Grace's Table (2 page)

2

‘Where's the flour?' Susan asked, rummaging through the shelves of Grace's pantry cupboard.

‘Second shelf down. The container on the left.' Grace looked over her shoulder. ‘Not that one. The one with the blue lid. The red's self-raising flour.'

‘You've always had this colour system for anything in a packet – which is most of it!'

Susan came over to where Grace was preparing the lamb, looked over her shoulder.

‘Should be big enough,' she said. ‘Are you going to do anything special with it?'

‘Yes. I thought I'd flavour it with some herbs.'

In small doses her daughter was good company, but for longer stretches Grace felt she was like a bird of prey, a secretary bird perhaps, all long legs and imperious plumage.

Susan watched Grace cook in a way that unnerved her. It wasn't just the presentation of Grace's food she eyed – beans cut on the diagonal when Susan preferred them left whole – but there were her low-fat long-life quips too. A raised eyebrow from her daughter had the power to make Grace shake fewer grains of sugar into the cream she might be whipping. Perched on a kitchen stool observing, Susan reminded Grace of how Matron had watched her do some nursing task years before. Sometimes her hands had trembled from the close scrutiny and she'd struggle to guide a needle into an ampoule to draw up a drug or to grip the tail of a suture. But where Matron's scrutiny had been to prevent mistakes, Susan's was to let Grace know that she was being observed.

‘Isn't he meant to have one of the little pink pills in the morning as well?' Susan had asked, only fifteen or sixteen years old at the time.

By then Grace had taken to administering Des's medications for him – and there were many. She'd put them into an old ceramic pin dish and leave them and a glass of water on the table beside his cutlery, ready for him to have with his meals. He'd often lift the small bowl to his mouth and take them, unchecked, all in one.

Des poked through the coloured tablets with his index finger, looked from Susan to Grace.

Grace stopped filling the milk jug and studied her daughter's face. Those miss-nothing eyes looked back at her.

‘The pink one can be varied,' she said finally, and returned her attention to filling the jug.

‘You reckon she's tryin' to diddle me, Susie?'

‘Just checking,' Susan said, ‘in case she'd forgotten it.'

‘I think I should know what I'm doing,' Grace said, putting the milk jug on the table.

Susan took it up, started pouring milk over her cereal. ‘I suppose you should.'

But what did Susan, or any observer, see really, when they studied the actions of another? Grace wondered. Did she think she was witnessing the truth of her mother's life when she watched her, or was it her own version of it?

Grace inspected the leg of lamb she'd bought two days earlier. It was paler than the ones Mother had prepared. And though she hoped this one would be tender, she doubted the flavour would stack up as well. Mother had a deft hand for making the ordinary sublime.

It was through food that Mother's love was given voice, and just as well because in other ways it was mute. Grace marvelled at how something warm or sweet could speak like this. How a mouth stuffed with soft, freshly-baked scone, sweet jam and cream could take hurt into the stomach and lose it there. It proved to her that food, so taken for granted by some, was a powerful thing.

But Grace had learnt a trick or two over the years to bring out the best flavours. Susan might raise an eyebrow at the salt she used to achieve it, although it was a lot less now Des wasn't around.

Grace cut slits in the roasting joint until the knife's tip hit against bone; miniature pockets she planned to fill with garlic and fresh rosemary. Mother wouldn't have made such a fuss. She'd have grabbed it by the knuckle without ceremony, dropped it in her old blackened baking dish and slid it into the oven of the wood stove on the way out the door to church. It was the pinch of nutmeg and pat of butter she added to the julienned carrots later, the tiny thyme leaves she scattered across the roasted potatoes before serving, that showed Grace her mother cared.

Nowadays, Grace catered for a crowd who liked modern twists. She sealed each rosemary-filled slit in the lamb with a clove of garlic. Grace thought whether anybody would notice the pockets had been filled once the meat was cooked. Would her guests believe what they tasted when they ate the meat or would they need their eyes to see something of the garlic and rosemary, for them to trust their tongues? She doubted it. Such was the truth of cooking.

