The Devil's Larder Read online

  You’d like his wife as well, I think. And she would introduce to your table something that I have missed these last few years, the female outlook on the world. She can express herself most cleverly and in a teasing way that I have never found misjudged or tiresome. Perhaps I ought to implicate you in a secret that might amuse you covertly if we are ever gathered at your table. My cousin’s wife and I are ancient friends. She visits me alone. I am, she says, her private rogue. I’m sure you see how she would benefit our lunches.

  There is a problem. There always is. My cousin and his wife have greater appetites than us. This is not greed, of course. I am referring to their higher expectations of a meal and their discernment.

  I have, you know, been more than happy to settle for the simple compromises that you make with food. A good farm cheese and decent bread, together with a choice of pickles and some fruit, are more than adequate for me. I make my satisfaction clear to you each week by always leaving something untouched on my plate. The fact that sometimes you present me with a cheese that is not fresh that day or with some supermarket bread has never been an issue in my eyes. I know your thoughts. You do not like to see good produce go to waste, no matter that the pickles have been hardened in the sun or the nectarines are bruised and floury. Where would our planet be if food of lesser quality were thrown out? The world would starve.

  But, still, you ought to know that my cousin and his wife have wilder tastes. Why would they stir themselves to make the expedition to your ungarnished part of town if they were not beckoned by the prospect of some treats? Do not bankrupt yourself. Some decent pasta would serve well. Or fish. It’s always easy to get fish. Our little port sustains more than sixty fishing boats. You’d be surprised by all the choice of species. Equally, the hunting season has begun; it would be simple to lay your hands on some nice game.

  I see you wince again. The cooking is too much for you, of course. Well, here’s a compromise. If you are short of energy – I sympathize with that, old friend; men of our age cannot be expected to work in kitchens – then there’s a way to save your legs and keep your blood pressure down. You are not short of cash, I know. I’ve seen, by chance, your pension slip. You’ve worked for over forty years to pay for your retirement and to enjoy an unstinting quality of life. So, now, be generous to yourself. You are deserving of some luxury. Let’s put an end to lunches in your yard. It is, anyway, I have to say, a little damp and draughty there. The table and the drains are far too close to each other. I always feel your bread and cheese have just an edge of borrowed pungency. The ripeness I detect is sometimes inappropriate. And, when the instant coffee comes, the smell is blunted, don’t you think?

  We could move into the house, of course, as we have done from time to time when it is raining. But it’s a little dark in there – and you would be obliged to tidy up if there were guests less liberal than me. No, you should take a taxi to that little restaurant, the Saint Celice, behind my apartment block. Invite the three of us. Four is the perfect number. It is a pity, obviously, that none of us could volunteer to share the burden of the bill. Life’s inequalities are always an embarrassment. But I’d be happy to meet you there at any time, as would my cousin and his wife. We are good friends with the proprietor and so you could be certain of a welcome and the grandest meal. Good wine as well. No table cats. Celice is the patron saint of cooks. She graces only the best of kitchens. So, you see, I am proposing something less simple and informal than we have been used to, something less confined at least.

  I’ll miss your charming yard, of course, but I think we’ve reached an age when we can be indulgent and immoderate without fear of reproach. We have to change our ways or calcify.

  What do you say? We’ve been having lunch together for so many years. We count on it. It keeps us sane. It would be a pity, don’t you think, if our fond custom were to end?

  26

  MONDAZY IS the greatest writer from this town, but not the wealthiest. That honour rests with Alicja Lesniak (a pseudonym), who wrote The Boulevard of Perfect Health and The Well of Wellbeing and sold more than a million copies of each in seven years, not out of bookshops but from cardboard serve-yourself stands inside pharmacies and fitness clubs worldwide. The day after she died, from a stroke in her seventy-first year and not five kilometres from here, the local newspaper attached to its obituary a photograph of Lesniak, looking oddly robust in the driveway of her villa, and the following transcript from one of her famously assertive radio broadcasts:

  If you wish to banish migraines from your life avoid the following: champagne, wine and wheat-based alcohol, malt beers, hard cheese (particularly English Cheddars and blue varieties), coffee, all forms of chocolate, strong pickles, cigarettes, rhubarb, spinach, tomatoes, cereals, cola, and meats excepting white fish, prawns and chicken breast.

