The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [28]
In the small cabin of the houseboat, books in the blankets, Jean read to Avery about capon magro, “the celebrated Genoese fish salad made of about twenty different ingredients and built up into a splendid baroque edifice.” She unfolded her legs along his while assuring him that “wooden herb bowls with choppers are to be found at Madame Cadec's, 27 Greek St, W1,” as if they might just stroll down to the shop the following morning before lunch, as if the closest market were not seven hundred kilometres away through cataracts and desert. Avery drifted with strange possibilities of fulfillment whispered in his ear: “If by chance you happen to come upon a watermelon and some blackberries in the same season, try this dish …” He listened to descriptions of peppers sleek with oil. In his childhood, the only olive oil Avery knew was sold in chemists' shops in tiny brown bottles as an ablution (which his mother had used to clear his ears), and rationing meant that meat and fish and butter in the quantities Elizabeth David wrote of were absurdities (roast of whole hog browned on a spit). But in that absurdity was an ideal, and in the ideal a possibility, and yes, that every meal was planned for four servings contained hope – even if that hope was leftovers.
And, of course, Elizabeth David had married in Egypt.
Only after many months, with the delayed response we often have to facts too obvious to see, did Jean realize that their dear companion of the kitchen shared her mother's name, and that when she listened to Avery read in the desert about phosphorescent plankton clinging to the backs of dolphins, turning them into “clouds” and “luminescent ghosts,” swimming beside the raft in such tight formation the sea was white and solid in the darkness, and of black rays the size of a room, she was also listening to her father's miracles, his voice quiet beside her on the Moccasin, riding home from Aultsville.
They were to meet again in Morrisburg; they had known each other four months. Jean had taken the train and was to wait for Avery at the lunch counter near the small station. Avery watched her walking there, in her loose sweater flowing almost to her knees and with her auburn braid swinging back and forth across her back. He drove slowly alongside her and rolled down his window.
– I have to go to Montreal for a job interview, said Avery. Jump in.
Jean looked at him.
– I know you don't have anything with you, but I can buy you things … you can wear my clothes …
The wind was high across the river, through the trees a continuous splashing of shadow and early autumn sun. Jean's bare skin was cold under her cotton skirt.
They drove for about an hour and then stopped by the side of the road. Avery took out a folding camp table from the car and placed it in a field. The tabletop seemed to float in the high grass. Jean set out the hard sour spy apples and the blackberries, the bread and the cheese, two tin plates and a knife.
Jean looked out at the swaying field and the hurtling clouds; she held back strands of her hair with one hand. Amid the wind, the perfect fruit lay still and solid on the table.
Later they drove into the suspended light of dusk, the sun falling in the miles behind them. She could not stop thinking of the stillness of the apples, the movement around them.
A still life belongs to time … And this day's stillness, she thought, this single day: it belongs to us.
They continued to drive north in the cool beginning of night.
– During the war, said Avery, while my father was away, I stayed in Buckinghamshire with my mother and my Aunt Bett and my three cousins.
Every Tuesday in London there were lunchtime concerts in the vacant National Gallery; hundreds came each week without fail to stand in the picture-empty rooms