Lunch
DATE: Monday.
VENUE: Le Truc Interessant, Lexington Street, Soho.
PRESENT: Me, Gerald Vere, Melanie Swartz, Peter (somebody) from Svenska Bank, Barry Freeman, Diane Skinner (account exec. from S.L.L. & L.), Eddie Kroll (left before pudding).
MEAL: Tabouleh chinois, roulade de foie de veau farcie, millefeuille de fruits d’hiver.
WINE: Two Moet & Chandon non-vintage, two Sancerre, an ’83 Pichon Longueville, a big Provençal red called Mas Jullien. Port, brandy (eau de vie de prune for Diane S.).
BILL: £878, service not included.
EXTRAS: Romeo y Julietas for Vere and Freeman, t-shirt and condiments set for Melanie. Twenty Silk Cut for Diane S.
COMMENTS: No piped music. Tabouleh chinois an orthodox tabouleh with sliced lychees mixed in. Unusual. Roulade de foie exquisite, served on a little purée of celeriac. Diane S. barely touched her food, ‘saving up for dessert’. Millefeuille – eight out of ten for the pastry. Fruits bland. Diane S. picked up tab. Taxied me back too. Thank you Swabold, Lang, Laing and Longmuir. Thank you very much.
DATE: Tuesday.
VENUE: Eurotel Palace, Heathrow Airport.
PRESENT: Me, Diane S.
MEAL: Insalata Tricolore, Dover sole, tarte aux pommes.
WINE: G & T in bar, Merry Dale Chardonnay, House champagne with pud.
BILL: £96 (service incl.).
EXTRAS: Irish coffee served in our room. £5.50 each. Twenty Silk Cut.
COMMENTS: Almost inaudible classical muzak. Rubbery mozzarella. When will the British stop serving ‘A selection of vegetables’? Tasteless carrots, watery broccoli, some kind of swede. Tarte aux pommes a simple apple pie, not flattered by translation. House champagne surprisingly good – small bubbles, buttery, cidery. Undrunk Irish coffee – waste.
DATE: Wednesday.
VENUE: Chairman’s dining ‘set’, sixth floor. Pale oak panelling. Silver. Good paintings – a small, perfect Sutherland, Alan Reynolds, two Craxtons.
PRESENT: Me, Sir Torquil, Gerald Vere, Barry Freeman, Blake Ginsberg (new m.d.), some senior suit from Finance (introduced as ‘you know Lucy’ – can’t be his first name, surely? Very foreign looking).
MEAL: Vegetable terrine, lamb chops with new potatoes, raspberries with crème fraiche. Stilton.
WINE: Hipflask in loo downstairs, then Vodkatini (could have been colder), a perfectly good Chablis, followed by a ’78 Domaine de Chevalier (stunning). Port (Taylor’s, missed date).
BILL: A heavy price to pay.
EXTRAS: At least I saw the Sutherland.
COMMENTS: Apart from the vegetable terrine (always a total waste of time) this was superior corporate catering. Sensible. Lamb nicely pink. Superb wine. They had the grace to wait until the cheese. The condemned man had eaten a hearty meal. Fucking heartless cold fucking swine.
DATE: Thursday.
VENUE: La Casa del’ Luigi, Fulham Road.
PRESENT: Me, Diane, (later) Jennifer.
MEAL: Minestrone, spaghetti bolognese, tiramisu.
WINE: G & Ts, Valpolicella, replaced by a Chianti Classico when spilt. Large grappa after Jennifer’s arrival and departure.
BILL: £73 rounded up to £90. Scant gratitude.
EXTRAS: Twenty Silk Cut. Three glasses, two plates. Dry cleaning to be notified.
COMMENTS: Minestrone was tinned, I’d swear. Alfredo’s spag. bog. amazingly authentic as ever (why can’t one ever achieve this at home?). He refuses to divulge his secret, but I’m convinced it’s the chicken livers in the ragú. Which must simmer for days, also. Watery, ancient tiramisu. Big mistake to eat so close to home. HUGE mistake. Jennifer would have walked right past. What bastard waiter called her in?
DATE: Friday.
VENUE: Montrose Dining Club, Lincoln’s Inn. Basement, large overlit room, long central table. Staffed by very old ex-college porters and very young monoglot girls who appear to be from Eastern Europe.
PRESENT: Me, Alisdair Lockhart.
MEAL: Potted shrimps and toast, duck à l’orange, treacle tart (!).
