Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  But the maid didn’t go away. She remained standing beside, and slightly behind, Richard Pratt, and there was something so unusual in her manner and in the way she stood there, small, motionless, and erect, that I, for one, found myself watching her with a sudden apprehension. Her old, gray face had a frosty, determined look, the lips were compressed, the little chin was out, and the hands were clasped together tight before her. The curious cap on her head and the flash of white down the front of her uniform made her seem like some tiny, ruffled, white-breasted bird.

  “You left them in Mr. Schofield’s study,” she said. Her voice was unnaturally, deliberately polite. “On top of the green filing cabinet in his study, sir, when you happened to go in there by yourself before dinner.”

  It took a few moments for the full meaning of her words to penetrate, and in the silence that followed I became aware of Mike and how he was slowly drawing himself up in his chair, and the color coming to his face, and the eyes opening wide, and the curl of the mouth, and the dangerous little patch of whiteness beginning to spread around the area of the nostrils.

  “Now, Michael!” his wife said. “Keep calm now, Michael, dear! Keep calm!”

  1951

  “Hi. My name is Don. I’ll be introducing you to Mark, who will be taking your drink order, and after that to Gloria, who will be your waitress.”

  “This giblet gravy is lumpy.”

  TWO ROAST BEEFS

  V. S. PRITCHETT

  “When one says that what one is still inclined to call civilization is passing through a crisis,” says Mr. Plymbell in his very expensive antique shop, raising a white and more than Roman nose and watching the words go off one by one on the air and circle the foreign customer, “one is tempted to ask oneself whether or not a few possibly idle phrases that one let fall to one’s old friend Lady Hackthorpe at a moment of national distress in 1940 are not, in fact, still pertinent. One recalls observing, rightly or wrongly, at that time that one was probably witnessing not the surrender of an heroic ally but the defeat of sauces. Béarnaise, hollandaise, madère—one saw them overrun. One can conceive of the future historian’s inquiring whether the wars of the last ten years, and indeed what one calls ‘the peace,’ have not been essentially an attack on gastronomy, on the stomach and palate of the human race.”

  After a pause, a small medallion of distaste is stamped on his white imperial face. Plymbell is obviously one whose loose clothes have once been better filled and whose stomach has known better days. He adds, “Of course, it may or may not have escaped your notice that the British nation have made a not unremarkable attempt to do ‘the thing’ fairly. One could offer the modest example of one’s daily luncheon….”

  Plymbell’s lunch is a study.

  For several years now, at two minutes before half past twelve every day, Plymbell is first in the queue in the foyer outside the locked glass doors of Polli’s Restaurant, a few yards from his shop. On one side of the glass Plymbell floats—handsome, Roman, silver-haired, as white-skinned and consequent as a turbot of fifty; on the other side of the glass, in the next aquarium, stands Polli with the key in his hand waiting for the clock to strike the half hour—a man liverish and suspended in misanthropy like a tench in the weed of a canal. Plymbell stares clean through Polli to the sixty empty tables beyond; Polli stares clean through the middle of Plymbell into the miasma of the restaurant keeper’s life. Two fish gaze with the indifference of creatures who have accepted the fact that neither of them is edible. What they want, what the whole of England is crying for, is not fish but red meat, and to get meat at Polli’s one has to be there at half past twelve, on the dot.

  First customer in is Plymbell. He has his table, in the middle of this chipped Edwardian place, with his back to one of those white pillars that give it the appearance of a shop-soiled wedding cake mounted on a red carpet, and he faces the serving hatch. Putting up a monocle to his more annoyed eye, he watches the chef standing over his pans, and while he watches he taps the table with lightly frantic fingers. Polli’s waiters are old men, and the one who serves Plymbell has the dejected smirk of a convict.

  Plymbell hardly glances at the farcical menu and never looks at the waiter when he coldly gives his order. “Two soups,” says Plymbell. “Two roast beefs…Cheese and biscuits,” he adds. “Bring me mine now and you can bring the second order in a quarter of an hour, when my secretary arrives.”

