Secret Ingredients (67 page)

After he had eaten her food, Mr. Plymbell looked at Miss Tell with a warmer interest. She had come to work for him in his mother’s time, more than fifteen years before. Her hair was still black, her skin was now gray and yellow with a lilac streak on the jaw, there were sharp stains like poor coffee under her eyes. These were brown with a circle of gold in the pupils, and they seemed to burn as if there were a fever in their shadows. Her black coat, her trousers, her cotton blouse were cheap, and even her body seemed to be thin with cheapness. Her speech was awkward, for part of her throat was trying to speak in a refined accent and the effect was half arrogant, half disheartened. Now, as he swallowed the last piece of biscuit, she seemed to him to change. Her eyes were brilliant. She had become quietly a human being.

What is a human being? The chef whom he could see through the hatch was one; Polli, who was looking at the menu by the cash desk, was another; his mother, who had made remarkable ravioli; people like Lady Hackthorpe, who had given such wonderful dinner parties before the war; that circle which the war had scattered and where he had moved from one lunch to the next in a life that rippled to the sound of changing plates that tasted of sauces now never made. These people had been human beings. One knew a human being when the juices flowed over one’s teeth. A human being was a creature who fed one. Plymbell moved his jaws. Miss Tell’s sly smile went. He looked as though he was going to eat
her.

“You had better take the top room at the shop,” he said. “Take the top room if you have nowhere to live.”

“But I haven’t found Tiger,” Miss Tell said. “He must be starving.”

“You won’t be alone,” said Plymbell. “I sleep at the shop.”

Miss Tell considered him. Plymbell could see she was weighing him against Tiger in her mind. He had offered her the room because she had fed him.

“You have had your lunch, I presume,” said Plymbell as they walked back to the shop.

“No—I mean yes. Yes, no,” said Miss Tell secretively, and again there was the blush like a birthmark on her forehead.

“Where do you go?” said Plymbell, making a shameful inquiry.

“Oh,” said Miss Tell defensively, as if it were a question of chastity. “Anywhere. I manage. I vary.” And when she said she varied, Miss Tell looked with a virginal importance first one way and then the other.

“That place starves one,” said Plymbell indignantly. “One comes out of there some days and one is weak with hunger.”

Miss Tell’s flush went. She was taken by one of those rages that shake the voices and the bones of unmarried women, as if they were going to shake the nation by the scruff of its neck. “It’s wrong, Mr. Plymbell. The government ought to give men more rations. A man needs food. Myself, it never worries me. I never eat. Poor mother used to say, ‘Eat, girl, eat.’” A tear came to Miss Tell’s right eye, enlarged it and made it liquid, burning, beautiful. “It was funny, I didn’t seem to fancy anything. I just pick things over and leave them.”

“I never heard of anyone who found the rations too much,” said Mr. Plymbell with horror.

“I hardly touch mine since I was bombed out,” said Miss Tell primly, and she straightened her thin, once humble body, raised her small bosom, which was ribbed like a wicker basket, gave her hair a touch or two, and looked with delicate resolution at Plymbell. “I sometimes think of giving my ration books away,” she said in an offhand way.

Plymbell gaped at the human being in front of him. “Give them away!” he exclaimed.
“Them?”
he said. “Have you got more than one?”

“I’ve got Father’s and Mother’s, too.”

“But one had gathered that the law required one to surrender the official documents of the deceased,” said Plymbell, narrowing his eyes suggestively. His heart had livened, his mouth was watering.

A warm, enticing shamelessness, the conceit, even the voluptuousness, of sin were upon Miss Tell. She moved her erring shoulders, her eyes became larger, her lips drooped. “It’s wicked of me,” she said.

Plymbell took her thin elbow in his hand and contained his anxiety. “I should be very careful about those ration books. I shouldn’t mention it. There was a case in the paper the other day.”

They had reached the door of the shop. “How is Lady Hackthorpe?” Miss Tell asked. “Is she still away?”

Miss Tell had gone too far; she was being familiar. Plymbell put up his monocle and did not reply.

A time of torture began for Plymbell when Miss Tell moved in. He invited her to the cellar on the bad nights, but Miss Tell had become light-headed with fatalism and would not move from her bed on the top floor. In decency Plymbell had to remain in his bed and take shelter no more. Above him slept the rarest of human beings, as Plymbell conceived human beings—a creature who had three ration books, a woman who was technically three people. He feared for her at every explosion. His mouth watered when he saw her: the woman with three books who did not eat and who thought only of how hungry Tiger must be. If he could have turned himself into a cat!

