Jim Crace - The Devil's Larder

There was what Rosa took to be a kind of thistle growing in the dunes. She broke a piece off. Its stem was glaucous. Its leaves were leathery. She searched for it in Mrs Caraway but it was him — his chin upon her shoulder — who spotted the tiny illustration. Not thistle, then. But sea holly or eringo.

‘You can eat the roots,’ she said.

He took the book and read the entry. ‘It’s good for flatulence. It’s diaphoretic, aromatic and it’s expectorant.’ And then, ‘An aphrodisiac. “The roots should be first candied or infused with fruits and then consumed. It will be witnessed how quickly Venus is provoked.” ’

They pulled a few handfuls of the root. They couldn’t tell from smelling it how it would taste. At least they wouldn’t suffer from flatulence, he said, and flatulence was always a risk with unhung pheasant.

He grated the eringo and boiled it with a little water; then he added blackberries and sugar. ‘Let’s see,’ he said. He dipped his little finger in the bowl. He could hardly taste the root. It was too bland for him. Besides, he hadn’t made it for himself. He gave the bowl to Rosa.

She used a spoon. ‘It isn’t very nice,’ she said. ‘A bit too sharp.’ She was sweet-toothed.

He added some more sugar and offered her another spoonful, like a parent doling out medicine.

‘It doesn’t taste of anything,’ she said. No thanks, she didn’t want it as a sauce to eat with the roasted pheasant and the mushrooms.

He said it would be pleasant to sit naked by the fire. He coaxed her to remove her clothes. The semi-darkness and the lisping firelight made it easier for her to do as she was asked. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders. ‘I know you’ll need to take your time,’ he said. ‘I do not want to hurry you. But it is only natural that I should want to love you fully, on our honeymoon.’ Her back was cold. Her knees and breasts were burning hot. The cushions were not comfortable. She was relieved when he suggested that they went to bed. She let him cup her breasts in his hands, although his fingers smelt of pheasant feathers. She let him curl around her with her nightdress bunched up underneath her arms. He was exasperated — and murderous — when, almost at once, she fell asleep.

It was midnight when Rosa woke. She’d dreamed that she was drowning. And, indeed, her pillow and her hair were soaking wet, and hot. Her body too. Her mouth seemed gummed with phlegm. She had to swallow. Her breasts were hard. She knew that it was something that she’d eaten. The mushrooms, perhaps. Or the pheasant had been off. But she could taste the blackberries. It was eringo that had woken her. She pushed the bedclothes on to her husband’s side and lay on the bed with nothing but her nightdress for warmth. Her breathing was becoming thin and papery. She thought that she would either tear or be dissolved.

And then, quite suddenly, her fever cleared. The air expanded round her. There was space. She swung one leg over the side of the bed. She pushed the other deep into the blankets. Her body was the temperature of blood. Her breathing thickened. Her back arched. She seemed to swell and lift. She had to press her hands onto her abdomen to keep herself from floating. She had to brace her arms and thighs to stop herself from sinking through the bed. She felt like the driftwood she had gathered on the beach — compact and dry and silvery and, somehow, not as heavy as she ought to be, as if her insides had been tunnelled out by worms. And one by one — with her fingers pressed into her flesh, and with her knees spread out to make a rhombus of her legs — her splinters and her corners were removed and she became a lizard with five limbs, and she became a boomerang, and she became a root.

Rosa was up before her husband woke. She could not bear to interrupt his sleep or look at him. She wanted privacy. She made herself some tea and took it, with a spoon and the half-empty bowl of grated eringo, blackberries and sugar, into the living room. There was a little warmth left in the fire. She wrapped a tablecloth around her shoulders, and pulled a stool up to the ashes. She finished off the eringo. She licked the bowl. During the night the root had marinated with the berries. She could detect a taste like chestnuts and the pungency of quicklime.

In the early afternoon, she walked down to the beach for firewood. Her husband had gone off to get some eggs and milk from the farm. He said the free food of the countryside had been a disappointment. They’d been naive. He could not wait to have her back home where things between him and his bride could settle down, could grow. This time she recognized the symptoms when they came. Her hair and skin were soaking wet, exactly as before. Her mouth was full of spit, and then was dry and papery. She lay down on the dunes and waited, while her breathing thinned and thickened.

Rosa pulled some roots again that day, for supper. She woke at two o’clock — a little later than the night before, but no less memorably. She took an early breakfast by the fire.

She pulled more roots to take back from their honeymoon, and hid them in the car. She’d try what Mrs Caraway had recommended and candy them in baked syrup. She’d have to share them with her husband, she supposed. She’d have to share with him what she had found out on her own. But not just yet. Marriage was for life, she reminded herself. There was no need for haste. It would be a joy to make him wait. She’d not be caught as easily as pigeons, pheasants, shrimps.

WHEN HE’D BEEN serving in the restaurant, his party trick had been to sing out the names of all the ninety types of pastas, in alphabetical order, in less than three minutes, from angel hair to ziti. It was a comic aria of food — and usually it had earned him a round of applause from the customers, and calls for an encore. He’d got huge tips.

Now that he was working for a bank, there wasn’t much demand for pasta, but still he liked to practise his party trick, if only for his own amusement. Skills atrophy unless they’re cared for.

Each morning, once he’d walked to the tram stop on the way to work, he muttered all the pastas to himself. Usually, if he cut his timing fine, he would only have reached cannelloni, cappelletti, cavatelli, conchiglie before his tram arrived, a modest daily pleasure he was eager to repeat.

MY MOTHER’S birthday — and I’ll bake a pie for her. Blind pie. The sort she baked for us when we were small, on our birthdays. The trick’s revealed. I have her recipe. She wrote it down more than forty years ago, in pencil and in capitals, on the last page of her 1961 House Diary. I found it on the kitchen shelf when we were clearing her apartment, the week she died.

This much I always knew. We were allowed to watch her line the deep dish with pastry and prepare a decorated lid. We’d help her roll and paste into place the walls of dough, which divided the pie into six triangular compartments. The birthday child could choose the filling, but only ‘something sensible’. Sliced fruit and dates. Leek and cheese. Chicken and onion. Pigeon and damsons. The pie was fit for almost anything. But she would never let us stay to watch the filling of the spaces. We had to giggle on the far side of the kitchen door while — now we know — she packed five of the compartments with the chosen food and blinded the sixth segment of the pie with flour and dried beans. Then she hid the contents under the lid.

We were allowed to see her slide the pie into the middle of the oven, and wait in the kitchen for the forty minutes that it took to bake. But then, again, we had to leave and guess at what she did behind our backs, what tricks she used to make the pie so generous. But here it’s written down in pencil and in capitals. The lifting of the pastry lid with its exasperated shush of steam. The careful, hot removal of the aggregate, the pebbles and clay of hardened flour and bullet beans. The filling of the blind sixth, with either the necklace or the marbles that my mother had kept hidden in her linen drawer, the ornament she’d ordered through the post, the shell purse from the seaside, the metal animal, the set of dice. And finally the dinner gong, the family gathered at the oblong table, the serving spoon, the violated pastry lid, with — almost — everybody praying for no fruit, no meat, but hoping that something costly and inedible would end up on their plates.