Toast

by Nigel Slater

  Prawn Cocktail

  There’s something going on. Dad’s wearing his best Rael Brook shirt and cavalry twills. Joan has come downstairs in the only thing she owns that didn’t come from a catalogue. What is more, he is drinking a gin and tonic and she is holding a sweet Martini and lemonade. In the sink is a packet of prawns.

  ‘Do you think they are defrosted yet?’

  ‘I should think so, darling. I took them out an hour ago.’

  He turns to me. ‘We thought we’d have prawn cocktail tonight.’ A question mark looming large over the sentence.

  ‘Oh, can I make it for you? I make them every night at the hotel.’

  For weeks I had been making prawn cocktails. Shredded lettuce, defrosted prawns (you’d better get three bags out, Nige, we’re fully booked tonight), a sauce made from cash-and-carry mayonnaise and tomato ketchup, and then a scattering of chopped parsley and the merest hint of paprika. ‘Go easy on the paprika, some of them might not like it. You know what they are like on a Saturday,’ chimed Doreen Beckett.

  I cut a thin slice from the iceberg lettuce in the fridge. ‘I know it doesn’t taste of much, but it keeps so well.’ I stuff it into two Paris goblets. We only have two. I tear open the prawns, squeeze out the water and drop the pale pink commas into the glasses. We don’t have mayonnaise so I shake a glob of salad cream into a Pyrex bowl, then stir in a dollop of tomato ketchup bought specially for the occasion. At the back of the pantry shelf is a tub of Lion brand ground pepper. I shake it into the sauce but the holes are blocked, so prise out the lid with my thumb and pick up a pinch with my fingers. Next to the pepper is a drum of brick-red powder that looks just like the paprika that I use at work. The label says Cayenne but it smells pretty much the same.

  My father takes a teaspoon of his prawn cocktail. He glares at me over the top of his glasses. Despite the stern, glassy-eyed look I get the feeling he is about to tell me it is the best prawn cocktail he has ever had in his life. He carries on glaring, his spoon poised mid-air, his eyes suddenly full of tears.

  ‘Is it supposed to be so hot?’ Joan asks between sniffs.

  ‘You little bugger,’ said my father. A wave of hatred on the last word.

  Peach Melba

  Sunday lunch at the Talbot was a family affair I slipped into gratefully. Several small tables in the restaurant were pushed together to form one long one, and staff and family sat cheek by jowl, talking about the ‘service’, the customers, ‘I could have killed that old cow on table three,’ and the goings-on among the overnight guests, ‘I tell you, it’s X in room six and that is NOT his wife.’ Plates of Diane’s beef and pork were passed around the table along with steel dishes of cauliflower cheese and buttered runner beans, and the nattering never stopped.

  It was not unusual for the Becketts’ two daughters to join us, sometimes with school friends who had turned up for the weekend. They were sweet but always distant, like they belonged to another world. ‘Mrs Beckett’s son is coming for lunch today,’ announced Diane one Sunday morning. ‘You haven’t seen him yet, have you? He’s so good-looking.’

  Stuart was indeed good-looking, he also had that air of supreme confidence with the hotel staff that came not just from years at public school but from simply being the owners’ son. ‘Don’t you think he’s like David Bowie?’ quizzed Di after Stuart and his friend, a short, dark-haired girl with a loud laugh called Beany, walked through the kitchen. I asked if Beany was his girlfriend. ‘She could be,’ said Diane slowly, making the ‘could’ last several seconds, then lowered her voice, ‘but you know what they say about dancers, don’t you?’

  I did. And I rather hoped they were right. I wanted to meet, or at least see at close quarters, someone whom my father used to refer to as ‘one of them’. Joan called them ‘sissies’ or on one occasion ‘nancy boys’ and could reel off their names like the ten times table: Larry Grayson, Kenneth Williams, Frank Ifield, Charles Hawtrey and she ‘thought’ Frankie Howerd and Bruce Forsyth. ‘I’m not sure you’re right about old Brucie, you know. I think he’s just putting it on,’ argued Dad quite rightly. ‘Oh and those two boys who sing together,’ she would always add, meaning Peter and Gordon. But then Dad and Joan had a bit of thing about people being ‘one of them’. Marc Bolan, Michael Crawford, Jimmy Edwards, almost everyone on Top of the Pops was suspected of it and, needless to say, Mick Jagger after he wore a white dress to the open-air concert in Hyde Park. ‘Don’t be stupid, of course they can’t,’ snapped my father when I once asked if women could be ‘like that too’.

