Sweet Fruit, Sour Land Read online

  She laughed and folded the dress back up, laying it on the counter. ‘And what a treat you are. I must thank you both, you have to come to a little dinner I’m having. How do you say it, soirée?’ But she said it like souris, which could have been a mouse or a smile, but most definitely was not a party.

  My grandmother humoured her. ‘I don’t go to parties, I’m afraid. But my Mathilde would be happy to.’

  ‘Oh, wonderful,’ Gloria said, eyes wide and bright and looking me up and down, no doubt realising her mistake. She took my grandmother’s pen from her hand without asking, and wrote her address down.

  I wondered whether I should ask her what to wear, or tell her I couldn’t come because I had nothing suitable. But she was gone in a blink, tissue paper left strewn and torn on the floor.

  Gloria introduced me at the party as the French dressmaker’s daughter. I didn’t want to correct her: despite her being my grandmother and not my mother, she did mother me; and despite my being perfectly English, I was – at one point, at least on paper – French.

  In that giant fairy tale house on the corner of Arkwright Road – with black window frames, crawling ivy, and a red brick wall – I sat at a dining room table with an intricate lace-edged tablecloth placed over it. I studied the place settings, I watched the white plates, I waited with my hands folded. I said very little, but it went unnoticed. All the care and attention that had been put into the arrangement of the crockery was soon dismantled, with people touching the prongs of their forks and swirling their glasses around the table cloth, watching the indentations they made in the linen like ripples forming on the surface of a pool.

  It was the first time I ever tasted fish, the real thing, and I asked where they caught it from and they laughed at me. I held onto my linen napkin and fingered the hem. I pressed each individual stitch between my fingers, and touched the starchy whiteness of it. I thought, that’s one thing I know. I know how to stitch this, I know how to make something, and maybe they don’t. I thought that if I held the napkin it would save me from this dinner party, and transport me to somewhere that made more sense, somewhere that had a cosy domesticity about it, or a place where people ate fish whenever they wanted.

  I looked into my lap the whole meal, but when I held my napkin like that, that’s when the man next to me turned to me and said, ‘You have better taste in food no doubt. Tinned tuna is not the height of sophistication.’

  He said it like we were sharing a joke, and I looked at my plate and wondered if it was tuna we were eating or if he was referring to something else. I smiled and agreed, and his assuredness gave me a feeling I hadn’t had before, and it owned me.

  That night, after tasting the fish, I felt an opening in time; one I hadn’t known could exist. Gloria worried about me, clearing my plate, at one point stroking my hair from my shoulder. But Gloria’s care did not betray an ounce of her knowing what she had done for me. I was not myself. I had an urge to recount my whole life to that man, a stranger. He tapped my cutlery to indicate which utensil to pick up, he gestured here and there, to show me where to stand and what to do.

  And when a woman sat down, a stranger then, at the piano, I wanted to cry just from seeing the black and white keys, and her feet moving on pedals I didn’t even know pianos had.

  I marvelled at the lamps jutting from the walls and wondered how they stayed lit all throughout the evening; their flickering a constant washing over us, taking away the need for waxy candles on the table that would ruin the cloth.

  He stood closer to me, to reassure me. That’s why I told him, later, for no reason at all, about the recipe books that were in a box in the attic. We found them when we tidied out my mother’s house in Paris and sold her things. Condensed her life into two boxes. The pages were worn and stuck together, smatterings of stains littering the pages, covering pictures of things I’d never eaten. But I didn’t tell him that I felt resentful of her, so I had thrown them away.

  Before I left, my grandmother told me Gloria was married to someone important, a politician whose name I should’ve known, but didn’t. It worried me, and naïve as I was, I spent the evening looking around, waiting for Mrs P herself to enter the room. I worried what they’d think of me, into my twenties and childless – with the policy enforced so strictly those days – but I was struck by how adult that dinner was, in all of its tone and form. It was different from the parties I went to with my own friends, the ones still around. I didn’t realise it, until someone presented a bottle of wine halfway through dinner (a symbol of not worrying about your condition), and no one seemed to falter, pause or worry about drinking alcohol, or for that matter, find it in any way surprising to be presented with alcohol at all, especially as it wasn’t some homemade concoction, but a wine with a label and a cork yet to be popped.

