by William Boyd
DATE: Friday
VENUE: Montrose Dining Club, Lincoln’s Inn. Basement, large overlit room, long central table. Staffed by very old ex-college porters and very young monoglot girls who appear to be from Eastern Europe.
PRESENT: Me, Alisdair Lockhart
MEAL: Potted shrimps and toast, duck à l’orange, treacle tart (!)
WINE: G&Ts, club claret, club brandy
BILL: £18. (I paid. Astonishing value. Alisdair said he could add it to his bill but I insisted.)
EXTRAS: About £5000 if I know Alisdair
COMMENTS: Time travel. Back to school. This was English cuisine until quite recently; we have forgotten that this was how we all used to eat. Potted shrimps like consuming cold butter, limp toast. Duck cooked to extinction, repulsive cloying sauce. I ordered treacle tart for nostalgia’s sake. (Alisdair has appalling dandruff for a comparatively young man.) I said Jennifer was being difficult, thus far. He was not sanguine. Asked if this had happened before so I told him of Jennifer’s ultimatum. Spoke briefly about custody of Toby. He left early as he had to get to court. Depressing. Drank whiskey in an Irish pub.
DATE: Saturday
PLACE: My kitchen, Rostrevor Road, Fulham
PRESENT: Me and (intermittently) Birgitte, the au pair
MEAL: Raided fridge—cottage cheese and crispbread, remains of Thursday’s shepherd’s pie, some of Toby’s little yogurt things, cheese triangles. Birgitte sent out for a pizza but I couldn’t be bothered waiting.
WINE: “Three goes of gin, a lemon slice and a ten-ounce tonic …” Who said that? Then two glasses of Pinot Grigio, before I went down to the basement and rooted out the Ducru-Beaucaillou. Fuck it. I gave some to Birgitte, who made a face. She preferred to drink her own beer. She gave me a can when I’d finished the Beaucaillou. Strong stuff. Slept in the afternoon.
BILL: The Human Condition
EXTRAS: I miss Toby and Jennifer. I miss our usual Saturday lunch. Best lunch of the week.
COMMENTS: Music—Brahms horn trio initially but it made me want to weep. Birgitte played something rhythmic, ethnic. She gave me a tape of ocean waves breaking on a shore. “For calming,” she said. Big, bighearted girl. Why would anybody eat cottage cheese? What, in terms of taste and texture, could possibly recommend it? Jennifer and her silly, perpetual diets. Perfectly slim, perfectly … The cheese triangles were unbelievably tasty, ate a whole wheel’s worth as I drank the Beaucaillou.
DATE: Sunday. Cold, low, packed clouds, a flat, sullen light.
VENUE: Somewhere in eastern England on the 11:45 to Norwich. Writing this in the bar. On my way to Mother and Sunday lunch.
PRESENT: Me, three soldiers, a fat woman, and a thin weaselly man with a mobile phone
MEAL: Started with a Jimmyburger on the station concourse, then a couple of Scotch eggs in the bar. On the train I had a bag of salt-’n’-vinegar crisps and an egg-and-cress sandwich from the steward with the trolley. In the buffet thus far I have had a pork pie, a sausage roll, something called a “Ploughman’s Bap” and a Mars bar. There is a solitary mushroom-and-salami omelette wrapped in cellophane that they will do in a microwave. Why am I still hungry?
WINE: Large vodka and orange in the station bar—vague, very temporary desire to keep my breath alcohol-free. Two cans of gin and Italian vermouth in the train before I wandered buffetward. Started drinking lager: “Speyhawk Special Strength.” Notice the squaddies are drinking the same. They do quarter bottles of wine in here, I see. I’ve now bought a couple, having ordered the omelette. It is labeled “Red Wine.” No country of origin. Tart, pungent, raw. I worry it will stain my lips. Mother will serve, as usual, Moselle and call it hock.
EXTRAS: A lot of cigarette smoke, everyone is smoking including, covertly, the steward behind the bar. Smoke seeps between the fingers of his loosely clenched fist resting on his buttocks. The fat woman is smoking. The man on the mobile phone is smoking as he mutters into his little plastic box. I have a metallic taste in my mouth, and am seized by a sudden, embittering image of Diane S.—naked, laughing.
