by Tim Pears
He slipped away soon after because Laura had to make a huge Christmas lunch for the family over in the house, but afterwards she left Adamina there and came down to his flat. She fed him the most delicious results of her recent experiments, but they depressed James: the more wonderful they were, the more certain it was that at least one of the dinner-party guests would want to employ her singular skills.
‘Everyone knows that Americans have a thing about English culture,’ he moaned. ‘I can just imagine those rich New Yorkers, what a social coup it would be. They’ll be queueing up to beg you to stay there.’
‘Don’t be silly, James. It’s out of the question. It’s not on the agenda, and that’s that,’ Laura declared, omitting to mention that the more he went on the more she did consider such a possibility. The idea of starting afresh, away from the place she’d spent her whole life, away from the complications of Robert’s and Adamina’s relationship, had a real appeal.
A couple of weeks earlier, Laura had been cooking and Adamina, sitting bored at the window, was intoning to herself in the background:
‘Last night upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today –
oh, how I wish he’d go away.’
It was a drone in the background of Laura’s concentration, when words suddenly focused in her brain and chilled her blood. She grabbed Adamina’s arm.
‘Who was there?’ Laura demanded. ‘Was your father inside the cottage?’ In her panic she brought Adamina to the brink of tears before accepting that it was no more than a rhyme picked up in school.
‘Have you ever thought of moving?’ she asked James tentatively. ‘As a purely hypothetical question. Does America hold any temptation at all?’
‘What on earth would I do there?’ James demanded.
‘Take photographs. People are people, aren’t they?’
‘Laura, don’t you understand? This is my town. I’m documenting my town. It’s my life. I thought you understood.’
‘Of course I do. It’s just a hypothetical question.’
James went with Laura to Heathrow – they had to go by coach, since he’d failed to learn to drive – in a sombre mood. They checked in one suitcase of clothes and another of kitchen implements and sat in an air-conditioned cafeteria, surrounded by the throng of travellers from every continent; people who’d stepped out of different time zones and were eating anachronistic meals with an air of resignation or else sleeping stretched out across seats.
They squeezed into a photo booth and took a strip of four passport colour photos which James folded and cut in half with his Opinel penknife.
‘I’m only going for ten days,’ Laura said. ‘And then I’ll be back for ever.’
‘There’s no such thing as for ever,’ James told her. She prodded him. ‘I know I’m being melodramatic,’ he admitted, ‘it’s this airport as well, all these people meeting and leaving loved ones: the place is clogged up with emotion. It’s like some huge international wedding.’
James’ melancholy may have been exacerbated, but his photographer’s eye was enthralled. He was in a Tower of Babel, except instead of being destroyed, its inhabitants – Arabs, Asians, Chinese, Africans, in robes and veils, suits and ties, togas and saris, kimonos and djellabas – were about to fly out. Which helped him from dwelling on his lover’s imminent departure.
‘Your eyes will be worn out from staring,’ Laura told him.
‘Hey, come here, woman,’ James urged her. ‘I’m sorry. Listen, I hope you have a brilliant time out there. Make sure you have some time for being a tourist.’
Laura telephoned after a couple of days. The flight had been easy, although she’d kicked off her shoes early on and when they landed her feet had swollen up so much she had to walk off the plane barefoot; she didn’t seem to have suffered jet lag, she said; she was discovering where to buy ingredients; and New York was a buzz.
‘It’s just like the movies,’ she told him. She was in the penthouse apartment of a block on the Upper East Side. ‘I look out across Central Park on one side,’ she said, ‘and the city on the other. Helicopters circle around the lit-up antennae of the skyscrapers, they’re like lazy, luminous bees, James. Down on the streets whooping sirens of police cars swoop after their prey. And there’s steam rising from the streets, there really is.’
James tried to welcome her enthusiasm. The line across the Atlantic was so clear it sounded like she was calling from around the corner, except that there were gaps, time lapses, between each side of the conversation.
‘I miss you, Laura,’ James said. There was a long pause, that made James’ mouth go dry.
