The Inspector-General of Misconception

by Frank Moorhouse

  For a while in our writing life we had a twelve-cup electric percolator which kept coffee hot all day and from which we would take a cup every so often.

  We finally began to tremble and had palpations and then one day ran into the street without any clothes (not even our mother’s) while still cleaning our teeth and came to realise that having ever-ready strong coffee always at hand was unsettling, nay, perilous.

  The most recent change in coffee-drinking we have noticed, is that both in the United States and Australia, there is a new practice of drinking cappuccino with dinner. In the US, it is used between main course and dessert. In Australia, the cappuccino or flat white is used almost as a substitute dessert, especially in restaurants which can be depended upon to serve petits fours.

  Coffee-drinking and the internet seem also to have merged. Some coffee-shops offer net access and the customers, instead of talking with each other – or wishing to talk with each other – make contact with complete strangers in other places who are comfortably distanced by the computer.

  Recently, a companion suggested that we go to a dentist to have the coffee stains removed from our teeth.

  It would be as if to begin a fresh page in our gastronomic history.

  For truly, our gastronomic history is written on our body, Peter Greenaway.

  THE BALLAD OF THE SADE1 CAFE2

  It was in the month of February in the year 19–, while we were living in Cambridge as Professor of Tired Notions in residence at King’s College. We were inclined one night to forgo High Table and leave the gown and sherry and the scintillating conversation of the best minds of our generation behind us, and to lose ourself in ‘the town’.

  We decided that we would not attend the sherry at 7:20 pm and the procession into Hall behind the President of the Table (the most senior fellow present) and, after grace, to be seated and served a beautiful meal by the butlers.

  And then, after dessert, to retire to the Wine Room for fruit and cheese and port and white wine. And snuff. Of course.

  So, we ventured out into ‘the town’ with a certain swagger belonging to a chap from King’s, choosing to wear our academic gown for the heck of it.

  During our time there, we had sometimes snuck off college grounds and visited the Indian restaurants and searched for decadence without much luck.

  We were known, of course, at some places by now for our eccentricities regarding the making of the martini and our penchant for lone dining and sometimes for improper conduct with table attendants.

  We had yet to be thrown out. True, we had been moved once or twice because of our over-friendliness to people at other tables. But on the whole, we were tolerated even if kept under watchful eye by the staff, and we like to think that we were well admired for our quips and sallies.

  On this particular night, therefore, we were nonplussed to find our Indian restaurant declared ‘full’ by the maître d’. As with all rejected diners, we peered at the empty tables and suspected that we were being denied a table because of some previous behaviour or because of some aberrance of appearance.

  ‘Bookings,’ the maître d’ said, ‘all tables booked.’ We had never had to book at this or any other restaurant in Cambridge.

  However, we left politely and went on to our restaurant of second choice.

  Again, we were told that ‘all the tables were reserved’.

  Outside the restaurant in the reflection of the restaurant window, we examined our dress. We had not forgotten to put on our socks and our socks matched (although this is not a sartorial requirement in Cambridge, believe us) or to do up our flies (ditto). No disconcerting bodily sheddings hung from any of our visible orifices (ditto). And that our trousers were kept up by our college tie was also not out of place in Cambridge. We felt our back to check whether we had a notice pinned there saying, ‘Thief and Liar’ or ‘Child Molester’, stuck on as a ‘jape’ by the ever-playful students who tended to treat Australians as a butt for all pranks and jests and practical jokes (they forget that if it had not been for the food parcels we sent their parents during the war, they would not have such perfect teeth).

  At our third restaurant of choice, having met the same response, we confronted the maître d’. ‘Why is it that the restaurants are booked out on this particular Tuesday?’

  We did not allow a querulous tone to enter our inquiry.

  ‘If you will observe the tables of diners already seated, you will notice something,’ he said, and patiently gestured at the diners.

  We observed. We observed couples.

  Only couples.

  All with long-stemmed red roses in long-necked vases and candle-lit tables.

  ‘We observe couples dining by candlelight,’ we said inconclusively. ‘We see red roses.’

  ‘And why would that be the only clientele this particular night?’ the maître d’ said, leading our thinking, respectfully, Socratically.

  We thought of mass marriages by Dr Moon.

  We shook our head. ‘Give in,’ we said.

  ‘St Valentine’s Day,’ he said, sympathetically, breaking the news to us with a tenderness not usually characteristic of any maître d’.

  ‘St Valentine’s Day?’

  ‘Yes, St Valentine’s Day.’

  He patted our arm. ‘Perhaps a drink on the house – but I am afraid no table tonight, my dear friend,’ he said in his calming voice. It reminded us of the tone of voice of the counselling which we’d had on the half-dozen or so post-traumatic stress counselling situations we’d experienced since being in Britain.

  ‘St Valentine’s Day,’ we said numbly.

  ‘Yes.’ He poured us a British ‘large’ drink which never seems large to us.

  ‘St Valentine’s Day is a commercial fraud,’ we said. ‘It was never celebrated until the last few years.’

