We drank Sancerre to begin with, a year old. The smell of it was so fresh and rich that one feared to taste it and lose touch with a vineyard — the wooden fruit-filled aroma, of chalk soil and rain on some small hill, that blew out of the glass, moist and chill, a cloudy genie released from the lamp that I cradled in my hand. And at last we seemed to be able to talk of other things besides George Graham. She must have noticed my unusual application to the food, sensed something of my four-year denials, for I could barely restrain myself over the menu, nor the attack I made on the meal when it came.
She said, watching me, ‘Food is going back isn’t it? I mean — the basic reassurance — of one’s right to greed and sympathy, like a baby. It’s just a chore for most of us — most of the time, something to fill the day with. But you eat the other way, as if your whole life depended on the meal. As if it was your last.’
‘You mean “Do this in memory of me”? Christ, I’m just eating.’ I looked at her, pausing over the blue-point oysters.
‘Yes, but not the gourmet or the gourmand, that’s not you. You eat as if you were — as if the whole food thing was something you’d lost.’
‘Symbolic of good fellowship and warmth? That’s a pretty common reason for going to restaurants.’
‘Have you lost that?’
‘Maybe. Like Rip Van Winkle.’
I let the oyster lie in my mouth for a moment, then bit it gently before it slipped away. ‘Food is a homecoming, if that’s what you meant — when you said eating was “going back”. A house that’s always there, even when everything else has disappeared. A constant. It doesn’t disappoint.’
I sipped the sea-water and lemon juice from the last oyster and the waiter took our plates away. We had ordered the plat du jour: gigot d’agneau de Beaumanière. I didn’t know quite what it meant. But apparently it was the main smell in the room — the leg of lamb cooked in pastry somehow, with veal and herbs the waiter had tried to explain — and the smell was good. The Sancerre in its ice bucket was sharp and cold as ever but now its taste of orchards was mixed with that of the sea, and the astringent lemon, and when you drank it, it was neither the sea nor the wine that was in your mouth but some new flavour, echoing down the throat, indeterminate and frail.
The waiter carved the gigot we’d ordered from a small table beside us. The Beaumanière consisted of a parcel of brown, egg-basted pastry which enclosed the leg of lamb, which in turn — the bone removed — enclosed a black stuffing of mushrooms, pork, and veal. Each time he sliced it, the knife fell through the strange football without any resistance. It was as firm yet as pliant as ice cream. Afterwards, he carefully spooned up the debris of herbs and stuffing and laid it over the slices of meat. Nice, but a fiddly way to cook a leg of lamb, I thought.
‘You wrote about that to George Graham, didn’t you?’ I asked. ‘I’m sorry to drag it up again — but it seemed to absorb you.’
‘What?’
‘This “going back” thing. About not wanting to re-live the past, that it had nothing to do with nostalgia — but to “live now all that was unlived then”. I think you said “What was so un-lived then? You’ve lived pretty fully surely?” Yet you seem to see yourself as somehow unawakened — the sleeping beauty, Rip Van Winkle.’
‘It’s too long, that story.’
‘Of course it is. You’re all of thirty-five.’
‘Well, if it’s not nostalgic — it’s unrealistic, isn’t it?’
‘Why? Being unhappy with a man? That’s not unrealistic. That’s exactly what people mean when they want to change, to divorce: the chance to live what was unlived, to move away from an unlivable life. You wrote about that to Graham too.’
‘It’s not all that, not all to do with people — with being, living better, with one person rather than another. It was as much to do with a generally unlivable life. And that was unrealistic. That can’t be changed so easily. There’s no divorce from it — other than through madness perhaps.’
‘Not divorce — but you can change it, can’t you? Change the “generally unlivable”. That’s not unrealistic!’ And then I suddenly thought: ‘You’re political, aren’t you? I wouldn’t have thought it.’
She ground some pepper on her gigot, strong though its flavours were already. ‘No, it’s not that — nothing to do with Women’s Lib.’
‘I didn’t mean that, I meant — simply politics. How should we all be living, how to make that change.’
She looked at me sharply, as though I was a child and had found something I didn’t know was dangerous and was holding it towards her.
I thought of Graham’s Marxism, and the image she had given him once of the old-fashioned colonial Tory — their arguments about the future of happiness and the future of Africa. Yes, it seemed as if it might be a long story — but not too long, not for me.
She said: ‘It’s not only the poor that want to change the world, you know — or the intellectuals.’
I looked at her dress, her make-up, her general bearing — all the rich and careful choices about her person. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘It’s just a surprise — finding the rich wanting revolution.’
As soon as I’d said this I didn’t know quite what I meant. I couldn’t follow the implications of it. She noticed this momentary confusion and stepped in before I could clarify the thought.
‘That’s not it at all. I don’t want revolution. My God — I wanted that old bore of a thing — to be at ease, happy. That’s all. And I’ve spent time thinking of all the ways there are toward those ends. Some of the ways are political. Obviously, you don’t just sit still crying “poor little me”. You do something about it. You make the effort, you give, if you want any return. Well, almost all that sort of outward effort is political in some degree, though it may not appear so. Your happiness — or at least mine — depends a lot on society’s.’
‘The personal and the political, they must come together for you in some way? Like some people, they say, can only make love in moving vehicles. It’s very difficult.’
She laughed a little. ‘Why do you suddenly see me as a political animal, rather than as just — an animal? That’s the way I’d like to come together. If you want to know.’
‘That passage in your letter to Graham about Africa — what else could one think? It’s not an expected topic between lovers surely? — the relative demerits of the old colonialism and the new imperialism in the dark continent. I was surprised by it in the letter, and even more so now, seeing you: rich Manhattan girl, apartment on the East Fifties, married to a diplomat. Well, now that’s not the expected background for a person who suggests that every act has a political relevance, who feels that individual happiness must depend on the general well-being of society. That’s not usual at all. I thought people like you rang the bell for a drink when they felt out of sorts.’
The smile came again — the naïve one, in which knowledge and experience have been dismantled and hidden.
‘That’s pretty old-fashioned of you. Where have you been locked up all these years — the Tower of London? You seem to have the old chivalrous idea of women — helpless creatures you have to lay down cloaks for. Does money mean you can’t have a mind — does sex — I mean the gender — debar me from political interest, or action for that matter? Come on. I’ll really start to believe in Women’s Lib if you go on like that. The world has changed since you put your head in the sand, wherever that was; I’m not trying to change it, I’m just part of the change.’ She looked at me closely, shades of the detective creeping over her face again. ‘You’ve been away somewhere a long while, that’s the feeling you give me. The way you eat — as if you’d not eaten properly in years. And talking to me — and the way you look at me, as if you’d just emerged from a bout of some strange sleeping sickness and the last woman you’d seen was in corsets and curlers.’