And then, quite suddenly, her fever cleared. The air expanded round her. There was space. She swung one leg over the side of the bed. She pushed the other deep into the blankets. Her body was the temperature of blood. Her breathing thickened. Her back arched. She seemed to swell and lift. She had to press her hands onto her abdomen to keep herself from floating. She had to brace her arms and thighs to stop herself from sinking through the bed. She felt like the driftwood she had gathered on the beach – compact and dry and silvery and, somehow, not as heavy as she ought to be, as if her insides had been tunnelled out by worms. And one by one – with her fingers pressed into her flesh, and with her knees spread out to make a rhombus of her legs – her splinters and her corners were removed and she became a lizard with five limbs, and she became a boomerang, and she became a root.
Rosa was up before her husband woke. She could not bear to interrupt his sleep or look at him. She wanted privacy. She made herself some tea and took it, with a spoon and the half-empty bowl of grated eringo, blackberries and sugar, into the living room. There was a little warmth left in the fire. She wrapped a tablecloth around her shoulders, and pulled a stool up to the ashes. She finished off the eringo. She licked the bowl. During the night the root had marinated with the berries. She could detect a taste like chestnuts and the pungency of quicklime.
In the early afternoon, she walked down to the beach for firewood. Her husband had gone off to get some eggs and milk from the farm. He said the free food of the countryside had been a disappointment. They’d been naive. He could not wait to have her back home where things between him and his bride could settle down, could grow. This time she recognized the symptoms when they came. Her hair and skin were soaking wet, exactly as before. Her mouth was full of spit, and then was dry and papery. She lay down on the dunes and waited, while her breathing thinned and thickened.
Rosa pulled some roots again that day, for supper. She woke at two o’clock – a little later than the night before, but no less memorably. She took an early breakfast by the fire.
She pulled more roots to take back from their honeymoon, and hid them in the car. She’d try what Mrs Caraway had recommended and candy them in baked syrup. She’d have to share them with her husband, she supposed. She’d have to share with him what she had found out on her own. But not just yet. Marriage was for life, she reminded herself. There was no need for haste. It would be a joy to make him wait. She’d not be caught as easily as pigeons, pheasants, shrimps.
14
WHEN HE’D BEEN serving in the restaurant, his party trick had been to sing out the names of all the ninety types of pastas, in alphabetical order, in less than three minutes, from angel hair to ziti. It was a comic aria of food – and usually it had earned him a round of applause from the customers, and calls for an encore. He’d got huge tips.
Now that he was working for a bank, there wasn’t much demand for pasta, but still he liked to practise his party trick, if only for his own amusement. Skills atrophy unless they’re cared for.
Each morning, once he’d walked to the tram stop on the way to work, he muttered all the pastas to himself. Usually, if he cut his timing fine, he would only have reached cannelloni, cappelletti, cavatelli, conchiglie before his tram arrived, a modest daily pleasure he was eager to repeat.
15
MY MOTHER’S birthday – and I’ll bake a pie for her. Blind pie. The sort she baked for us when we were small, on our birthdays. The trick’s revealed. I have her recipe. She wrote it down more than forty years ago, in pencil and in capitals, on the last page of her 1961 House Diary. I found it on the kitchen shelf when we were clearing her apartment, the week she died.
This much I always knew. We were allowed to watch her line the deep dish with pastry and prepare a decorated lid. We’d help her roll and paste into place the walls of dough, which divided the pie into six triangular compartments. The birthday child could choose the filling, but only ‘something sensible’. Sliced fruit and dates. Leek and cheese. Chicken and onion. Pigeon and damsons. The pie was fit for almost anything. But she would never let us stay to watch the filling of the spaces. We had to giggle on the far side of the kitchen door while – now we know – she packed five of the compartments with the chosen food and blinded the sixth segment of the pie with flour and dried beans. Then she hid the contents under the lid.
