The Point (14 page)

Is it hard to get them to grow?

Not usually. Mainly water is all they need.

Willows siphon up water faster than an elephant, says the girl.

All the water poured on this slope to keep it green, a lot of it runs down here. A real little sink. They should root in no time. And the grafts, they’ll take. Then you’ll have to watch it.

Why?

It’ll grow like mad. Need clipping three times a year, at least.

The girl says, Something so beautiful, people have to look after it. You have to be involved, if you want a willow sculpture. Pay attention to it.

I see, said Clovis.

He thought it was time to move along. Good luck, he said. Well, it’s not good luck, is it, it’s skill, and I can see you’ve got that.

We need the goddess to smile on us as well, said the man.

I hope she does, said Clovis.

A willow sculpture, said Elinor. Whatever made you think of that?

This day she and Flora were eating in a cafe near Foreign Affairs that sold twenty different sandwiches, named after artists. Elinor had chosen a Chihuly, with bacon and lettuce.

I should have known the mayonnaise wouldn’t be real, she said.

That’s why I didn’t risk it, said Flora, who was taking her several bites out of a Roberts, with roasted sweet potato, humous and almonds. Nice but a bit all the same, she said.

Friends of mine in England had a willow sculpture, Flora said, the most beautiful little Gothic pavilion. Except they went away too long in the summer and it turned into a monster.

Why?

Willow grows really fast. I saw a screen in the Chelsea Flower Show, it was growing at the rate of more than three centimetres a day.

Yikes.

So you have to look after them. Keep trimming so they don’t grow all wavy and wandy at the top and bare in the real part.

I suppose it’s an ancient skill.

Willow working is. There are beds all over England for cutting the canes. Here it’s a bit more hit or miss. Oh Elinor. You can’t imagine how beautiful the sculptures are. Ever since I saw that Gothic pavilion, I’ve wanted one. It’s the growing that’s so wonderful. She puts the Roberts decisively down.

Thank god for wine, says Elinor. You’d die of malnutrition otherwise. But where did you find someone to do it, here?

I wrote to the people who did the pavilion, and they told me about this pair. Ted and Julia. That wasn’t hard. It was getting permission. I don’t own the restaurant, you know, it’s not my property even temporarily. I had to talk the local powers into it. Public property, not ours to deface, they said. A work of art that would beautify the foreshore, I said. And it’s a screen too, it’ll hide the kitchen. I do my best, but even my kitchen yard isn’t pretty. They took a lot of convincing, even so. In the end I got Bill Skaines – do you know him? Curator of sculpture at the gallery – to tell them they’d be mad to miss it. Wonderful philanthropic gesture etcetera. Only one of its kind in the country, great tourist attraction. Got out his trowel, Bill did, laid it on.

So it’s willow, growing, and plaited into patterns.

Mmm. A double diamond trellis. Classical. We’re using
Salix
triandra
. The male catkins come at the same time as the leaves in the spring and they smell lovely, like mimosa, Ted tells me. Oh I can’t wait. They say it will be well away this spring.

I won’t even ask you how much it’s costing.

A bomb, says Flora.

I know about willow wands, says Elinor. People used to tie up packages with them and then sometimes they’d plant them. Pope did. Alexander, the poet.

Oh, that Pope.

Okay, I suppose there isn’t another. Anyway, he had a willow at Twickenham that came from the twine round a parcel some lady sent him.

You never fail, says Flora. Always a mine of abstruse info.

Yup. Well, mine’s an encyclopaedic dictionary, we go into things. What’s more, all the willows in Oz are supposed to come from Napoleon’s tomb on St Helena. He was keen on them too. Ships passing cut twigs and kept them in cool dark damp sacks of seeding potatoes. They take root easily. And kill your drains.

Not mine, says Flora. I shall keep my willow out of my drains. Their drains. Ted and Julia are planting by the moon, you know. It has to be midwinter, before the wands leaf, but they make sure the moon is right, too.

So did my father. Had a moon chart for planting.

Rather New Age, isn’t it?

Not in his time. And why shouldn’t it make sense? The tides are pretty powerful things, and they’re controlled by the moon. Why not plants?

Why not. Yes, why not. It’s quite powerful on people, too, isn’t it. Turns you into a lunatic.

Moonstruck. I’m not sure it actually turns you into one. I think it mainly makes you worse if you already are.

Like dancing to psalms.

Elinor looked at her. Oh yes? Come on, Flora, tell.

But Flora smiled and wouldn’t.

Flora did not have a garden. Plants were vegetables and flowers and you bought the best in a market. Or they were trees and you looked out at them from a large airy apartment, several floors up. She sat at her desk and stared into the treetops. Scribblings against the sky at this time of year.

The scribblings on her page seemed to have no meaning. Or they had meanings, but didn’t go anywhere. Sat stumpy and silent, not even fluid enough to type on a computer.
Basil erotic
and sinister
, she had written. The royal herb. Erotic and sinister. People would want recipes. Basil equals pesto. She was impatient with recipes. Too much numbing detail. Bumbling detail. Too prosy. She looked at the bare branches against the sky. She wanted her words to be poetry, allusive, elliptical, glancing not defining. Not poetry like Sidney Smith’s salad poem, poetry like Wallace Stevens.

Cooking was what you did in your head, in your kitchen, spending hours getting it right, doing it over and over again until it worked as you had imagined it would when you first thought of it. Patience endlessly repeating, until it came right and you felt as if you had swallowed a fish, darting and dancing its queasy pleasure in your gut. You couldn’t reduce that to a list of ingredients and a paragraph of method. You could do it in many pages, like Elizabeth David’s recipe for spinach in butter, but then it was a curiosity. Not to mention a quotation. And yet, somewhere there must be words to tell people what food means.
Oh! Blessed rage
for order
, she wrote.
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea.

