Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Page 39

  The trapped one knocked round the room. Bang – over went the table. Crash, tinkle – the supper dishes smashed. Bang, crash tinkle – the dresser fell forward upon the hard white shale of crockery it shed in falling. Over went the meal barrel and she coughed, she sneezed like a child sneezes, no different, and then she bounced around on fear-stiffened legs in a white cloud until the flour settled on everything like a magic powder that made everything strange. Her first frenzy over, she squatted a moment, questing with her long nose and then began to make little rushing sorties, now here, now there, snapping and yelping and tossing her bewildered head.

  She never rose up on two legs; she crouched, all the time, on her hands and tiptoes, yet it was not quite like crouching, for you could see how all fours came naturally to her as though she had made a different pact with gravity than we have, and you could see, too, how strong the muscles in her thighs had grown on the mountain, how taut the twanging arches of her feet, and that indeed, she only used her heels when she sat back on her haunches. She growled; now and then she coughed out those intolerable, thick grunts of distress. All you could see of her rolling eyes were the whites, which were the bluish, glaring white of snow.

  Several times, her bowels opened, apparently involuntarily. The kitchen smelled like a privy yet even her excrement was different to ours, the refuse of raw, strange, unguessable, wicked feeding, shit of a wolf.

  Oh, horror!

  She bumped into the hearth, knocked over the pan hanging from the hook and the spilled contents put out the fire. Hot soup scalded her forelegs. Shock of pain. Squatting on her hindquarters, holding the hurt paw dangling piteously from its wrist before her, she howled, in high, sobbing arcs.

  Even the old woman, who had contracted with herself to love the child of her dead daughter, was frightened when she heard the girl howl.

  Peter’s heart gave a hop, a skip, so that he had a sensation of falling; he was not conscious of his own fear because he could not take his eyes off the sight of the crevice of her girl-child’s sex, that was perfectly visible to him as she sat there square on the base of her spine. The night was now as dark as, at this season, it would go – which is to say, not very dark; a white thread of moon hung in the blond sky at the top of the chimney so that it was neither dark nor light indoors yet the boy could see her intimacy clearly, as if by its own phosphorescence. It exercised an absolute fascination upon him.

  Her lips opened up as she howled so that she offered him, without her own intention or volition, a view of a set of Chinese boxes of whorled flesh that seemed to open one upon another into herself, drawing him into an inner, secret place in which destination perpetually receded before him, his first, devastating, vertiginous intimation of infinity.

  She howled.

  And went on howling until, from the mountain, first singly, then in a complex polyphony, answered at last voices in the same language.

  She continued to howl, though now with a less tragic resonance.

  Soon it was impossible for the occupants of the house to deny to themselves that the wolves were descended on the village in a pack.

  Then she was consoled, sank down, laid her head on her forepaws so that her hair trailed in the cooling soup, and so closed up her forbidden book without the least notion she had ever opened it or that it was banned. Her heavy eyelids closed on her brown, bloodshot eyes. The household gun hung on a nail over the fireplace where Peter’s father had put it when he came in but when the man set his foot on the top rung of the ladder in order to come down for his weapon, the girl jumped up, snarling and showing her long yellow canines.

  The howling outside was now mixed with the agitated dismay of the domestic beasts. All the other villagers were well locked up at home.

  The wolves were at the door.

  The boy took hold of his grandmother’s uninjured hand. First the old woman would not budge but he gave her a good tug and she came to herself. The girl raised her head suspiciously but let them by. The boy pushed his grandmother up the ladder in front of him and drew it up behind them. He was full of nervous dread. He would have given anything to turn time back, so that he might have run, shouting a warning, when he first caught sight of the wolves, and never seen her.

  The door shook as the wolves outside jumped up at it and the screws that held the socket of the bolt to the frame cracked, squeaked and started to give. The girl jumped up, at that, and began to make excited little sallies back and forth in front of the door. The screws tore out of the frame quite soon. The pack tumbled over one another to get inside.

