Various Flavors of Coffee (8 page)

it, since the various shades may be mixed from combinations of primaries, she worked out that our sample box did not have to contain every scent: an essence of oranges, for example, was enough to remind one of the general qualities of all citrus fruit, and so on.A perfumer, Mr. Clee, was found and briefed. From then on Ada dealt with the technical issues of fixing scents in a way which would withstand the heat of the tropics.

One afternoon
I was striding up and down the office, talking volubly—I was, I think, attempting to elucidate the qualities of a particularly astringent Brazilian; despite the presence of the bucket, I still tended to ingest more coffee than I should, and consequently became quite excitable; in addition, I had just that morning purchased a splendid ivory-topped cane, and a splendid new cane is no use for twirling unless you are in motion—when I glanced down and saw a leg under the table.

I looked up. Emily was sitting at one end, taking notes;Ada was at the other, deep in a science book. I glanced down again.The leg must have realized that it was visible: it shifted surreptitiously, like a snail pulling in its horn.

“I smell . . .” I sniffed the air ostentatiously.“I smell an
intruder.
” Emily looked at me curiously.

“There is a whiff,” I explained, “of . . . of . . .” I sniffed again. “Of disobedient puppy dogs and wickedness.
Fe fi fo fum.
”

Emily clearly thought I had taken leave of my senses.

“It is the smell,” I announced,“of little children who are hiding where they should not.”With my cane I solemnly rapped the top of the table.“Who’s there?”

A small, frightened voice issued from beneath the wood.“Me.” “It’s only the Frog,” Emily said.

“Go away,” Ada said without looking up from her book. “Begone, troublesome amphibian.”

A small child hopped out from under the table. She squatted on the floor like a frog and croaked.

“Why aren’t you in the schoolroom, Frog?” Ada said sternly. “Mrs.Walsh is ill.”

“Mrs.Walsh is only ill because you make her so,” Emily scolded. “The governess,” she explained to me. “She suffers from neural-gia.”

“Anyway, I’d much rather be in here with all of you,” the child announced, springing up. She was about eleven years of age: her legs seemed much too long for her body, and her eyes had a slightly pouched quality that did indeed make her look very like a frog. “Can’t I stay? I shan’t be trouble, and I can help guard Emily from Robert’s poetic licenses as well as anyone.”

“He’s Mr. Wallis to you,” Ada said. She looked a little embarrassed. “And there is no question of guarding Emily from anything.”

The girl frowned. “But why must I always be left out? I’ll be good.”

“You’ll have to ask Father.”

“Then I can stay,” the girl said triumphantly. “Because Father said I could stay if I asked you.”

“. . . on condition you don’t say a word,” Emily added sternly. The girl squatted down and croaked.

“Or make that ridiculous croaking sound.” “I’m a frog.”

“In France,” I said mildly,“frogs are boiled and eaten with green sauce.”

She turned her big eyes on me.“I’m not really a frog,” she said excitedly. “I’m Philomena. When she was little Ada couldn’t say Philomena, so she called me Frog instead. But actually I quite like being a frog.” She hopped up onto a chair. “Don’t mind me.You had just got to where you were saying it was like lemons.”

Thereafter, there was often quite a crowd in our little cupping

room. Ada ignored me whenever possible, but the porter, South, and the child, Frog, both stared at me open-mouthed while I tasted, as if I were a creature from some exotic country—a gallery, I’m ashamed to say, to which I occasionally played, coming up with fanciful descriptions and wordplay that elicited from the Frog gasps of admiration, and from Emily the faintest of sighs.

“Do you mean
to ravish Emily?” the Frog demanded. Emily and I had just returned from one of our lunches; Emily had gone to hang up her coat, so I was alone with the child.

“I’m not sure that’s altogether a polite question.”

“Ada thinks you do. I heard her ask Emily if she’d been ravished by Lord Byron yet.That’s what Ada calls you, you know.” She was silent a moment.“If you do ravish Emily, you’ll have to marry her. That’s the rule.Then I can be a bridesmaid.”

“I think your father might have an opinion on that subject.” “Shall I ask
him
if I can be a bridesmaid?” Frog said hopefully. “I meant, an opinion on whom Emily marries. It’s rather up to

him, you see.”

“Oh, he’s very keen to marry her off,” she assured me.“I’m sure you’ll do.Are you rich?”

