I loved the degree of difficulty this challenge set and immediately sprang into action. First, I called Berthillon to make sure the flavour would be available as some were strictly seasonal.
‘Oui, madame,’ the voice on the phone responded with plangent serenity.
I explained that I needed to take it with me on the plane to London (this was in pre-Eurostar days).
‘Aucun souci, madame, nous pouvons vous préparer un petit coffret congélateur.’ Perfect: they would provide a chill box to keep the ice cream from melting for a limited amount of time.
I arranged to fly to London, change planes there, fly on to Paris for a couple of days to get over jet lag so that I would be fully alert once I reached my parents’ home.
On the second day, bristling with the purpose of a secret mission, I walked to the Ile Saint-Louis, joined the eternal queue at the Berthillon Tea Rooms in the Rue Saint-Louis en L’Ile with scores of tourists—mostly American—and placed my order. It all went without a hitch. Soon I was speeding to the airport with my cooler packed with ice. When I boarded the plane, I handed the box to a flight attendant and asked her if she could store it for me in one of the galley fridges. She obliged without raising an eyebrow or asking to see the contents. Imagine that happening today.
At Heathrow, my mother met me with an insulated food bag, having snuck out of the house on a pretext. Although she was a mess of nerves, both of us revelled in our collusion and hoodwinkery.
‘You ring the bell. I’ll wait in the car,’ she said when we reached home.
When my father opened the door, his face was neutral, prepared to say a polite but firm ‘No thank you, not today’ to someone offering to wash his car or asking him to donate to charity. When he saw me, he did a violent double-take: his head swung back in a whiplash jolt. His whole body followed in a jerky lurch. He stumbled backwards, as if edging away from a vision in horror. I was his Banquo’s ghost, come to spoil his imminent feast. It was as if his brain could not trust the evidence of his eyes. It lasted about a second, but it shocked me into realising I might be causing a heart attack. I had not thought this through. I had not calculated the impact of such a surprise. I had not factored in health and age considerations. I might kill my father there and then.
My mother watched from behind me, horrified. She, too, thought my father was about to die. In which case, she would be complicit, an accessory. Guilt froze her face into a frown of concern.
By the time all this had registered, the cogs in my father’s brain had aligned and begun whirring smoothly enough for him to fall forward on to me, in a heavy embrace. I carried the weight of him, wondering if my knees would buckle and we would both fall to the floor. Somehow, we made it inside, my father’s eyes watering with emotion. I took the chill box from my mother.
‘I brought you something,’ I said, suddenly awkward and embarrassed at how vulnerable the moment had made my father.
‘I’ll just get lunch ready,’ said my mother, happy to escape the charged atmosphere by fleeing into the kitchen, her customary refuge.
My father opened the chill box and read the lid of the ice cream container. He looked up in disbelief.
‘You mean you … ?’
He could not even finish the sentence.
I nodded.
Bewildered, he shook his head, lifted the lid of the tub, dipped a finger into the rose pink mixture flecked with tiny seeds. My heart swelled with pride. My father began to sob, his shoulders heaving. We stood there, laughing, crying, too bashfully shy of the tidal wave of emotion surging between us to look at each other.
‘Come on, you two, lunch will be ruined,’ said my mother, briskly ushering us into the dining room where she had cleared away all her sewing paraphernalia and set the table with the best bone china, crystal and silver.
Over a champagne lunch, Papa made me tell him every minute detail of my plot, as if replaying a favourite film sequence in slow motion to catch every frame: exactly how I had made the arrangements, deceived him, enlisted the help of my mother to distract him.
‘Of course I will pay your airfare,’ he said, with the customary munificence he always used to smother anyone’s attempt at generosity. I shook my head vehemently. No. Not this time. For once, he did not insist.
We ate the ice cream as if we were slightly tipsy, merry with elation and infectious congeniality. Old wounds and grievances set aside or forgotten, we licked our spoons in sync, sugar flooding our veins and tricking our minds into an insulin-spiked state of benign bliss. Every mouthful or so, my father would look up at me in disbelief, as if he needed to check I was not going to disappear as suddenly as I had appeared.
