by Baxter, John
From Paris, we’d rung Madame Becker, asking her to prepare the house for our stay, taking down the shutters, switching on the heat, and stocking the refrigerator with basics. Our arrival, a few hours earlier than planned, caught her on the wrong foot. The shutters were still up, the fridge empty, the floors unswept. The only signs she’d been near the place in weeks were an ashtray filled with Marlboro butts and an empty three-litre box of vin rosé.
As I carried the bags from the car, Marie-Do prowled the rooms, slamming doors, muttering, her voice rising periodically to a cry of frustration at some new example of neglect.
About hired help, she and I had exactly opposite ideas. The previous summer, I had barely stopped her from firing M. Courtepaille, an eccentric young local who’d rebuilt our kitchen and bathroom. He did the work well enough, but, as he told it later, a leak had soaked some cartons of wine placed in the cave.
“The cardboard was wet,” he explained, “and when I lifted it up, it broke.”
“The whole carton?” I said. “A dozen bottles?” I’d suffered similar accidents myself, but a few bottles always survived.
“Afraid so,” he said, staring me in the eye. “Every last one.”
“That was a Margaux ’96,” I said. “You know what it’s worth?”
“I couldn’t be more sorry.” Or more of a liar.
Marie-Do would have fired him on the spot, but I intervened. After all, I told myself, would I, in similar circumstances, have resisted the temptation? But this was just an evasion. Egalitarian Australia has a national problem with employees and servants, which I had inherited. Is there any other country where cab passengers automatically take the seat next to the driver? To ride in the back would indicate an unearned sense of superiority. When, in Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story, the millionaire played by Rudy Vallee refuses to ride first-class on the train—“Staterooms are un-American!”—I know exactly how he feels.
When I arrived in Paris, it shook me somewhat that Marie-Dominique had a pretty black maid from Réunion named May, who slipped in early in the morning to brew coffee and squeeze orange juice, then make the bed and do the washing and the shopping. However, just as I decided that my discomfort reflected outmoded colonial attitudes, and this was, after all, a simple commercial relationship, hints appeared that made me change my mind. Despite their apparent insouciance, the French are deeply ambivalent about servants. Every few years, some filmmaker or novelist rakes up the story of Lea and Christine Papin, the maids who butchered their employer and her daughter in Le Mans in 1933. Jean Genet’s play The Maids shows the sisters repeatedly acting out the crime before they commit it. Each rehearsal increases their hatred, until, when they do strike, it is with fury. (In real life, the Papins gouged out the eyes of their victims and mutilated the corpses, after which they neatly cleaned up and went to bed, making no attempt to escape.) The cold-bloodedness of the crime bore a dismaying moral: Our servants hate us. They’d kill us if they dared.
Through my years in France, I’d accepted the necessity of having a housekeeper, but some of my old concerns returned as we waited for Madame Becker, whom Marie-Do had summoned with an icy phone call. Hearing her car arrive and her heels click on the pavement outside our front gate, I found an excuse to go upstairs. This was something only a Frenchwoman could handle.
Most of what followed I half-heard as it filtered up through the floorboards. The conversation swelled and diminished as they moved from room to room, in each of which Marie-Dominique paused to enumerate the deficiencies of care. At every moment, I expected to hear the declaration that Madame was virée—fired—but each time the recital of complaint and excuse flowed on.
After half an hour, her heels receded and our gate creaked shut. Looking out the window, I saw her car accelerating away, the only sign of her departure the empty wine box, now lying defiantly in the gutter in front of the house.
I went back downstairs. “Are we looking for a new housekeeper?”
“We’ll see. She says she’s going to find some firewood. And produce some food.”
“On the Friday before Christmas? From where?”
“That’s her problem.”
For half an hour, we pottered about, restoring habitability to the house. We were just done when a car pulled up and, a moment later, a clatter brought us to the window. Madame Becker, still dressed in high heels, a fur-collared overcoat, and kid gloves, as if on her way to church, was dumping a pile of logs by the door. By the time we reached the kitchen, she was on her way out the gate.