  Stuart and Beany ate at the other end of the table amid much hilarity and fooling around. At one point there was even the start of a food fight, though it stopped when old man Beckett walked in to bring more drinks to the table. This was so different from how we ate at home, where even a passing compliment on the food was just ‘not done’. At the hotel we always ate up the pies and syllabubs that were left over, but Stuart and Beany went into the kitchen and made vast peach Melbas, leaving a trail of peach juice and drips of strawberry ice cream everyhere. ‘They make an exotic couple, like the people you see on the television,’ suggested Joyce, one of the cleaners.

  ‘Why don’t you go and watch telly with Stuart and his girlfriend?’ said Mr Beckett later, as we dried up the wine glasses and filled the shelves in the bar with bottles of Britvic orange and Canada Dry. Doreen suggested exactly the same about ten minutes later and then added, ‘You won’t be interrupting, she’s not his girlfriend, you know, she’s just a friend from school.’ Doreen Beckett eyeballed me as if she was trying to tell me something.

  Stuart and Beany were lying on the bed together, watching a black-and-white film and drinking beers. They certainly looked like girlfriend and boyfriend. ‘Come in, my dear,’ said Stuart, whose eyelashes suddenly seemed twice as long and black as before. I sat on the floor, my back up against the bed and stared straight at the television. Despite his mother’s assurance, I felt almost as much a gooseberry as I did at home.

  We sat and watched the film, me listening to every rustle as they rearranged their positions, first his head on her chest, then hers on his, then him lying on his back with Beany’s leg underneath him. At one point I felt his knee resting against my neck, and then his leg fell slowly down my side, and he tucked his toes into my elbow; the three of us knotted loosely together like a bowl of spaghetti. I was uncomfortable, yet strangely happy with it.

  The film credits rolled up the screen and all of us stirred slightly, stretching our arms and untangling our limbs. Stuart suggested a walk to the river. ‘I’m not moving an inch,’ said Beany, who was by now almost asleep. ‘Come on then, we’ll go on our own.’ Stuart bounced up and pulled me to my feet.

  It was an awkward walk. Long silences, which I didn’t know how to fill (I couldn’t forget he was my employers’ son), accompanied by a sick feeling in my stomach and a desperate need to pee. He was less confident on his own, away from the family and his girlfriend, quiet even. We dawdled along the river bank, as if we were each waiting for something to happen, or to be said. At a patch where the current became stronger, we clambered up through the tall grass and long-stemmed buttercups to a bit of the field I often came to with Julia. ‘Hang on a sec,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to pee.’

  As I zipped up my jeans Stuart slid his arms round my neck and pulled my face towards him. We kissed briefly, maybe for two or three seconds, then he put his arm round my neck and we ran back to the hotel. ‘See you later,’ he said and bounced up to his room, two steps at a time. I went into the bar and lay on one of the long, squashy sofas, unsure of what, if anything, had just happened. I had butterflies in my stomach but at the same time felt somehow disappointed. I thought being ‘one of them’ was going to be much more exciting.

  Pickled Walnuts

  Once Dad retired he took to picking me up from the school bus in the car. He had traded in his old Rover with its polished leather seats and walnut dash for a new, bright blue Japanese thing that seemed to be mad
e of plastic and smelled of sick. I was embarrassed to be seen in it, and I missed kicking the autumn leaves that gathered in loose piles at the roadside and the buzz I would get from feeling that someone was watching me as I stopped to take a piss in the woods.

  The greenhouse was Dad’s main escape from Joan’s do-it-and-dust-it world. The world where nothing mattered more than being seen to be clean and tidy. Warm and damp, the timber-framed greenhouse smelled of potting compost and, faintly, cigarette smoke in spring and the deep herbal notes of green tomatoes in summer. When there was frost on the ground the scent of Dad’s orchid collection hung heavy, like you were walking through honey, and passion flowers wound their way along strings above your head. Joan never set foot in the greenhouse, never held a cymbidium to her nose, never snapped a tomato shoot just to sniff it, never picked a single tomato save once, when she caught a stranger helping herself to a pound of Dad’s ripest, chasing her off like she was a tomcat protecting its territory. ‘These are the ones she’s picked,’ snapped Joan, holding out a handful of plump, green-shouldered Moneymaker. ‘Said she thought it was pick-your-own, I gave her bleedin’ pick-your-own.’ Dad replied that she should have let her keep them. ‘We’ve got more than enough.’

