William Boyd - The Destiny of Nathalie X

EXTRAS: About £5000 if I know Alisdair

COMMENTS: Time travel. Back to school. This was English cuisine until quite recently; we have forgotten that this was how we all used to eat. Potted shrimps like consuming cold butter, limp toast. Duck cooked to extinction, repulsive cloying sauce. I ordered treacle tart for nostalgia’s sake. (Alisdair has appalling dandruff for a comparatively young man.) I said Jennifer was being difficult, thus far. He was not sanguine. Asked if this had happened before so I told him of Jennifer’s ultimatum. Spoke briefly about custody of Toby. He left early as he had to get to court. Depressing. Drank whiskey in an Irish pub.

DATE: Saturday

PLACE: My kitchen, Rostrevor Road, Fulham

PRESENT: Me and (intermittently) Birgitte, the au pair

MEAL: Raided fridge — cottage cheese and crispbread, remains of Thursday’s shepherd’s pie, some of Toby’s little yogurt things, cheese triangles. Birgitte sent out for a pizza but I couldn’t be bothered waiting.

WINE: “Three goes of gin, a lemon slice and a ten-ounce tonic …” Who said that? Then two glasses of Pinot Grigio, before I went down to the basement and rooted out the Ducru-Beaucaillou. Fuck it. I gave some to Birgitte, who made a face. She preferred to drink her own beer. She gave me a can when I’d finished the Beaucaillou. Strong stuff. Slept in the afternoon.

BILL: The Human Condition

EXTRAS: I miss Toby and Jennifer. I miss our usual Saturday lunch. Best lunch of the week.

COMMENTS: Music — Brahms horn trio initially but it made me want to weep. Birgitte played something rhythmic, ethnic. She gave me a tape of ocean waves breaking on a shore. “For calming,” she said. Big, bighearted girl. Why would anybody eat cottage cheese? What, in terms of taste and texture, could possibly recommend it? Jennifer and her silly, perpetual diets. Perfectly slim, perfectly … The cheese triangles were unbelievably tasty, ate a whole wheel’s worth as I drank the Beaucaillou.

DATE: Sunday. Cold, low, packed clouds, a flat, sullen light.

VENUE: Somewhere in eastern England on the 11:45 to Norwich. Writing this in the bar. On my way to Mother and Sunday lunch.

PRESENT: Me, three soldiers, a fat woman, and a thin weaselly man with a mobile phone

MEAL: Started with a Jimmyburger on the station concourse, then a couple of Scotch eggs in the bar. On the train I had a bag of salt-’n’-vinegar crisps and an egg-and-cress sandwich from the steward with the trolley. In the buffet thus far I have had a pork pie, a sausage roll, something called a “Ploughman’s Bap” and a Mars bar. There is a solitary mushroom-and-salami omelette wrapped in cellophane that they will do in a microwave. Why am I still hungry?

WINE: Large vodka and orange in the station bar — vague, very temporary desire to keep my breath alcohol-free. Two cans of gin and Italian vermouth in the train before I wandered buffetward. Started drinking lager: “Speyhawk Special Strength.” Notice the squaddies are drinking the same. They do quarter bottles of wine in here, I see. I’ve now bought a couple, having ordered the omelette. It is labeled “Red Wine.” No country of origin. Tart, pungent, raw. I worry it will stain my lips. Mother will serve, as usual, Moselle and call it hock.

EXTRAS: A lot of cigarette smoke, everyone is smoking including, covertly, the steward behind the bar. Smoke seeps between the fingers of his loosely clenched fist resting on his buttocks. The fat woman is smoking. The man on the mobile phone is smoking as he mutters into his little plastic box. I have a metallic taste in my mouth, and am seized by a sudden, embittering image of Diane S. — naked, laughing.

COMMENTS: The English countryside has never looked so drained and dead under this oppressive pewter sky. The barman beckons … Now I have my mushroom-and-salami omelette, a piebald yellow with brown patches, steaming suspiciously, a curious, gamey but undeniably foodlike smell seems suddenly to have pervaded the entire carriage, obliterating all other odors. Everyone is looking at me. I screw the top off my “Red Wine” and fill my glass as we hurtle across Norfolk. Gastric juices squirt. I’m starving, how is this possible? My mother will have the archetype of an English Sunday lunch waiting for me. A roast, cooked gray, potatoes and two or three vegetables, a lake of gravy, cheese and biscuits, her special trifle. I look out the window at the miles of somber green. Rain is spitting on the glass and the soldiers have started to sing. Time for my omelette. I know what I am doing but it is a bad sign, this, the beginning of the end. I am deliberately setting out to ruin (because, let’s face it, you cannot, before lunch, lunch) lunch.

NGUYEN N, Laotian bellelettrist and amateur philosopher. Born in Vientiane, Laos, 1883; died Paris, France, 22 February 1942. N’s family was of bourgeois stock, comparatively wealthy, Francophone and Francophile. Nguyen, a precocious but somewhat unhealthy youth, yearned for Paris, but World War I delayed his arrival there until he was twenty-four.

But after humid Vientiane Paris proved noisome and frustrating. The severe winter of 1920 caused his health to fail (something cardiovascular) and he went south to recuperate, to the Côte d’Azur. Strengthened, he decided to settle there. He earned his living as a math tutor and semiprofessional table tennis player, participating in the short-lived Ping-Pong leagues that briefly flourished on that sunny littoral in the 1920s.

And it was there that he wrote his little masterpiece, Les Analectes de Nguyen N (Toulon: Monnier, 1928), a copy of which I found last year in Hyères, its cerise wrapper dusty and sun-bleached, its pages uncut. A sequence of epiphanic images and apothegms, its tone fragile and nervy, balancing perilously between the profound and the banal. “Somewhere snow is gently falling,” Nguyen writes amid the mimosa and the umbrella pines, “and I still feel pain.” English cannot do their tender sincerity full justice.

After the book’s success Nguyen was taken up by the cultural salons of Paris, where he returned permanently in 1931. He is a tenant of the footnotes of literary history; the unidentified face at the café table; a shadowy figure on the perimeter of many a memoir and biography.

He wrote once to André Gide, who had taxed him on his unusual surname, which is not uncommon in Laos “… It is properly pronounced unnnnhhhh , effectively three syllables, the final ’h’s being as plosive as possible, if you can imagine that. Ideally, after introducing me, you should be very slightly out of breath.”

The war brought penury. Nguyen went to work in the kitchens of Paris’s largest Vietnamese restaurant, where he discovered a talent for the decorative garnish. His lacy carrot carnations, scallion lilies and translucent turnip roses were miniature works of art. In between shifts he wrote his short autobiography, Comment ciseler les légumes (Paris: Plon et Noel, 1943—very rare), which was published posthumously.

Nguyen N was run over in the blackout one gloomy February night by a gendarme on a bicycle. He died instantly.

Persistence of vision is a trick of the eye, an ability the eye possesses to fill in the gaps between discrete images and make them appear perfectly contiguous. This is what makes animation work.