A Demon Summer

by G. M. Malliet

  Dame Ingrid’s complexion exploded bright red at the compliment, and she dipped her head in bashful acknowledgement. “I’m sure I do my best,” she murmured. She had a constellation of freckles across her nose and cheeks; red hair coiled at her temples. “And of course, I couldn’t do anything without my sisters. Without the support of the abbey. Without, needless to say, God’s help. I—”

  As this was turning into an Oscar acceptance speech, Max cut in.

  “Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about your work?”

  “Of course not, Father.” Her hazel eyes shone at the prospect. She was a tall woman, so tall that Max could meet her eye to eye. Her rounded features gave her a wholesome, milk-maidish appearance, as if she might at any moment break into a yodel. “We often have visitors—people at the guesthouse are generally curious to see the famous cakes being made. Of course, it’s a process of months, so at any given time you will only see one stage of the process. This is how we keep the recipe secret—oh, yes! You need not look so surprised, Father. Industrial espionage comes with the territory when you have a product as popular as ours.”

  Max briefly closed his eyes, nodding in solemn understanding. “My lips are sealed,” he said.

  “We once had a man come to a weekend retreat only pretending to be here for spiritual refreshment,” she leaned in to confide. “He was from a major biscuit manufacturer and it was obvious from his questions and his general demeanor … well. The Rule tells us we must welcome all who come to our door, but it does not say that we have to reveal our secrets to any passerby of ill intent. Right.” She picked up a wooden spoon and waved it like a baton. “So now, I’m simply assembling the batter. We deal in large vats now, rather than bowls. We had to step up the process to meet demand.”

  Her face glowed with pleasure as she warmed to her topic. This was clearly a performance she had starred in many times.

  “Now, fruitcake has been around since the time of the Egyptians.” She looked at him expectantly, anticipating the punch line.

  “That explains the fruitcake one of my aunts kept sending us,” he said. “Perhaps my mother simply mailed it back every year. Our family version of the curse of the Pharaohs.”

  “Ha!” said Dame Ingrid, delighted. Max was playing right into her hands. “That is where fruitcake got its bad name—those dried up, amateur attempts. With all due respect to your aunt. Now, my fruitcake—I mean, our fruitcake—succeeds because it is baked at a very low oven temperature for just the right amount of time.” First looking over her shoulder, she lowered her voice. “Shall I tell you the secret ingredient?”

  Max nodded solemnly. The ingredient he was interested in was poison, but he guessed that was not what she meant.

  “Pineapple,” she said, and Max struggled to look astonished. She placed one finger against the side of her nose, and nodded. “Chunks of pineapple soaked in rum—I won’t tell you for how long, no use asking me! I’ll never tell. But that makes the difference you can taste. None of this drizzling rum over the top of the cake—that’s the lazy woman’s way. Too late by then to save it.”

  “The word ‘pineapple’ will never pass my lips,” Max assured her.

  “I can tell if a man is trustworthy, Father. I knew a thing or two before I came to the convent. I came here later in life, later than most of the others.”

  “Have you always been a cook?”

  “Yes, I cooked professionally. For many years.”

  He waited, but she seemed reluctant to say more. He watched as the blood again rose in her already hectic complexion. Her high color may have come from the heat of the stove, of course. The room was nicely warm, as the day was just getting started. By noon with all the ovens going it might be deeply unpleasant to have to work here.

  “Here, let me show you something.” She turned with an awkward movement, grasping the table edge to steady herself. One of her legs appeared to be shorter than the other or may have been injured, for she walked with a noticeable hitch, and without the gliding locomotion of her sisters. Indeed, she had the sort of rolling gait one might associate with someone who’d spent her life aboard a whaling ship. Now she made her way to a door at one side of the kitchen proper and motioned him to follow her into another room.

