Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

So I was curious when he and I crossed paths. I followed him. He let me follow him, for he is not afraid of us. He turned his back on me and didn’t care. I watched his antics in the night. I watched his white hands and his sack. And I can tell you, he has fooled you yet again. The devil is not emptying his sack, but filling it. He does not plant. He picks, he picks, he picks: that’s why his back is bent. He is the one who wants the mushrooms for himself. His greed is stronger than his spite. He thinks the mushrooms are too good for us. We’d not appreciate the poisons or the tangs that they provide, their blasphemies. We are too dull and timid for the magic and the flesh. He roams the woods and meadows when it’s dark to satisfy himself. He knows which mushrooms to pull up. The ones he leaves for us are flavourless.

HERE IS AN average restaurant. Each Sunday, we take our seats to order omelettes and to watch the chef present our mussels to the visitors. He has become the weekend entertainment of the town. There’s nothing else to do — except in church, or ten miles up the coast, away from friends and family.

Last summer (so the chef reports) a politician from the state drove through. The woman with him couldn’t be his wife. They sat right there, next to the window, with a sideways view down to the port. He ordered local produce for her (‘I always dine from the region,’ he said. ‘That’s how you end up with the simplest and the freshest food.’ The cheapest, too). They’d have the brandied aubergines to start with — oily, cold, lascivious — and then the pork stew and a bottle of the earthy, hillside wine that no one from the region drinks. You can imagine what he had in mind for her — what with the alcohol, the aphrodisiacs, his hand pushed out across the table top to stroke her painted fingernails, the showing off.

A little ancient jealousy from chef, perhaps, explains what happened next. The politician only wanted to impress his guest and not be made a fool of by the food. He had a point. The wine bottle was insufficiently chilled, he complained. The bread (served in one of the yellow, woven-plastic baskets that gave the restaurant its name) was ‘not today’s’. The aubergine was bitter. Had no one in the kitchens degorged it with salt before they dished it up? Did they employ a comic or a cook?

The waiter at that time (a student long since gone up north with one of our town’s better-looking girls) returned the wine and the dish of aubergine to the kitchens. ‘I heard!’ chef said. ‘So give them my apologies. And they can have two dozen mussels on the house.’

Oh, surely, everybody knows that our mussels can be dangerous, particularly at that time of the year. The tides are far too weak in summer to clear the soup of sewage from the banks. Dead shellfish decompose more thoroughly when it is warm. So was it just bad luck that nearly all the mussels that finished up on that free dish were treacherous?

Now, this is supposition. No one truly knows exactly how the lovers spent their afternoon. It’s possible, of course, that their intestines had been lined with steel and that the sifted toxins of our lavatories passed through without effect. But where’s the anecdote in that? We’d rather have the chef’s report in which (and God knows how chef knew) the politician and his lunch guest had hardly reached the hotel down the coast when justice called. It might have seemed to other guests or to the ever-patient clerk that their eagerness to reach the room was simple summer lust. But no, they were too pinched about the haunches and too self-involved to be true lovers. And no, his hands were shaking at the lock with something more disruptive — and less fleeting — than desire. Inside at last, alone, they would have tussled for the sink and toilet seat, her skirt half up, his trousers down, but not for the reasons they had planned.

Indeed, the politician had been right to ask; the chef was more a comic than a cook. The stories that he served were better than the food. He made good soufflé out of lies. He made bad soufflé out of eggs. And so, while we might only risk the omelettes or grilled fish on our visits to the Yellow Basket, we never tired of his stories of revenge, or hearing him reproduce on the expresso machine the sound those depth-charged stomachs must have made when his rogue mussels were propelled into the hotel room that summer afternoon. We didn’t mind the repetitions, or that he would always illustrate the colour of the diners’ skin by holding a lime up to the light, or that some of the details changed — improved — with each retelling.

Was it, then, simply to please himself or to keep us in his thrall (and in his restaurant) that chef announced at the beginning of this season that mussels would be served ‘by way of an apology’ more regularly at the Yellow Basket? He says that he can tell which mussels will be troublesome. The safe ones snap shut at once if they’ve been prised open with a fork. The dead ones don’t. Others to avoid are those with shells that have unhinged before being cooked, and any that do not fall open to accept the sacrament of garlic butter and parsley once (according to his recipe) they have been roasted in hot ash. All these unworthy ones are set aside for chef’s selected guests. Perhaps he’s only teasing us, but still we have to — want to — swallow all his words.

They look so innocent, those blue-black castanets, their pearly inner cases and their fat grey beans of meat. But they have caused, this year, a banker from America to spoil his trousers and the front seat of his car. And they have packed their dark export of bacteria into the luggage of at least three lady pensioners from the cruise liner, which puts into our port on its round trip each spring. The on-board doctor almost had to have one of the women lifted off by helicopter. And the chef’s apology has given the sweats, the vomits and the chills, the cramps and the diarrhoea to one lone diner from Milan, two German boys, a family of five with noisy children, a Princeton graduate, a priest, the owner of a smart boutique in France, a couple planning a divorce, several state executives and (according to the chef) a gastronomic writer from the New York Times magazine. It was as if we’d made these strangers pregnant. They’d gone away with our dull, revengeful town inside. And they’d rebirthed our mussels down the coast.

So, as we lift his omelette to our mouths each Sunday lunchtime, we pray for troublemakers. We pray that chef will be offended by his passing visitors, that they’ll complain, that he will offer his apologies and speak those paralysing words, ‘I hope you will accept a plate of mussels on the house.’ We do not like to stare, of course, but it is hard to resist a sideways look from time to time. We want to see the empty shells pile up.

So this is how an average restaurant can always have its tables occupied.

But best of all is on the street, when the driver of too large a car, or the possessor of an accent we don’t like or merely someone who appears too fortunate enquires, ‘Where is a decent place to eat?’ It is a duty and a joy to point and say, ‘The Yellow Basket. Up above the port. The mussels are quite good, I hear. Bon appétit .’ An unexpected opportunity.

We’re cruel, of course. We’re unforgivable. Why should we punish them simply for coming from a different place or having better lives or being on vacation? The pleasure that we get when we imagine how they’ll pass their afternoons is hardly warranted. We know our laughter is malicious — but surely there’s some justice in it too.

We feel as if we’ve cast a heavy stone onto the all-too-perfect surface of the sea, to send our ripples out against the waves.