Loose Living (7 page)

I finished my recollection and we sat in a still, pensive silence, or what I took to be silence on the Duc's part but which could have been a coma.

The servants, who often gather around when I am talking, sighed at the poignancy of the story—the meeting of my youthfulness with camembert, with sophistication and with death.

The Duc did become nobly animated and clapped, or what I took to be clapping—his hands did not quite meet—and he ordered the musicians to play the drums slowly and to play the fifes lowly.

We all sat there on that chill Normandy morning, each in his or her own thoughts as the elegiac music carried across the winter fields to where the peasants were already at work hoeing.

I could tell that my story had set the day right and I was again, for a time, in the Duc's favour.

B
ACK HERE
in Australia I reported to the Ministry of Australianness to answer the charge of Having Been Away Too Long.

As one of the investigating officers said to me, ‘People visiting you in France reported that you were showing signs of refinement.'

I intend to call witnesses and fight these allegations.

I was sent on a De-Overseasing Course in the Flinders Ranges.

I had to relearn how to eat meat pies without spilling sauce or meat on the toes of my shoes.

It is a matter of remembering that the rigidity of the pie depends on the ring of reinforced crust and that you must keep this in place as long as possible by eating into the pie towards the centre. You should also bring into play a liquid reduction technique by slurping the liquid out of the pie at every bite.

As most of us discovered in our Australian childhood, the whitish, almost soggy, soft-cooked pastry of the pie tray is the best part.

It is not only the best part but it is the point of weakness in the pie structure where all hell can break loose if you don't watch it.

I believe that it is possible to eat a pie not only without spilling gravy onto the toes of your shoes, but also to avoid any flake of pastry landing on clothing or on the floor. Some people leave a dandruff field of crust around them.

To use the aluminium foil dish as a safety net, or as a catching tray, is prissy.

I hold that leaning forward while eating a pie is inelegant and shows lack of confidence. I also have a belief from childhood that you should be able to eat a pie regardless of how hot it is.

The trick is in the cooling of the first contact with the hot gravy. This is done firstly by blowing, loudly and obviously, and then by bringing a flow of saliva to the front of the mouth as a barrier to the hot gravy and as a way of diluting the incoming heat, again with as much saliva noise as possible.

The Adelaide pie with peas is another problem and another dish requiring another essay.

I had to do all the other Australian tests such as throwing a knife and making it stick blade first into a tree, singing the Aeroplane Jelly song, telling farting jokes with sound effects, stealing drinks from the minibar of hotels, and ducking out on the tip in restaurants.

I was jeered at when I inadvertently dressed for dinner, appearing without jeans or the T-shirt inscribed with the message ‘I don't give a stuff'.

I was mocked when I ate the head meat of the crab. I spent the night in the guard house for that.

The next morning at the confession session I had to admit to the Unrepentant Marxist Inquisitors that the French have placed too high an ideological expectation on cheese as a means of social transformation.

I received much abuse when I admitted having eaten cheese made from human breast milk at a rather strange little dinner party which the Duc organised in Beaulieu with his personal entourage, but that is
very much
another story. For this, I nearly spent another night in the guard house.

On the fourth night I said bugger this for a game of soldiers and went over the fence and got on to a plane to France.

On my return to France, pale and shaken, the Duc met me with the four-in-hand and a nurse.

With great consideration, I was helped into the four-in-hand and a finely woven cashmere travelling rug was spread over my knees. A silver travelling cup of Cognac was handed to me and some
coulibiac
of salmon.

I thought the Duc looked much recovered from his stroke, although during the journey back to the
château
one of his muscular spasms hurled him on to the lead horse and he slipped down under its hooves.

No harm done. A good trample does us the power of good from time to time. Especially when done by high heels, although in my experience horses' hooves will do. Please check with your doctor before undertaking these forms of exercise.

So here I am back in France at the Duc's
deuxième château
in my high-winged Colloquy Chair with
its gout rest, watching the autumn leaves falling to reveal the centuries-old skeleton of the tree branches, what Marlowe rather banally called ‘the wondrous architecture of the world…', waiting for the snow, listening to the bop of shotguns as the villagers go after partridge, pheasant, hares and so on which the Duc's staff will prepare for dinner.

As I looked out at the landscape from this mountain
château
I told the Duc that I did not join in the general acclamation of the panorama as seen from a high vantage point, commonly encouraged by ‘look-outs' or viewing platforms.