COMMENTS: The English countryside has never looked so drained and dead under this oppressive pewter sky. The barman beckons … Now I have my mushroom-and-salami omelette, a piebald yellow with brown patches, steaming suspiciously, a curious, gamey but undeniably foodlike smell seems suddenly to have pervaded the entire carriage, obliterating all other odors. Everyone is looking at me. I screw the top off my “Red Wine” and fill my glass as we hurtle across Norfolk. Gastric juices squirt. I’m starving, how is this possible? My mother will have the archetype of an English Sunday lunch waiting for me. A roast, cooked gray, potatoes and two or three vegetables, a lake of gravy, cheese and biscuits, her special trifle. I look out the window at the miles of somber green. Rain is spitting on the glass and the soldiers have started to sing. Time for my omelette. I know what I am doing but it is a bad sign, this, the beginning of the end. I am deliberately setting out to ruin (because, let’s face it, you cannot, before lunch, lunch) lunch.
N Is for N
NGUYEN N, Laotian bellelettrist and amateur philosopher. Born in Vientiane, Laos, 1883; died Paris, France, 22 February 1942. N’s family was of bourgeois stock, comparatively wealthy, Francophone and Francophile. Nguyen, a precocious but somewhat unhealthy youth, yearned for Paris, but World War I delayed his arrival there until he was twenty-four.
But after humid Vientiane Paris proved noisome and frustrating. The severe winter of 1920 caused his health to fail (something cardiovascular) and he went south to recuperate, to the Côte d’Azur. Strengthened, he decided to settle there. He earned his living as a math tutor and semiprofessional table tennis player, participating in the short-lived Ping-Pong leagues that briefly flourished on that sunny littoral in the 1920s.
And it was there that he wrote his little masterpiece, Les Analectes de Nguyen N (Toulon: Monnier, 1928), a copy of which I found last year in Hyères, its cerise wrapper dusty and sun-bleached, its pages uncut. A sequence of epiphanic images and apothegms, its tone fragile and nervy, balancing perilously between the profound and the banal. “Somewhere snow is gently falling,” Nguyen writes amid the mimosa and the umbrella pines, “and I still feel pain.” English cannot do their tender sincerity full justice.
After the book’s success Nguyen was taken up by the cultural salons of Paris, where he returned permanently in 1931. He is a tenant of the footnotes of literary history; the unidentified face at the café table; a shadowy figure on the perimeter of many a memoir and biography.
He wrote once to André Gide, who had taxed him on his unusual surname, which is not uncommon in Laos “… It is properly pronounced unnnnhhhh, effectively three syllables, the final ’h’s being as plosive as possible, if you can imagine that. Ideally, after introducing me, you should be very slightly out of breath.”
The war brought penury. Nguyen went to work in the kitchens of Paris’s largest Vietnamese restaurant, where he discovered a talent for the decorative garnish. His lacy carrot carnations, scallion lilies and translucent turnip roses were miniature works of art. In between shifts he wrote his short autobiography, Comment ciseler les légumes (Paris: Plon et Noel, 1943—very rare), which was published posthumously.
Nguyen N was run over in the blackout one gloomy February night by a gendarme on a bicycle. He died instantly.
The Persistence of Vision
Persistence of vision is a trick of the eye, an ability the eye possesses to fill in the gaps between discrete images and make them appear perfectly contiguous. This is what makes animation work.
Murray and Ginsberg’s Dictionary of Cinema (1949)
4:05 A.M. The island. Seated on the terrace in front of my house. This is what I tried to retain. This is what I wanted to come to me unbidden from those three years. The soft explosion of a pile of leaves. A bare-breasted Gypsy girl dancing for some native soldiers. Orange snakes uncoiling in the glossy panels of an antique automobile. Big papery blue blossoms of hydrangea. A red printed smile on a s
quare of tissue. A honeyed triangle of toast on a faience plate. Tennis in Sausalito. The huge pewtery light of the salt pans. The bleached teak decks of a motor yacht. A rare cloud trapped in a cloud-reflecting pool.