WINE: G & Ts, club claret, club brandy.
BILL: £28. (I paid. Astonishing value. Alisdair said he could add it to his bill but I insisted.)
EXTRAS: About £5000 if I know Alisdair.
COMMENTS: Time travel. Back to school. This was English cuisine until quite recently, we have forgotten that this was how we all used to eat. Potted shrimps like consuming cold butter, limp toast. Duck cooked to extinction, repulsive cloying sauce. I ordered treacle tart for nostalgia’s sake. (Alisdair has appalling dandruff for a comparatively young man.) I said Jennifer was being very difficult, thus far. He was not sanguine. Asked if this had happened before so I told him of Jennifer’s ultimatum. Spoke briefly about custody of Toby. He left early as he had to get to court. Depressing. Drank whiskey in an Irish pub.
DATE: Saturday.
PLACE: My kitchen, Rostrevor Road, Fulham.
PRESENT: Me and (intermittently) Birgitte, the au pair.
MEAL: Raided fridge – cottage cheese and crispbread, remains of Thursday’s shepherd’s pie, some of Toby’s little yoghurt things, cheese triangles. Birgitte sent out for a pizza but I couldn’t be bothered waiting.
WINE: ‘Three goes of gin, a lemon slice and a ten-ounce tonic…’ Who said that? Then two glasses of Pinot Grigio, before I went down to the basement and rooted out the Ducru-Beaucaillou. Fuck it. I gave some to Birgitte, who made a face. She preferred to drink her own beer. She gave me a can when I’d finished the Beaucaillou. Strong stuff. Slept in the afternoon.
BILL: The Human Condition.
EXTRAS: I miss Toby and Jennifer. I miss our usual Saturday lunch. Best lunch of the week.
COMMENTS: Music – Brahms Horn Trio initially, but it made me want to weep. Birgitte played something rhythmic, ethnic. She gave me a tape of ocean waves breaking on a shore. ‘For calming’ she said. Big, big-hearted girl. Why would anybody eat cottage cheese? What, in terms of taste and texture, could possibly recommend it? Jennifer and her silly, perpetual diets. Perfectly slim, perfectly… The cheese triangles were unbelievably tasty, ate a whole wheel’s worth as I drank the Beaucaillou.
DATE: Sunday. Cold, low, packed clouds, a flat, sullen light.
VENUE: Somewhere in eastern England on the 11.45 to Norwich. Writing this in the bar. On my way to Mother and Sunday lunch.
PRESENT: Me, three soldiers, a fat woman, and a thin, weaselly man with a mobile phone.
MEAL: Started with a Jimmyburger on the station concourse, then a couple of Scotch eggs in the bar. On the train I had a bag of salt ’n’ vinegar crisps and an egg and cress sandwich from the steward with the trolley. In the buffet thus far I have had a pork pie, a sausage roll, something called a ‘Ploughman’s Bap’ and a Mars bar. There is a solitary mushroom and salami omelette wrapped in cellophane that they will do in a microwave. Why am I still hungry?
WINE: Large vodka and orange in the station bar – vague, very temporary desire to keep my breath alcohol free. Two cans of gin and Italian vermouth in the train before I wandered buffetwards. Started drinking lager: ‘Speyhawk Special Strength’. Notice the squaddies are drinking the same. They do quarter bottles of wine in here, I see. I’ve now bought a couple, having ordered the omelette. It is labelled ‘Red Wine’. No country of origin. Tart, pungent, raw. I worry it will stain my lips. Mother will serve, as usual, Moselle and call it hock.
BILL: I refuse to spend more than £20.
EXTRAS: A lot of cigarette smoke, everyone is smoking including, covertly, the steward behind the bar. Smoke seeps between the fingers of his loosely clenched fist resting on his buttocks. The fat woman is smoking. The man on the mobile phone is smoking as he mutters into his little plastic box. I have a metallic taste in my mouth, and am seized by a sudden, embittering image of Diane S. – naked, laughing.
