The Hundred-Foot Journey (16 page)

Then, one day, it was just the two of us in the room. He was sitting flush against the bed, and we were playing backgammon on my tray, sipping tea like we did ages ago on the Napean Sea Road, in a life that now seemed so far away.

“Who’s doing the cooking?”

“Don’t worry about dat. Everyone’s helping. All covered.”

“I had an idea for a new dish—”

Papa shook his massive head.

“What?”

“We are going back to London.”

I threw down my dice
and looked out the window. The hospital was in a valley one mountain range over from Lumière, but I had a backside view of the Jura Alps that I could also see from my attic room at Maison Mumbai.

It was winter. The pine forests were dusted with snow, and icicles dangled like daggers from the eaves overlooking the hospital window. It all looked so beautiful, pristine and pure, and tears, inexplicably, rolled down my face.

“What? What you crying for? We are better off going back to London. They won’t make any room for us here. I was foolish to think they would. Look at you. Look what my pighead has done to you—”

But Papa’s outburst was cut short by a knock on the door. I wiped my eyes while Papa yelled “Hold on” at whoever was knocking. He came over and kissed the undamaged skin of my forehead. “You are my brave boy,” he whispered. “You are a Haji.”

When Papa opened the door, his massive build filled the frame, but I could still see over his arm. Monsieur Leblanc and Madame Mallory stood before him. Le Saule Pleureur’s chef was wearing a chocolate brown wool suit, a bouquet of roses sticking out of the cane basket hanging from her arm. Behind her, Auntie and Uncle Mayur and Zainab sat in the hospital corridor, silently staring. Their silence was deadly, and it seemed to drown out the general cacophony of the working hospital.

“How can you come here?” an incredulous Papa finally asked.

“We came to see how he is.”

“Don’t bother,” he said, his lips curled with disgust. “You have won. We are leaving Lumière. Now go. Don’t insult us with your presence.”

Papa slammed shut the door. But he was like a beast in a cage, spinning around to pace across my hospital room floor, walloping his hands together like he had when Mummy died.

“Imagine the nerve of dat woman. Imagine.”

Mallory was momentarily flustered. She tried to give Zainab the roses, the packet of pastries, but Auntie hissed at the little girl and Zainab scuttled back to her aunt’s knees.

“We are sorry to have upset you further,” Monsieur Leblanc told an expressionless Uncle Mayur. “You are quite right. It is too late for flowers.”

And so they returned to the Citroën in the hospital parking lot. They did not exchange a word as Leblanc fired up the car, or when he pulled out onto the A708 back to Lumière. Each was lost in thought.

“Well,” Mallory finally said. “I tried. It’s not my fault—”

But Mallory would have been wise to keep her mouth shut. To Monsieur Leblanc’s ears, her protestation was just too much, simply one insensitive remark too far. Leblanc slammed on the brakes and the car came to a skidding halt on the side of the road.

He turned his crimson face to Madame Mallory, and the chef put a defensive hand to her chest, for she could see that even the tips of his ears were a throbbing red.

“What, Henri? Drive.”

Leblanc leaned over and popped open her door. “Out. You can walk.”

“Henri! Are you mad?”

“Look, look what you have accomplished with your life,” he hissed, cold with fury. “You have such fortune. And what have you given back to the world but selfishness?”

“I think—”

“That’s the problem, Gertrude. You think far too much—about yourself. I am ashamed for you. Now out. I simply can’t stand the sight of you right now.”

Monsieur Leblanc had never before talked to her in this manner. Never. She was in total shock. No longer recognized him.

But before she could process this incredible turn of events, Leblanc was around the side of the car, pulling her out onto the shoulder of the road. He jumped into the car’s backseat and this time emerged with Mallory’s basket, roughly shoving it at the startled chef. “You can walk home,” he said tersely.

And then the Citroën was roaring down the country road in a blast of blue exhaust smoke.

“How dare he leave me here like this?” Mallory stamped her feet on the ice. “How dare he talk to me like that?”

Just snowy silence.

“Has he gone mad?”

And she stood fuming like that, incredulous, for quite some time.