I argued that the high-vantage panorama which most people enjoy is lordly—a distanced and organised relationship. The Duc seemed puzzled by this as best he could and struggled to imagine how the world looked to those who were not ‘lordly'. (This problem reminded me of when I first began to play chess with the Duc. He pointed out that for me it was a game but that he, himself, was a chess piece. It obviously gave the game a different emphasis for him.)

I said that I thought most people needed to be able to see defined zones in nature—zones of horizon, a defined ‘fore' ground and ‘middle' ground and a sky ‘line'.

Often other reassuring natural boundaries or lines are present. This gives the viewer control because the lines of nature thus perceived carry the suggestion of mapping—the navigational capture of nature.

I, myself, receive much stronger sensations from
immersion in the forest, that is, by plunging in and being enveloped.

It is a confrontation with Gothic nature and a surrendering to its prickly, existential embrace.

You need to have a strong personality to expose yourself to such sensory impact and I count myself as being one of the fortunate few in this respect, and whenever I have described my approach to nature to Europeans, I notice that I rise in the listeners' estimation.

However, the Duc simply dribbled what I took to be a reply.

I told him that I am curious about the fashionable predilection for nature wall charts which are, again, at the other end of the spectrum from the panorama but show the same human need for organisation in nature.

These nature charts or tabulations of fauna and flora in their various categories—shellfish, bird life, mushrooms and so on—are now produced throughout the world, especially by National Park authorities.

An old man in the nearby village
estaminet
tells me that these charts have a long history (there is always someone around in this country to tell you that whatever it is ‘has a long history').

He remembers them at least as far back as the fourth century. They were used to identify plants, especially for pharmaceutical purposes (the charts were called Herbals) or for gastronomic reasons, but also, he thought, as pattern books for tapestry designers. I rather enjoy the company of tapestry designers.

What is our interest today in wall charts of nature?

The only time I have offered a gift and had it refused was when I offered a chart of The Mushrooms of East Coast Australia to the then editor of the
Sydney Review
, and he refused it on the grounds that literal identification of common objects was not the purpose of art nor of decoration.

Teaching aids, he said, were not his idea of a gift at all. Or any kind of aids. It gave me cause for thought. I realised that he was recalling Paracelsus, who said that to explore nature one must read her books with one's feet (
mit den Füssen ihre Bücher treten
).

When we put up the chart of all the sea-shells of the east coast of Australia, we are, figuratively, garnering or amassing them, and we feel as if we at last know the extent of the boundary of that particular small world.

We are given existential relief from the discomfort of living in an endless and unknown universe.

Michael Levey reminds us that maps began to be used as interior decoration in the 1500s. I think that maps probably gave this existential relief even more potently back then.

Now we can look at the chart and believe that what we see there on the chart is all that there is to see when it comes to sea-shells or whatever.

Furthermore, there are their names, common and Latin. If we went on picking up different shells, ultimately we might have them all.

At this point of existential relief the usefulness of the chart ceases. I suspect that the charts are also a gesture
towards ‘green guilt', a guilt some people feel when they do not know the names of plants and insects and birds.

As though remembering the names of the plants and birds is somehow more
courteous.

As visual ‘collections' the charts can offer only tepid collector-satisfaction. The charts are, after all, only an
illustration
of a collection, not really a collection.

The charts could be used as an aid to the collector who goes out and seeks the sea-shells or whatever in nature. The collector then experiences perhaps an instant of exhilaration followed again by the almost immediate emptiness of completion, of having finished the game and finding him or herself with a pile of silly shells which mimic the now pointless wall chart.

The act of mounting the charts on the wall is also followed by an emptiness.

I, myself, have experienced this.

I intended to mount charts which I have bought but I do not seem to have got around to it. In my mind's eye I see them as decorating my gun and tack room. Something in me holds back. They remain with the other items of my life which I intend one day to ‘frame', my birth certificate, my IKEA speed assembly certificate.

They would then become, perhaps, recognition aids for my hunting, or emblematic trophies, or may even be defensible as thematic and atmospheric decoration.

The capture of nature in wall charts is ultimately too removed and too effortless to be gratifying. ‘One must read her books with one's feet,' etc.

That's right, isn't it, Duc?

Duc?

It may be going too far, however I cannot help but think that there is an echo of medieval magic lurking in these charts.

We are getting a medieval thrill from having nature ‘exposed', revealed and placed within human purview.

