The Point (6 page)
What’s with the blood pudding, Titania is asking Godblot.
There was a story, about a banquet that Flora did. That she saved her own blood and made black pudding out of it. Probably apocryphal, but who knows?
Wouldn’t it be illegal?
Hard to say, really. The question probably hasn’t come up. So no precedents. The law is all about precedents, you know.
And analogy. I’d imagine. What would be the analogy?
I’d have to give it some thought. And I’d rather consider the oysters. Very large and sizzling. As big and juicy as they look, I hope.
When Bruno brings the tiny bowl of consommé Jerome asks, What’s this about oysters Rockefeller and sixties revival?
It’s one of Flora’s interests. You know how so much of the food of that time has become a cliché, even a joke? Not to mention junk food, industrially produced, like chicken Kiev. She likes to take it up again and subvert it, or rather, subvert what it’s become, get beyond the kitsch to the real ingredients. She’s working on a prawn cocktail – you should keep an eye out for it. It’ll be pretty cool.
Hugh Todhunter is dining with his wife, who understands that he is not feeling chatty. He is thinking of the man he has been defending against the murder of a young woman, who disappeared early one morning after a night’s dancing at a club in Manuka, whose body was found naked, raped and mutilated in the bush near the sparkling little rocky creek called Paddy’s River, where he has been in the habit of taking his family for picnics. A legal aid case. It’s over now, and he’s won.
The man he was defending, forty-eight years old, his skin corded with muscle and brown from the sun and dirt too, works in the forest and camps there. He owns and seemed to live in a ute, of an acid-green colour, the colour of the seventies and dreams of hippies and rainforests, now battered and crumpled and the green ridged with rust like a contour map in three dimensions, a rough and mountainous landscape.
The girl was young and white-skinned, very smooth before she was dragged over rough earth and metal surfaces, probably drunk at the time and no virgin, Todhunter making much of this while he thought to himself, there are no young women I know of whom this could not be said at some moment and none of them are tarts and whores. My daughters are not virgins and yet they are virtuous. There were bits of rusted green paint found on the girl’s body. The barrister had argued that this was not conclusive. Now he says to his wife, Of course he did it. I didn’t expect to win. I don’t know what the prosecution was doing. I shouldn’t have won.
Terry Feldman on one of his tours stops at Hugh’s table. Celebrating your win, I see, he says.
The barrister raises his glass to eye level, but doesn’t say anything. Terry dips his glass and moves on.
A wordless salute, Hugh thinks. And is briefly pleased with this thought because he is a person whose work is words. But of course it is all words still. A wordless salute is the words he finds.
He lifts the wine up to his eye again to see the world stained red, but rather it is blotted out. The wine is not transparent.
I hear the black pudding is brilliant, says Fiona, a safe wifely steering away from guilt and murder and into food and the everyday, though of course it’s hardly everyday here.
I think I’d rather have fish.
But you’re drinking red wine.
So? I can have the swordfish. That’ll work okay. He lifts up his glass again, holds it tipped slightly sideways, looking at the colour of the wine against the white of the tablecloth. It’s a fine brownish red, as it should be, a Lake’s Folly of its age. He sips at it. They will need another bottle.
At the next table is the birthday party, of Candida and Cressida, twin daughters of Leo and Judy Prelec; they are nineteen years old. The birthday dessert is bombe Alaska, carried to the table by Martin, who doesn’t want to be an actor and isn’t going to university; he plans to be master of his own restaurant, whose chef will be his girlfriend, Kate, a third-year apprentice, who made the bombe, the cake a citrus-flavoured génoise, the ice-cream two kinds, cardamom and vanilla, with candied lemon and orange peel, under its many-peaked brown-grilled dome of white meringue. It is served on a heavy silver salver, and set into its point is a half eggshell in which brandy burns. Martin carries it in proudly, and the restaurant ripples with interest.
Bombe Alaska, murmurs Fiona Todhunter. I haven’t had one of those for decades. Can we come here for my birthday, and order bombe Alaska?
What is it, asks Hugh.
You remember. Baked ice-cream. We had it in the motel in Albury, that trip we did the year we were married. It came stuck full of sparklers, all fizzing away. We cackled our heads off.
I remember the fireworks.
