by John Baxter
An eminent scholar and scientist, Jean-Paul had retired from a highly profitable career as an analytical chemist to become a painter, at which he achieved even greater success. François Mitterand, president of the republic, twice chose one of his paintings for his personal Christmas card—the sort of accolade that really counted with the status-conscious French.
To me, he accorded a gloomy “Bonsoir, Monsieur” and a limp handshake, before disappearing into the dining room. From the doorway, I watched him put on his glasses to examine the labels on the night’s bottles of wine, lined up to breathe on the stone mantel above the open fire.
With Jean-Paul present, the meal could begin. A few minutes later, he took his place at the head of the table, and the other dozen guests arranged themselves, with me at the foot.
The marathon of Christmas dinner commenced.
I’d been warned what to expect. After the foie gras, we’d be enjoying white boudin veal sausage with fried apple, then roast pintade—or guinea fowl—a gratin dauphinois of sliced potatoes baked with cheese and cream, accompanied by green beans and carrots, followed by salad, cheese, and Françoise’s twenty-five-egg mousse—each course with its wine, including champagne with the dessert.
The goose liver was delicious enough for one to spare little thought for the poor bird that produced it. We smeared it onto fresh white pain, larger brother of the more familiar baguette, washing it down with ’84 Bordeaux from Madame’s own cave—which was literally a cave, hollowed out of the rock on which this house was built.
The women never stopped handing around plates, offering more foie gras, and returning to the kitchen for bread or cornichons. Jean-Paul exchanged a few phlegmatic words with Jean-Marie, then fell silent. From time to time, he would tilt a wine bottle away from him and stare at the label, as if it might have changed miraculously into a better year.
I began to see the problem.
I was the problem.
Marie-Do had gone to Los Angeles on vacation and returned with this … person.
Who was I?
Seducer, fortune-hunter, boyfriend, bigamist? Was I there for the weekend, the month, or should I be regarded as a permanent fixture? If so, would I be an ornament to this tight little clan or an embarrassment, to be hushed up and apologised for, like cousin Nicolas, who, as Marie-Do had explained, periodically broke with his girl, wrecked his apartment, climbed onto the roof, and had to be locked up for his own safety?
I was at this supper for only one reason—to sing for it. But what could I tell these people which might convince them I deserved their hospitality, let alone their friendship, even their love?
Without quite knowing what I was about to say, I cleared my throat. Conversation halted. Every face turned in my direction.
“In Australia,” I announced, “I had a friend …”
3
George
… and I thought of Jack … looking just like these men, hard and strong and confident and with brown legs planted in the Seymour dust as if the whole world was his to conquer, a man fulfilled in his own rightness …
—GEORGE JOHNSTON
My friend was a writer. His name was George Johnston, and when I met him in 1964, he had just returned to Australia after decades spent in China as a war correspondent and in London and the Greek Islands as a journalist and novelist. My Brother Jack, the first in his trilogy of autobiographical novels, had been a bestseller, and was about to be turned into a TV mini-series— as good a reason as any for him to come home.
George and his wife, Charmian Clift, trailed the titillating perfume of their wild reputation. Who in Australia’s literary world didn’t have a George-and-Charmian story? Their drinking, their fights, their infidelities—all were legendary, and this return to Australia merely magnified them.
I got to know the couple when I included one of George’s stories, about their life on the Greek island of Hydra, in an anthology I was editing. To me, they were figures out of myth. Charmian embodied the aging Circe, still able to enchant us with the raddled shreds of her beauty and the remains of an aristocratic drawl, now roughened by decades of booze and sex.
As for George, rail-thin and already having lost one lung to tuberculosis, nobody gave him long to live. Yet he spun tales tirelessly, of navigating the mountains of China with the Flying Tigers and sampling the bohemian decadence of peacetime Greece. He punctuated each sentence with a drag on a sodden cigarette, and paragraphs with a phlegm-flecked cough. Listening to him talk, I understood the old sailor of whom Coleridge wrote in his Rime of the Ancient Mariner, who spellbinds a young man with his tale:
He holds him with his skinny hand.
“There was a ship,” quoth he …
George was never more hypnotic than when he described how, the war over and their future uncertain, he and Charmian shivered in the fog-shrouded London winter of 1947, wondering where to go next. Imagine their astonishment, he recounted, when they received a call from the French embassy. Could George call on their trade attaché to discuss a matter of the gravest importance?
It was the story of what followed that I decided to tell my soon-to-be-adoptive family at this, my first French Christmas dinner.
George’s first reaction to the summons from the embassy was confusion.
“The trade attaché? You don’t mean the cultural attaché?”
No, it was M. Dubois of the Trade Desk who desired to see him. And yes, it was George Johnston, the writer, they wanted.
M. Dubois had a sad story to tell. During the Nazi occupation, French vignerons continued to make wine. Millions of litres had accumulated, far more than Europe could ever drink. They were looking for alternative markets. Australia, perhaps?
“Australians do like a drink,” George conceded, “but mainly beer. They don’t go much on …”
He barely stopped himself using the disdainful term “plonk”. Australian soldiers in France during World War I learned to ask for “van blonk”, and the name survived as a generic term for any alcoholic drink made out of grapes, from Gewürztraminer to Amontillado.
