The Devil's Larder

40

OUR CONCIERGE has been away. A short break from sitting in other people’s draughts for a living, she explains. She’s spent a week at Anderbac Falls, where she went on her vacations as a child. She’s come back with the benefits burned on her face. The weather was fabulous, the Falls miraculously unchanged in all those years, and to top it all she’s forged what might prove to be a lasting friendship with a man. ‘A widower,’ she adds. The word — she almost whispers it — bestows decorum, as if his marriage and bereavement put this new liaison beyond reproach. So, nothing like the noisy, inappropriate affair she’s been conducting with the janitor — ‘a bachelor’ — in his apartment on the seventh floor.

Her widower is charming and presentable, she explains, well read, well heeled, well dressed, though somewhat overweight. And he is kind. ‘I’m torn up over him.’ They’d picnicked together in the woods, had shared a table at a restaurant, and on their final night together had jointly cooked a meal in the little chalet which he’d been renting in the grounds of her hotel.

‘He never tried to touch me even once, you know,’ she says, to illustrate how genuine her new suitor had proved himself to be. ‘Though if he’d tried he might have found me willing. I’d drunk a half a bottle of his wine. And he was so respectable — and such a cook! — that I would have liked to show my gratitude. But still he said his wife was present in the room. They’d rented that same chalet the year before she died. He said that I was sitting in her chair.’

You have to interrupt the concierge. If you don’t, she’ll wrap you up in conversation until (my mother’s phrase) your bladder turns to stone. Before you realize it the taxi driver’s tired of waiting, or the shop has closed, or your appointment has been missed, or the slow stew you’ve left to cook upstairs has been reduced to clinker, ash and smoke. And so I have to turn towards the street and say, ‘I’ll catch up with the details when I get back, but now I really have to go.’

I’ve looked down at my watch and pulled a face. I’ve said ‘Oh, dear. .’ to show how late I am. Already I have reached the double door, but I feel as if I’ve been too hurried, impolite. I turn and add ‘Well, good for you. .’ and then, once I’m halfway down the steps and have almost broken free, ‘I’m stopping off at George’s tonight, if you want anything. .’

‘Why not? I owe myself a little treat. Can you bring two cheese pies? And if he has those baby macaroons, then six.’

I ALMOST get back to the block this evening without her cheese pies and her macaroons. It’s been an awkward day, too argumentative, too rushed. My head’s a sieve. I don’t need shopping for myself. There’s cold meat in the fridge to finish off and then I’d like to curl up in my bed and sleep. It’s not until I reach the baking smell that I remember our concierge’s ‘little treat’. I get the taxi driver to circle the square and wait for me at George’s. The driver hands me some change and asks me to bring him ‘something hot’. Nobody can be downwind of George’s and not want food.

I think that I’m in luck. The concierge is not behind her desk. But by the time I’ve pushed her bag of food beneath the metal grille, she’s at my side. We used to have a little dog called Plum, before my husband left. Just like the concierge. You couldn’t move, you couldn’t sneak yourself a tiny piece of cake, you couldn’t slip out of the house, without the dog appearing at your side.

The concierge is keen to carry on where we left off. ‘My widower could outbake George,’ she says. A little romance suits her well. I see she’s had her hair in curlers and changed out of her ‘mopping slacks’ into her going-out dress. It’s no longer difficult to picture her in an Anderbac restaurant, across the table from an attentive man.

I say, ‘Excuse me if I hurry off. My head’s on fire. .’ Already I have reached the elevator door.

‘Hold on for me,’ she says. ‘I’m coming up.’ This is a pretext, I am sure, for pursuing our conversation. But I’m resigned to her, and oddly touched, despite my throbbing head. For it is touching when a woman of her age finds this late blessing in her life.

And so I have to wait five minutes with my foot holding the door until she joins me in the elevator, with her keys and carry bag.

‘When will you have the chance to see this man again?’ I ask.

‘Next year,’ she says.

‘Next year?’

‘Same week, same place.’

‘You might not like him in a year.’

‘That doesn’t worry me. We both like the falls at Anderbac and they won’t change. We thought it would be safest if we met up there again. A year soon goes. We’ll write. We’ll phone. We’re not young kids. If you’re attracted to a man at my age, then what’s the hurry? It’ll be something to look forward to. What do they say? It’s better to travel than arrive.’

At last she pulls shut the elevator door and I can head towards my room, my cold meat supper and my bed.

‘What floor?’ I ask, my finger hovering above the ten buttons of the console.

She smiles. I think that beneath the suntan and the make-up she almost blushes. ‘The seventh floor,’ she says. She bites her lower lip — there’s lipstick on her teeth — and looks down at her shoes.

It’s not until we reach the janitor’s floor — and his two dogs are already barking at his door in greeting — that she confides in me. She’s backing out into the hall, into the early evening smell of other people’s meals, pushing the elevator door with her bottom. She opens up her carry bag to let me see inside. A bottle of wine. The paper packet full of treats that I have brought from George’s: two pies, six baby macaroons.

‘You spoil that man,’ I say.

‘Well, yes, perhaps I do. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so cheap. A macaroon’s too good for him.’ She tips her head towards the undeserving janitor, towards his raucous dogs. ‘You wouldn’t say this one’s well read, well dressed, well heeled! You wouldn’t say this one won’t try to get his hands on me.’ She backs away into the dark. ‘But, still, a woman’s got to eat if she’s to keep herself in trim. And no one wants to eat alone, not when your heart’s torn up like mine.’