The Devil's Larder Read online

  I did not stay to watch their picnicking. There’s always work to do. But I imagine that, when they sat cross-legged on their fine blankets beneath the pine while mum and dad dished out a harmless meal from plastic containers, tin foil and flasks, the children brought the food up to their mouths with just a touch of fear and half a glance towards the tree that had betrayed their hopes. Here was a lesson never to be forgotten, about false claims, and bitterness, and trespassing.

  Sometimes, in a certain mood, I walk down to the bottom fences of my land, where my gate, ever open on to the road, gives access to picnickers, and find myself a little sad that no small child is running, full of hope, across the field. Then the small child that still survives in me shoves me in the back. I walk across to taste the fruit of that one crab for myself. I never swallow any of the flesh, of course. I simply plunge my teeth into the tempting bitterness. Even after all these years – misled, misled, misled again – I like to test the flavours of deceit. And I still find myself surprised by its malicious impact in my mouth. It’s bittersweet and treacherous, the kiss of lovers from opposing villages.

  6

  IT WAS MONDAY, almost noon, and he still suffered from the aftermath of Sunday’s garlic. Bad breath and a stinking conscience, too.

  He walked about the offices as usual, distributing client folders and the gossip, leaning over colleagues at their desks. He noticed how their heads went back, an instant recoil from his face, his speech. He noticed how their hands went up to hide their mouths and noses. He noticed how they frowned at him.

  Was there some unexpected tangent from his working life that touched the private circle of his friends? He racked his brains and found no link. They could not possibly have heard how badly he’d behaved the night before, how slyly and how grossly. They could not know what harm he’d done. No, the disapproval that his colleagues were so obviously displaying had to be intuitive, instinctive, from the heart. The evidence of his misdeeds was hanging round his shoulders like a heavy, garish shroud, he guessed. He shrugged it off. Raised his voice. Would not lose face.

  7

  OUR MERCHANT-TRADERS’ CLUB behind the warehouses is still better known to members as ‘the Whistling Chop’. Here’s why. Soon after it was founded in the 1870s by the great-grandfather of our present mayor, the resident manager came out of his office one evening to find a waiter in the corridor carrying a tray of food. A not unusual sight. Except that this waiter had gravy on his chin. The man had helped himself to some of the cut chicken breast intended for the members in the dining rooms. ‘Not only is this common theft,’ the manager said, ‘it’s also unhygienic in the extreme. If the gentlemen had required dirty fingers in their meal, they would have ordered them. And had they wanted you to join them here for dinner, they would have had a card delivered to your home.’

  The waiter lost his job, of course. But sacking him was not enough for the club manager. He was a man who prided himself on his systems. And clearly these were failing. How many waiters helped themselves to members’ food? he wondered. How many meals were so diminished and defiled before they reached the tables? How could he put an end to it?

  He chuckled when the answer came to him. A sharp idea. A witty one. He added his new rule to the list on the staffroom door: ‘During their passage from the kitchens to the dining rooms with members’ orders of food and drink, all waiters are directed to whistle. Any break in whistling longer than that required to draw breath will attract a fine or a dismissal.’

  Now he could sit inside his office, the door a touch ajar, and monitor the traffic to the dining rooms. He got to recognize the waiters from their whistling. There were the warblers, who merely offered a seamless trill without a melody. And then there were the songsters, addicts of the operetta and the music hall, or country lads with harvest tunes. One waiter specialized in hymns. Another always piped the wedding march, a touch too fast. There were, as well, the irritating ones, who sounded either as if they’d lost their dogs, or as if they were impatient stationmasters.

  Nevertheless, the manager adored his latest rule. It was the cleverest control he’d ever exerted over his employees. He’d stopped them eating members’ meats for free and also, he judged, he’d caused the waiters to appear a little foolish to themselves. And that was no bad thing.

  The members liked the system, too. It jollied up their club. And there was always early warning when their food was on its way. A risqué anecdote or some recent slander could be put on hold until the waiter had come and gone. A gentleman, dining quietly in a private room with someone other than his wife, might be glad to hear the wedding march approaching and be grateful for the chance to disengage.

