by Jim Crace
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.
37
HE 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.
38
ONE 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.
39
HERE 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 no
thing 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.
HOW 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.
Here is a picture difficult to banish from our minds. It’s gone midnight. The moon and stars are bearing down on the anchored boat. Our Toby Erickson is dead. He sits quite still, in his straw hat, intoxicated, and untroubled by the nagging sea. His first and final tad – the dinner catch that might impress his lady friend – is hooked and tugging on the deep end of his line. It can’t escape from predators. The carnivores will pick it clean before the night is done. The bones above the water are holding on to bones below. The numb are fishing for the numb.
At last, his boat is shifting slightly on its ropes as tides regress and winds align in readiness for the day. The hotel staff are innocent, as yet. They are preparing breakfasts for their guests, unscrewing pots, opening cans, cutting off the tops of cartons, snipping sachets, breaching packets, breaking eggs, and quietly laying out the feast.
40
OUR CONCIERGE has been away. A short break from sitting in other people’s draughts for a living, she explains. She’s spent a week at Anderbac Falls, where she went on her vacations as a child. She’s come back with the benefits burned on her face. The weather was fabulous, the Falls miraculously unchanged in all those years, and to top it all she’s forged what might prove to be a lasting friendship with a man. ‘A widower,’ she adds. The word – she almost whispers it – bestows decorum, as if his marriage and bereavement put this new liaison beyond reproach. So, nothing like the noisy, inappropriate affair she’s been conducting with the janitor – ‘a bachelor’ – in his apartment on the seventh floor.
Her widower is charming and presentable, she explains, well read, well heeled, well dressed, though somewhat overweight. And he is kind. ‘I’m torn up over him.’ They’d picnicked together in the woods, had shared a table at a restaurant, and on their final night together had jointly cooked a meal in the little chalet which he’d been renting in the grounds of her hotel.
‘He never tried to touch me even once, you know,’ she says, to illustrate how genuine her new suitor had proved himself to be. ‘Though if he’d tried he might have found me willing. I’d drunk a half a bottle of his wine. And he was so respectable – and such a cook! – that I would have liked to show my gratitude. But still he said his wife was present in the room. They’d rented that same chalet the year before she died. He said that I was sitting in her chair.’
You have to interrupt the concierge. If you don’t, she’ll wrap you up in conversation until (my mother’s phrase) your bladder turns to stone. Before you realize it the taxi driver’s tired of waiting, or the shop has closed, or your appointment has been missed, or the slow stew you’ve left to cook upstairs has been reduced to clinker, ash and smoke. And so I have to turn towards the street and say, ‘I’ll catch up with the details when I get back, but now I really have to go.’
I’ve looked down at my watch and pulled a face. I’ve said ‘Oh, dear . . .’ to show how late I am. Already I have reached the double door, but I feel as if I’ve been too hurried, impolite. I turn and add ‘Well, good for you . . .’ and then, once I’m halfway down the steps and have almost broken free, ‘I’m stopping off at George’s tonight, if you want anything . . .’
‘Why not? I owe myself a little treat. Can you bring two cheese pies? And if he has those baby macaroons, then six.’
I ALMOST get back to the block this evening without her cheese pies and her macaroons. It’s been an awkward day, too argumentative, too rushed. My head’s a sieve. I don’t need shopping for myself. There’s cold meat in the fridge to finish off and then I’d like to curl up in my bed and sleep. It’s not until I reach the baking smell that I remember our concierge’s ‘little treat’. I get the taxi driver to circle the square and wait for me at George’s. The driver hands me some change and asks me to bring him ‘something hot’. Nobody can be downwind of George’s and not want food.
I think that I’m in luck. The concierge is not behind her desk. But by the time I’ve pushed her bag of food beneath the metal grille, she’s at my side. We used to have a little dog called Plum, before my husband left. Just like the concierge. You couldn’t move, you couldn’t sneak yourself a tiny piece of cake, you couldn’t slip out of the house, without the dog appearing at your side.
The concierge is keen to carry on where we left off. ‘My widower could outbake George,’ she says. A little romance suits her well. I see she’s had her hair in curlers and changed out of her ‘mopping slacks’ into her going-out dress. It’s no longer difficult to picture her in an Anderbac restaurant, across the table from an attentive man.
I say, ‘Excuse me if I hurry off. My head’s on fire . . .’ Already I have reached the elevator door.
‘Hold on for me,’ she says. ‘I’m coming up.’ This is a pretext, I am sure, for pursuing our conversation. But I’m resigned to her, and oddly touched, despite my throbbing head. For it is touching when a woman of her age finds this late blessing in her life.
And so I have to wait five minutes with my foot holding the door until she joins me in
the elevator, with her keys and carry bag.
‘When will you have the chance to see this man again?’ I ask.
‘Next year,’ she says.
‘Next year?’
‘Same week, same place.’
‘You might not like him in a year.’
‘That doesn’t worry me. We both like the falls at Anderbac and they won’t change. We thought it would be safest if we met up there again. A year soon goes. We’ll write. We’ll phone. We’re not young kids. If you’re attracted to a man at my age, then what’s the hurry? It’ll be something to look forward to. What do they say? It’s better to travel than arrive.’
At last she pulls shut the elevator door and I can head towards my room, my cold meat supper and my bed.
‘What floor?’ I ask, my finger hovering above the ten buttons of the console.
She smiles. I think that beneath the suntan and the make-up she almost blushes. ‘The seventh floor,’ she says. She bites her lower lip – there’s lipstick on her teeth – and looks down at her shoes.
It’s not until we reach the janitor’s floor – and his two dogs are already barking at his door in greeting – that she confides in me. She’s backing out into the hall, into the early evening smell of other people’s meals, pushing the elevator door with her bottom. She opens up her carry bag to let me see inside. A bottle of wine. The paper packet full of treats that I have brought from George’s: two pies, six baby macaroons.
‘You spoil that man,’ I say.
