The Devil's Larder (11 page)

Here is a picture difficult to banish from our minds. It’s gone midnight. The moon and stars are bearing down on the anchored boat. Our Toby Erickson is dead. He sits quite still, in his
straw hat, intoxicated, and untroubled by the nagging sea. His first and final tad – the dinner catch that might impress his lady friend – is hooked and tugging on the deep end of his
line. It can’t escape from predators. The carnivores will pick it clean before the night is done. The bones above the water are holding on to bones below. The numb are fishing for the
numb.

At last, his boat is shifting slightly on its ropes as tides regress and winds align in readiness for the day. The hotel staff are innocent, as yet. They are preparing breakfasts for their
guests, unscrewing pots, opening cans, cutting off the tops of cartons, snipping sachets, breaching packets, breaking eggs, and quietly laying out the feast.

O
UR CONCIERGE
has been away. A short break from sitting in other people’s draughts for a living, she explains. She’s spent a week at
Anderbac Falls, where she went on her vacations as a child. She’s come back with the benefits burned on her face. The weather was fabulous, the Falls miraculously unchanged in all those
years, and to top it all she’s forged what might prove to be a lasting friendship with a man. ‘A widower,’ she adds. The word – she almost whispers it – bestows
decorum, as if his marriage and bereavement put this new liaison beyond reproach. So, nothing like the noisy, inappropriate affair she’s been conducting with the janitor – ‘a
bachelor’ – in his apartment on the seventh floor.

Her widower is charming and presentable, she explains, well read, well heeled, well dressed, though somewhat overweight. And he is kind. ‘I’m torn up over him.’ They’d
picnicked together in the woods, had shared a table at a restaurant, and on their final night together had jointly cooked a meal in the little chalet which he’d been renting in the grounds of
her hotel.

‘He never tried to touch me even once, you know,’ she says, to illustrate how genuine her new suitor had proved himself to be. ‘Though if he’d tried he might have found
me willing. I’d drunk a half a bottle of his wine. And he was so respectable – and such a cook! – that I would have liked to show my gratitude. But still he said his wife was
present in the room. They’d rented that same chalet the year before she died. He said that I was sitting in her chair.’

You have to interrupt the concierge. If you don’t, she’ll wrap you up in conversation until (my mother’s phrase) your bladder turns to stone. Before you realize it the taxi
driver’s tired of waiting, or the shop has closed, or your appointment has been missed, or the slow stew you’ve left to cook upstairs has been reduced to clinker, ash and smoke. And so
I have to turn towards the street and say, ‘I’ll catch up with the details when I get back, but now I really have to go.’

I’ve looked down at my watch and pulled a face. I’ve said ‘Oh, dear . . .’ to show how late I am. Already I have reached the double door, but I feel as if I’ve been
too hurried, impolite. I turn and add ‘Well, good for you . . .’ and then, once I’m halfway down the steps and have almost broken free, ‘I’m stopping off at
George’s tonight, if you want anything . . .’

‘Why not? I owe myself a little treat. Can you bring two cheese pies? And if he has those baby macaroons, then six.’

I
ALMOST
get back to the block this evening without her cheese pies and her macaroons. It’s been an awkward day, too argumentative, too rushed. My
head’s a sieve. I don’t need shopping for myself. There’s cold meat in the fridge to finish off and then I’d like to curl up in my bed and sleep. It’s not until I
reach the baking smell that I remember our concierge’s ‘little treat’. I get the taxi driver to circle the square and wait for me at George’s. The driver hands me some
change and asks me to bring him ‘something hot’. Nobody can be downwind of George’s and not want food.

I think that I’m in luck. The concierge is not behind her desk. But by the time I’ve pushed her bag of food beneath the metal grille, she’s at my side. We used to have a little
dog called Plum, before my husband left. Just like the concierge. You couldn’t move, you couldn’t sneak yourself a tiny piece of cake, you couldn’t slip out of the house, without
the dog appearing at your side.

The concierge is keen to carry on where we left off. ‘My widower could outbake George,’ she says. A little romance suits her well. I see she’s had her hair in curlers and
changed out of her ‘mopping slacks’ into her going-out dress. It’s no longer difficult to picture her in an Anderbac restaurant, across the table from an attentive man.

