Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

Sometimes, when he caught my eye, I’d have to wave in reply, I’d have to smile — embarrassed, I suppose — despite what my parents said about avoiding him and not accepting any fruit or vegetables. Embarrassment is worse than pain, for boys.

One afternoon when I’d had to wave at him in that last year before I went away, he pulled an apple off his tree and threw it at me, high, uphill, across the meadow fence. I caught it with one hand, the crispest catch, the smack of flesh on flesh, of skin on peel. Another time, when he was working near the road, he dropped some berries into my palm. At other times, it was a handful of his manac beans or ripe shrubnuts. And then, occasionally, he’d give me something to take home ‘for the table’, some radishes perhaps, or a lettuce head, or — once — a fine, fat perch he’d caught.

I never tasted anything, of course. I smiled, I waved, I shouted thanks. I took his berries and his beans, his vegetables, his fish, and dropped them from the railway bridge onto the line, a half-minute from our house, then wiped away the poison and the smell of them on snatches of wet grass. At home, I’d dream of him, bad dreams. A train was hurtling down the railway line. The blood and sap of lettuce, carrots, fish and fruit were splashed across its windscreen and its wheels.

Once, though, he caught me off guard. He must have known I’d rather die than not do what he asked. He pulled a baby carrot from the row, snapped off its plume, wiped (half) the earth off on his sky-blue trouser leg, and made me eat it there and then, while he was watching from the far side of the fence. ‘You have to eat it from the earth, at once,’ he said. ‘Or else the flavour flies away. Go on. This is the best.’ And he was right. I put his dirty carrot in my mouth. I chewed, expecting bitterness. But nothing could be more delicate and sweet than that frail root. It is a taste that’s stayed with me for thirty years. A carrot from the shop could not compete. It had to be the earth, I thought, that tasted good.

And so I took to finding new ways to and from the school, and I was thankful when, at the end of the year, I moved to the boarding college and never had to pass the meadow except in father’s car. I don’t believe I saw our neighbour’s husband for a year or two, and by then he had forgotten me — so I was not obliged to wave or smile again or throw his produce on to the railway line.

I grow carrots of my own these days. I draw them from the soil before they’re quite mature and eat them there and then, just like I once did at my neighbour’s husband’s fence, fresh-pulled and half disguised by earth. But there’s no special taste to mine. They seem shop bought and ordinary, according to my son. So now I wonder what his secret was. If it was not the flavour of the soil that made the difference, then perhaps it was the taste of fear and shame. I can’t deny that he had frightened me or that I’d cheated him. Even in the grimmer half-light of the afternoon, I cannot make our neighbour’s husband disappear.

But my son is young enough for simple explanations. I’ve told him how the man was calling from the far side of the fence, the stooping back, the snapping plume of leaves, and how the earth was (half) removed. It could have been his gammy trouser leg that made the carrots delicate and sweet, my son suggests (for loneliness is bound to have its taste). That one swift wipe across the sky-blue cloth, he says, had left its dressing on the root.

HER DAUGHTERS wouldn’t eat. She tried to bribe them with their favourite foods. They said they had no favourite foods. She threatened them with early bed, pocket-money fines, extra duties round the house, less television. That didn’t work. She feared her daughters more than they feared her. So, finally, she sought advice by contacting a childcare magazine. Its doctor wrote: ‘Do not forget that mealtimes should be fun. Once your daughters begin to enjoy the occasion, they will also start to love the food. Do not impose unnecessary rules, which blunt their pleasure. Try to make the food entertaining to look at and amusing to eat.’

So mother sat her children down in easy chairs in front of the television and brought their dinners in on trays. She left them to enjoy themselves. They let their food go cold. She let them take their lunches out to the playhouse in the wood and eat with their fingers, like runaways. They threw their meals into the bushes. She tried giving them only desserts to eat. They just picked at them, even though she’d marked a smiley face on the custard skin of one fruit tart with chocolate pips. She prepared pasta dishes from five different shapes and many colours, but her daughters only tried the colours and the shapes they liked and wouldn’t even taste the rest.

Finally, furious with herself, exasperated by her girls, she made a pizza and scored an angry face into the cheese topping with the handle of a knife. And just to show her, the daughters ate it, every crumb. Eating mother’s anger was good fun.

I’LL COME TO LUNCH, but only if you promise me that there’ll be other guests, old friend. We’ve spent too many years at that oak table in your yard with just ourselves for company. And I’ve grown bored. Enough, I say. Let’s change our habits or let’s call a halt. We die too soon.

I see you wince. But, no, I’m bored by me, not you. You always were the perfect host, a listener. And I have been the less-than-silent guest for far too long. I’ve heard my anecdotes too many times. I can’t resist repeating jokes and telling you again my views on art or gardening or God or politics or chemistry or how you comb your hair. I have a reputation, I’m mortified to say, for being the life and soul of any gathering. I’ll speak my mind on anything, especially when my tongue’s been loosened by the grape.

Excuse me if I blame the wine. Good honest wine, the sort you buy, is cheap, I know, but there are disadvantages to such outstanding discounts. A better wine, even one of modest price, might silence me while I appreciate the smell and flavour or inspect the details on the label. A good wine encourages a little placid introspection. But a bargain wine, in my case anyway, achieves the opposite. It makes me tedious. I am unsettled by the aftertaste. I feel I have to talk to pay you back for asking me, week after week, to share a bottle and some food. This is my only contribution, as you know, because my finances do not allow me to pay you back in other ways. Besides, you look so pained by any silences. I can see it in your eyes; they’re darting to and fro, alarmed, demanding that I rescue you by saying something, anything. If I don’t talk, you count the lunch a failure. But, if I do all the talking, then I hate myself. And that can’t be the proper purpose — or the desired outcome — of a lunch, that your one guest should go away with a lesser opinion of himself and just a little drunker than when he arrived (for I must admit I generally prepare myself for you by stopping off on the way for an aperitif at the Passenger Bar and, occasionally, if we’ve exhausted our acquaintance more quickly than expected, I console myself on my way home with a digestif there as well).

So here is my proposal. Let’s stretch ourselves, expand the pleasures of the lunch, put extra chairs out in the yard. I have a friend whom you would like, a cousin actually, though there does not exist between us any of the reticence that normally you find in families. No, I think you would enjoy our badinage. And he would be a better guest than me, as he is younger and his comments will be fresh. Moreover, he will welcome the attentions of your cats. I have not dared to say before, but I am not a felophile. I do not take exception to the distant view of wildlife in your yard, but I am not happy, let’s admit, to have the creatures seeking comfort in my lap or exposing their neat parts below stretched tails as they patrol the table top in search of titbits on our plates.