COMMENTS: The English countryside has never looked so drained and dead under this oppressive pewter sky. The barman beckons… Now I have my mu
shroom and salami omelette, a piebald yellow with brown patches, steaming suspiciously, a curious, gamey but undeniably foodlike smell seems suddenly to have pervaded the entire carriage, obliterating all other odours. Everyone is looking at me. I screw the top off my ‘Red Wine’ and fill my glass as we hurtle across Norfolk. Gastric juices squirt. I’m starving, how is this possible? My mother will have the archetype of an English Sunday lunch waiting for me. A roast, cooked grey, potatoes and two or three vegetables, a lake of gravy, cheese and biscuits, her special trifle. I look out of the window at the miles of sombre green. Rain is spitting on the glass and the soldiers have started to sing. Time for my omelette. I know what I am doing but it is a bad sign, this, the beginning of the end. I am deliberately setting out to ruin (because, let’s face it, you cannot, before lunch, lunch) lunch.
Loose Continuity
I am standing on the corner of Westwood and Wilshire, just down from the Mobilgas station, waiting. There is a coolish breeze just managing to blow from somewhere, and I am glad of it. Nine o’clock in the morning and it’s going to be another hot one, for sure. For the third or fourth time I needlessly go over and inspect the concrete foundation, note again that the powerlines have been properly installed and the extra bolts I have requested are duly there. Where is everybody? I look at my watch, light another cigarette and begin to grow vaguely worried: have I picked the wrong day? Has my accent confused Mr Koenig (he is always asking me to repeat myself)?…
A bright curtain – blues and ochres – boils and billows from an apartment window across the street. It sets a forgotten corner of my mind working – who had drapes like that, once? Who owned a skirt that was similar, or perhaps a tie? –
A claxon honks down Wilshire and I look up to see Spencer driving the crane, pulling slowly across two lanes of traffic and coming to a halt at the kerb.
He swings himself down from the cab and takes off his cap. His hair is getting longer, losing that army crop.
‘Sorry I’m late, Miss Velk, the depot was, you know, crazy, impossible.’
‘Doesn’t matter, it’s not here anyway.’
‘Yeah, right.’ Spencer moves over and crouches down at the concrete plinth checking the powerline connection, touching and jiggling the bolts and their brackets. He goes round the back of the crane and sets out the wooden ‘Men at Work’ signs, then reaches into his pocket and hands me a crumpled sheet of flimsy.
‘The permit,’ he explains. ‘We got ‘til noon.’
‘Even on a Sunday?’
‘Even on a Sunday. Even in Los Angeles.’ He shrugs. ‘Even in 1945. Don’t worry, Miss Velk. We got plenty of time.’
I turn away, a little exasperated. ‘As long as it gets here,’ I say with futile determination, as if I had the power to threaten. The drape streams out of the window suddenly, like a banner, and catches the sun. Then I remember: like the wall hanging Utta had done. The one that Jochen bought.
Spencer asks me if he should go phone the factory but I say give them an extra half hour. I am remembering another Sunday morning, sunny like this one, but not as hot, and half the world away, and I can see myself walking up Grillparzerstrasse, taking the shortcut from the station, my suitcase heavy in my hand, and hoping, wondering, now that I have managed to catch the early train from Sorau, if Jochen will be able to find some time to see me alone that afternoon…
Gudrun Velk walked slowly up Grillparzerstrasse, enjoying the sun, her body canted over to counterbalance the weight of her suitcase. She was wearing… (What was I wearing?) She was wearing baggy cotton trousers with the elasticated cuffs at the ankles, a sky blue blouse and the embroidered felt jacket with the motif of jousters and strutting chargers. Her fair hair was down and she wore no makeup; she was thinking about Jochen, and whether they might see each other that day, and whether they might make love. Thinking about Utta, if she would be up by now. Thinking about the two thick skeins of still damp blue wool in her suitcase, wool that she had dyed herself late the night before at the mill in Sorau and that she felt sure would finish her rug perfectly, and, most importantly, in a manner that would please Paul.
Paul looked in on the weaving workshop often. Small, with dull olive skin and large eyes below a high forehead, eyes seemingly brimming with unshed tears. He quietly moved from loom to loom and the weavers would slip out of their seats to let him have an unobstructed view. Gudrun had started her big knotted rug, she remembered, and he stood in front of it for some minutes, silently contemplating the first squares and circles. She waited: sometimes he looked, said nothing and moved on. Now, though, he said: ‘I like the shapes but the yellow is wrong, it needs more lemon, especially set beside that peach colour.’ He shrugged, adding, ‘In my opinion.’ That was when she bought his book and started to go to his classes on colour theory – and she had unpicked the work she had done and began again. She told him: ‘I’m weaving my rug based on your chromatic principles.’ He was pleased, she thought. He said politely that in that case he would follow its progress with particular interest.