  I didn’t touch it, of course, and felt my face radiate as it was offered to me, as though it were a test. The answer was obvious. But the young woman at the piano had a glass that was even refilled and I assumed she wasn’t older than twenty-five. After that I concluded this was what wealthy people did as an escape, and their children were all safely at home. But no one hinted at my flat belly, or marital status, and no one even mentioned Mrs P’s policy, except as a passing comment as a measure of her strength. I hid my own ambivalence about Mrs P that evening, and realised as I did so that my opinion of our leader was only inherited bias from my grandmother. When people spoke of ‘Auntie’s strong will’ and the way she’d turned the country around after the blackout, I felt that I’d criticised her with my grandmother unfairly. They even joked about the slogan that had brought her into power: ‘England isn’t eating’, in-between gorged mouthfuls. Someone held up a slimy forkful of food and declared, ‘Without her putting food into all our mouths, we’d be dust. Auntie Knows Best.’

  They also talked about things in front of them: the glasses and where they came from, each item’s weighted history; the pieces of the continent they’d been to; the scarf they’d got from Spain, years ago; the cutlery from Prague; all of this without struggle. So much so that as the evening progressed I felt it wouldn’t have mattered a great deal if I had touched the wine after all, if it would even have been noted or commented on.

  Certainly not by him, sloshing his glass about and explaining to me (as though my polite refusal warranted a lesson in what I was missing) about the taste, the earth the grapes came from – not English earth, presumably – and its legs, which he showed to me with great adoration as he swirled the red liquid around, and watched it fall down the glass.

  Gloria stroked my hair and patted my shoulder at intervals, in that intimate way she had. Every so often she’d exclaim, ‘The dressmaker’s daughter, all ours for the night. We collect people here.’

  He smiled, gesturing to the woman at the piano. ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘we do.’

  But Gloria stroked everyone’s arm, didn’t she? I watched her, and her way with people. I listened to her conversations and observed her clinking her glass with a friend who had long hair, waved in the same way Gloria’s was.

  They stood in confidence, as Gloria nudged her shoulder, ‘Oh, Wendy, you strumpet,’ laughing heartily, her mouth at her friend’s ear.

  Her friend’s hands pressed to her waist to quell her laughter. ‘Stop it, Gloria.’

  I smiled after them, not realising I was doing so, and Gloria noticed me from a few steps away. She gestured for me to come over and then wrapped a convivial arm around me, pointing to her friend, ‘Wendy Darling, this is the dressmaker’s daughter,’ she patted her gown appreciatively. ‘Mathilde, this is Wendy Darling.’

  ‘Is that really your name?’ I said, as she outstretched a hand and suppressed a laugh, eyeing Gloria.

  ‘Second star to the right!’ Gloria laughed.

  Wendy Darling shook my hand vigorously. ‘Gwendolyn,’ she said, and made a face as if to say, isn’t it awful, it happened quite by accident.

  At the end of the night the same man touched my arm and I
watched his fingers press my skin and lift as he removed them. He looked at me, puzzled, and I laughed at nothing in particular. I laughed because he was a severe sort of man, with white strands through his dark hair. I laughed because he was oddly formal in every gesture and word he spoke to me. I laughed because of the way he stood and listened to the woman at the piano, and watched as I watched her feet moving about the piano’s feet. I laughed because he had touched me with a sense of urgency, and then stopped, as though remembering himself.

  He stood at the doorway of Gloria’s large house on the corner. ‘Is that your bike, Matilda?’ He asked me, and I nodded, pleased with the inclusive anglicisation of my name, but embarrassed by the bike’s handlebars and the rusty spokes, and the way it would squeak if he stood there and watched me go.