“Not in the least.” “You
look
rich.”

“That’s because I’m a spendthrift.” “What’s a spendthrift?”

“Someone who doesn’t earn as much as they ought to. And who keeps buying nice things even when they oughtn’t.”

“Like wedding rings?”

I laughed. “Not wedding rings. Wedding rings aren’t nice things.”

[
ten
]

have something to show you,” Pinker announced one

day, bounding into the office where Emily and I were working. “Put on your coats—it cannot wait.”

Outside, his carriage was waiting, and we set off at a smart trot through the crowded streets. I was sitting next to Emily, facing backwards. The carriage was a narrow one, and I could feel the warmth of her thigh where it lay against mine. As we went round corners we were gently swung together: she shifted to avoid being thrown into my arms, but there was little either of us could do.

“Have you heard about the latest autokinetics, Robert?” Pinker said. He gazed out of the window at a snarl of traffic.“I’ve ordered one from France. Four wheels, a small combustion engine, and as fast as a mail cart at a gallop.There will be none of these ridiculous hold-ups once they become the norm.”

“I will miss the horses, if that is so,” Emily said. “Where will they all go?”

“I am sure horses will always be in demand on farms,” her fa-ther said.“Ah! Here we are.”

We drew up not far from Tower Bridge, in Castle Street. On the corner was a public house—or rather, what had once been a pub. Workmen were putting the finishing touches to a smart new door; there were clear windows where once there would have been frosted glass, and above it all was a black-and-gold sign proclaiming that this was a Pinker’s Temperance Tavern.

We dismounted and inspected the property. Pinker senior was bursting with pride, and took us on a tour at breakneck speed. Inside, everything was painted black and gold.“It is not so much a color scheme, you see, as a livery. The colors will be replicated in every establishment, as they open.”

“Why, Father?”

“So that they all look the same, of course. And the staff—the waiters—will all have black uniforms, with a gold motif. And white aprons, as they wear in France. I took that idea from the Café Royal.” He nodded at me. “The tables—here is one—are topped in marble. Like Florian’s in Venice, I believe.”

I looked around me. The place was extraordinary; smart enough, in its way, but strange. Every inch of wood was painted black, and the only other color was the gold. It was more like the inside of a hearse-carriage than a tavern. At the rear, behind what had once been the bar, was the contraption Pinker had demonstrated at our first meeting in his office, chugging quietly to itself. Next to it Jenks, kneeling, was making some adjustments to the dials.

“Are we operational?” Pinker called.

“Almost, sir.” As Jenks spoke a gust of steam hissed out of a valve, making Emily jump.

“Well?” Pinker turned to us, rubbing his hands with excitement.“What do you think?”

“It’s wonderful, Father.” “Robert?”

“Remarkable,” I agreed. “Most impressive. There is just one thing . . .”

“Yes?”

“The name.” “What of it?”

“Do you think people—ordinary people—will want to go and drink coffee somewhere that is actually called a Temperance Tavern? One might as well advertise a foodless restaurant or a grape-free wine.”

Pinker frowned.“Then what would you call it?”

“Well, anything.You could call it . . .” I looked around. My eye fell on the sign that said “Castle Street,” and I recalled his predilec-tion for military analogies.“You could call it Castle Coffee.”

“Castle.” Pinker considered. “Hmm. Castle. Castle Coffees. Yes—it has a ring. It sounds dependable. Emily? What do you say?” “I think Robert has a point when he says that Temperance may

be off-putting to some customers,” she answered carefully. “So Castle would, perhaps, be better.”

Pinker nodded. “Castle it is, then. Thank you, Robert, your contribution has been most valuable. I’ll have the workmen change the sign immediately.”

So was born one of the most famous trademarks in the history of coffee—a name as well known in its time as Lion, Ariosa or Maxwell House. But something else was conceived that day as well, amid that bustle of industry; the workmen, the marble table-tops, the smell of new paint mingling with the rich coffee-scented steam that issued from the twin nozzles of Signor Toselli’s apparatus like smoke from a dragon’s nostrils. . . . As Pinker stalked outside to find the foreman, his daughter turned to me. “Yes, thank you, Robert. That was tactfully done. And Castle is undoubtedly the better name.”

I shrugged.“It’s hardly a big matter.”