You wouldn’t want to remember the bombe. Commercial ice-cream and sickly-sweet meringue. Nothing like Flora’s, you can depend on that.
Jerome knew Flora only by sight, and this was because Terry Feldman always called for her as he was leaving. He’d be fingering the cigar he would smoke as soon as he got outside, and would wait in the bar until she came in from the kitchen. Then he would stand with his arms outstretched as though contemplating, or maybe even offering, one of the wonders of the world, and his voice would boom out, always the same words, his variations on the idea of her name. Ah Flora,
ma fleur
,
ma belle fleurissante
, he would say,
florissima
,
bella bella bellissima
. Flora would stand at the centre of this invocation, and Jerome thought how pale she looked, wan even, tired, her head bent, drooped, and a faint smile on her lips, an ironical smile, he described it to himself, but had to admit it might have been modestly pleased. If he could have seen her eyes he might have been able to tell.
Because of Terry he didn’t want to meet her himself, didn’t see how he could follow those roaring mangled shreds of French and Italian. And anyway he didn’t know her. Wasn’t it patronising to call for somebody you didn’t know, as though your admiration could make any difference to what she was doing here? He’d seen Godblot talking to her, slightly more quietly, kissing her hand, and once Marilyn Ferucci had given her a hug. Always Flora stood with a cool sort of stillness, and under the light of one of the octagonal lanterns, so her eyes were dark sockets, and her hair had the yellow droughty sheen of the hills in high summer. She didn’t say much, and he could tell that people spoke their fulsome praise and then were not sure what to say.
So Jerome loitered when this was happening, and waited until Flora had gone back into her offices before leaving. He knew her food was sublime, so why demean himself by failing to find words to do it justice. He imagined that the faint curve of irony about her lips recognised just that, the disparity between her work and their praise. He knew he was quite likely wrong about this, that she was grateful for the
florissimas
, and that what he took for irony was the tiredness at the end of long effort. A kind of exultant tiredness, he imagined. Inventing her still. Preferring it that way, not wanting to find out whether he was right or not.
You can admire an artist’s work without needing to tell him so. It was a bit like going up to Picasso and saying, Great paintings, mate, I love ya work.
Laurel was different, pretty Laurel, in her elegant black dress, she was there to be talked to. He was having a conversation with her like a serial, a new instalment each time he came, but as in a serial a lot was repeated.
How’s that lad of yours? Young Oscar.
She looked away, and smiled a bit. Oh, well, he’s being good. He says. He’s turned over a new leaf. No more drugs … he says.
Excellent.
Mm. He did get a High Distinction for an essay. But it was to do with computers.
Why
but
?
Well, that’s his thing. What he’s good at. He doesn’t have to do any work. Well, he does I suppose, but he doesn’t see it like that.
Still, an HD.
You’re right, there could be worse things. Laurel gave a shudder, an elegant shudder, but evidently involuntary. She laughed. Someone walking over my grave, she said. As long as it’s
my
grave.
Computers are a useful thing to be good at, he said. I should know.
Oh yes. He’s supposed to be a genius, they say. One of the best in the world at … But I’m talking to you.
Please do, he said. Realising that wasn’t quite right.
Oh. She laughed. Did you enjoy your meal?
That’s not a question that needs asking, he said. You know I did.
She held his overcoat while he put it on, smoothing it over his shoulders in a faint final gesture. Laurel’s was the last delightful touch of the evening.
Laurel sometimes thought of touching his cheek, too, its lean brown hollows that crinkled when he smiled, his thin lips curving in a way both kind and sensual. He bent over her in his courtly manner and she looked up into his eyes which always surprised her, they were so deeply violet inside their fringe of black lashes, and thought of smoothing his hair which was grey and thick and always a bit tousled, but of course she did none of those things, just helped his coat into place.
I wonder, you know, if perhaps the devil was a goldfish. Gold, we say, but actually the colour is red, that exquisite bright vermilion so highly prized as a colour in painting and in enamel work. And the fish a precious object itself, with its scales delineated in curving calligraphic lines, its tail furling. As it darts through the water or hangs motionless lip to lip with its companions. Why not a fish, since he took the form of a snake, and very beautiful this creature is too, especially if you can look at it with unfallen eyes, as Eve did, no knowledge of sin, so no fear. As children may sometimes, being innocent, but not entirely, I have heard babies cry with such a desolation of terror in their voices that it must be the sorrow of humanity and not their own pain. The curse of Eve, obliged to bear her children in sorrow and in tears.
