The Devil's Larder (12 page)

B
EWARE THE
chilling phrase ‘This calls for some champagne!’ Resist that weighty bottle if you can. Champagne will spoil the day.

Champagne is tolerable at times, equal to a glass of lemonade for sweetening dry throats, superior even to a can of beer for brisk inebriation, preferable to homemade wine or cider. But
otherwise obey the warning on the label: ‘Open with care.’ The drink is rarely equal to its task or to its reputation. How could it be? Nothing is that heavenly or transcendent. We
should hold champagne in contempt. It lets us down.

I
HAVE COLLECTED
two bottles of Moët & Chandon, Brut Impérial, from the cold pantry, to celebrate my husband’s success at work.
The Director at last. Bravo! I carry them like liquid luck down to the summer house. His mother’s there, three colleagues, his two best friends, our daughter and her current partner, a
neighbour and (reluctantly) his wife. With us that’s twelve. One bottle wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be enough to spoil the day.

What – apart from my husband – could be more well mannered and more sociable than two bottles of champagne? Placed at the centre of the trellis table, they strike, like him, a solid
attitude. They’re dignified. But they’re light in disposition, smartly presented, aspiring. Their pedigrees are on display. Their rising gases promise both energy and levity. Expense
has not been spared.

My husband likes to open bottles of champagne himself. He feels I lack respect. The bubbly is too finely and too patiently blended, too lovingly matured to handle with anything other than
finesse, he says. We should not allow a pressure spill to waste any. He stands at his end of the table, tears back the gold, loosens the wire and shows us how to pull and twist the cork. The finest
waiter could not better him. A flying cork might add some drama but is, in his opinion, unnecessary and vulgar. Everybody laughs and sighs at the muted popping of the corks, the barest frothing of
the champagne.

We hold our glasses out and watch the tumbling liquid and the fizz. We lift our glasses. Trembling hands. We have to drink at once. The bubble reputation will not last. Our disappointments and
our jealousies will soon be heavy in the glass.

‘Congratulations,’ someone says. ‘To your success.’

We all stand up to toast my husband and his good fortune. He has a smile for everyone. He would not understand how chilled we feel and vexed. He’s sparkling now. He is
grand cru
. He
does not know that he has let us down.

T
HE CELEBRATED
restaurant is a short walk from the transport stores, westwards, towards the empty tenements. Just ask the way if you get lost or muddled
in the yards and alleyways. A magazine article – with the headline ‘Simply the Best’ – has said it serves the finest soup in the region and ‘merits the detour’.
So, for a month or two, its tables are reserved by detourists, as we call them, and regulars like the Fiat garage workers and the women from the trade exchange must eat elsewhere.

The menu is a simple one. It has not changed for seven years at least and will not change until she dies, the owner says. Each diner gets a hock of bread, some butter and some salt, a spoon, an
ashtray and a glass. There are sometimes three soups to choose from. One made with fish, of course. The port is nearby and fish is plentiful. Another’s made with vegetables, according to the
season. And, occasionally, there is a third, prepared from either beef or chicken. But most days there are only two, fish soup or vegetable. A glass of beer or water is included in the price. There
is no point in asking for an omelette or some wine. The restaurant can’t cope with such variety. The best you’ll get is soup and beer and smoke. There’s also little point in
asking what the fish is for that day, or what fresh vegetables were used. The owner usually says, ‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ because, to tell the truth, she’s not
entirely sure.

You could not say the place is celebrated for its ambience. It’s just a corner house converted forty years ago into a lunchery, at a time when there were countless families living in this
quarter of the town and employed in the naval joineries and engineering shops. It’s modest, then, and not entirely clean. It’s two rooms up and one room down, with plastic tablecloths
and kitchen chairs to make you feel at home. It’s cheap in there and cramped and, unusually for a celebrated restaurant these days, it’s heavy with tobacco smoke.

If not the ambience, then what? You find out when you lift the soup spoon to your lips. The soups are never liquidized into a smooth consistency but, even with their nuggets and morsels of flesh
and vegetable, the substrate ballast of lentils, peas and beans, the broth is so delicate and light, so insubstantial and so resonant, that taste and smell precede the near lip of the spoon and
leap across the thin air to your mouth. You’ve heard of aftertaste? This is the opposite. This is a soup that’s full of promises. We’re not surprised. We’re used to it.