I say, ‘Excuse me if I hurry off. My head’s on fire . . .’ Already I have reached the elevator door.

‘Hold on for me,’ she says. ‘I’m coming up.’ This is a pretext, I am sure, for pursuing our conversation. But I’m resigned to her, and oddly touched, despite
my throbbing head. For it is touching when a woman of her age finds this late blessing in her life.

And so I have to wait five minutes with my foot holding the door until she joins me in the elevator, with her keys and carry bag.

‘When will you have the chance to see this man again?’ I ask.

‘Next year,’ she says.

‘Next year?’

‘Same week, same place.’

‘You might not like him in a year.’

‘That doesn’t worry me. We both like the falls at Anderbac and they won’t change. We thought it would be safest if we met up there again. A year soon goes. We’ll write.
We’ll phone. We’re not young kids. If you’re attracted to a man at my age, then what’s the hurry? It’ll be something to look forward to. What do they say? It’s
better to travel than arrive.’

At last she pulls shut the elevator door and I can head towards my room, my cold meat supper and my bed.

‘What floor?’ I ask, my finger hovering above the ten buttons of the console.

She smiles. I think that beneath the suntan and the make-up she almost blushes. ‘The seventh floor,’ she says. She bites her lower lip – there’s lipstick on her teeth
– and looks down at her shoes.

It’s not until we reach the janitor’s floor – and his two dogs are already barking at his door in greeting – that she confides in me. She’s backing out into the
hall, into the early evening smell of other people’s meals, pushing the elevator door with her bottom. She opens up her carry bag to let me see inside. A bottle of wine. The paper packet full
of treats that I have brought from George’s: two pies, six baby macaroons.

‘You spoil that man,’ I say.

‘Well, yes, perhaps I do. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so cheap. A macaroon’s too good for him.’ She tips her head towards the undeserving janitor, towards his raucous dogs.
‘You wouldn’t say this one’s well read, well dressed, well heeled! You wouldn’t say this one won’t try to get his hands on me.’ She backs away into the dark.
‘But, still, a woman’s got to eat if she’s to keep herself in trim. And no one wants to eat alone, not when your heart’s torn up like mine.’

S
PITTING IN
the omelette is a fine revenge. Or overloading it with pepper. But take care not to masturbate into the mix, as someone in the next village
did, sixty years ago. The eggs got pregnant. When he heated them they grew and grew, becoming quick and lumpy, until they could outwit him (and all his hungry guests waiting with beer and bread out
in the yard) by leaping from the pan with their half-wings and running down the lane like boys.

T
HIS WAS THE
challenge that they faced. To cook their meal without a cooker or a pot. The boys had brought their tents out to the island in the stream
for just three nights of liberty. It had been heavy work, toiling up the valley with their gear. They had their sleeping bags, their cartons of packaged, tinned and foil-wrapped food, their plastic
plates and cutlery, their gas bottle.

But someone – let’s not spoil their weekend yet by naming names – had failed to put the little cooker and the pots and pans into his bag. It didn’t matter on day one.
They ate the fruit, the biscuits and the bread, the chocolate, the cereal. That night they made a fire – at least the boy we should not name had packed the matches – and dined on toast
and jam. Next morning they ate the bacon and the meat goujons, roasted on a flat stone in the fire. Their lips were singed and ashy. They drove away the taste with candy bars.

By the evening of day two they were immensely hungry, bored as well. They had misjudged their rations.

All that remained to eat were eggs and rice. The boys knew that it was possible to fry an egg on the bonnet of a 1950s car. They’d seen a photograph – a silver Buick, four spitting
eggs, sunny side up, the bluest sky, the baking hills of Stovepipe Wells in California. But this was not America, nor was it warm, nor were there any cars. If only they could find an old tin can,
then they could boil their supper. But this was untouched countryside. The sort of people who liked this kind of landscape did not leave their trash behind.

At first they thought these deprivations would be fun. They’d have to hunt for food, catch fish, like cavemen, cook their conquests on an open fire. But there were no fishing rods or nets.
There were no traps or snares. There was no wildlife other than themselves, as far as they could tell.