  All very satisfying, then, until the day the manager discovered gravy on the palm of his own hand and on his shirt cuff. Still slightly warm. It smelled – and tasted – of lamb, that day’s select dish. It was a mystery. He’d not been in the kitchens for an hour or so. He’d not been in the dining rooms. He’d only been upstairs, replacing magazines and newspapers in the reading lounge. He retraced his steps, but found no clues until he was coming down again and held on to the bottom stair-post to swing himself into the service corridor, like some hero in a play, his private vanity. Again, his hand was dark with meat.

  It was not clear to him at once why there should be fresh gravy on the flat top of the post. It was just possible, he supposed, that there was some innocent explanation, a spill perhaps. But, still, he would be vigilant.

  For the next day or two, he took to stepping to his office door and peering down the corridor whenever he heard whistling. At last his worst fears were confirmed. A waiter passed, a tray of lunches poised above his shoulder. But still there was the pungent smell of pork hanging in the corridor. The man had left a nice chop on the stair-post. He would have eaten it during his unwhistling return had not the manager waylaid him with his dismissal papers and thus robbed the club of selections from The Scarlet Veil.

  A tougher system was required, of course. The waiters were now called upon to whistle on their way back to the kitchens with their empty trays as well as on their journeys out. It was a step too far. The service corridor was bustling now with competing and discordant tunes. The members seemed discomforted as well. One wrote an unsigned paragraph in the complaints ledger. He said the club had begun to sound ‘like a public alleyway’ and not a refuge where merchants and traders might come to find a little peace. Another told the manager, ‘You’ve turned the place into an orchestra pit.’

  The manager had one last card to play. He could not ask the waiters to whistle without cease whenever they were working. They served nine-hour shifts. Nor could he sack the waiters and require the members to collect their meals themselves. That might suit the spirit of democracy, which was fashionable in the town at that time, but would not please his businessmen. Instead, he took upon himself the job of carrying dishes and servers of meat only along the corridor into the dining rooms. The members could then help themselves to as much as they wanted, as many chops, as much carved beef, as great a number of chicken wings as they could despatch at one sitting. So they were satisfied.

  The waiters provided all the other services, of course. The manager could not do everything, nor could he be expected to have eyes in the back of his head. He had to trust his waiters ultimately. He was past caring if they helped themselves to vegetables on the way along the corridor, or poked their tongues into the soups. His main tasks had been to save the flesh and stop the whistling. He had succeeded, too. He was, though, once in a while and much to his alarm, tempted himself in that dim corridor by all the smells and flavours of the meat. And, at those times, a colleague on the staff might catch him whistling, as small boys do to help them cope with their remorse.

  8

  IF ANNA WAS allergic to aubergines she hadn’t noticed. She was unhesitant in buying them and cooking them and eating them. On shop display their plumpness and their waxiness were irresistible, though, honestly, the flavour was too tart sometimes.
A pinch of sugar helped. But tartness is often the price you have to pay for beauty. She’d learned that lesson from too many of her friends.

  Her symptoms were discreet: a little flushing, possibly a touch of wind, and occasionally – following a dinner party or a late meal out – what her mother called a flighty head, but nothing sinister or even inconvenient. She did not suffer from rashes or palpitations. There were no seizures. So she had little opportunity to discover that aubergines did not suit her, that aubergines were treacherous and damaging. They seemed to her too flawless to be harmful, too pleasing to the eye. She liked the aubergine’s affinity with olive oil and garlic, its generous response to mushrooms or tomatoes. It kept good company. She liked its versatility, just as happy to be stuffed as fried, just as tasty in a moussaka or a ratatouille as in a dip or served as fainting priest.

