My mother, being French, liked to assert that everything French was the best in the world. Wine, for example. Champagne, Burgundy, Bordeaux. Foreign vineyards simply could not compete.
However, most of the time, in her family, she explained to me, only men drank. At mealtimes her father would pour himself a tumbler of red vin ordinaire (the sort that came with a plastic cap), while everyone else drank water. Only on special occasions, such as the cure arriving to share Sunday lunch, would a bottle of a good red be uncorked and the women given half a glass, and the children allowed just a sip to taste. The men drank as much as they wanted.
My strongwilled mother liked to repeat to me the tale of her rebellion. First of all she demanded the right to have a proper, full measure of decent wine with her food, on Sundays if not every day, not just a few drops mixed with water. She sniffed at the glass her father offered her and handed it back: this is corked. He stroked his moustache, laughed, and conceded: tu es une fille serieuse!
Next, she insisted on leaving home. She came to England as a teaching assistant just as the second world war broke out. She met my English father, who was serving in the army near the school in which she worked, fell in love, and stayed on. He persuaded her to try beer, and she taught him to appreciate French wine.
I was so much better off marrying an Englishman, she would conclude her story: he lets me do as I like. Don’t get involved with a Frenchman, darling, you’ll regret it if you do.
While I was growing up, she gave me three more pieces of advice.
The first was always to carry a corkscrew in my handbag. She taught French at a suburban London convent school, where the lay staff and teaching nuns liked to indulge in a little drop of something at the end of term, and it was her pride, when a search of the staffroom cupboards proved fruitless, to whip out her corkscrew and open the bottle to smiles all round.
The second was that if you were to drink white wine, only a very dry one would do, in fact only Muscadet. When she served cold poached mackerel with mayonnaise, or moules a la mariniere, or crab salad, or simply the fish and chips beloved of my father, a glass of nicely cold Muscadet formed the best possible accompaniment.
Her third piece of advice was always to buy the best quality of everything available, if you could afford it, or to save up for it if you couldn’t. A good solid corkscrew tucked into an elegant leather handbag, for example. Or, if your plate of fried sprats were to be accompanied by Muscadet, then only an excellent one- sur Lie- would do, from a vineyard with a solid reputation. Wine was a condiment; part of a meal. You drank it sparingly. Just one glass.
Mum’s attitude to the choice of men invoked similar abstinence: one husband was quite enough for any woman. She recommended picking a chap with a solid income, solid prospects, solid morals; oh, and you never kissed a man on the first date.
At Christmas in my childhood the two families got together, the French relatives coming over and mixing with all the English uncles and aunts and cousins. We’d have our dinner at mid-day, with a turkey and pudding, and then late in the afternoon a high tea, featuring glass jugs full of celery sticks to dip in salt, and dishes of shrimps with brown bread and butter, served with Muscadet for those who wanted it and beer for those who didn’t. Afterwards we’d play games.
One year, a certain game involved all the women sitting in a row behind a sheet, just their bare feet showing. The men had to guess whose feet were whose. If they got it wrong they had to pay a forfeit, usually involving a kiss. Next, the men took their turn to sit behind the sheet, only this time small holes were cut in it, to allow their noses to poke through, and the women had to guess whose nose was whose. More kissing ensued, more beer was drunk, and more Muscadet. My cousins and I sat watching and marvelling.
Later Mum kissed me goodnight. Her breath smelled pale green, golden, like ice-flowers and grass and straw. I minded being packed off to bed while the noise and laughter downstairs was still increasing and so to punish her I turned my head away. You stink of booze! She just smiled. Aha, so you’re getting a nose for wine, are you? She kissed me on the top of my head and tucked me in.
Overnight it snowed. Next morning, looking down from my frost-framed bedroom window, I saw that the empties had been put out, stacked next to the dustbin. Half buried by heaped-up crystals the short brown beer bottles showed their stumpy snouts. The longer necks of the Muscadet bottles stretched up, pale green, out of glittering whiteness. I wanted to lick their mouths, to find out what they tasted like. That was how you discovered the nature of things: you bit into them, you savoured them on your tongue.
Happy Christmases, those childhood ones; partly because we all accepted our places in the family and performed accordingly. The games turned everything topsy-turvy for one night only.
In my adolescence, however, Christmases became fraught: Mum and I began to argue.
Just as Mum had done, I felt compelled to rebel against my family in order to create my own life. I didn’t want to try for university: I wanted to go to catering college instead, to train as a chef. But I’ve already taught you to cook, Mum shouted: what more d’you need? And girls can’t be chefs! That’s a man’s job!
