The Devil's Larder

by Jim Crace

  ‘Well, yes, perhaps I do. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so cheap. A macaroon’s too good for him.’ She tips her head towards the undeserving janitor, towards his raucous dogs. ‘You wouldn’t say this one’s well read, well dressed, well heeled! You wouldn’t say this one won’t try to get his hands on me.’ She backs away into the dark. ‘But, still, a woman’s got to eat if she’s to keep herself in trim. And no one wants to eat alone, not when your heart’s torn up like mine.’

  41

  SPITTING IN the omelette is a fine revenge. Or overloading it with pepper. But take care not to masturbate into the mix, as someone in the next village did, sixty years ago. The eggs got pregnant. When he heated them they grew and grew, becoming quick and lumpy, until they could outwit him (and all his hungry guests waiting with beer and bread out in the yard) by leaping from the pan with their half-wings and running down the lane like boys.

  42

  THIS WAS THE challenge that they faced. To cook their meal without a cooker or a pot. The boys had brought their tents out to the island in the stream for just three nights of liberty. It had been heavy work, toiling up the valley with their gear. They had their sleeping bags, their cartons of packaged, tinned and foil-wrapped food, their plastic plates and cutlery, their gas bottle.

  But someone – let’s not spoil their weekend yet by naming names – had failed to put the little cooker and the pots and pans into his bag. It didn’t matter on day one. They ate the fruit, the biscuits and the bread, the chocolate, the cereal. That night they made a fire – at least the boy we should not name had packed the matches – and dined on toast and jam. Next morning they ate the bacon and the meat goujons, roasted on a flat stone in the fire. Their lips were singed and ashy. They drove away the taste with candy bars.

  By the evening of day two they were immensely hungry, bored as well. They had misjudged their rations.

  All that remained to eat were eggs and rice. The boys knew that it was possible to fry an egg on the bonnet of a 1950s car. They’d seen a photograph – a silver Buick, four spitting eggs, sunny side up, the bluest sky, the baking hills of Stovepipe Wells in California. But this was not America, nor was it warm, nor were there any cars. If only they could find an old tin can, then they could boil their supper. But this was untouched countryside. The sort of people who liked this kind of landscape did not leave their trash behind.

  At first they thought these deprivations would be fun. They’d have to hunt for food, catch fish, like cavemen, cook their conquests on an open fire. But there were no fishing rods or nets. There were no traps or snares. There was no wildlife other than themselves, as far as they could tell.

  The only option, then, was to find some way to boil their eggs without a pot or pan. It could be done. It had been done, so many times, 4,000 years before. Their island was an ancient place, a proven refuge for the night, where hunters, travellers might camp in those far days before the larder and the fridge. If those ancestors had some eggs, then they’d not have to wait until a Buick limousine turned up. All they’d have to do was dig a hole and line it with clay from the river bank, then fill it with water carried in skins. A constant supply of red-hot stones baked in their fire would make the water tumble-boil and cook the eggs to perfection. Indeed, the challenge could be met quite readily, but not by boys who hadn’t studied their prehistory.

  So they sat round the fire that second night and contemplated something worse than hunger. They contemplated river, night and clay, the broken landscape and the perfect eggs, the foolishness of camping by this unceasing and unfeeding stream. They dreamed of being more courageous than they were, of being braver boys. And when the rain began to fall they contemplated their defeat of going home as soon as it was light, a whole day earlier than planned, and smuggling back that box of eggs into the simpler, chilling, less historic place from which they’d taken it.

  43

  THERE WAS an eating contest after the bride had left with her new husband on their honeymoon and all the duller couples had gone upstairs to their expensive rooms to sleep off the excesses of the day. Just nine men remained amid the debris of the dancing and the meal – five of the younger and more hearty guests, reluctant to bring such an amusing, colourless event to an end, the Spanish barman, two waiters and the hotel’s under-manager (who clearly wanted everyone to go to bed). All bachelors, all dressed (approximately) in white. That was the wedding theme. All white. A vulgar, wealthy man can have exactly what he wants when his youngest daughter marries, and this one wanted everything and everybody white. That meant a brand-new carpet in the hotel’s dining room, redecorated walls and doors, pearl tablecloths (hand-stitched with hearts in matching thread), displays of the very palest roses, lilies and carnations, and, of course, a wedding dinner ‘cooked from white ingredients’. An irritating challenge for the hotel’s chef.

