The Devil's Larder (10 page)

I
T IS, IN FACT
, my twenty-seventh birthday today. I do not have the courage to phone home. I’m going out with friends tonight to celebrate. But in
the hours I had to kill this afternoon I went down to the market streets far below my small apartment to treat myself. A book, the latest Bosse CD and a bunch of local grapes. Black grapes. In
these supermarket days those are the only ones with any pips.

Like almost every guilty man who has neglected home and family, I am a sentimentalist. I placed the CD on the stereo, selected its romantic track. I burst my twenty-seven homesick grapes between
my teeth and stored the almost sixty pips against the soft side of my mouth. Of course, I had no dancing witnesses. I counted down from ten to one myself, silently, hardly daring to move my lips.
Then, standing at the open window, I threw back my head and spat my disappointments out into the street. Before I had the chance to look, I heard the clatter of my twenty-seven birthdays strike the
windscreens and the roofs of passing cars. In that same instant, I glimpsed a shaded stretch of water far beyond the town, a stand of trees, abandoned tables, and the turning circle of my
half-remembered friends, smiling, smiling, but with no one at their centre from whom to take the impact of those past forgiven years.

T
HERE IS
no greater pleasure than to be expected at a meal and not arrive.

While the first guests were standing in the villa’s lobby with their wet hair and their dry wine, their early efforts at a conversation saved and threatened by fresh arrivals at the door,
he was driving slowly in the rain along the coastal highway, enjoying his loud absence from the room, enjoying first the cranes and depots of the port, and then the latest condominiums, the
half-glimpsed bypassed villages with their dead roads, the banks of coastal gravel, the wind, the darkness and the trees.

While they were being seated at the dining table and were thinking – those who knew him – Lui’s always late, he was taking pleasure from the water on the tarmac, the old movie
romance of the windscreen wipers and the dashboard lights, the prospect of the speedy, starless, hungry night ahead.

At what point would his sister, or her husband George, dial his home (discreetly from another room) to get only the answerphone and leave the message . . . What? Was he OK? Had he forgotten that
they’d asked him round to eat with friends? Would he come late? Was he aware what trouble he’d put them to? Would he arrive in time to charm the sweet young teacher that they’d
found and placed at his left elbow?

At what point would his plate, his napkin and his cutlery be gathered up and two women be asked to shift their chairs along to fill his place and break the gendered pattern at the table?

At what point would his hostess say ‘It’s not like him at all’?

While they were eating in his absence – a sweetcorn soup, a choice of paddock lamb or vegetarian risotto, Mother Flimsy’s tart with brandy – he was driving with one hand and,
with the other, breaking pieces off his chocolate bar. He was dreaming repartee and dreaming manners of a king, and being far the smartest, sharpest person in the room.

While they were sitting in his sister’s long salon, for coffee and a little nip of Boulevard Liqueur, and getting cross about some small remark their host had made at their expense, Lui
reached the hundred-kilometre mark that he had set himself. He took the exit from the highway, slowed down to drive the narrow underpass – sixty sobering metres of bright lights, dry road,
wind-corralled litter, a couple sheltering – and turned on to the opposite lane. He headed back towards the town and home, another hundred k, a hundred k less cinematic, less romantic, and
more futile than the journey out.

The rain, now coming from the right, presented unexpected angles for the car. It tilted at the windscreen with more percussion than before. He had to put his wipers on their fastest setting. The
smell was weather, chocolate, gasoline. The skyline warmed and lifted with its fast-advancing lights, those attic rooms, those bars, those streets, those television sets, those sweeping cars and
cabs, those marriages that brighten up the night.

His eyes were sore and tired. His mouth was dry. He’d have to concentrate to take his pleasure from the drive, his safe and happy absence from the room, his prudent, timid, well-earned
thirst. He put a steady glass up to his lips and sipped. Dipped his spoon into the sweetcorn soup. Chose the lamb. Nodded at the windscreen wipers for a second helping of the tart. How witty he
could be, how certain in his views, how helpful with the wine, how neat and promising. The pretty woman on his left extended her slim arm and squeezed his hand by way of thanks for his good
company, and slipped out of the room into his car, a passenger, an absentee, the gender pattern at the table restored. He broke his chocolate bar in half and shared with her the unfed, midnight
journey into town.