We were allowed to see her slide the pie into the middle of the oven, and wait in the kitchen for the forty minutes that it took to bake. But then, again, we had to leave and guess at what she did behind our backs, what tricks she used to make the pie so generous. But here it’s written down in pencil and in capitals. The lifting of the pastry lid with its exasperated shush of steam. The careful, hot removal of the aggregate, the pebbles and clay of hardened flour and bullet beans. The filling of the blind sixth, with either the necklace or the marbles that my mother had kept hidden in her linen drawer, the ornament she’d ordered through the post, the shell purse from the seaside, the metal animal, the set of dice. And finally the dinner gong, the family gathered at the oblong table, the serving spoon, the violated pastry lid, with – almost – everybody praying for no fruit, no meat, but hoping that something costly and inedible would end up on their plates.
Not me. I used to fear my mother’s pies. I hated my birthdays, too. Still do. While we were exiled from the kitchen, my sisters would torment me, twisting arms and pulling hair, just to turn my birthday sour. ‘You should have been a girl,’ they’d say. ‘Mother only wanted girls. She said you were a curse, when you were born. She told us she could never love a boy like you. You’ll see. You’ll see how much she loves you when she serves the pie. You’re in for a surprise.’
So I’d learned to fear the contents of the sixth, that dark and blind compartment with no edible filling. Inside there’d be, my sisters would say, a little snake for my birthday, hissing hate and steam. There’d be a smooth, black bat – well baked – to break out of the pastry lid and hunt for warrens in my hair. There’d be a nest of cockroaches to mark my anniversary. Or a cake of melted soap, with body hairs, girls’ body hairs. Or else a dry and steaming toad to sing ‘Congratulations’ with its dry and steaming voice. Alone, alone amongst the birthday celebrants, I always prayed my piece of pie would not be a surprise. I know, of course, what it was I always feared the most – not gifts, not bats, not toads, but that my mother’s love would prove as hard and hissing as my sisters said.
And so, too late, I plan to bake a pie for her and for my sisters on our mother’s anniversary, to show I know they meant me harm. I have her pencilled recipe for guidance. I have my grievances to mix in with the pastry. I’ll fill the six compartments, lid the pie, and cook it well, as well as any woman could.
I’ll serve the pie myself. My hand, I know, will shake as I plunge the spoon into the pastry. I know my sisters will expect surprises, gifts. They will be surprised. There’ll be no empty compartment for the birthday dead, no ornament, no snake, no necklace, and no soap. And nothing edible. No steam. They don’t deserve sliced fruit and dates, or leek and cheese, or chicken and onion. Pigeon and damsons are too good for them. The six compartments will be full of flour and dry beans. Blind pie. The sort my mother baked when I was small.
16
MORE THAN forty years ago, in simpler times, our produce wholesaler, by way of an experiment in exotica, bought a consignment of kumquats, cheaply, off a storm-docked cargo boat. Well, cheaply if he could pass them all on to his retailers, and quickly. Then he’d make a profit. He gave the problem of disposing of this unfamiliar fruit to his raw and unpersuasive son. But after two days of softening and maturing at the depot, the kumquats were – mostly – still unsold.
‘People don’t want kumquats, whatever they might be,’ his son explained. ‘They just want simple oranges. This isn’t Paris. Don’t blame me.’
‘Well, give them simple oranges.’
His father took a fat black marker from his desk, and underneath the word ‘KUMQUATS’ on the display
card, wrote ‘a.k.a. PYGMY ORANGES’.
They’d made their profit by the end of the day. Pygmy oranges were all the rage, just right for kids and snacks and picnics. They could be eaten whole. No peel, no mess, no lacquered chins. How had our town got by without this infant fruit for so long? The retailers demanded more. But our wholesaler could not discover any fresh supplies. He couldn’t count on any more storm-docked boats.
‘That’s life,’ his son said. ‘Ten days ago, they didn’t want to know. Today they want kumquats and won’t settle for anything else. Oranges are far too vulgar now.’
‘Well, give them kumquats,’ his father said. ‘The wholesaler should always come up with the goods.’
He took the same fat pen from his desk, found the display card for ‘ORANGES’, and wrote below ‘a.k.a. KINGQUATS’.
He gave his son a knowing, weary look. He hoped this twice-explained lesson had been learned, that if customers were soft enough to like their oranges reduced, then they’d be bound to love their kumquats swollen and resized. This was his understanding, from a life in trade. The buying public were as innocent as kids. They’d always pay to see the scale of life disrupted by the pygmies and the kings.