  The day had been exciting and bizarre. The ninety guests arrived to find themselves blanched out by lighting from the chandeliers and by the artificial snow heaped up in all the corners of the rooms. They must have felt they’d stepped onto the set of a television advertisement for heaven or into some uncanny Alpine hospital. Perhaps that’s why they drank and laughed so heartily. They felt such fools. But, when the waiters in their white smocks arrived to load the tables with the food, they had to clap. The chef had achieved the impossible. They sat at their appointed places and reverently picked their ways through fourteen spotless dishes, which seemed less vivid even than the chalky china tableware from which they had been served.

  IT WAS THE barman’s fault. He said it was a pity that the waiters had to waste good drinking time clearing up the mess. It was a pity, too, that such eccentric food should go to waste. ‘Let’s eat the lot,’ he said. ‘I bet we can.’

  ‘In less than twenty minutes,’ said the under-manager, ‘or else you lose the bet. I want you out by two.’

  The nine of them, keyed up and challenged by the errant spirit of the wedding night, spread out around the tables and set to work on what remained of the feast. There were no rules or etiquette, no social niceties. So lung and lychees shared a fork; fish steaks and sallow andouillettes were sweetened by the icing from the wedding cake; baby white aubergines and boiled potatoes were dipped into the coconut sauce; prawn crackers scooped up basmati rice, yoghurt dip and cream. The men made sandwiches of white oat bread, buffalo cheese, blanched asparagus and stiffened albumen. Vanilla ice cream went with everything. Speed was the thing. This was a race against the clock. They had to cram their mouths. If anything fell on the carpet, then so what? It didn’t show. By the time – eighteen minutes – everything had been dispatched, their suits, shirts and trousers were spattered with niveous gravies and with grease, white stains on white.

  They filled their glasses with the last dregs from the bottles of white wine, mixed drunkenly with milk, and held them up to toast the bridegroom and the bride, by now a hundred miles away. The bachelors could only picture them and hope their own white day would come, their own fake snow. Somewhere, driving through the night, the honeymooners were in each other’s arms, his lips on hers, deep in the lambswool cushions of their white limousine, behind the stiff and blushing chauffeur in his pallid uniform.

  44

  BEWARE THE chilling phrase ‘This calls for some champagne!’ Resist that weighty bottle if you can. Champagne will spoil the day.

  Champagne is tolerable at times, equal to a glass of lemonade for sweetening dry throats, superior even to a can of beer for brisk inebriation, preferable to homemade wine or cider. But otherwise obey the warning on the label: ‘Open with care.’ The drink is rarely equal to its task or to its reputation. How could it be? Nothing is that heavenly or transcendent. We should hold champagne in contempt. It lets us down.

  I HAVE COLLECTED two bottles of Moët & Chandon, Brut Impérial, from the cold pantry, to celebrate my husband’s success at work. The Director at last. Bravo! I carry them like liquid luck down to the summer house. His mother’s there, three colleagues, his
two best friends, our daughter and her current partner, a neighbour and (reluctantly) his wife. With us that’s twelve. One bottle wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be enough to spoil the day.

  What – apart from my husband – could be more well mannered and more sociable than two bottles of champagne? Placed at the centre of the trellis table, they strike, like him, a solid attitude. They’re dignified. But they’re light in disposition, smartly presented, aspiring. Their pedigrees are on display. Their rising gases promise both energy and levity. Expense has not been spared.

  My husband likes to open bottles of champagne himself. He feels I lack respect. The bubbly is too finely and too patiently blended, too lovingly matured to handle with anything other than finesse, he says. We should not allow a pressure spill to waste any. He stands at his end of the table, tears back the gold, loosens the wire and shows us how to pull and twist the cork. The finest waiter could not better him. A flying cork might add some drama but is, in his opinion, unnecessary and vulgar. Everybody laughs and sighs at the muted popping of the corks, the barest frothing of the champagne.