‘I miss you, too,’ she finally replied, as if forcing herself to. ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you,’ she said. This time there was a long pause at Laura’s end. It was scary; it made her breath catch.
‘So am I,’ came James’ reply eventually. ‘Laura,’ he said, his pulse racing, ‘I love you.’ He’d never said that in his life, to anyone: the words spilled out. A long, heart-stopping silence followed, like she was trying hard to make up her mind what she felt. Did she love him, did she not? A difficult question. What could she say? How could she put it? James nearly slammed the phone down in panic. Eventually he heard her voice.
‘I love you too,’ she said. And then they ended the conversation three thousand miles apart, both trembling from the strain.
While Laura was in America, James realized that he hadn’t seen anyone else since Guy Fawkes night. For two months he’d had no need of the company of others, and hadn’t missed them for a moment. Not that anyone was queueing up to be with them: he and Laura radiated the exclusivity of new lovers that made a third person want to both pull them apart and run away.
Now that Laura wasn’t there, James found he had to make up for her absence by telling Lewis all about her, so he cycled to the park that Sunday for Lewis’s kick-around, and went back to his pad afterwards.
‘I don’t think a man should be alone, Lew, it’s not really natural. A man needs a mate and I suppose I’m just lucky I’ve found her.’
Lewis groaned and escaped to the kitchen to make them a cup of tea, but James followed him to explain that Laura was one in a million in this town of two hundred thousand, so statistically he was even more fortunate than you might already think. He extolled the virtues of the woman who was Lewis’s cousin – with whom Lewis and his sister had gone on annual holidays all through their childhood – and ended by admitting that as for sex, they’d been together two months and it wasn’t getting boring, it was getting better, how about that?
‘I mean I knew it could be fun, Lew, but I never knew making love was the best thing in the world.’
Lewis shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a temporary rearrangement of the chemistry of the brain,’ he said as if to a third person.
‘I don’t need your diagnosis, you old cynic.’
‘It’s scientifically proven, mate, but the results have been suppressed. The trouble is people get hitched and the chemicals settle down and then they wake up married to strangers.’
‘Married? Who said anything about married?’
‘What’s more,’ Lewis continued, ‘all the things they found most endearing and adorable in their lover are exactly what become most irritating and drive them bloody crazy. So to compensate they have kids, hoping that’ll cement them back together. But it doesn’t. It just creates new divisions.’
‘Maybe you’ve got children,’ James suggested. ‘Do you know if you haven’t?’
‘I can’t remember the last time I had sex without a condom,’ Lewis told him. ‘If you’re not safe, you’re stupid.’
‘I can’t remember the last time I used one,’ James admitted.
‘You are stupid.’
‘And you’re a misogynist, Lew, as well as a cynic.’
‘That’s crap, man. I just never fell for fairy tales. We’re not meant to be monogamous animals. You know I love wom
en. And you know they like me.’
* * *
Laura didn’t phone again, except to confirm her flight home. Natalie drove Adamina and James to pick her up from the airport. They stood behind the Arrivals barrier and after an age and a multitude of strangers emerging as if from captivity with improbable sun-tans Laura came around the screen wheeling a trolley. Intimidated by the crowd of faces, she searched for the ones she knew, but they saw her first. ‘Mummy!’ Adamina yelled. She pulled her hand loose from Natalie’s and slipped under the barrier, and ran over to Laura, who knelt and hugged her. James and Natalie waited till Laura had walked free of the partitioned area before embracing her.
Laura sat in the back with Adamina and did most of the talking on the way home. They dropped James off at his flat: Laura knew even now he wouldn’t come into the grounds of the house in daylight.
‘See you later?’ she asked.
‘Tonight,’ he agreed.
‘Oh, I wrote you a letter,’ Laura said.
‘I haven’t had it yet,’ James replied.
‘I didn’t send it,’ she said. ‘Here. Have it now.’
That afternoon James read and reread Laura’s letter from America.