  “See, here is the oven,” she said, finally rolling to a stop. “And over there,” she pointed to rows of shelves lining two walls, “over there are the resting fruitcakes. The beauty of the fruitcake is in its need to sit and mellow for several months—there is a lesson for us all in that, do you not think, Father? ‘Consider the lilies of the field … they toil not, neither do they spin.’ Neither does my fruitcake. All will be well,” she added, surveying the rows of fruitcake either resting or being readied for baking, “so long as the generator doesn’t break down.”

  She went on to explain that over six hundred cakes could be made at a time in the specially built oven. The cakes would be left to sit, patiently awaiting their weekly lashings with more liquor. Max, reminded of Miss Pitchford’s Deadly Fruitcake (so-called by the villagers), imagined the old schoolmistress’s envy at the sight of so many loaves being produced on such a vast scale.

  “And you manage all this yourself?”

  “Good heavens, no. We all take turns in the kitchen. I have lots of help. Some help is more helpful than others, if you follow. The new postulant and the novice will take time to train—we all needed time when we first got here. How easy it is to forget that! In the old days, we would have had a frateress to help—someone who saw to the crockery and such. We all have to be a bit more flexible in our duties these days.”

  So they all just shoved along together and somehow it all got done, without friction, without animosity, hidden or otherwise, thought Max. Was any human organization ever so free of strife as this one appeared to be? Well, the attempted poisoning of Lord Lislelivet, or whatever it was, strongly suggested otherwise.

  “The oven was built to my specifications.” She pulled open one of the oven doors and turned to him, her face beaming with pride. “See? See how each pan has its own little shelf? ‘Special-built’ cost the moon but after many months our prayers were answered.”

  Max took a guess.

  “The Goreys?”

  She nodded. “Mr. and Mrs. Gorey have been most generous to the abbey over the years. We thank God for them every day. Of course, we thank the Goreys, too, but it is God working through them.”

  “How long have they been coming here on retreat?”

  She stopped to think, chin resting against her thumb.

  “Forever,” she said at last. “The daughter, though—this is her first visit. Poor thing doesn’t seem to quite know what to do with herself. It takes some people awhile to adjust to the quiet.”

  “I think that is a particular challenge of this day and age, for all of us.”

  “Too right,” she agreed.

  “Could you tell me something of your background, Dame Ingrid? What you did before you came here to the abbey? You indicated you were a professional chef.”

  “Well … I guess that would be all right.” Shutting the door to the oven, she steered him back into the kitchen proper. She took a simmering kettle off the hearth and asked, “Some tea while we talk, Father?”

  Max nodded, and when she had got them both sorted with cups and saucers and spoons, she sat across from him at the wide wooden work table.

  “Yes, I was a cook before I came here,” she said. “Only then I called myself a chef.” She laughed. “That was just me putting on airs. A cook is someone with a loving heart, wanting to keep his or her loved ones well nourished. A chef, though—a chef is something else. In my case, a showoff.”

  “You worked in restaurants?” Max asked.

  “A few, when I first finished my training. I was born in Sweden, in Stockholm, and I went to Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.”

  Max, impressed, made a whistling sound.

  “Yes,” she said. “I was awfully proud of myself. Shockingly ambitiou
s, I was. The competition is unbelievable, Father. Who can make the best soufflé in the world—it becomes a matter of life and death. Ridiculous. And the tempers you see in a restaurant kitchen, the chef exploding all over everyone, causing accidents. I once saw a man badly burned when a soup kettle overturned during a scuffle. It is the opposite of a peaceful and nourishing occupation. And the language could scorch the paint off the walls.”

  “So you gave it up, to come here?”

  “Not right away. I went to work as a private chef—that word again. A private ‘chef.’ For a novelist and her family, in Hampstead.” And she named a famous thriller writer, the sort of author whose fame and flair with the art of storytelling kept airport bookstalls thriving.

  Max, despite himself, was intrigued. “Really?” he asked. “What is she like?”

