So we move to the entree, the foreplay. The main course, the climax. The dessert, the delicious aftermath. And so out into the cold night. (It is true, a lover may not dismiss you so abruptly as a meal, once it is all over. Though she may.) The end of the climax, the main course, is sad, always, it means the best is over. The dessert can’t hide the end from us, it’s at its best a postponement. Maybe the night won’t be cold, will be balmy, and we can wander through it nursing our memories of the pleasures of that recent intercourse and the melancholy of its passing. Though the melancholy is sweet, since the pleasure will be renewed, we have faith in that.
Oh yes, we can come back again. And our beloved the meal will always be there, waiting with a variety more infinite than Cleopatra’s. So when I say we were all in love with Flora it was Flora in her food that I mean, and none of us thought that she could ever belong to just one of us.
At this time in my life I was happy. So I said to myself. I had my work, which was going remarkably well, the business in the clever hands of the children was gathering clients and pleasing them and making money, and my own studies were progressing. I sometimes remembered Anabel and my passion for her, but I knew that passion doesn’t last. The baby she killed I still grieved for, but let’s not talk about that. Not now. Sometimes I went about with handsome women, less often to bed with them. I didn’t often take them to The Point, that could have resembled an orgy.
I lived in my house in Barton, I lived the good life. I was happy, I said. I was not unhappy. I was content. In the sense that what I was trying to do I thought I could do. Hadn’t done it, but didn’t see that I wouldn’t, that I shouldn’t.
One night I had been working late; my lads long gone, I thought I would wander across to The Point, drink a bottle of wine, eat some cheese; it would be too late for dinner, most likely.
But even if it was too late for me to eat I could watch the other guests in the last transports of their meal. Does that make me a voyeur? Oh yes. The religious life is a life that watches, that trains itself to the regarding of others. Their sins, and perhaps their joys too, their struggles and cares.
I walked across, I hadn’t given that up simply because some louts in a car nearly killed me.
But when I got there it was long too late for me to be a voyeur of other people’s eating. The restaurant door was open but when I went in the room was empty, tidied and fresh and ready for the next day. Flora was standing on the terrace, nursing her elbows, gazing out across the lake. Through the open door shone yellow bands of light. And music.
I danced with her. I do not know how to dance. The music was boys’ voices singing a psalm, Parry perhaps. Not music for dancing. And yet, there on the terrace, I took her in my arms, not like a lover but like a partner, and gravely we danced, our bodies turning but not touching, our feet interleaving, in a pattern mine didn’t know it knew. Until the music stopped. And we stopped, and looked across the dark glimmering lake.
Would you like a glass of wine, she said.
I did not need wine. I was intoxicated by the way our bodies had spoken, without needing words. But I said yes. Yes. She brought white wine in big transparent globes and the moon rose and shone upon them, they were like our own moons in our hands. That was the feeling. My own moon held in my hand, mine to hold, while the great yellow moon of heaven rose in the sky. And I thought, this is being in love, and I have not known it before.
I look at these words and see how beautiful they are on the page. Round and black, firm, shapely, with a fine calligraphic rhythm. As beautiful as the moment they annotate. I would like the moment to be always this moment, as it may be, here, in the perfection of this recording of it. The moon forever hanging in the sky, the glasses in our hands, and I forever knowing what love is.
Well. Words may stop the moon in the sky. Life cannot.
I have been and made my dinner, stopped writing for a moment. A boiled egg, a cup of tea, bread and butter. A childish meal, and such comfort in it. And now I sit down again to my page.
The moon. Stopping the moon. Good grief. Should I cross it out? But my rule is not to reread, so I cannot do that.
Anyway, there it is, my falling in love with Flora the woman, not the cook, surprising and unexpected and maybe even unlikely, as falling in love so often is. And there is another beginning, if you like. So many beginnings, and all the same end.