  ‘It started around the year 270,’ the maître d’ said. ‘Chaucer kicked it off,’ he said, pouring me a second drink. In Cambridge, even the maître d’ is learned.

  We saw couple after couple enter his restaurant with red roses; the women in little black dresses and the boys with tight jeans and pressed shirts. Very little black dresses.

  ‘However,’ he said, leaning close and whispering, ‘in every city there is always one restaurant designated …’ he paused, choosing his words, ‘for people such as you on St Valentine’s Day.’

  ‘Such as we?’

  ‘Such as you.’

  ‘Who are such as we?’

  ‘Well, single people – people without partners,’ he conjectured.

  ‘Or people away from their partners?’

  He obviously did not believe that we were ‘away’ from our partner.

  ‘I doubt that people away from their partners would wish to eat alone in public on St Valentine’s Day,’ the maître d’ said gently. ‘They would be more likely to eat from the refrigerator at home. Say something eggy on toast. Waiting to take a call from their loved one perhaps.’ His voice trailed off protectively.

  And, of course, although he didn’t say it, the maître d’ knew that Those Who Are Loved know when it is St Valentine’s Day. The others don’t.

  ‘As I say,’ he said, in his now infuriatingly consoling voice, ‘there are places to go.’

  He wrote something on a piece of paper which we took to be the name and address of a restaurant and handed it to us.

  We suggested a compromise. ‘We could eat something here at the bar.’

  ‘I don’t think that would be a good idea,’ he said. ‘Not a good idea.’

  He did not want, we could tell, a single person hanging morbidly and lasciviously around his restaurant on St Valentine’s Day.

  He moved us towards the door.

  He stood at the door watching as we moved down the street which seemed now devoid of light. Perhaps he was fearful that we might return and try to gain entry to his restaurant, perhaps by alleging that we had made ‘a reservation for two’. And then saying that our companion had been killed in a car acc
ident and would not be joining us for dinner.

  We then went to the address – in a dark back lane – and found the restaurant. A lane so dark and full of hopeless sleazy promise that even we had never been in it. The restaurant was so dilapidated and out-of-the-way that it was not pretending to be other than a Place of Last Resort for diners not welcome at Venus’s table.

  It was where the unfit (physically and morally) and the unworthy, the unsociable, the unfortunate, the smelly, the unwashed, the profoundly demoralised, gathered to eat – and not only, we suspected, on St Valentine’s Day.

  The place was so dim we had to feel our way in and the maître d’, if that was how he saw himself, with his soiled apron and collapsed chef’s hat, led us to a table. All tables were tiny and designed for one person with room for a book and a small light.

  Without asking, he brought us a heavy drink of some dark, fizzing alcoholic beverage which we drank without question. He did not say, ‘Happy St Valentine’s Day’ but nor did he say, ‘Unhappy St Valentine’s Day’.

  There were no flowers in sight. No long-stemmed roses. No music played.

  Our ears heard the sounds of the restaurant before our eyes became accustomed to the dark. Occasionally a sigh disguised as a clearing of the throat.

  Occasionally we heard a noise which was a cross between a cry from the soul and a cough.

  There was, from time to time, audible sobbing (something we were familiar with from dining alone at Christmas).

  We became aware that there were both men and women dining in this sad cafe.

  No eye contact was made at any time among the diners or the table attendants and the diners. All eyes were cast down as victims punished cruelly by the so-called Saint of Love.

  We now saw the sadism of St Valentine’s Day.

  There were no smiles and no one laughed. All read books. Thick books; the books which people who fear running out of reading matter and being left with themselves, cart around in restaurants and read on public transport.

  They were all concerned to be seen as busy readers.

  They made facial movements of agreement or disagreement with the book, some made vigorous marks in the margins of the books or wrote copious notes in old personal leather-bound notebooks, or they scribbled in the flyleaf or in the margins or on the blank pages at the back of the book.

  We opened our own big book and began to read, and to drink in that way where, without looking at glass or bottle you reach out and refill the glass. We have no recollection of what we ate.

  And then, one by one, we paid our bills and left, walking with that false steadiness and bogus purpose which the unsteady and purposeless always affect.

  None of us were under the protection of any saint as we walked out into the dark.

  But no.

  Perhaps we were watched over by other older pagan spirits (from whom the Catholic Church had stolen St Valentine’s Day). Those pagan spirits who visited those such as us on other days in our lives, if not today, and who occasionally, surprisingly, bestow upon us their own strange, aberrant, pagan gifts.

  Admonition: Read the work of Carson McCullers.

  A MUSING: THE MUSIC OF ICE

  The bane of eating outdoors in the Australian summer is that the last part of a drink very quickly changes into dregs.

  Especially beer. We asked a friend who became a millionaire what it was that becoming a millionaire meant to his life. He replied without hesitation, ‘I will never again drink the last third of any can of beer.’

  ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I intend to drink only the first few mouthfuls of any can of beer and throw the rest away.’ He argued that it is only the first few mouthfuls of a can of beer that tasted right.

  Even those of us who may not be worth quite a million secretly do not drink the last of any can of beer. We know that the beer dies. The last third of a glass of chilled wine suffers but wine is not as dependent on temperature to be palatable.

