Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (50 page)

He turned and stared at the mountain for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years but he had never seen it before as it might look to someone who had not known it as almost a part of the self, so, for the first time, he saw the primitive, vast, magnificent, barren, unkind, simplicity of the mountain. As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into so much scenery, into the wonderful backcloth for an old country tale, tale of a child suckled by wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman.

Then he determinedly set his face towards the town and tramped onwards, into a different story.

“If I look back again,” he thought with a last gasp of superstitious terror, “I shall turn into a pillar of salt.”

“Born in a trunk”, they say when a theatrical sups grease-paint with mother’s milk, and if there be a culinary equivalent of the phrase then surely I merit it, for was I not conceived the while a soufflé rose? A lobster soufflé, very choice, twenty-five minutes in a medium oven.

And the very first soufflé that ever in her life as cook me mam was called upon to make, ordered up by some French duc, house guest of Sir and Madam, me mam pleased as punch to fix it for him since few if any
fins becs
pecked their way to our house, not even during the two weeks of the Great Grouse Shoot when nobs rolled up in droves to score the feathered booty of the skies. Especially not then. Palates like shoe leather. “Pearls before swine,” my mother would have said as she reluctantly sent the four and twenty courses of her Art up to the dining room, except that pigs would have exhibited more gourmandise. I tell you, the English country house, yes! that’s the place for grub; but, only when Sir and Madam are
pas chez lui.
It is the staff who keep up the standards.

For Madam would touch nothing but oysters and grapes on ice three times a day, due to the refinement of her sensibility, while Sir fasted until a devilled bone at sundown, his tongue having been burned out by curry when he was governing a bit of Poonah. (I reckon those Indians hotted up his fodder out of spite. Oh, the cook’s vengeance, when it strikes—terrible!) And as for the Shooters of Grouse, all they wanted was sandwiches for hors d’oeuvres, sandwiches for entrées, followed by sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, and their hip flasks kept replenished, oh, yes, wash it down with the amber fluid and who can tell how it tastes?

So me mam took great pains with the construction of this, her very first lobster soufflé, sending the boy who ground knives off on his bike to the sea, miles, for the beast itself and then the boiling of it alive, how it come squeaking piteously crawling out of the pot etc. etc. etc. so me mam all a-flutter before she so much as separated the eggs.

Then, just as she bent over the range to stir the flour into the butter, a pair of hands clasped tight around her waist. Thinking, at first, it was but kitchen horseplay, she twitched her ample hips to put him off as she slid the egg yolks into the roux. But as she mixed in the lobster meat, diced up, all nice, she felt those hands stray higher.

That was when too much cayenne went in. She always regretted that.

And as she was folding in the toppling contents of the bowl of beaten egg-white, God knows what it was he got up to but so much so she flings all into the white dish with abandon and:

“To hell with it!”

Into the oven goes the soufflé; the oven door slams shut.

I draw a veil.

“But, mam!” I often begged her.
“Who was that man?”

“Lawks a mercy, child,” says she. “I never thought to ask. I were that worried the wallop I give the oven door would bring the soufflé down.”

But, no. The soufflé went up like a montgolfier and, as soon as its golden head knocked imperiously against the oven door, she bust through the veil I have discreetly drawn over this scene of passion and emerged, smoothing her apron, in order to extract the exemplary dish amidst oohs and aahs and of the assembled kitchen staff, some forty-five in number.

But not quite exemplary. The cook met her match in the eater. The housekeeper brings his plate herself, slaps it down. “He said: ‘
Trop de
cayenne,’ and scraped it off his plate into the fire,” she announces with a gratified smirk. She is a model of refinement and always very particular about her aspirates. She hiccups. She even says the “h” in “hic”.

My mother weeps for shame.

“What we need here is a congtinental—hic—chef to improve
le ton,”
menaces the housekeeper, tossing me mam a killing look as she sweeps out the door for me mam is a simple Yorkshire lass for all she has magic in her fingers but no room for two queens in this hive, the housekeeper hates her. And the housekeeper is pricked perpetually by the fancy for the importation of a Carême or a Soyer with moustaches like hatracks to
croquembouche
her and
milly filly
her as is all the rage.

