Pulse (7 page)

‘Like hypocrisy.’

‘Don’t get her started on that. You rode that hobby horse to death last time, darling.’

‘Did I?’

‘Riding a hobby horse to death is flogging a dead metaphor.’

‘What
is
the difference between a metaphor and a simile, by the way?’

‘Marmalade.’

‘Which of
you two
is driving?’

‘Have you made yours?’

‘You know, I always spot the Sevilles when they first come in and then never get around to buying any.’

‘One of the last fruit or veg still obedient to the concept of a season. I wish the world would go back to that.’

‘No you don’t. You’d have turnips and swedes on the trot all winter.’

‘When I was a boy, we had this big sideboard in the kitchen with deep drawers at the bottom, and once a year they’d all suddenly be full of marmalade. It was like a miracle. I never saw my mum making it. I’d come home from school, and there’d be this smell, and I’d go to the sideboard, and it was all full of pots. All of them labelled. Still warm. And it had to last us the whole year.’

‘My dear Phil. Cue rheumy tear and violins. This was when you were stuffing newspaper into your shoes as you trudged to your holiday job at t’mill?’

‘Fuck off, Dick.’

‘Claude says this is the last week for Sevilles.’

‘I knew it. I’m going to miss out again.’

‘There’s a pun in Shakespeare on “Seville” and “civil”. Not that I can remember what it is.’

‘You can freeze them, you know.’

‘You should see our freezer already. I don’t want it to become an even greater repository of guilt.’

‘Sounds like those damn bankers – repositories of gilt.’

‘They don’t look very guilty.’

‘I was trying to make a pun, sweetie.’

‘Who’s Claude?’

‘He’s our greengrocer. He’s French. Actually, French Tunisian.’

‘Well, that’s another thing. How many of your traditional shopkeepers are English any more? Around here, anyway. A quarter, a third?’

‘Speaking of which, did I tell you about the home bowel-screening kit the government kindly sent me now I’m officially an old git?’

‘Dick, must you?’

‘I promise not to offend, though the temptation is glittering.’

‘It’s just that you get so potty-mouthed with booze.’

‘Then I shall be demure. Prim. Leave everything to the imagination. They send you this kit, with a plasticky envelope in which to send back the – how shall I put it? – necessary evidence. Two specimens taken on each of three separate days. And you have to fill in the date of each sample.’

‘How do you … capture the sample? Do you have to fish it out?’

‘No, on the contrary. It must be uncontaminated by water.’

‘Then …’

‘I have promised to restrict myself to the language of Miss Austen. I’m sure they had paper towels and little cardboard sticks back then, and probably a nursery game called Catch It If You Can.’

‘
Dick
.’

‘That reminds me, I had to see a proctologist once, and he told me one way to check my condition – whatever it was, I deliberately forget – was to squat down over a mirror on the floor. Somehow, I thought I’d rather risk whatever it was I might be getting.’

‘Doubtless some of you are wondering why I raised the subject.’

‘It’s because you get potty-mouthed with booze.’

‘A sufficient but not a necessary condition. No, you see, I did my first test last Thursday, and I was just about to do the next one the next day until I realised. Friday the 13th. Not an auspicious day. So I did it on the Saturday instead.’

‘But that was –’

‘Exactly. St Valentine’s Day. Love me, love my colon.’

‘How often do you think that happens, Friday the 13th followed by Valentine’s Day?’

‘Pass.’

‘Pass.’

‘When I was a boy – a lad – a young man – I don’t think I sent a single valentine or got one. It just wasn’t what … people I knew did. The only ones I’ve had have come since I’ve been married.’

‘Joanna, aren’t you worried by that?’

‘No. He means, I send them.’

‘Ah, sweet. Indeed,
schweeeet
.’

‘You know, I’ve heard of your famous English emotional reticence, but that really does set the bar high. Not sending valentines till after you’re married.’

‘I read that there was a possible link between Seville oranges and bowel cancer.’

‘Did you really?’

‘No, but it’s the sort of thing you say when it gets late.’

‘You’re funnier when you don’t strain so much.’

‘I remember one of the first times I went into a lavatory stall and read the graffiti, there was one that said, “Do not bite the knob while straining.” It took me about five years to work it out.’