17
HERE IS A QUESTION for your guests, next time you dine with new acquaintances at home. The coffee has been served. You sit, not quite at ease, confronted by the detritus of empty plates and by the awkwardness of strangers. You say, to break the ice, ‘Imagine it. You’re on a raft, the two of you, three days from any land. Everybody else has drowned. The sea is calm; it’s hardly bothering the raft. The four horizons offer you no hope of rescue. The skies are absolutely blue. Bad news. Blue skies provide no rain. The empty can you’ve found aboard the raft will not fill up with rain before eternity. You’re bound to die of thirst within three days, before there’s any chance of being washed up on a shore, unless you drink. You have to make a choice. What do you drink to save your lives? Sea water, or your own urine? Will you take piss or brine? Decide. You’re caught between the devil and the salt blue sea. Don’t hesitate to say.’
I promise you, the woman always takes the devil. It does not bother her that piss contains her body waste, the excess, sterile toxins of her complicated life. She is at ease with body fluids, blemishes, has to be, she deals with them throughout her years. She finds salvation in herself, collects the urine in the can, and drinks.
The husband – again I promise you – selects the sea, invariably. He knows the dangers of the salt. They say it dries your blood and drives you mad. The water makes you thirstier, so you drink even more. But still a man can’t face the poisons in his life. He’d rather die. He finds salvation in the seven tenths. He dips the can into the sea and drinks.
Which of the two survives, do you suppose? The woman, obviously. She must outlive the man. Her own bladder is soon empty, but the ocean is endless. Her husband’s lips are white with salt, not thirst. She has a second chance through him. She makes her husband get his penis out and – despite his protests of disgust – fill the can for her. His water is quite clear. Not salty either. His kidneys have removed the salt. So long as he drinks sea, preferring universe to self, she will survive unscathed.
There are no shores. There are no rescue boats. No rain.
18
NOBODY THOUGHT it wise or necessary to invite the director to my backward-running dinner party for colleagues on my twenty-seventh birthday. He was not the sort to much enjoy our kind of levity. He wouldn’t be amused, we thought, by the reversals that I’d planned. I was not keen that he should see me – his ambitious protégé – in this minor, playful mood, in which digestifs came before aperitifs and cutlery was dirtied in topsy-turvy order.
But he came nevertheless, and was announced with some embarrassment by the steward at the private club room just as we were finishing cigars and Calvados and looking forward – backward? – to our meal. He indicated that we should not rise from our places; the evening was informal, and he was hungry only for some company. He had, he said, good news. For one of us.
He pulled a chair up to the angle of a table end and passed some pleasantry about it being just as well that he had missed dessert. The director took the uneasy volume of laughter which greeted his remark to be a friendly acknowledgement of his spreading waistline. We assured him – bravely frivolous – that he had not missed dessert at all. I dared not catch his eye.
The director hung his jacket over the back of the chair, accepted a small cigar and a liqueur for himself, and started to address the other seven at the table. ‘I have been honoured,’ he said, ‘not only, of course, by your hospitality this evening but also by the Board of Governors . . .’ He produced a fax from his jacket pocket and waved it at us. ‘Brussels, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I am to be Director Europe, Forward Planning.’ We rewarded him with some applause.
‘It is possible, of course, that my preferment might provide some opportunities for my young friends,’ he continued. ‘Which one of you gentlemen has the finest creases and the straightest back? At least one of you – I should not tease – has so impressed me with his gravitas that I can imagine him established as my aide in Belgium. And there are further possibilities. So best behaviour, gentlemen! We’ll see who benefits on Monday.’ He turned to place his empty glass on a side table and raised both eyebrows. ‘Who knows?’ he said, smiling directly at me, and ‘We shall see.’
His good news silenced us. No one spoke until the trolley with desserts was brought into the room. ‘Desserts?’ Director Europe said. ‘They’re rather late.’