  Set a day aside each week for fasting, and an hour every morning for meditation in a screened or darkened room, refreshed only by bottled water, not sparkling. That’s a hidden stimulant.

  On other days, eat nothing but fruit, preferably pears, before midday, and never drink after your (early) evening meal, except weak tea or water.

  Try to include cooked onions or some garlic with every dish. Carrots, too, are generally regarded as safe. Throw sugar, salt and spices in the kitchen bin. They’re irritants and, incidentally, ruinous for your complexion. It might be a good idea as well to reduce domestic static by taking your television to the tip and not bothering to renew the radio batteries. Unplug the telephone. A migraine flourishes in noise. Cars and public transport do not help. Nor does a stressful job, nor arguments at home. Do not take over-heated baths. Do not keep pets.

  Migraines are occasioned by modern life. Eschew it if you can. Migraines are driven off by purity of spirit. Embrace it if you can. It’s best, in all, to live a monkish life, avoid most work except the gentlest, and concentrate on keeping all the pain at bay. You owe it to yourself, no matter what your family or friends might say.

  Once you’ve been clear of migraines for three months, it might be tempting to introduce into your diet one of the foods you’ve missed the most, but this could cause a more vigorous recurrence of your allergy. It’s wiser to be patient and complete the journey until you’ve truly reached ‘the Boulevard of Perfect Health’. You will, of course, have hunger headaches during this regime, but they shouldn’t be confused with migraines, though they might feel just as punishing and last as long.

  Within six months, the benefits should start to manifest themselves. Where there was once discomfort, you will now encounter evidence of the kinder and less brutal world ahead. Within nine months your migraines will be vanquished. You’ll feel wide-eyed, clear-headed and smooth-browed. Then you’ll be calm enough to cope with any pain and strong enough, once in a while, to risk a little coffee or some cheese.

  Mondazy, incidentally, wrote in his last year, aged ninety-two, this little jeu d’esprit for his great-grandson:

  27

  I AM A PIMP of sorts. I have a team of girls. When school is finished and it’s low tide, they work for me. I arm them with a bucket and a bag of salt, and send them out onto the flats, between the rock spine and the bar, to hunt for razor clams. They’re not paid much, but then the task isn’t very difficult. All they have to do is walk barefooted on the rippled sand, on the lookout for the comic, tell-tale squirt of water, which reveals the hiding place. They bend or kneel, peer into the opening of the clam’s burrow, drop in a pinch of salt, and wait. No one is sure if it is love or hatred of the salt that makes the clam momentarily protrude its twin valves by half a centimetre and extend its pink and fleshy siphon, as if gasping for light or oxygen, or – given what it most resembles – something lewder.

  My girls are quick. They have to seize the brittle upper shell and snap the clam clear of the sand before ‘the sea dick’ disappears again or, digging with its muscled foot, slides free from their gripping fingers. ‘Prick-teasing’ is their name for salting clams – though none of them is older t
han twelve.

  Sometimes, between the lunchtime sittings at the restaurant and the early evening customers who come for Sunset Snacks, I sit on the terrace by myself with my binoculars and watch the girls. They have no concentration. In between short bursts of work, I see them kicking loops of sand and water at each other. I see them arguing. I see them playing tag, or writing libels in the sand, or squatting on their haunches, so very far from any bush, to urinate. I have to keep an eye on them. If there’s a racing tide or heavy winds I have to call them back. The flats are hazardous. Once in a while, I catch them waving at me from afar. They’re out of salt. And then I ride out on the quad bike with a fresh supply. They know I’m watching them.

  It is the teacher from their school who bothers me. She’s come into the restaurant at night several times, with different men. She loves my clams, however I present them, whether chowdered, steamed with seaweed and a freshener of lemon, grilled with garlic, butter and oregano, tenderized for zuppa di cannolicchi, ground up with crumbs and spices and then frittered or simply boiled and flattered with a sauce. They are, she tells me, ‘sweet’. My heart stands still for her when she says ‘sweet’.