“… er, wine,” he finished lamely.
“Ah, that is where you come in, M’sieur Johnston,” the diplomat said. “We wish to commission a series of articles about French wine for Australian newspapers and magazines. If this creates a demand, we could ship it to your country in quantity, by tanker.”
George hesitated. The plan sounded crazy to him. Australians abandoning beer for vin ordinaire? Obviously M. Dubois had never seen an Australian pub on a hot Saturday afternoon, with drinkers sluicing down pint after pint of icy, gullet-numbing lager. He would be doing French winemakers a favour by nipping this scheme in the bud. On the other hand, times were thin, and he needed the work.
“I’m no expert on French vintages,” he temporised.
But Dubois was ahead of him. They would send him to France, all expenses paid, for a tasting tour. Would he be interested?
Savouring the moment more than twenty years later, George lit another cigarette. “I thought back over my life,” he told me. “I’d done many contemptible things, but obviously, somewhere, somehow, I’d performed a good deed. And this was my reward.”
The trip to France—the little he remembered of it—was a boozer’s dream. At every château throughout Burgundy, the Loire, and the Rhône, the propriétaire—sometimes a count or a duke, occasionally a prince—waited to greet him. This, after all, was the Australian who was going to make them rich.
In scraps of fractured movie French, with frequent translations from Marie-Dominique, and illustrated with gestures, noises, much waving of arms, and badly acted impressions of French aristocrats and decrepit sommeliers, I recounted George’s adventures in the vineyards of France that bitter, fog-bound winter.
Around the table, forks and glasses were poised halfway to lips as people struggled to follow what I said. Once I got to explaining his experience with wine, storytelling became easier. I could mime glasses being filled, tasted, filled aga
in. And it was no problem to act out George’s increasing inebriation, the out-of-focus eyes, the slurring voice.
For George, the tour became the fulfilment of every drinker’s fantasy. Wine was consumed by the gallon rather than the glass, and all of it wonderful. By the time he reached the great vineyards around Bordeaux, he could barely remember who—let alone where—he was. So it was with some alarm, following another wine-logged dinner, that his host—George rather thought it had been Baron Robert de Rothschild—rose and courteously conducted him into the ancient caves cut into the clay and gravel of the Médoc.
After winding through corridors and tunnels so complex they’d defeated even the ingenuity of the Nazis, they arrived in a tiny chamber where, waiting for them, was, in George’s words, “the oldest old fart I’d ever seen”.
M. Petitjean, explained the baron, had directed wine-making in these vineyards in his father’s time. Long retired, he’d come in tonight to see George and to show him “something interesting”.
The old man held up a bottle. In shape, it differed from modern wine bottles in being wider and more squat, with a longer neck. Though dust obscured the faded label, George made out the number: 1812. Napoleon still ruled Europe when this was bottled.
George was about to make all the appropriate noises of appreciation at this antique when, to his consternation, the old man produced a corkscrew and began to open it. He watched in alarm as, with minute care, a spoonful of straw-coloured liquid was decanted into a glass.
George regarded it in confusion. “A white wine?”
The baron winced. Naturally not. This was the legendary 1812 Bordeaux. Over the decades, its solids had settled out into a black sludge, leaving only this pale plasma. And this, the last surviving bottle, as far as they could discover, had been saved for George Johnston to drink.
For the first time, George noticed he held the only glass.
“But … you’ll taste it with me?”
The baron’s shrug blended appreciation of the generosity of the offer with regret at the impossibility of acceptance. The honour of this historic degustation belonged to their guest alone.
“Well, I took a sip,” George told me, “but my palate was so buggered, not only with the wine I’d drunk that week but the years of arak and jungle juice and sake and bad scotch, that it didn’t taste of anything.”
Petitjean and the baron were waiting. Honour was at stake.
“My skills as a drinker had deserted me,” George lamented, “but I thought my skills as a writer might save the day.”
“Gentlemen,” he said at last, “how can I put this?”
He held the glass up to the light.
“Perhaps, like me, you have attended the farewell concert of some great old baritone at the end of a long career.”
The two men frowned. What had this to do with Bordeaux?
“This wine,” he went on, “reminds me of that baritone. The voice is gone—and yet, now and then, and faintly, one hears a pure and perfect note.”
The baron was silent for a moment. Then he translated for M. Petitjean. Spontaneously, the old man stepped forward and kissed George on both cheeks.
I reached the end of the story feeling as if I had just hauled a wardrobe up six flights of stairs. There was silence around the table.
Looking up, I caught the eye of Jean-Paul, the elder statesman of the family, who was staring at me down the table.
Then he smiled, and lifted his glass in a toast.
“Voici un bonne raconteur,” he said. Here is a good storyteller.
Suddenly everyone else was smiling, too, and talking at once. Madame bolted, beaming, for the kitchen, to serve the guinea fowl.
Under the table, Marie-Do squeezed my hand.
After dinner, as people sipped a digestif of cognac, wandered around the room, or gossiped by the big windows looking out into the darkened garden, Jean-Paul strolled over and sat down next to us.
