The Point Read online

  Later still he thought he should have seen it as a portent, when he couldn’t keep up the credit card merry-go-round any longer and he borrowed from the trust fund and didn’t get it paid back in time and disgrace came and everything was lost, his wife his children his grandchildren, you understand, don’t you, Dad, it’s better if they don’t see you, if we all don’t really, better if they just don’t get to know you, now while they’re too young to remember, let alone house and friends, business or otherwise, and cars and antique furniture and unread books and fully stainless-steel kitchen with continental appliances and all that life he’d known, and left him daily examining these vast skies for any clues they might offer, or any comfort. Blood smearing the heavens, smearing his dining table, and then terrible events. Wasn’t it presumptuous to suppose you knew for certain they had no meaning? And wasn’t it equally presumptuous to suppose that something so grand as a red sunset and a sky filled with bushfire smoke was a message for one puny person? It’s all in the seeing, he thought. The world is full of warnings, the heeding of them is our choice.

  And the fact was he didn’t miss those things because he’d never really had them. Sadness for the loss of his wife should have happened years ago, and it was hard to feel fond of a stainless-steel kitchen. He had more affection for his ferry-stop shelter. Where no ferries stopped. An admirable edifice, surprisingly cosy. It has a wooden base which could be meant to be boat-shaped and above that is glass, with pillars supporting a roof that has twirly bits like a pagoda. It’s painted blue, and serves to show how the lake never is. If you put your feet on the seat you are mostly safe from the wind. He hunkers down in a corner. Maybe Spenser’s bride rode across the water, in a barge, with banners. With the swans keeping the procession company. Not in this weather though. Getting on for red wine time. But maybe a bit of a doze first. He is impressed with how well he sleeps these days. Never anything to worry about, nothing on his mind. He sleeps the sleep of the innocent. The untrammelled. He wonders what untrammelled really means. What is trammelling?

  He senses rather than sees the other person. Opens his eyes, squints, recognises the jumper, not the person, a skinny striped thing that he last saw cuddled up to The Point’s refrigerator vents. The person is female, as he’d guessed, a waif, thin, and her flesh a mauve-white bruised colour. Her hair is stringy, brown from the roots then halfway down turning brass-yellow blonde in a jagged stripe, and her eyes are enormous and purple-smudged. He can’t tell whether it’s cold or dirt or something else that gives her this purplish-mauve colour. She clutches her arms across her chest and her right hand smoothes her hair behind her ear, over and over in a lifting and smoothing gesture, though her hair is greasy and stays where she puts it. He lifts his feet off the seat and unhuddles. If he was his father and wearing a hat he’d tip it.

  Is this taken, she asks, and he replies, No, feel free. It’s a bit sheltered from the wind. Not a lot.

  He realises that she’s shivering. But he has nothing to help except his own closeness and knows better than to offer that. This waterfront is so tidy, no newspaper or old cartons, no old rugs or bits of rag.

  He offers his scarf, just for a moment, he says, not to keep, but she refuses. I’m always cold, she says, I’ll stop shivering in a minute.

  She sits and stares at nothing with eyes so big in her face they must make it ache.

  He closes his again but no longer feels dozy.

  My name is Clovis, he tells her.

  Really? No kidding?

  Why should I say it was if it weren’t?

  All kinda reasons, but hey, okay, if you say it’s Clovis then Clovis it is. What sort of name is it, anyway.

  It’s the name of French kings.

  I suppose that’s why it’s news to me.

  There’s another silence. He asks, What’s your name?

  She gives him a look. Gwyneth.

  That’s an unusual name.

  No it’s not. There’s … She stops, and gives him another look that he is starting to think might be crafty. Well, my parents had kinda funny ideas. She says again, Funny ideas, as though there is something bitter about the flavour of the words in her mouth.

  Do you live here, she asks.

  Round about.

  Have you for long?

  Yes.

  Don’t you have anywhere else to go?

  Possibly.

  You mean you choose to live here?

  We always choose our lives, he says, even if we do not know we are doing so.

  No, she says, no, some of us have no choice, no choice at all.

  So we may choose to believe.

  No, it’s not true, she says. Fuck, who’d choose … She stamps her feet on the seat, drumming them violently until she falls back exhausted.

  Would you like some red wine, he asks.

  You got any?

  Would I offer if I didn’t?

  Yeah. Well, you might. Some people would.

  Wait here, he says.

  In a few minutes he is back. In one hand he has a pair of handsome oval glasses. Hold these, he says. Be careful.

  When he passes them to her it is apparent that they are broken off at the stem. The bowls are their perfect curving selves, but they have snapped somewhere in their long stems, and lack feet.

  One night I was going past the restaurant, he says, and there was a box of empty bottles outside. And on the top four glasses. One had a cracked bowl, but the others had snapped stems. Must have been a design fault. Or maybe nervous diners.