  His face always dropped slightly when he saw what his new wife had produced for supper. ‘I don’t really know if I can eat all this,’ he said meekly one weekday night when he came in from the garden to find melon slices on the table, a roast chicken crackling away in the oven and an apple pie complete with pastry leaves and holly berries resting on the kitchen counter. He seemed afraid to say too much, but it was clear he felt she was going over the top with these midweek meals of three courses, and even, from time to time, a choice of puddings. Then there were the snacks; the little treats she would make him throughout the day and run up to his greenhouse: toasted cheese or Welsh rarebit, ham sandwiches, slices of strawberry and apple pie or pieces of Battenberg cake. No cup of tea came without its fat slice of Victoria sandwich. I still bought the odd thing home from my school cooking lessons, proud of them as I was, but I had started to pass the results round on the school bus. Four cold rissoles wrapped in tinfoil seemed a somehow pathetic offering now that Joan had taken up making mandarin orange and maraschino cherry pavlova.

  Dad had a taste for odd things I didn’t understand. A grey-brown ointment called Gentleman’s Relish that he used to spread on triangles of toasted Mother’s Pride; Campbell’s Meatballs in Gravy; Shipphams Chicken Spread sandwiches; Crosse & Blackwell Piccalilli that everyone at school called camel snot; marmalade with whisky in it; porridge with salt instead of sugar; and his precious pickled walnuts – the last sitting in glass jars like anatomical specimens in the damp, dark pantry, tightly sealed against the army of scurrying silverfish that lived under the fridge. ‘They’re nothing to do with dirt, it’s the damp they like,’ Joan reminded us every time one made a break for the skirting board. (The silverfish, that is, not the pickled walnuts.)

  One weekend when we attended a fête in a field by the river, Dad came back with a jar of pickled walnuts as big as the jars of sherbet lemons that stood behind the sweet counter in the post office. ‘It will last us a year or two,’ he said, bringing them in from the boot of the car.

  ‘I don’t know how you can eat the filthy things,’ shuddered Joan, screwing up her nose like he had just handed her a jar of preserved dog poo.

  One day I came home to be told that Dad was out playing tennis. The idea of my father without a pipe in his hand was difficult enough, let alone that of him cavorting around on a tennis court. ‘Why tennis?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, your father has just decided he needs to take up some sort of sport now he’s retired,’ reasoned Joan, though I could tell she wasn’t any more convinced than I was. ‘It’s better than all that funny Masonic business,’ she whispered, lowering her voice and making me feel as if for once she was confiding in me. ‘He says he’s going to be doing it two days a week.’

  The Freemasons had always been a big part of Dad’s life. He was always out at a lodge meeting, a ladies’ night or a charity event. ‘It’s got something to do with rolling up your trouser leg,’ said Joan knowledgeably one night, as if that explained everything. ‘It’s some sort of code,’ she continued, with the implication that millions of professional and apparently sane men travelled hours to roll up their left black trouser leg in front of one another and go home again. The Masons, the greenhouse and now tennis. Why marry her in the first place if he wanted to do so many things that excluded her?

  We didn’t talk about money, ever. I just suspected that something wasn’t right. He had spoken quite crisply to Joan a couple of times recently, once when she bought some smoked salmon to eat before Sunday lunch, and again when she threw a piece of stale cake in the bin. ‘There just seem to be so many cakes nowadays?’ he said like he was asking a question. Then he quickly added, ‘It’s just that it could have been a trifle.’

  Joan went ballistic. ‘Could have been a trifle!’ she yelled. ‘It could only have been a trifle if I made it into one.’ And then: ‘Don’t you think I’ve got enough to do? Cleaning up after him, after you, doing the garden, weeding, mowing the lawns, taking the dog out. He doesn’t do anything except his homework. Get him to make you a bleedin’ trifle.’ She tossed her head sideways in my direction. It was like a huge rock had dropped from the sky and just missed us all. My stomach twisted into a knot and I wanted to go to the loo urgently. I just walked out into the garden, avoiding looking at either of them. As I rounded the corner I heard him say, ‘I’ll get him to do a bit more to help.’

