The Point (8 page)

You’re very brave, they say.

No I’m not. I’m just not stupid.

And anyway, she says, Flora and I are on a quest for the perfect sandwich.

But she doesn’t serve sandwiches, they say.

Maybe that’s why.

Always after these lunches Elinor says to Ivan, I worry about Flora. She works too hard. She’s so driven. And so sad.

Talking to Ivan at moments like this is marginally better than talking to herself. He says things like mm.

She needs to stop being so serious and committed and intellectual. Mmm?

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things. Just not all the time. She needs to lighten up. Fall in love. Get emotional. Get involved in something a bit more reciprocal than food.

Get laid.

That’s her business.

Isn’t it all?

We should find her a nice bloke.

We …

Except there aren’t any. Or the ones there are are gay.

Mmm.

Ivan isn’t always so taciturn. It’s only because he’s been in this conversation so often. He could get irritated and say, We’ve said all this a hundred times, but he doesn’t. He agrees with Elinor. Just finds it hard to react as though it were new.

After a while Ivan says: It’s being a perfectionist. Nothing is ever good enough.

She’s hired a dishwasher because his grandfather was a butler, says Elinor.

Really? Is he a good dishwasher?

She’s got no idea. She says he has a vision of good washing up. Copper sinks and all that.

When she writes that book she can do a chapter on the metaphysics of dishwashing, says Ivan.

That bloody book.

Maybe if she stopped reading Bakhtin and just wrote it, says Ivan.

I don’t think it’s that simple.

Flora’s book is another worry to Elinor. It is about food but she doesn’t want to put any recipes in. She despises her fellow chefs (she says cooks) who jump on the bandwagon of recipe purveying. She wants to write a book that is metaphysical and philosophical, the kind that might get the lead article in the
New York Review of
Books
. About food but not about how to cook it. Though occasionally that might get a mention, in an archetypal way.

It’s not surprising that it’s not getting done, says Ivan. I’m not sure that it can be. There’s a limit to food’s being metaphysical.

Hush your mouth, says Elinor. Remember Mrs Barker. This week you do the silver. That month the books. Another the pictures. She had a philosophy of cleaning.

Really only a theory. Not even that. A plan of work.

Mrs Barker came with the house they’d rented in Cambridge, in Park Terrace. They’d decided they couldn’t afford her until they saw the house. A noble Regency edifice. Five floors, and tall ones. Kitchen in the basement. Mrs Barker used to be a bedmaker at Emmanuel. Now in her way she owned the things in the house, like the family silver, because she looked after them. Her husband worked for the railways, his job was shovelling snow off the lines. They didn’t think at the time to ask what he did when it wasn’t snowing.

What about our Pat, says Elinor.

Our Pat, groaned Ivan.

You can groan, but she did okay with our house. Cleaning was what she did in life. What she enjoyed. Remember she told me that when she didn’t have anything to do she cleaned her own house, even though it was perfectly clean, she’d just done it, she’d do it again. Just for fun.

And painted the rocks in the garden white.

Yes. You could wish there were more people around who loved housework as an idea, and wanted to be part of it.

But not painting rocks white.

No.

And anyway, cleaning. It’s not food.

I was thinking of visions of washing up.

They were eating dinner while having this conversation. Elinor didn’t cook anything amazing after being out with Flora. This evening she’d made a
puttanesca
. Whore’s spaghetti. Why whore’s? Because it is made from the ingredients you have in your larder, olives, capers, tinned tomatoes, anchovies, onions, not things that you have gone to the market and bought especially, like a virtuous housewife. The pasta of working women, says Elinor, who have no time to shop. Not on this occasion does she tell him this, Ivan has heard the story of whore’s pasta many times.

We should be feeding a whole lot of little wosbirds, she says.

This is new; Ivan looks at her, you could say he pricks up his ears, not literally, but his eyes crinkle in an ear-pricking glance.

Wosbirds, says Elinor, with satisfaction, the children of a whore.

That’s good, says Ivan, who enjoys finding a new word as much as Elinor does, new to him, of course, wosbird itself isn’t, it’s archaic and probably dead. Interesting, he goes on, wosbird, the child of a whore; wouldn’t you expect it to be pronounced hosbird?

You’re right, says Elinor. I’ll have to pursue that.