“Et votre ami, l’écrivain,” he inquired. “Il est encore vivant?”
My friend the writer still alive? No, I explained. Both George and Charmian were dead. In 1969, on the eve of the publication of the second book in George’s trilogy, Clean Straw for Nothing, which traced the tangled sex life of a perfunctorily fictionalised Charmian, she washed down an overdose of sleeping pills with alcohol and lay down on the couch in her study to die alone. He survived her for only one more year.
In a gesture of startling intimacy for one so formal, Jean-Paul patted me on the shoulder.
“But he lives,” he said in halting English. “He lives here, tonight.”
By February of the following year, Marie-Dominique was pregnant. Louise Virginie Caroline—“Virginie” for my sister Virginia, “Caroline” for Marie-Dominique’s sister—was born in October. The following June, we were married in the fourteenth-century church of Richebourg. And in between, on the occasion of my second December in France, in a far more potent acknowledgment of my standing in the family than any certificate of marriage or baptism, the duty of cooking Christmas dinner passed to me. I’ve been doing it ever since.
4
Ninety Degrees of Christmas
Church bells o’er the Darling Ranges … Flora gloriously rejoicing, reigning triumphant and welcoming Santa Claus to Australia… The feathered tribes— black swans, lady companions, kangaroos, and Aboriginals negotiating a Christmas corrobboree.
—JOSEPH SUMMERS
A few years ago, Australian friends came to visit us in Paris over Christmas.
“If you were at home now,” I asked, “what would you be having for lunch?”
“Well, since it’s high summer out there …” said the husband.
“… and the temperature’s at least ninety degrees Fahrenheit …” added his wife.
“… with bushfires everywhere …”
“… we’d probably go for something cold …”
“… some nice shrimp and oysters … maybe a lobster …”
“… with a green salad …”
“And for dessert?”
They stared at me. Silly question. “A Pavlova, naturally.”
There were few social occasions in Australia where it would not be appropriate to prepare this tooth-achingly sugary concoction of whipped cream and fruit salad in a boat of meringue. I had even served it myself occasionally at French dinner parties, to general enthusiasm.
And yet, whatever my friends said, a Christmas lunch of seafood and Pavlova was a relatively recent development in Australian culture.
Quite the contrary, in my childhood, an extended and indigestible English-style Christmas meal was obligatory, to be endured as a sign that the old values of Queen and Empire still thrived. This was a country where older people still spoke of England as “home”, even though they had never visited it, and, when the queen’s Christmas message was broadcast on the radio, solemnly stood to listen.
Driven by the same impulse to respect the British way of life, Australians ignored the fact that almost every tree on the continent was a eucalypt and raked up a scraggy conifer on which to hang our hoarded decorations. For the twelve days of Christmas, this reminder of the European winter drooped in a corner of the living room, shedding needles onto the carpet. Festoons of tinsel yellowed in the heat while strings of fairy lights glimmered feebly in sunlight so powerful it seeped through even the thickest curtains.
If we hesitated in our celebration of a feast whose roots lay in the ritual sacrifices of neolithic Scandinavia, commerce stood ready to spur us on. By October, cardboard Santas and boxes of Christmas crackers had appeared in the newsagents. Butchers urged us to order our turkeys and hams. And also in October, at the height of the Australian spring, some seasonal impulse nudged my mother into creating her puddings.
It took days for her to assemble, weigh, and amalgamate the fats and carbohydrates, dried and preserved fruits and rinds, the liqueurs and spices that went into these potent examples of traditional northern European Christmas cuisine. As a kid, I w
as given the job of mixing the batter. I can still feel the gluey yellow/brown paste between my fingers, gritty with sugar but at the same time slick with butter. Ironically, years later, I tasted an almost identical mixture of sugar, fat, and spice in that potent Swedish Christmas drink, glögg. Between the dark northern woods and the gums of the Australian bush, the degrees of separation were not as numerous as I’d thought.
Once the mix was completed, she exhumed from a bottom drawer half a dozen “pudding cloths”. Squares cut from the remains of ancient linen teatowels, they were stiff as parchment, “seasoned” with repeated use. Each one, freshly dusted with flour, was allocated a dollop of the paste, into which, before it was gathered into a bundle with a loop of string, a sixpenny piece, boiled free of germs, was dropped.
Attached by their strings, these bundles were suspended in boiling water from a broom handle placed across the largest pot we owned. After simmering them for hours, she lifted them out and hung them to “season” from the shower rail in the bathroom. They remained there until Christmas day, when the cloth was peeled off, and the pudding carried ritually to the table, doused in burning brandy, the blue flames dancing feebly in the summer light.
Their firm, slightly gelatinous consistency, more like heavy aspic than cake, and achieved, I later learned, by substituting white bread crumbs for some of the flour, made her puddings delicious both hot and cold. The two or three she made never lasted through the holidays. Creeping downstairs in the dawn of Boxing Day, hoping for a few quiet, cool hours before the heat descended and the flies rose, one would surprise a family member standing in robe and slippers before the open refrigerator, guiltily forking up the last crumbs of a plateful.