In Pursuit of the English - Doris Lessing [58]
‘But now he knows.’
‘Eat what I’m given,’ he said, grinning.
‘Ah, my Lord, listen. Well, you can talk if you like, but I know you wouldn’t go back to the old ways. Just as I wouldn’t, once my granny had taught me. When she left to go back to Italy, hung in between two great black slicks with the gammy leg all crooked, like a witch she was, she said: Flo, she said, now you’re fit to get married, she said. And I was married all the time. She didn’t like my first husband and I don’t blame her.’
Meanwhile, pots were bubbling all over the stove, and the oven was crammed.
‘It’s not going to be enough,’ Flo said, anxiously, counting the dishes on her fingers.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Rose. ‘We’ll burst as it is.’
‘No, it won’t. I think I’ll just run up a little pie, and if there’s no room for it, it’ll hot up for supper.’
At about half past two, the men cleared the long table of newspapers and laid places. The two children were sat up side by side, with napkins around their necks. ‘Yes, that’s right.’ Flo would say. ‘Make Peter sit by Oar. Perhaps the way he eats’ll be an example to Oar. Oar, you see how Peter eats his food so nice? You do, too. Ah, my God, that I should be punished with a kid that won’t eat.’
It was true, Aurora did not eat. She sat through the long feasts, watching everyone else eat. When one of her parents pushed some food into her mouth, she let it stay there, until they shouted at her, when she might swallow it, but more often spat it out again.
We began with rich vegetable soup, flavoured with herbs. Flo never used a recipe book. Her soups were always invented out of whatever materials lay around. Then we ate great mounds of spaghetti, or ravioli, or giant macaroni sticks stuffed with meat and herbs. By then we were all groaning and saying we could not eat another mouthful.
‘There’s no hurry,’ Flo said, beaming with pleasure because of our enjoyment. ‘No hurry in the world. We’ll have a little rest now.’ We leaned our elbows on the table and smoked a while, while Flo cleared the table for the next course. That would always be a small piece of roasted meat, because as she said: ‘It’s a waste of good rations, but just once a week we must remember what Sunday dinner is.’ We all ate small herb-flavoured slices of meat; a kind of vestigial reminder of the traditional British Sunday meal.
Then came a great bowl of fresh salad.
‘Yes, you eat plenty of that, dear,’ Flo said. ‘There’s nothing like salad for emptying your stomach so there’s more room for what’s coming next.’
At the right moment, she whisked off the salad, and served delicate flaky pies, filled with creamed spinach, or leeks, or onions. These went with the weekly ration of tasteless corned beef, which she had cooked up with chips of potato and rich blackened onions. Or she would stuff cabbage and lettuce leaves with a paste made of rye bread and herbs and gravy and serve it with mounds of rice cooked so subtly flavoured one could have eaten it alone.
‘And now stop it. Flo.’ Rose said. We had all loosened our belts or undone our waist hooks, and sat helplessly, unable to move.
‘Ah, my Lord, but it’s Sunday – and, Dan, what’s that smell? You tell me.’
Dan would obediently sniff. ‘Rosemary? Thyme? Saffron? Garlic? Coriander?’
‘Ah, you make me laugh, that’s mint. Look I’ve got these new potatoes fresh from the market yesterday.’ And she would slide in before us a flat dish with tiny new potatoes, swimming in butter and mint. ‘Have some. Yes, you must. When’ll we see new potatoes like that again in our lives? What with this Government there might be no food at all, at any minute.’
Then, another lull. The smell of strong coffee began to overpower the other smells. The table was cleared for the coffee cups, and as Flo filled our cups and handed us cream, she put proudly before us her fruit tart that her grandmother had taught her. No English fruit tart this, but a flat base of rich buttery biscuit, piled high with raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants and sliced peaches.
‘Ma, I’m dead,’ Jack would announce, stuffing in fruit