Various Flavors of Coffee (7 page)

“—promised Father nothing objectionable would take place.” “Don’t be such a nincompoop, Ada. There is about as much

chance of me succumbing to Mr.Wallis’s purple compliments over a harmless lunch as there is of that river freezing over. But if you’re really so concerned, come with us.”

“You know I can’t.You’ll have to take the Frog.” I heard Emily sigh.“I’d rather not.”

“Why not?”

“We can’t possibly talk with the Frog there.”

“Wallis does nothing
but
talk, as far as I can see. But very well— if you can really bear to go with him, then go.”

As we walked
along Narrow Street a silence fell upon us.To tell the truth, I was still smarting from Ada’s remark that I did nothing but talk.

“How long have you been working for your father?” I said at last.

“Almost three years now.”

“Three years!” I shook my head. “It is a longer sentence than poor Oscar got at his trial!”

“You don’t understand. For me to be able to work is a luxury.” She gave me a sideways look. “Whereas for you, I suppose, it is a novelty.”

“Certainly. To paraphrase that great writer, the only work worth pursuing is a work of art.”

“Hmm.You have clearly lit your torch at that man’s flame, like so many of our artists at present.”

“Oscar Wilde is a genius—the greatest man of the age, whatever anyone says.”

“Well, I hope you have not been too much influenced by him.” “Whatever do you mean?”

“Only that it would be a shame if you were to copy him in . . . certain respects.”

I stopped.“Are you flirting with me, Miss Pinker?” “Certainly not,” she said, blushing.

“Because if you are, I shall have to complain to your father. Or possibly to Ada, who is even more terrifying.”

I would never
have believed such a delicate creature could put away so much food. I watched open-mouthed as she finished off an eel pie with liquor and mash, a dozen oysters, a slice of trout pie, and a plate of whelks with parsley butter, all washed down with half a pint of hock-and-seltzer.

“I told you I had an appetite,” she said, wiping parsley butter off her lips with a napkin.

“I am most impressed.”

“Are you going to finish those oysters? Or shall we order some more?”

“I had not realized,” I said as she reached for my plate, “that lunch with you was going to turn into a competition.”

Over the course
of that meal I learned rather more about her family. The girls’ mother having died many years before, Pinker was left with a prosperous business that he inherited from his father-in-law, and three daughters, of whom Emily was the eldest.

These girls he resolved to bring up in the most advanced way possible. The governesses and tutors all came from the various societies—the Society for the Advancement of Knowledge, the Royal Scientific Societies, and so on. The children had been encouraged to read books and attend public lectures.At the same time their father was busy stripping their home of its old-fashioned furnishings, installing electric lights, bathrooms and a telephone, replacing the furniture with the latest styles, and generally embracing all things modern.

“That is why he is amenable to the idea of us working,” she explained. “Having invested so much in our education, he wants to see us give something back.”

“That seems a somewhat . . . prosaic attitude to take to his own flesh and blood.”

“Oh, no—quite the opposite. Father believes in business— believes in its principles, I mean, its power to do good.”

“And you? Is that how you see it?”

She nodded.“As I said, working is a luxury for me, but it is also the expression of my moral beliefs. It is only by showing that women can be worth as much as men in the workplace that we will prove we are worthy of the same political and legal rights.”

“Good Lord.” Suddenly, working to pay off my wine merchant seemed rather ignoble.

Toward the end
of the meal I pulled out my cigarette case. “Mind if I smoke?” I said automatically.

“I do, rather,” Emily replied. “Oh?” I said, surprised.

“We will not be able to taste my father’s coffees accurately after breathing a fug of tobacco,” she explained.

“These make no fug.” I was a little offended. My cigarettes were

from Benson’s in Old Bond Street; slim ovals of fine Turkish tobacco that filled a room with a drowsy, perfumed mist. “Besides, smoking is one of the very few things I am good at.”

She sighed.“Very well, then. Let us have one each before we go back.”