“Bon appétit,” she said over her shoulder.
On the table she had left a baguette, a bottle of milk, a slab of butter, lettuce, and a bowl of pale pink salt-water crayfish. I touched one. It was still warm from the water in which it had been boiled.
“Langoustines,” I said reverently.
The langoustine, a miniature lobster, is trawled from the waters just off Fouras. It’s larger than a shrimp and longer than the American or Australian crayfish, with two hard, elongated claws and a stubby body. Every summer, langoustines were piled in great squirming heaps in the local fish market. We bought them by the kilo, plunged them into salted water flavoured with a bay leaf and an onion, then gorged ourselves on dozens each, with homemade mayonnaise and a baguette.
“Do you suppose this was her dinner?” I knew it was absurd the moment I said it. Madame wasn’t the self-sacrificing type.
“No,” said Marie-Do thoughtfully. “But maybe her lover’s?”
That made more sense. For a woman, Frenchmen would sacrifice much more than their dinner. I spared a thought for this individual, no doubt morosely settling down to a cold supper of bread and cheese. Hopefully, however, his reward for this self-sacrifice would be worth it.
As with most French food, there is an approved technique for eating the langoustine. One first tears it in two, separating the head and claws from the stumpy body. The meat of the body, tender and sweet, is extracted by squeezing the shell until it cracks, then edging out the nugget of white flesh.
This leaves the claws, from which one can, if one has the energy, winkle a little more meat with a probe. But if you’re really serious about langoustines, like my mother-in-law, you take the head, put the severed end to your lips, and slurp out the juice.
I got used to having servants. But I never got used to that.
• • •
Over supper, my thoughts turned again to Christmas dinner.
There are always two possible strategies in preparing a meal for the French.
One was novelty. I could present the family with something so exotic that sheer strangeness would keep them interested. I’d done this a few times when I first cooked in France. At various times, dinner guests had been treated to Indian curries, Thai shrimp salad, and Mexican chicken with bitter chocolate mole sauce. We had once—not an experience to be repeated—even taken them to an Australian restaurant that served kangaroo.
Most had been polite. A few had been appreciative. But one sensed a general feeling that I was trying too hard to impress.
Which brought me to the second and far more demanding option—tradition.
Anyone who takes on classic French cooking faces a formidable challenge. Whatever its reputation for rich sauces and flashy presentation, French cuisine, I’d come to understand through painful experience, is essentially simple. It relies on precisely isolating and emphasising the essential flavour of an ingredient, then juxtaposing two or more such tastes in a pleasing or surprising harmony. Who else but the French would think of cutting the fattiness of foie gras with a sweet, chill glass of Sauternes? Or serving scrambled eggs with the roe of the sea urchin?
Seasonality and regionality also count for a lot. Better to eat local girolles or coeur de pigeon cherries during their brief seasons than imported Romanian or Spanish equivalents. And no satisfaction is greater than serving game shot on your own terroir, fish caught in your own river, or fruit picked in a local orchard.
The pleasure the French take in this was underlined for me the previous summer, a week of which we spent in Cambridge. In soaking rain, we drove to Calais to take the Dover ferry. Along every kilometre of the narrow roads of Picardy, men and women in raincoats browsed the grass verges with plastic bags, gathering snails—a familiar sight on any warm wet day in France. But, on the British side of the Channel, an identical landscape in identical weather, the verges, no doubt just as crowded with snails, were deserted.
The supper Marie-Do and I were enjoying showed that, even in winter, the French terroir continued to produce the best ingredient. These langoustines, this bread, butter, and wine all came from within a few kilometres of where we ate them. Why shouldn’t my Christmas dinner comprise dishes that represented all of France, not simply the island of specialised taste that was Paris?
