Various Flavors of Coffee (56 page)

“We were wondering,” Ada said, “why we can’t sell people a quality coffee.”

I looked at them, puzzled.

“You see, we grew up with coffee—fine coffee,” she explained. “The sort of coffee that is now almost impossible to get hold of. It seems to us that, if we are finding it hard to get, then there must be others in a similar predicament. Not, perhaps, a vast number, but”—she allowed her eyes to travel around the empty and, I had to admit, somewhat run-down café— “perhaps enough to support a business.”

“So what you are suggesting—”

“Is a small operation, not unlike Pinker’s used to be,” Philomena finished for her. “Essentially, it would be a shop with a couple of roasting ovens, the roasters not hidden away but proudly on display for all to see.” Almost unconsciously she pointed with a delicate finger to the end wall, where, I could now see, there was just room for two small roasters side by side. “It will be the drama of the roasting which makes the difference—”

“And the smell—”Ada said.

“And the smell.” Philomena inhaled deeply. “The smell of freshly roasted mocca! Imagine!”

“I
am
familiar,” I said drily, “with what roasting coffee smells like.”

“And the chimney—” Ada said, ignoring me. She pointed to a currently chimneyless corner.

Philomena nodded.“Wafting said aroma down the street . . .” “. . . so that even if you don’t want a pound of Bogota to take

home . . .”

“. . . you might decide to call in and buy a cup instead . . .” “. . . or a jug . . .”

“A jug?” I said, puzzled.

Philomena turned her eyes on me. The sleepiness, I now saw, was an illusion. Her eyes were sharp and shrewd and quick. “Like buying a jug of beer for your supper.Why not a jug of coffee for your breakfast?”

“They do something similar in Africa,” I admitted. “There the coffee sellers wander the streets of Harar at dawn, and everyone comes to their door to buy from them.”

Philomena clapped her hand on top of Ada’s.“You see? Robert is already seeing how it could work.” She grinned at me.

“So we would roast and sell fresh beans,” I said. “But wouldn’t that mean we were competing directly with—well, with pre-packaged coffee? Such as Castle?”

Ada nodded.“But since Castle is no longer owned by us, that is hardly a problem.And let’s face it, if we can’t produce a better cof-fee than that, there’s something very wrong.”

“And
we
won’t be spending money on advertising,” Philomena added. “Just on good beans—African beans, if you wish it.” She opened her bag and took out some sketches and photographs.“We will make it look nice, though.” She placed them in front of me. “These are some tea rooms I visited recently in Glasgow.The style is
art nouveau—
extremely so. I thought perhaps something similar here.” She waved her gloved hand at the space around her. “With

your palate, and our investment, there is no reason why this place should not be a success.”

“We would need to close,” I said, studying the sketches. “This refit will take months.”

“Three weeks,” Philomena corrected me.“We start the day af-ter tomorrow.”

“Good Lord. Er—‘we’?”

Philomena put the sketches away. “We are going to be quite hands-on employers. I hope that will not cause you any problems—working for a woman, I mean.”

“But—this is hardly fitting work for Samuel Pinker’s daughters, surely? You must be very wealthy women now.”

“Really, Robert, have my sisters taught you nothing? We will decide for ourselves what is fitting.”

“Your father won’t be happy about it.”

“On the contrary.You underestimate Father, Robert. He likes nothing better than to see his daughters succeed.” She paused.“He sent his regards, by the way.”

I grunted.

“There is not a bean of coffee in Narrow Street these days,”Ada said. “The warehouse is a great big office now, with desks instead of sacks. But I think Father rather misses the old days.You should talk to him sometime.”

“You really think he’ll help you?”

The two sisters looked at each other.“Why would we want his help?” Philomena asked.“This is
business.
”

At the door,
just as they were leaving, Philomena turned. “Are you writing something about Emily?”

“What makes you think so?”

“Because she asked you to. I know—she told me.”

I shrugged.“It’s not quite as easy as that.” “But you are trying?” she persisted.

