by Patrick Gale
Even to her eye, trained solely by a lifetime of fishmongers’ slabs and a few evenings of poring over The Observer’s Book of Sea Fishes, she knew it wasn’t a bass. But it was beautiful, covered in a violent pattern of turquoise and dull gold and with thick, gasping lips of sky-blue. It was hard to believe something so glamorous could come from such unexotically British waters. She was quite unready for the way its eye met hers, rolling, desperate, or for the violence of its thrashing when her hands drew near, or the threatening spikes of its dorsal fin.
She couldn’t kill it. Not possibly. She ignored the priest, tugged on the clumsy gardening gloves and, fighting the urge to cry out in distress, held it firmly down while she tried to free the hook from its mouth. This was not a thing she had discussed with Glossop. They’d talked only in terms of hunter and prey, not of captor and release. After what felt like minutes of the poor thing drowning in air, she worked out for herself that the hook’s barb meant it had to be drawn through in the direction it was already travelling. She took her little pen knife, fumbled off the gloves to open it, got the gloves back on, almost lost the knife into a rock pool, cut the line, teased the hook out through the creature’s jaw – which produced no blood, she thanked God, or she’d have surely given up – then tossed it back into the water.
For a few dreadful seconds she thought she had killed it, as it merely hung in the water and began to turn its pale belly to the sky, a plump offering for gulls. Then it shook itself and flew down into the shadows beneath the rock.
‘Sounds like a wrasse,’ Glossop told her. ‘Corkwing Wrasse. A proper sport fish. You’re blooded now. No stopping you!’
She looked wrasse up in her cookery books and was relieved to find it described as having watery, rather yellow flesh, fit only for Portuguese stews. Its Latin name, aptly enough it seemed, was turdus.
Glossop went on to make shelves for her daughter’s room and two bedside tables for her own, then, without warning, was deprived of trusty status halfway through making her a cheese board.
‘An act of violence,’ was the only explanation her husband offered, and he took against the bedside tables and banished them to the spare room, claiming his had a wobble.
After several more wrasse and a dispiriting quantity of mackerel, which at least taught her how to kill unflinchingly, she landed her first bass later that summer and fed it to him, steamed, à la Chinoise. She would have liked to cook it for Glossop but, of course, that was out of the question. Instead she bought him an oceanographic map of the Dorset coast and posted it to him from Weymouth, along with a postcard of swans at Abbotsbury.
Success at last! she wrote. Only 21/2 pounds but delicious and so satisfying. First of many, I hope. Thank you so much. She hesitated over how to close, aware of rules, aware that a prison cell was all too public and that letters went astray. She used Yours sincerely, Mrs Whiteley correctly then defiantly gave him her Christian name, in brackets, and added a ps – I shall guard your rock for you – knowing it would mean nothing to anyone else.
Jane became rather an expert at sea angling and bought much and varied tackle from Glossop’s army friend in Weymouth but her husband’s next posting was a landlocked one. The new house’s lush and sheltered rose beds were no compensation.
COOKERY
A favourite piece of broodily autumnal Fauré came on the radio. Perry turned it up and sang along under his breath, still unused to the delight of having the house to himself and being able to make as much noise as he liked. He lifted a saucepan lid to check on the leeks which were sweating in a pool of butter. He prodded them with a wooden spoon then turned off the heat, ground in some pepper and grated in some nutmeg. Nutmeg subtly sweetened the taste and blended nicely with the air of slightly burnt butter. One had to be sparing, however; too much, and the spice overcame the taste of leek rather than merely enhancing it.
He continued singing to himself as he whisked in eggs, cream and some crumbled Wensleydale cheese. Swathing his hands in a towel, he pulled a baking tray from the oven on which two small tart cases had been baking blind under a shroud of silicone parchment weighted with earthenware beans. They were done to perfection; dry without being coloured yet. He allowed the steam to escape from them then, biting his lower lip from the fear of them breaking, tipped each of them gently onto the palm of his hand then slid them, naked, back to the baking tray. He spooned the leek mixture in, sprinkled on a few Parmesan shavings then returned the tray to the oven and set the timer.
