Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [8]
Here my mind cut out, and I ran up the hill and walked softly past my sleeping mother and into the cabin, and got out the jar full of raisins, and made my way to the large poplar tree where I always went when I’d come to the edge of an unthinkable thought. I propped myself against the tree, crammed a handful of raisins into my mouth, and plunged into my favourite book.
This book was a cookbook. It was called The Art of Cooking and Serving, and I’d recently thrown over all novels and even The Guide to Woodland Mushrooms and devoted myself to it entirely. It was by a woman called Sarah Field Splint, a name I trusted. Sarah was old-fashioned and dependable, Field was pastoral and flowery, and Splint – well, there could be no nonsense and weeping and hysteria and doubts about the right course of action with a woman called Splint by your side. This book dated from the olden days, ten years before I was born; it had been put out by the Crisco company, a manufacturer of vegetable shortening, at the beginning of the Depression, when butter had become expensive – said my mother – so all the recipes in it had Crisco in them. We always had lots of Crisco on the island, because butter went bad in the heat. Crisco on the other hand was virtually indestructible. In the long ago, before she’d started expecting, my mother had used it to make pies, and her writing could be found here and there among the recipes: Good!! she’d written. Or, Use half white, half brown.
It wasn’t the recipes that held me in thrall, however. It was the two chapters at the front of the book. The first was called “The Servantless House,” the second “The House with a Servant.” Both of them were windows into another world, and I peered through them eagerly. I knew they were windows, not doors: I couldn’t get in. But what entrancing lives were being lived in there!
Sarah Field Splint had strict ideas on the proper conduct of life. She had rules, she imposed order. Hot foods must be served hot, cold foods cold. “It just has to be done, however it is accomplished,” she said. That was the kind of advice I needed to hear. She was firm on the subject of clean linen and shining silver. “Better never to use anything but doilies, and keep them immaculately fresh, than to cover the table for even one meal with a cloth having a single spot on it,” she ordered. We had oilcloth on our table, and stainless steel. As for doilies, they were something beyond my experience, but I thought it would be elegant to have some.
Despite her insistence on the basics, Sarah Field Splint had other, more flexible values. Mealtimes must be enjoyed; they must have charm. Every table must have a centrepiece: a few flowers, an arrangement of fruits. Failing that, “some tiny ferns combined with a bit of partridge vine or other coloured woodsy thing in a low bowl or delicate wicker basket” would do the trick.
How I longed for a breakfast tray with a couple of daffodils in a bud vase, as pictured, or a tea table at which to entertain “a few choice friends” – who would these friends be? – or, best of all, breakfast served on a side porch, with a lovely view of “the winding river and the white church spire sailing out of the trees on the opposite bank.” Sailing – I liked that. It sounded so peaceful.
All of these things were available to the house with no servant. Then came the servant chapter. Here too Mrs. Splint was fastidious, and solidly informative. (You could tell she was Mrs. Splint; she was married, though without sloppy consequences, unlike my mother.) “One can transform an untidy, inexperienced girl into a well-groomed, professional servant if one is patient and kind and fair,” she told me. Transform was the word I seized on. Did I want to transform, or to be transformed? Was I to be the kind homemaker, or the formerly untidy maid? I hardly knew.
There were two photographs of the maid, one in daytime dress, with white shoes and stockings and a white muslin apron – what was muslin? – and the other in an afternoon tea and dinner outfit,