Loose Living

by Frank Moorhouse

  In the bar of the Cattleman’s Club Sandra and I were dressed, appropriately, as a cowboy and cowgirl.

  Everyone was dressed as cowboys and girls because that is normal dress in the San Antonio Cattleman’s Club.

  On this night I went on to drink eight or ten Bloody Marys and to sing a few songs.

  Next morning I awoke in fine fettle although still with my Mexican cowboy boots and spurs on. But that is another story.

  ‘What a remarkable substance is that Tabasco,’ I remarked to Sandra. ‘It controls the effect of alcohol and means that you do not have hangovers. Look at me, I drank eight or ten Bloody Marys and I do not have a hangover.’

  She went on ordering her breakfast and then, putting down the telephone, said, ‘Perhaps they stopped putting vodka in your drink after the second or third. Because of the strong Tabasco and your yahooing and hat waving, and riding the mechanical bull, you would never have known.’

  I frowned and went to swim in the hotel pool.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  On the DISORDER

  in the Rules

  of EATING

  ALTHOUGH I had been striving to avoid it, I was forced to describe to the Duc how differently children eat in Australia to the way they eat in France.

  ‘In Australia,’ I said in a low voice, holding the Duc’s bitterly cold hand, ‘the Rules of Eating seemed to have collapsed.’

  I have never seen on the Duc’s face, or the face of any living person, the look of consternation which I now saw there displayed.

  Though the Duc still has little control of his facial muscles or the movement of his eyeballs, it was still a contortion more fearful than any I had ever seen before.

  So alarmed was I, that I rang for Cognac.

  Holding the Duc by both elbows, while the butler poured the Cognac into the Duc through a silver, medieval mouth-funnel, I apologised, saying that I was sorry to convey to him this sad news.

  The Duc, recovering his composure somewhat, bravely pressed me to continue. He stuttered out that he must face the truth about the masses. His ancestors had failed to do this and had lost their heads.

  I was then given cause to consider whether the look of consternation which I had just observed was a ghostly manifestation of the historic psychic trauma of the guillotine striking the neck of his ancestors (for indeed, that is what it reminded me of) but dismissed this as too far-fetched.

  I described to the Duc how, when recalled to Australia, I took two five-year-olds to a Chinese restaurant. The Duc then stopped me and recollected the wonderful occasion when I had taken him to a Chinese restaurant in Paris and where he had seen the Yum Cha Maids whipped for returning to the kitchen with uneaten dishes.

  I did not consider the way the Duc dwelt on this memory as particularly seemly but he is generally a kindly old man and his life as an aristocrat has not been easy.

  I interrupted him to say, ‘If I may continue, my Duc? One of the five-year-olds refused all the dishes on the menu and instead ordered “noodles with nothing”, and the other ordered prawn cutlets but then ate only the batter and left the prawns.’

  I begged the Duc not to ask me, at this point, to explain what prawn ‘cutlets’ were and what part they played in Australian life.

  The children left most of the food uneaten and played Peter Pan, Captain Hook and the Lost Boys in the restaurant at large.

  The restaurant staff had to forcibly return them to the table, where I sat with my face against the coolness of the ice bucket, suffering as I was from a sick headache.

  In my childhood, I told the Duc, we ate at a table on grown-up chairs and we were expected to ‘eat what was put before us’ and we were not allowed to leave the table until we had eaten everything on our plates, especially, for some reason I never understood, the ‘green’ vegetables.

  No one ever said to us, ‘Eat all those white vegetables.’

  During the days that I was caring for these two five-year-olds I was able to observe their grotesque tastes.

  One ate the chicken skin but not the flesh. One insisted on a sandwich filled with ‘the outside leaf of a cauliflower’ (I swear to God!).

  They both ate something called Coco Pops. The Duc stared uncomprehendingly at me. I explained that the children had told me that Coco Pops was ‘a breakfast cereal made of delicious puffed rice with natural cocoa containing five vitamins and iron, low in fat—just like a chocolate milkshake only crunchy’.

  The children, however, ate them without the milk and at all times of the day. One drank only what he called ‘hospital formula Sustagen, twenty-four per cent protein, eight per cent fat, sixty-eight per cent carbohydrate’.

  The Duc shook his head as I told of the strange tastes and food knowledge of these children.

  When I say ‘shook his head’, I mean that he literally flung his head from one side of his neck to the other with such force that he would stagger first to the right and then to the left, often taking two or three staggering steps, sometimes colliding with furniture. That is what I mean about the Duc ‘shaking his head’.

  I said that as children, we always asked permission to leave the table.

  We folded our serviette before leaving the table and inserted it in our personally initialled serviette ring.

  We placed our knife and fork at half-past six on the plate. We washed our hands, removing any dirt from under the nails, both before and after a meal. We did not burp. We did not play intergalactic wars with our food. We were not permitted to have dessert before main course, let alone four desserts instead of a meal. We thanked our mother for preparing the food. We said grace, thanking God for our food and for our mother and at the same time prayed to win at marbles.

  We did not read at the table.