13
On winter mornings the fog hangs over the lake and its shores so nothing can be seen but thick wet whiteness. Eventually it starts to shred and allow angles of the landscape to become visible. A corner of the metal octagon forming The Point, for instance. Clovis opens his eyes to the mist and wonders how much is in his eyes and how much around him. That’s a game he plays with himself.
One morning he looks across to the restaurant and beyond it sees an activity he can’t understand. He knows he can see well enough to function in the world of his short sight because his reason supplies much of what his eyes can’t decipher. He likes the idea that it is reason seeing for him and not idle thoughtless mechanical sight, but this morning reason fails him. There is something happening, figures, busy movement, indiscernible objects, but he can’t tell what. He dips his fingers in the icy lake and wipes his face. He forgets how long you survive if you fall in: is it one or two minutes, or two or three? Not long enough to get rescued, anyway. Then he walks warily towards the restaurant. There isn’t usually anybody about it at this hour.
There’s a bloke and a girl. They’ve got a great pile of longish whippy sticks, poles, what would you call them, canes maybe, and a few tools, strange knives, secateurs, a thing for poking holes in the ground, a dibbler, that’s the word for it. Morning, they say, in a natural way. Clovis is surprised because usually he’s invisible. Good morning, he says, his voice creaky. He finds himself stopping, not sloping off as he usually would, stopping and staying to watch.
The bloke looks a bit like him. Beard, rumpled coat. Rather more mud than he allows himself. The girl in a parka. Scarves, caps, no gloves. They are fixing the sticks in holes they make in the ground then bending and plaiting them into a pattern of diamond shapes, grafting them where they cross and knotting them together with quick intricate knots. He knows they are intricate because of the speed and complexity with which their hands move, not because he can see much of the final tie.
Cold weather for it, says Clovis, squinting at their blue hands.
Got to be. Got to be midwinter, just the moment when the sap starts to rise, but before your wands start to leaf up.
They work silently, deft and long practised. Clovis watches.
Can I ask … what you are doing?
A double diamond trellis, says the girl.
It’s your willow, says the man. It’s a sculpture it’s making.
So, do you have to do it on the site? Couldn’t you, well, make it in a studio and bring it and install it?
Oh no, they’ve got to grow, see? We’re planting them, they’ll take root and grow. It’s a living sculpture. Living leafing wands of willow.
We’re willow weavers, says the girl.
They speak slowly, comfortably, telling him things but not yapping on, their hands plaiting and knotting, dextrous and quick. He’s standing quite close now, peering, not crowding them, but leaning to see close. The knots are willow too, fine fronds of it, the way they twine and twist and fold in and over is a little work of art by itself. They remind him of some lace makers he saw in Belgium once, only the scale is grand and the raw material long whippy canes, not thread.
Is it hard to get them to grow?
Not usually. Mainly water is all they need.
Willows siphon up water faster than an elephant, says the girl.
All the water poured on this slope to keep it green, a lot of it runs down here. A real little sink. They should root in no time. And the grafts, they’ll take. Then you’ll have to watch it.
Why?
It’ll grow like mad. Need clipping three times a year, at le
ast.
The girl says, Something so beautiful, people have to look after it. You have to be involved, if you want a willow sculpture. Pay attention to it.
I see, said Clovis.
He thought it was time to move along. Good luck, he said. Well, it’s not good luck, is it, it’s skill, and I can see you’ve got that.
We need the goddess to smile on us as well, said the man.
I hope she does, said Clovis.
A willow sculpture, said Elinor. Whatever made you think of that?
This day she and Flora were eating in a cafe near Foreign Affairs that sold twenty different sandwiches, named after artists. Elinor had chosen a Chihuly, with bacon and lettuce.
I should have known the mayonnaise wouldn’t be real, she said.
That’s why I didn’t risk it, said Flora, who was taking her several bites out of a Roberts, with roasted sweet potato, humous and almonds. Nice but a bit all the same, she said.
Friends of mine in England had a willow sculpture, Flora said, the most beautiful little Gothic pavilion. Except they went away too long in the summer and it turned into a monster.