Flora did wonder if she’d been a bit romantic about Joe. Not because he wasn’t any good at dishwashing. She expected him to learn that. She told Elinor that she thought he had absorbed rather more of his grandfather’s work habits than was altogether useful. Practically expected to live on the job. I can’t get him to go home, she said. He’s always there. Always wanting to be given something to do.

Maybe he doesn’t have a home to go to, said Elinor.

Oh, do you think so? Oh, good grief.

Weren’t lower servants allowed to sleep under the table, near the stove, keeping warm?

Were they? Maybe in grand houses. Or Russian novels. Not in restaurants. Oh god. I suppose I better ask him if he’s got anywhere to live.

Might be better not to know.

Flora saw a lot of young people wanting work in her restaurant. Whenever she advertised, queues of them turned up. Even when she didn’t there was a traffic of them to her door. When it was a matter of choosing a dishwasher as useful a guide as any was likely to be something as esoteric as a knowledge of copper sinks, which Flora also had, having seen them in grand houses that still had working sculleries; in her publishing days she’d done a book on heritage gardens, and they often belonged to houses with sculleries and flower rooms and whole sets of offices where once were servants to keep life running smoothly. Dishwashers: the work was awful, there is no easy way to scrub pots, people came and went, it was rare to meet somebody who considered it the start of a career path.

The young people who wanted to cook were another matter. There were a lot of them, some starry-eyed about the glamour of being a chef. You’ll see yourself as a cook, one day, she said. But not yet. First you’ll be an apprentice. I run my kitchen strictly on hierarchical lines. She’d learned she needed to explain that. An order from the top to the bottom, she said. You’re at the bottom, I’m at the top. You obey me, no questions. A kitchen in full working mode is like a battle. Life and death depends on the chain of command. I’m the general. Disobedience is death.

That often put the stars out. But anyway, Flora believed she could see at a glance the ones who would never make it. The sluggish ones, the slow-footed, the overweight, the heavy breathers who would not have the stamina or the energy to do the work at the speed required. The ones who sniggered down at her small person when she told them she was boss. Then there were the lean ones, their eyes bright not with stars but with desire. Some of them might get there.

She made her little speech to them. The people who cook for me are good workers, she would say. Good workers: examine those two words. Honest workers, who believe in the integrity of the task and the importance of doing it well. This is especially honourable in the case of cooking, because of the ephemeral nature of the product, the brevity of the moment before it is mussed about on a plate and consumed, or maybe not consumed, just mussed and destroyed and thrown away. Or thrown away hardly touched, in all its heartbreaking perfection. And the fact that you have charged a great deal of money for the dish won’t help: it is its closeness to perfection that is your only reward. You’ll need courage and skill and stamina and strength, and your return will be first and finally the satisfaction of the job properly done. You’ll be paid, but not a lot at the beginning. You may earn a reputation and a following and make a great career, but all of this will only come from the job well done. A job that is slog and craft and technique and skill and occasionally art, and maybe once in a lifetime genius.

But these admonitions were not for Joe. His job was washing dishes. The kind of job that kids applied for so they could stay on the dole; they behaved outrageously so they would get fired and go back on the dole again. Part of a bureaucratic rigmarole, which they played like a game.

On the other hand, even the apprentices chosen for their litheness and leanness, their speed of hand and foot and eye, their capacity for close attention, even they didn’t always make it. It’s a matter of will, she said to them, whether you have the will to make yourself a good cook. The desire and the will, and both in your gut like a worm gnawing, craving the best. Zola writes about a tapeworm. It lives in a woman’s stomach and twists it up unless she feeds it the finest delicacies. It likes a nice bit of chicken. A terrible expense for a poor woman, her whole life is feeding the worm. Make what you will of that.

By the way they gaped at her they made little of it. They were commis chefs, not students of literature.

I recommend Zola to you, she said.
L’Assommoir
, that particular novel is, with the tapeworm in it. The name means something like the grog shop, serving the kind of crude spirits that knock you out. It’s a novel about food, in a very strange way. It uses eating as an image of evil, and a sexual one at that. You can’t read too widely when you want to be a good cook.

Joe waited behind, after the others had gone. He looked at her a little slyly. You can cure the tapeworm, you know. You swallow a grilled mouse and that poisons it.