Of course this loved-up truce did not last. It held longer than it took for the sweetness to stabilise in our bloodstreams, but within days we were back to our cloudier, tetchier selves. Even so, nothing could dull the inescapable fact that whether I liked it or not, I was very much my father’s daughter. From then on, he consulted me about itineraries, sending through drafts of proposed trips for my approval. I would send them back annotated with comments like a teacher correcting homework, mostly insisting that his plans were too rushed, or that he was overlooking a place of interest. He would also defer to me when I had local knowledge, or had been somewhere he had not. I became, in effect, his co-pilot. I had earned my planning stripes.
But on most of our trips my father’s need for control was stifling. Once, though, for my mother’s birthday, she and I went ahead on our own for a few days to Paris, where my father would join us for a celebratory dinner somewhere swish. Left to our own rhythms, we wandered like true flâneurs, got lost, sat at terraces for endless coffees, chose where to eat on the look of a place and its clientele, without any recommendations, reservations or guide books. Unleashed, we were as carefree and abandoned as two girls who had escaped boarding school. We ate at unusual hours, went to the cinema and sat through two films because we felt like it, and took cheeses and patisseries back to our room for in-between meal snacks. By the time my father arrived, genteel anarchy was well and truly in place and we resented his attempts to shape our days.
Having mastered the fine art of passive aggression singly and jointly, my mother and I simply ignored him. As we wandered the streets aimlessly browsing, my father followed, asking with mounting frustration where we were going and what our destination was. My mother giggled girlishly that we had none.
Bewildered, outnumbered and outgunned, my father had no choice but to follow along narrow pavements in single file, baffled as we stared into the dark windows of galleries, antique shops and boutiques.
‘Shall we go in here?’ he ventured, always up for a bit of purchasing power to bolster his self-esteem.
‘No, we’re just looking,’ we always replied, trying to get him to understand the pleasures of lèche-vitrines—literally licking windows. Deflated, he followed with hangdog meekness, as if being subjected to a form of torture.
In his element when trips revolved around an event or spectacle, Papa was never better than when he was in charge of us as a small platoon under his command, going to a festival such as Bayreuth or Salzburg, for which he prepared as if about to engage in battle.
There, he spoke the language, understood the rules, and had all the on-the-ground intel from years of experience: he knew where to stay so that you could walk to the theatre and save yourself the bother of parking hassles, had deals for discounts in all the best places, and often got upgraded suites because of his regular custom. He appreciated the complex unstated codes and protocols of these elaborately formal occasions: where the best seats were, how to pre-order drinks for the interval to avoid the scrum, where was the best place to stand and watch the passeggiata of patrons wearing their heirloom finery, where to eat quickly before or after the show. Calibrated by decades, if not centuries of ritual, there was something pleasing in the seamless efficiency of their execution. ‘If you stand here, you will see the trumpeters come out on to the balcony to summon the audienc
e in for the performance,’ said my father outside the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, bursting with pride that he could afford to bring his family to such an exclusive occasion in style. And he was right: we were in exactly the right spot to see the brass gleam in the afternoon light, fanfaring us into Wagner’s Valhalla.
Thanks to him I developed a love of pomp and pageantry. He thought nothing of standing for three hours to watch a parade or of sitting on uncomfortable bleachers for a march, fly-past or son et lumière show. He believed in bearing witness to history, celebrating victories, honouring heroes, paying his respects; with so few family anniversaries, instead we marked the births and deaths of Joan of Arc, Oliver Cromwell, Horatio Nelson, Napoleon Bonaparte and Winston Churchill as if they were the flamboyant overachievers in our small tribe. At the age of eighty, he stood for hours among the crowds in the sun outside Westminster to catch a glimpse of Nelson Mandela on his first visit to London.