‘Is that knob as in knob?’

‘No, it’s knob as in doorknob.’

‘Changing the subject entirely, I was in a stall once and taking my leisure when I noticed something written down at the bottom of the side wall at a sort of slant. So I bent over until I could read it, and it said, “You are now crapping at an angle of 45 degrees.”’

‘I would just like to say that the reason I mentioned marmalade …’

‘Apart from its link to bowel cancer.’

‘Is because it’s such a British phenomenon. Larry was saying how we’re now all the same. So instead of saying the Royal Family or whatever, I said marmalade.’

‘We have it in the States.’

‘You
have
it, in little pots in hotels at breakfast. But you don’t make it in your
homes
, you don’t
understand
it.’

‘The French have it.
Confiture d’orange.’

‘Same thing applies. That’s just jam. Orange jam.’

‘No, it’s French to begin with, it comes from “
Marie malade
”. That Queen of Scotland who had French connections.’

‘FCUK. They were here already?’

‘And Mary, Queen of Scots, or Bloody Mary, or whoever it was, was ill. And they made it for her. So
Marie malade
– marmalade. See?’

‘I think we were there already.’

‘Anyway, I’ll tell you why we Brits will always remain British.’

‘Don’t you hate the way everyone says “the UK” or just “UK” nowadays? Not to mention “UK plc” and all that.’

‘I think Tony Blair started it.’

‘I thought you blamed everything on Mrs Thatcher.’

‘No, I’ve switched. It’s all Blair’s fault now.’

‘“UK plc”’s just honest. We’re a trading nation, always were. Thatch just reconnected us to the real England that is for ever England – money-worshipping, self-interested, xenophobic, culture-hating. It’s our default setting.’

‘As I was saying, do you know what we also celebrate on February the 14th, apart from St Valentine’s Day?’

‘National Bowel-Screening Day?’

‘Shut up, Dick.’

‘No. It’s also National Impotence Day.’

‘I lurv your Breedish sense of yumor.’

‘I lurv your Croatian accent.’

‘But it’s true. And if anyone asks me about national characteristics, or irony, for that matter, that’s what I tell them: February the 14th.’

‘Blood oranges.’

‘Let me guess. Named after Bloody Mary.’

‘Did you notice a few years ago they started calling blood oranges “ruby oranges” in supermarkets? Just in case anyone thought they might really contain blood.’

‘As opposed to containing rubies.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Anyway, they’re just about coming into the shops, so they’re overlapping with Sevilles, and I was wondering if that happens as often, say, as Friday the 13th precedes Valentine’s Day.’

‘Joanna, that’s another reason I love you. You’re able to impose narrative coherence on the likes of us at this time of night. What could be more flattering than a hostess who can make her guests imagine they’re sticking to the point?’

‘Put that on next year’s Valentine, Phil.’

‘And does everyone agree tonight’s blood or ruby orange salad was fit to set before a queen?’

‘And the neck-of-lamb stew fit to be set before a king.’

‘Charles the First’s final request.’

‘He wore two shirts.’

‘Charles the First?’

‘On the day he was beheaded. It was extremely cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering and have Ye People believe he was frightened.’

‘
That
’s pretty British.’

‘All those people who dress up in period costume and fight Civil War battles all over again. That’s very British too, I always think.’

‘Well, we do it in the States. I guess in lots of other countries too.’

‘OK, but we did it
first
. We invented it.’

‘Like your cricket and your soccer and your Devonshire cream teas.’

‘If we can stick to marmalade for the moment.’

‘It gives a good glaze to a duck.’

‘I bet everyone here who makes it does it differently and wants a different consistency.’

‘Runny.’

‘Sticky.’

‘Sue boils it so hard it falls off the toast if you aren’t careful. No stick at all.’

‘Well, if you leave it too runny it pours off the toast.’

‘You have to put the pips in a muslin bag to get extra … whatsit.’

‘Pectin.’

‘That’s the stuff.’

‘Fine cut.’

‘Coarse.’

‘I cut mine up in the Magimix.’

‘Cheat.’

‘My friend Hazel does hers in the pressure cooker.’

‘But that’s my point. It’s like boiling an egg. Or was it frying? They did a survey and discovered everyone does it differently and everyone thinks theirs is the right way.’