  Dissonance. Terror. The clamour within the house was that of all the winds of winter trapped in a box. That which they feared most, outside, was now indoors with them. The baby in the hayloft whimpered and its mother crushed it to her breast as if the wolves might snatch this one away, too; but the rescue party had arrived only in order to collect their fosterling.

  They left behind a riotous stench in the house, and white tracks of flour everywhere. The broken door creaked backwards and forwards on its hinges. Black sticks of dead wood from the extinguished fire were scattered on the floor.

  Peter thought the old woman would cry, now, but she seemed unmoved. When all was safe, they came down the ladder one by one and, as if released from a spell of silence, burst into excited speech except for the mute old woman and the distraught boy. Although it was well past midnight, the daughter-in-law went to the well for water to scrub the wild smell out of the house. The broken things were cleared up and thrown away. Peter’s father nailed the table and the dresser back together. The neighbours came out of their houses, full of amazement; the wolves had not taken so much as a chicken from the hen-coops, not snatched even a single egg.

  People brought beer into the starlight, and schnapps made from potatoes, and snacks, because the excitement had made them hungry. That terrible night ended up in one big party but the grandmother would eat or drink nothing and went to bed as soon as her house was clean.

  Next day, she went to the graveyard and sat for a while beside her daughter’s grave but she did not pray. Then she came home and started chopping cabbage for the evening meal but had to leave off because her bitten hand was festering.

  That winter, during the leisure imposed by the snow, after his grandmother’s death, Peter asked the village priest to teach him to read the Bible. The priest gladly complied; Peter was the first of his flock who had ever expressed any interest in learning to read.

  The boy became very pious, so much so that his family were startled and impressed. The younger children teased him and called him ‘Saint Peter’ but that did not stop him sneaking off to church to pray whenever he had a spare moment. In Lent, he fasted to the bone. On Good Friday, he lashed himself. It was as if he blamed himself for the death of the old lady, as if he believed he had brought into the house the fatal infection that had taken her out of it. He was consumed by an imperious passion for atonement. Each night, he pored over his book by the flimsy candlelight, looking for a clue to grace, until his mother shooed him off to sleep.

  But, as if to spite the four evangelists he nightly invoked to protect his bed, the nightmare regularly disordered his sleeps. He tossed and turned on the rustling straw pallet he shared with two little ones.

  Delighted with Peter’s precocious intelligence, the priest started to teach him Latin. Peter visited the priest as his duties with the herd permitted. When he was fourteen, the priest told his parents that Peter should now go to the seminary in the town in the valley where the boy would learn to become a priest himself. Rich in sons, they spared one to God, since his books and his praying made him a stranger to them. After the goats came down from the high pasture for the winter, Peter set off. It was October.

  At the end of his first day’s travel, he reached a river that ran from the mountain into the valley. The nights were already chilly; he lit himself a fire, prayed, ate bread and cheese his mother had packed for him and slept as well as he could. In spite of his eagerness to plu
nge into the white world of penance and devotion that awaited him, he was anxious and troubled for reasons he could not explain to himself.

  In the first light, the light that no more than clarifies darkness like egg shells dropped in cloudy liquid, he went down to the river to drink and to wash his face. It was so still he could have been the one thing living.

  Her forearms, her loins and her legs were thick with hair and the hair on her head hung round her face in such a way that you could hardly make out her features. She crouched on the other side of the river. She was lapping up water so full of mauve light that it looked as if she were drinking up the dawn as fast as it appeared yet all the same the air grew pale while he was looking at her.

  Solitude and silence; all still.

  She could never have acknowledged that the reflection beneath her in the river was that of herself. She did not know she had a face; she had never known she had a face and so her face itself was the mirror of a different kind of consciousness than ours is, just as her nakedness, without innocence or display, was that of our first parents, before the Fall. She was hairy as Magdalen in the wilderness and yet repentance was not within her comprehension.

