little Topshop, even though they had the same clothes in there, week in and week out. Otherwise, they’d sit in the canteen and Priya would provide a running commentary on everyone in their eyeline. Who she liked, which was a very short list – basically all the Foundation Art students and a very select few of her fellow Theatre Studies extroverts.

Then she’d move on to who she didn’t like, which was a much longer list. All the students ‘who are too thick to do A levels’. That included the girls who were studying Tourism & Travel or Hair & Beauty, with their Sun-In and their stone-washed jeans. And the boys, who were studying Electrical Engineering and Plumbing, and were really rowdy and always having big, shouty not-quite-pretend fights.

Mostly, Priya wanted to talk about Rob. What he was wearing that day. What he’d said to her that day. How he’d looked while he was saying it. The long and detailed subtext to what he was saying. ‘It’s not like I fancy him. His big thick lips, they’re all rubbery.’

Rob didn’t have rubbery lips. He had perfectly ordinary lips. But Jen wasn’t going to point that out, because even to Jen, who’d never been kissed, never been anything with a boy, it was pretty clear that actually Priya did fancy him.

When Jen wasn’t with Priya, she was with George. There were eight or nine charity shops on Barnet High Street and they visited them all at least once every two days. They’d pop into Our Price on the corner, to be condescended to by the guys who worked in there. Then they’d visit Harum Records at the other end of the high street; the staff were friendlier and they had a box of old seven inch singles, which were reduced to 60p.

Finally, they’d settle in the café across the road from the college, to sit upstairs with a scone and a cup of coffee each. Jen didn’t like coffee but now she was sixteen, it was imperative that she learned to drink something hot that wasn’t hot chocolate.

‘Every time you take a sip you look like you want to cry,’ George would always note. Trying to encourage her tastes to something older and more sophisticated had to be worth spending 65p on a cup of bitter bilgewater and forcing it down. It took Jen’s mind off George who used these café chats as an excuse to talk about Priya. About how beautiful she was and how lustrous and shiny her hair was and were her parents strict because he wasn’t being racist but Indian parents tended to be quite strict and maybe Priya wasn’t allowed boyfriends, but if she were allowed boyfriends then did Jen think there might be a chance that the boyfriend could be George?

‘Has she said anything to you?’ he’d ask hopefully.

Jen would take another sip of coffee, screw her face up at the taste, and shake her head. ‘We don’t really talk about boys. Unless it’s to bitch about the Electrical Engineering students.’

Rob’s name was never mentioned, but on some level, George had to know he wasn’t the one Priya wanted. He had to.

Some days Rob even joined them on their charity shop/record shop trawl. ‘Haven’t you read that?’ he’d ask incredulously when Jen triumphantly plucked a copy of a book from the carousel in the North London Hospice shop. No matter whether it was Tender is the Night or Valley of the Dolls. ‘Wow!’

‘Yeah, actually I preferred their earlier stuff,’ he’d say without fail when George would spend some of his hard-earned weekend job money (he worked in the hospital canteen and spent most of his time being made fun of by the older women on his shift) on a new single that he’d heard on the John Peel show the night before. ‘That single isn’t bad. But it’s just, you know, quite pedestrian.’

The four of them even had their own preferred table in the college canteen, along the wall next to where the Foundation Art students congregated but not so close that it looked like they were obsessed with them. Although maybe the four of them were a little bit obsessed with them because the art students were older and cooler and if there were art students who weren’t that cool, then Jen never noticed them. She only noticed the girls who wore paint-stained boiler suits, patterned scarfs tied around their back-combed hair. And the boys! With their leather jackets and long fingers clutching high tar cigarettes.

The art students all looked a lot like Nick – so Jen wasn’t surprised when she saw him hanging out with them. Priya had done some not-at-all-discreet digging and had discovered that Nick had done the first year of A levels at the local boys’ school then crashed out after spectacularly failing his summer exams. Now he was forced to repeat the whole year again with people younger than him, people whom he didn’t acknowledge with so much of a flicker on his impassive face.

Most days Jen cycled to college, which took twenty-four minutes exactly. Then she’d wedge and lock her bike into the rack, which was situated next to the entrance of the art block, right at the back of campus. Separated from the main college building by a small grass square, as the weather grew colder, damp autumn seeping in, there were very few students lounging on the lawn. Most mornings, Jen saw Nick huddled with a couple of other boys on the stone wall that edged the grass, as they had one last cigarette before classes began. Nick held his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, like he was used to having to quickly conceal it if someone spotted him. Not that anyone cared. You were even allowed to smoke in the canteen.

Jen would act as if she didn’t care either. When she’d realised that she’d be spending the next two years in the same English A level class as Nick Levene, she was relieved that she was already clear in her mind that, like peas and pastel colours, Nick was not for her. He wasn’t someone she would ever speak to. She’d make do with gazing at him from a distance. Jen didn’t mind having crushes that would never amount to anything. On the contrary, she was entirely comfortable with the bittersweet pangs of unrequited love for boys she’d never even spoken to. So, if her face was bright red in the mornings when she hurried past him and his art boy buddies, it was simply because she’d just cycled four and a half miles and hadn’t had time to apply her green colour corrector concealer. That was all.

Chapter 10

November 5th, 1994
Oxford Circus Station

Before Sunday, there was a double shift at the restaurant on Friday, then another double shift on Saturday. Friday lunchtime was a bloodbath of businessmen taking long, boozy lunches with absolutely no intentions of going back to their offices. But they tipped well, and so they should because they never, ever kept their hands to themselves. Friday lunchtime tended to bleed into the dinner service, punctuated by the staff meal at 4.30, when Jennifer ate better than she had all week. Loading up on pasta drizzled with truffle oil, she shared war stories with her colleagues, before slipping her biker boots back on, tying a fresh snowy white apron round her waist and heading back into the restaurant to do it all over again, from six until at least midnight.

Then Saturday was Groundhog Day but without the handsy businessmen at lunchtime.

Jennifer had been working at Ciccone’s for four years. Four years! It was the longest she’d stuck at anything.

She’d started her waitressing journey at a small family-run trattoria in the nicest bit of Mile End when she’d moved out of the parental home and realised that the precious maintenance grant really couldn’t maintain her. After a couple of months at Il Positano, it was clear that £5 an hour, plus tips from the good folk of Mile End wasn’t going to keep her in a style to which she’d like to be accustomed. But if Jennifer swapped Mile End for Mayfair and its coked-up advertising execs and media whizzkids with large expense accounts, on a good weekend, she could take home a hundred quid in tips.

By now, Ciccone’s felt like family. The staff were young. They worked hard then partied hard and Jennifer was no exception. Except lately, she was starting to feel like a veteran, one of the old guard. There was a fast turnover. Potboys saving up enough to go travelling. Sous chefs going on to be commis chefs somewhere else. Her fellow waiters getting their degrees and finding well-paid jobs that meant that they didn’t end Friday night soaking their feet in a washing-up bowl