  We hold our glasses out and watch the tumbling liquid and the fizz. We lift our glasses. Trembling hands. We have to drink at once. The bubble reputation will not last. Our disappointments and our jealousies will soon be heavy in the glass.

  ‘Congratulations,’ someone says. ‘To your success.’

  We all stand up to toast my husband and his good fortune. He has a smile for everyone. He would not understand how chilled we feel and vexed. He’s sparkling now. He is grand cru. He does not know that he has let us down.

  45

  THE CELEBRATED restaurant is a short walk from the transport stores, westwards, towards the empty tenements. Just ask the way if you get lost or muddled in the yards and alleyways. A magazine article – with the headline ‘Simply the Best’ – has said it serves the finest soup in the region and ‘merits the detour’. So, for a month or two, its tables are reserved by detourists, as we call them, and regulars like the Fiat garage workers and the women from the trade exchange must eat elsewhere.

  The menu is a simple one. It has not changed for seven years at least and will not change until she dies, the owner says. Each diner gets a hock of bread, some butter and some salt, a spoon, an ashtray and a glass. There are sometimes three soups to choose from. One made with fish, of course. The port is nearby and fish is plentiful. Another’s made with vegetables, according to the season. And, occasionally, there is a third, prepared from either beef or chicken. But most days there are only two, fish soup or vegetable. A glass of beer or water is included in the price. There is no point in asking for an omelette or some wine. The restaurant can’t cope with such variety. The best you’ll get is soup and beer and smoke. There’s also little point in asking what the fish is for that day, or what fresh vegetables were used. The owner usually says, ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ because, to tell the truth, she’s not entirely sure.

  You could not say the place is celebrated for its ambience. It’s just a corner house converted forty years ago into a lunchery, at a time when there were countless families living in this quarter of the town and employed in the naval joineries and engineering shops. It’s modest, then, and not entirely clean. It’s two rooms up and one room down, with plastic tablecloths and kitchen chairs to make you feel at home. It’s cheap in there and cramped and, unusually for a celebrated restaurant these days, it’s heavy with tobacco smoke.

  If not the ambience, then what? You find out when you lift the soup spoon to your lips. The soups are never liquidized into a smooth consistency but, even with their nuggets and morsels of flesh and vegetable, the substrate ballast of lentils, peas and beans, the broth is so delicate and light, so insubstantial and so resonant, that taste and smell precede the near lip of the spoon and leap across the thin air to your mouth. You’ve heard of aftertaste? This is the opposite. This is a soup that’s full of promises. We’re not surprised. We’re used to it.

  These detourists, however, are perplexed as they depart between the crowded tables and step out through the narrow door into the diesel-smelling streets. They tip like kings and queens. Their tips are stiffer than the bill. It can’t be right, they think, to dine so well and simply and be so cheaply satisfied. And, oh, such soup, such soup! The magazine has said the owner has a secret formula, an additive she will not name. So now they try to guess what they have tasted, other than the finest recipe not only in the region but in the world. What is the conjuring trick?

  We have the answers, should they ask. When we have drunk a beer or two, then we will gladly tease the cook, the celebrated chef, with theories to explain the new-found eminence of her restaurant. Her secret is the sewer truffles that she adds to every pot of soup. She grows them in her cellar. Her secret is sea water: two parts of that to every three parts taken from the tap. Seaweed. Sea mist. The secret is the heavy pan she uses, made for her out of boiler iron by a ship’s engineer as a token of his devotion. Its metal is not stable, but leaks and seeps its unrequited love into the soup. Her secret is the special fish that’s caught for her by an old man, at night. He rows out beyond the shipping lanes, anchors in the corridor of moonlight, and scoops them from the water in a kitchen colander. Or else the magic’s in the vegetables. Or in some expensive, esoteric spice.

  ‘Why all the fuss?’ she asks, as the visitors depart. ‘Is not all soup the same?’