He was not happy at the Institute, she knew; since Meyer took over, the mood had changed, was turning against Paul and the other painters. Meyer was against them, she had been told, they smacked of Weimar, the bad old days. Jochen was the same: ‘Bogus-advertising-theatricalism,’ he would state, ‘we should’ve left all that behind.’ What the painters did was ‘decorative’, need one say more? So Paul was gratified to find someone who responded to his theories intead of mocking them, and in any case the mood in the weaving workshops was different, what with all the young women. There was a joke in the Institute that the women revered him, called him ‘the dear Lord’. He did enjoy the time he spent there, he told Gudrun later, of all the workshops it was the weavers he would miss most, he said, if the day came for him to leave – all the girls, all the bright young women.
Spencer leans against the pole that holds the powerlines. The sleeve of his check shirt falls back to reveal more of his burned arm. It looks pink and new and oddly, finely ridged, like bark or like the skin you get on cooling hot milk. He taps a rhythm on the creosoted pole with his thumb and the two remaining fingers on his left hand. I know the burn goes the length of his arm and then some more, but the hand has taken the full brunt.
He turns and sees me staring.
‘How’s the arm?’ I say.
‘I’ve got another graft next week. We’re getting there, slow but sure.’
‘What about this heat? Does it make it worse?’
‘It doesn’t help, but… I’d rather be here than Okinawa,’ he says. ‘Damn right.’
‘Of course,’ I say, ‘of course.’
‘Yeah.’ He exhales and seems on the point of saying something – he is talking more about the war, these days – when his eye is caught. He straightens.
‘Uh-oh,’ He says. ‘Looks like Mr Koenig is here.’
Utta Benrath had dark orange hair, strongly hennaed, which, with her green eyes, made her look foreign to Gudrun, but excitingly so. As if she were a half-breed of some impossible sort – Irish and Malay, Swedish and Peruvian. She was small and wiry and used her hands expressively when she spoke, fists unclenching slowly like a flower opening, thrusting, palming movements, her fingers always flexing. Her voice was deep and she had a throaty, man’s chuckle, like a hint of wicked fun. Gudrun met her when she had answered the advertisement Utta had placed on the notice-board in the students’ canteen: ‘Room to rent, share facilities and expenses.’
When Gudrun began her affair with Jochen she realized she had to move out of the hostel she was staying in. The room in Utta’s apartment was cheap and not just because the apartment was small and had no bathroom: it was inconvenient as well. Utta, it turned out, lived a brisk forty-five-minute walk from the Institute. The apartment was on the top floor of a tenement block on Grenz Weg, out in Jonitz with a distant view of a turgid loop of the Mulde from the kitchen window. It was clean and simply furnished. On the walls hung brightly coloured designs for stained
glass windows that Utta had drawn in Weimar. Here in Dessau she was an assistant in the mural-painting workshop. She was older than Gudrun, in her early thirties, Gudrun guessed, but her unusual colouring made her age seem almost an irrelevance: she looked so unlike anyone Gudrun had seen before that age seemed to have little or nothing to do with the impression she made.
There were two bedrooms in the apartment on Grenz Weg, a small kitchen with a stove and a surprisingly generous hall where they would eat their meals around a square, scrubbed pine table. They washed in the kitchen, standing on a towel in front of the sink. They carried their chamber pots down four flights of stairs and emptied them in the night soil cistern at the rear of the small yard behind the apartment building. Gudrun developed a strong affection for their four rooms: her bedroom was the first of her own outside of her parents’ house; the flat was the first proper home of her adult life. Most evenings, she and Utta prepared their meal – sausage, nine times out of ten, with potatoes or turnip – and then, if they were not going out, they would sit on the bed in Utta’s room and listen to music on her phonograph. Utta would read or write – she was studying architecture by correspondence course – and they would talk. Utta’s concentration, Gudrun soon noticed, her need for further qualifications, her ambitions, were motivated by a pessimism about her position in the Institute to which all talk inevitably returned. She was convinced that the mural-painting workshop was to be closed and she would have to leave. She adduced evidence, clues, hints that she was sure proved that this was the authorities’ intention. Look what had happened to stained glass, she said, to the wood- and stone-carving workshops. The struggle it had taken to transfer had almost finished her off. That’s why she wanted to be an architect: everything had to be practical these days, manufactured. Productivity was the new god. But it took so long, and if they closed the mural-painting workshop… Nothing Gudrun said could reassure her. All her energies were devoted to finding a way to stay on.