At one point Plymbell decided that Miss Tell was like Lady Hackthorpe with her furniture; Miss Tell wanted money. He went to the dark corner behind a screen between his own office and the shop, where sometimes she sewed. When he stood by the screen he was nearly on top of her. “If,” he said in a high, breaking voice that was strange even to himself, “if you are ever thinking of
selling
your books…”

He had made a mistake. Miss Tell was mending and the needle was pointing at him as she stood up. “I couldn’t do that,” she said. “It is forbidden by the law.” And she looked at him strictly.

Plymbell gaped before her hypocrisy. Miss Tell’s eyes became larger, deeper, and liquid in the dusk of the corner where she worked. Her chin moved up in a number of amused, resentful movements; her lips moved. Good God, thought Plymbell, is she eating? Her thin arms were slack, her body was inert. She continued to move her dry lips. She leaned her head sideways and raised one eye. Plymbell could not believe what he saw. Miss Tell was plainly telling him: “Yes, I
have
got something in my mouth. It is the desire to be kissed.”

Or was he wrong? Plymbell was not a kissing man. His white, demanding face was indeed white with passion, and his lips were shaped for sensuous delicacy, but the passion of the gourmet, the libidinousness of the palate gave him his pallor. He had felt desire, in his way, for Lady Hackthorpe, but it had been consummated in bisques, in crêpes, in
flambées,
in
langouste
done in many manners, in
ailloli,
in bouillabaisse and vintage wines. That passion had been starved, and he was perturbed by Miss Tell’s signal. One asks oneself (he reflected, going to his office and considering reproachfully his mother’s photograph, which stood on his desk)—one asks oneself whether or not a familiar adage about Nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum has not a certain relevance, and indeed whether one would not be justified in coining a vulgar phrase to the effect that when one shuts the front door on Nature, she comes in at the back. Miss Tell was certainly the back; one might call her the scullery of the emotions.

Plymbell lowered his pale eyelids in a flutter of infidelity, unable honestly to face his mother’s stare. Her elderly aquiline nose, her close-curled silver hair tipped with a touch of fashionable idiocy off the forehead, her too-jeweled, hawking, grabbing, slapdash face derided him for the languor of the male symptom, and at the same time, with the ratty double-facedness of her sex, spoke sharply about flirtations with employees. Plymbell’s eyes lied to her image. All the same, he tried to calm himself by taking a piece of violet notepaper and dashing off a letter to Lady Hackthorpe. Avocado pear, he wrote, whitebait (did she think?),
bœuf bourguignon,
or what about
dindonneau
in those Italian pastes? It was a letter crisp, in his fashion, with the glittering stare of lust. He addressed the envelope, and, telling Miss Tell to post it, Plymbell pulled down the points of his slack waistcoat and felt saved.

So saved that when Miss Tell came back and stood close to his desk, narrow and flat in her horrible trousers, and with her head turned to the window, showing him her profile, Plymbell felt she was satirically flirting with his hunger. Indignantly he got up and, before he knew what he was doing, he put his hand under her shoulder blade and kissed her on the lips.

A small frown came between Miss Tell’s eyebrows. Her lips were tight and set. She did not move. “Was that a bill you sent to Lady Hackthorpe?” she asked.

“No,” said Plymbell. “A personal letter.”

Miss Tell left his office.

Mr. Plymbell wiped his mouth on his handkerchief. He was shocked by himself; even more by the set lips, the closed teeth, the hard chin of Miss Tell; most of all by her impertinence. He had committed a folly for nothing and he had been insulted.

The following morning Plymbell went out on his weekly search for food, but he was too presumptuous for the game. In the coarse world of provisions and the black market, the monocle was too fine. Plymbell lacked the touch; in a long day all he managed to get was four fancy cakes. Miss Tell came out of her dark corner and looked impersonally at him. He was worn out.

“No offal,” he said in an appalled, hoarse voice. “No offal in the whole of London.”

“Ooh,” said Miss Tell, quick as a sparrow. “I got some. Look.” And she showed him her disgusting, bloodstained triumph on its piece of newspaper.