‘Is this leading anywhere, O keeper of the communal narrative?’

‘What Larry was saying. About us all being the same. But we aren’t. Not even with the simplest things.’

‘The marmalade theory of Britishness.’

‘That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid of being Europeans. All of you guys.’

‘I don’t know if Larry was in the country when our distinguished Chancellor of the Exchequer, now soon-to-be-ex-prime minister, Mr Brown, laid down a number of conditions before we would submerge the good old British pound in the filthy foreign euro.’

‘Converge. Not submerge. The tests for convergence.’

‘Can anyone remember them, by the way? Even one of them?’

‘Of course not. They weren’t designed to be comprehensible. They were designed to be incomprehensible, and, therefore, unmemorable.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the decision to join the euro was always going to be political not economic.’

‘That’s very lucid and may even be correct.’

‘But does anyone think the French are less French, or the Italians less Italian, because they joined the euro?’

‘The French will always be French.’

‘That’s what they say about you.’

‘That we’ll always be French?’

‘Anyway, you don’t need Seville oranges to make marmalade.’

‘I’m glad we’re back on the subject.’

‘Dick’s made it with every kind of citrus fruit.’

‘There goes my reputation.’

‘There was one year he made it with a mixture of – what was it? – Sevilles, sweet oranges, pink grapefruit, yellow grapefruit, lemons and limes. Six-fruit marmalade, I put on the labels.’

‘That wouldn’t get past EU regulations.’

‘Remind me – mint tea, mint tea, nothing, decaf, mint tea?’

‘I’ll switch to nothing tonight.’

‘So much for my chances later on.’

‘David, sweetie …’

‘Yes, Sue, sweetie?’

‘OK, since you raised it. Just to ask a non-British question, have any of us, in recent memory, left Phil and Joanna’s table and gone home and …’

‘“Had a spot of old-fashioned nookie” is what she’s trying to say.’

‘What counts as old-fashioned?’

‘Oh, anything involving intromission.’

‘Isn’t that a horrible word?’

‘I was told a story about Lady Diana Cooper. Or was it Nancy Mitford? One or the other, anyway, posh. And they were – she was – on a transatlantic liner and whichever of them it was fucked one of the stewards one evening. And the next morning he ran into her in the fo’c’sle or whatever and said hello in a friendly way –’

‘As one would.’

‘As one would. And she replied, “Intromission is not introduction.”’

‘Ah, doncha love our upper classes? There’ll always be an England.’

‘That sort of story makes me want to stand on the table and sing “The Red Flag”.’

‘“The Ruby Flag”.’

‘You’re all avoiding my question.’

‘How can we be if we can’t remember it?’

‘Then shame on you.’

‘It’s not really the alcohol, or the lack of caffeine, it’s not even the tiredness. It’s more that by the time we get home we’re what we in our house call TFTF.’

‘An acronym you are about to deconstruct.’

‘Too Fat To Fuck.’

‘Talk about secrets of the bedchamber.’

‘You remember Jerry?’

‘The guy with the plastic
testicules
?’

‘I thought you’d remember that detail. Well, Jerry was abroad for a few months, and Kate – his wife – started getting worried that her tummy was a bit on the fat side. And she wanted to be in perfect shape for Jerry’s return, so she went to a plastic surgeon and asked about liposuction. And the guy said yes, he could give her a flattie again …’

‘A flattie?’

‘I paraphrase the medispeak. The only downside, he said, was that she wouldn’t, as he so tactfully put it, be able to take any weight on her stomach for quite a number of weeks.’

‘Oh-oh. Posterior intromission only.’

‘Don’t you think, actually, that’s a story about true love?’

‘Unless it’s a story about female insecurity.’

‘Hands up all those who might like to know the derivation of the word “marmalade”.’

‘I thought you’d been a long time having a pee.’

‘It’s nothing to do with
Marie malade
. It comes from some Greek word meaning a kind of apple grafted on to a quince.’

‘All the great etymologies are wrong.’

‘You mean, you’ve got another example?’

‘Well,
posh
.’

‘Port out, starboard home, best accommodation to and from India, quarters on the side sheltered from the sun. Word applied to Lady Diana Cooper and Nancy Mitford.’