In the medieval sense, these wall charts of nature are a mutiny in the face of the mystery of divinity rather than a celebration of it.

With these charts we are dabbling in necromancy and other dark arts.

If we can capture and display, as a trophy, all the categories of nature, we can also do the same with the divine and with other dark secrets of life.

They are charts of secrets and consequently they still have the dwindling remnants of the medieval. They are like pages from the
Magia Naturalis
(1551) or from
De historia stirpium commentarii
(1542).

I could see that the Duc's credulity was being stretched here. The Duc had made a grimace or what I take to be a grimace.

It could be that he is smiling, and I will not press the point.

To conclude, I have heard people say that the beauty of these nature charts is that they celebrate the variety of nature, e.g., ‘Gee, see how many different sorts of parrots there are!'

This may be something to be made aware of but to use it as a justification for a permanent display on our domestic walls is unconvincing.

Behind all this there is a propaganda purpose for these charts.

They are produced to create an ‘awareness', especially among children, of the ‘bountiful wonder of nature' and as such, serve the new religions of nature which lurk within the otherwise sound sections of the green movement.

The other propaganda purpose is to boast of the natural ‘riches' of Australia to attract tourists.

In France the charts tend to be propaganda to remind people of the abundance of, and to encourage the enjoyment of, foods—cheeses, apples, mushrooms (and to warn of lethal kinds).

Maybe the Australian fishery charts have this in mind, also.

The nature charts are saying that we should admire these creatures and protect them on the bizarre grounds that they are varied and that they are colourful.

‘Protect', in a simple-minded green sense, means that they shouldn't be hunted or eaten. Which the Duc and I believe is nonsense.

The message of these charts, as ever, is in the eye of the beholder.

Chef Bilson and I, for instance, would look at them as culinary guides for parrot pie.

The Duc, who was, as it turns out, not asleep, seemed to understand exactly what I meant and twitched with an agitated excitement and called for his chef and his head huntswoman.

T
HE
D
UC
was, as ever, curious about the way Australians live and especially the domestic relationship between the sexes. When I say curious I should elaborate.

The Duc expresses his ‘curiosity' by coming very close to the face of the person to whom his curiosity is directed.

When I say close I mean skin to skin. He stares into the eyes of the person from whom he is trying to solicit information. It is not a socially comfortable closeness but because I am beholden to him for his generous patronage of my leisured life in the arts, I have to put up with it, feudal though it may be.

I have already mentioned the Duc's problem with saliva management. I will not return to that.

I am rather ill-placed to explain domestic life, having never really lived in what one would call a ‘household'. It is one of my fervent desires, which looks as if it is being granted, never to become what is known as a household ‘word'—it would be an ironic fate, given that since leaving home at thirteen I vowed never to wash another dish, mow another lawn, clean another bathroom, ‘put out' another garbage bin or make another bed. And I haven't.

The Duc himself was not well placed to understand
either, given his aristocratic upbringing. We did the best we could by pooling our limited experience of the real world.

I sketched out a floor plan of a typical Australian home and showed him advertisements of whitegoods to be found in the Australian home.

As we pored over the plans and IKEA catalogues spread on the large oak architect's desk (which was originally owned by Necker), I rushed to tell him that he must not expect to find cool rooms, cellars, pantries (
pain
being the French word for bread), butteries (corrupted from the French word
bouterie
for a room for storing bottles), or larders (the French room for storing lard or bacon).

By the way, when I say pored, I mean that the Duc's eyeballs literally touched the lines of the plans, and for all I could see, perhaps also his tongue.

The Duc became confused about the absence of proper food storage rooms. To escape from this information daze he changed the subject and asked me to explain ‘washing up'. What was it?

Recalling as best I could how washing up was done, I told him of the diverse approaches to this activity in my own country.

First I explained that, because of the heat and flies and the lack of refrigeration in earlier generations, the emphasis on ‘washing up' had become rather acute. My mother, for example, began the washing up before the meal was over.

This sensible attention to hygiene had carried over
into my generation as a form of frenzy. A frenzy which was to be found in all classes.

I said that on my return a Dear Friend, whose life is far from conventional in other ways (!), had patiently tried to explain what she called ‘the zen state' which accompanies washing up.

She said that one became lost and absorbed in the art of washing up in a way that other tasks rarely achieved.

One became a sud.

