Grace's Table (3 page)

Mother looked up. ‘Add another pinch, then.'

As Grace's young hands grew, so did the size of her salt pinches.

‘What have you learnt from me about cooking over the years?' Grace dared to ask Susan.

‘To use less salt.'

Grace knew that one was coming. ‘But … you've learnt nothing good?' Grace asked.

‘Of course I have.'

‘What?'

Susan stopped stirring the béchamel sauce. ‘Let's see. You've taught me how to cook old-fashioned stuff, I guess, like Anzac biscuits, scones, Christmas puddings. That sort of thing. Most of my recipes come off the internet now though. You type in the key ingredient and it brings up dozens of suggestions.'

Sometimes Grace still pulled her mother's old recipe book from the back of a drawer and scanned the torn and spattered pages. She'd try to make the steamed puddings or pastries written there, not weighing or measuring a single ingredient but sticking instead to the dashes and sprinkles her mother suggested. Sometimes they failed. Other times they turned out perfectly. Grace wondered what would become of such a book. She imagined it at the back of a cupboard in Susan's meticulous home and paraded around friends from time to time as a quaint but ridiculous relic from the past, like sanitary belts.

‘How long have these been on?' Susan stuck the tine of a fork into the hole where the saucepan lid's knob was once attached and lifted it to look at the potatoes inside. ‘They've nearly boiled dry.'

‘Long enough, then.'

Grace took one of the new knives from the block – a broad-bladed one that tapered to a severe point – and started chopping the mint leaves. The fragrance released from the herb made her salivate. She knew when she steeped it in vinegar that the acerbic taste of it would catch at the back of her throat, but in a tantalising way.

‘Makes my toes open and shut,' she recalled telling Mother of her homemade mint sauce as a child.

There was a clatter behind Grace – she knew the sound. The saucepan lid had slipped from the fork and hit the floor. She'd done it often enough herself.

‘I don't know how you put up with these old pots.' Susan had bent down to pick it up but it kept moving across the tiles as she struggled to catch it on the fork again.

‘Here, use this one – it's easier.' Grace passed her a carving fork from the drawer.

‘I should have bought you pots, not knives!'

Upright once more, Susan stuck the fork in the potatoes. ‘These are too soft to roast now. I'll have to bin them. And the pot may as well follow.'

‘I'm fond of both pot and lid, so don't throw either out.' Grace took the pot from the stove and tipped the overcooked potatoes into a colander to drain. She'd mash them later and use them to top a cottage pie.

She opened the cupboard under the sink and took a bag of potatoes from the basket inside. ‘I'll do more.'

Guilt obviously had some advantages, as Susan took the knife that Grace was about to use and said in a softer voice, ‘I'll do them. You go and get dressed or you'll be caught in your gardening clothes when everybody arrives,' and kissed Grace on the cheek.

In her bedroom, Grace swung back the doors to her wardrobe and sat on the edge of the bed. She cast her eyes across the clothes from left to right. Then back again. Nothing appealed.

Des had always liked to see her in fitted blouses with tightly belted skirts or trousers. Sometimes she'd felt he wore her on his arm like some people wear a Rolex watch. Mother had never allowed Grace bare shoulders or too much knee. And now Susan, Grace knew, would like to see her in the lavender floral frock with dainty pearl buttons she'd given her last Mother's Day. She'd expect it trimmed with pearls at throat and ears, the jewellery a gift too. Grace never felt her real self when she wore such an outfit. Jack wouldn't care what she wore; he praised her in a slip and bra as much as he did when she was dressed up for the theatre.

Grace stood again at the wardrobe. She ran a finger along the fabrics, stopping at a pair of lightweight cotton cropped trousers, relaxed at the waist. She took them from their hanger and laid them on the bed. Next she trailed through the tops; passed over cream, floral, pastel, bold fabrics, then lingered over a cotton blouse. Short-sleeved, button-through, loose. It was white like the cropped trousers. She took this from the hanger and laid it on the bed as well. She wouldn't look brazen, decorous, dressed up or striking. Instead, she'd look cool, clinical, efficient – just what the day needed.

3

With the pot back in service, the second round of potatoes simmering on the stove and an apron on, Grace turned her attention to the half-dozen mangoes lined up along the windowsill. She could smell them even above the chopped mint and the lamb roasting in the oven. She took a clean tea towel from a drawer and used it to polish a crystal bowl she'd brought in earlier from the china cabinet. She held the bowl up to the light that came in through the window. Satisfied that it was clean, she set it back on the bench, took each mango from the windowsill in turn, tested its weight. The last one she kept cupped in her hand. It was warm in her palm.

‘It's a sensual fruit, don't you think?' Grace rolled the fruit gently between her hands as she spoke, allowed her fingers to caress its smooth skin.

