Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

If you’ve an orange that’s gone hard and turned to parchment, then squeeze what reasty juice remains onto the tart. Then dine the old year out, with timid forks, with ancient friends. This is the taste of those dishonoured resolutions that have left their pungent marks throughout the house, those perfidies that have the gift of ageing cheese, and souring yeast, and shrivelling the plums and grapes, and putrefying meat.

Tomorrow is another year. Fresh milk.

OURS IS A little town of great, historic charity. In the last six months alone, public subscription has put a new roof on the medieval chapel, and planted a garden for the blind, and raised the money to buy a touring bus for the use of local schools. We have made holiday provisions for fifteen pensioners and sent coach parties to the zoo. The park is somewhat overburdened with cedar benches and flowering trees, donated to the town by dutiful relatives in memory of a parent or a child. The street fete in the summer raises money for the lame, the hungry and the orphaned, who limp and starve and grieve in places that we can’t pronounce. The cottage art museum, up in the pines, has just acquired a small Matisse, thanks to the efforts of our citizens.

So it ought to come as no surprise that when three refugee families were dumped like sodden cargo on the docks one night they were quickly offered temporary housing in the block behind the port by the Association for the Poor. And somebody (she much prefers to stay unnamed) began to organize a ‘cart’. In other words, the open trailer, used by the private school for taking camping expeditions to the hills, was draped with lights and dragged around the better streets by some of the older pupils to gather food for our new visitors.

To start it off, the one-who-wants-to-stay-unnamed went to her own larder and removed a large and almost full jar of mixed pickles. Her husband, a heartburn martyr and the owner of the school, could not — she was weary of reminding him — risk eating pickles any more. She cleaned the inside of the glass rim with a cloth, disguised the pierced jar top with a cap of green muslin held in place by a matching rubber band, and put her offering onto the cart. The boarding master, a divorcee of eighteen months, came out from his flat and rid himself at last of his wife’s exotic teas.

The first house that they reached provided half a dozen tins of fruit in heavy syrup. ‘Glad to help,’ the woman said. She was a kilo overweight and had determined, only that morning, to cut down on sugary desserts. The next house offered a packet of unpopular breakfast cereal, hardly touched. And the next, a cellophane packet of spaghetti shapes, which had hardened and lost much of their colour in the months since they’d been bought. The next, a red string sack of onions, podgy-skinned and coiffed with dying yellow shoots. And then a bottle of the local wine (which no one from the region drinks) and, finally (from the last house in the street), the well-intentioned but not entirely edible fig cake that the daughter had prepared at school a day or two before. ‘We ate it all up for lunch,’ her mother would explain. ‘And it was wonderful.’

The second street quickly yielded its offerings of rusty tins, odd-smelling packets thought too old to use, flat lemonade, three cartons of Fortified Meals for the elderly (no longer needed by a recently buried aunt), dried pulses smooth and solid as porcelain, yoghurt well beyond its date, the unused ingredients of too ambitious meals, unwanted gifts, imported goods with no translation on the label, hasty choices, past mistakes. And so on, downtown from the school, street after street, until the cart was overloaded with our charity and had become the oddest shopping trolley in the world.

Here is the photograph. The pupils are lined up behind the cart. Three little waifs are posing on their month of meals. The owner of the school is shaking hands with a wildly grinning refugee. The caption says the town donated 200 kilos to its ‘unfortunate guests’.

And that’s not counting all the problems solved, and all the larders tidied up at last, the daughters satisfied, the heartburns eased, the diets honoured, the separations finalized, and the blunders of the past concealed as gifts.

WHAT’S FOR DINNER? Pig’s cheese. Always the same reply. And what’s for pudding? Buttered stones and acorns. And what’s to drink? Chicken milk. What’s for breakfast, if we stay that long and don’t run home to mum in tears? Scrambled goat eggs on toast.

We never needed calling twice for meals.

But then my grandma always disappointed us with stews and roasts and apple tarts. Undramatic food that we could trust. Things we had at home. The sort of lunches that they dished up at school. Yet still we used to live in hope. We’d look out from her downstairs room, on those always rainy days when we stayed at the farm, and watch the two of them at work between the barns. Soon my grandma would return, wet through, her trugs and punnets full of food.

From that farmhouse window with its peeling paint, its ornaments, its wind-thinned glass, we saw the chickens and the pigs contesting for the kitchen waste. We saw the great oak trees refusing to relinquish even one centimetre to the wind. We watched the line of tethered goats picking at their nests of leaves. How easily their devil’s hooves might crack and spill our eggs. Behind the house the tipping field was dappled with the yellow, plough-turned stones. And on the hill-beyond-the-hill, the furthest field, my grandpa’s ewes were always lifting in the wind.

And what would make our feast on Christmas Day? Always the same reply. Sheep wings.

THE DEVIL WANDERS with his straw sack at night through the meadows and the woods behind the town. He’s there, we’re told, to plant the mushrooms that he’s raised in hell, where there’s no light to green them, so that the gatherers who come at dawn, against the wisdoms of the countryside, can satisfy their appetites for sickeners or conjurers or fungi smelling of dead flesh and tasting of nothing when they’re cooked. He feeds them disappointments, nightmares, fevers, indigestion, fear. He lets them breakfast on his spite.

The mushroom devil has been seen from time to time. Courting couples seeking privacy in some deep undergrowth have heard his foot snap stems behind them or sensed him creeping by their cars, a mocking voyeur hoping to disrupt their love. Those midnight wanderers who search for mysteries and gods when all the bars have shut have told how he has come so close that he has stunned them with his breath. He shows himself to children, too. They run out of the woods and fields, their punnets empty, their bikes abandoned, with the devil at their tails.

Those foolish ones who stand and stare report his backing gait, his clumsiness. He has the odours of a kennel, plus boiled eggs, scorched hair and sweat, they say. They cannot capture him. He will not talk or give his name. He slips away, enveloped by the unresisting darkness. But first he holds his open sack for them to see and smell the rootless puffballs and the chanterelles, the honey funguses, the magic heads, the ceps, the shagcaps, boletes, morels, the inky dicks, which he will push into the earth that night like unconvincing garden ornaments.

Sometimes they only see his stooping back and watch his white hands coming from his sack.

I, too, have met the devil in the woods. I, too, have seen the mushrooms in his bag, lolling like eviscerated parts, meringues of human tissue, sweetbreads, smelling of placenta and decay. To tell the truth, these mushrooms baffle me. I’ve eaten them in many of their forms, I’ve tried the best, but always I am bored by them. The moment that you take them from the earth, they’re dull. The moment that you place them in your mouth, they let you down. I’ve always thought they were expensive and absurd. If they’ve been planted by the devil, then he is making fun of us.