The Devil's Larder

2

‘THIS IS FOR the angel,’ Grandma used to say, tearing off a strip of dough for me to take into the yard. ‘Leave it somewhere he can see.’ Sometimes I left the strip on the street wall. Sometimes I draped it on the washing line. Sometimes I put it on the outside windowsill and hid behind the kitchen curtain beads to spot the angel in the yard.

Grandma said I wouldn’t catch him eating the dough. ‘That’s only greedy birds,’ she explained. ‘The angel comes to kiss it, that’s all, otherwise my bread won’t rise.’ And, sure enough, I often saw the birds come down to peck at our strip of dough. And, sure enough, my grandma’s bread would nearly always rise. When it didn’t she would say the birds had eaten the strip of dough before the angel had had a chance to prove it with his kisses.

But I never saw an angel on the windowsill. Not even once.

The thought of angels in the yard terrified my girls and so, when we made bread — in that same house, but thirty years along the line and Grandma long since gone to kiss the angels herself — I used to say, ‘To make good bread I need an angel in the kitchen. Who’ll be the angel today and kiss the dough?’ My girls would race to kiss the dough. I’ll not forget the smudge of flour on their lips. Or how, when I had taken the scarred and toppling loaves of bread out of the oven, they’d demand a strip of hot crust to dip into the honey pot or wipe around the corners of the pâté jar. This was their angel pay. This was their reward for kissing.

Now there are no angels in the kitchen. I’m the grandma and the girls are living far too far away to visit me more than once or twice a year. I’m too stiff and out of sorts to visit them myself unless I’m taken in a car, but I don’t like to ask. I stay in touch with everyone by phone. I keep as busy as I can. I clean, although the house is far too large for me. I walk, when it is warm and dry, down to the port and to the shops and take a taxi back. I keep plants in the yard in pots and on the windowsills. I eat mostly out of a can or frozen meals or packet soups.

This afternoon, I thought I’d fill my time by making bread. My old wrists ache with tugging at the dough of what, I think, will have to be my final loaves. I tore a strip off for good luck, kissed it, put it on the window-sill. I warmed the oven, greased the tins, and put the dough to cook on the highest shelf. Now I’m waiting at the window, with a smudge of flour on my lips and with the smell of baking bread rising through the house, for the yard to fill and darken with the shadows and the wings.