‘I've never really thought about it,' Susan said.

‘Firm like a breast,' Grace said. ‘A young breast, anyway.'

‘Come on, let's get them cut up. We'll see how good these knives are.'

Grace ignored this. ‘But inside, they're as soft and sweet as a puss—'

‘Mum!'

Grace looked at her daughter and smiled. ‘Yes, dear?'

Filip had once said Grace was
exotic
like a mango.

He'd brought one back to her at Harvest, after a visit to his family in the city. He often brought her unusual treats from these visits: syrupy sweet Macedonian specialities mostly – halva, baklava, ravanija. Grace imagined his mother – small, dark – pressing waxed-paper bundles or dented biscuit tins into her son's hands, as much a gift of culture as love.

Grace had neither seen nor tasted a mango before this gift, and was struck immediately by its sun-coloured skin.

‘Smell it.' Filip held the fruit out to her.

She sat up on the picnic blanket, wrapped her hands around the warm fruit, embraced his fingers too, and breathed deeply of its scent. The sweetness she inhaled was like nothing she'd smelt before. It spoke to her of elsewhere.

‘It is all the way from Queensland,' Filip said in his precise English. ‘It is a tropical fruit.'

‘Is that why it smells like the sun?' Grace asked.

‘It smells exotic, like you.' He pressed the fruit to his nose then rolled it in his palm, just as Grace was doing these many years later. ‘Firm like a breast,' he said, mock squeezing the fruit. Then, gentling his grip, added, ‘But inside, so soft, so sweet.'

‘Like me?' Grace teased.

‘Yes, like you.'

He took out a pocketknife and Grace watched as he carefully sliced the side off the mango. Juice from it ran through the gaps of his fingers and onto the blanket. He passed Grace the cut portion, curved like the hull of a boat. She licked the flesh tentatively, unsure what to expect.

Filip laughed at her. ‘You taste it like a kitten tastes milk from a bowl.'

Some firsts are not forgotten, her first taste of mango one of them. The flavour burst onto her tongue, declared itself as a fruit that needed to be eaten greedily, messily. Juice dripped from her chin and down to her elbows as she ate the flesh. She turned the curved-hull skin inside out to be sure not to miss any.

‘Delicious,' she said, and held the thin golden skin up to cover the sun when she'd finished.

Laughing, Filip passed her the other half, which she ate as quickly, then the seed, which she chewed until its stringy fibres stood out like a brush.

After she'd licked the juice from each of her fingers, she then took her time to lick it from each of his.

Susan took a glinting new knife from the block, tipped a mango up, and made a decisive slice down the side of the golden fruit.

Grace gave her fruit one last roll in the hand before cutting it, gently, with her old knife, which fitted its shape so well.

She wished she could say the same of Filip and the other men she'd loved, that the lives of each had fitted hers like worn knife to mango. Not even Des had achieved it, and he'd had more than thirty years to work on the fit.

Now, she found, love worked in less explosive ways. It had neither the highs nor lows of her youth, nor the disappointments of middle age. It had become, instead, a gentle constant, unstartled by intensity. It was no longer waited on or waited for but taken, as needed, like sips from a cup. That's what Jack provided now, those small sips.

His birthday gift to her sat now at one end of the kitchen bench in a pretty ceramic pot. It was an orchid, a beautiful one. Its small white flowers were so intricate that Grace had held a magnifying glass to a number of them to fully appreciate their detail. Their tiny throats were frilled with cream, which gave way to a lower petal that curled up like a friendly dog's tongue.

It was an unusual gift to receive from a man who rarely gave any. It had stirred that memory of Filip and his long-ago gift of a mango. Today Grace was thrilled to discover that she could still be courted with the exotic.

Susan, however, had ignored the orchid since she'd arrived, knowing where it had come from. What a shame even beautiful things were perceived by some to have an ugly underbelly. Grace tried to think lightly of it. Thirteen at the table would have been considered unlucky.

Mother and daughter stood side by side at the bench, crystal bowl between them. In silence they sliced cheeks from the mangoes, Grace with her old knife, Susan with the new. Susan was brisk and efficient in the way she worked. She peeled the skin from each then sliced the flesh into long even strips on a chopping board. Grace's actions were slow and less measured. The skin of hers fell away in irregular pieces and the slices varied in thickness and shape. Each took it in turns to scrape the sliced fruit from their boards into the crystal bowl.

‘You're dreamy today,' Susan said, after a while.

Grace selected another mango from the bench. ‘Lost in the past … I'm quite enjoying it.'

‘I've not known you to spend so much time there.'

Grace shrugged. ‘Turning seventy must have made me sentimental. Lamb. Mangoes. They're all bringing back old memories.'