Why?
Willow grows really fast. I saw a screen in the Chelsea Flower Show, it was growing at the rate of more than three centimetres a day.
Yikes.
So you have to look after them. Keep trimming so they don’t grow all wavy and wandy at the top and bare in the real part.
I suppose it’s an ancient skill.
Willow working is. There are beds all over England for cutting the canes. Here it’s a bit more hit or miss. Oh Elinor. You can’t imagine how beautiful the sculptures are. Ever since I saw that Gothic pavilion, I’ve wanted one. It’s the growing that’s so wonderful. She puts the Roberts decisively down.
Thank god for wine, says Elinor. You’d die of malnutrition otherwise. But where did you find someone to do it, here?
I wrote to the people who did the pavilion, and they told me about this pair. Ted and Julia. That wasn’t hard. It was getting permission. I don’t own the restaurant, you know, it’s not my property even temporarily. I had to talk the local powers into it. Public property, not ours to deface, they said. A work of art that would beautify the foreshore, I said. And it’s a screen too, it’ll hide the kitchen. I do my best, but even my kitchen yard isn’t pretty. They took a lot of convincing, even so. In the end I got Bill Skaines – do you know him? Curator of sculpture at the gallery – to tell them they’d be mad to miss it. Wonderful philanthropic gesture etcetera. Only one of its kind in the country, great tourist attraction. Got out his trowel, Bill did, laid it on.
So it’s willow, growing, and plaited into patterns.
Mmm. A double diamond trellis. Classical. We’re using Salix triandra. The male catkins come at the same time as the leaves in the spring and they smell lovely, like mimosa, Ted tells me. Oh I can’t wait. They say it will be well away this spring.
I won’t even ask you how much it’s costing.
A bomb, says Flora.
I know about willow wands, says Elinor. People used to tie up packages with them and then sometimes they’d plant them. Pope did. Alexander, the poet.
Oh, that Pope.
Okay, I suppose there isn’t another. Anyway, he had a willow at Twickenham that came from the twine round a parcel some lady sent him.
You never fail, says Flora. Always a mine of abstruse info.
Yup. Well, mine’s an encyclopaedic dictionary, we go into things. What’s more, all the willows in Oz are supposed to come from Napoleon’s tomb on St Helena. He was keen on them too. Ships passing cut twigs and kept them in cool dark damp sacks of seeding potatoes. They take root easily. And kill your drains.
Not mine, says Flora. I shall keep my willow out of my drains. Their drains. Ted and Julia are planting by the moon, you know. It has to be midwinter, before the wands leaf, but they make sure the moon is right, too.
So did my father. Had a moon chart for planting.
Rather New Age, isn’t it?
Not in his time. And why shouldn’t it make sense? The tides are pretty powerful things, and they’re controlled by the moon. Why not plants?
Why not. Yes, why not. It’s quite powerful on people, too, isn’t it. Turns you into a lunatic.
Moonstruck. I’m not sure it actually turns you into one. I think it mainly makes you worse if you already are.
Like dancing to psalms.
Elinor looked at her. Oh yes? Come on, Flora, tell.
But Flora smiled and wouldn’t.
Flora did not have a garden. Plants were vegetables and flowers and you bought the best in a market. Or they were trees and you looked out at them from a large airy apartment, several floors up. She sat at her desk and stared into the treetops. Scribblings against the sky at this time of year.
The scribblings on her page seemed to have no meaning. Or they had meanings, but didn’t go anywhere. Sat stumpy and silent, not even fluid enough to type on a computer. Basil erotic and sinister, she had written. The royal herb. Erotic and sinister. People would want recipes. Basil equals pesto. She was impatient with recipes. Too much numbing detail. Bumbling detail. Too prosy. She looked at the bare branches against the sky. She wanted her words to be poetry, allusive, elliptical, glancing not defining. Not poetry like Sidney Smith’s salad poem, poetry like Wallace Stevens.