H
E KEPT
a curved plate in the middle of his kitchen table, with carvings on its edge. The sun, the moon, some leaves, some stars. It wasn’t old or
valuable, but it was natural wood, unvarnished and hand-decorated. Each day, first thing, once he had done his lifts and bends, he placed his titbits on the plate, food to see off death. Pumpkin
seeds to protect the prostate. Bran for bowels. Brazil nuts for their selenium. Dried apricots. French pitted prunes. Linseed. A tomato. There were no supplements or vitamins. He had no confidence
in pills. Then he drank his green leaf tea with honey from the comb. He was a regimented man, well organized, reliable. He kept his diet up, without a break, until the day he died.

O
NE SUMMER HOLIDAY
, when I was nine or thereabouts, living in the blocks behind the port, my mother got me out from underneath her feet by setting up a
game of pass the cake. It was, she promised me, a way of finding out what kind of neighbour, wife and cook I’d be when I grew up, and also a lesson in the Expansion of Good Deeds.

The proper way to pass the cake, she said (making me write down her instructions) was this: on Friday, I should pour a single cup containing sugar, milk and flour into a covered bowl, take it
down with me into the yard and whistle for my gang of girls. We’d have to find a secret place, away from cats and rats and boys, to hide the bowl. On Saturday, all the girls should gather
round and take their turn at stirring the mixture and making a wish.

Sunday was the day of rest, so we’d do nothing to the bowl all day, except to say a prayer for it: ‘Dear God, don’t let the boys sniff out our cake.’ On Monday, I would
have to add another cup of sugar, milk and flour; on Tuesday, everybody should stir the mixture, make a wish again; on Wednesday, yet another cup from me; on Thursday, stir and wish a final
time.

When the second Friday came around, it would be my honour to remove two cups of mixture from my bowl and give them to two friends to start their own cakes, to add and stir and mix with help from
all of us throughout the following week. ‘One cake, you see, produces two.’

Once my cake had given birth to twins, my mother said, I could take what I had left inside my bowl, and come upstairs to see what she had to spare, an egg, some oil, some apple and sultanas,
perhaps, or the last jam in the jar. And once I’d mixed these extras in – so long as I did not clutter up the kitchen for too long – I could bake my cake in the family oven. Then
all I had to do was eat it up on Saturday, outside, sharing it with the girls and looking forward to sharing theirs in all the weeks ahead.

If everybody played their part and kept their faith, then my cake would have produced four unbaked grandchildren by the following Friday, mother explained, jotting down the figures underneath
the recipe, eight unbaked great-grandchildren within the fortnight, and 1,024 fully cooked descendants within twelve weeks of the game starting. ‘Before the year is up that little cup of
sugar, milk and flour will have fed the world,’ she said, pushing me towards the door. I was content to let her rest while I ran down to the gang with my astounding bowl.

That was the proper way to pass the cake. But, when you’re nine or thereabouts, a week is an eternity. We could not wait. We sat, the dozen in our gang, out in the stairwell with our bowls
and her instructions, and bred our future generations in an afternoon. At one o’clock we put my starting cup of sugar, milk and flour in my bowl. At five past one we stirred and wished. By
one thirty-five, we’d filled two more bowls, our eldest twins, and were already cooking the first cake. In less than six hours, by our reckoning, we would have made 10,000 wishes, offered up
a multitude of prayers, and passed the cake into every household in the Blocks. We would, indeed, have fed the world within the two weeks of our holidays, we would have made the generations
hunger-free, if there had been (there never are) sufficient girls and bowls.

H
ERE IS HIS NAME
, written in our register the day before he died: Toby Erickson, in capitals, above his signature, his home address (illegible), his
phone number, his fax. He’d come to stay for four nights, for the angling. He seemed polite and well-to-do and not unsettled by his own company or by the dumbing prospects of the sea.