Original sin. It seems hard to visit this upon a newborn, until you hear them cry and you know that they know. And yet, wouldn’t we each choose the apple, if the snake whispered it to us?
So, the beautiful slender scaly snake, the beautiful portly scaly fish. Not whispering, but kissing.
If only I had had my Leonie, then. One scoop of her dazzling white paw and she’d have plucked out that fish from his deceiving pond to lie frantically popping his kisses on the pavement until he drowned in air. I remember that the dexterity of the cat is an instance of the love of God to her exceedingly. And indeed when I consult my Christopher Smart I find that the cat has the subtlety and the hissing of a serpent, which in goodness she suppresses.
Of course when I looked in the pond that day and saw the fish I did not believe in the devil. I was a man walking in the sun dissatisfied with his life. Remembering the child he had been, solemnly forswearing every earthly desire. Ha. What are the world and the flesh to a boy of eighteen who had been in an ecclesiastical institution all his schooldays, not to mention a Christian home before and as well. Becoming a religious is like writing a blank cheque and too late discovering what monstrous sum you are being asked to pay. Please sir, I was a child, I knew not what I did.
The enormous promises of the religious life didn’t lead to holiness, or peace of mind. Not even the holy itchings of doubt, that could have occupied my days in the scratching of them. Just that Rimbaudian sense that life is elsewhere.
And the devil certainly not relevant. I was the product of my time. I could conjure him, but as myth, as metaphor. As a code that people of my intellect could decode.
The devil’s sin was pride, and maybe so was ours.
Nowadays, I fear metaphor. I am courteous and careful with it. You form the words that give shape to it, and shazam, shape and body it has, and its own mind, and the feeble leash of your wit cannot hold it. Metaphor exists, it will pad around your house at night with eyes like hot coals and heavy stinking breath. It will sink its teeth into your neck and not let you go. Try decoding the clamped jaw, the raking paws. Better to try to force them apart and escape. Better still to have learnt the words of command before it was too late. Stay. Back. Heel. Maybe even, Avaunt. Better above all never to have conjured the beastly image in the first place.
For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by frisking about the life.
And certainly my Leonie is safe, no clamping jaws and raking claws can come near her, and she is like to rake a claw in return. I suppose the danger is real but she is always safe, it is the other who is at bay and in flight. I doubt she can do it for me, though. She puts her paw on the word
bay
, the ink smudges, her pink pad has a blackish stain. If you were really a lion, Leonie … but maybe you are one by metaphor, and can save me from other metaphors.
My namesake interpreted the Bible, and I maunder on through my own sorry life. He translated it, but the monks who knew the bad translations of the psalms by heart stuck with them and refused his accurate ones.
And yet, had that fish stopped kissing its fellow long enough to tell me all that was to follow my leaving the order … what am I saying. Of course I would’ve … wouldn’t have … left … I am not that big an idiot. But of course I would have; our own suffering, it is something that we earn and would not give up, after all.
I have my hindsight, and that is not entirely regret.
The restaurant was octagonal, with the kitchens in a long slender shaft that pierced it, with windows overlooking the entrance path. I don’t have a car, I usually walked, it was pleasant exercise after a day in front of the screens, and I often went along the edge of the lake. The time I am thinking of was winter, it would be dark and you would approach this lantern-shaped structure, see it hanging in front of you, dim but full of rich muted light, and always I felt that remembered pang of a someone excluded, like a poor child in a Dickens novel, nose pressed to the glass of the rich family’s window, looking at the presents, the food, the warm firelight, the smiling faces and all the images of love that will never be his. I loved that moment of pang because that was all it was, because not any longer did I have to press my nose up against the glass, I would not be found a little frozen body when the sun rose next morning, I could go in, I belonged within the warmth, the lights would welcome me and the dwellers therein turn smiling faces upon me. You may think me naive, as now I do, to believe that love was to be had because I was on the right side of those double-glazed panes of glass. But then, I was new to that world, I disported in it, gambolled like a little dog who is petted.