“For isn’t it Alberlin, chef to the dear Devonshires; and Crépin, at the Duchess of Sutherland’s. Then there’s Labalme, with the Duke of Beaufort’s household, doncherno … and the Queen, bless her, has her Ménager … while we’re stuck with that fat cow who can’t speak nothing but broad Yorkshire, never out of her carpet slippers …”

Conceived upon a kitchen table, born upon a kitchen floor; no bells rang to welcome me but, far more aptly, my arrival heralded by a bang! bang! bang! on every skillet in the place, a veritable fusillade of copper-bottom kitchen tympani; and the merry clatter of ladle against dish-cover; and the very turnspit dogs all went: “Bow wow!”

It being, as you might yourself compute, a good three months off October, Sir and Madam being in London the housekeeper maintains a fine style all by herself, sitting in her parlour partaking of the best Bohea from a Meissen cup, to which she adds a judicious touch of rum from the locked bottles to which she’s forged a key in her ample leisure. The housekeeper’s little skivvy, that she keeps to fetch, carry and lick boot, just topping the tea-cup up with old Jamaica, all hell breaks loose below stairs as if a Chinese orchestra started up its woodblocks and xylophones, crash, wallop.

“What on earth are the—hick—lower ordures up to?” elocutes the housekeeper in ladylike and dulcet tones, giving the ear of the skivvy a quick but vicious tug to jerk the gossip out of her.

“Oh, madamissima!” quavers the poor little skivvyette. “Tis nobbut the cook’s babby!”

“The cook’s baby?!?”

Due to my mother’s corpulence, which is immense, she’s round as the “o” in “obese”, and the great loyalty and affection towards her of all the kitchen staff, the housekeeper knew nothing of my imminence but, amid her waxing wroth, also glad to hear it, since she thought she spied a way to relieve my mother of her post due to this unsolicited arrival and then nag Sir and Madam to get in some mincing and pomaded gent to
chaudfroid
and
gêlée
and butter up. Below stairs she descends forthwith, a stately yet none too stable progress due to the rum with a dash of tea she sips all day, the skivvy running in front of her to throw wide the door.

What a spectacle greets her! Raphael might have sketched it, had he been in Yorkshire at the time. My mother, wreathed in smiles, enthroned on a sack of spuds with, at her breast, her babe, all neatly swaddled in a new-boiled pudding cloth and the entire kitchen brigade arranged around her in attitudes of adoration, each brandishing a utensil and giving out there with that merry rattle of the ladles, yours truly’s first lullaby.

Alas, my cradle song soon peters out in the odd thwack and tinkle as the housekeeper cast her coldest eye.

“What’s—hic—this?”

“A bonny boy!” croons me mam, planting a smacking kiss on the tender forehead pressed against her pillowing bosom.

“Out of the house for this!” cries the housekeeper. “Hic,” she adds.

But what a clang and clamour she unleashes with that demand; as if she’d let off a bomb in a hardware store, for all present (except my mother and myself) attack their improvised instruments with renewed vigour, chanting in unison:

“The kitchen child! The kitchen child! You can’t turn out the kitchen child!”

And that was the truth of the matter; who else could I claim as my progenitor if not the greedy place itself, that, if it did not make me, all the same, it caused me to be made? Not one scullery maid nor the littlest vegetable boy could remember who or what it was which visited my mother that soufflé morning, every hand in the kitchen called to cut sandwiches, but some fat shape seemed to have haunted the place, drawn to the kitchen as a ghost to the dark; had not that gourmet due kept a gourmet valet? Yet his outlines melt like aspic in the heat from the range.

“The kitchen child!”

The kitchen brigade made such a din that the housekeeper retreated to revive herself with another tot of rum in her private parlour, for, faced with a mutiny amongst the pans, she discovered little valour in her spirit and went to sulk in her tent.

The first toys I played with were colanders, egg whisks and saucepan lids. I took my baths in the big tureen in which the turtle soup was served. They gave up salmon until I could toddle because, as for my crib, what else but the copper salmon kettle? And this kettle was stowed way up high on the mantelshelf so I could snooze there snug and warm out of harm’s way, soothed by the delicious odours and appetising sounds of the preparation of nourishment, and there I cooed my way through babyhood above that kitchen as if I were its household deity high in my tiny shrine.