These detourists, however, are perplexed as they depart between the crowded tables and step out through the narrow door into the diesel-smelling streets. They tip like kings and queens. Their
tips are stiffer than the bill. It can’t be right, they think, to dine so well and simply and be so cheaply satisfied. And, oh, such soup, such soup! The magazine has said the owner has a
secret formula, an additive she will not name. So now they try to guess what they have tasted, other than the finest recipe not only in the region but in the world. What is the conjuring trick?

We have the answers, should they ask. When we have drunk a beer or two, then we will gladly tease the cook, the celebrated chef, with theories to explain the new-found eminence of her
restaurant. Her secret is the sewer truffles that she adds to every pot of soup. She grows them in her cellar. Her secret is sea water: two parts of that to every three parts taken from the tap.
Seaweed. Sea mist. The secret is the heavy pan she uses, made for her out of boiler iron by a ship’s engineer as a token of his devotion. Its metal is not stable, but leaks and seeps its
unrequited love into the soup. Her secret is the special fish that’s caught for her by an old man, at night. He rows out beyond the shipping lanes, anchors in the corridor of moonlight, and
scoops them from the water in a kitchen colander. Or else the magic’s in the vegetables. Or in some expensive, esoteric spice.

‘Why all the fuss?’ she asks, as the visitors depart. ‘Is not all soup the same?’

Yet now, at night, when we are going home, we sometimes smell the putrefying truffles from the street, or catch a glimpse of moonlit rowing boats, or look into her kitchen at the back end of the
house to see her lifting her lovelorn sailor’s pan onto the hob, or hear the tidal rhythms of the sea as two-parts brine goes by its secret route into her soup. We find her carrying something
– skeins? – across the room. They could be wool or seaweed skeins. We cannot tell. We see her fingers in the steam, adding magic touches to the stock. We see her sleight of hand, the
charms she uses to entice these strangers to her rooms.

So, for a month or two – for fame is brief and fashions only fleeting – our tables at the celebrated restaurant are taken by new visitors to town. And we must wait – yes, wait
and see – until its reputation fades, until there’s room again for us to sit and smoke, to dine and feel at home, to dip our spoons and bread into this new and famous mystery.

W
E WERE AWAY
ten days. In our absence, something must have shifted in our house, a quake, a tilt, a ghostly hand, a mischievous intruder, some global
subsidence. It was enough to make the freezer door swing open. Maybe only slightly at first, just wide enough to fill the kitchen with gelid air. But once the frozen food inside began to defrost,
to shed its cold paralysis, the packets and the bags became unstable. They sank and fell against the partly open door. They avalanched. Some packets tumbled out and hit the boards. The wildlife in
our house had cause to celebrate. Heaven had provided manna on the kitchen floor and lots of time to feed on it. The distant glacier had calved some frozen meals for all the patient arthropods.

When we returned, the smell was scandalous, a nauseous conspiracy of vegetables and meats and insect waste. The rats had defecated everywhere. The larder slugs had filigreed their trading
routes. Someone had left a green-blue mohair sweater inside the freezer, knitted out of mould. The broken flecks of wool were maggot worms and wax-moth larvae. The sweater seemed to shrug and
breathe with all the life it held.

We shrugged and cursed. This was the worst of welcomes. We put on rubber gloves, got out the cleaning rags and mops, filled up a bucket with disinfectant and hot water, set about the task of
clearing up the food, of pulling out the emerald body from the freezer, of closing once again the slightly open door.

Within an hour we’d restored the ice. Unless you looked inside the empty freezer, saw the lack of frozen food, you’d never guess that we’d been breached and burgled by the
teeming universe.

W
E WERE
brought up not to eat the cores. To do so was considered greedy, messy, ill-mannered and, we were assured, immensely dangerous. Vitalized by our
digestive juices and the dark, the pips would swell and strike. An apple tree would spring up and flourish in the warm loams of our intestines ‘like a baby’, until its roots and
branches spread and burst out of our sides. Our skins and clothes would tear apart. ‘Then you’ll be sorry,’ mother said.