The only option, then, was to find some way to boil their eggs without a pot or pan. It could be done. It had been done, so many times, 4,000 years before. Their island was an ancient place, a
proven refuge for the night, where hunters, travellers might camp in those far days before the larder and the fridge. If those ancestors had some eggs, then they’d not have to wait until a
Buick limousine turned up. All they’d have to do was dig a hole and line it with clay from the river bank, then fill it with water carried in skins. A constant supply of red-hot stones baked
in their fire would make the water tumble-boil and cook the eggs to perfection. Indeed, the challenge could be met quite readily, but not by boys who hadn’t studied their prehistory.

So they sat round the fire that second night and contemplated something worse than hunger. They contemplated river, night and clay, the broken landscape and the perfect eggs, the foolishness of
camping by this unceasing and unfeeding stream. They dreamed of being more courageous than they were, of being braver boys. And when the rain began to fall they contemplated their defeat of going
home as soon as it was light, a whole day earlier than planned, and smuggling back that box of eggs into the simpler, chilling, less historic place from which they’d taken it.

T
HERE WAS
an eating contest after the bride had left with her new husband on their honeymoon and all the duller couples had gone upstairs to their
expensive rooms to sleep off the excesses of the day. Just nine men remained amid the debris of the dancing and the meal – five of the younger and more hearty guests, reluctant to bring such
an amusing, colourless event to an end, the Spanish barman, two waiters and the hotel’s under-manager (who clearly wanted everyone to go to bed). All bachelors, all dressed (approximately) in
white. That was the wedding theme. All white. A vulgar, wealthy man can have exactly what he wants when his youngest daughter marries, and this one wanted everything and everybody white. That meant
a brand-new carpet in the hotel’s dining room, redecorated walls and doors, pearl tablecloths (hand-stitched with hearts in matching thread), displays of the very palest roses, lilies and
carnations, and, of course, a wedding dinner ‘cooked from white ingredients’. An irritating challenge for the hotel’s chef.

The day had been exciting and bizarre. The ninety guests arrived to find themselves blanched out by lighting from the chandeliers and by the artificial snow heaped up in all the corners of the
rooms. They must have felt they’d stepped onto the set of a television advertisement for heaven or into some uncanny Alpine hospital. Perhaps that’s why they drank and laughed so
heartily. They felt such fools. But, when the waiters in their white smocks arrived to load the tables with the food, they had to clap. The chef had achieved the impossible. They sat at their
appointed places and reverently picked their ways through fourteen spotless dishes, which seemed less vivid even than the chalky china tableware from which they had been served.

I
T WAS THE
barman’s fault. He said it was a pity that the waiters had to waste good drinking time clearing up the mess. It was a pity, too, that
such eccentric food should go to waste. ‘Let’s eat the lot,’ he said. ‘I bet we can.’

‘In less than twenty minutes,’ said the under-manager, ‘or else you lose the bet. I want you out by two.’

The nine of them, keyed up and challenged by the errant spirit of the wedding night, spread out around the tables and set to work on what remained of the feast. There were no rules or etiquette,
no social niceties. So lung and lychees shared a fork; fish steaks and sallow
andouillettes
were sweetened by the icing from the wedding cake; baby white aubergines and boiled potatoes were
dipped into the coconut sauce; prawn crackers scooped up basmati rice, yoghurt dip and cream. The men made sandwiches of white oat bread, buffalo cheese, blanched asparagus and stiffened albumen.
Vanilla ice cream went with everything. Speed was the thing. This was a race against the clock. They had to cram their mouths. If anything fell on the carpet, then so what? It didn’t show. By
the time – eighteen minutes – everything had been dispatched, their suits, shirts and trousers were spattered with niveous gravies and with grease, white stains on white.

They filled their glasses with the last dregs from the bottles of white wine, mixed drunkenly with milk, and held them up to toast the bridegroom and the bride, by now a hundred miles away. The
bachelors could only picture them and hope their own white day would come, their own fake snow. Somewhere, driving through the night, the honeymooners were in each other’s arms, his lips on
hers, deep in the lambswool cushions of their white limousine, behind the stiff and blushing chauffeur in his pallid uniform.