Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

EVERYBODY — rich or poor — had soup stones in those days. I found ours a half an hour’s bike ride out of town on what, before the container port was built, used to be Crescent Beach. I had to wet my shoes and trouser legs to retrieve it from the plunging tide. Amongst the million grey-white granite rocks, it caught my eye, distinguished by a circling band of black, which made the stone appear as if it had been split in two then fixed with tar gum. It was a glinting and dramatic gem, still wet in that hard light, a perfect fit in my small hand.

It was less glinting when I got home that afternoon. The granite had dried and dulled. A half an hour from the sea was all it took to rob my stone of light. But still I prepared it for my mother’s kitchen, full of hope. You had first to boil the ocean out, or else your soups would always taste of fish.

My mother used that stone in every soup she made. She couldn’t make good soup without its help, she said. The flavours wouldn’t mix. The bottom of the pot would burn or stick. The ingredients would tumble on the heat and boil over. A soup without a stone was as heartless as a peach or plum without a stone. But with its help, she claimed, she could even make good soup out of just tap water. No stock, no meats, no vegetables. Perhaps the granite had a flavour of its own. We’d have to try one day. Perhaps it stored a memory and aftertaste of everything that had ever shared its pot.

Whenever she made soup and I was home, she used to let me add my piece of granite to the pot before she lit the gas. And, when the soup was cooked, it was my job to take the colander spoon and lift the soup stone out. I used to marvel at its fleeting smell and how it had briefly regained the light and colour of the beach.

I keep the family soup stone on the windowsill of my apartment now. I haven’t cooked with it for years. Who makes soups these days? There’s such a choice of ready-mades in shops. Occasionally I use the stone as a pocket companion for travelling, a granite talisman to keep the plane from crashing, but otherwise I hardly notice it. Except sometimes, when I’m reminded of home, I run my soup stone underneath the tap to bring the smells and colours out, the beach, the sea-tricked light, the gems of silica, the small boy stepping in the tumbling tide, retrieving flavours for his mother’s thousand soups.

HIS BREATH WAS damp and earthy. The old man had tuberous growths in his gut. Dr Gregor could palpate them with his palm. They were starchy, as tough as carrots. ‘There is some inflammation,’ he said. ‘Nothing to worry about. Rest is what you need.’ What was the point of alarming a man of eighty-two with an honest diagnosis, with hospitals, with surgery? He would be dead within the month. ‘Are you in any pain?’ The old man shook his head. The doctor prescribed warm olive oil to ‘ease the passage through your bowel’.

He did not die within the month. He lasted ten more months before he came to Dr Gregor’s clinic again. It was the spring of the drought. He looked as tough and sinewy as a man of half his age. Indeed, he looked a little younger than before, though he was eighty-three now.

‘Are you in any pain?’ the doctor asked again.

‘A little. Once in a while.’ When he bent to tie his boots, he explained, or tug at weeds, the hard knots in his stomach bunched against the waistband of his trousers. It was uncomfortable. What man of eighty-three could bend to touch his boots without a little pain?

‘I think I’d better take a look,’ the doctor said. He helped the old man onto the examination bed and turned him on his side, his face towards the wall. He pulled on a pair of disposable lubricated gloves. ‘Knees up. This shouldn’t take a second. Think of somewhere nice.’

The old man searched for somewhere nice. At first it was the modest garden where he now lived in town: the tiny square of lawn, the hem of evergreens, the single potted maple on the patio. But soon he settled on the larger piece of land that he had owned when he was younger, its trees, its stony paths, its dogged thistles, its flinty earth, the vegetables, which he would harvest on summer Sundays and bring up to the house in a trug.

The doctor did not have to penetrate too deeply beyond the sphincter to find the woody growths in his patient’s bowel. Perhaps they were elephantine polyps of some kind, and not a string of cancers. Perhaps they were benign. Clearly they caused no pain, except when the old man stooped to touch his toes. Dr Gregor pushed against the lowest tumour with his index finger. It did not seem attached, but moved freely. Its shape was odd. It was not symmetrical or funnelled, but complex, with extensions and recessions like the chambered plaster cast of an earth-roach burrow. ‘Have you examined your stool of late? Anything unusual? Any blood?’ The old man shook his head. Why would he want to examine his stool?

The doctor was not a sentimental or a squeamish man. He managed to work a couple of small ‘polyps’ loose. He put one in a lidded specimen tub and labelled it with a date and a reference for the laboratories. The other he put in a sterile bag with a little purified water. He was puzzled, but doctors are often puzzled. Let the laboratories give a name to it. He put his arm around the old man’s shoulders and took him to the door. ‘Warm olive oil,’ he said.

Laboratories can take a month to analyse and process specimens. Dr Gregor did not think the matter urgent enough to telephone for their report. The old man was fit for eighty-three. What was a month to him? They’d get their answers soon enough. In fact the old man died within three weeks of his last visit to the surgery. A sudden and unheralded stroke, too quick to experience. A neighbour called the doctor out one morning and led him to the body. His patient must have died the evening before. He’d been standing in his tiny garden with a hose. The grass and shrubs were green with care, despite the weeks of drought. The tap had been running all night long. The old man lay on his back in shallow water. Slugs were on his shirt and trousers, taking refuge from the flood. There was a smell — damp and earthy like the old man’s breath had been. It was the smell of vegetation. So that was that. He’d made a decent age and met a decent death.

The laboratories sent their report and their invoice. The old man’s specimen was described as ‘non-invasive’, ‘benign’, and ‘entirely vegetable: water 83 %; albuminoids 2 %; gum 9.1 %; sugar 4.2 %; inulin 1.1 %’. Dr Gregor held the ‘polyp’ he had kept up to the light in its sterile bag. It seemed more swollen. The inside of the bag was silvery with condensation. He paid the laboratory bill by cheque. A waste of time and money. He could not pass the costs on to a patient now. He put the swelling polyp on his windowsill. He did not like to part with it, now that the man was dead.

Encouraged by the heat and light and by the purified water, the vegetable grew a pair of tiny yellow horns. Its wrinkles flattened. Its extensions and recessions achieved a kind of nippling puberty. One horn pinkened, lengthened and uncurled. The old man’s polyp had a shoot. The doctor put it in a glass dish on a bed of damp toilet paper. He watered it each day. He gave it houseplant feed. Quite soon he had three green shoots and two more horns. Roots as thin as cotton thread clung to the damp paper. He had to pick a greenfly from its stem.

A patient — asked to lean against the windowsill while Dr Gregor checked her damaged vertebrae — recognized it as a tuber. Not a tumour, then?

‘I’ve never grown these ones myself,’ she said. ‘It’s root ginger, isn’t it? Or Jerusalem artichoke? What do they taste like? Does it smell?’

The doctor held it to his nose. The old man’s breath again.