DECEMBER 27TH
Dear James
It’s so cold here. New York is frozen. Derelicts are found dead in the mornings, on sidewalks, in Central Park. The maid (blue jeans and sneakers, mind) guides me by taxi to shops in the morning, and we return laden with extravagant food to this warm penthouse refuge. The top of this ivory tower.
Outside the city is numb; just concrete and tarmac on the frozen earth, as if the world’s one big deep freeze. There are no smells.
Then this kitchen becomes all the more lush and verdant for the contrast, a mini sensual world. The gas clicks aflame. Water, oil, butter heat up, and things are thrown into them, sizzle in the pan, and aromas are unlocked from inside the flesh of animals and plants, released into the air of this room.
In the kitchen I am absorbed, I lose myself. I chop onions running the cold tap close by, slice crisp ribbed stalks of celery, split open crackling peppers, crush cloves of garlic with the flat blade of a knife and already I am anywhere, nowhere.
Each vegetable has its own texture: take the skin of an onion off, it’s followed by the outermost of those membranes between the layers like gold leaf, adding a viscous slipperiness to the crispness of onions.
They had turkey left over from their Christmas, so today I made one of my favourite soups, turkey and almond.
Simmered pink meat from the thigh in the stock for a few moments – just to reheat it. Then liquidized, and sieved it back into the rinsed pan.
Did you like those salted almonds in your stocking? Have you eaten them yet? Whenever I’m unsure about a meal I always salt almonds for an aperitif. We’ve been importing almonds for two thousand years, ever since the Romans introduced them; I guess we’re hooked.
Almonds remind me of breast milk. Why? When I was suckling Mina I tasted my own, there was nothing almondy about it. It was pale and thin and sweet.
I remember being dragged up from sleep by her crying, hauled out of dreams, bemoaning my lot, yet my breasts already letting down milk in response to her cries: flowing down ducts into the aerola. Then her toothless mouth pressing, her tongue and throat sucking, and feeling milk pulsing out of my nipple. From torture to deep, tired contentment.
Now it is you at my breast; me sucking – my lips around you, my tongue – me a suckling child, bringing forth your milk, until it comes spurting albumen, tasteless, except for a faint aftertaste of blood, and of almonds …
I miss you already. Three thousand miles away. From across the sea, you tug at me; your absence pulls inside me.
DECEMBER 28TH
I made leg of lamb stuffed with crab yesterday. Yes, I assured them, it’s an old English dish; although it fell out of fashion early in the nineteenth century, and was only revived by a French chef in London a few years ago.
(You know it’s assumed that one of the earliest ways of cooking was to stew a slaughtered animal’s stomach over an open fire: the stomach would contain semi-digested food, giving an unpredictable but rich, deep flavour to the meat. Whenever I make a gravy I always mean to try it myself; I still haven’t.)
The crab gives not a fishy but a nutty-tasting piquancy to the meat. The guests didn’t know what was in the stuffing; the hosts made them guess, and finally one of them did. Surreptitiously, I watched them.
Later I ate from what was left; when I tasted, I imagined your tongue not mine, your saliva not mine. I imagined you enjoying it, James.
DECEMBER 29TH
Every time I go out I apply lip-salve – and reapply it every ten minutes. I’m determined not to get cracked lips this winter, and I have to keep them safe till I get back, to you. Another person’s saliva is the best way to keep lips in good condition through the winter. OK?
Hey, listing our favourite things, we never mentioned food, our favourite dishes. I assume it never occurred to you because – despite your vocal, demonstrative appreciation of what I give you – it means little to you. There’s no use denying it, my love, I know you: the child is the man.
Or have I awoken your palate? I don’t think so. It must be too late now, after all those cigarettes. Have you ever worked out how many you must have smoked? What chance do your tastebuds have?
Well, even your palate might have responded to the dessert I gave them tonight. I made a chocolate-cream pudding, from the seventeenth century, when chocolate was a rare luxury used mainly as a drink, in the chocolate houses of London and other cities.