  “Well,” said Dame Ingrid. “She was nice. The photos make her look awfully mean, you know. That’s because of the sort of blood-and-guts stories she writes—maybe her publicist thinks she should look forbidding, to match her books. I never understood it, myself. She was divorced, and her kids were a handful. I acted as their nanny half the time, since their mother always had her head in the clouds. But she was generous about paid leave and things.”

  She was quiet for a moment, stirring her cup. Max prompted: “So why did you leave?”

  “It’s difficult to explain.… One day I came here on a retreat. I wasn’t Anglican at the time—you know how we Swedes are, Father. Lutheran at birth, even if we never set foot in a church.”

  “Your parents weren’t religious?”

  “My parents were content to leave my spiritual growth to chance. It is such a different culture there, Father. Anyway, I came here thinking I’d enjoy the quiet, read a bit, get away from the children, who were a full-time job when they got to be teenagers, let me tell you.”

  “How did you come to hear of the abbey?”

  “I think I saw an article about the place—their arts and crafts were already beginning to attract attention. Anyway, once I saw the abbey … well, that was the first step on a long road. I didn’t really mean to attend the services, that wasn’t part of the plan, but the beauty of the nuns’ voices singing, the surroundings, the cloister garden, the clean air—well. Something happened to me that weekend; it is so difficult to put into words. I didn’t just want to convert, you see. I wanted to live here. To dedicate my life to that peace and beauty. To God and serenity. I knew that right away. Isn’t it odd? I knew I would live here one day.

  “But I couldn’t just up and leave my employer. Because she drank, you see, while her kids ran wild. I don’t know when she got any writing done, to be honest, but somehow she produced a book a year. You know the sort of thing that can happen when a single mother, even one you’d think had lots of resources, is overwhelmed. I used to think if she wrote nicer stories it would help—not focus all day on horrible murders and tortures and such. A nice Agatha Christie type of story, you know? A nice sort of murder. But I suppose she wrote what paid the bills for her and for the kids. She had let her husband run off without paying child support on the condition he never came near her or the kids again. And he didn’t.

  “Anyway, I was her personal chef for about three years. She liked me to cook healthy foods, which she would wash down with a quart of scotch a day. Go figure. I stayed until the children left for university, and then I left, too. I suppose that sounds heartless?” she asked. “I often think about it … about her…”

  This time the rush of blood to her face definitely was not from the heat of the room, but from a memory that still seemed to pain her, no matter how many times she may have talked of it or thought it over. And Max had the idea she often thought of it and wanted finally to hear that the voice in her mind saying she had behaved selfishly was wrong.

  Max shook his head. “I don’t see how your staying would have made any difference. If she one day decides she’s had enough, that day will not arrive because you or anyone scolded her into it or protected her from the inevitable day of reckoning.” A vision of his parishioner Chrissa Baker crossed his mind just then. “It is too bad for the children, though. It was kind of you to stay for their sake, until they were launched.”

  The relief on her face, and her wobbly smile, told him how long she had worried over what she surely saw as her defection from the household.

  “That is true: if you are determined on destruction, no one can protect you.”

  “Do you ever see the children?”

  “Oh, yes. They come to visit me here sometimes—not often. I suppose in my heart I adopted them as my own and I do miss them. One can’t help it.”

  Max hesitated, wondering how to bring the subject round to the main purpose of his visit to Dame Fruitcake in her abbey kitchen.

  “The recent events…” he began. “Lord Lislelivet…”

  Again the flush of color. He felt he could monitor her blood pressure if only he had a detailed color chart. She was just saved from plainness, he realized, by that high coloring and by the attractive hazel spark in her eyes. He could see her in another life, away from here, sitting before her own hearth and surrounded by very tall children and grandchildren, perhaps getting ready to prepare a meal for her own family. Again he marveled at the sacrifices so willingly made by these women.