It was a challenge. But that was the fun of it. As I winkled a nugget of orange roe from the head of a hen langoustine and smeared it on some baguette with a glob of mayonnaise, I began yet again to replan the menu.
7
The Ghosts of Christmases Past
Christmas? Bah! Humbug!
—CHARLES DICKENS
Until I moved to France, Christmas was not a season I viewed with affection or anticipated with pleasure.
A solitary child, I lived in books and movies—and the Christmas in books and movies, invariably European or American, was not the Christmas I saw through the window. Where was bleak midwinter? The stockings all hung by the chimney with care? The Ghost of Christmas Past and Tiny Tim and “God bless us every one”? Watching Judy Garland sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” in the movie Meet Me in St. Louis or reading of Christmas among the small animals of the English countryside in The Wind in the Willows could move me to tears, but for the blazing sun of the Australian December, I shed not a drop.
Some of my warmest Christmas memories were of those times when I’d avoided it entirely, when, for instance, living in Los Angeles in the 1980s, I briefly became an international courier.
Well, I can call it that, but essentially I was a delivery boy, albeit an exalted one. Before FedEx and other express shippers cornered the market, certain companies that needed to move documents across the world in bulk and in a hurry—large legal firms, in particular—used couriers. In return for the use of our baggage allowance, we received an air ticket to wherever the papers needed to go. This was the pinnacle of unskilled labour. Provided we had a passport and were willing to cross the world with just a toothbrush and a change of underwear, we got the job. The trick, as with much else in the world, was in knowing such jobs existed and, more important, being friendly with the people who handed them out.
In December 1988 I was alone in Los Angeles and contemplating another joyless Christmas when my friend at the courier agency rang. She had documents for Australia, but nobody wanted to take them over the holidays. Could I accompany a shipment to Sydney on Christmas Eve?
There was an exhilarating sense of freedom in boarding a Boeing at LAX with only an overnight bag as hand luggage. Whirling in my wake as it took off were all thoughts of gifts, cards, trees, carols, eggnog, turkey, Santa, and screenings of It’s a Wonderful Life.
After an entire day in the air, I landed at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Terminal. Breezing through the “Returning Australian Citizens” lane of passport control, I left my fellow passengers to loiter around the baggage carousels, strolled through customs, and delivered my luggage tickets to a frazzled-looking legal secretary. Within half an hour of touchdown, at the start of what promised to be a scorching summer morning, I was in an air-conditioned cab heading for the house of a friend. Conveniently, she wasn’t even out of bed when I arrived, and we didn’t leave it for most of the weekend. I remember that particular Christmas as brimming with comfort and joy, and not a reindeer in sight.
But such happy occasions were rare. To be unattached and far from home during the holiday season is generally to be a leper. Despair trails you like a miasma, infecting everyone.
It’s almost worse when friends take pity. They squeeze in an extra chair at the Christmas lunch, and, rather than see you excluded from the oohs, aahs, and cries of “Oh, you shouldn’t have!” around the Christmas tree, rake out a few of last year’s unused or unwanted gifts. (“Let’s give him this. You’ve never worn it.”)
Only one writer, to my knowledge, positively relished the idea of a lone Christmas far from home. Samuel Beckett, in London to rehearse the 1979 premiere of Happy Days at the Royal Court Theatre, announced to the director’s assistant Anton Gill that he wouldn’t bother returning to Paris for Christmas but would stay in London. Anton invited him to spend Christmas with his family, but Beckett politely declined.
When rehearsals recommenced the following week, Anton asked, “How did you spend Christmas, Sam?”
Beckett regarded him with his customary weary melancholy.
“Oh, I just walked around London,” he said, “revisiting the old places.”
“Well, I hope you enjoyed a good Christmas dinner,” Anton said.
It was like asking the Archbishop of Canterbury whether he’d taken the opportunity of a trip to California to visit Disneyland.