For a week I wouldn’t touch my supper. So she gave in.
The minute I left home and went off to catering college I forgot all Mum’s advice. It didn’t apply to me, anyway, did it? I was a student on a small grant. So I did not carry a handbag, let alone the elegant sort she recommended, preferring to stuff my possessions into my jacket pockets, and I did not require a corkscrew, since I did my drinking in pubs, and I had no need for a husband, since I took lovers: I kissed the student chefs I fancied just as soon as they let me.
Throughout my twenties Mum and I conducted a war, loving each other yet quarrelling bitterly, making up, then quarrelling again. I rarely went home for the family Christmases, finding them stifling and claustrophobic, crowded with my cousins’ babies and toddlers: all too much. I preferred to celebrate New Year, anyway, and did so with my friends: feasting and fireworks and whisky.
I mainly got work through an agency. I was often broke, just scraping by, living in one scruffy shared flat after another. As the years passed, I began to see how like Mum in some ways I was, and she commented that she admired my independent spirit. She came to rely on me, especially after my father had died, for conversations about all things French, for discussions of food and wine, and for a good fight when she needed one. By the time I was in my late thirties the rows had dwindled to ritual skirmishes; we’d call a truce then cook dinner together and enjoy it over a bottle of wine.
On my fortieth birthday, in early December, I was sent with some other chefs to cook for an office party whose managers had hired a warehouse space at the Elephant & Castle for the evening. Cheaper than fashionable Shoreditch; the kind of neighbourhood estate agents call vibrant.
The waiters and butlers had been provided by a separate catering firm. We were all strangers to one another with no time to say hello let alone chat; but we managed fine. Two teams, one on either side of the makeshift serving hatch; plates whizzing back and forth.
The clients sat on benches at trestle tables covered in industrial-sized sheets of brown tissue paper and were served pork pies and jellied eels and mash followed by jam roly-poly, together with beer in pewter tankards, and wine, red or white, in tumblers. I think it was all supposed to be very Dickensian and jolly, but the clients didn’t really appreciate the ambiance; they left unexpectedly early, to go on to a newly-opened club near Brick Lane.
We had an hour to wait before the cleaning team and our own management were due. Bored, we decided to break a few rules. In our kitchen corner, we chefs divvied up the leftovers. Someone shouted through to the waiters and butlers in the dining area: any one for jellied eel? They shouted back: no thanks! They were helping themselves to the unfinished wine. They invited us to come and share it.
A tall roll of unused brown tissue paper lolled against the wall. Clean sheets of paper. Nice clean sheets. White sheets. Suddenly I found myself describing to my colleagues the guessing games my family had played during that Christmas party long ago.
Someone turned down the lights, someone else pulled out two of the benches and set them end to end in the middle of the floor, a third person unrolled a length of brown tissue paper, a fourth person slashed holes in it. We decided to reinvent my childhood game: we would play it with mouths. Two teams: waiters and butlers versus chefs and sous chefs, one person at a time doing the guessing. Forfeits to be applied if you got the names wrong.
They made me go first.
Impossible, of course. I’d hardly glimpsed the waiters and butlers; how could I recognize their mouths let alone know their names?
I looked along the row of sheeted bodies.
The sheet twitched.
A big rosy mouth, plump and inviting. Quivering, as though it wanted to smile or laugh.
How did you find out about someone? In my childhood I’d wanted to taste the whole world. Accordingly I kissed this lovely mouth. Lips tasting somehow pale green, golden, a scent of grass and straw and ice-flowers. I said: you’ve been drinking Muscadet.
When we’d all had a go, and the sheet was dropped, revealing the faces, I saw her swept-back glossy black hair, lustrous and thick, her dark blue eyes, her black lashes and black brows. I gazed at her and she gazed at me.
You’ll have to pay a forfeit, she said: another kiss.
Her French accent was utterly distinct and powerfully charming. Her butler’s outfit, complete with black bow tie, was chic comme chez chic. I told her it was my birthday and she kissed me again. Later she walked me home, then I walked her home, then she walked me home again. The following night we did the same. On the third night she came in. She stayed.
She’d always wanted to work as a butler, she told me, but it was that much harder in France, where the job was still thought of as one for men. Living in the UK she felt much freer.
Later that month we invited my mother to spend New Year’s Eve with us. She accepted. She opened her elegant handbag, drew out two corkscrews. One each. We ate oysters and drank excellent Muscadet.