Washing up, she said, was
really
living and that my strange fantasy life as a
rémora
in the
châteaux
of France was my way of hiding from life.

‘Pardon?' said the Duc, or noises to that effect.

To put it another way, I said to the Duc, searching carefully for my words, one's body became the washing-up sponge, and for the duration of the washing up no other world existed.

I told the Duc that I myself found this a disturbing notion.

The Duc muttered in perplexity, or what I took to be muttering, and what I took to be perplexity, although it could very well have been befuddlement.

I went on to tell him that I had observed that many people in the homes I visited in Australia, all of whom were warm and generous towards me despite my rather dubious past conduct, seemed to see the washed-up-and-put-away condition of the dishes as the state of perfection. This I took to be a historical legacy.

The more I thought about it—clean dishes, that is—maybe it was the very quintessence of our cultural heritage.

It seemed in Australia that ‘dirty dishes' were dishes in a state of imperfection and dishes which were in use were in decline towards this state of imperfection. That within the genetic spiral of this imperfection was also a strand of treason. Dirty dishes were a treason because historically they threatened the health and wholesomeness of the nation.

I speculated there with the Duc, as we looked out through the castellations of the north tower onto the rolling, snow-covered fields and forests of France, that what was needed in Australia was the formulation of a Circle of Purity doctrine where the dishes were in a state of perfection at all times and in all stages of use—including the so-called ‘dirty dishes' stage.

Is the dressed table really a point of perfection? A metaphor for that fleeting instance of the pre-entropic condition? That state which must inexorably begin its journey into degeneration—which, in fact, is already decaying in the invisible-to-the-eye world of molecules and such—which must suffer entropy as everything else in life?

We sat in silence while we ruminated on this idea as the cattle in the winter barns worked their cud.

I broke the silence by telling the Duc that dishwashing machines were now common in Australia, although many could not feel truly confident of the
cleanliness of the dishwashing machine and also washed the dishes manually before putting them into the machine.

I described to him the ‘steamy hot sickly smell' which came out of dishwashers.

It seemed that the dishwasher ‘cooked' the minute smears and scraps of food on the plates and cutlery and food gathered in a strainer in the dishwasher drain which created this denatured ‘cooking' smell.

The Duc raised an eyebrow at these tales of the dishwasher. When I say ‘raised an eyebrow', it has to be remembered that the Duc has little control of his eyes or eyebrows at this point in his recovery and raising an eyebrow can sometimes cause considerable movement of the facial skin so that the mouth and eye apertures are seriously astray from their respective organs.

However, I said that loading and unloading the dishwasher took as long as the old-fashioned manual washing up.

Kindly ignoring his facial expression, I said that some people scraped and rinsed the plates before putting them in the dishwasher. This made the washing up twice as long as the old-fashioned method and three times as long as using clean things until everything ran out and then putting the dishes in the bath and turning on the shower and washing them with your feet while you showered.

And four times longer than going to a restaurant.

I said that I noticed an unacceptable tendency in some households to ‘save on the washing up'. I have heard this expression used quite often in homes of all classes.

It means making items do double service—the main course dish for salad, using the same knife and fork for entree and main course, not changing the wine glasses with each new bottle or when they became greasy from eating, and so on.

The Duc broke into speculation about the effect of washing up on the production of art. He hypothesised that it probably has lost us a great deal of good art.

We agreed that if Henry James had had to wash up the dishes, etc., we would not have had
The Golden Bowl
because those chores would have eaten up five years of his life, although it might be arguable whether
The Golden Bowl
or helping his mother was the preferable use of his time. I remember hurling the book across a room in a fury in the Algonquin in New York where I was once living. If James Joyce had to do the washing up he would not have finished
Finnegans Wake
but then I haven't been able to read that fruitfully. If Joyce Cary had done the washing up we would not have
The Horse's Mouth.
If Peter Carey had to do the washing up we would not have
The Unusual Life of Tristram Smith.
Had it not been for slavery Julia Peterkin would not have had the leisure to write
Scarlet Sister Mary
(1929) which won the Pulitzer Prize. Nor would she have had anything to write about. Julia Peterkin was the white wife of an American plantation manager and wrote about her black servants.

‘Yes, yes,' said the Duc, ‘don't overextend the gag and don't labour the point simply because I am temporarily lamed by a stroke.'

The Duc has these moments of savage lucidity when the clouds of his mind clear and the beams of light break through.