The cat, Edie, was clawing at the window and, being on the large side due to a diet of culinary leavings and field mice, threatening to dislodge the herbs that grew on the sill. Perry let her in, kissed her nose in greeting and set her down a saucer of cream. She was the only cat he had known to purr and eat at the same time. The sound was faintly indecent and spoke of appetites beyond the power of man to tame.
‘Cookery is power,’ his mother told him at an early age. She meant it jokingly. Minutes before, she had taught him how to make a simple chocolate toffee sauce to pour over ice cream (butter, sugar, cocoa, a few grains of instant coffee – he made it occasionally still) and was laughing at how instant a reaction it won with some schoolfriends he brought home to lunch.
He had little sense of humour at that age, even less than he had now, and he asked her, quite solemnly, what she meant.
‘I’ll tell you when we’re alone,’ she said, and winked.
He asked her again that night, while he sat on the end of her bed and watched her, fascinated, as she teased out her dancing hair in the breeze from the hair drier. She was taken aback at his earnestness. She had forgotten both sauce and comment. He had thought of little else all day.
‘Men have very simple needs,’ she said, ‘sleep, food, warmth and the other thing. But hunger is the most powerful. When your stomach’s turning in on itself, you can’t concentrate. When you eat something delicious, you’re happy, you’re grateful. A griddle’s more potent than any gun, Perry.’ She laughed. ‘Why frighten people into doing what you want when you can win their love with cake? That hubble-bubble stuff in Macbeth is a parody of a recipe; a cauldron’s just an oversized casserole, after all. If you ask me, those women they burned at the stake were simply cooks who led whole communities by the nose and tongue.’
With the untutored taste buds of childhood, he had favoured sweet recipes at first. Happily these tended to be those involving the most magical transformations. Thus his early cookery lessons carried all the attraction of games with a chemistry set. There was that hot chocolate sauce that, once he had learned to let it boil sufficiently, set into filling-tugging caramel on contact with ice cream. There was the sequence of hot desserts, nicknamed chemical puddings by his mother, in which an unpromising sludge would rise up through a watery layer during baking, thickening it into a rich sauce as it formed a puffily cakey crust above it. Victoria sponge taught him pride. Patience he learned through meringue; those wrist-numbing extra minutes of whisking that divided egg whites that were merely stiff from those that were said to be standing in peaks, and the slow baking in a cool oven which managed mysteriously to produce a confection so crumbly and dry. It was only with chocolate brownies, however, with which a girlfriend’s older brother was so easily persuaded to drop his jeans for a five-minute scientific inspection, that Perry learned the extent of his new-found power.
Adult, savoury cookery was taught piecemeal, largely through being asked to help out with occasional tasks. Learning how to brown chicken thighs, roll pieces of steak in seasoned flour, dissect and meticulously de-seed red peppers, he combined his new techniques with what he saw his mother doing and so added coq au vin, boeuf en daube and ratatouille to a still succinct repertoire.
‘If you can cook,’ she told him, ‘you’ll never be hungry, but if you can cook well, if you can do more than just feed people, you’ll be popular too. You’ll be able to choose who likes you.’
Thrilled by the potency of such a spell, for he was a scrawny child who had yet
to grow into his nose, he hung on her every word. He followed her about the garden absorbing wisdom.
‘Parsley,’ she pronounced. ‘Useful but common. The curly one is only really usable in sauce and soup. And never use the flat-leaved one unthinkingly. Often this plant, chervil, will do much better. Taste it. Go on. See? Now try this. Coriander. Superb stuff. You can use it almost like a vegetable, by the handful, but be careful again. Used in the wrong context it tastes like soap and it sticks to teeth as embarrassingly as spinach.’
In season, she led him around the fields and lanes behind the house introducing him to blackberries, sloes, elder bushes, mushrooms, crab apples, sorrel.
