Loose Living

by Frank Moorhouse

  I have already mentioned the Duc’s problem with saliva management. I will not return to that.

  I am rather ill-placed to explain domestic life, having never really lived in what one would call a ‘household’. It is one of my fervent desires, which looks as if it is being granted, never to become what is known as a household ‘word’—it would be an ironic fate, given that since leaving home at thirteen I vowed never to wash another dish, mow another lawn, clean another bathroom, ‘put out’ another garbage bin or make another bed. And I haven’t.

  The Duc himself was not well placed to understand either, given his aristocratic upbringing. We did the best we could by pooling our limited experience of the real world.

  I sketched out a floor plan of a typical Australian home and showed him advertisements of whitegoods to be found in the Australian home.

  As we pored over the plans and IKEA catalogues spread on the large oak architect’s desk (which was originally owned by Necker), I rushed to tell him that he must not expect to find cool rooms, cellars, pantries (pain being the French word for bread), butteries (corrupted from the French word bouterie for a room for storing bottles), or larders (the French room for storing lard or bacon).

  By the way, when I say pored, I mean that the Duc’s eyeballs literally touched the lines of the plans, and for all I could see, perhaps also his tongue.

  The Duc became confused about the absence of proper food storage rooms. To escape from this information daze he changed the subject and asked me to explain ‘washing up’. What was it?

  Recalling as best I could how washing up was done, I told him of the diverse approaches to this activity in my own country.

  First I explained that, because of the heat and flies and the lack of refrigeration in earlier generations, the emphasis on ‘washing up’ had become rather acute. My mother, for example, began the washing up before the meal was over.

  This sensible attention to hygiene had carried over into my generation as a form of frenzy. A frenzy which was to be found in all classes.

  I said that on my return a Dear Friend, whose life is far from conventional in other ways (!), had patiently tried to explain what she called ‘the zen state’ which accompanies washing up.

  She said that one became lost and absorbed in the art of washing up in a way that other tasks rarely achieved.

  One became a sud.

  Washing up, she said, was really living and that my strange fantasy life as a rémora in the châteaux of France was my way of hiding from life.

  ‘Pardon?’ said the Duc, or noises to that effect.

  To put it another way, I said to the Duc, searching carefully for my words, one’s body became the washing-up sponge, and for the duration of the washing up no other world existed.

  I told the Duc that I myself found this a disturbing notion.

  The Duc muttered in perplexity, or what I took to be muttering, and what I took to be perplexity, although it could very well have been befuddlement.

  I went on to tell him that I had observed that many people in the homes I visited in Australia, all of whom were warm and generous towards me despite my rather dubious past conduct, seemed to see the washed-up-and-put-away condition of the dishes as the state of perfection. This I took to be a historical legacy.

  The more I thought about it—clean dishes, that is—maybe it was the very quintessence of our cultural heritage.

  It seemed in Australia that ‘dirty dishes’ were dishes in a state of imperfection and dishes which were in use were in decline towards this state of imperfection. That within the genetic spiral of this imperfection was also a strand of treason. Dirty dishes were a treason because historically they threatened the health and wholesomeness of the nation.

  I speculated there with the Duc, as we looked out through the castellations of the north tower onto the rolling, snow-covered fields and forests of France, that what was needed in Australia was the formulation of a Circle of Purity doctrine where the dishes were in a state of perfection at all times and in all stages of use—including the so-called ‘dirty dishes’ stage.

  Is the dressed table really a point of perfection? A metaphor for that fleeting instance of the pre-entropic condition? That state which must inexorably begin its journey into degeneration—which, in fact, is already decaying in the invisible-to-the-eye world of molecules and such—which must suffer entropy as everything else in life?

  We sat in silence while we ruminated on this idea as the cattle in the winter barns worked their cud.

  I broke the silence by telling the Duc that dishwashing machines were now common in Australia, although many could not feel truly confident of the cleanliness of the dishwashing machine and also washed the dishes manually before putting them into the machine.

  I described to him the ‘steamy hot sickly smell’ which came out of dishwashers.

  It seemed that the dishwasher ‘cooked’ the minute smears and scraps of food on the plates and cutlery and food gathered in a strainer in the dishwasher drain which created this denatured ‘cooking’ smell.

  The Duc raised an eyebrow at these tales of the dishwasher. When I say ‘raised an eyebrow’, it has to be remembered that the Duc has little control of his eyes or eyebrows at this point in his recovery and raising an eyebrow can sometimes cause considerable movement of the facial skin so that the mouth and eye apertures are seriously astray from their respective organs.

  However, I said that loading and unloading the dishwasher took as long as the old-fashioned manual washing up.

  Kindly ignoring his facial expression, I said that some people scraped and rinsed the plates before putting them in the dishwasher. This made the washing up twice as long as the old-fashioned method and three times as long as using clean things until everything ran out and then putting the dishes in the bath and turning on the shower and washing them with your feet while you showered.

  And four times longer than going to a restaurant.

