The Sinking Admiral. Simon Brett

Winters were always bad, but none had been as bad as the one that was currently extending its stay into March. All the factors gloomily detailed by the newspapers – general belt-tightening, ever more expensive fuel, the availability of cheap beer and spirits in supermarkets – were having their effects on the Admiral Byng. The rest of the staff weren’t aware of how close to the wind they were sailing, but Amy was kept up to date with bad news by the pub’s owner.

      Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons, landlord of the Admiral Byng, must have been well into his seventies. He was never referred to, incidentally, by his full name. The closest anyone got to that was calling him ‘Fitz’. But more often – and perhaps inevitably – he was known as ‘the Admiral’. Certainly that was how all the pub staff referred to him. His bluff manner and drawling vowels, together with his silver hair and moustache, his uniform of gold-buttoned blazer and cravat, gave the impression of a patrician public-school background, but nobody in Crabwell actually knew much about his past. There was also a common assumption, from the way he talked, that at one stage of his life he had been extremely rich. Some of the staff, gossiping in the kitchen, believed he still was.

      Well, if that were the case, Amy Walpole knew his wealth didn’t come from the Admiral Byng. She was too close to the account books to believe that. And from conversations with the Admiral she recognised how genuinely anxious he was about the future of his business. The idea that Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons had a vast fortune stashed away somewhere and wasn’t using it to bail the pub out just didn’t make sense. Apart from anything else, although the kitchen and casual bar staff had received their regular stipend, Amy Walpole herself had not been paid for three weeks. The Admiral kept saying he would regularise the situation ‘soon’, but she knew that the money just wasn’t there.

      Amy liked her boss. He could be infuriating, though. He was one of those alcoholics who never appears to be drunk, but is just permanently topping himself up. His constant tipple was red wine – preferably something robust and French, he didn’t believe in all this new-fangled New World rubbish – but in the evenings he could also get a long way down a bottle of malt whisky. Laphroaig was his favourite. What effect his lifetime’s drinking had had on his health Amy didn’t like to speculate. The Admiral himself always said that if he gave up the booze his body would drop dead from sheer shock.

      He was also, by her standards, something of a Luddite. He didn’t even use a mobile phone. ‘When I’m home people can ring me on the pub number,’ he always said. ‘And when I’m not home they can leave me a message. No telephone call is so important that it can’t wait a couple of hours.’

      Fitz’s dinosaur attitudes applied to other technology as well. Amy had had to argue for a long time to persuade him to upgrade his old bar-room till to a more user-friendly electronic model. And her strongest powers of persuasion were also required to get him to buy a laptop and printer for the pub’s tiny office. But the idea of touching either of the devices was anathema to him. Fitz, Amy often thought, would have been happiest living in the 1950s, before any of this troubling technology had become available to the general public.

      Whether he’d ever been married or in any kind of permanent relationship no one knew. Certainly there had been no romantic skirmishes since he’d moved to Crabwell. Amy knew she was an attractive woman, and long experience in the pub trade had inured her to the advances of landlords, but the Admiral had never so much as touched her on the shoulder. She was certain he wasn’t gay, but his emotional history – like many other areas of his life – remained unknown to the people of the village.

      In spite of the more annoying aspects of his personality, Amy still had a fierce loyalty to the Admiral, remembering the generosity with which he had welcomed her when she first arrived in Crabwell.

      She had been quite surprised, though, when he’d agreed to the intrusion into his pub of Ben Milne and the camera crew. She didn’t think he would buy into the theory of the publicity bestowed by the documentary turning around the Admiral Byng’s fortunes, and it seemed out of character for him deliberately to threaten his protective secrecy. But there was no doubt that the television people were there with the Admiral’s consent.

      They didn’t see much of him, though, on that first day of filming. Running the whole width of the Admiral Byng’s first floor there was a long, low gallery. In a previous incarnation it had acted as the pub’s function room, but fewer and fewer people in the Crabwell area seemed to be having functions these days. Or maybe for weddings, birthdays, and post-funeral wakes they now booked venues slightly less shabby than the village pub.

      Besides, Geoffrey Horatio Fitzsimmons had rather colonised the space for himself. Though his bedroom was on the floor above, this gallery, which he referred to ironically as ‘the Bridge’, was where he spent most of the time when he was not downstairs in the bar. And the clutter of his files and documents had spread over time until there was no surface in the room uncovered. It was from the Bridge, with its broad view across the steely expanse of the North Sea, that the Admiral conducted his business. But none of his employees was bold enough ever to ask him what that business was.

      On the first day of Ben Milne’s filming at the Admiral Byng the landlord spent most of his time up in the Bridge. Amy Walpole had been kept so busy at the bar dealing with the uncharacteristic flood of custom that she hadn’t checked them out in detail, but she’d been aware throughout the day of a procession of visitors going up the side stairs to visit the Admiral. Presumably he’d made some private arrangement with Ben Milne to be interviewed another day. There was no way the journalist was going to make his film without talking to the Admiral Byng’s landlord.

      Amy Walpole’s unenthusiastic attitude to the invasion of documentary-makers was not typical of the Admiral Byng’s staff and regulars. Most of them responded with the customary reaction of ordinary people to the prospect of being ‘on the telly’. They all wanted their fifteen seconds of fame.

      Of no one was this truer than Meriel Dane, the queen of the pub’s kitchen. Honey blonde since anyone could remember, and always dressed a good ten years younger than her real age; she was a woman of unbridled aspiration. Nobody who didn’t dwell inside Meriel Dane’s head could be aware of the glorious futures she constantly created for herself (despite some less than successful experiences in her past). Frequently these fantasies involved impossibly glamorous men who would succumb to her substantial charms, but she had career ambitions too. Meriel Dane was convinced that she was about to become the next big thing in television chefs, so she regarded her participation in Ben Milne’s documentary as a kind of audition.

      ‘You see, Ben,’ she confided as she rolled out the pastry for the day’s pies, ‘I always add a couple of special ingredients when I’m doing steak and kidney. They impart a subtlety to the taste, which is commented on by many of the Admiral Byng’s customers. Satisfied customers, I should say. People who order my steak and kidney pie never regret their choice. They are always satisfied. One of my secret ingredients,’ she went on slyly, almost winking at the camera, ‘is Worcester sauce – just a little shake of the bottle into the mixture. I’m never one for measuring things too exactly. I have an instinct for the right amount. Most of my cooking is instinctive. I am rather a creature of impulse, you know.’

      She leaned forward to the camera, fully aware of the amount of ample cleavage that the movement revealed. It was Meriel Dane’s view that there was a lack of glamour in the current stock of television chefs. Most of them were men, for a start – and not very attractive men at that. What British television needed was a series by someone who put the sex back into cookery. Someone remarkably like Meriel Dane, in fact.

      ‘And my other secret ingredient, Ben, no one suspects. But being here by the sea in Crabwell – and me being the kind of person who is really drawn to the sea, I do add a little maritime flavour to my steak and kidney. Oysters. Not a lot of them – it’s not a steak and oyster pie – but just enough to provide that little salty tang. And nobody – but nobody – can identify what gives the pie that oh so distinctive flavour.’

      Meriel Dane smiled. A warm smile, promising who knew what delights ahead. She reckoned the little piece she’d just done to camera, confiding the secrets of her steak and kidney pie,