“A little boiled fish,” said a pained Beckett, “in my room.”
“If that hadn’t been so exactly what one would expect him to say,” Anton recalls, “I would almost have believed it.” But he could never entirely dispel an image of the austere Beckett, napkin tucked into his collar, in some big London restaurant, like Simpson’s in the Strand, stuffing himself with roast turkey and Christmas pudding, washed down with a quart of Guinness.
For many years, my American wife, Joyce, and I lived in north London. Having calculatedly severed ourselves from our roots, we imagined our neighbours, also mostly childless couples in middle management or the arts, had done the same. Yet the night before Christmas, our streets emptied of parked cars, even the most ancient bangers, as these hardened city-dwellers, like salmon swimming upstream, headed back to their family homes for the holidays.
One Christmas, hoping to strike a blow for a less family-oriented festival, we threw a lunch for a dozen unattached friends who were, like ourselves, alone in London.
The occasion could have been more cheerless, I suppose—if, for instance, we served cold mutton, mutton soup, and bananas (the menu that drove Lizzie Borden to take a hatchet to her parents), or staged a reading from Ibsen, or invited a Jehovah’s Witness to lead us in prayer. One by one, our guests, made even more miserable by booze and the Christmas television programming, subsided into armchairs, staring in silence at the walls as night drew on and scraps of old newspaper blew along the empty streets.
We did even worse on another American Christmas, this time spent in Louisville, Kentucky, where my ex-wife’s mother was visiting her mother. (Divorce ran through Joyce’s family like one of those genetic conditions that passes down the female line. Her grandmother, mother, and sister were all divorced, so, when she and I separated, it seemed no more than a case of succumbing to the family disease.) The plethora of discarded wives and new husbands scattered around Louisville made the city a diplomatic minefield. Socialising with one faction automatically attracted the hatred of all the others. “I can’t believe you stayed with them, after what he did to me!”
On that particular Christmas, neither of us could face the barrage of recrimination. We decided, after calling on Joyce’s mother and grandmother, to stay quietly in a hotel over Christmas and slip out of town on Boxing Day.
But on Christmas morning, a knock on the door roused me. I opened it, to be faced by a skinny African-American man in a Santa suit. Behind him stood a TV camera crew, lights blazing.
“Happy Christmas,” said the sable Santa and, dipping into his sack, handed me a banana.
“Um, Merry Christmas,” I said, and closed the door. Pausing a beat, I reopened it and asked, “Someone like to tell me what this is about?”
“We’re from local TV news,” the
cameraman said. “We’re doing a piece on people alone in town over the holidays.”
“OK,” I said. “Want to try take two?”
I closed the door, opened it to a second knock, affected surprise, accepted the banana, and answered a couple of questions about hospitable Louisville, a city I loved.
“What was that?” Joyce asked sleepily when we were done.
“Local TV.”
She was suddenly alert. “You didn’t talk to them?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Because it’ll be all over tonight’s news! Now everyone will know we were here.”
She was right, of course. This time, the complaints were exceptionally bitter. “It’s bad enough you didn’t call,” hissed an aunt, “but to go to a hotel …”
All the time I lived in the United States, I never escaped the conviction that Americans don’t celebrate Christmas at all. It’s at Thanksgiving that families come together, massive meals are eaten, hatchets buried (or disinterred), affections restored, wounds healed. Christmas comes as a gaudy afterthought, an encouragement to overdo those reconciliations, to put love on a paying basis, to offer objects in place of emotions. Too often, the good done in November doesn’t survive into the New Year. Maybe Europe is fortunate in having less to be thankful for.
8
Oysters
You needn’t tell me that a man who doesn’t love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.
—SAKI (H. H. MUNRO)
Fouras sits on a crooked spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. Erosion by the ocean on one side and the river Charente on the other has worn the promontory knife- blade thin, and so in danger of separation from the mainland it’s earned the title La Presqu’île—the Almost Island.