  It is a daily scene. Plymbell’s waiter comes forward with his dishes like one hurrying a funeral in a hot country, feebly averting his nose from the mess he is carrying on his dish. He scrapes his serving spoons and, at the end, eyes his customer with criminal scorn. Plymbell’s jaws move over this stuff with a slow social agony. In fifteen minutes he has eaten his last biscuit, and is wetting his finger to pick up the small heap of crumbs he has worked to one side of his plate. Plymbell looks at his watch.

  Exactly at this moment Plymbell’s assistant comes in. Shabby, thin, with wrinkled cotton stockings and dressed in black, a woman of forty-five, Miss Tell scrapes on poor shoes to the table. She carries newspapers in a bundle under an arm and a basket in her hand. He looks carefully away from her as she alights like some dingy fly at the other side of the table. It is astonishing to see a man so well dressed lunching with a woman so bowed and faded. But presently she does a conjuring trick. Opening her bundle, Miss Tell puts a newspaper down on the roll of bread on her side plate and then picks it up again. The roll of bread has gone. She has slipped it into her lap. A minute passes while she wriggles to and fro like a laying hen, and then she drops the roll into the basket by the leg of her chair.

  Plymbell is looking away from her while she does this and, his lips hardly moving, he speaks one word.

  “What?” is the word.

  She replies also with one word—the word naturally varies—cringing toward him, looking with fear, trying to get him to look at her.

  “Sausages,” she may whisper.

  “How many?” Plymbell asks. He still does not look at her.

  “Half pound,” she says. On some fortunate days: “A pound.”

  Plymbell studies the domed skylight in the ceiling of the restaurant. The glass is still out; the boards put there during the war when a bomb blew out the glass have not been replaced. Meanwhile the waiter brings a plate of soup to Miss Tell. She stares at the soup without interest. When the waiter goes, she lifts the plate across the table and puts it in Plymbell’s place, and then lowers her head in case other customers have seen. Plymbell has not seen, because he has been gazing at the ceiling, but, as if absent-mindedly, he picks up a spoon and begins to drink Miss Tell’s soup, and when he has finished, puts her plate back on her side of the table, and the waiter takes it away.

  For several years now Plymbell has been lunching at Polli’s. He used to lunch there before the war with Lady Hackthorpe. She was a handsome woman—well-cut clothes, well-cut diamonds, brilliantly cut eyes, and sharply cut losses. She took a cut of everything. Plymbell bought and sold for her, decorated her house. She had several slices off him.

  Miss Tell used to go home to her parents in the evening and say, “I don’t understand it. I make out her bill every month and he says ‘Miss Tell, give me Lady Hackthorpe’s bill,’ and tears it up.”

  Miss Tell lived by what she did not “understand.” It was an appetite.

  After 1940, no more Lady Hackthorpe. A bomb cut down half of her house and left a Hepplewhite bed full of broken glass and ceiling plaster on the first floor, and a servant’s washstand on the floor above. Lady Hackthorpe went to Ireland.

  Plymbell got the bed and a lot of other things out of the house into his shop. Here again, there was something Miss Tell did not “understand.” She was supposed to “keep the books straight.” Were Lady Hackthorpe’s things being “stored” or were they being “returned to stock”?

  “I mean,” Miss Tell said, “if anyone was killed when a thing is left open it’s unsatisfactory.”

  Plymbell listened a
nd did not answer. He was thinking of other things. The war on the stomach and the palate had begun. Not only had Lady Hackthorpe gone. Plymbell’s business was a function of Lady Hackthorpe’s luncheons and dinners, and other people’s, too. He was left with his mouth open in astonishment and hunger.

  “Trade has stopped now,” Miss Tell said one night when she ducked into the air-raid shelter with her parents. “Poor Mr. Plymbell never goes out.”

  “Why doesn’t he close the business, Kitty?” Miss Tell’s mother said.

  “And leave all that valuable stock?” said Mr. Tell. “Where’s your brain?”

  “I never could fathom business,” said Mrs. Tell.

  “It’s the time to pick up things,” said Mr. Tell.

  “That’s a way to talk when we may all be dead in a minute,” said Mrs. Tell.

  Mr. Tell said something about prices being bound to go up, but a huge explosion occurred and he stopped; it was embarrassing to use the words “go up.”