He put his spoon into his cream gateau. He nodded, smiled and added, ‘Now I smell the flavour of the meal.’ Then, ‘I am reminded of my grandmother, when she was in the nursing home. I went with my older brother one evening to visit her. She’d ordered hot mint water as an aperitif and then, when the nurse had settled the tray of food across her bed, she insisted on eating her meal in reverse order, starting with chocolate mousse and ending with the soup. “I am eighty-three years old,” she told me and my brother. “Life is uncertain. Eat the pudding first.” ’
He put the dessert spoon into his mouth and hummed with pleasure at the taste. My prospects were restored by him. Forward Planning seemed a possibility again. Outside, the waiters lined up with the meats. And, in the kitchen, our soup was simmering on low and patient flames.
I’m twenty-seven years of age today. Life is uncertain. Leave the soup till last.
19
AFTER SHE HAD caught food poisoning from the soft cheese at the cafeteria (but before any of the symptoms had appeared), she had made love to her boyfriend and then to an old acquaintance she’d encountered entirely by chance, and then had kissed (though only playfully, but using tongues) her special friend in her local bar, a homosexual man, in fact.
She fell ill that evening, fever, headache, vomiting. And the three men caught up with her early next day. Fevers, headaches, vomiting, throughout the town.
Now, she wondered, could it be that in a world where there were evidently at least three cases of sexually transmitted indigestion, that there could be – that she could even cause – a single case of gastronomically transmitted venereal disease? Could that old devil, lurking in the bedroom, flourish in the kitchen too? Might she discover recipes to feed and satisfy and aggravate those famished lovers at her door?
20
FOR THE 500TH anniversary of the ending of the siege, Professor Myles McCormick, the big, bizarre Chicagoan who’d made our town his ‘project’, arranged a study week for amateur historians, ending with a celebratory feast. The fourteen participants – mostly, like the professor himself, Americans – could tour the burial site, the recently discovered (and augmented) earthworks and emplacements of the besieging army, the museum with its sad collection of wills and testaments, the still-intact harbour chain that had once stretched across the sea channel to the port. They could inspect the little statue of the city prefect chewing on a shoe and the memorial obelisk with its roster of
the wealthy dead. In seminars, they could consider the day-to-day minutiae of living – and dying – without fresh food for more than fifteen months, and then discuss the broader, nagging questions of historical principle. And they could read and buy (in the professor’s own translation from the sixteenth-century text) the merchant dell’Ova’s contemporary accounts.
The study group was surprisingly easygoing for such a mordant subject, cheerful, attentive and intelligent, delighted with the hotel and the town, and keen to be as stimulated as possible on this short, testing and expensive vacation. So Professor McCormick must have judged that they would appreciate the ‘fitting’ menu he’d prepared for the closing feast. The hotel chef, a Dane with an unexpected sense of humour, had volunteered his services. ‘Anything for a change,’ he had said. The professor presented him with a copy of dell’Ova’s diaries, in which he’d highlighted one of the final passages. ‘Do what you can with that.’
We have been reduced to eating slop that might have been intended for my good host’s chickens and his pigs, had not those chickens and those pigs been speedily dispatched some weeks ago [dell’Ova wrote, elevendays before he died from the insupportable pain of ‘hunger headaches’]. I have always hoped, despite my many travels, that I would not need to sacrifice my dignity so much that I could sup on baser foods, as savages, but in these last few weeks I have discovered myself tasting – and, indeed, relishing – lascivious flesh from mice, ebb meat and worms, and also from dead creatures that have perished from their want of sustenance, all flavoured by our only condiment, the salt from shore weed. My vegetable dishes have presented only the very best grasses from the city lanes and leaves of such variety that autumn seems to have bared its branches at us in the courtyard, though it be only early spring . . . Today we were called to table and an unexpected stew of leather goods. Within the steaming tureen our spoons located the tooled remains of a once-fine saddle, cut strips of bags and purses, a bandolier with the buckles thankfully removed, and a good pair of tanned shoes, which all too late I recognized to be my own. I can report that, given my condition and the rarity of any meal, this was the finest and sweetest-smelling preparation, as good as any beef, which it has ever been my fortune to savour or to chew. Hardship and hunger sophisticate the palate and the nose.