  Language crumbled into dust under the weight of her speechlessness.

  A pair of cubs rolled out of the bushes, cuffing one another. She did not pay them any heed.

  The boy began to tremble and shake. His skin prickled. He felt he had been made of snow and now might melt. He mumbled something, or sobbed.

  She cocked her head at the vague, river-washed sound and the cubs heard it, too, left off tumbling and ran to burrow their scared heads in her side. But she decided, after a moment, there was no danger and lowered her muzzle, again, to the surface of the water that took hold of her hair and spread it out around her head.

  When she finished her drink, she backed a few paces, shaking her wet pelt. The little cubs fastened their mouths on her dangling breasts.

  Peter could not help it, he burst out crying. He had not cried since his grandmother’s funeral. Tears rolled down his face and splashed on the grass. He blundered forward a few steps into the river with his arms held open, intending to cross over to the other side to join her in her marvellous and private grace, impelled by the access of an almost visionary ecstasy. But his cousin took fright at the sudden movement, wrenched her teats away from the cubs and ran off. The squeaking cubs scampered behind. She ran on hands and feet as if that were the only way to run towards the high ground, into the bright maze of the uncompleted dawn.

  When the boy recovered himself, he dried his tears on his sleeve, took off his soaked boots and dried his feet and legs on the tail of his shirt. Then he ate something from his pack, he scarcely knew what, and continued on the way to the town; but what would he do at the seminary, now? For now he knew there was nothing to be afraid of.

  He experienced the vertigo of freedom.

  He carried his boots slung over his shoulder by the laces. They were a great burden. He debated with himself whether or not to throw them away but, when he came to a paved road, he had to put them on, although they were still damp.

  The birds woke up and sang. The cool, rational sun surprised him; morning had broken on his exhilaration and the mountain now lay behind him. He looked over his shoulder and saw, how, with distance, the mountain began to acquire a flat, two-dimensional look. It was already turning into a picture of itself, into the postcard hastily bought as a souvenir of childhood at a railway station or a border post, the newspaper cutting, the snapshot he would show in strange towns, strange cities, other countries he could not, at this moment, imagine, whose names he did not yet know, places where he would say, in strange languages, ‘That was where I spent my childhood. Imagine!’

  He turned and stared at the mountain for a long time. He had lived in it for fourteen years but he had never seen it before as it might look to someone who had not known it as almost a part of the self, so, for the first time, he saw the primitive, vast, magnificent, barren, unkind, simplicity of the mountain. As he said goodbye to it, he saw it turn into so much scenery, into the wonderful backcloth for an old country tale, tale of a child suckled by wolves, perhaps, or of wolves nursed by a woman.

  Then he determinedly set his face towards the town and tramped onwards, into a different story.

  ‘If I look back again,’ he thought with a last gasp of superstitious terror, ‘I shall turn into a pillar of salt.’

  The Kitchen Child

  ‘Born in a trunk’, they say when a theatrical sups grease-paint with mother’s milk, and if there be a culinary equivalent of the phrase then surely I merit it, for was I not conceived the while a soufflé rose? A lobster soufflé, very choice, twenty-five minutes in a medium oven.

  And the very first soufflé that ever in her life as cook me mam was called upon to make, ordered up by some French duc, house guest of Sir and Madam, me mam pleased as punch to fix it for him since few if any fins becs pecked their way to our house, not even during the two weeks of the Great Grouse Shoot when nobs rolled up in droves to score the feathered booty of the skies. Especially not then. Palates like shoe leather. ‘Pearls before swine,’ my mother would have said as she reluctantly sent the four and twenty courses of her Art up to the dining room, except that pigs would have exhibited more gourmandise. I tell you, the English country house, yes! that’s the place for grub; but, only when Sir and Madam are pas chez lui. It is the staff who keep up the standards.