Cooking was what you did in your head, in your kitchen, spending hours getting it right, doing it over and over again until it worked as you had imagined it would when you first thought of it. Patience endlessly repeating, until it came right and you felt as if you had swallowed a fish, darting and dancing its queasy pleasure in your gut. You couldn’t reduce that to a list of ingredients and a paragraph of method. You could do it in many pages, like Elizabeth David’s recipe for spinach in butter, but then it was a curiosity. Not to mention a quotation. And yet, somewhere there must be words to tell people what food means. Oh! Blessed rage for order, she wrote. The maker’s rage to order words of the sea.
I need to find a voice in which to sing my song, which will be my song only, and will make order of my world and art out of it. To be the single artificer of the world In which she sang …
The name of that poem was ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’. For a lot of people Key West was the name of a kind of lime pie. Made of egg yolks beaten into condensed milk, with lime juice, and the whites whipped into meringue, not a dish she’d ever wished to try. And then of course Key West was a place in Florida, and that was presumably where Wallace Stevens had been when he heard the girl singing on the beach, and Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
That poem spoke so profoundly to her that she felt her eyes widen and glaze and for a while she was seized by a sort of atavistic knowledge of it, as though she had been possessed by it, not just the words but the huge whole meaning of it. She stared at the paper. But her gaze was not anywhere on the things around her, but inside, until with a shiver she came back to her own words on the page.
Basil erotic and sinister. Take a large bunch of basil. A handful of parsley big as a bunch of violets. That was Pomiane. On the radio, in Paris between the wars. Radio Cuisine, his book was called, and in it he talked to his listeners with zest and wit. So effortless, so beautiful, the words of others.
What did Morgan le Fay eat for breakfast? But that wasn’t a question to ask, and she wasn’t a sorceress, and maybe the answer would be to write a novel. Make it all up. But she wasn’t a novelist.
She looked at the Perceval angel, wicked ceramic impish creature, standing safely on its head on a shelf above her desk. Her mother had bought it years ago for twenty pounds. An enormous sum, my dear, and never better spent. Maybe it was best to be a collector of the works of art of others. Wallace Stevens poems, willow sculptures, ceramic angels.
My food is a work of art. But I am failing to put it into words. And maybe that is as it should be. A painting is a painting. A symphony a symphony. A Beatles
song, a Perceval angel. I should do it and not talk about it. Redo Stevens for my own purpose: There never was a world for her Except the one she cooked and, cooking, made.
But. She had a contract. Already two extensions. She could give the money back. Other people wrote about food … And that was it. I do not want to be like them, she wrote, in bold black ink on a yellow pad. On the other hand, Bach wrote his music down, so that other people would have the pleasure of playing it. They could never be Bach, but they could play him. Play with him, play at him.
She sat at her desk but she was thinking about making cassoulet. Not writing it, making it. Not the heavy duck-fatty dish of Carcassonne, but its lighter, fresher child. She went into the kitchen, easier to think with the tools of the trade. Beans of course, but not too many or too stodgy. And the duck; maybe a Chinese method of cooking, not the flavours, but the manner, to get rid of the fat but keep the skin crispy, rather than the soggier confit. Long winters and harsher times needed duck preserved in its own fat; not any more.
It was the beginning of her making this dish. Jerome could be present as it evolved, she would do it before him.
Everybody who comes to the restaurant admires the willow sculpture. It is a narrative which has to be told over and over. Laurel is the keeper of it. Customers arrive and straightaway speak about it. So beautiful, so mysterious, when, why, how? Laurel has a spiel which she keeps changing, for her own amusement. As it is, her eyes sparkle, she is as keen to talk about it as those who see it are to know.
Gwyneth talks to Clovis about it. She wishes she could do something like that. She is good with her hands, that’s why the job in the massage parlour was just the thing. But to make something like a willow sculpture, and have the whole world see; they are so lucky, she says.
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