Never had Miss Tell seemed so common, so flagrant, so lacking in sensibility, but, also, never had she seemed so desirable. And then, as before, she became limp and neutral and she raised her chin. There were the unmistakable crumb-licking movements of her lips. Plymbell saw her look sideways at him as she turned. Was she inviting him to wipe out the error of the previous day? With one eye on the meat, Plymbell made a step toward her, and in a moment Miss Tell was on him, kissing him, openmouthed and with frenzy, her fingernails in his arms, and pressing herself to him to the bone.

“Sweetbreads,” she said. “For you. I never eat them. Let me cook them for you.”

An hour later she was knocking at the door of his room and carrying a loaded tray. It was laid, he was glad to notice, for one person only. Plymbell said, “One had forgotten what sweetbreads were.”

“It was nothing. I have enjoyed your confidence for fifteen years,” said Miss Tell in her poetic style. And the enlarged eyes looked at him with an intimate hunger.

That night, as usual, Plymbell changed into a brilliant dressing gown, and, standing before the mirror, he did his hair, massaging with the fingers, brushing first with the hard ivory brush and then with the soft one. As he looked into the glass, Miss Tell’s inquiring face kept floating into it, displacing his own.

“Enjoyed my confidence!” said Plymbell. “The devil she has! What is she up to? What does she want?”

In her bedroom Miss Tell turned out the light, drew back the curtains, and looked into the London black and at the inane triangles of the searchlights. She stood there listening. “Tiger, Tiger,” she murmured. “Where are you? Why did you go away from me? I miss you in my bed. Are you hungry? I had a lovely dinner ready for you—sweetbreads. I had to give it to him because you didn’t come.”

In answer, the hungry siren went like the wail of some monstrous, disembodied Tiger, like all the dead cats of London restless beyond the grave.

Miss Tell drew the curtains and lay down on her bed. “Tiger,” she said crossly, “if you don’t come tomorrow, I shall give everything to him. He needs it. Not that he deserves it. Filling up the shop with that woman’s furniture, storing it free of charge, writing her letters, ruining himself for her. I hate her. I always have. I don’t understand him and her, how she gets away with it, owing money all round. She’s got a hold—”

The guns broke out. They were like an open declaration of war upon Lady Hackthorpe.

Tiger did not come back, and rabbit was dished up for Plymbell. He kissed Miss Tell a third time. It gave him the agreeable sensation that he was doing something for the war. After the fourth kiss, Plymbell became worried. Miss Tell had mentioned stuffed veal. She had spoken of mushrooms. He had thoughtlessly exceeded in his embrace. He had felt for the first time in his life—voluptuousness; he had discovered how close to eating kissing is, and as he allowed his arm to rest on Miss Tell’s lower-class waist, he had had the inadvertent impression of picking up a cutlet in his fingers. Plymbell felt he had done enough for the vanity of Miss Tell. He was in the middle of this alarmed condition when Miss Tell came into his office and turned his alarm to consternation.

“I’ve come to give my notice,” she said in her poetic style.

Plymbell was appalled. “What is wrong, Miss Tell?” he said.

“Nothing’s wrong,” said Miss Tell. “I feel I am not needed.”

“Have I offended you?” said Plymbell suspiciously. “Is it money?”

Miss Tell looked sharply. She was insulted. “No,” she said. “Money is of no interest to me. I’ve got nothing to do. Trade’s stopped.”

Plymbell made a speech about trade.

“I think I must have got”—Miss Tell searched for a word and lost her poetic touch—“browned off,” she said, and blushed. “I’ll get a job in a canteen. I like cooking.”

Plymbell in a panic saw not one woman but three women leaving him. “But you are cooking for me,” he said.

Miss Tell shrugged.

“Oh yes, you are. Miss Tell—be my housekeeper.”

Good God, thought Plymbell afterward, so that was all she wanted. I needn’t have kissed her at all.

How slowly one learns about human nature, he thought. Here was a woman with one simple desire: to serve him—to slave for him, to stand in queues, to cook, to run his business, do everything. And who, to crown all, did not eat.

“I shall certainly not kiss her again,” he said.

At this period of his life, with roofs leaving their buildings and servants leaving their places all round him, Plymbell often reflected guardedly upon his situation. There was, he had often hinted, an art in keeping servants. He appeared, he noted, to have this art. But would he keep it? What was it? Words of his mother’s came back to him: “Miss Tell left a better job and higher wages to come to me. This job is more flattering to her self-importance.” “Never consider them, never promise; they will despise you. The only way to keep servants is to treat them like hell. Look at Lady Hackthorpe’s couple. They’d die for her. They probably will.”