“I suppose I am.Why?”

“Because I should very much like to read it, Robert,” she said simply.“So get on with it, will you?”

I went to
the window to watch them as they walked away. Philomena evidently already had some further ideas; she was pointing to the street corner, and then back to the café, talking animatedly to her sister as she turned. I caught her face in profile, the edge of that sleepy smile—

And I suddenly felt something stir in me, something I had not expected to feel.

Oh no,
I thought.
Please no. Not that. Not again.

e opened the shop; we fell in love. But that is an-

other story—a story as different from this one as chalk from cheese, yet in its own way just as fascinating: a story with its own plot, its own surprises, its prologues and choruses and sudden reverses of fortune; a story which cannot be told because, unlike the story of Emily and me, as yet it has no ending.

“To demand
moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work,” said Goethe. Once, I would have defended that statement as if it were an article of religion. Now, having reached the end of my own brief memoir, I find the Victorian in me will not be satisfied without a moral—or perhaps, it is fairer to say, a conclusion. And since I am writing this to please no one but myself, a conclusion is what I will damn well write.

What have I learned?

I have learned what every man must learn, and no man can be taught—that despite what poets may tell you, there are different kinds of love.

I do not only mean that every love affair is different from every

other love affair. I mean that love itself consists not of one emotion, but many. Just as a good coffee might smell of—perhaps— leather and tobacco and honeysuckle, all at once, so love is a mixture of any number of feelings: infatuation, idealism, tender-ness, lust, the urge to protect or be protected, the desire to ravish, comradeship, friendship, aesthetic appreciation and a thousand more besides.

There is no chart or code which can guide you through these mysteries. Some must be sought at the end of the world, and some in a stranger’s glance. Some can be found in the bedroom, and some in a crowded street. Some will burn you like a moth in their flames, and some will warm you with a gentle glow. Some will bring you pleasure, some will bring you happiness, and some—if you are lucky—will even bring you both.

The laugh of a woman, the scent of a child, the making of a coffee—these are the various flavors of love.

was going to leave it there, but Phil, having read over
these pages, has some comments.That is the problem with hav-ing your wife double up as your employer: you are under her

thumb twice over, and I know there will be no rest until I agree.

So, for the record, it is apparently not true that I was once promised “a very advantageous proposition—three aways for two poems.” She also claims that the poem I then composed for her was far shorter than the one I actually give here, and not as good: it did not even rhyme properly, apparently.

She also says that Hector was a far more sympathetic character than I have made him out to be—“a rather dashing, romantic type, a sort of restless adventurer-hero, incredibly well read, fluent in several languages, an anthropologist before the term was invented.” So perhaps I have done him a disservice—but if, as Oscar Wilde has written, every portrait is an accurate depiction, not of its subject, but of its creator, I feel justified in allowing my original, biased sketch to stand.

She feels, too, that my portrayal of Emily may be a little slanted, but for opposite reasons: love may have blinded me to her faults.

My sister was admirable in many ways,
Phil has scribbled in a margin,
but she could also be inflexible and strict. She would certainly never have farted in front of me, for fear of encouraging me in what she called my heathenism, although Ada does remember some sort of competition they had in that regard in their teens. However, I think the more important point is that Emily was attracted to the militants partly because she admired their absolute autocracy—the way those suffragettes referred to Emmeline Pankhurst as “The Leader” always made me feel slightly nauseous.You don’t mention anywhere that it was the moderates, not the militants, who eventually won us the Vote, and that not for years after the events you describe.

As for the section on Fikre, Phil—who was, of course, not even there—has littered the margins with a series of exclamation marks
—!,
and
!!,
and even
!!!!
She reserves the full armory of her punctuation, however, for the scene in which Fikre and I first slept together at the French merchant’s house, when Fikre served me coffee in the ceremony of love. Toward the end of that passage a note in the margin says,
What?!!! By my count this makes four (!) times—is this a different Robert Wallis we are talking about???
Well, she can choose to disbelieve me if she likes—but in answer to her question: yes, it is a different Robert Wallis; I was a young man then, and you cannot have the advantages of maturity without some of the drawbacks, too.

