The Point (10 page)

Goneril and Regan. You were just a sperm, Dad, and didn’t even end up being a good one. He hadn’t any hopes of a Cordelia. But maybe one would come. Maybe this Gwyneth was a Cordelia. He was quite certain she wasn’t a Gwyneth.

8

A journalist from one of the colour supplements wanted to interview Flora for a glossy article with photographs about the restaurant. He wanted to come when the evening service was in full production.

No, you can’t possibly, said Flora. Far too dangerous. Boiling water, boiling oil, naked flames, sharp knives. No way. The staff wear steel-toed boots. Kitchens are ugly places.

That’s just what I want to capture.

No. You want to interfere with the machine. A good kitchen is just that, a set of cogs and wheels that spin in their own trajectories and all together work in perfect harmony. Whereas you would be the spanner in the works. Setting it all aglitch and awry. Or worse still, the body in the works, chewed up in some terrible nineteenth-century industrial accident. And endangering others.

We wouldn’t get in the way.

The safety of my staff depends on the skill and familiarity with which they work together. I said the kitchen is a machine. It’s a dance too, you have to know the steps, the movements.

The more you say the more I want to do it.

I don’t want my lovely machine stuffed up by your interfering bloody body, said Flora. Think of the mess. Come early in the afternoon if you must. I can give you half an hour then.

The journalist who is called Bim Becker, a fuzzy-haired charming young-looking man, believes he can spin it out much longer than that. Especially if the photographer runs a bit late.

He begins by asking her about her food as a work of art.

Have you thought about that, she replies. It’s such a glib thing to say. My food is food, it’s meant to be eaten. Think about Cézanne, painting apples, picture in your mind a Cézanne painting of apples. They’re no longer apples, they’re paint on canvas, they’re a work of art. However much they remind us of the originals, the fruit off a tree, they are not they. Those apples withered and were thrown away over a century ago. Or somebody ate them, and that person’s flesh that was nourished by them is dead and buried long ago.

But, says Bim.

And yet, curiously enough, we can believe that Cézanne’s apples are even more essentially apples than the real transient thing ever manages. They are you might say a Platonic idea of apples.

There are different ways of recognising works of art.

Consider a Chardin. A just-killed rabbit, a quince, chestnuts. A piece of salmon, a loaf of bread. He puts two or three things together and there is a painting to break your heart. But who knows what they were like as food? The rabbit may be stringy, the bread stale, the salmon not in its first youth. But the painting: sublime.

Bim leans back and narrows his eyes at her. Hang on, he says, I think you’re falling into the representational fallacy here. Agreed, Cézanne’s apples have little to do with fruit, everything to do with paint. Chardin ditto. But let’s skip the still lifes. I think your food is a work of art in the way, say, a building is, the Parthenon, the Opera House, made of its own necessary raw materials and transcending them.

There’s a difference between stone and wood and marble, and food.

They both exist in space and in time too, though the food in a shorter span of time. Possibly relative. A cake may seem to have a very long life if you’re a butterfly.

Flora frowns. Isn’t this a sort of nonsense?

Okay, one is ephemeral, the other less so. You can compare art forms in a useful way without needing them to be identical. Another comparison: food and music, both one-off performances.

And the recipe the equivalent of the musical score?

Precisely.

Flora is having fun with this man, as she hadn’t expected to.

I always think that recipes are subject to all sorts of errors. So fallible. I hate giving them.

Mozart probably thought that about his music written down.

What about a recording, says Flora. Food may be a recipe, and it also can exist as a memory, but no more. Whereas the performance can be captured in virtually all its power. Philip Glass, conducting his own composition – I can’t do that with a recipe.

You can …

There are so many imponderables with food and its reproduction. A piece of beef is not the same in Canberra as it is in Florence as it is in Tokyo. Peaches may be floury and flavourless, or sunripened and scented. Bread industrial, or artisanal. Cheeses are where and what the animals graze. There is the
terroir
, always the
terroir
, and the care and skill of the grower, the use or not of chemicals and poisons.

Terroir
meaning territory …

More than that, the earth and the climate, the angle of the sun, the rainfall, everything that makes a growing place its individual self.

It’s all terribly poetic, says Bim.

And pedagogic.

Of course the optimum of one of your dishes, where it achieves its highest pinnacle of art, is prepared by you in your kitchen, your territory, and served in your restaurant. But Mozart played by a skilful child on a moderately well-tuned family piano is still absolutely Mozart.

Flora laughs. She makes some of her wonderfully powerful coffee and puts out a plate of Kate’s petits fours. It’s as though Bim has passed a test. He is a clever journalist. She is losing her wariness.

Okay, she says, I do have strong views about my food. And of course it’s not just something nice to eat. It is like any kind of art, it’s craft plus imagination, it’s the dance of the senses and the intellect, elaborate, elegant, strictly patterned yet spontaneous. With all the ambiguities that these things imply. Consider: a dish in its final form is made by the eye, the tongue, the belly and the brain. That makes it, you could say, more complex than any other art form. I think you should feel when you look at it some of the tender awe you feel before a Chardin painting. That this is one person’s view of the simple beauty the world has to offer.