  I said that I noticed an unacceptable tendency in some households to ‘save on the washing up’. I have heard this expression used quite often in homes of all classes.

  It means making items do double service—the main course dish for salad, using the same knife and fork for entree and main course, not changing the wine glasses with each new bottle or when they became greasy from eating, and so on.

  The Duc broke into speculation about the effect of washing up on the production of art. He hypothesised that it probably has lost us a great deal of good art.

  We agreed that if Henry James had had to wash up the dishes, etc., we would not have had The Golden Bowl because those chores would have eaten up five years of his life, although it might be arguable whether The Golden Bowl or helping his mother was the preferable use of his time. I remember hurling the book across a room in a fury in the Algonquin in New York where I was once living. If James Joyce had to do the washing up he would not have finished Finnegans Wake but then I haven’t been able to read that fruitfully. If Joyce Cary had done the washing up we would not have The Horse’s Mouth. If Peter Carey had to do the washing up we would not have The Unusual Life of Tristram Smith. Had it not been for slavery Julia Peterkin would not have had the leisure to write Scarlet Sister Mary (1929) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Nor would she have had anything to write about. Julia Peterkin was the white wife of an American plantation manager and wrote about her black servants.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the Duc, ‘don’t overextend the gag and don’t labour the point simply because I am temporarily lamed by a stroke.’

  The Duc has these moments of savage lucidity when the clouds of his mind clear and the beams of light break through.

  He inquired about the Australian domestic relationship between the sexes and I did my best to explain this somewhat complex condition.

  When I say ‘explain to the Duc’, it is important to have a picture of how communication occurs between myself and the Duc. We sit before a roaring log fire in a rather high vaulted stone room. We stil
l need fur rugs over our legs despite the fire, for the stone walls of the château are so thick that even in summer the outside temperature does not penetrate the living quarters.

  If curious for information, the Duc places his face very close to my face as aforementioned.

  It was a while before I realised that the Duc thought that household tasks in Australia, as in France, had grammatical gender.

  I had to explain that some household tasks were still traditionally ‘gendered’—sewing, replacing fuses and so on—but not through language, although impressive efforts were being made to de-gender household tasks.

  I explained how domestic tasks were also becoming indexed and weighted so that they could be traded within the household political economy. So that one task such as putting out the garbage might be seen as especially irksome and traditionally ‘male’ because of the atavistic echoes from the days of the cave, when the male was the protector and carried weapons, and when, presumably, garbage collection was done at night.

  Putting out the garbage in ancient times required the person to leave the safety of the cave and to go out into the night some distance from the cave. The further the distance one travelled from the cave the greater the risk. The risk was increased when it was done in darkness. And in prehistoric times, garbage was collected at night when it was cool, to prevent the stench being aggravated by the hot sun.

  I told the Duc that I was interested to see that in many Australian households notes, notices, cartoons and other communications were magnetically pinned or taped to the refrigerator door.

  The refrigerator door seemed to have become the switchboard for domestic communication.

  I smiled to myself when the Duc said (quite sensibly, given his upbringing and way of life) that wouldn’t it mean that only the staff saw the notices?

  I told him that in Australia every member of the family had the right to use the refrigerators and that these were not locked at night.

  I said that some Australians actually stood at the door of the refrigerator and ate food—had le snack while standing at the door of the refrigerator lit by the refrigerator light (I had already explained to him that larders, butteries and cool rooms were incorporated into the refrigerator, including, I was amazed to see, the pantry, bread now being stored in the refrigerator, resulting in the loss of the practice of freshly baked bread).

  The Duc was flabbergasted. He asked if the Australians actually selected the food from the refrigerator shelves and then consumed it without decanting it into appropriate serving dishes, and without laying out or ‘setting a table’, without selecting a tablecloth and ironing it on the table, or allowing the food to reach room temperature?

  I said that I was afraid so. I had a quiet laugh to myself that he should be so particular about this, given how goddam cold it is in the château.

  ‘And do they take wine with this, this, le snack?’ the Duc asked, in a voice still distorted by flabbergast.

  I said that I had seen Australians drinking wine from the bottle while standing at a refrigerator door and very often I had seen males, especially, drinking a can of beer while in this position. I had seen an Australian child drinking orange juice from a two-litre container while standing at the door of the refrigerator.

  The Duc became agitated by these descriptions of Australian life. The agitation was so fierce that a muscular spasm hurled him into the log fire and I had to ring for the butler (bouterie/buttery/butler, that is, one who originally served the drinks) to help retrieve him.

  I sprayed the Duc with a soda siphon and although caked with ash he seemed only slightly singed.

  I thought it best to stay away from descriptions of life in the Australian household for now because its bizarre ness was beyond the Duc’s imagination.

  Instead, I went on with my gastronomic autobiography, which he always enjoys.

  I told him that as an Australian, not having come from a peasant culture such as France, but from an ‘efficient’ technological culture, meant that as a child I had come to use canned foods and factory-made goods as the yard stick and criterion for appearance and flavour in food.