It was in the gusty autumnal pathways of the park that I first saw her. Her small dog had nosed its way into a crackling and shifting drift of plane leaves and she was tugging crossly at the lead, shouting, “Mimi, no, come on, really, you impossible beast!” in her surprisingly deep voice. But it was her wrists that held my attention first and provoked that curious breathlessness that I always associate with moments of intense irritation or intense desire. They were very thin, with the bony nodule of the wristbone, the ulna, particularly prominent as she tugged and heaved on recalcitrant Mimi’s crocodile-skin leash. She was bundled up against the astringent frostiness of the day in an old ankle-length apple-green tweed coat, a black cashmere shawl and a soft felt hat that concealed her figure totally, but the length and slimness of her pale wrists and swift computations and assessments thereafter—a slightly hooked nose, sunglasses of an opaque ultramarine hue, a corkscrew of auburn hair—were enough for me to lose concentration and allow Gilbert, my adored but ineffably stupid Labrador pup, to gallop by me, unchecked, from whatever shrubbery or tree bole he was dousing, and hurl himself into Mimi’s leaf-drift.
The soft explosion of dry leaves, the terrified yips and idiot barkings, the cuffs administered to Gilbert’s golden rump, the apologies, the pacifying of Mimi, the crouchings-down, the straightenings-up, the removal of sunglasses, the removal of a calfskin glove from my right hand, the briefest gripping of those thin cold ringless (ringless!) fingers were achieved in a kind of roaring silence as if one half of my brain were registering the full tapestry of sounds available (the dogs, our voices and above the traffic the querulous where-the-hell-are-you? toot of an impatient motorist, blocked in by a delivery van or waiting for someone), while the other half, as if in some dust-free, shadowless laboratory, were pedantically analyzing and observing. Noting: the ability to raise one eyebrow (the left) without any change in expression; the depth of the blue hollows in the undulations of bone and skin where the clavicle joined the manubrium below her throat; the wide mouth and the perfect unevenness of her teeth. Assessing: the exact moment when to effect the introduction; the exchange of doggy arcana (“A Norfolk terrier? Quite rare, I think.” “Norwich, actually.” “Really?”); the casual invitation absentmindedly offered just as one was saying goodbye, about to set off: “Look, I don’t suppose you’d fancy—?” The observable pause, the flick of the eye toward the east gate of the park, the decisive, independent jut of the chin and the tautening of the lips to suppress a smile as she accepted.
We sat at a small table and she rubbed a small circle, tugging her coat sleeve down over the heel of her hand, in the bleary condensation of the window to peer out at the motorcars speeding past. She chose hot chocolate and smoked a French cigarette. I had an apple juice and tried not to sneeze. Her name was—is—Golo.
Even at the wedding her father did not trouble to disguise his candid dislike for me. That he had a handsome, young, parentless, independently wealthy son-in-law whose devotion to his daughter was both profound and unequivocal seemed to make no difference at all. I asked Golo why he hated me. “Oh, Daddy’s like that,” she said. “He hates everybody. It’s nothing to do with the fact that I’m marrying you.” I asked my best friend, and best man, Max. Doctor Max thought for a while and then said: “It’s obvious. He’s jealous.”
Of course that made it worse. We married in a small rural church stacked with the tombs and effigies of Golo’s ancestors, a short canter from the family home. I had a flaming sword of indigestion rammed down my esophagus for three days preceding the ceremony which miraculously disappeared the moment I said “I do” and I knew that the old man had lost his power to frighten me anymore. I could look at his seamed, haughty face, the thinning, oiled hair and the debonair hidalgo’s sideburns that he affected and feel no fear. I was not at ease, true, but I was no longer scared. “You may call me Avery now,” he said, as we shook hands after the ceremony, but I never did.
At the reception the relief made me drink too much and, feeling myself unsteady, I sought a distant lavatory in which to vomit. I tickled my throat with the thin end of my tie and emptied my stomach. Patting my lips with a hand towel and feeling markedly better, I realized I had wandered into Golo’s father’s apartments. The bathroom was paneled in a knotty and brooding oxblood cherrywood. Many stern, blazered, cross-armed young men sitting in rows gazed proudly out from sepia photographs. Here and there among the cased memorabilia were samples of discreet erotica: breast-baring Gypsy maidens playing the tambourine for languid Zouaves; loose peignoirs slipping off shoulders at midday levées. And a picture of Golo, a thin and pubescent fourteen-year-old.