  She also tells me, every time she sees the bill or spots the prices on my menu, that I am exploiting her young pupils, abusing them, that, at the very least, I ought to pay the hunters a quarter of the menu asking price. ‘I’ll have to organize a strike,’ she says.

  Last week, she went down with my team when school was closed to try prick-teasing for herself. She splashed along the beach towards the flats just like the rest, barefooted, her skirt tucked up, her bucket heavy with a half-kilo issue of rough salt. And on her back, a bag of pickings from her kitchen, some sachets of cinnamon and cayenne pepper, tubs of curry powder, twists of jam and pickle in greaseproof paper, a vial of vinegar, packets of sugar and flour, mustard seeds, a bottle of pop. She explained she’d set her girls a project. The usefulness of salt for teasing out clams was, she said, ‘unproven’. The pupils had to carry out experiments to understand why clams would pop up so recklessly for salt. Why salt and nothing else, when they were living ‘up to their necks’ in salt anyway? You might as well hunt rats with air.

  I told the teacher how people from the coast had been catching and cooking clams for centuries, and they’d always used salt. It smuggled its flavour into the flesh. They can’t all be wrong. ‘Indeed they can,’ she said. She thought her girls, my team, could prove that a pinch of anything, a drop of anything, was good enough to tease the siphon from its shell. Not just salt would do the trick. She could smuggle other flavours in.

  I watched with my binoculars. I watched them bend and kneel and hunt for razor clams with all the products from their teacher’s bag. The girls, for once, were working hard. A new project is always fun. They seemed to be more lively on the flats than they had been for weeks. Their buckets, I could tell, were getting full. I could not drag myself away and go to work while they were there. The teacher held me by my brittle shell. I could not take my eyes off her. I would have watched until my eyes were sore, except – too soon – I shamed myself with my binoculars and had to flee, red-faced and fearful, from the terrace. I’d gone too far. I’d caught her squatting on the flats, her skirts held up, her underpants pulled clear, the urine sinking at her feet. The clams for that night’s customers were springing up between her legs. And she was beckoning her girls.

  She came that evening, of course, to taste her spoils. I shucked and cooked for her, no charge, as payment for her efforts on the beach. I’d not exploit her as I had the girls. She waited in the kitchen, at my side with a beer, while I took my clam knife to her catch, rotating its flat blade between the razor shells to sever the upper muscle. I rinsed the clams clean, showed them to the steam for half a minute and let her eat them on the half-shell, raw. They tasted just like prawns, she said, but not as salty. She liked the satisfying chewiness and swore she could detect the jam, the cinnamon, the pop, and many things besides.

  28

  TAKING DOWN the rucksack in the spring for our first outing, we found the undiscarded detritus of last year’s final picnic, the chocolate wrappers and the little Thermos flask, the balls of foil that had been used to wrap sandwiches and a plastic box with half a cake inside, vermilion with age. From deep in the rucksack we retrieved an undiscovered element harder than a curl of tin, which once had been an orange peel, and (looking almost perfect, five months on) a white hen’s egg boiled in its shell.

  We cracked it open on the window ledge, pulled off its shell and cut it lengthways into halves. The albumen looked curiously transparent, though edible, despite its age. The yolk was greenish brown and fibrous. The smell was subtle and unnerving.

  Our dog would not accept the cake, but she seemed glad to eat the egg. She did not mind the colour or the smell, or care about the months of darkness and neglect. Besides, she liked to see the rucksack and the Thermos flask. There’d be a picnic and some exercise at last.

  29

  YOUR GRANDFATHER was not a modern man. He thought a woman’s business was waiting – first on her father, then on her husband, then on their sons – not dressing up in coat and lipstick and going out with friends, like Parisian wives. He made that clear when he was courting me. I found the prospect charming in a way, because I’d loved my father and I wanted sons.

