The Debt to Pleasure Read online

  It was on an evening when I had prepared a bourride that I received my first visit from Pierre and Jean-Luc, my Provençal semi-neighbours. They were (are) a pair of brothers of very great antiquity, weathered, sceptical, stupid-intelligent in the classic peasant manner, brusque, full of unpredictable, unrefusable kindnesses and not very tall; and, despite both being almost completely blind – opinion in the village varying as to whose eyesight was, strictly speaking, worse – addicted to shooting. Pierre, the elder of the two, is also the darker, the taller, the more liver-spotted and much more likely to visit on his own than Jean-Luc; he is also, by a fine margin, the more silent. He never looks directly at one, but his avoidance of one’s eye somehow manages not to seem either shifty or apologetic; it is as if he were a polite basilisk, courteously failing to avail himself of his ability to turn us all to stone. The three or four partially feral cats who frequent my house during the months I spend at St-Eustache, who always have an air of feline condescension in permitting my co-habitation, are always mysteriously absent during Pierre’s visits, perhaps fearing that this Gorgonic power might vent itself on them as they scuttle about on the floor and, in the etymologically radical sense of the term, leave them astonished. On the other hand, perhaps some supersensory perception informs the cats that if they stray across the paths of the brothers, they run the risk of being shot. Jean-Luc, physically distinct from his brother in the ways outlined, is also atmospherically distinct, with an air of mild general affability not at all dispelled by the fact that he is never to be seen without his shotgun, a long, fearsome, single-barrelled instrument with marked affinities to a cartoon blunderbuss; he always carries the weapon either broken open over the crook of his arm or – much more alarmingly – resting vertically in the ‘shoulder arms’ position. They live alone together in a little cabanon, or shepherd’s hut, about five kilometres away and are, in fact, relatively rich, owning a great deal of land in the area, including all the area immediately around my own humble property. Their territory is given a wide berth in the hunting season. They are feared and respected eaters. Their visits never fail to precipitate a cryptic exchange on the subject of the weather, of farm prices, an anti-German anecdote or two, a silent and evidently merciless scrutiny of whatever is being prepared for supper that evening and an often equally cryptic, subtly menacing presentation of gifts: a guinea fowl that has been drowned in home-made eau-de-vie, its little beak held under by Jean-Luc’s powerful grimy hands, or a line-caught fish that has been suffocated rather than clubbed to death. On that first visit, though, Pierre and Jean-Luc, dropping in to introduce themselves, caught sight of the bourride I was preparing and, both standing over me as I made finishing touches to the seasoning, pronounced the immortal verdict, ‘Bon,’ a compliment which got our relationship off to a good start. I was to develop an affection for the brothers which subsequent events did nothing to efface.

  From contemplated soups, theoretical soups, hypothetical, remembered and virtual soups I – though sadly not you, reader, and more’s the pity, since I think you would have enjoyed it if you had been there – must now return to the real thing. After a splendid coastal evening in St-Malo, I, at the end of a happy afternoon pottering around the reconstructed streets, was in search of that desirable preparation, another standing reproach to our country’s depleted culinary culture, the matelote normande. (Why are there not equivalent soups in the British Isles, with Newcastle and Ramsgate vying to outdo each other in the sophistication of their local specialities, and ferocious arguments being conducted over whether samphire can legitimately be included in the eponymous pottage of Cardiff?) It is pleasant to saunter as-if-aimlessly through the streets of a town such as St-Malo, one eighth sleepily provincial, one eighth practical and fishermanly workmanlike, and three quarters tourist-oriented, gift-shopped and multiply hotelled. The narrow streets, hostile to traffic, give the town the air of hiding from the sea, as if the houses were a form of collective security, a cramped human identity defined in opposition to the life-sustaining, death-dealing, fish-yielding, widow-making, alien expanses of water. As in so many seaside towns, the architecture and topography is such that the sea itself comes as a surprise glimpsed at the end of a steep alley, or vividly apparent in the gaps between houses, or reluctantly acknowledged as you turn the corner on to a fortified marina or sudden esplanade (its very width another attempt to keep the water at bay), but with its presence betrayed all the time by the smell of ozone and the bad-tempered cawing of hungry gulls.