  For her part, Dame Ingrid was thinking: Were we not supposed to notice how handsome Father Tudor was? Well, we might be the sisters of St. Lucy, patroness of the blind, but we aren’t blind. She smiled in a flustered way and said, “You’ll be wondering about those berries. Believe me, I have wondered, too.”

  “Where did they normally come from? Were they imported from elsewhere?” That might be too much to hope for, but he thought it was worth a shot.

  “As much as possible, we harvest them ourselves. But the demand has been so great, we’ve had to augment our supplies. The cellaress orders the quantities I tell her I need. We recently took in a shipment from the motherhouse in France.”

  “You say everyone helps out in the kitchen?”

  “Oh, yes. They all take turns. Everyone except the abbess is required to help, according to the Rule. But Abbess Justina does not excuse herself. She likes to pitch in, now and again.”

  “It is hard to imagine her having the time.”

  “It is harder to imagine the cellaress having the time. But the abbess very wisely insists we all be treated the same, as much as is humanly possible.”

  “I can see why that would be necessary. The emphasis on fairness.”

  She stirred her tea, spooning in more syrup from a little white jar labeled AGAVE in neat cursive script.

  She said, “St. Benedict was so wise about the ways of humans. He understood anger, and envy, and ego. He understood that danger could come as easily from within a community as without. He understood above all that we can’t choose where we love: that seems somehow preordained. Some may call it heresy but I’ve always thought it to be true. We don’t choose in these matters, which is why we so often see these oddly matched couples out there in the world: beauty hand in hand with beast; genius conquered by the pure of heart. It makes no sense—probably not even to the couples themselves.”

  Max smiled, thinking life would be so much easier and, at the same time, so not worth living were he facing a future with a woman more “suitable,” more “mainstream,” than the endlessly fascinating Awena.

  “Anyway,” continued Dame Ingrid, “the abbess is no different from any other human being. She is bound to have her favorites. But it is fatal to the community to let those favorites be known. The trust is gone once you show that sort of fallibility.”

  “It’s lonely at the top then,” said Max.

  “If it’s not, it should be,” she asserted, and Max was struck again by the savvy of this otherwise humble and unworldly woman. “Anyway, in the old days, the cellaress would have been in charge of the kitcheness, and I would have reported to her. But when it is Dame Sibil’s turn to help out in here, things
are the other way round, and she is to be guided by me.”

  “Oh?” Max had picked up a certain wry note in her tone, noticing the topic of favoritism had led her directly to comment on the cellaress. “And how does that work out?”

  She smiled. “Not all that well. Dame Cellaress—that is, Dame Sibil—is used to being in charge. Old habits die hard. No pun intended.”

  Max returned the smile.

  “What did she do in her life before the nunnery?”

  “I’ll tattle no tales, Father,” she said. “Really, I don’t know the specifics. I gather she was a big noise in the City, but we don’t reminisce about such things here.”

  “Even though you’ve lived together for years, some of you? Known each other for years?”

  She nodded. “We simply don’t talk about personal things. We certainly don’t talk much about the past—that is forbidden by the Rule. Talking to you as I have done is a different thing, but even there—it doesn’t do to wallow, even under the guise of unburdening one’s soul to a priest. But maintaining privacy about the past is the only way we can shuffle along together in peace in such a small community.

  “We had an American postulant here once who tended to ‘over-share’—her term. And then she would thank us for sharing, almost regardless of what we said to her. ‘Pass the butter’ or whatever. And the questions! Why this, and why that. She was a lovely girl with a big heart and a true vocation to serve, but she didn’t last long here—she did not understand it when no one reciprocated her rather gushy fervor by baring their souls in return. It was partly British reserve, I suppose, but partly the psychology of being packed in together like commuters on a crowded train. We know that the only way we survive here is by erecting a privacy fence around ourselves. Anyway, she left us finally, and I heard she went on to become a missionary with another order, out in Africa somewhere, which work I think would suit such an outgoing type very well. Our more shuttered way of life requires that we maintain our own boundaries.