  Anna took the usual precautions in her kitchen, of course, cutting off the bruises and the sponge, scooping out the pips and degorging the bitterness in a saltwater soak, before she put the fruit into its saucepan or its dish. She had been told that it was bad luck to slice an aubergine lengthways or peel an aubergine. Good fortune came to those who favoured cubes, or wheels of fruit, rimmed with blue-black tyres of rind. Indeed, she’d lived a life of good fortune and good health, she thought.

  She was well into her seventies before her joints seized up. Then even simple tasks – like cubing aubergines – became a challenge and a cause of pain. She had a walking stick for use inside the house. ‘You should give up the toxic foods,’ her younger and exquisite neighbour said, ‘or else you’ll stiffen up completely. Your fault!’

  What were ‘the toxic foods’? The neighbour listed all the usual suspects – pickles, citrus fruits, bananas, fat milk and cheese, red meat, green meat, tomatoes, coffee, chocolate, shore fish, cheap wine, rhubarb – and then she raised her knife to stab the little lunchtime stew that Anna, despite her aches and pains, had prepared for both of them. ‘These aubergines. They’re poisonous. They’ll have to go. They’re why your wrists and knees have let you down.’ They left their meal unfinished on their plates.

  Anna made adjustments to her life. She never asked her neighbour back for lunch again. The woman was too poisonous, she thought. Despite herself, she cut down on the coffee that she drank. She ate less meat and fewer oranges. But Anna liked her aubergines too much. She was undisciplined. She meant to give them up, but when she saw them – purple, polished – in the shops, she soon forgot about her allergy and all the damage it had caused. She scooped and cubed and wheeled until she had to use her stick out in the street as well. She grew old and frail unnecessarily. Just a little self-restraint, a little less regard for comeliness, may well have kept her younger, quicker, straighter than her years.

  9

  WHENEVER A LINER or the ferry put in to port, we’d end up at the Passenger Bar to gawp at all the trippers disembarking. Many of them would troop into the bar for something to calm their sea-churned stomachs and steady their legs. The Passenger was the first safe place that they’d encounter between the gangways and the town. Often, there were foreign girls whom we could tease and irritate. Sometimes there was a tourist looking for a guide, or a businessman wanting a local to translate for him, or simply someone needing two strong arms to carry luggage to the hotels. Perhaps – as happened once before, a hundred years ago – one of the older women passengers (a German probably) would pay for sex. Their fees would subsidize our studies.

  So we – the five of us – would leave our work and gather in the Passenger at the funnel blast of every approaching ship. We’d take the large, square table by the door, buy beer that we could hardly afford, dine gratis on the bar’s salt-glazed, thirst-inducing snacks, and wait for prey. We had a trick to play on them.

  My colleague Victor and I had been working all year on the chemical properties of carbonated drinks. We hoped to isolate the tingling discharge on the tongue, the mild but disconcerting pain-with-pleasure response that follows every sip of sparkling water or fizzy fruit drink or champagne, and create a sweet food coating from which the pain had been removed. Succeed and patent it, then we’d be rich, we thought.

  We understood the mechanisms, how receptors in the mouth parried the assault of dissolved CO2 with their defensive saliva, how legions of enzymes reacted with the sparkle to produce a complex carbonic acid, our guilty irritant. And we had succeeded in blocking this effect with neutralizing dorzolamides. We’d tested what remained on rats and noted that our tincture, oddly, made them sneeze. We tasted it ourselves, the merest dab on our tongues. Instead of the familiar fizz and the ambiguous shudder of pleasure, instead of the rodent sneeze, we responded with a sudden, unearned laugh, real to the ears, but mirthless in its derivation. Every time we tested it, the outcome was the same, an involuntary reflex of laughter, independent of the will. We had concocted the inverse of an onion, bringing emotionless joy instead of tears. We called our mixture the sternly, scientific-sounding ‘euphrosyne’, after the Muse who ‘rejoices the heart’.

  I must blame Victor for the sin of breaking scientific protocol. He bought some snacks and coated them with fluid euphrosyne. These days, he’d be struck off the register for being so dangerously unprofessional. But that day, as soon as we were summoned by funnel blasts, we hurried to the Passenger for our first consumer trials. Our snacks, of course, replaced the ones provided by the bar on our table.

