Toast. Nigel Slater
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Название: Toast
Автор: Nigel Slater
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007386871
isbn:
We rarely had visitors who stayed to eat. We had never even been to, let alone given, a dinner party, despite having a dining table that could seat twelve. But there were friends who would appear now and again, usually couples so similar as to be indistinguishable from one another. They had names like Ray or Eunice. All the men wore ties and cardigans. The women wore twinsets. The sort of women who talked about their ‘dailies’ and would never leave the house without a brooch. I do remember them all laughing a lot, but I never understood what about. Everyone was taller than me. It was as if I wasn’t there.
It was my job to pass around the room with the food. Oh God, the food. ‘Now, dear, you make certain that everyone gets a cheese football, won’t you?’ my mother would say. Our place in local society seemed not to depend on whether we had a double garage (we had) or which golf club my father belonged to (he didn’t). It was more a question of whether you had Huntley & Palmer’s Cheese Footballs or not.
The pièce de résistance was a grapefruit spiked with cocktail sticks holding cubes of cheese and pineapple. The preparation was always a bit of a performance: draining the syrup from the tinned pineapple, cutting the Cracker Barrel into even-sized chunks, finding the cocktail sticks that would usually end up at the back of the gadget drawer covered in a dusting of flour. I hated doing it.
Few things could embarrass a would-be chef quite as much as having to hold out a whole grapefruit speared with cubes of Cheddar and tinned pineapple on cocktail sticks to men in cardigans.
The worst of it was that everyone thought I had done the food. ‘He wants to be a chef,’ my father would say, as I held up the spiked grapefruit to the Masonic Worshipful Master’s wife, who had a tight perm and lips like a cat’s bottom. When it came to offering the dreaded grapefruit to everyone else, I would throw my head in the air and flay my nostrils in disapproval. ‘Don’t pull a face like that,’ my father once snapped, ‘you look like Kenneth Williams.’ But I had to let everyone know my disdain for my parents’ catering arrangements. After all, if I had done the food, they would have had prunes wrapped in bacon.
I played in the garden mostly, away from the road and the big boys with their plastic footballs that stung my legs. ‘I’d rather you played where I can see you,’ warned Mother, so that suited me fine. Long borders ran either side of the lawn, white rhododendrons, pink- and saffron-coloured azaleas, purple Michaelmas daisies and, in deepest summer, dahlias, spiky ones as big as a dinner plate, maroon and white and gaudy yellow. In one corner was an apple tree, not ours, but most of it overhung our garden, so that come late August its fruit fell into the mauve and white phloxes below.
If I stood on tiptoe I could just reach the apples hanging on the lower twigs, flat-topped apples, pale green and rose like Turkish delight, with snow-white flesh that had ripples of pink running through it. They tasted of strawberries but smelled of the scented phlox that grew underneath them. I could reach these apples, unlike the fruit of the three trees in our garden whose branches were, even on tiptoes, just out of reach. I could get to the glue bands my father put round their trunks though, and used to peel off the flies and wasps they trapped, pulling them by their wings until their bodies came apart.
Uncle Reg used to come round once a week, on a Thursday evening, bringing with him a white paper bag of Cadbury’s Flakes, Aztecs, Milky Ways, tubes of Rolo, Munchies, Mintolas and Refreshers and thin black-and-white bars of Caramac. A tall handsome man with sunken cheeks, a slightly hooked nose and shaking hands, the whites of his eyes shot with red veins. He wore a long, grey mackintosh and smelled of something that was both sour and sweet.
Over the summer Uncle Reg came less and less often, his bags of sweets getting bigger with each visit. Sometimes he would bring flowers for my mother. Then one day he stopped coming altogether. I heard my mother on the phone telling someone that he had died. I never saw the lovely Uncle Reg or his sweets again.
There was no limit to how many of next door’s apples I was allowed to eat. So I just kept eating them throughout the summer. The largest always fell first, right down through the pink-eyed flowers on their tall stems. At first, I would stretch down into the flowers to pick up the apples until one day I got stung by a wasp hiding in the half-eaten side underneath. Another time there was a maggot jerking its way through the flesh, which I might have missed and eaten if it hadn’t been for its tiny dot of a black head. From then on I went in foot first, turning each fruit over with my toe, inspecting for anything that might sting or wriggle.
Nobody tells me anything. They talk in whispers over my head; in hushed tones when I’m sitting drawing my usual pictures of Scottish hills or gluing model planes together. (I’m very good at shading heather and frankly draw nothing else, inspired no doubt by our last holiday, when we drove back from Loch Lomond with a sprig of the stuff tucked in the radiator of the car.)
Friday afternoon is when the pop man comes. During the summer holidays I wait around for him to arrive so that I can get at the dandelion and burdock before my brothers do. The bottles are heavily embossed and have screw caps that are almost impossible to undo. Favourite: D & B; second favourite: cream soda; least fave is plain lemonade which I leave for everyone else. I think my dad drinks it.
I like dandelion and burdock because it makes me burp really loudly, but the best flavour is actually cream soda. I don’t know how they get something clear and pale green to taste creamy but they do.
‘I don’t know how you can drink that stuff,’ says our daily, Mrs Poole, grimacing like a haddock eating mustard. Mrs Poole has long grey hair tied in a plait round her head. Bits of hair, dry and floaty, splay out at all angles so that her plait looks like a viper in a nest. She is fat with a big bottom, actually a vast, flat bottom that sways as she hoovers the sitting room and seems to have a life of its own. You always knew when Mrs P. had been, the house smelled of lavender polish and stale Hoover bags and there was the faintest whiff of armpits. I don’t know what my mother would do without her, even though she does smell of tinned tomato soup.
‘That stuff’ll give you wind,’ huffs Mrs P.
‘Actually, everything gives me wind.’
‘Like you needed to tell me that. I hear you aburpin’ an’ ablowin’ all the time. If your father was to hear those noises you make he’d ban you from drinking all that pop. Sometimes, I’m surprised you don’t go bang.’
‘Well, if I do, then you’ll just have to mop me up, won’t you.’
Cream soda never seems as cold СКАЧАТЬ