‘You? Sentimental?'

‘Yes, today it's the emotion du jour.' Grace smiled.

‘Sounds like a soup menu.'

‘Ah, you see, just the word soup makes me nostalgic today.'

‘Why?'

‘Because it takes me back to Mother relaxing her rules.'

‘How?'

‘If it was cold and Mother had made soup, I was given a treat.' Grace dropped her voice to a whisper and leaned in towards Susan. ‘I was allowed to sit on the floor to eat it.'

Susan laughed. ‘Sitting on the floor was a treat?'

‘Uh-huh. With Mother it was. She'd let me sit on an old cushion with my back pressed up against the warm bricks around the wood stove and a big mug of soup wrapped in a tea towel on my lap. I was even allowed to blow across the top of it to cool it.'

‘Wow – that's really living it up.'

Grace laughed with Susan. ‘As they say, sometimes it's the small things.'

Susan cleared another mango from her board into the bowl.

‘Pa would come home and say,
Look, Grace's a hearth rug. Let's bring the dog in too and they can both lie in front of the stove
.'

‘I bet Nan drew the line at that.'

‘Definitely.'

Grace couldn't remember a more flagrant disregard of manners allowed by Mother at meal times than sitting cross-legged on the floor to eat – no bowl, no napkin.

There had come a morning long ago when Grace had wanted to show her own children the same freedom soup had sometimes brought her as a child. She'd woken with the coldest feet she could remember having since moving to the hot north from Harvest. As she got up from her bed, she said the word soup without any prior thought or reckoning.

The cold snap would be short-lived – they always were – but Grace was determined to celebrate its arrival all the same. Just as Mother had, when the first frosts came in hard and they lingered in the shade, even at midday. Out would come the heavy cast-iron pot. Mother would chop and dice anything to hand, then leave the brew to simmer and thicken on the old wood stove for the best part of the day. Grace's cold snap hadn't brought any frost but if she cooked soup she could pretend it was there. She saw it as a way of restoring a gentleness to the often hard memories of her mother.

A mean south-westerly pummelled Grace's windows as she boiled the soup bones that day. She cooked them until the meat fell away as tender morsels and the marrow had all but disappeared, the surface of the liquid glossy with it. The hard little pellets of barley became soft and plump at the bottom of the pot and the small squares of vegetables obligingly kept their shape.

But that evening, as the soup simmered gently on the stove, Des came in the back door in front of a cold draught: ‘What's for dinner?' he asked, before his jacket had even reached the coat hook on the back of the kitchen door.

‘Soup.'

‘What else?'

‘Well, there's bread and dessert, of course. But the soup's a meal on its own.'

‘You know I don't like soup. I like chewin' me food. I can take it from a spoon when I'm old and lost all me teeth.'

‘But it's so cold.'

‘And why are those kids eatin' on the sofa?'

‘Mum said we could play hearth rugs,' Claire called from the adjoining room. The music to
Gilligan's Island
jangled in the background.

Grace suddenly felt foolish, for imagining Des would be as easygoing as Pa.

He went to the fridge looking for leftovers, but there were none.

Then he slammed the fridge door shut and wrenched open the freezer door. He crashed frozen bundles about inside, eventually pulling out a plastic bag that held a slab of beef fillet. There for a special occasion, Grace remembered he had said when he brought it home from work.

Frozen meat in hand, Des went out the back door. Grace saw the light from his shed flicker on through the kitchen window. Fleetingly she thought how cold it must be outside, no jacket and a two-pound slab of frozen beef in your hands. Above the wind she heard the bandsaw start up.

A few minutes later Des came back in, a slightly less than two-pound piece of beef in one hand and a frozen slice of steak in the other.

He dropped the larger piece back in the freezer and threw the steak on the bench in front of Grace.

‘I'll have it with mash and fried onion,' he said, and headed towards the bathroom. ‘And there'll be hell to pay if you kids make a mess in there!'

Grace stopped peeling the mango and looked at a spot on the kitchen wall, as though the memory was projected onto it. ‘There were so many rules.'

Susan shrugged. ‘She was an old-fashioned woman, I suppose.'

‘And your father's excuse?'

Susan stopped cutting the mango she was working on and looked at Grace. ‘He was old-fashioned too. It's not fair to blame the person. Blame the era.' She went back to her slicing but with more force than was necessary for the delicate fruit.

It disappointed Grace to think Susan could justify Des's shortcomings in this way. With this thin excuse for bad choices. And Des had often chosen badly.

‘All things considered,' Susan added, clearing the last of her mango, ‘he was a good man.'

Grace took her board to the sink and turned on the tap, pretended not to hear. She rinsed board and knife under running water then made a show of seeing every orange fibre washed down the plughole.