  A stroll through these streets brought me to a little restaurant that – earlier research had already informed me – was mentioned in guidebooks as specializing in fruits de mer. The likeably straight-faced patronne showed me to a flattering corner table, demonstrating, as if it needed to be demonstrated, that always beguiling French attitude of respectful attention towards the solitary diner. The room was narrow and L-shaped, with myself in the far corner of the dog-leg, and it was decorated in a style of acceptably un-ironized kitsch with fishing nets, prints and wall-hung crustacean pots. Without consulting the menu I ordered a matelote; the waiter was impressed.

  Scrutiny of one’s fellow-customers is one of the acknowledged pleasures of dining out. This evening the restaurant was quiet. A group of tourists at the next table were discussing the relative traffic density of different holiday locations, their South German ichs slithery and lubricious; a middle-aged French couple were eating in the traditional Gallic, concentrated, reverential silence; a widow was dining alone with a small pampered dog across her feet; there was also a young British couple, the man instantly forgettable, of no interest whatsoever, the woman with sun-lightened, careless, honey-brown hair, hazel eyes which brought the room towards them as if they and not oneself were the universe’s centre of consciousness, something Egyptian about the length and beauty of her neck, wearing a cream-coloured dress that shimmered with her movements like wind-blown wheat, a single band of gold dismayingly visible on one of her long fingers as they absentmindedly curled around a tall wineglass (Entre-Deux-Mers, he had moronically ordered), her bread-breaking movements delicate and heedless, everything about her radiant, enhanced, wasted. This couple had committed the solecism involved in ordering a first course before their now certainly unfinishable marmite dieppoise. I caught the eye of the waiter and smiled from behind my ‘shades’.

  The discovery, among Mary-Theresa’s possessions, of my mother’s earrings (found hidden under the mattress by the polite, fair-haired gendarme already mentioned; it was as if Mary-Theresa had been acting out one of the failed impersonations in the legend of the princess and the pea) was a shock, of course, and the scene that ensued was very terrible, not least, one gathered, because of the vehemence and passion with which she categorically asserted her innocence. The news was broken to us children in that way that adult scandals always are – mediated to one’s childish self by a sense of things unspoken, by small anomalies in the texture of the everyday, by a feeling of parental distractions and absences, by the knowledge that heated conversations are taking place just out of earshot. So one knew, from the time of one’s father’s arrival home in the early afternoon – ‘dropping in on the home front’ was what he reported himself as doing – that something was up. At about six o’clock, by which time my brother and I had been alerted by all sorts of major distortions to the daily routine (non-presentation of tea by Mary-Theresa, my mother instead distractedly constructing sandwiches of, I remember noting, a disturbingly irregular thickness of bread; non-presence of Mary-Theresa in her putting-the-boys-down-for-their-afternoon-nap role; non-presence of Mary-Theresa in a supervisory capacity during our afternoon rough-and-tumble; non-praising by Mary-Theresa of whatever my brother had got up to in the afternoon, her hysterical cry of, ‘Look at what Barry’s done now,’ as she held up his latest daubing or smear, being welcomely and conspicuously absent; and finally non-preparation of tea by Mary-Theresa, what seemed like a slight delay in proceedings gradually extending into a bona fide gastric eme
rgency), my father intervened with his gravely radical tidings.

  ‘Boys, I have some bad news.’

  The word ‘boys’ inevitably prefaced some announcement of more than usual import – ‘Boys, your mother is staying for a while in a sort of clinic.’ In this case:

  ‘Mary-Theresa has been rather naughty, and she has had to leave us.’

  ‘But Papa!’

  ‘Please don’t ask any more questions, boys. Your mother is very upset, and it is important that you show you are strong for her.’