The smell of melting chocolate is tantalizing. Have you ever been to Norwich? I bet you haven’t, you who get the shakes if you pass beyond the ring road. I went there once, just a few hours: there must be a confectioner’s factory near the centre, because the air smelled of chocolate that day. A whole tantalizing city.
Chocolate contains a chemical that’s released in the brain when we fall in love. I didn’t mean to fall in love. I never expected or even wanted it. I’ve seen friends reliant for their happiness upon men, and thought it strange. Not me.
I don’t know yet whether I can afford that. I was impregnable; sufficient; safe. I was happy enough, too. Enough.
I shall phone you in the morning.
DECEMBER 30TH
I’m homesick.
Today they invited me, these Americans, to join them and their guests for dinner – as if I’d passed muster by now, had proved I could converse and so on. No, that’s mean, it was nice of them. I made it clear I didn’t want to, not even at the end of the meal; I hope they appreciated it was simply a question of etiquette. The fact is if I did the guests would be obliged to compliment me, and it’s vulgar to pay too much attention to the food: to discuss nothing but the food one’s ingesting is too much; gourmandizing. The point of a meal is conversation, communion.
Or maybe I just can’t take a compliment. At least face to face. It’s enough for me – it’s the cook’s prerogative – to listen from the kitchen door to guests’ first responses. I need that, of course: a meal has little meaning if it’s not tasted and enjoyed; otherwise we may as well be fruitarians, living in the woods on nuts and berries.
JANUARY 1ST
Sunday today: I went for a walk in Central Park this afternoon. Cold but sheer blue sky, and a stream of joggers, speed-walkers, cyclists and roller-bladers. Some looked like they were taking a painful cure, prescribed by a sadistic physician; others undergoing punishment for past misdeeds; or seeking redemption through pain, on a modern pilgrimage.
A very few looked beautiful, in their element, animals easy in their stride. All, though, somehow decadent, pursuing fitness as an end in itself – not walking a dog, digging a garden, bicycling to work, climbing a mountain, playing a sport. Not that I’ve done any of these things! I just cook food for the rich.
At least they kept themselves warm. I got back to the apartment with my toes dropping off,
teeth chattering, fingers numb, ears aching, chilled through and shivering. I wished above all for you to be here and give me a massage. To knead warmth back into my body, revive the circulation of my blood, revitalize my skin from the outer stretches of my limbs all the way to the centre.
Have I told you how much I like it? The way you pull the curtains, turn on the heater, light a candle, put on music; choose a perfume to put in the oil; put your warm hands to my skin, and never take them off again. The way that sensation spreads out from where you’re working the skin, until it’s hard to tell where your hands actually are. Warm currents flowing out from your fingers, melting me.
I don’t know if you’re a great masseur. You’re not trained, are you? You don’t really know about anatomy. It’s just instinct, feel. Well, it’s good enough for me. I miss you in my body, James.
Sometimes I know what you’ve eaten the day before. We make love, you sweat, I smell cumin, coriander. Garlic in your armpits, ginger on your skin. I taste your sweat, it’s not just salty but there’s a flavour of rosemary, mint.
One’s beloved – lover or child – becomes edible. Where love meets cannibalism!
You know there are cows reared for a particular sushi in Japan? They’re fed beer, and given massages. Pampered flesh. Do you think cannibals fed their victims special food to make them tasty? I shall imprison you, feed you fantastic banquets full of spices for a week, and then eat you slowly!
Well, you weren’t here, of course. No massage. Instead, a different kind of comfort, I made banana loaf. Mixed everything in a bowl with my hands: bananas are so mushy, they make for a great gloopy mess – which, of course, once the cake’s baked keeps it moist. I love it when I have time to use my hands; feel like I’m getting my fingers inside the recipe, inside the process.
My mother used this recipe – you should remember it. It has to come out just right. Too dry and it crumbles in your mouth, the flavour’s lost, it tastes old. Too gooey and it sticks to your teeth and each mouthful’s a gummy ball you have to chew just to break up a bit. But get it right, and its texture’s a sensual pleasure in itself, to bite into and feel on your tongue and play around the inside of your mouth, soggy and mulchy.