The apotheosis of all my father’s organisational acumen was a trip to Paris in July 1989 for the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The occasion had been years in the planning. Feeling expansive, my father booked us into the most extravagantly luxe hotel in town, reserving a suite at the Crillon. The historic establishment overlooks the Place de la Concorde, site of the guillotine, where an evening parade would culminate in a rousing rendition of the national anthem with fireworks. It was a lavish, over-the-top gesture, even by my father’s own standards, costing an eye-watering sum. But occasions like this only come once in a lifetime, he reasoned. So he was livid when, just months before the big day, the Crillon wrote to him with barely a semblance of courtesy, informing him that the entire hotel had been commandeered by the government to host its international heads of state. Unceremoniously bumped, his booking was nullified. He wrote to the Elysée Palace to complain, but the president’s office was impervious to his appeal to Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Short of becoming a world leader, he could not have his suite.
Undeterred, he found another hotel, further from the Champs-Elysées, where the much vaunted défilé would pass on its way to the Place de la Concorde. He finagled an invitation from colleagues with an office in a prime position to stand on a strategically located balcony. So far, so good. But there was one unforeseen obstacle. We were staying on one side of the Champs and our viewing point was on the other. Security barricades along the avenue prevented pedestrians from crossing. The crowds were already banked up ten deep when we realised our problem. The underground walkways were blocked off for security reasons. Paris was cut in half and we were in the wrong half.
What to do faced with this unexpected setback? For the first time, my father looked worried. To be unable to reach our destination, which we could see, would entail a severe loss of face and huge disappointment.
‘Let me see what I can do,’ I ventured, emboldened. Perhaps being Australian conferred special status. Surely no one in this vast crowd could have come further than I?
Gripping our invitation to the exclusive address on the other side as if it were a laisser-passer of the most official kind, I bowled up to a gendarme. Speaking as deferentially as possible, I told him that we were from Australia and had come all this way specially for the celebrations. My parents looked humbly at the ground while he studied the card closely. Fortunately, it was stiff and embossed with a crest, giving it an almost heraldic look. Miracle of miracles, he pushed his way to the front of the crowd with a brisk ‘Suivez moi’ and, to the great displeasure of the people at the front of the nearest barrier, pushed it open to allow us through. For a brief heady instant, we were the only people standing on Paris’s grandest avenue, able to look up and down its entire length at the hundreds of thousands gathered there, waving their tricolores towards the Arc de Triomphe, where a giant version of the flag swayed gently in the summer night air.
The French cannot abide unfair advantage: spectators grudgingly let us through on the other side of the road, wondering aloud why we had been accorded this special privilege. My father looked relieved. All his planning had hung in the balance, hingeing on one unforeseen hurdle that could have scuppered everything. And I had come through, playing Australia as my trump card.
Many hours later, we walked back to our hotel elated by the sheer scale and fantasy of the parade, humming ‘La Marseillaise’ while the city’s nocturnal street-washing carts rinsed away all traces of revolutionary fervour.
CHAPTER 16
Couch potato
As he drifted into his sixties, my mother and I taunted my father regularly with the question of what he would do when he retired, pointing to his workaholic personality and lack of hobbies. He was never going to take up golf or become a volunteer guide at a museum. My mother dreaded having him under her feet all day.
When retirement came, my father was marooned. For the first time in his life, he did not have a plan. He shuffled about, sorting papers, claiming to have embarked on a major clear-out. But nothing was ever thrown away and his desk was increasingly colonised by towering piles and files. He remained on boards, spoke at conferences, attended a few public lectures, but his vaguely stated intentions of writing a book never materialised. He was undeniably reduced by stepping down as company director. The offers he expected did not eventuate. Disappointed, disillusioned, he spent his days in futile but caustic correspondence as an ardent consumer/complainer, arguing with the council, borough, City of London and beyond about all the aspects of British life that infuriated him. The rest of the time he sat back in his recliner watching daytime re-runs of Friends. It was a pathetic sight, and I teased him about it with cruel insensitivity. ‘I like that pretty girl’s smile,’ he said lamely, referring to Jennifer Aniston without even knowing her name.