  He pulled at his shirt cuffs, standing at the doorstep, and opened his mouth to speak. He was interrupted by Gloria appearing behind him, leaning from his side to speak to me, her perfectly waved red hair falling intimately at his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t ruin your dress on that thing,’ she called to me. ‘Pull your skirt up. Mind your shoes.’ She laughed, head held back, satisfied with her joke, and I laughed too, trying to think of something to say to impress her. But she disappeared as soon as she arrived, back into her winding hollow corridor that led to the dining room.

  I turned to walk towards my bike, without saying anything. I kept my arms close to my sides, worried that sweat had stained the fabric of my pale blue dress, which I hoped to unpick later and return to the shop. The humidity of the night air clung at my legs. I waded through it. I put my small fabric bag in the basket at the front and pulled the bike towards me. It clicked and whirred as I moved it forward. He was still waiting there, by the front door, pulling at his shirt sleeves.

  ‘Get home quickly now,’ he said. ‘The watch will be after you.’

  I nodded to him, I smiled.

  ‘I’ll call on you soon. You’re not far are you, in Hampstead?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘just to the west.’

  He waved at me, his broad hand towering over his head. ‘George,’ he said, ‘Don’t forget. It’s George.’

  I walked my bike down the drive, out past the stone wall. I walked it far down the length of Arkwright Road, down the sloping hill that rattled the pedals, before stopping and leaning my bike against a wall. It had been papered over with a fresh poster of a black and white graphic of Mrs P’s face. I stopped and looked at her eyes, lit from candlelight emanating from over the road. Auntie Knows Best, it read. I pulled my dress up, just as Gloria had said, and rode home in the dark.

  3

  That week my grandmother brought home a punnet of gooseberries. She rushed to our garden flat and bounced them at me and they rolled about each other. I picked one up by its tail and put it in my mouth. My face pruned pleasurably at the tartness.

  She treated them with great care. She used them every way she could; their flesh for flavouring; their skin for fragrant water; she boiled them and watched them burst and split and she used their stinging sweetness carefully. One punnet lasted us days and those gooseberries were a mask for all her melancholia; as long as she had something that had been granted to her, she could hide behind its happiness.

  She collected our ration coupons religiously, and was always the first in the village to queue outside the issuing office for them. She was careful never to spend them all and save plenty just in case. Every morning she laid them out on the scrubbed wooden table and counted them. She recorded what we had in her small red notebook, laid its ribbon down as a marker and then snapped it shut. She looked at the coupons like they were a crossword, and she would stare at them in great stillness until she decided what we could eat that would cost us the least amount and last us the longest. On good days she might decide we could have a chicken wing, parcelled up in greasy brown paper and thin on the bone, and only if the queue wasn’t too long once word got around; on bad days, it was only vegetables and the grey bread they sold you stale to stop you eating it too quickly. The rest of the day she would hurry to her shop and on the days that I was working, I would follow her. But even when she wasn’t at the shop I would come home and find her by the fireplace, leaning over a piece of stitching, pins in her mouth, and pausing to count the logs we had left, or blowing on the fire when it threatened to go out.

  If I think of her now, I remember her perfectly like that: quiet and contemplative and always thinking of three things at once, three things to make sure she hadn’t dropped one small thing that would affect us, that would mean we would do without. Even in the summer, with the windows blown open and the smell of plant life throughout the village, and the abundance of crops, she would still sit and stitch and count and make sure. I was sure it was because she had a memory of how things fall apart, in the way that I didn’t.

  That was a good day, shortly after Gloria’s dinner party, when she came home with gooseberries. They had a small crop of them come in to the grocers, and no one knew where they came from but no one asked. She said she hadn’t seen them for months, years maybe, and she held one up above her head between her fingers as though it was the sun, and she was the small planet below.

  ‘They didn’t even cost us that much,’ she said, laying out our coupons again and counting them. ‘We’ll be all right.’