She poked the last of the garlic into the slits, grabbed it by the knuckle, just as Mother would have, and placed it in the baking dish. With her back to Susan, Grace sprinkled the leg generously with salt and rubbed it into the meat with her hands.

Grace studied her hands as they moved across the meat. They looked much like any others the same age – veined, lined, the backs stained with tea-coloured spots. But they'd felt their way through the past seventy years in unique ways. Much of their work had been to the benefit of others, some not. She'd known them as still, listening hands, but also as hands that moved with urgency and madness. For a while they'd been careful nurse's hands. Then hands that cradled three babies and clapped, tickled and taught in turn. She'd bruised, burnt and cut them; some scars suggested badly. They'd dismissed, beckoned, pleaded over the years, and not always successfully. Their goodbyes were too many to recall.

She held out her arms and studied the flat platter of her palms, red now from salt and friction. She turned them over, looked at the backs again. Her fingers were long and slender as her legs still were; the nails neater at seventy than they had been in her fifties – back when she'd had to scrub beds and bodies in the nursing home. She was fond of them, she decided, attached, beyond the obvious. She'd rather lose an eye or a foot than either of these two old friends. She'd miss the feel of one against the other as they rested in her lap, cupped comfortably like a successful marriage. Not that Grace could give anybody tips on that.

Her relationships, even now, were as problematic as they were when she was younger. She hadn't thought it unreasonable to expect she'd have them down pat by now. And she probably would have if it wasn't for her children. Unfortunately, they were determined to stand like a nagging conscience between her and Jack, forcing them to conduct their romance like sly adolescents.

‘They'll all be coming?' Jack had asked her last week of the day's celebration.

‘Yes. Along with Ada and Kath.'

He nodded, face impassive, typically hiding what he really felt.

‘One day,' Grace said, and rested her hand on his arm.

He'd laughed then, a rich, generous sound despite his exclusion. ‘Let's hope it happens sooner than later. It'd be nice if one of us could put in an appearance at the funeral of whoever goes first.'

‘I'd show up anyway if I were you,' Grace said. ‘You've earnt a seat on a pew.'

She put her hands back to work on the lamb, cold after the warm thought of resting them on Jack's arm.

The lamb was slow-cooking in the oven, the timer set for two hours.

‘I'll make a start on the mint sauce,' Grace said and moved to the sink, half-filled it with water.

Earlier, she'd picked a large bunch of mint from the old cement tub by the tap at the back of the house. She dropped the mint into the water now and swept it about, separating the sprigs. A money spider made its way to the surface from the submerged greenery and tried to scramble up the sink. Grace gave it a helping hand and it scuttled off across the bench. Behind her, she could hear Susan moving a pebble of fresh nutmeg across the grater.

‘I've never put nutmeg in a béchamel sauce.' Grace worked the mint leaves up and down in the water, picking off webs and browned leaves as she spotted them.

‘I've never made mint sauce,' Susan said.

Grace had never bought it. Just as Mother had never bought tinned peaches.

Peaches had been one of Mother's favourite bottling fruits. The seasons at Harvest could be measured each year by the number of Fowlers Vacola preserving bottles that filled Mother's pantry shelves. If they were lined up three and four deep, then it had been a good year. The years there were few were the years Grace recalled wearing shoes too tight and jumpers too thin.

She'd looked upon those tall glass jars with their metal lids clamped down tightly on red rubber seals, and marvelled at the colourful patterns her mother had the patience to create. Deep maroon plum orbs pressed against the glass like eager faces and golden peaches, layered in symmetrical convex halves, forming hilly landscapes all the way to the top. There were sauces, chutneys and pickles too, made during times of plenty, plus pears, quinces, cumquats and stubby pieces of fibrous rhubarb. The change of seasons could be mapped in that pantry from summer blackberry jam through to winter pickled onions.

There had been a peach tree in Grace's city backyard once, but it was a tree she came to despise. The people who sold them the house had praised the tree's fruitfulness. Grace was thrilled. Back then she still believed a well-stocked pantry said much about a woman. Each August the tree teased her with its weighty display of pink flowers. But by late October, when all the blossoms were gone and the fruit should have been plump with promise, they were still hard and ill-formed little nuts of bitterness. No amount of fertiliser or mulch helped; the tree continued to mock her optimism.