  Needless to say, it did not take too long to piece together the real story, not least because my parents’ official declaration of a wall of secrecy had to contend unsuccessfully with my mother’s histrionic impulses. She spent the next few days, as she was in certain circumstances prone to do, standing for minutes at a time gazing at the restored earrings in her ears (via a mirror) and was not above muttering, as if to herself, the single word ‘Betrayed . . .’. That evening, uniquely, my father cooked, serving a surprisingly competent sorrel omelette that he must have learnt somewhere on his travels, much as he had been taught to juggle by a Neapolitan aristocrat while waiting in a queue to clear customs during a government employees’ work-to-rule in Port Said. Luckily it wasn’t one of the times I had part-emptied the gas canister.

  Spring

  ROAST LAMB

  A LUNCHEON ON THE THEME OF LAMB CURRY

  Roast Lamb

  Spring, optimum time of the year for suicides, is also an excellent season for the cook. Though I must say that I have often wondered whether, just as Turner invented sunsets, T. S. Eliot may have invented the seasonal surge in the incidence of people attempting to do away with themselves, and whether, before the publication of The Waste Land, April was actually, as months go, entirely benign. Notwithstanding that, April, if it didn’t used to be the cruellest month, certainly is now – and empirical confirmation of the seasonally adjusted suicide rate was provided by Mary-Theresa’s apparently guilt-maddened action in precipitating herself off the Pont-Neuf one crisp Paschal morning immediately following her exposure. Her body was so heavily weighted with stones (paving stones, stolen or borrowed from a street under repair near the Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de la Cité) that the policeman who broke the news, two fit young gendarmes, unpuffed themselves by the four-storey walk up to our flat, were impressed by her ability to carry herself as far as the famous bridge with the stones in a bag she subsequently attached to herself, let alone her then managing to heave herself and her burden over the side. Sturdy peasant stock, as my father, not often wrong about people, had observed when initially employing her.

  Still, the same factors which make this a difficult time for the manically depressed, the elderly, the memory-tormented and the weak make it an excellent season for those who are able to congratulate themselves on being in the fortunate position of having survived the winter. And perhaps it is this very element, the resurging, triumphant, self-delighting, competitive rude health of spring, that makes it paradoxically debilitating for those aforementioned types, just as living in beautiful surroundings and in beautiful weather can exaggerate individual misery by giving its victim a feeling of what he is failing to live up to. As a young friend of mine remarked, à propos her reluctance to take up a lucrative academic position in Southern California: ‘Two hundred and fifty days of sunshine a year – what if you still felt miserable?’ Perhaps this is only to say that, as the demotic American maxim has it, show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser – and spring is the time when losers are brought face to face with their loserdom, their loserhood. The rest of us rejoice (in the words of the Old Testament) as the sun emerges like a bridegroom from his chamber, rejoicing to run a race.

  The appropriate food for this season is combative, uptempo, sanguinary.

  Lamb is, of course, the meat most closely associated, in the Christian tradition, with ideas of violence and sacrifice – in fact, even the most robust of us self-contentedly pagan moderns has been known to experience a slight flicker of distaste at the imagery of the born-again being rinsed in the blood of the lamb. (One wonders what the mythological force of this image would be if the cleansing agent were, say, baked beans.) And indeed the disturbing literal-mindedness of Christian imagery is seldom as apparent as it is in the practice of eating lamb at Easter. I mean, really. This is a particularly off-key custom when one bears in mind the centuries-old association of sheepmeat with the lands where Islam holds its sway. For mutton was originally a staple food of nomadic tribesmen, who favoured food cooked in tail fat and loved to spit-roast their charges on their swords. One can imagine Genghis Khan himself listening to his next-day’s supper bleating in the field outside his yurt as he stood under the huge, star-filled amphitheatre of the Central Asian plains and, for the first time, began to feel the weight of years . . . The association of sheepmeat with Islam grew through the development of the cuisines of the Middle East, which include dishes such as the superbly tender and esculent inmos, in which mutton is stewed with yoghurt and cumin in what must surely be a deliberate inversion of the Hebraic injunction against seething a kid in its mother’s milk, through to Islamized and re-Christianized Spain, where an excessive affection for lamb (with its religio-racial associations) could be enough to earn the unfortunate gourmand the attentions of the Inquisition, through to contemporary Britain, where the time-honoured religio-culinary coupling is celebrated anew in the exciting proliferation of large-windowed and conveniently situated kebab outlets, there being a number of remarkable examples near my Bayswater pied-à-terre.