The room was redolent of expensive hair oils and sandalwood soaps. It was a private shrine to the sort of clubby yet perverse masculinity that I loathed—the beery sexuality of a rugby team’s locker room or the officers’ mess after the port has gone round. Max’s observation now seemed alarmingly apt. I crumpled my face towel and threw it in the wastepaper basket. I had to get out. I opened the door.
“What the hell are you doing in here?” her father—Avery—said. He held a long cigar, ash down, in his five fingers.
“Came to say goodbye, sir.” I offered my hand. “I was told you were in your sitting room.”
Avery was not convinced, but, transferring his cigar, he shook my hand all the same. “They’ve only just started the ball, for Christ’s sake.”
“Ferry to catch.”
I stood in the misted blue dusk with Max, waiting for Golo, standing beside the old burnished Malvern some uncle had given us as a present, our cases strapped into the boot. Fitful orange snakes danced in the glossy bodywork from the flares burning down the drive.
“I’ve got to get her out of here,” I said, a little hysterically. “That man is a monster. No wonder her sisters went to live with the mother.”
“Stepsisters,” Max said. “Golo’s from the first wife.”
“Oh? I didn’t see her here.”
“She committed suicide when Golo was five.”
“Jesus. How do you know?”
“I was talking to a cousin, inside.”
Max offered me a small silver box. I lifted its lid: it was full of small round unmarked pills. “My wedding present,” Max said. “I rarely prescribe them. One has to have an exceptionally healthy heart, but they’re guaranteed to make your honeymoon go with a zing.”
We embraced and I caught a scent of the menthol jujubes Max used to suck to sweeten his breath.
“Where is that girl?” I said, my voice thick with emotion.
Max reached into the Malvern and tooted a brisk cadenza on the horn, redundantly, as Golo, dressed as far as my blurry eyes could tell in a matador’s spangled suit of light, emerged through the front door and seemed to flow luminously down the stairs into my arms.
We honeymooned at my little house on the island. I had had its clapboard exterior repainted a lemony cream the better to offset the regulation bottle green demanded by the mayor’s office. Big cloudy blue blossoms of hydrangea lined the sandy path down to the beach. Across the silver bay I could see the dark stripe of the mainland. A lone yacht slowly edged its way east. In a minute the composition would be perfect. I ached for my sketch pad.
Image. Golo sitting on the lavatory, her skirt hitched up to her thighs, her ankles footcuffed by her impossibly sheer panties. Her long pale thighs angled upward, knees meeting, her satin evening shoes just clinging to her heels as she sits on tiptoes, like a jockey straddling a thoroughbred. Except this jockey is simultaneously painting her lips vermilion without the aid of a mirror. She purses her lips, pouts and turns to offer me her best false smile.
“Mmm?”
“Perfect. I don’t know how you do it.”
She tears off a square of lavatory paper and prints her lips on it.
Neatly folded once, it does the work it was intended for down below, before the panties are hoicked to the knee, and then Golo rises in a swoop and rustle of crêpe. There is a millisecond of buttock-cleft on view before the dressing is complete and the chrome knob is pressed and the cistern voids itself.
“Why did you quit medical school?” she asks, apropos of nothing, checking her impassive face in the mirror. Her little finger lightly touches each corner of her mouth.
“What? Because I wanted to be a painter.”
“Can’t you be a doctor and a painter at the same time?”
“I can’t.”
“What about your friend? He’s a doctor and other things.”
“Max? But Max is Renaissance Man. I can’t compete with Max, for heaven’s sake.”
“Can we get a yacht?”
“Of course. But why on earth?”
“I think I want to learn to sail. Where are we going tonight?”
“The maharani’s.”
“How dreary.”
I watched Max dicing the garlic cloves. Each clove was peeled, halved lengthways and then laid flat and held with a fingertip on the chopping board, where, with a small fine knife, the clove was sliced vertically into a fan, turned 90 degrees and sliced across again, tiny neat cubes resulting. The residue left under the finger was discarded.
“Why don’t you use a press?”
“It doesn’t taste the same.”
We were in his garden flat in Kensington, not far from one of the hospitals where he had consulting rooms. He was cooking me supper—scallops. In oil and tomatoes. His kitchen was both efficient and picturesque. Big cleared areas for working, many pan-crowded shelves and racks and, hung here and there, hams and sausage, pimentos, chiles and garlic. Needless to say, Max was a highly accomplished cook and he liked his cuisine flavorsome.