  One afternoon – the most shaming day of my life – when we’d been married about ten months and I was hardly pregnant with your eldest aunt, he came back early from the warehouse, wanting to be fed. But I’d gone out with my cousin to the little restaurant, where the pharmacy now is. I’m glad that restaurant has closed. It made me blush to even pass it.

  Your grandfather, he tracked me down that afternoon – and naturally he made a dreadful scene, showing off in front of all the women there. You could hear the little coffee spoons rattling on their saucers, he was so loud. I told him why I wasn’t in the house when he came home, as quietly as I could, although I trembled as I spoke. My little cousin had called, and we had strolled down to the corner for a conversation and some cake. I wiped my mouth to hide my face from him. There was a smudge of pastry cream reddened by my lipstick on the back of my hand.

  Well, as you must have heard from your mother, nothing could silence the man once he’d had a lunch-time drink, particularly on this occasion, with his unexpected audience of captive women, their fingers glued to their coffee cups. He loved an audience of women.

  ‘Am I unreasonable to want her in whenever I come home?’ he asked. ‘To want her there, to cook for me? To want meals on the table a mere three times a day, like other men? It is the principle. The perfect wife would lay three meals a day on the table even when her husband was not there.’

  I pushed my cake and cup away, stood up and, nodding farewell to my cousin, began to walk out of the restaurant. It took too long. He said, ‘My wife has dined, I see. Her husband goes without.’

  Now that he has died and I am living in the empty house, I have become the perfect wife at last. I am at home for him. I cook my meals and, just for company, lay out an extra, unattended plate, with his wine glass and with a knife and fork wrapped in a napkin, as he liked. Of course, if someone calls, one of our daughters, say, or my pretty niece, then there is already a place set for them at the table. I live in constant hope that even you might come one day. But usually I am alone. I have myself only to serve. I do not tremble. And I do not have to hide my face. These are the joys of widowhood. Again I dine. Again my husband goes without.

  30

  THE RUMOURS started when – a rare event – one of the prison guards was spotted shopping in the square where Jo and his forebears had kept their bakery since 1841. It was the evening before the execution. The next day a murderer was due to die in the correction facility, two kilometres out of town. Too close for comfort. Everybody was on edge. The air seemed thin and aromatic with the prospect and proximity of such a death.

  Old baker Jo was bald and staid, and not the most progressive o
f men. ‘Don’t waste your sympathy,’ he said. But George, his son – the one who runs the bakery today and has become the mirror image of his dad and just as difficult – was a libertarian. He wore long hair tucked up inside his baker’s cap, and spent any time when he wasn’t slaving for his family in the cake, bread and pastry business at the far end of the quay, with his guitar and some unlikely friends. I used to watch them smoking pot with my binoculars and wish I had the courage to saunter down and join them. He was our only hippie then. And he wore flour in his hair.

  It seems the prison guard had drawn attention to himself that evening by buying a suspicious assortment of foods. Some freshly shucked oysters, from the basket girl. Two strawberry milkshakes from the cafeteria. A slab of coffee chocolate. A piece of pummelled beefsteak. Nectarines. It wasn’t long before the whispering began. These items had to be the condemned man’s final meal, they said. His choices had Death engraved all over them.

  Then, of course, when the prison guard was spotted talking to George at the rear door of the shop and money was seen to be exchanged for a bakery bag, any fool could guess what was going on. No doubt about it. The bag contained some of young George’s Magic Cookies or Sister Mary Mix or Lebanese Red Loaf or Sweet Dream Biscuits or whatever it was that George provided for those longhaired travellers who queued a touch too patiently each evening amongst the locals waiting for their bread. The murderer, for his last meal, had found a way of dining on oblivion. Good luck to him.

  I don’t believe that anybody slept too late the following morning. Baker Jo was standing in the street by 8 a.m., affecting an inspection of his window display but really with his eyes fixed on the grey woods high above the town where, at that moment, as they thought, that boy, that man, that murderer was sitting down with plastic plates and plastic cutlery to oysters, milkshake, chocolate, nectarines and beef to fortify his final hour on the earth. He’d save his magic pastries till the last. We all knew that. He’d want to fly away. Surely George’s baking, his sorcery, would let the man break free.