“Excellent,” I said, although this was even more surprising—for a well-brought-up woman to smoke in front of a man was considered quite a racy thing in those days. I offered her the case, and struck a lucifer.

It is a sensual pleasure to light a woman’s cigarette: her eyes are on the kiss of flame against the tip, which means that yours are on the downward sweep of her lashes and the delicate shape of her upper lip, pursed around the paper tube. “Thank you,” she said, blowing a little trumpet of smoke from the side of her mouth. I nodded, and lit my own.

She took another drag, and looked thoughtfully at the cigarette in her hand.“If my father notices the smell on us,” she said suddenly, “you must say that it was only you, not me, who was smoking.”

“He doesn’t approve?”

Her eyes held mine as she took another pull. “He doesn’t know.” Small barks and puffs of smoke eddied around each word.

“A woman is entitled to her secrets.”

“I’ve always hated that expression—it makes it sound as if we’re entitled to nothing else.You’ll be saying we’re the weaker sex next.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Oh, Robert. You really are quite hopelessly old-fashioned, aren’t you?”

“On the contrary. I am every inch
à la mode.
”

“One can be fashionable and still be old-fashioned— underneath your fine clothes. I’m sorry, am I making you blush?”

I said quietly, “I didn’t think you cared for what is under my clothes.”

She gazed at me for a moment. It is a phenomenon I have noticed on many occasions, that smoking makes a woman bolder in her manner, almost as if one freedom begets another.“I was referring to your thoughts.”

“Oh, I try not to have any of those. I find they get in the way of my fine feelings.”

“What does that
mean,
exactly?” she asked with a frown.

“I have absolutely no idea. It is much too clever for me. I find that at least three-quarters of what I say goes completely over my own head.”

“Then you must be too clever by three-quarters.”

“Do you know, if I had said that it would have been quite amusing.”

“But a woman, of course, cannot be witty.” “Not when she is as beautiful as you are.”

She breathed smoke into the air. “You are flirting with me again, Robert.”

“No, I am flattering you, which is not the same thing at all. Women are an ornamental gender. It is the secret of their success.” She sighed.“I doubt if I will ever be as ornamental as you. And unlike an ornament, I do not intend to sit on a mantelpiece gathering dust. Now, shall we put these out and get back to work? Our palates will be no good to us, but perhaps we could make some

notes.”

It was a great shame, I reflected, that Emily Pinker was a respectable middle-class bourgeois and not a bohemian or a whore. There was something combative, even challenging, about her manner which I was finding quite irresistible.

What I learned,
in those first weeks at Pinker’s offices, was something that is quite obvious to me now: the absolute treachery of words.Take a word like
medicinal.
To one person, it might mean the sharp tang of iodine; to another, the sickly-sweet smell of

chloroform; to a third, the rich, spicy warmth of a balsam or cough mixture. Or
buttery.
Is that a positive attribute, or a negative? To which my answer is: when it describes the moist feel that freshly ground coffee beans should have between the fingers—like crumbled cake—it is a positive; when it describes the feel of a brewed coffee in the mouth—viscous, thick, the opposite of
watery—
it is also good; but when it describes a taste, as when a coffee is over-rich in oils, verging on
rancid,
it becomes undesirable. Our job was thus to define not only the tastes of our coffees, but also the words and phrases we used to describe them.

Or take these words:
scent, fragrance, bouquet, aroma, odor, nose.
Do they mean the same thing? If so, why? Lacking the words that described different kinds of smell—the smell of the beans, the aroma of the grind, the bouquet of the coffee in the cup—we appor-tioned existing words according to our needs. In this way we soon left ordinary language behind, and began to speak in a private dialect of our own.

I learned something else, too: that our perceptions become more substantial when we start to examine them. Pinker had spo-ken of my palate becoming trained, an obvious enough expression, except that I had at the time no inkling of what it really meant. Day by day I became more confident in my judgments, more precise in my terms. I seemed to enter a state of synaesthesia, that condition in which all the senses become interlinked, so that scents become colors, tastes become pictures, and all the stimuli of the physical world are felt as strongly as emotions.