  My father came back an hour later with a long-handled lawn trimmer, brand new and obviously expensive. ‘It’s for doing the edges,’ he said apologetically, ‘so you don’t have to do it on your knees with the little snippers any more.’ He must have driven into Bromyard for them. Joan didn’t even look up, she just carried on deadheading the roses, a job I knew my father loved dearly, a job he used to do about nine o’clock on a summer’s evening after a glass of whisky, but one he never got the chance to do any more. Nowadays his wife did it. One brown edge on a single petal and then even the most exquisite rose suddenly found itself on the compost. A rose bush is much tidier without the roses.

  Sweeties

  My father had started to look tired and white when he came in from the garden, a faint clamminess to his skin, like wet dough. Things he had always wanted to grow – scented wigwams of sweet peas, rows of broad beans held up with string, soldierly lines of carrots neatly labelled with their varieties – filled every bed, he even grew his own tobacco and dried the long leaves over the bedroom storage heaters. He became obsessed with his orchids, turning one half of the greenhouse into a small rainforest and hanging baskets of miniature variegated orchids from the roof, tiny, like yellow and blood-splattered bees. When he was in a good mood the old man would summon me to look at his latest success, an arching branch of white blossom, edged pink and mauve like the wings of rare butterflies, or a stiff spire of green and maroon buds that had opened to reveal exquisite, explicit blooms.

  The new warmth he had given off since his marriage, like a freshly baked loaf, had cooled of late, and he would talk less than he used to. Questions were answered gruffly, or sometimes not at all, and patience, other than with his beloved garden, had worn thin. He took to snapping at me for no particular reason. Fifteen, moodily hormonal and laden with work for my exams, I became an easy target. The air between us became tight and tender, like the skin round an erupting spot.

  Once or twice I saw him from the bathroom window clutching at his chest when he was digging the parsnip bed. He would stop, stone still, then rub his chest like he did when he had indigestion. Except that this time he didn’t take one of the Setlers he always carried in his trouser pocket. I heard him asking my stepmother why we had to have three courses at every meal now, and why there always had to be a pudding, even on weekdays. One Sunday lunchtime, when we started our roast dinn
er with soup and finished it with raspberry tart decorated with swirls of buttercream, I remember him saying, ‘It’s all very nice, Joan, but I really don’t need all this.’

  When I wasn’t working I would spend most of my time in my bedroom, listening to albums – Madman Across the Water, Aladdin Sane, Tea for the Tillerman – in darkness but for the underwater light of the lava lamp. I invented homework projects too, anything really to get out of having to sit with the newly-weds, a gooseberry in front of the television. ‘I don’t know what you do in your room all the time,’ Joan would moan, accusingly. I am not sure Dad minded what I did, but once she had let her dissatisfaction be known he would be obliged to join in, telling me it wasn’t normal for a fifteen-year-old to spend so much time alone in his room. On other occasions she would talk about me as if I wasn’t there: ‘He’s been in his room all afternoon again,’ she would say to him, folding her arms tightly across her chest, with me sitting less than six feet away. It wouldn’t have mattered if her hostility, so much more open now, hadn’t been quite so infectious.

  Dad was still a sweetie man, rarely without a Murray Mint, a humbug, a toffee eclair or a Payne’s Poppet. There were Toffos in his greenhouse, Liquorice Allsorts in his bedside drawer and a bag of Fox’s Glacier Fruits in the glovebox of the car. At weekends he brought in boxes of pastel-coloured fondants or Clarnico Mint Creams, Ruffle bars with their pink coconut filling, and at Christmas liqueur chocolates in amber-, green- and gold-coloured foil. It was then we had crystallised figs too, sticky dates in long boxes, the fruit stuck to the paper lining, and shallow, round packets of sugar-coated orange and lemon slices.

  More to my taste were chocolate bars such as Peppermint Aero and Curly Wurlys, the ill-fated Summit bar and Cadbury’s sickly Aztec. Dad treated chocolate bars (except for Fruit and Nut and, for some reason, Caramac) as something from a lower order. For him the nadir of sweetie life was a box of chocolate Brazils or the coffee creams in Black Magic.