  He takes a cask of wine out of his bag. Only rough red, he says. Château Cardboard.

  Gwyneth holds out the glasses and he fills them half full. Gwyneth downs hers in several long swigs and holds the glass out again.

  Steady on, he says. It occurs to him that maybe wine isn’t the best thing to be giving this waif.

  It makes me feel better, she says, and he pours her another glass, not stopping halfway this time, realising that this is a carryover from the days of drinking wine that demanded sniffing and tasting and not at all necessary for plonk out of a bladder.

  Are you planning to stay long, he asks.

  I dunno. I’ve got to think. When she says this the expression on her face moves from baffled to blank, dead almost. It seems to him an expression that’s the negation of thought. He squirts some more wine into her outstretched glass.

  Lucky there’s more where that came from, he says. He’s okay for money, there’s not a lot to spend his money on, and if she knocks off most of this, well, he can get cleaned up and go and look at Spenser tomorrow.

  The girl tries to lean back into the corner of the shelter but it’s too hard against her bony little body and she sits up and hunches down into herself. Tell me your story, he says, and she looks at him, a mixture of her crafty and her baffled looks and is silent. After her fourth glass of wine, she suddenly says, Gotta go. She stands up, stretches, says, See ya, and makes off up the slope.

  He dips the glasses in the lake, sloshes them about, shakes them dry. A glass like these should be dried with a fine linen cloth, but even puddled and murky and without a foot it is still a beautiful piece of work. He doesn’t care, it’s a vessel, that’s all.

  The sunset is reddish again tonight, muddy against the thunder-purple clouds. Clovis looks at it and remembers the blood-red sunset staining his dining room, but as though it had happened to another person. Whom he observes, but is not. Observes the rage of those days, that what was nearly so perfectly well done should have at the last minute gone wrong, and his shame that he should have committed – should have needed to commit? – so criminal an act, and grief that his family should so entirely cast him off. No affection, no care, no flash of gratuitous love.

  He’d gone to live homeless like Lear fleeing into the wilderness, away from the ingratitude of family, the Lear image his, how he saw himself, and intended to be short-term, a gesture, no, more than a gesture, an act, but not one that needed to be maintained. And yet it had been, here
he was; that other fellow, the Lear character, might have gone back to some version of his own world, but Clovis somehow did not. This Clovis character looked at the world with his own blunt eyes and its hazy shapes were sufficient puzzle to his mind. He no longer raged, but he had not gone back.

  It was you might say Lear that had brought him undone. A gala charity premiere, famine in Africa or something, at the Seymour Centre, with champagne and caviar and the people who went to that sort of thing. Did they see any ironies in a performance of King Lear in these circumstances, he wondered, but not at the time. At that time he paid the large sum the tickets cost on one of his credit cards, and so did Lindi, the new dress she had to have, since the people who went to that sort of thing had all seen her old ones, other ones, and suddenly it was too much; King Lear and a new dress a small thing in the context, a straw of a thing, and suddenly his camel was belly-flopped in the dust, its legs splayed, its spine cracked, and all its precious load scattered and irredeemable.

  He often thought of that camel. It was out of a painting one of his great-aunts had, mostly rather sepia, with a brilliant orange sunset, a desert sunset he supposed, and some palm trees in black lines against this coloured sky. The camel still unbroken.

  How sharply he’d seen that performance of Lear, how clearly and brightly, from the best seats in the house and through one of his several pairs of up-to-the-minute prescription glasses. He remembered it very well.

  Remembered that Lear had fled into his own particular wilderness – it was a renovated Lear, set in Fascist Italy, and it was the rubble of a bombed town rather than a desolate moor – and run mad for a while, but in the end, for a moment, redemption had come. Even if death had followed soon after. His daughter Cordelia had saved him and for a little while there had been love. Simple, perfect love.

  Well, his daughters wouldn’t come and find him. They were more in the Goneril and Regan mould. Were paying him to stay away, organising it, with their brothers. A small stipend, Dad, and stay away. Not even a sacrifice on their part. His edifice had collapsed, but there were plenty of assets. It was his own money they were paying him. And he was spending it on Château Cardboard. Excellent stuff it was too.

  Goneril and Regan. You were just a sperm, Dad, and didn’t even end up being a good one. He hadn’t any hopes of a Cordelia. But maybe one would come. Maybe this Gwyneth was a Cordelia. He was quite certain she wasn’t a Gwyneth.

  8

  A journalist from one of the colour supplements wanted to interview Flora for a glossy article with photographs about the restaurant. He wanted to come when the evening service was in full production.

  No, you can’t possibly, said Flora. Far too dangerous. Boiling water, boiling oil, naked flames, sharp knives. No way. The staff wear steel-toed boots. Kitchens are ugly places.