Does that sound fanciful? Consider these tastes.
Smoke
is a fire crackling in a pile of dead leaves in autumn; a chill in the air, a crispness in the nostrils.
Vanilla
is warm and sensual, a spice island warmed by a tropical sun.
Resinous
has the thick pungency of pine cones or turpentine. All coffees, when considered carefully, have a faint smell of
roast onions:
some, without a shadow of a doubt, also have
soot, fresh linen,
or
mown grass.
Some will yield the fruity,

yeasty smell of freshly peeled
apples,
while others have the starchy, acidic taste of
raw potato.
Some will remind you of more than one flavor: we found one coffee that combined
celery
and
blackberries,
another that married
jasmine
and
gingerbread,
a third that matched
chocolate
with the elusive fragrance of fresh, crunchy
cucumbers....
And all the time Pinker was rushing in and out, checking on our progress, crying, “What have you found?” and “Shall we fix its Soul? Roses, is it? Let us Improve—what kind of roses?”

It became a kind of obsession. I was walking along the Strand one evening when I heard a shout: “Get them roasted!” and smelled the odor of hot nuts, their shells scorched by burning coals. I turned: an urchin was standing by a brazier, shoveling walnuts into a paper cone. It was exactly the aroma of a Java as the wa-ter first hits the beans. On another occasion I was in a bookshop in Cecil Court, examining a volume of verse, when I realized that the smell of beeswax on well-preserved leather bindings is almost identical to the aftertaste of aYemen mocca. Or the simple smell of buttered dark-brown toast would prompt a memory of an Indian Mysore, and then nothing would satisfy me but a cup of the same brew—I had taken samples back to my rooms by now, so that I could indulge my addiction the moment I woke up, and clear my head as well.

For my head, most mornings, was generally very thick. I spent my days with Emily and Ada; I spent my evenings, and my advance, with the girls of Wellington Street and Mayfair. There was one memorable occasion when a dollymop at Mrs. Cowper’s, in Albemarle Street, asked me what I did, and when I explained that I was engaged in the organoleptic analysis of tastes and aromas, nothing would do but that I smell her cunny and tell her what I discerned there (for the record: musk, peaches, Pears’ soap, cray-fish); when she proudly told the other girls, they all demanded I do the same for them, too. I explained the principles of side-by-side tasting, and got four or five of them onto a bed together. It was

an interesting experience, not least because they were all subtly different—the base note, as it were, of musk, present to a greater or lesser degree in all, was accompanied by a range of individual scents, from lime to vanilla. One girl had an elusive fragrance I could not identify, although I knew that I knew it; like a forgotten name, it nagged at me all evening. It was only the next day that it finally came to me: it was the aroma of blackthorn blossom, that fragrant, honeyed scent of country lanes in springtime.

That evening had two important consequences. First, I realized that just as the human body has some of the same aromas as coffee, so some coffees have a musky, feral odor that is almost erotic— certain African coffees, in particular, have something about them that is dark, earthy, even clay-like, evoking the stamp of naked feet on sun-baked ground. I did not mention this to Emily or Ada, of course, but in my own mind I used Linnaeus’s term to describe it:
hircinos,
goatishness. Second, I realized that if we were to make the Guide truly practical as a way of spanning distances, we would have to have a box of samples.

The issue was a simple one: the code only worked if two peo-ple meant exactly the same taste or smell when they used a certain word. For some tastes this was not a difficulty: tar, for example, or cloves. But blackthorn blossom, vanilla, even walnuts—these were smells which it was easy to summon up in the calm of Pinker’s offices; but we could assume that in the future at least one of the parties to each communication would be in the field, in Africa or Ceylon or Brazil, where blackthorn blossom might well be in short supply.The answer was to create a small, stout traveling box containing a dozen or so of the key scents, to which the taster could refer.

It was Ada who grasped the practical aspects of this. As a scientist, she understood the techniques by which an aroma could be distilled, and I think she was pleased to have found a role for herself. Just as a painter’s palette does not need to have every color on