He inquired about the Australian domestic relationship between the sexes and I did my best to explain this somewhat complex condition.

When I say ‘explain to the Duc', it is important to have a picture of how communication occurs between myself and the Duc. We sit before a roaring log fire in a rather high vaulted stone room. We still need fur rugs over our legs despite the fire, for the stone walls of the
château
are so thick that even in summer the outside temperature does not penetrate the living quarters.

If curious for information, the Duc places his face very close to my face as aforementioned.

It was a while before I realised that the Duc thought that household tasks in Australia, as in France, had grammatical gender.

I had to explain that some household tasks were still traditionally ‘gendered'—sewing, replacing fuses and so on—but not through language, although impressive efforts were being made to de-gender household tasks.

I explained how domestic tasks were also becoming indexed and weighted so that they could be traded within the household political economy. So that one task such as putting out the garbage might be seen as especially irksome and traditionally ‘male' because of the atavistic echoes from the days of the cave, when the male was the protector and carried weapons, and when, presumably, garbage collection was done at night.

Putting out the garbage in ancient times required the person to leave the safety of the cave and to go out into the night some distance from the cave. The further the distance one travelled from the cave the greater the risk. The risk was increased when it was done in darkness. And in prehistoric times, garbage was collected at night when it was cool, to prevent the stench being aggravated by the hot sun.

I told the Duc that I was interested to see that in many Australian households notes, notices, cartoons and other communications were magnetically pinned or taped to the refrigerator door.

The refrigerator door seemed to have become the switchboard for domestic communication.

I smiled to myself when the Duc said (quite sensibly, given his upbringing and way of life) that wouldn't it mean that only the staff saw the notices?

I told him that in Australia every member of the family had the right to use the refrigerators and that these were not locked at night.

I said that some Australians actually stood at the door of the refrigerator and ate food—had
le snack
while standing at the door of the refrigerator lit by the refrigerator light (I had already explained to him that larders, butteries and cool rooms were incorporated into the refrigerator, including, I was amazed to see, the pantry, bread now being stored in the refrigerator, resulting in the loss of the practice of freshly baked bread).

The Duc was flabbergasted. He asked if the Australians actually selected the food from the refrigerator
shelves and then consumed it without decanting it into appropriate serving dishes, and without laying out or ‘setting a table', without selecting a tablecloth and ironing it on the table, or allowing the food to reach room temperature?

I said that I was afraid so. I had a quiet laugh to myself that he should be so particular about this, given how goddam cold it is in the
château.

‘And do they take wine with this, this,
le snack
?' the Duc asked, in a voice still distorted by flabbergast.

I said that I had seen Australians drinking wine from the bottle while standing at a refrigerator door and very often I had seen males, especially, drinking a can of beer while in this position. I had seen an Australian child drinking orange juice from a two-litre container while standing at the door of the refrigerator.

The Duc became agitated by these descriptions of Australian life. The agitation was so fierce that a muscular spasm hurled him into the log fire and I had to ring for the butler (
bouterie
/buttery/butler, that is, one who originally served the drinks) to help retrieve him.

I sprayed the Duc with a soda siphon and although caked with ash he seemed only slightly singed.

I thought it best to stay away from descriptions of life in the Australian household for now because its bizarre ness was beyond the Duc's imagination.

Instead, I went on with my gastronomic autobiography, which he always enjoys.

I told him that as an Australian, not having come from a peasant culture such as France, but from an ‘efficient' technological culture, meant that as a child I had come to use canned foods and factory-made goods as the yard stick and criterion for appearance and flavour in food.

Canned food was certainly seen as a guarantee of the ‘safety' of food—given the absence of reliable refrigeration (as aforementioned) in my childhood and a hot climate, flies and bad food-handling practices, ‘fresh' food was more likely to be contaminated than canned.

There was and still is an Australian phobia about food which might have ‘gone off'.

I suspect that is why every edible thing in the Australian household now finds its way into the refrigerator.

My gastronomic journey from childhood has been a bewildering encounter with what I saw as the ‘inauthenticity' of fresh and traditionally prepared food.

Hence, I refused as a child to eat the first traditionally cooked spaghetti served to me because it was, in my opinion, not ‘real' spaghetti—that is, not canned spaghetti. (I will only note the gastronomic oddity called ‘the canned spaghetti sandwich' which I still eat from time to time, trying to put myself back into the simple palate pleasures of the playground, a destination I can only incompletely reach.)