  For Madam would touch nothing but oysters and grapes on ice three times a day, due to the refinement of her sensibility, while Sir fasted until a devilled bone at sundown, his tongue having been burned out by curry when he was governing a bit of Poonah. (I reckon those Indians hotted up his fodder out of spite. Oh, the cook’s vengeance, when it strikes – terrible!) And as for the Shooters of Grouse, all they wanted was sandwiches for hors d’oeuvres, sandwiches for entrées, followed by sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches, and their hip flasks kept replenished, oh, yes, wash it down with the amber fluid and who can tell how it tastes?

  So me mam took great pains with the construction of this, her very first lobster soufflé, sending the boy who ground knives off on his bike to the sea, miles, for the beast itself and then the boiling of it alive, how it come squeaking piteously crawling out of the pot etc. etc. etc. so me mam all a-flutter before she so much as separated the eggs.

  Then, just as she bent over the range to stir the flour into the butter, a pair of hands clasped tight around her waist. Thinking, at first, it was but kitchen horseplay, she twitched her ample hips to put him off as she slid the egg yolks into the roux. But as she mixed in the lobster meat, diced up, all nice, she felt those hands stray higher.

  That was when too much cayenne went in. She always regretted that.

  And as she was folding in the toppling contents of the bowl of beaten egg-white, God knows what it was he got up to but so much so she flings all into the white dish with abandon and:

  ‘To hell with it!’

  Into the oven goes the soufflé; the oven door slams shut.

  I draw a veil.

  ‘But, mam!’ I often begged her. ‘Who was that man?’

  ‘Lawks a mercy, child,’ says she. ‘I never thought to ask. I were that worried the wallop I give the oven door would bring the soufflé down.’

  But, no. The soufflé went up like a montgolfier and, as soon as its golden head knocked imperiously against the oven door, she bust through the veil I have discreetly drawn over this scene of passion and emerged, smoothing her apron, in order to extract the exemplary dish amidst oohs and aahs and of the assembled kitchen staff, some forty-five in number.

  But not quite exemplary. The cook met her match in the eater. The housekeeper brings his plate herself, slaps it down. ‘He said: “Trop de cayenne,” and scraped it off his plate into the fire,’ she announces with a gratified smirk. She is a model of refinement and always very particular about her aspirates. She hiccups. She even says the ‘h’ in ‘hic’.
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  My mother weeps for shame.

  ‘What we need here is a congtinental – hic – chef to improve le ton,’ menaces the housekeeper, tossing me mam a killing look as she sweeps out the door for me mam is a simple Yorkshire lass for all she has magic in her fingers but no room for two queens in this hive, the housekeeper hates her. And the housekeeper is pricked perpetually by the fancy for the importation of a Carême or a Soyer with moustaches like hatracks to croquembouche her and milly filly her as is all the rage.

  ‘For isn’t it Alberlin, chef to the dear Devonshires; and Crépin, at the Duchess of Sutherland’s. Then there’s Labalme, with the Duke of Beaufort’s household, doncherno . . . and the Queen, bless her, has her Ménager . . . while we’re stuck with that fat cow who can’t speak nothing but broad Yorkshire, never out of her carpet slippers . . .’

  Conceived upon a kitchen table, born upon a kitchen floor; no bells rang to welcome me but, far more aptly, my arrival heralded by a bang! bang! bang! on every skillet in the place, a veritable fusillade of copper-bottom kitchen tympani; and the merry clatter of ladle against dish-cover; and the very turnspit dogs all went: ‘Bow wow!’

  It being, as you might yourself compute, a good three months off October, Sir and Madam being in London the housekeeper maintains a fine style all by herself, sitting in her parlour partaking of the best Bohea from a Meissen cup, to which she adds a judicious touch of rum from the locked bottles to which she’s forged a key in her ample leisure. The housekeeper’s little skivvy, that she keeps to fetch, carry and lick boot, just topping the tea-cup up with old Jamaica, all hell breaks loose below stairs as if a Chinese orchestra started up its woodblocks and xylophones, crash, wallop.