  We spoke when spoken to. We did not offer, unasked, elaborate and fanciful explanations for simple natural phenomena.

  We did not eat between meals.

  The Duc managed to stutter out that in his day the Rules of Eating in France also included knowing the names of all the dishes and the regions from which they originated and being able to identify all the sauces. The Duc said proudly that by the age of five he knew the names of 200 cheeses. By the age of ten he hunted his own game, albeit with a full mounted entourage.

  He said that he ate in restaurants quite commonly as a child but was brought up to always shake the hand of every other patron in the restaurant upon arriving and leaving.

  He had never played Peter Pan, Captain Hook and the Lost Boys in a restaurant.

  I then came to the difficult part of my story about the Australian children. Whispering to the butler to hold the Duc firmly in a protective embrace, a human straitjacket as it were, I told the Duc that one of the five-year-olds had proclaimed himself a vegetarian.

  As I expected, the Duc had a paroxysm resembling a fit which, despite the embrace of the butler, carried both the Duc and the butler crashing out of the French windows onto the snowy lawn.

  I began to doubt the wisdom of my telling him of my Australian experiences.

  Upon being helped up from the snowy lawn, the Duc fumed that a citizen could not be a vegetarian in France until reaching the age of twenty-one and then had to have a declaration signed by two doctors. Privately, I doubted this but said nothing, feeling it better to leave him with his comforting misconceptions.

  I said that I wouldn’t continue with my account of the eating behaviour of Australian children because of the strain it was causing the Duc, which was, in turn, causing me much distress and not a little damage to the château. But he insisted on hearing more.

  I told the Duc that I explained to the five-year-old vegetarian that there is no real biological distinction between animals and plants—they are part of a spectrum of life and at the centre of the spectrum there were animal-like plants and plant-like animals.

  The Duc then spluttered out, ‘All flesh is grass,’ quoting, I recognised, from the book of Isaiah.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, applauding the Duc for th
e aptness of his remark. The butler also nodded and discreetly clapped.

  The five-year-old vegetarian had replied that if that were the case he swore to me that he would eat only pasta and Coco Pops for the rest of his life. He would refuse to eat any living thing, plant or animal.

  Furthermore, he would report me to Captain Planet.

  I tried to explain the cycle of nature from plankton through to little fish being eaten by bigger fish and how at death we return to the soil and atmosphere as molecules which in turn became plant and animal molecules. I said that we were all a single cycle of changing molecular matter. He seemed adamant about not having anything to do with the cycle of nature or any part thereof.

  I told him that I supposed he could resign from the cycle of nature if he so wished.

  I couldn’t help but privately agree with him while feeling sorrowful that he should be excluding himself from the infinite and manifest joys of participating in that cycle. I refrained from outlining the pains of the cycle.

  They both asked for plain bread and butter sandwiches from which they ate only the centre.

  I told the children that if they didn’t eat their crusts their hair would not be curly.

  They said they did not wish to have curly hair. They saw nothing particularly attractive about curly hair.

  ‘And anyhow,’ one said, ‘it is a dietary myth that bread crusts make your hair curly which was invented by parents who wished to entice their children into eating mouldy old crusts of bread.’

  I said that he was quite wrong. It was not a dietary myth invented by parents but a nutritional fact. Because of the baking process, the crust contained many vital elements not found in the rest of the bread. So there.

  They simply turned to each other and rolled their eyes.

  I further added that ‘curly hair’ was a synecdoche for A Good Life.

  I admitted that the preoccupation of parents with the consumption of the bread crust as healthy and obligatory was curiously mirrored by the removal of the crust from sandwiches on Special Occasions.

  It is as if, on Special Occasions, we were excused from eating the crust. I agreed with them that this is something of an admission by the adult world that the crust, even if healthy, was not particularly appetising.

  I told of my early childhood experiences in Australia with bread. In my childhood bread had more rules about it than any other food (for reasons which escape me). Perhaps the Rules of Bread had to do with the metaphorical weight we give to bread, as in the ‘staff of life’, cast not your bread upon the waters, the loaves and fishes, we live not by bread alone, knowing which side your bread is buttered on, and so on.

  Anyhow—in my family the Rules of Bread were as follows:

  The bread was bought from a baker who carried the bread to the house from a horse-drawn cart in a bakers’ basket and placed it in the bread compartment built into the side of the house.

  The bread was taken from this compartment by the kitchen maid.

  At meal times the loaf was placed on a bread board on the table and sliced with a bread knife. The slices had to be just so. Picking the hot fresh bread from the centre of the loaf was an irresistible temptation for a child and punishable by death.

  For reasons which elude me, this fresh crust, that is, the first outer slice of bread, was highly prized but not so the crusts (the other ‘crusts’ were the crusty frame of the slice of bread).

  It was unacceptable to treat the crust as a separate gastronomic entity by spreading butter along the inside of the crust, something which I found particularly delectable (despite it being proscribed) and which is delectable because of the combination of butter and the aforementioned constituents of the crust.

  The butter was transferred from the butter dish by the butter knife to the edge of the plate—never directly to the bread and never with the plate knife.