Finally, however, reality began to sink in and she looked around the wintry landscape to get her bearings. Mallory was at the foot of a frozen field, the iced-over mountains staring coldly down at her with their tops knotted in dark clouds. Along the valley’s floor a thin gray mist hovered, but at the far end she could just make out two chalets, some barns, cones of smoke rising from wood-shingled roofs.

Ah, she thought, Monsieur Berger’s farm. Not so bad. She’d use the opportunity to check on her haunch of venison and have the old farmer drive her back to Lumière.

Madame Mallory started her march across the valley. A cawing raven scratched at the frozen stubble in the field. And the farther she walked along the back roads to Monsieur Berger’s farm, the more the brittle, icy vista about her began to invade her mood. What if he leaves me? she suddenly thought. What will I do without Henri?

Mallory stumbled on in her ankle boots through the ice and snow, never seeming to get closer to the two farms at the far end of the valley. She crossed a black stream slicing through a snowdrift; she passed an old army depot once used for tank maneuvers and a forlorn clump of leafless silver birch alone in a dead field.

When the old track circled around a hill, she came across a roadside chapel. It was small and its paint was flaking. Mallory had been walking hard for almost forty minutes at this point, and she stopped to catch her breath, steadying herself with a hand on the gate. The chapel, she realized, would have a bench inside for her to sit on.

No one knows for sure what happened in that chapel and it is likely not even Madame Mallory rightly understands. But for many years I have wondered about what occurred in that roadside house of worship, imagined it, and perhaps the picture that I have in mind is not all that far off from the truth.

I imagine Madame Mallory primly sitting for some time on the chapel’s only pew, the cane basket on her lap, staring up at the washed-out mural of Christ’s Last Supper covering the opposite wall. Disciples, faded into a dull wash, break bread. The figures are shrouded in the gloom, mere smudges in the dark, but she can just make out, on the set table, a bowl of olives, a jug of wine, a loaf of bread.

The air itself is leaden with a cold and musty rot. The chapel’s wooden crucifix stands stiffly and mechanically erect, and the unlit oil lamp to the side of the stone altar is caught up in a dewy net of cobwebs. Not a flower. Not a melted candle or even a burned matchstick. No sign of human life.

It is then Madame Mallory realizes the chapel has died, that long ago all religious meaning had slipped from the neglected room. And as Mallory sits stiffly on that pew, clutching that basket on her lap, her soul fills with a horrific thought: How cold this chamber. Dear God. How cold this chamber.

The feeling is unbearable and, being who she is, she tries to fight against the discomfort. She rummages in her basket for a matchbook, lights a match, leans forward to bring some life to the altar lamp. In this small gesture everything changes, for when the flaring match head meets the oil lamp’s wick, the chapel convulses violently in new light and new shadows. The crucifix leaps out across the room, an emaciated and tortured man imploring her with outstretched arms. The cobwebs twitch, like a fisherman’s net full of fish thrashing about for dear life, and a humping mouse scurries behind the altar.

Mallory wonders if she might be going mad, for she suddenly hears a voice, the angry voice of her father, of years ago, taking a little girl to task. Her forehead beads with sweat but she is too frightened to move. She musters all her strength and lifts her eyes to the ceiling, desperately in search of relief.

The Last Supper has been transformed by the lamp’s light. Christ and the disciples are in their familiar poses, their garments now glinting with threads of silver and gold paint caught in the light. But it is not the weak-chinned Christ gazing wanly out over the horizon that catches her attention, but the table itself, not sparsely decked with olives and bread as she had first surmised, but groaning under a feast.

Figs in port. A white clump of sheep’s cheese. A leg of roast mutton and a dish of herbs. And over there. A peeled onion. A boar’s head on a plate.

It is the eyes of that boar that lock on to her, a decapitated head curiously full of life, and a trembling Mallory, always brave, she forces herself to look resolutely back at the animal. And in the depths of those glinting little eyes she sees the balance sheet of her life, an endless list of credits and debits, of accomplishments and failures, small acts of kindness and real acts of cruelty. And the tears finally come as she looks away, unable to see this thing to the very end, for she knows without looking of the terrible imbalance, how long ago the credits stopped while the debits of vanity and selfishness run on and on. And her involuntary cry for mercy, it rings out into the chapel, witnessed only by a painted boar with a puckish, tusk-toothed smile.