Flora looked at him, astonished. You’ve read
L’Assommoir
?

Joe grinned. I can’t pronounce it. My grandfather had books. Not a lot, he’d read them one by one and when he’d finished he’d start with the first one again. A good book just gets better, my mum said he used to say. We took them with us, it was something to do, out there, reading. I dunno that I always understood them, but still.

Are you sure you want to be a dishwasher, Flora asks.

It’s a start, says Joe. I don’t have to stay a dishwasher forever.

7

The man who sometimes sleeps on the ferry wharf, now sitting on a seat by one of the lake’s sandy beaches where boats can be pulled up, he has walked right round to the other side, sees two pelicans come in to land. Directly facing him. Their round bodies hanging below their outspread wings make him think of Catalina flying-boats. They are followed by two black swans. Together they come in, together settle on the water, together sail away. He watches them until they are small black smudges on the pewter-coloured lake, sailing up and down it seems for the simple pleasure of it. Because that is what swans do. In their companionship they are an image of fidelity, of serene couplehood. There’s a poem, he remembers, about swans and marriage. He can only think of one line.
Sweet
day, so calm, so fair, so bright
… it’s as though the Antipodes has turned all those things upside down. It’s a sunless day, the sky is full of purplish clouds with only occasionally a hint of sun like polished metal between them. The trees are full of winter, the rows of poplars bunched bundles of sticks, the claret ash and the elms spreading their branches like nets. The lake that grey colour it nearly always is. And sailing on the choppy water, the swans, black. You couldn’t get anything more different from the sparkling blue white green of the poem – Spenser, that’s who it is. A wedding poem.

He dozes, and when he wakes up the shallow curve of the bay is full of swans. A woman and a child in a pusher are feeding them bread. He counts forty-four swans, there’d be even more ducks, the seagulls numberless, and a solitary goose. Feral, it would be, a fat and juicy bird, safe so far from the table. And two pelicans, one at either side of the narrow bay, like statues to a portal, uninterested in bread.

After that, he often notices black swans in faithful pairs sliding over the lake’s surface. Sometimes they sail with the current, other times they turn upstream and you can see them breasting the choppy water, rocking up and down as it streams past them.
Sweet
day, so calm, so fair, so bright
, he thinks, and wishes he knew more. One day his eyes fix on the library. The poem would be in there. He could go to the toilets at the gallery, the ones in the garden, spruce up, brush down, go and find a book of Spenser’s poems.
Sweet day
… maybe he will.

The nights are cold. You need a lot of grog to get through a cold winter night. It means you aren’t so sharp in the morning. Not exactly hungover. Not so bad you need another dose of poison before you can get on with the day. Just a bit slow and sleepy. Perhaps one night he could lay off. For a poem? Good practice perhaps. Prove that he’s not an alcoholic. Only ever red wine. For the cold. And the time passing. The good warm haziness of it. They’re all so long ago, those words he remembers. What did he read in recent years? He recalls books, on the coffee table, on the back seat of the car. Glossy pictures. One about French villages. And all those Tuscan renovations. Books you glance at idly, sipping a glass of champagne, waiting for the guests to arrive, the television program to start. Or novels people are talking about, that you mean to read, knowing you won’t, and that nobody else has either, they’re just talking about them. His wife bought them, that was her job, to furnish their lives. His to pay the credit card bills. Bestsellers, they usually were, out of the papers, the weekend book pages, the glossy magazines. He remembered one with a picture on its cover of a girl sitting starkers on a toilet, holding her ankles. He’d flicked it open and read a bit, some chick having diarrhoea in a taxi. Not so lucky as the one on the cover. Of course she’s not sitting on the toilet, his wife said, but he reckoned she was.
Sweet day,
so calm, so fair, so bright
… there was a wedding in the silver birches one afternoon. The bride in a short white dress and a veil that the wind plucked at, she had to keep grabbing it with one hand and her dress rode up and he could see the curve of her bottom under her lace knickers. So it seemed to him, sitting on the lake wall nearby. He imagined his hand just resting there, fitting into that curve where her bottom turned into her thigh. He stared at the pale brown flesh, but somehow he could not feel it in his hand. He could not touch it, even in his head.