  The bread was buttered with the plate knife from the crust evenly inwards to the centre, but there was some thing called ‘having too much’ butter on the bread.

  I do not know who set the amount of butter which was considered ‘correct’ for a slice of bread (I suspect that it is the same Authority which sets all limits in life). I only know that it was less than I considered desirable. I liked my butter spread thickly and suffered severe deprivation throughout childhood for which I have more than amply made up.

  If something was to be added to the bread and butter such as jam or honey there was also some decreed amount beyond which it was ‘too much’.

  Looking back over my turbulent and varied life I can see that seeking ‘too much’ or asking too much was to become a guiding maxim of my life.

  Our bread was then cut into two triangles. Working-class people cut their bread into two rectangles. Small children had their bread cut into four rectangles or four triangles.

  One did not eat the slice whole. I was to find that Americans ate the slice whole but that was later, around the time I began sitting on the chair back to front, wearing a baseball cap, chewing gum and saying ‘that’s rich’.

  The loaf had to be eaten whether stale or not and was never wasted. It could be used as toast or, failing that, it could end up as an atrocious dish without a name, made of bread-sugar-and-hot milk, or bread and butter pudding, which was also an atrocious dish, regardless of being sweetened with Golden Syrup.

  Stale bread, thinly spread butter and these two dishes were some of the reasons I listed in my declaration to my family when I left home at thirteen, never to return.

  The Duc and I then sat in the sad silence of Jeremiah for the rest of the day.

  When I say ‘sat in silence’ I mean that the only noise was the strange eruptions of gas, saliva and food which came from the Duc’s mouth from time to time, and the swish of his riding crop as he lashed out at whatever maid happened to pass too near. A practice I deplore.

  Maids should always stay their distance.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  On the DISORDER

  of Restaurant Anxiety

  One man may have some special knowledge at first hand about the character of a river or a spring, who otherwise knows only what everyone else knows. Yet to give currency to this shred of information, he will undertake to write on the whole science of physics. From this fault many great troubles spring.

  MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE 1533–1592,

  ON CANNIBALS ,BOOK ONE, CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE INVITATION for me to join the Montaigne Clinic for Civilised Disorders as Gregarious Fellow came as a proud surprise and finally attested to how I’d risen in the estimation of all Civilised People.

  It was with sadness that I said farewell to the Duc, the three-fingered maid, the musicians, the head huntswoman, the butler’s brother, Lord Malicious (who does not wish to be mentioned in this book), the Queen of Commas and the Queen of Commas’ dopey boyfriend, who all came across from the old château to farewell me. The butler’s brother put on a great act of ‘counting the silver’. It went on a little too long and a little too seriously for my tastes.

  Over the years which I have been with the Duc and his entourage, we have had our disagreements, but we were all companions dedicated to fun and games on the Great Journey.

  The Duc made a moving speech (in all physical senses of the word ‘moving’, mouth, eyes, ears and every muscle of his body—but at least he rose to the occasion, again, in every sense of the word ‘rose’—his twitching and his spasms sometimes taking him high out of the chair and off the rostrum).

  In his speech, he said some things which I will always remember.

  He said that as far as revolutions were concerned, and I take it that he had in mind the French Revolution which he fears may happen again, he said that he would always work against it, and then added grandly, ‘but I should like it to happen in spite of me.’

  And then he turned to the gathered staff, peasants, townspeople and scholars of the region and said, ‘Remember that someone soon to start on a journey is always a little holy.’ He then hug
ged me and kissed me on both cheeks.

  Upon my leaving the château, the Duc insisted on riding beside my train for some distance, which was not, in my opinion, a good idea.

  I doubt that the horse had seen a railway line or a train before, and the Duc himself seemed only to have the vaguest knowledge of the mechanics of rail transportation. Needless to say, a number of times he and his horse careered, as it were, off the side of the train, and then, for a short distance, impeded the train’s movement by riding ahead on the track in a stumbling fashion, despite the blowing of whistles.

  Eventually a bridle or some part of the tackle must have become tangled in the train’s workings, and while leaning out the window, I was startled to see the Duc and the horse being dragged behind the train—a rather frantic and sweaty horse it was too, involuntarily still with us, at 160 kilometres per hour.

  I had the train stopped and the Duc and his horse were freed.

  I last glimpsed the Duc, strapped in the contraption we had made to keep him upright on horseback since his stroke, riding away on his pitch-black Arabian stallion (glittering somewhat with sweat and with a few rub patches on his flank), the Duc’s noble head and long-barrelled Martini-Henri rifle in its leather gun bucket silhouetted against the alpine landscape as he made his way up the trail.

  I imagined him riding proudly through the villages which were situated on his land and in my mind’s eye I saw the peasants lining the streets, caps off, waving and cheering him, for he was much loved by his people.

  He would then meander back to his château and its quiet, forgotten way of life from times long past, with the quaint, gentle, squabbling rhythms of its hours and days, les très riches heures du Duc de Berry.

  There in the train which was to carry me to unknown and challenging encounters, I wept silently into my beret.