Tell them about
ARTHUR
, she has written under the last page. Actually, I was intending to do so, but somehow it didn’t fit anywhere. After Emily’s death, Arthur Brewer, MP, had a rather extraordinary change of heart. He began making speeches in support of suffrage. It would be easy to be cynical, and say that he had finally seen which way the wind was blowing; it would also be easy to take a more forgiving view, and say that her death, and the circumstances of it, made him realize that he had done his wife a great wrong. His own public comments on the matter could support either interpretation. Interviewed by the
Daily Telegraph,
he

the various flavors of coffee
*
543

would say only, “My job is to represent my constituents’ views in Parliament. It has become clear to me that a majority of them now want female suffrage, even if they deplore the methods which have done so much to discredit the women’s cause.”

Castle Coffee was for a time the most successful packaged brand in the country. But when Jock Howell took over he made some bad decisions; in particular, he failed to anticipate the way that instant coffee would transform the market after the war. The Castle name was eventually sold to another concern, who embarked on an aggressive price battle with a competitor which ultimately destroyed them both.

Meanwhile, several small importers were developing their own versions of the cupping guide, refining and improving on the work that Emily and I began. The Wallis-Pinker Guide is no longer unique, nor even amongst the most comprehensive of those systems. But I like to think that, had it never existed, those later versions would never have become quite what they are today.

The coffee shop, needless to say, has prospered.The Pinker sisters were not being entirely honest when they visited me that day: I would refer you to a small but significant slip Phil made, when she asked me if I would find it difficult working for
a woman—
note the use of the singular. It quickly became clear that the plans, and the impetus to implement them, were all Phil’s: she had asked Ada to come along with her that morning for support, and because—she admits it now—she already suspected that her relationship with me was going to be charged with feelings that were more than just professional.

After two years we opened a second branch, and then another, and another—and then we realized that, unless we were careful, we would have just the sort of business we both abhorred, in which you start to rely on numbers to tell you what is going on, rather than on the aroma of a roasting Java, or the mouthfeel of a Kenyan, or the taste of a freshly brewed Guatemala, bright and

lively in the cup . . . So we stopped, and there are currently no plans to open any more.

I confess that I still retain a certain snobbery about blends. It seems to me that something should taste of what it is, rather than what you want it to be: the faults of a coffee are as much a part of its character as its virtues, and I for one would not wish to mask them. But Phil insisted, and I have mellowed enough to stock a few: they are amongst our most popular lines.

And then, five years after the events I have written about here, Phil and I produced a blend of our own. It smelled intensely of vanilla and meringues, burnt cream and crusty bread, and that faint, far-off whiff of sex that perfumes all newborn skin when it first emerges from the womb. She is absolutely perfect, and she re-joices in the name of Geraldine Emily Wallis.

a cognizant original v5 release october 14 2010

For a reading group guide, an interview with Anthony Capella and a readers’ message board, visit
www.anthon
ycapella.com
.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Wallis-Pinker Guide owes a great deal to several cupping manuals both old and new, and in particular to
The Coffee Cupper’s Handbook
by Ted R. Lingle, published by the Specialty Coffee Association of America. It also owes a debt to
Le Nez du Café,
a set of bottled aromas created by Jean Lenoir, and the accompanying booklet of sensory definitions co-authored by Jean Lenoir and David Guermonprez, translated from the French by Sharon Sutcliffe.

I have drawn on many books about coffee, including
Uncommon Grounds
by Mark Pendergrast,
Black Gold
by Antony Wild,
The Devil’s Cup
by Stewart Lee Allen and
Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity
by Heinrich Jacob. What little I know about Victorian coffee farming I learned from
Coffee: Its Cultivation and Profit
by Edwin Lester Arnold, published in 1886.