One year, in a state of frustration, or madness perhaps, she harvested the pathetic crop anyway, determined they'd be eaten. She spent some time rubbing the fuzz from each, tossed out the ones with grubs and blemishes, and kidded herself that what was left looked better than usual. She pricked each fruit to its stone with a skewer then stewed them whole in sugar and water.

The failure of the exercise was revealed early when they refused even to give up their skins. And the one she cut to try was tasteless. Feeling she'd be doubly damned by the tree if she wasted the two pounds of sugar in the syrup as well, she went to the greengrocer and bought peaches. She stewed those sunny fruits in the syrup but the pleasure in eating them was spoilt by the ones she'd thrown out. When the tree toppled over one windy January night, she was glad.

Grace reflected later that the real reason she'd hated that peach tree in her backyard was because in producing inedible fruit year in, year out, it had reneged on its purpose. But then Grace had not always done what was expected of her either, so who was she to question?

Grace pulled the plug from the sink, scooped up the mint and shook the excess water from it. She set the mint on the draining board and wondered, as she started to pinch the leaves from the branches between thumb and index finger, if Susan's years of watching her had taught her much that was useful.

Grace had learnt a good deal at her mother's elbow, especially about the art of cooking. Even as a small child she'd watched enthralled by the mystery and cleverness of it, as her mother scooped and poured and shook ingredients into pots and bowls and moulds. A slab of butter could be rubbed into a generous shake of flour and the two mixed into pliable dough by a good splash of milk and beaten egg before it was cut into scones. Some days they'd have mixed peel or sultanas added, on others, grated cheese and parsley.

As a child Grace believed the act of making something sweet or savoury, spicy or sour, was down to nothing more than whimsy. Later, she came to realise that her mother had put much thought and effort into concocting variety, as much to prevent her own boredom, Grace suspected, as theirs. Unintentionally, Grace was being taught to live inventively.

There was rarely a cookbook open on Mother's kitchen table, only an assortment of bags and packets and tins. When there was a recipe, it was in a tattered and torn exercise book she had filled with handwritten slips of paper gathered from friends and neighbours. There was little in the way of explanation on those pages, just a list of the main ingredients, their quantity described in words like
generous
or
dash
or
sprinkle
. Flours weren't identified, techniques not explained; it was assumed the cook would know when to fold or cream or beat. The heading to the dish might read
Mavis's Chocolate Dessert
or
Freda's Pork Dish
. The ingredients to these recipes could metamorphose into something new like a Chinese whisper. But a little of the original person was always left behind in the recipe's name despite Mother's small, neat notations altering many of the pages,
try cinnamon
,
better with four eggs
or
cook longer
.

Grace's experimentation started with those butter-stained pages. As a girl, she set up her own mixing bowl and wooden spoon beside her mother's on baking days and she scrutinised the recipes encoded in that exercise book. She soon realised there was no code to break: ‘Is this enough sugar?' she would ask.

Her mother would look across, thoughtful. ‘A little more.'

Simply those extra granules, Grace learnt, made a pavlova's peaks more pert and creamed butter whiter.

Mother shook flour or cocoa or arrowroot into a sifter and Grace cranked the handle until a soft peak formed in a bowl. The height of those peaks started to make sense once knocked down to form a well, filled with beaten eggs and mixed to a smooth batter.

‘How much salt?' she asked.

‘A pinch.' These measurements were a secret language just for girls. ‘Here, I'll show you.' Mother dipped her thumb and index finger into the salt pig and brought out a triangle of white grains.

A pinch seemed a funny measure. Grace held up her own fingers, caught the thumb and index finger together and looked at them. They made her think of shadow puppets and birds' beaks. She dipped that beak into the salt pig as her mother had done, and pinched. ‘My pinch looks smaller than your pinch,' she said, looking at her own collection of salt grains, paltry compared to her mother's.