  “And this Lady Hackthorpe—is she friendly with this Plymbell?” said old Mrs. Tell when the explosion settled in as part of the furniture of their lives.

  “Mr. Plymbell,” Miss Tell corrected her mother. Miss Tell had a poor, fog-colored London skin and blushed in a patch across her forehead. “I don’t query his private life.”

  “He’s a man,” sighed Mrs. Tell. “To hear you talk he might be the Fairy Prince or Lord Muck himself. Listen to those guns. You’ve been there fifteen years.”

  “It takes two to be friendly,” said Miss Tell, who sometimes spoke like a poem. “When one goes away it may be left open one way or another, I mean, and that”—Miss Tell searched for a new word but returned to the old one, the only one that ever, for her, met the human case, “and that,” she said, “is unsatisfactory.”

  “You’re neurotic,” her mother said. “You never have any news.”

  And then Miss Tell had a terrible thought. “Mum!” she cried, dropping the poetic accent she brought back from the West End every night, “where’s Tiger? We’ve left him in the house.”

  Her mother became swollen with shame.

  “You left him,” accused Miss Tell. “You left him in the kitchen.” She got up. “No one’s got any heart. I’m going to get him.”

  “You stay here, my girl,” said Mr. Tell.

  “Come back, Kitty,” said Mrs. Tell.

  But Miss Tell (followed across the garden, as it seemed to her, by an airplane) went to the house. In her panic Mrs. Tell had left not only the cat, she had left her handbag and her ration books on the kitchen table. Miss Tell picked up the bag, and then kneeled under the table looking for Tiger. “Tiger, dear! Tiger!” she called. He was not there. It was at this instant that the airplane outside seemed to have followed her into the house, for the place suddenly closed in, then expanded and became hot, rose up in the air and fell down in cartloads upon the kitchen table. When Miss Tell was dug out alive and unhurt, black with dust, six hours later, Mr. and Mrs. Tell were dead in the garden.

  When Plymbell recalls his experiences in the war for the inquiring foreign customer, he says there were times when one was inclined to ask oneself whether the computed odds of something like 897,000 to 1 in favor of one’s nightly survival were not, perhaps, an evasion of a private estimate one had arrived at without any special statistical apparatus—that it was fifty-fifty, and even providential. It was a point, he said, one recollected making to one’s assistant at the time, when she came back.

  Miss Tell came back to Plymbell’s at lunchtime one day a fortnight after she had been dug out. She was singular: she had been saved by looking for her cat. Mr. Plymbell was not at the shop, or in his rooms above it. In the vainglory of her escape she went round to Polli’s. Plymbell was more than halfway through his meal when he saw her come in. She was wearing no hat on her dusty black hair, and under her black coat, which so often had ends of cotton on it, she was wearing navy-blue trousers. Plymbell winced: it was the human aspect of war that was so lowering; he saw at once that Miss Tell had become a personality. Watching the wag of her narrow shoulders as she walked, he saw she had caught the general immodesty of the “bombed out.”

  Without being invited, she sat down at his table and put herself sideways, at her ease, crossing her legs to show her trousers. Her face had filled out into two little puffs of vanity on either side of her mouth, as if she were eating or were containing a yawn. The two rings of age on her neck looked like a cheap necklace. Lipstick was for the first time on her lips. It looked like blood.

  “One inquired in vain,” said Plymbell with condescension. “I am glad to see you back.”

  “I thought I might as well pop round,” said Miss Tell.

  Mr. Plymbell was alarmed; her note was breezy. “Aren’t you coming back?”

  “I haven’t found Tiger,” said Miss Tell.

  “Tiger?”

  Miss Tell told him her story.

  Plymbell saw that he must try and put himself for a moment in his employee’s situation and think of her grief. “One recalls the thought that passed through one’s mind when one’s own mother died,” he said.

  “They had had their life,” said Miss Tell petulantly.

  A connoisseur by trade, Plymbell was disappointed by the banality of Miss Tell’s remark. What was grief? It was a hunger. Not merely personal, emotional, and spiritual; it was physical. Plymbell had been forty-two when his mother died, and he, her only child, had always lived with her. Her skill with money, her jackdaw eye had made the business. The morning she died in hospital he had felt that a cave had been opened inside his body under the ribs, a cave getting larger and colder and emptier. He went out and ate one of the largest meals of his life.