  Yet now, at night, when we are going home, we sometimes smell the putrefying truffles from the street, or catch a glimpse of moonlit rowing boats, or look into her kitchen at the back end of the house to see her lifting her lovelorn sailor’s pan onto the hob, or hear the tidal rhythms of the sea as two-parts brine goes by its secret route into her soup. We find her carrying something – skeins? – across the room. They could be wool or seaweed skeins. We cannot tell. We see her fingers in the steam, adding magic touches to the stock. We see her sleight of hand, the charms she uses to entice these strangers to her rooms.

  So, for a month or two – for fame is brief and fashions only fleeting – our tables at the celebrated restaurant are taken by new visitors to town. And we must wait – yes, wait and see – until its reputation fades, until there’s room again for us to sit and smoke, to dine and feel at home, to dip our spoons and bread into this new and famous mystery.

  46

  WE WERE AWAY ten days. In our absence, something must have shifted in our house, a quake, a tilt, a ghostly hand, a mischievous intruder, some global subsidence. It was enough to make the freezer door swing open. Maybe only slightly at first, just wide enough to fill the kitchen with gelid air. But once the frozen food inside began to defrost, to shed its cold paralysis, the packets and the bags became unstable. They sank and fell against the partly open door. They avalanched. Some packets tumbled out and hit the boards. The wildlife in our house had cause to celebrate. Heaven had provided manna on the kitchen floor and lots of time to feed on it. The distant glacier had calved some frozen meals for all the patient arthropods.

  When we returned, the smell was scandalous, a nauseous conspiracy of vegetables and meats and insect waste. The rats had defecated everywhere. The larder slugs had filigreed their trading routes. Someone had left a green-blue mohair sweater inside the freezer, knitted out of mould. The broken flecks of wool were maggot worms and wax-moth larvae. The sweater seemed to shrug and breathe with all the life it held.

  We shrugged and cursed. This was the worst of welcomes. We put on rubber gloves, got out the cleaning rags and mops, filled up a bucket with disinfectant and hot water, set about the task of clearing up the food, of pulling out the emerald body from the freezer, of closing once again the slightly open door.

  Within an hour we’d restored the ice. Unless you looked inside the empty freezer, saw the lack of frozen food, you’d never guess that we’d been breached and burgled by the teeming universe.

  47

  WE WERE brought up not to eat the cores. To do so was considered greedy, messy, ill
-mannered and, we were assured, immensely dangerous. Vitalized by our digestive juices and the dark, the pips would swell and strike. An apple tree would spring up and flourish in the warm loams of our intestines ‘like a baby’, until its roots and branches spread and burst out of our sides. Our skins and clothes would tear apart. ‘Then you’ll be sorry,’ mother said.

  The only cure, if any pips were to be defiantly swallowed by any of her girls, was a dose of weedkiller and, possibly, if that did not prevent germination, a painful operation with a pair of secateurs. ‘It’s not a story I’ve made up,’ she said. ‘Go down to the orchard and you’ll see how true it is. Look for the faces and the hands of the boys and girls who’ve swallowed cores. They’ve turned into bark.’

  I hated orchards then, and apples too. I did not want to end up like the children I’d discovered in the bark, hard and sinewy, distorted by pain, with ants and beetles crawling on their eyes and nothing to protect them from the night.

  These days I have recovered from my mother’s house. I always chew the cores. I do not spit the pips into my palm. Indeed, as I grow older, the thought of something new and green, striking life inside me, growing ‘like a baby’, is not a nightmare any more. I rather think that orchards are a better resting place than cemeteries or crematoria. I’d sooner finish as a piece of bark than ash or bone.

  I used to tell my only son, ‘Eat the cores. They’re the healthiest bit.’ He did as he was told. Frightened, I suppose, of being ill. But he’s defiant now, I find. Today we drove my grandchildren to school. They had their breakfasts on the hoof. An apple each. I watched them chewing up against the cores like hamsters. I did not dare speak. My son rolled down the windows of the car. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘See how far they’ll go.’ A family ritual, I am sure. They waited till we reached the open land, between the fast road and the shops. And then the cores went out, flung fast and wide.