A bottle of retsina.
In the spirit of the List of Betterment, as a means of understanding the book, I felt I ought to at least try to establish whether this meal was edible or not. So I rode my bike to the supermarket and filled a basket with these items, brought them home and prepared them to the best of my limited ability. The spaghetti was ok, and the cabbage and corned beef were, well, cabbage and corned beef, but the boiled onion concoction was unspeakable. Thank goodness for the retsina.
I tried again a couple of days later with a lunch that required a little more planning:
Lentil soup
Chipolata sausages served with boiled onions and apples stewed in tea
Dried apricots and shortcake biscuits
A light Beaujolais
‘Fresh apricots are best of course,’ notes Arrowby, ‘but the dried kind, soaked for twenty-four hours and then well drained, make a heavenly accompaniment for any sort of mildly sweet biscuit or cake. They are especially good with anything made of almonds, and thus consort happily with red wine. I am not a great friend of your peach, but I suspect the apricot is the king of fruit.’
I soaked the dried apricots overnight and stewed the apples in tea, as instructed, but the result was neither heavenly nor illuminating – the combination was simply revolting – and once again I got a hangover from downing a bottle of wine at lunchtime. It was a sort of Charles Arrowby drinking game, with additional unpleasant gastric consequences.
Of course, these experiments were a lark but they were beside the point. They brought me no nearer to divining the meaning of the meals, or for that matter, The Sea, The Sea itself.
That weekend, we had a visitor to stay, an old friend called Richard. He and Tina had known one another since infant school where, because of an accident of surname, they were allocated desks together. They then had to sit next to one another, day in, day out, for the next nine years. Richard is a hearty individual, whose general bonhomie covers a roving and somewhat intense spirit. Tina is very fond of him; he is tremendous company. He is also a somewhat intense bon viveur, in the sense that he likes to eat well and drink very well – quality in quantity.
What do you cook the man who eats everything? I considered boiling some onions à la Arrowby in his honour but decided against it. Instead, I did what we always do when Richard visits, which is buy a lot of wine and several extravagant cheeses and let him get on with it.
We were sitting at the kitchen table, and as I uncorked another bottle, Richard leant back in his chair and pulled a cookbook off the shelves by the window.
‘Is this any good?’ he asked, leafing through it. And then, a minute later, ‘God, you really look after your books, don’t you? Ours are always covered in sticky marks. This looks like it hasn’t even been opened.’
Inadvertently, Richard was onto something. Our cookbooks were in pristine condition because none of them had ever been used. Several years earlier, when Alex was born, I had decided that I would shoulder my new responsibilities by taking care of the cooking. I had bought a juicer and some superior measuring spoons and we started frequenting farmers’ markets and high-class butchers; and of course, I had bought a lot of cookbooks, far more than we needed, most of which stayed permanently on the shelf and made the place look culinary. And it was true that I had learned a few basic dishes, though nothing with any finesse and certainly nothing I could rustle up for a gourmand of Richard’s standing. However, it had not really occurred to me until this moment that my appetite for the trappings of gastronomy, which had felt so genuine, had been little more than another way of going shopping. ‘The heart of a man is hollow and full of ordure,’ writes Pascal in Pensées. Ah well. I was shallow but at least I was consistent.
‘Is this any good?’ The uncomplicated, unreflecting answer to Richard’s simple question would be, ‘Yes.’ I had every reason to suppose that it was good, bar personal experience of the book, of which I had almost none. But what could personal experience really add? I lacked the expertise in cookery to make this judgement. In my ignorance, it would be a matter of blurting out whether or not I liked the book, and that was not what was being asked. However, the new-born integrity spawned by the List of Betterment, and the fine wine, was urging me towards a full confession: ‘I don’t know. It was in that list of the greatest cookbooks of all time, you know the one, the supermarket one, a few years ago. I haven’t read it. I haven’t even looked at it. I bought the whole lot and we never use them. I’m a charlatan.’
‘Have some more cheese,’ I said instead.
‘Well, I thought it was shite,’ said Richard, slipping the book back on the shelf. ‘What are you working on at the moment?’
I told him the truth. I had done very little writing since Alex had been born. ‘But,’ I said, ‘I’m doing this project at the moment with books, I think you’ll like this.’
‘Is this that list you mentioned the last time I saw you?’ he said. Mmm, and several times before that.
‘Yes, but now I’m actually doing it,’ I said. And I told him about the books I had read so far.
Richard, ever the perfect guest, listened politely while I expounded on the virtues of this or that book, nodding occasionally to confirm whether he had read it or not. (‘Yep.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Awful.’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Never heard of it.’) When I reached The Sea, The Sea, however, he suddenly sat bolt upright.
‘Shit!’ he yelled, the wine sloshing around his glass. ‘I love that book!’
‘I, er, I’m not sure I really get it,’ I said.
‘Have you finished it?’ he demanded.
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘It’s INCREDIBLE,’ he said, with absolute conviction. And for the next fifteen minutes, he rhapsodised about this intoxicating novel which had so far done little but give me a sore head. As I sat and listened, a bit drunk, what struck me was not his coherent argument regarding the glory of The Sea, The Sea – there was little coherence, he was drunk too – but the joie de vivre that was spilling out of him. Richard is a documentary filmmaker. He has seen some fairly awful sights and regularly encounters the worst of humanity: tyrants, lowlifes, TV executives. But reflecting in the glow of this book he was rejuvenated. You could see him catching his own enthusiasm.
‘But the meals, Richard,’ I said. ‘What about the meals?’
He shouted with laughter. ‘Oh, they’re hilarious,’ he said.
And, of course, they were. It wasn’t that the meals in The Sea, The Sea were only hilarious, but being given permission to find them hilarious opened the novel for me. Until now it had not occurred to me that I was allowed to find anything in any of these books properly funny rather than ‘witty’ or ‘amusing’ or ‘comic’. I had been reading literature, and literature mistrusts hilarity, reasoning that something that makes you laugh out loud must be making its appeal to a coarser sensibility. Yet The Sea, The Sea, especially in its first few chapters, is brilliantly, mischievously funny. I went back to the beginning and laughed a lot at Charles Arrowby. It felt good to laugh.
Another thing which made me smile was the discovery that no two commentators seemed to agree about the meals in The Sea, The Sea. A quick Internet search revealed that one newspaper considered them ‘nauseating’, while another preferred ‘parodically rustic’. To one reviewer, they were ‘elaborately described’, to another merely ‘tedious’, to a third ‘delightful’. One website singled out a couple of the dishes as ‘refreshing and organic’; another noted that they were ‘primarily out of tins’. Moreover, an obituary of Dame Iris in the Independent revealed that ‘the disgusting menus were suggested by Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, who would shock people by pretending to find the food perfectly nice’.
It was liberating to discover there was no right answer: one man’s meat is another’s excuse for