The only cure, if any pips were to be defiantly swallowed by any of her girls, was a dose of weedkiller and, possibly, if that did not prevent germination, a painful operation with a pair of
secateurs. ‘It’s not a story I’ve made up,’ she said. ‘Go down to the orchard and you’ll see how true it is. Look for the faces and the hands of the boys and
girls who’ve swallowed cores. They’ve turned into bark.’

I hated orchards then, and apples too. I did not want to end up like the children I’d discovered in the bark, hard and sinewy, distorted by pain, with ants and beetles crawling on their
eyes and nothing to protect them from the night.

These days I have recovered from my mother’s house. I always chew the cores. I do not spit the pips into my palm. Indeed, as I grow older, the thought of something new and green, striking
life inside me, growing ‘like a baby’, is not a nightmare any more. I rather think that orchards are a better resting place than cemeteries or crematoria. I’d sooner finish as a
piece of bark than ash or bone.

I used to tell my only son, ‘Eat the cores. They’re the healthiest bit.’ He did as he was told. Frightened, I suppose, of being ill. But he’s defiant now, I find. Today
we drove my grandchildren to school. They had their breakfasts on the hoof. An apple each. I watched them chewing up against the cores like hamsters. I did not dare speak. My son rolled down the
windows of the car. ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘See how far they’ll go.’ A family ritual, I am sure. They waited till we reached the open land, between the fast road and the
shops. And then the cores went out, flung fast and wide.

‘There’ll be an orchard there before you know it,’ their father said. ‘Those pips are apple trees.’

T
HIS WAS THE
second time she’d died in bed. It was her second burial as well. Nine years before the funeral, the hillside – undermined by
summer rain and quarrying – had slipped and piled itself against our neighbour’s house as quietly as a drift of snow. She and her husband were fast asleep, exhausted by a day of
harvesting, their suppers still uneaten at their sides. The boulder clay had shouldered all its strength against their stone back wall until their room capsized and the contents of the attic and
the flute-tiled roof collapsed onto their bed. My neighbour dreamed, fooled for an instant by the sudden weight across her legs, that the dogs had jumped up on the eiderdown. This was against the
farmhouse rules. She was ready in her sleep to knock them back onto the bedroom floor.

Now she and her husband were not sleeping. But they were trapped beneath their sheets, beneath the eiderdown, by rubble from the land and from the house and so could only stay exactly where they
were, their heads and chests protected by a porch of beams and timbers, their legs encased by cloth and clay. A stroke of luck. They had been saved from instant death by ceiling beams, stout wood
from local trees. They had woken in a dark and sudden tent, closed off from the world.

By dawn the heat was stifling. They tore their night-clothes off and ripped the sheets. They called for help but could tell from the way their voices were absorbed that they would not be heard.
They knew that their uneaten supper was within reach. Except there was no reach for them. They could not turn or stretch. The earth was just a finger-length away. They breakfasted on perspiration
from their lips and moisture from the clay.

By evening the clay had fixed and baked, entirely dry. They sweated only smells. No moisture any more, and nothing on their lips to drink. They should have died within a day; the heat, the pain,
the thirst would put an end to them. But they had worked their whole lives with clod and clay and stone and knew their properties. A thousand times, to stave off hunger in the middle of a task, the
old man had popped a pebble into his mouth and sucked. He swore that he could always taste what crop was in the field. So now he searched the rubble with his one free hand until he found the flat,
impassive flanks of stones, the ones he’d hauled so many times out of the way of his motor plough. He tugged two stones the size of supper plates free of the clay with his strong fingers and
placed one on his wife’s naked stomach and the other on his own. The weight expelled the danger, saved their lives. Their fevers were absorbed by stones. And once the stones had levelled off
at body temperature, they were discarded by my neighbours and colder thermostats were found.

The old man and his wife stayed strong with stones. Their bodies grew as gelid as the earth and they could feel their stomachs filling, the slow transfusion into them of rain and sun and harvest
crops.