She smiled at me—a smile that lingered a fraction longer than it might have done.Then, suddenly bashful, she dropped her gaze.

“Come along!” Pinker urged from outside.

In the carriage, as we returned to Limehouse, it seemed to me that the pressure of her thigh against mine was withdrawn just a little less than it had been before.

[
eleven
]

“Earthy”—this is the characteristic of freshly dug earth, of the soil after storms, and is not unlike that of beetroot.

—
lenoir,
Le Nez du Café

*

hat evening, as I walked down Piccadilly, I passed a
carriage horse trying to copulate with a mare. Most carriage animals were geldings, of course, but this was obviously some rich person’s mount, docile enough in the ordinary way to be shackled to a brougham.The mare had been tied up outside Simpson’s department store, and the driver of the carriage was nowhere to be

seen.

It made a strange sight: the stallion, still harnessed to the shafts of the carriage, was attempting to clamber on to the mare’s back, prodding his great pizzle into her hindquarters. Each time he slipped off, pulled backwards by the unwieldy weight of the brougham; yet, nothing daunted, he immediately returned for another attempt, pulling himself clumsily up again with his front hoofs, like a Chinaman trying to clasp a piece of meat with chop—

sticks.The mare, for her part, stood for it patiently, barely moving even when the stallion took the skin of her neck between his teeth.The back end of the carriage had tipped up, and was being crashed around on the road with every staggering thrust of the stallion’s rear legs.

A small crowd had gathered. The more respectable ladies hurried on by, but amongst the onlookers were several young women who were rather more daring, and I alternated between watching the congress of the beasts and the wide-eyed, giggling fascination of the girls.

Eventually the driver of the brougham returned and began shouting at his beast, trying to force it off. Of course the stallion had no intention at all of stopping, even when its master began laying into it with a whip—at considerable risk to himself, I might add: the stallion’s front hoofs were flailing wildly as he struggled for purchase on the mare’s back, and his hind legs were doing a kind of dance as he tried to kick free from the crinoline of the carriage. It almost looked as if the man were whipping the animal on. Eventually the stallion was done, and slid off the mare of his own volition, the battered brougham returning to the level with a crash.The horse’s pizzle was still dripping onto the cobbles when the owner finally succeeded in trotting him away, to an ironic cheer from the watchers.

A couple of doxies, meanwhile, had hit on the idea of going round the crowd touting for business. One brushed by me, with a muttered “Are we feeling gay, sir?”—“gay” being London slang in those days for a prostitute. She glanced back at me: a pretty enough girl, more common than I usually liked, no more than sixteen or so. I shook my head. She said,“My sister’s here.” I must have looked interested then, because she beckoned to another girl to join her. Sure enough, they did resemble each other, brown-eyed and brown-haired, both with cheeky round faces. It was a novelty; I had never had sisters before, and my blood was up from

watching the stallion.“Quick,” she said, sensing she’d made a sale. “In here.”

There was a note in the tobacconist’s window behind us,
Rooms for rent.
I followed them into the shop and up some stairs: when I had given them half a crown each and another for the shopkeeper, I unbuttoned and had them both, one after the other in quick succession, without even pausing to take my trousers off.

Ah, that’s the thrill!

First drink the stars, then grunt amid the mire,

as Richard Le Gallienne puts it.

I suppose
I should explain something about myself here. I have not, in this account, made any attempt to paint myself in an attractive light—rather the opposite.When I think back to what an affected, vainglorious young
poseur
I must have been in those days, I am quite astounded that any girl could have fallen in love with me: if I make myself sound ludicrous, it is because I think I probably was. On that, I am happy to be judged. But I am aware that you will be judging me now on a quite different account, for my morals.

I would only remind you that things were different then.Yes, I went with prostitutes—good ones, when I could afford it: ugly ones when I could not. I was a healthy young man, and what was the alternative? Abstinence was believed to be injurious to the health, while self-abuse was thought even more dangerous, causing weakness, lassitude and foul temper. Prostitution was not illegal, although the Contagious Diseases Acts, which allowed the police to apprehend any woman and have her examined for signs of vene-real disease, had caused a great outcry amongst respectable ladies, who felt slighted by association. Nor was sleeping with a prostitute grounds for divorce (although a woman’s adultery, conversely, would be grounds for the husband to instantly divorce
her
).