  That’s just what I want to capture.

  No. You want to interfere with the machine. A good kitchen is just that, a set of cogs and wheels that spin in their own trajectories and all together work in perfect harmony. Whereas you would be the spanner in the works. Setting it all aglitch and awry. Or worse still, the body in the works, chewed up in some terrible nineteenth-century industrial accident. And endangering others.

  We wouldn’t get in the way.

  The safety of my staff depends on the skill and familiarity with which they work together. I said the kitchen is a machine. It’s a dance too, you have to know the steps, the movements.

  The more you say the more I want to do it.

  I don’t want my lovely machine stuffed up by your interfering bloody body, said Flora. Think of the mess. Come early in the afternoon if you must. I can give you half an hour then.

  The journalist who is called Bim Becker, a fuzzy-haired charming young-looking man, believes he can spin it out much longer than that. Especially if the photographer runs a bit late.

  He begins by asking her about her food as a work of art.

  Have you thought about that, she replies. It’s such a glib thing to say. My food is food, it’s meant to be eaten. Think about Cézanne, painting apples, picture in your mind a Cézanne painting of apples. They’re no longer apples, they’re paint on canvas, they’re a work of art. However much they remind us of the originals, the fruit off a tree, they are not they. Those apples withered and were thrown away over a century ago. Or somebody ate them, and that person’s flesh that was nourished by them is dead and buried long ago.

  But, says Bim.

  And yet, curiously enough, we can believe that Cézanne’s apples are even more essentially apples than the real transient thing ever manages. They are you might say a Platonic idea of apples.

  There are different ways of recognising works of art.

  Consider a Chardin. A just-killed rabbit, a quince, chestnuts. A piece of salmon, a loaf of bread. He puts two or three things together and there is a painting to break your heart. But who knows what they were like as food? The rabbit may be stringy, the bread stale, the salmon not in its first youth. But the painting: sublime.

  Bim leans back and narrows his eyes at her. Hang on, he says, I think you’re falling into the representational fallacy here. Agreed, Cézanne’s apples have little to do with fruit, everything to do with paint. Chardin ditto. But let’s skip the still lifes. I think your food is a work of art in the way, say, a building is, the Parthenon, the Opera House, made of its own necessary raw materials and transcending them.

  There’s a difference between stone and wood and marble, and food.

  They both exist in space and in time too, though the food in a shorter span of time. Possibly relative. A cake may seem to have a very long life if you’re a butterfly.

  Flora frowns. Isn’t this a sort of nonsense?

  Okay, one is ephemeral, the other less so. You can compare art forms in a useful way without needing them to be identical. Another comparison: food and music, both one-off performances.

  And the recipe the equivalent of the musical score?

  Precisely.

  Flora is having fun with this man, as she hadn’t expected to.

  I always think that recipes are subject to all sorts of errors. So fallible. I hate giving them.

  Mozart probably thought that about his music written down.

  What about a recording, says Flora. Food may be a recipe, and it also can exist as a memory, but no more. Whereas the performance can be captured in virtually all its power. Philip Glass, conducting his own composition – I can’t do that with a recipe.

  You can …

  There are so many imponderables with food and its reproduction. A piece of beef is not the same in Canberra as it is in Florence as it is in Tokyo. Peaches may be floury and flavourless, or sunripened and scented. Bread industrial, or artisanal. Cheeses are where and what the animals graze. There is the terroir, always the terroir, and the care and skill of the grower, the use or not of chemicals and poisons.

  Terroir meaning territory …

  More than that, the earth and the climate, the angle of the sun, the rainfall, everything that makes a growing place its individual self.

  It’s all terribly poetic, says Bim.

  And pedagogic.

  Of course the optimum of one of your dishes, where it achieves its highest pinnacle of art, is prepared by you in your kitchen, your territory, and served in your restaurant. But Mozart played by a skilful child on a moderately well-tuned family piano is still absolutely Mozart.

  Flora laughs. She makes some of her wonderfully powerful coffee and puts out a plate of Kate’s petits fours. It’s as though Bim has passed a test. He is a clever journalist. She is losing her wariness.

  Okay, she says, I do have strong views about my food. And of course it’s not just something nice to eat. It is like any kind of art, it’s craft plus imagination, it’s the dance of the senses and the intellect, elaborate, elegant, strictly patterned yet spontaneous. With all the ambiguities that these things imply. Consider: a dish in its final form is made by the eye, the tongue, the belly and
the brain. That makes it, you could say, more complex than any other art form. I think you should feel when you look at it some of the tender awe you feel before a Chardin painting. That this is one person’s view of the simple beauty the world has to offer.

  Simple, but also extremely complex.

  Heartbreaking simplicity usually is.

  Do your customers see all that?