I need to find a voice in which to sing my song, which will be my song only, and will make order of my world and art out of it. To be
the single artificer of the world In which she sang
…

The name of that poem was ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’. For a lot of people Key West was the name of a kind of lime pie. Made of egg yolks beaten into condensed milk, with lime juice, and the whites whipped into meringue, not a dish she’d ever wished to try. And then of course Key West was a place in Florida, and that was presumably where Wallace Stevens had been when he heard the girl singing on the beach, and
Knew that there never was
a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

That poem spoke so profoundly to her that she felt her eyes widen and glaze and for a while she was seized by a sort of atavistic knowledge of it, as though she had been possessed by it, not just the words but the huge whole meaning of it. She stared at the paper. But her gaze was not anywhere on the things around her, but inside, until with a shiver she came back to her own words on the page.

Basil erotic and sinister
. Take a large bunch of basil.
A handful
of parsley big as a bunch of violets
. That was Pomiane. On the radio, in Paris between the wars.
Radio Cuisine
, his book was called, and in it he talked to his listeners with zest and wit. So effortless, so beautiful, the words of others.

What did Morgan le Fay eat for breakfast? But that wasn’t a question to ask, and she wasn’t a sorceress, and maybe the answer would be to write a novel. Make it all up. But she wasn’t a novelist.

She looked at the Perceval angel, wicked ceramic impish creature, standing safely on its head on a shelf above her desk. Her mother had bought it years ago for twenty pounds. An enormous sum, my dear, and never better spent. Maybe it was best to be a collector of the works of art of others. Wallace Stevens poems, willow sculptures, ceramic angels.

My food is a work of art. But I am failing to put it into words. And maybe that is as it should be. A painting is a painting. A symphony a symphony. A Beatles song, a Perceval angel. I should do it and not talk about it. Redo Stevens for my own purpose: There never was a world for her Except the one she cooked and, cooking, made.

But. She had a contract. Already two extensions. She could give the money back. Other people wrote about food … And that was it. I do not want to be like them, she wrote, in bold black ink on a yellow pad. On the other hand, Bach wrote his music down, so that other people would have the pleasure of playing it. They could never be Bach, but they could play him. Play with him, play at him.

She sat at her desk but she was thinking about making cassoulet. Not writing it, making it. Not the heavy duck-fatty dish of Carcassonne, but its lighter, fresher child. She went into the kitchen, easier to think with the tools of the trade. Beans of course, but not too many or too stodgy. And the duck; maybe a Chinese method of cooking, not the flavours, but the manner, to get rid of the fat but keep the skin crispy, rather than the soggier
confit
. Long winters and harsher times needed duck preserved in its own fat; not any more.

It was the beginning of her making this dish. Jerome could be present as it evolved, she would do it before him.

Everybody who comes to the restaurant admires the willow sculpture. It is a narrative which has to be told over and over. Laurel is the keeper of it. Customers arrive and straightaway speak about it. So beautiful, so mysterious, when, why, how? Laurel has a spiel which she keeps changing, for her own amusement. As it is, her eyes sparkle, she is as keen to talk about it as those who see it are to know.

Gwyneth talks to Clovis about it. She wishes she could do something like that. She is good with her hands, that’s why the job in the massage parlour was just the thing. But to make something like a willow sculpture, and have the whole world see; they are so lucky, she says.

14

The boys with the baseball bat walked across the slope towards the art gallery. Three of them peeled off to catch buses home, two made their way towards Manuka. One of these was Chad Shenstone, the other Julian Lett. Julian danced about like a monkey looking for a tree to climb. Chad was carrying the baseball bat. His street kid’s cherub face was vacant. He’d just swallowed a handful of Serepax.

As they were walking along Canberra Avenue a car stopped for them. It was a Volkswagen convertible and its driver was Steve Costello. His beefy arm was draped over the door and his neckless head constantly pumped back and forward to the music booming from the stereo. They got in and Steve drove to Manuka, then round and round the shopping centre which was busy with people buying stuff and sitting at the cafes. A lot of the cafes had gas heaters so people could sit out on the pavement, even though it was so cold. They were mostly people who wanted to smoke, rugged up warm. It was still light, in a grey livid sort of way, and there were the remnants of a thin sunset. Soon it would be dark.

Just think, we could be living in Bali, said Steve, banging the wheel with his sausagey fingers, and here we are, stuck in this hole.

Do people live there? I thought it was just for holidays.

Of course they do, shit-for-brains, said Steve. This year when we go I’m not coming back.

Your parents won’t like that. What about school?

Tough, said Steve. When did school ever get you a decent job? It wasn’t school that made my parents’ business. He drove in a casual manner, arm hanging over the door, finger on the steering wheel. The car belonged to his mother, and she wasn’t that keen on letting him drive it, but his father said it stood to reason, it was the logical car for the boy to use, she didn’t need it all the time, not like him, going to work, and Steve could do errands for her. Sometimes he dropped her off and picked her up, that way she could drink as many cocktails as she wanted, and she did quite enjoy being chauffeured around by her beautiful boy who did seem to drive quite carefully. She sat behind large sunglasses with her long blondestreaked hair whipping in the breeze and imagined people would think he was her lover.

Doing the circuit in Manuka Steve accelerated and braked abruptly, made the engine roar, and then sometimes the car couldn’t move because the circulation was held up by cars parking and by the crowds of people using the frequent humped-up pedestrian crossings. On one of these stops they saw Chad’s brother, Hamish, and his friend Oscar walking along the footpath. Chad gave a piercing whistle and the older boys came over to talk to them.

Hiya, Hamish, hi, Oscar.