  Canned food was certainly seen as a guarantee of the ‘safety’ of food—given the absence of reliable refrigeration (as aforementioned) in my childhood and a hot climate, flies and bad food-handling practices, ‘fresh’ food was more likely to be contaminated than canned.

  There was and still is an Australian phobia about food which might have ‘gone off’.

  I suspect that is why every edible thing in the Australian household now finds its way into the refrigerator.

  My gastronomic journey from childhood has been a bewildering encounter with what I saw as the ‘inauthenticity’ of fresh and traditionally prepared food.

  Hence, I refused as a child to eat the first traditionally cooked spaghetti served to me because it was, in my opinion, not ‘real’ spaghetti—that is, not canned spaghetti. (I will only note the gastronomic oddity called ‘the canned spaghetti sandwich’ which I still eat from time to time, trying to put myself back into the simple palate pleasures of the playground, a destination I can only incompletely reach.)

  The canned spaghetti was the real spaghetti, as canned asparagus was the real asparagus and fresh asparagus, not tasted by me until my twenties, seemed to be some other thing barely related to what I called asparagus. The canned asparagus was sweeter, deliciously without ‘vegetable’ texture or stringiness, and much more zesty than fresh asparagus.

  The aberrance of it is that I still love canned spaghetti, canned asparagus and canned sweet corn (and most canned fruit as opposed to fresh fruit), but for many adult years I have had to pretend to a sophisticated disdain for all factory-made and canned foods so as to keep my world wide reputation for sophistication.

  Hence, I said to the Duc, no one can cancan a can as I can cancan a can.

  I have to modestly report that the Duc thoroughly enjoyed my gag (for those who have no French, a cancan is not only a dance but also means malicious gossip, hence the appreciative chuckles from the Duc which continued to erupt long after I had finished my anecdote, and which I attribute to the intricacy of my gag more than the malfunctioning of his gastric system following his stroke).

  I am prepared to argue now that canned food may not be so inferior and that to be able to enjoy both—the fresh and the canned—may be a gastronomic versatility for which I should be grateful.

  The Duc then managed to blurt out a question which I had seen building up inside his cheeks like gas filling a balloon.

  ‘What,’ he asked, ‘is “canned” food?’

  However, I caught his wink at the butler (or what I took to be a wink) as he said this. We both knew that Napoleon’s army, during the Egyptian campaign, was the first army to use canned food.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Whipping

  the YUM CHA

  Maids

  BECAUSE THE Duc has been showing me so much forgiveness and at the same time giving me so much guidance on Refinement in Life, I thought it only fair that I give something to him in return.

  I decided that he should learn of the cuisines of other cultures and not be so parochially French and that, having been a cultural delegate to China, I could, in that cuisine, be his guide.

  He was at first disbelieving and then pleasantly surprised to learn that other cultures ate differently to the French.

  When I say the Duc was pleasantly surprised, I think that I should describe this further. Since his stroke I have had to learn to understand his gestures and signals. Sometimes, I feel like Oliver Sacks.

  His way of expressing pleasant surprise is something like a Fred Astaire dance from a forties movie, only that it is a Fred Astaire suffering from middle ear disorientation and there is no Ginger Rogers, unless I am Ginger Rogers (but that is definitely another story).

  I thought I would begin the Duc’s culinary education with yum cha at a Chinese restaurant and I hoped also that the Chinese herbs would assist his rec
overy from the stroke, although only as cuisine, not as medicine. I do not share the fashionable faith in Chinese medicine.

  I thought it might work for the Duc. He has nothing to lose.

  We travelled to the Chinese lunch by taxi because the chauffeur had been given the afternoon off to attend his son’s wedding.

  I remarked to the Duc, who had never been in a taxi, that in Australia it was customary for a lone passenger, even the Prime Minister, to sit in the front with the driver, and that any passenger who sat in the back was considered to be snobbish.

  The Duc, while ever-interested in Australian mores, was bemused by the meaning of snobbish and after I explained it to him I realised that what we call ‘snobbish’ was what he called ‘his family character’.

  I said that in Australia it was obligatory to listen to the taxi driver’s comments on world affairs and their opinions of the other drivers on the road, their views on traffic engineering, and that one should never disagree with a taxi driver because they were not accustomed to being corrected and it could make for a tedious trip.

  Because everyone is forced to sit beside the taxi driver and talk to them, they assume that there truly is an egalitarian ethos. This false world of taxi drivers is the reverse of that of royalty, who think that all streets everywhere are always bedecked with flags.

  ‘There you go using that word “egalitarian” again,’ the Duc said. ‘And using the word “royalty” rather contemptuously.’

  I apologised but we did the rest of the journey in sullen silence while the Duc fumed over the French Revolution and the rise of égalité and the sad fate of his ancestors.

  When I say fumed, I mean that fumes literally came from his nose and ears. I suspect that they were Cognac fumes.

  At yum cha he was bemused that there seemed to be no order to the way the dishes arrived at the table—no beginning and no end to the offerings.