  This attachment to chilled wine and beer in Australia has made us very dependent upon ice. We feel uneasy, somehow incomplete, as party-goers and picnickers if we don’t have a few of those plastic bags of ice pieces (virtually unknown in Europe) which wishfully we call ‘party’ ice and which we dump in baths.

  We like to have copious ice about us – the bags which promise a ‘party’.

  But ice has an aesthetic dimension.

  Ice (especially that which is at around minus twenty, and at the peak of its hardness) has a special clunk and clink against glass or metal.

  Along with the sound of good glass clinked against glass, the sound of the ice in the ice bucket, is a part solution to wine’s single deficiency as a sensory experience – wine has no sound. Wine pleasures the nose, the eye and the mouth (and, of course, the nervous system generally) but can give little to the ear. There is some music to a well-pulled wine cork – that single steady note as the cork slides from the neck of the bottle, a long chirp – and there is the pop of the champagne cork.

  Legend has it that the tradition of clinking glasses was introduced to pleasure the ear, to complete the sensory experiences of wine.

  Ice brings music to the experience of a drink.

  Remember the lines about the noises of ice from The Ancient Mariner?

  The ice was here, the ice was there,

  The ice was all around:

  It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,

  Like noises in a swound. (In his reference to swound, Coleridge is referring to the noises made by someone swooning – swounding – or fainting from wounds. Coleridge was obviously stumped for a word to rhyme with ‘around’).

  We once walked in the glacier country of the South Island of New Zealand, and throughout the day and night there were dramatic noises from the ice falling from mountainsides or moving. The ice in the glacier country growled and roared, but it did not howl.

  Ice has subtle sounds as well. We were able to chip off a piece of million-year-old ice from a glacier for our campsite cocktail-hour bourbon.

  The glacier ice was cold enough (although not minus twenty) and gave the right clink and clunk, and what’s more – it crackled.

  This crackling of the ice is from the release of air trapped in the ice. In this case, million-year-old air.

  We fancy that we might have drunk some dinosaur spore and may grow a tail. It would be a price worth paying.

  To be savoured, attention must be paid to the ice at its time of arrival. The rattle of the ice in the ice bucket and the beads of condensation on the silvered bucket gives us a satisfaction of its own, together, of course, with the sight of the ice bucket with the neck of the wine bottle bobbing and waving.

  Chef Tony Bilson taught us some things about ice. Especially this: that the most effective way to chill a bottle of wine is not in a bucket solid with ice but in a bucket of water with ice in it.

  We once thought that the restaurant was saving on ice by mixing it with water and that it would not chill the wine as well as a bucket full of ice.

  But water, as Chef Bilson points out, is a perfect conductor of cold and will conduct it from the ice to the bottle (in point of scientific fact, in eight minutes the bottle will cool down by about ten degrees).

  Finally, ice has other things to tell us.

  In the high mountains, an incautious move or even a sudden loud exclamation can start an avalanche. In our experience, it’s the same with social drinking. The ice of the bucket contains the echoes of our primeval past.

  Within the clink of that ice in the bucket reverberates the potential avalanche of life. And the taking of drinks.

  There is a distinctive bond which is understood to exist between those who take alcoholic drinks together which had to do with sharing a heightened openness, and, maybe, the willingness to take a small, subtle, undefined risk in life.

  Admonition: Always acknowledge the ice when it arrives, and heed within its murmuring, the tremor of the avalanche.

  ON SOCIETY

  THE LAR
RIKIN SPIRIT: AN INTERROGATION

  Our appointment as Inspector-General of Misconception came, we suppose, as no surprise.

  Naturally, we denied at the time, modestly, that we were being head-hunted but as always in these matters, there was a little dance going on behind the scenes. And a song as well.

  We had Our People suggest to journalists that ‘family considerations’ made us reluctant to go into public life again – that is, we enjoyed not having a family or anything to do with a family.

  Admittedly, in public life to have a family is very desirable so that when the heat is turned up, one can resign from public life for ‘family considerations’. We intend to get one for this reason.

  Incidentally, we were surprised to read recently that ‘moving residence’ is placed high on the list of stressful activities. We, on the other hand, find that living in a domestic situation for too long seems very stressful for many people.

  There were also rumblings in the media about our wearing of too many hats. No one seemed to care about us wearing too many furs or feather boas.

  Our Number Crunchers also worried about the public perception that we keep ourself as distant from the real world as possible and were not ‘listening’.

  However, Our People were able to turn this around and presented us as a ‘very private person’, one who shunned the spotlight (although there are very good reasons why we keep our life private).

  Our Spin Doctors also turned the accusation of ‘not listening’ into a positive by describing us as being more inclined to the solitary, studious and meditative life.

  Then the media rumoured that we were in the Prime Minister’s pocket.

  We wish to say this now, and to state it categorically, and to make it perfectly clear, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that we have never been in the Prime Minister’s pocket.

  However, at the same time, we rush to say that we do not discriminate against people whose preferences are in this direction and at the end of the day we may in fact rather like being in someone’s pocket ourselves.