My father was not one for made-up words but one day he surprised us by describing his current state of mind as houdry voudry. The word was made up, he told us almost apologetically, as if he were embarrassed by its non-dictionary illegitimacy. A childhood nonsense expression invented by one of his Hungarian cousins to convey a sort of comme çi comme ça melancholy. He had never used it before; now, out it popped from some deep recess, summoned perhaps by this new unfamiliar feeling of uncertainty. Maman and I both loved the word and adopted it instantly. It was as close as my father ever got to admitting that he might be depressed.
Now that he was home all day, he squabbled with my mother more pettily than ever, and they scratched at each other’s frustrations like peevish chickens. He subjected her to a near-constant barrage of demands and needs, mistaking her for a member of staff. Like a maharajah to a chai wallah, he shouted ‘TEA!’ almost hourly from his top-floor eyrie, only to find his request ignored.
In 2000, the near collapse of the Equitable Life Assurance Society affected my parents’ financial security, along with that of thousands of others. Their nest egg shrank. Incapable of frugality, they tightened their belts by taking shorter holidays and eating at less fancy establishments. The shopping sprees ended. My father hid his worry as best he could, but we were not fooled.
Desperate for new sources of income, my father came up with his least sensible scheme to date. Rösti (pronounced rerr-shti) is a Swiss dish of coarsely grated raw or boiled waxy potato, shaped into patties and fried in butter. Once considered the traditional breakfast of farmers in the Bern canton, it soon became a popular national dish, resilient and versatile enough to withstand adulteration with the addition of interloper ingredients such as cheese, bacon and onion. The border between Switzerland and France and Switzerland and Germany is known as the Rösti Ditch.
My father adored rösti. As a historian with a firm grasp of genealogy, he liked to enhance its appeal in terms of its gastronomic lineage. Adopting pompously pontificating language to ennoble its humble provenance, he explained that it was ‘related on the mother’s side’ (one of his favourite expressions) to the Jewish latke and ‘on the father’s side’ to hash browns.
This distinguished family tree did nothing to disguise the real appeal of rösti
: it is an ambrosial conjunction of carbohydrate and fat, differing only in texture from chips. For unfathomable reasons in a country that loves potatoes—and fat—it had never taken off in Britain.
My father was never one to ask for advice. Instead, he dispensed it freely, on all manner of subjects. As a child, I was infuriated when he offered unsolicited coaching on how to play tennis and how to ski, though he did neither. Now he embarked on a second career in food wholesale without any expertise. A wiser head than his would have pointed out that very little Swiss food was known in the UK and that introducing some would involve a massive public education and promotional campaign.
Apart from chocolate and cheese, it would be hard to think of a single Swiss dish that Brits could identify. If they were health-food consumers, they would be aware of Bircher muesli; if they had been on a skiing holiday they might recognise French-inspired cheese fondue and raclette; but it was doubtful they would have heard of bündner nusstorte, zürcher geschnetzeltes, spätzli, cervelat or zopf, to name a few of the country’s tongue-twister gastronomic highlights. The Swiss may have been eager to promote their watches and discreetly proud of their banks but they had done precious little to proclaim their cuisine.
Undeterred by my mother pleading with him not to embark on such a folly, my father decided that he would become the Colonel Sanders of rösti. Desperate for a get-rich-quick scheme to replace lost funds and give purpose to his floundering retirement, undaunted by his lack of experience in the food importation and wholesale business, he made contact with a reputable Swiss supplier, Hero, well known for its high-quality jams and condiments, of which my father was a connoisseur and loyal customer. They sent samples of their various products, which my parents trialled over several dinners. The purist original version (without the new-fangled additions of either cheese or bacon) won the day comfortably. Boasting a forty-year-old recipe, Hero was only too happy to oblige and filled an order for hundreds of vacuum-sealed foil packets of which my father took delivery in numerous cartons.
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