  She manically prepared them, splitting them up, deconstructing them, until they looked nothing like food. She sang the whole time, sleeves rolled up and hair pulled from her face, apron tied at her waist (for no reason in particular, other than as a way to feel normal, I imagine, to feel how she used to feel when she had baking ingredients that would spatter about her).

  I watched her as I flicked through the orders we had at the shop, and went through her notebooks and looked at the inventory. Cash was always tight but she ran a meticulous and tidy shop in every sense. She knew how to make things work and I admired her greatly for it. And she was reliable; people always chose to come to her, for a knitted jumper in winter or a new house dress, because she knew how to make their clothing coupons go as far as they could.

  She finished preparing the gooseberries and wiped her clean hands on her apron. She laid down her knife and put a hand up to her hair. ‘I was thinking the other day of crumpets,’ she said, without turning around.

  I frowned. I couldn’t remember them. It was like a test I was constantly failing. ‘Crumpets.’ I said, with little intonation. I didn’t want her to know I didn’t know what she meant.

  ‘They were lovely toasted.’ She turned to look at me. Now the work with the gooseberries was over her normal contemplative look returned. She moved towards me conspiratorially, bending down to my chair, as though she’d just told me a secret, and then she whispered, ‘We had them with butter and jam, when we first got here. Do you remember?’

  ‘Both?’ I couldn’t imagine it.

  She pulled a chair beside me and sat down. She picked up the notebooks I was going through. She looked toward the open windows. I saw sweat forming on her upper lip and around her temples. We had whitewashed the walls and cleared the heavy furniture, taken up the carpets. But in summer it was never enough, we were never prepared for it.

  ‘Margot missed them, of course, such a trivial English thing. But I imagine asking her about them. Margot, these strange little English muffin things, they taste good! But I’m sure she would’ve laughed at me and asked why I was suddenly besotted with British pastries.’

  She did this often. She remembered my mother. She always called her Margot, never ‘your mother’, an impersonal touch. But it made sense to her, and was a way to remember her, just as she had been. She seemed to be deep under water when she talked like that.

  She never talked about the day we left, or what we left behind. She never probed about my aversion to speaking the language, but she went on with it all the same.

  ‘You met someone nice at Gloria’s, didn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know, grandmother.’ I put my hand on he
rs and looked with her out the window.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with it. Your friends have all done it, better that way, isn’t it?’

  ‘I still have a few years,’ I said, and removed my hand. I felt angry all of a sudden, of the ease with which she talked about my mother, and my own frivolity.

  ‘Not long when you think about it. And someone like that, you’d be set for life.’

  I imagined one of her old jellied pies; the fat that was moulded and cooled and set like that as a barrier so that no meat would leak out from the pastry. Constrained and suffocated and stuck. I tried to taste the fat, that wobbly, shiny, glutinous texture, but I couldn’t imagine it.

  ‘Margot and I had a little money once. We had things you wouldn’t dream of. I would want that for you, one day. I would want that.’ But she said it as though she believed its opposite.

  We both looked out the window as though we were watching a play, and I don’t know what we were waiting to appear at its ledge, with only one other house on the street occupied. But we did that frequently, worried about our empty street. My grandmother stood up and went towards the pane, leaning above the sink. She pressed her nails into the white chipped sill, its blackened edges rotting in the frame. I wanted to prise her fingers from it and move them away.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, but she didn’t move her fingers from the sill. ‘I just wondered if the neighbours would be out today.’

  There were groups of people from the village, scattered about. They marched past our house every so often, on watch. They pushed hand-written notes through the letterbox about supporting Mrs P and standing firm against the farmers’ strikes and how they were holding the country to ransom. About how Mrs P had let the country flourish and the nation be fed, how beyond our borders there was nothing, not even within the countries that were once part of our collective Kingdom. They wrote about the dangers of the abandoned buildings that were filled with squatters, most recently Kenwood House. But they only wrote about them stealing our water and scant electricity, hacking the grid. They never mentioned a potential for violence. That threat they internalised.