  Two Canadian travellers with rucksacks, young men about our own age, were easily tempted to join us. We even bought them beers and were unusually attentive. The volume of their laughter after they had, almost simultaneously, stretched across to try the snacks was startling. As were their blushes and the disconcerted expressions on their faces. Perhaps we’d overdosed the euphrosyne. But, certainly, their hoots of unamused laughter briefly halted every conversation in the bar and, even after some minutes of relative silence, the Passenger’s proprietor was still looking anxiously towards our group. Perhaps it was the five of us, rib-clutching and bent double at the Canadians’ ersatz joviality, that made him shake his head.

  It was not long before all the staff and all the regulars in the bar were privy to our secret, co-conspirators, eager for the sudden outbursts of strangers at our table. The hungry, seasick travellers, no matter how deep their oceanic melancholy, their homesickness, their dislocation, could be counted on to pop a laughter snack in their mouths to thrill us all – and both scare and animate themselves – with their shocking chemical mirth.

  It must have seemed we hosted the jolliest bar table in the world. Sometimes, one of the locals took our dish of snacks and offered it around the bar. Then there’d be a salvo of laughter, like an erratic firecracker. And once, when the Passenger’s proprietor was absent at a funeral, we filled every dish in the bar with euphrosyne snacks and punctuated that afternoon, down at the harbour-side, with the intermittent rifle blast of gladdened, triggered customers who had not thought to laugh so readily amongst so many strangers. We never tired of it.

  REGRETTABLY, I am not rich. Euphrosyne was widely tested but considered unmarketable. Consumers do not like to lose control. Besides, a food which causes sudden laughter in company is likely to be expelled onto other people’s plates and jackets. No commercial company would take the risk. And that’s a shame. I feel we could have made the world a more amusing place. What scientist can claim more?

  I always told my children, at times of stress, that ‘laughter is the best medicine’, that one good joke is equal to an hour in the gym. It must have been tiring having a scientist as a father. So, usually, I bit my tongue to suppress all the tedious proofs and details at my fingertips – the eighty-seven muscles that were employed every time they laughed; the aerobic exercising of the thorax and the diaphragm; the faster heartbeat occasioned by a simple laugh; the increase of oxygen levels in the blood; and, best of all, the release of endorphins in the brain, making anyone that cachinnates feel good about themselves.

  One day, I’ll dig my student papers o
ut and, maybe, try again with euphrosyne. Not as a gloss for snacks or packaged food. But as a stimulant. I saw enough glad and startled faces in the Passenger those many years ago to know what unexpected pleasure I might bring to strangers.

  10

  IN THIS PART of the world, where manac beans grow as commonly and readily as moss, coddled by the salty coastal air and the nipping temperatures of night, no one with any money would choose to add them to their stews or use their greyish flour in their baking. Manacs are ‘the poor man’s weeds’. That is to say, they’re food for pensioners, peasants, paupers and livestock. To buy a kilo in the stores is to advertise your misfortune, or to boast the recent purchase of a sow.

  Yet my neighbour’s daughter tells us that the well-heeled ladies who often drive past the farmers’ market, where she works, on the way up to their villas in the hills have started stopping off for bags of manac beans. ‘That’s really slumming it,’ she says. ‘Next thing, they’ll be having all our turnip tops. Our pigs’ll have to swill on caviar.’

  I think I’ve guessed the actual motive of these women, though. They’re poisoning their husbands, in a way. They’re looking for a break in their routines. About two weeks ago, driving into town, I heard a radio report on livestock infertility and impotence. Stud animals, it said, would not perform reliably if fed on feeds which were rich in iogranulates. They’d suffer from fibrous swellings in the urinary and reproductive tracts. Even though their testes might swell to twice their normal size and the penis could enlarge appreciably, they would have problems with presenting an erection. Feeds to avoid in excess were brassicas, root grass and certain pulses.