On the first morning – a beryl sky, with hardly any wind – he phoned down to our jetty house to hire a motor boat and a set of sea rods with some bait. He planned to anchor out in
the drift stream, amongst the floods of migrating fish. He’d set his heart, he said, on catching tad. Not easy with a hook and line. A friend of his – and one he needed to impress
– would dine with him that evening, so could we cook the tads he caught? Of course we could, we said. Our chef’s a genius with fish. ‘Good angling, Mr Erickson. We have prepared a
packed lunch for your trip.’

Here are his signatures again – the boatman’s log, insurance forms, acknowledgements that he had read the boat-hire safety file. This listed all the dangers and the protocols:
fouling the propellers in the wrack, being pushed onto the west side of the low-tide buoys, using emergency flares, always wearing a safety line and a buoyancy suit, giving way to sail, staying
within clear sight of the hotel. ‘Remember: Our seas are prone to sudden swells’, it warned in red. It’s a pity no one thought to caution him about the lunch.

Here is the list of foodstuffs in our ‘Gourmet Picnic Lunch for Anglers’. It is a feast: one cold-meat baguette with cornichons, rye slices from the bakery, a Baby Camembert, a
casket of salad vegetables, fresh seasonal fruit, a choice of home-baked mini-pastries, Swiss chocolate, a flask of filter coffee (select from Java/ Harrar/mocha) or hot water with infusions, a
half of our house white, your pick of bottled beers. Who’d think that there were any hazards there?

The boatman checked on Mr Erickson with his binoculars throughout the day. There was, he says, a pancake sea and barely a cloud, so nothing to cause concern. The boat was anchored on the clear
side of the wrack with its outboard lifted and correctly tucked. Three fixed rods had been deployed. The gentleman was sitting midships, wearing his yellow buoyancy suit and a straw hat. It was the
warmest, stillest day for weeks and not especially good for catching tad. The tad likes choppy seas and hates harsh light. The boatman judged it was the safest afternoon for him to leave his post
and drive down to the town ‘for business and a drink’.

The friend arrived a little after seven in the evening and took her aperitif out onto the terrace to wait for the fishing boat to lift its anchor and come home. We joked with her.
‘He’ll not return, your friend, until he’s caught his tad for dinner.’ Here is the bar chit that she set against his room. And here’s her signature.

Nobody noticed when the woman gave up hope and left. And nobody noticed, as the dark set in, that Mr Toby Erickson was still at sea. This is a busy place at night. Chef had more than fifty
covers to cook for. And all the hotel’s rooms were booked.

Next morning, the boatman went out in the launch with our manager to bring the body in. It was a little choppier, a better day for catching fish. Our guest was still sitting midships, stiff as
wood. He’d caught his tad that night, but hadn’t had the chance to play it in and lift it off the hook. An open bottle had spilled beer onto the deck. What remained of the
‘Gourmet Picnic Lunch for Anglers’ was being picked clean by gulls. The rescue flare had been unpacked from its holdings but had not been fired. There was evidence – again picked
clean by gulls – of vomiting. It seemed his death had not been swift. We guessed – incorrectly – he’d had a heart attack or stroke.

We have a protocol: a hotel has at least one death a year. There is a laundry room which can be used for corpses. They had to dislocate his shoulder blade to get the buoyancy suit off so that he
was presentable. His face was yellow. Like the suit. The police were called. Somebody phoned the contact number that he’d written in the register to give the sad news to the stranger at the
other end.

H
OW DID HE DIE
? Just when? There are no documents to say. But once the magistrates had finished their reports, and diagnostic tests had been returned
from the laboratories, the agent of his death was named. The culprit was a home-baked mini-pastry, which chef had filled with country-canned asparagus. Low-acid vegetables that have been canned by
amateurs at room temperature, it seems, are rich in vitamins and poisons. Under such conditions poisons multiply. Here is the Chemical Analysis, which shows that Mr Erickson’s mini-pastry
– and the remaining contents of the can – was rich enough in the neuro-toxin
Clostridium botulinum
to slay a team of horses. He would have found his vision blurred at first.
He’d be dry-mouthed, a little weak. Nothing to panic about. He’d blame it on the gently rocking boat. He might have dozed and, when he woke, felt stiff and rheumatoid – first
signs of his paralysis, the clamping of his lungs, his loss of reflex and the wrenching pain. If only chef had made another fifty little pies, he could have put a corpse in every room.