  The upsurge in animal spirits that accompanies the onset of spring is, of course, partly just that – an exultant intifada of our animal nature, the winter-slimmed beast slipping through the bars of its seasonal cage. Many of the ideas about rising sap, quickening pulses and so on are no more than literally true: I myself, at this time of year when the first scent of the resurrecting flora was enlivening my nostrils, used to feel as if I were growing an inch or two taller; my father would take out a mortifyingly dilapidated grey woollen two-piece outfit, a fossil ancestor of the modern tracksuit, and go for his wobbly first bicycle ride of the year; my mother’s hats would, as if in response to a chemical reaction, mysteriously change colour; my brother, in his mountebankish way, would claim to be felled in his tracks by a seasonal migraine (generally robust, indeed culpably over-robust, in his constitution, he permitted himself this annual bout of malaise). And there was also the strange overexcitement which used to come upon Mitthaug. He was a ‘recovering’ alcoholic, a fact I gradually pieced together, as one does in childhood, from silences, elisions, absences, and that elusive sense of something not being quite right, which children are so quick to intuit and which provides one reason why they are so alarming to us grown-ups. His normally ebullient mood would go through a marked seasonal dip in or around mid-December. Perhaps, for him, the first snow of the year was too-tangible evidence of the imminent full onset of winter: the claustrophobic melancholy of the narrowing year. (The Scandinavian winter, the almost physical sense of constriction it imposes on the psyche, must be a factor in the typical Scandinavian manner of depressive, lugubrious, hibernatory drinking.) But when spring came Mitthaug would dramatically perk up and would re-assume his habitual near-manic good humour. His problematic teetotalism, with its paradoxical high spirits, was a sort of backlash against the way he might have been if he was drunk; since, to any really committed career drinker, drunkenness is normality and undrunkenness is exceptional, his sobriety was a way of being, in that all too accurate phrase, ‘out of his head’.

  It is inevitable that spring, by providing a visible metaphor for the processes of rebirth, growth, birth and resurrection, should have become associated with other kinds of nascence and opening out; this is especially, doubly, true in the case of the artist, intimate as he is with sensations of unfolding and budding, of tentative realization swelling into ecstatic apprehension of not-quite-certainty with the rampant unexpectedness of
one of those ingenious little packets which, when dropped into water, so startlingly and magically transform themselves into fully inflated, accessorized and provisioned liferafts.

  It was at this time of year, one day after a garlicky, haricot-accompanied classic gigot, prepared by my own fair hand in Norfolk at the cottage which is still my primary place of dwelling, that the artistic project which was to form my lifetime’s work began its first shy glimmerings in my imagination – the light it emitted being faint, elusive, detectable only by the most sensitive and finely tuned of instruments, perceivable only by the most dark-adapted of imaginable eyes, like the light cast in a deep cave not by lanterns, torches or candles but by the faery luminescence of decomposing moss.

  ‘I was walking in the garden after lunch,’ I recently recollected for the benefit of an interviewer as we both unspokenly relished the exquisite consonance of torpidly slaloming between ovoid plant beds in the very same garden. ‘The willow’s ringlets were turning green. There was a slight breeze. It suddenly occurred to me that the garden stood as an image for an art designed not to seem like art.’

  ‘I’m not sure I follow you,’ said my delightful interlocutor faux-naively and cunning-little-minxishly, already providing an early instance of the ability to lead one on and draw out one’s train of thought so essential in an amanuensis or Boswell – not that she herself in any other way (least of all physically) resembled that portly, opportunistic Caledonian journalizer. As she spoke she leaned forward and looked up sidelong at me through a fine curtain of wind-mussed, palish hair that intensified the eroticizing force of her glance in the same way that the movement of a light summer dress enhances, by fluidly half-revealing and half-concealing, the shapeliness and animal lambency of the female leg. Her eyes were hazel (everybody’s eyes are hazel) but with green radial tigerstripe highlights.