Simple, but also extremely complex.

Heartbreaking simplicity usually is.

Do your customers see all that?

No. Not often. But so far, often enough. Just now and then, someone pays that kind of attention. And, I’m sure you know, artists make art for themselves. It’s nice if people notice, but you do it for yourself. Your own demands, your own standards.

You have to be tough, says Bim. You have to believe in yourself.

Any artist does. They don’t survive, otherwise.

Can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen, eh?

Flora smiles faintly. It’s evident she’s heard this before.

I could make claims, she says. Music is for the ear. Painting for the eye – try touching a Cézanne, however much you want to. Dance is the eye and the ear. Mine is eye and touch and taste and even sometimes hearing.

The musical slurping of soup.

I was thinking more of aural textures – crispness, and such. Mayonnaise, the audible softness of it.

You have the words for what you do, says Bim.

And Flora, after all, lets his photographer take pictures of the kitchen in full working mode, but only through the long window which opens on to the restaurant. Bim does quite a good job of writing her up, he is not dishonest, he uses her words exactly as he taped them, but because he leaves out his, the arguments with which he led her to tell him how she feels, the responsive nature of her passion, she comes across as pontificating, making grand rotund wordy claims for food as art. Spouting a diatribe, humourless and didactic. The journalist with his insistence on making the cook admit her passions is simply absent. Her delicacy disappears, her reticence is invisible. The glamour of the piece is the photographs of the kitchen working, taken on quite a slow shutter speed so the figures of the cooks in their starched jackets and toques are whitish blurs across the precise steel and copper spaces of their surroundings.
The Dance of the Kitchen
, the caption says.
Living
Dangerously
, screams a box heading. The pictured food looks beautiful. Flora is enraged. There, she says, that’s exactly the problem, the eye is involved but not the tongue or the belly or the brain. It’s all diminished. I knew I was right not to want to do it.

She gave the journalist one of her favourite recipes, the tripe dish that is a version of the Lyonnais fireman’s apron, thinking it would be earthly and humble and lacking in pretension, but of course it is long and quite complicated and seems precious, and in words like this not at all delicious.

Your own book, that’s what we need, then you can take control of it, says Elinor.

Maybe, says Flora. That interview shows just how hard it is. After all, I do believe that Bim Becker’s intentions were good.

You were furious. Beside yourself.

Oh yes. But I still think his intentions were good. And yet look how it turns people out. I think I should just cook, not write about it.

9

Jerome usually walked home from The Point. He crossed the sloping lawn and walked up behind the High Court. The night was cold, with a moon and the kind of windy cloud that makes the moon look as though it is scudding across the sky at great speed. He craned his neck back and gazed at it; the illusion was inescapable. Even knowing it wasn’t true couldn’t stop you seeing it. There’s a poem about it.
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed
upon cloudy seas.
‘The Highwayman’.
And the highwayman came
riding – Riding – riding
… Not a terribly good poem, you were supposed to think later, but kids loved it. The highwayman riding to his lover,
The landlord’s black-eyed daughter, Bess, the landlord’s
daughter, Plaiting a dark-red love-knot into her long black
hair.
The highwayman comes riding, riding, but she has been turned into a trap, tied to the bed and bound to a musket so that its muzzle presses into her heart. The forces of good, but evil because they are against the heroes of the poem, expect her lover to come galloping in and they will have him. But when she hears the sound of his horse’s hooves she manages to pull the trigger, and warns him with her death. Saves him with her death. He remembered arguing about it in the playground. Would you do it, would you shoot yourself through the heart to save your lover from capture? He still didn’t know the answer, but expected not. But the poem, the galloping glamorous rhythms of the poem were still in his head.

It was quiet, not silent, plenty of rustlings and stirrings, but no traffic. He took the road beside the High Court. He enjoyed walking alone through the night, thinking about highwaymen and black-haired beauties and the nature of love; he’d get home and do some hours work, Flora’s sublime meal sitting comfortably in his stomach. Even her rich antique peasanty dishes managed a digestive lightness.

There was a violent screaming skidding noise from the road in front of the art gallery, the sort that you expect to hear end in a rending crash of steel and sudden steaming silence. But that didn’t happen, instead a car came hurtling round the corner, weaving from side to side, going too fast for such a narrow road. It was a VW, one that had been cut down into a convertible, and it was full of people. He had a sense of it being stuffed with bodies, pale floppy bodies like celery in a glass, as many as could be shoved in. They were shrieking, laughing, singing. Jerome stepped off the bitumen, there were no footpaths and some hedgy groundcovers grew close to the edge. When the car was only a few metres from him it swerved and mounted the gutter and he realised that it was driving directly towards him, and he threw himself into the prickly bushes. The car swerved back to the road with another shrieking burst of laughter and screamed round the corner and up past the gallery.

His legs were shaking too much to get him out of the bushes. When they calmed down, and his heart stopped flapping like a bird in a cage, gradually he clambered out, scratched, bruised, aching, stinging. His stomach turned over and he vomited his dinner back into the hedge. He knew he should feel grateful he was alive.