Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

The friend arrived a little after seven in the evening and took her aperitif out onto the terrace to wait for the fishing boat to lift its anchor and come home. We joked with her. ‘He’ll not return, your friend, until he’s caught his tad for dinner.’ Here is the bar chit that she set against his room. And here’s her signature.

Nobody noticed when the woman gave up hope and left. And nobody noticed, as the dark set in, that Mr Toby Erickson was still at sea. This is a busy place at night. Chef had more than fifty covers to cook for. And all the hotel’s rooms were booked.

Next morning, the boatman went out in the launch with our manager to bring the body in. It was a little choppier, a better day for catching fish. Our guest was still sitting midships, stiff as wood. He’d caught his tad that night, but hadn’t had the chance to play it in and lift it off the hook. An open bottle had spilled beer onto the deck. What remained of the ‘Gourmet Picnic Lunch for Anglers’ was being picked clean by gulls. The rescue flare had been unpacked from its holdings but had not been fired. There was evidence — again picked clean by gulls — of vomiting. It seemed his death had not been swift. We guessed — incorrectly — he’d had a heart attack or stroke.

We have a protocol: a hotel has at least one death a year. There is a laundry room which can be used for corpses. They had to dislocate his shoulder blade to get the buoyancy suit off so that he was presentable. His face was yellow. Like the suit. The police were called. Somebody phoned the contact number that he’d written in the register to give the sad news to the stranger at the other end.

HOW DID HE DIE? Just when? There are no documents to say. But once the magistrates had finished their reports, and diagnostic tests had been returned from the laboratories, the agent of his death was named. The culprit was a home-baked mini-pastry, which chef had filled with country-canned asparagus. Low-acid vegetables that have been canned by amateurs at room temperature, it seems, are rich in vitamins and poisons. Under such conditions poisons multiply. Here is the Chemical Analysis, which shows that Mr Erickson’s mini-pastry — and the remaining contents of the can — was rich enough in the neuro-toxin Clostridium botulinum to slay a team of horses. He would have found his vision blurred at first. He’d be dry-mouthed, a little weak. Nothing to panic about. He’d blame it on the gently rocking boat. He might have dozed and, when he woke, felt stiff and rheumatoid — first signs of his paralysis, the clamping of his lungs, his loss of reflex and the wrenching pain. If only chef had made another fifty little pies, he could have put a corpse in every room.

Here is a picture difficult to banish from our minds. It’s gone midnight. The moon and stars are bearing down on the anchored boat. Our Toby Erickson is dead. He sits quite still, in his straw hat, intoxicated, and untroubled by the nagging sea. His first and final tad — the dinner catch that might impress his lady friend — is hooked and tugging on the deep end of his line. It can’t escape from predators. The carnivores will pick it clean before the night is done. The bones above the water are holding on to bones below. The numb are fishing for the numb.

At last, his boat is shifting slightly on its ropes as tides regress and winds align in readiness for the day. The hotel staff are innocent, as yet. They are preparing breakfasts for their guests, unscrewing pots, opening cans, cutting off the tops of cartons, snipping sachets, breaching packets, breaking eggs, and quietly laying out the feast.

OUR CONCIERGE has been away. A short break from sitting in other people’s draughts for a living, she explains. She’s spent a week at Anderbac Falls, where she went on her vacations as a child. She’s come back with the benefits burned on her face. The weather was fabulous, the Falls miraculously unchanged in all those years, and to top it all she’s forged what might prove to be a lasting friendship with a man. ‘A widower,’ she adds. The word — she almost whispers it — bestows decorum, as if his marriage and bereavement put this new liaison beyond reproach. So, nothing like the noisy, inappropriate affair she’s been conducting with the janitor — ‘a bachelor’ — in his apartment on the seventh floor.

Her widower is charming and presentable, she explains, well read, well heeled, well dressed, though somewhat overweight. And he is kind. ‘I’m torn up over him.’ They’d picnicked together in the woods, had shared a table at a restaurant, and on their final night together had jointly cooked a meal in the little chalet which he’d been renting in the grounds of her hotel.

‘He never tried to touch me even once, you know,’ she says, to illustrate how genuine her new suitor had proved himself to be. ‘Though if he’d tried he might have found me willing. I’d drunk a half a bottle of his wine. And he was so respectable — and such a cook! — that I would have liked to show my gratitude. But still he said his wife was present in the room. They’d rented that same chalet the year before she died. He said that I was sitting in her chair.’

You have to interrupt the concierge. If you don’t, she’ll wrap you up in conversation until (my mother’s phrase) your bladder turns to stone. Before you realize it the taxi driver’s tired of waiting, or the shop has closed, or your appointment has been missed, or the slow stew you’ve left to cook upstairs has been reduced to clinker, ash and smoke. And so I have to turn towards the street and say, ‘I’ll catch up with the details when I get back, but now I really have to go.’

I’ve looked down at my watch and pulled a face. I’ve said ‘Oh, dear. .’ to show how late I am. Already I have reached the double door, but I feel as if I’ve been too hurried, impolite. I turn and add ‘Well, good for you. .’ and then, once I’m halfway down the steps and have almost broken free, ‘I’m stopping off at George’s tonight, if you want anything. .’

‘Why not? I owe myself a little treat. Can you bring two cheese pies? And if he has those baby macaroons, then six.’

I ALMOST get back to the block this evening without her cheese pies and her macaroons. It’s been an awkward day, too argumentative, too rushed. My head’s a sieve. I don’t need shopping for myself. There’s cold meat in the fridge to finish off and then I’d like to curl up in my bed and sleep. It’s not until I reach the baking smell that I remember our concierge’s ‘little treat’. I get the taxi driver to circle the square and wait for me at George’s. The driver hands me some change and asks me to bring him ‘something hot’. Nobody can be downwind of George’s and not want food.

I think that I’m in luck. The concierge is not behind her desk. But by the time I’ve pushed her bag of food beneath the metal grille, she’s at my side. We used to have a little dog called Plum, before my husband left. Just like the concierge. You couldn’t move, you couldn’t sneak yourself a tiny piece of cake, you couldn’t slip out of the house, without the dog appearing at your side.

The concierge is keen to carry on where we left off. ‘My widower could outbake George,’ she says. A little romance suits her well. I see she’s had her hair in curlers and changed out of her ‘mopping slacks’ into her going-out dress. It’s no longer difficult to picture her in an Anderbac restaurant, across the table from an attentive man.

I say, ‘Excuse me if I hurry off. My head’s on fire. .’ Already I have reached the elevator door.

‘Hold on for me,’ she says. ‘I’m coming up.’ This is a pretext, I am sure, for pursuing our conversation. But I’m resigned to her, and oddly touched, despite my throbbing head. For it is touching when a woman of her age finds this late blessing in her life.