When Perry turned ten, shortly after his creation of a puffball and bacon roulade had seduced a new neighbour and demoralized the neighbour’s wife, his mother fell ill. For a few weeks, without anyone’s appearing to notice, he inherited her apron, and whisked up menu after comforting menu for his father and older brothers, reading cookery books in bed and skiving off afternoon sports sessions at school to race into town on his bicycle before the covered market closed. When she returned, grey and shattered after her operation, she was grateful to have had her wooden spoon usurped, still more to taste his nutritious soups and cunning vegetables after two weeks of hospital pap.
Her gratitude, however, seemed to break the peaceful spell of his father’s quiescence. It was as though he were noticing for the first time as Perry stirred his sauces and deftly shredded roots and nuts, swamped in a practical but undeniably floral apron.
‘Why don’t you play rugby like Geoff?’ he asked. ‘You’d like rugby. Once you got used to it.’
‘Sport bores me. What do you think of this duck? Was the fennel a mistake? Maybe celeriac would work better, or even parsnip. If I could get it to caramelize properly without the skin burning…’
Perry was duly banished to a boarding school on the Yorkshire coast, handpicked for its bracingly sporty philosophy and lack of opportunities for any science more domestic than the use of Ralgex and Universal Embrocation. His mother was brought down from her sickbed and set back to work at the kitchen stove. She collapsed there shortly afterwards and died of an internal haemorrhage halfway through assembling a deceptively humble fish pie. Perry cursed his father for his cruelty but laid on a suitable buffet for her funeral and brought his seduction of the neighbour to an electric conclusion with the aid of some witty yet somehow mournful filo parcels of pigeon, leek and sultana.
He hated school and counted off the passing weeks like a prisoner. His impatience to be free had more to do with the liberty to have access to more inspiring ingredients than with any brutalities visited on him. His growing mastery over food continued to protect him like a hero’s winged sandals or magic armour. An ability to dress crab and whip up a mayonnaise won him an entrée to the shielding comforts of the prefects’ common room in his second week and the older boys soon set him to baking them cakes instead of forcing him out onto icy playing fields. He even came to look forward to overnight field trips with the cadet corps, given charge as he was of the campfire kitchen. Since adolescents have always lurched between the kindred demands of belly and groin, cookery also brought him sporadic tastes of rough-handed romance.
His father and brothers had long dismissed him as effetely artistic and were as surprised as he was when he began to specialize in chemistry. Boarding school had given him a taste for independence. Without his mother there, the family home held little appeal for him and while passing through university and qualifying as a forensic scientist, he went there as little as possible. (He made exceptions for his brothers’ successive weddings, miserable occasions where the poor quality of the catering made him more than usually grateful that he had kept cookery as a vice and not pursued it as a livelihood.)
He had only the one live-in lover, first encountered in the meat aisle of a local supermarket. Douglas had come out shopping in tennis clothes, fresh, or rather not, from a match. Perry could not help noticing the way the chilled air from the meat cabinets raised goose bumps on his legs and Douglas noticed him notice. After smiling, smirking then grinning encounters beside toiletries, Kosher and home baking successively, the evening had ended in Perry cooking Douglas lamb noisettes in a pink peppercorn sauce. Smug and yawning twelve hours later, he made them scrambled eggs and bacon. It took only two more dinners for Douglas to move in.
It was a love expressed as Perry knew best, in generous helpings, judiciously seasoned. Over four years, Douglas added running and secret dieting to tennis as he fought in vain the extra poundage that Perry’s devotion was heaping on him. Then he fell ill and for three years after that, Perry became an expert in nutritional coaxing as he tried in vain to stave off Douglas’s inexorable spells of weight loss, vanished appetite or nausea. The most innocent foods – yoghurt, bread, cheese – would suddenly be branded as enemies. His ingenuity was stretched to the limit. Whenever Douglas was in hospital, Perry would cook a portable supper for them both and make a point of their still sharing an evening meal there, even if Douglas could manage no more than a spoonful before sinking back on the pillows in defeat. Never had the preparation of food carried such an emotional charge for him.
Douglas’s was the second funeral feast he had cooked, beating tears into cake batter, anger into cream. He intended it to be his last.