It was sometime after dinner when Madame Mallory slipped into my hospital room. I was resting my eyes, and she spent several undetected minutes quietly studying my chest, my arms, my neck, all painfully wrapped in bandages. And most of all, she studied my hands.

At long last I sensed her great force in the room, like I had when I was cooking on opening night, and I snapped open my eyes.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I didn’t want it to come to this.”

It began to rain outside.

Mallory was partly in shadow, but I could see the outline of her bun, the muscular arms, the trademark wicker basket from earlier in the day. This was, I realized, the first time we had ever talked with one another.

“Why do you hate us?”

I heard the sharp intake of her breath. But she did not reply. Instead, she moved over to the window and looked out into the dark. Sheets of water poured down the black glass.

“Your hands are all right. They were not damaged.”

“No.”

“You’ll still have the same sensitivity in your hands. You can still cook.”

I didn’t say anything. My emotions were too jumbled and in my throat. I was grateful that I could still cook, yes, but all my family’s troubles were because of this woman, and I could not forgive her. At least not yet.

Madame Mallory pulled a package out of her basket, almond and apricot pastries. “Please, try one of my pastries,” she said. I sat up and she leaned over to fluff the pillows behind my back. “Tell me,” she said, turning her back on me and again looking out the window, “what do you taste?”

“Apricot and almond filling.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, there’s also a thin layer of nutmeg and pistachio paste, and the glaze is a lacquer made from egg yolks and honey. And you’ve—let me think—is it almond? No. I know. It’s vanilla. You’ve crushed vanilla pods and worked the powder right into the puff pastry.”

Madame Mallory could not find words. She continued to look out the window, rain pouring down the pane as if some goddess up above were weeping with a broken heart.

And when she did turn around, her eyes glistened like Spanish olives, a single eyebrow arched up, and she stared fiercely at me like that in the dusk until I realized, for the first time, I had the culinary equivalent of perfect pitch.

Mallory finally placed the wax paper and pastries on the portable hospital tray. “Good night,” she said. “I wish you well.”

A few moments later she was out the door again, and I immediately let out a sigh, as the air rushed from the room. Only after she was well and truly gone did I realize how incredibly tense and
sur mes gardes
I had been in her presence.

But she was gone, a great weight was lifted, and I sank back into my bed and closed my eyes.

Well, that’s that, I thought.

The dining room was full when Mallory arrived back at Le Saule Pleureur late that night. Monsieur Leblanc stood at his spot at the reception desk, greeting the guests and taking them to their tables. The white jackets of the junior waiters quickly flashed by the window, silver domes glinting as they were borne aloft among the maze of starched linen tables.

Mallory saw all this from outside, as she stood up to her ankles in snow and looked in silently through the brightly lit windows above her rock garden. She saw the wine steward warming a brandy while Le Comte de Nancy Selière laughed, his gold-capped tooth sparkling in the light. And she watched the count as he lifted a piece of pineapple spice bread to his lips, his aging face suddenly filled with a hedonistic pleasure.

Mallory brought a hand to her throat, moved beyond words at the sight of her life’s work elegantly, effortlessly turning over in the night. And she stood like that in the cold dark for some time, silently observing her staff devoting themselves to the restaurant and its customers, until the exhausting events of the day at long last settled into her weary joints. It was shortly before St. Augustine chimed midnight that Mallory took the back stairs to her attic, finally surrendering body and soul to the rhythms of the night.

“You had me worried,” Monsieur Leblanc scolded the next morning. “We couldn’t find you. I thought, My God, what have I done? What have I done?”

“Ah, cher Henri.”

But that was all the emotion Mallory could express, and she busied herself with the buttons on her cardigan. “You have done nothing wrong,” she said lightly. “Come, let us get back to work. Christmas will be on us soon. It’s time we collected the foie gras.”

Madame Degeneret, the Weeping Willow’s foie gras supplier, lived on the slopes above Clairvaux-les-Lacs. Degeneret was a feisty old woman in her eighties who kept her dilapidated farm ticking over with the income she earned force-feeding a hundred Moulard ducks. And as Leblanc pulled the Citroën into the potholed drive of the old farm, brown ducks, heads held high and quacking, waddled briskly back and forth across the courtyard.