And, indeed, is there not something holy about a great kitchen? Those vaults of soot-darkened stone far above me, where the hams and strings of onions and bunches of dried herbs dangle, looking somewhat like the regimental banners that unfurl above the aisles of old churches. The cool, echoing flags scrubbed spotless twice a day by votive persons on their knees. The scoured gleam of row upon row of metal vessels dangling from hooks or reposing on their shelves till needed with the air of so many chalices waiting for the celebration of the sacrament of food. And the range like an altar, yes, an altar, before which my mother bowed in perpetual homage, a fringe of sweat upon her upper lip and fire glowing in her cheeks.

At three years old she gave me flour and lard and straightaway I invented shortcrust. I being too little to manage the pin, she hoists me on her shoulders to watch her as she rolls out the dough upon the marble slab, then sets me to stamp out the tartlets for myself, tears of joy at my precocity trickling down her cheeks, lets me dollop on the damson jam and lick the spoon for my reward. By three and a half, I’ve progressed to rough puff and, after that, no holding me. She perches me on a tall stool so I can reach to stir the sauce, wraps me in her pinny that goes round and round and round me thrice, tucks it in at the waist else I trip over it head first into my own Hollandaise. So I become her acolyte.

Reading and writing come to me easy. I learn my letters as follows: A for asparagus,
asperges au beurre fondue
(though never, for my mother’s sake, with a
sauce bâtarde);
B for
boeuf,
baron of, roasted mostly, with a
pouding Yorkshire
patriotically sputtering away beneath it in the dripping pan; C for carrots,
carrottes, choufleur, camembert
and so on, right down to
Zabaglione,
although I often wonder what use the X might be, since it figures in no cook’s alphabet.

And I stick as close to that kitchen as the
croûte
to a
pâté
or the mayonnaise to an
oeuf.
First, I stand on that stool to my saucepans; then on an upturned bucket; then on my own two feet. Time passes.

Life in this remote mansion flows by a tranquil stream, only convulsing into turbulence once a year and then for two weeks only, but that fuss enough, the Grouse Shoot, when they all come from town to set us by the ears.

Although Sir and Madam believe their visit to be the very and unique reason for the existences of each and every one of us, the yearly climacteric of our beings, when their staff, who, as far as
they
are concerned, sleep out a hibernation the rest of the year, now spring to life like Sleeping Beauty when her prince turns up, in truth, we get on so well without them during the other eleven and a half months that the arrival of Themselves is a chronic interruption of our routine. We sweat out the fortnight of their presence with as ill a grace as gentlefolk forced by reduced circumstances to take paying guests into their home, and as for
haute cuisine,
forget it; sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, all they want is sandwiches.

And never again, ever again, a special request for a soufflé, lobster or otherwise. Me mam always a touch broody come the Grouse Shoot, moody, distracted, and, even though no order came, nevertheless, every year, she would prepare her lobster soufflé all the same, send the grinding boy off for the lobster, boil it alive, beat the eggs, make the panada etc. etc. etc., as if the doing of the thing were a magic ritual that would raise up out of the past the great question mark from whose loins her son had sprung so that, perhaps, she could get a good look at his face, this time. Or, perhaps, there was some other reason. But she never said either way. In due course, she could construct the airiest, most savoury soufflé that ever lobster graced; but nobody arrived to eat it and none of the kitchen had the heart. So, fifteen times in all, the chickens got that soufflé.

Until, one fine October day, the mist rising over the moors like the steam off a
consommé,
the grouse taking last hearty meals like condemned men, my mother’s vigil was at last rewarded. The house party arrives and as it does we hear the faint, nostalgic wail of an accordion as a closed barouche comes bounding up the drive all festooned with the
lys de France.

Hearing the news, my mother shakes, comes over queer, has to have a sit down on the marble pastry slab whilst I, oh, I prepare to meet my maker, having arrived at the age when a boy most broods about his father.

But what’s this? Who trots into the kitchen to pick up the chest of ice the duc ordered for the bottles he brought with him but a beardless boy of his own age or less! And though my mother tries to quizz him on the whereabouts of some other hypothetical valet who, once upon a time, might possibly have made her hand tremble so she lost control of the cayenne, he claims he cannot understand her Yorkshire brogue, he shakes his head, he mimes incomprehension. Then, for the third time in all her life, my mother wept.