After Douglas there had been men occasionally, but no more lovers. Perry’s experience of desire had always been so bound up in the pleasures of the table that he found it hard to surrender for long to any romance that was not essentially domestic. Then the hole in his domestic routine was unexpectedly filled.
A stroke after a hip operation left his father incapacitated. There was a gruesome council of war in which the brothers, abetted by child-worn wives, agreed that residential homes were both soulless and ruinously expensive. Perry had room in his house. Perry had experience of home nursing thanks to his ‘lodger’s’ long illness. They would each pay a nominal monthly sum to their younger brother and he should take their father in. He had never declared his sexuality, assuming it would be taken as read and, as they confronted him with their tidy plan, he sensed it was too late to do so now. He had allowed them to assume he was merely a bachelor, a eunuch with a way with sauces. He had allowed them to assume that, for all their initial doubts, his work for CID meant that he had been vetted as ‘sound’. Playing hard to define, he had played into their hands. He could hardly turn around and complain that visiting a speechless, incontinent, not to say unmusical parent on him would starve a love life that was already gasping for sustenance.
At first it seemed like an abominable invasion of his privacy. The old man might have lost control of tongue and bladder but retained his bullying nature and store of indignation. Gradually, however, Perry saw that there was no cause for fear. He was in charge now. He decided what the old man could and could not eat, when he would bathe, when he could watch television and, indeed, what he would watch. To cover the long hours he spent at work in the police laboratories, he took pleasure in hiring just the sort of camp, Irish nurse his father would loathe. Said treasure wore a uniform he described as Doris Blue. He was delighted when Perry confided that his father had been sleeping with men on the sly all his married life and was a wicked old flirt with wandering hands. Perry often came home to find the two of them watching films in which men loved men or women tap-danced and sang their hearts out. The nurse would be watching, at least, and singing along where appropriate. Perry’s father would be merely staring, aghast, in the direction in which he had been so mercilessly wedged with scatter cushions.
Perry opened them an account at a specialist video library. In twelve months his father was exposed to the entire output of Crawford, Davis, Stanwyck, Garland, and the Turners Kathleen and Lana. He became a passive expert on the complete weepies of Douglas Sirk – of which the nurse was especially fond – and even the most misbegotten of MGM’s musical output. He sat, breathing heavily, through any film that could be remotely des
cribed as lesbian or gay, subtitles, Kenneth Anger and all. He watched nothing pornographic, however, at least nothing hard core. Despite Perry’s bland assurances, the nurse was sure the excitement would have dire effects on his bladder or even his heart.
It startled Perry to find that he could be so vindictive. Apart from some singularly unhelpful grief counselling after Douglas died, he had never been in therapy and was not given to self-analysis. He had never given voice to the damage his father had done him, so had never given it substance. Even now, he did not immediately seek a retributive justification for what he was doing.
He did not abuse his father physically, although the odd smack might have seemed only the mild repayment of a long-outstanding debt. He dressed him. He undressed him. He bathed him. He changed his incontinence pads. If he spoon-fed him the kind of food his father had always dismissed as foreign or nancy, if he occasionally buttoned him into a violet quilted bed jacket that had been his mother’s (telling the nurse to humour a camp old man’s little ways) it was done in a spirit of domestic spite not unlike that practised between many a cohabiting couple.
As a year went by, then two, during which his father was a powerless, dolled-up guest of honour at several of Perry’s more Wildean parties, he came to think of the old man less as a parent than a grouchy partner. As he pecked his father’s cheek on leaving for work or retiring for the night, as he amused himself by brushing his still thick, silver hair into a variety of fanciful styles, as he meticulously piped a saucily naked cherub onto his heart-shaped birthday cake, Perry would admit that, while still not exactly fond, he had developed a kind of tender dependence on his father’s being there. Bereft of any other outlet, his nurturing energies were making do with the only available man on the horizon. (The nurse was never an option; Perry had old-fashioned views on the healthy inflexibility of sexual roles and had marked the nurse down as a sister from day one.)