  While Miss Tell, a little fleshed already in her tragedy, was still talking, the waiter came to the table with Plymbell’s allowance of cheese and biscuits.

  Plymbell remembered his grief. “Bring me another portion for my secretary,” he said.

  “Oh no, not for me,” said Miss Tell. She was too dazed by the importance of loss to eat. “I couldn’t.”

  But Polli’s waiter had a tired, deaf head. He came back with biscuits for Miss Tell.

  Miss Tell looked about the restaurant until the waiter left and then coquettishly she passed her plate to Plymbell. “For you,” she said. “I couldn’t.”

  Plymbell thought Miss Tell ill-bred to suggest that he would eat what she did not want. He affected not to notice and gazed over her head, but his white hand had already taken the plate, and in a moment, still looking disparagingly beyond her, in order not to catch her eye, Mr. Plymbell bit into one of Miss Tell’s biscuits. Miss Tell was smiling slyly.

  After he had eaten her food, Mr. Plymbell looked at Miss Tell with a warmer interest. She had come to work for him in his mother’s time, more than fifteen years before. Her hair was still black, her skin was now gray and yellow with a lilac streak on the jaw, there were sharp stains like poor coffee under her eyes. These were brown with a circle of gold in the pupils, and they seemed to burn as if there were a fever in their shadows. Her black coat, her trousers, her cotton blouse were cheap, and even her body seemed to be thin with cheapness. Her speech was awkward, for part of her throat was trying to speak in a refined accent and the effect was half arrogant, half disheartened. Now, as he swallowed the last piece of biscuit, she seemed to him to change. Her eyes were brilliant. She had become quietly a human being.

  What is a human being? The chef whom he could see through the hatch was one; Polli, who was looking at the menu by the cash desk, was another; his mother, who had made remarkable ravioli; people like Lady Hackthorpe, who had given such wonderful dinner parties before the war; that circle which the war had scattered and where he had moved from one lunch to the next in a life that rippled to the sound of changing plates that tasted of sauces now never made. These people had been human beings. One knew a human being when the juices flowed over one’s teeth. A human being was a creature who fed one. Plymbell moved his jaws.
Miss Tell’s sly smile went. He looked as though he was going to eat her.

  “You had better take the top room at the shop,” he said. “Take the top room if you have nowhere to live.”

  “But I haven’t found Tiger,” Miss Tell said. “He must be starving.”

  “You won’t be alone,” said Plymbell. “I sleep at the shop.”

  Miss Tell considered him. Plymbell could see she was weighing him against Tiger in her mind. He had offered her the room because she had fed him.

  “You have had your lunch, I presume,” said Plymbell as they walked back to the shop.

  “No—I mean yes. Yes, no,” said Miss Tell secretively, and again there was the blush like a birthmark on her forehead.

  “Where do you go?” said Plymbell, making a shameful inquiry.

  “Oh,” said Miss Tell defensively, as if it were a question of chastity. “Anywhere. I manage. I vary.” And when she said she varied, Miss Tell looked with a virginal importance first one way and then the other.

  “That place starves one,” said Plymbell indignantly. “One comes out of there some days and one is weak with hunger.”

  Miss Tell’s flush went. She was taken by one of those rages that shake the voices and the bones of unmarried women, as if they were going to shake the nation by the scruff of its neck. “It’s wrong, Mr. Plymbell. The government ought to give men more rations. A man needs food. Myself, it never worries me. I never eat. Poor mother used to say, ‘Eat, girl, eat.’” A tear came to Miss Tell’s right eye, enlarged it and made it liquid, burning, beautiful. “It was funny, I didn’t seem to fancy anything. I just pick things over and leave them.”

  “I never heard of anyone who found the rations too much,” said Mr. Plymbell with horror.

  “I hardly touch mine since I was bombed out,” said Miss Tell primly, and she straightened her thin, once humble body, raised her small bosom, which was ribbed like a wicker basket, gave her hair a touch or two, and looked with delicate resolution at Plymbell. “I sometimes think of giving my ration books away,” she said in an offhand way.