Next to the kitchen was a pantry, its shelves filled with canned and packaged and bottled goods. A deep freeze muttered and clicked in one corner. We wouldn’t starve, at any rate. No, we wouldn’t starve . . .
The deep freeze was packed to the brim. Thoughtfully I hefted a ten-pound roast, and those suppressed impulses stirred anew. They weren’t violent impulses – I was not contemplating a murderous assault on Max with a frozen rump roast. I didn’t need to resort to esoteric blunt instruments; the house and grounds abounded in large, hard, lumpy objects. I had no intention of getting that close to Max or any of his boys.
I put the roast back into the freezer and opened the fridge. The signs of clumsy foraging were only too evident; the food was all jumbled around, and some oaf had tipped over a jar of jam, which had leaked over two shelves before forming a sticky puddle on the bottom. Ancestral urges won. I cleaned up the mess. When I started to straighten the shelves, the first thing I found was a large fish. The layers of plastic wrap encasing it did not dull the hostile gleam of its bulging eyes. Pikes are not your ordinary placid fish – they are predators, and look as mean as they act.
The fish had been cleaned and scaled, and the gills removed, so I assumed it was supposed to be served with the head intact. I had never eaten pike, but my grandmother used to bake trout that way, brushed with beaten egg and sprinkled with breadcrumbs.
Well, why not? I had nothing better to do at the moment.
A short time later the place was – not spotless, I’ll never be a good Swedish housewife. But it was clean. The dishes were washed and stacked, the floor swept, and attractive smells were seeping out of the saucepans that bubbled on the stove. The pike was in one of the ovens, sans its head. Mrs Andersson and Granny wouldn’t have approved of decapitation, but I can’t stand those boiled white eyes looking up at me from a plate. When I opened the other oven, a heavenly odour almost cancelled out the stench of fish. The feeezer had contained stacks of pies, tarts, and pastries. All had been neatly labelled, but since my Swedish is minimal, the labels were of no use to me. This pie looked, and smelled, like red raspberry.
The first to respond to the smell of cooking was the cat. I had been wondering where it was; that cosy little sitting area absolutely demanded a fat, purring cat. it came in through the window, startling me so that I dropped the spoon I held – a big, fluffy tabby, its forehead marked with the customary black
While the cat wove in and out around my feet, purring hoarsely, I found its bowl in a cupboard, and a can of cat food, identifiable by the picture on the label, in the pantry. He (his sex was obvious, as soon as he turned his back) tucked into the food with that accusing air of imminent starvation typical of cats. I wasn’t too worried about him. The island probably abounded in small rodents, and he had already demonstrated a commendable caution in approaching strangers. His chances of survival were probably better than mine.
When the kitchen door opened, he scuttled for cover under the table. He didn’t move fast enough.
‘What a touching tableau,’ John exclaimed. ‘The cook and her cat. Hello, cat.’ He squatted. After a moment a suspicious whiskered face appeared. The two of them contemplated one another in solemn silence for a time. Then, with a kind of feline shrug, the cat gave John an unmistakable cold shoulder and returned to its dinner.
‘Crushed again,’ said John. Rising, he sniffed appreciatively. ‘What’s for dinner?’
‘Your dinner? I haven’t the faintest idea.’
John raised one eyebrow – a trick of his I particularly abhor – and wandered into the pantry I lifted the lid of a skillet. Whole onions, cooked in butter and brown sugar, simmered in half a cup of beef stock. John came back empty-handed but unperturbed. Whistling, he opened the refrigerator door and draped himself over it, staring into the fridge in that maddening way men and children have, as if they expected a seven-course meal to materialize on a shelf. I almost snapped, ‘Close that door.’ I must have heard Mother say it a thousand times.
To my chagrin John found the food I had pushed to the back of the shelves. I suppose Mrs Andersson had taken it out of the freezer the night before. Murmuring affectionately, he removed a bowl of kidneys, a box of mushrooms, and the butter.
‘Lend me the knife,’ he said abstractedly.
I borrowed it back a little later to slice cabbage. John stirred things into his sauteed kidneys and mushrooms and fed scraps to the cat. It had transferred its fickle affections to John, and ignored me completely. obviously it preferred kidney to canned food.
It went out the window in a long, flowing leap when the others started to file in. They stood around watching and sniffing hopefully. I drained my potatoes and put them through the ricer, added butter and a generous amount of hot milk. John tossed linguine into a big pot of boiling water. Everybody else drooled.
Leif was the last to appear. He had showered and changed, and he looked like the kind of man a wife hopes will come home for dinner. I gave him a melting smile and waved my spoon toward the rocking chairs. ‘Sit down, Leif. Supper will be ready in a few minutes.’
With a broadening grin he took in the two chairs, the table with two place settings, and the ring of hungry faces. ‘I will get us something to drink,’ he said.
I suggested a light Riesling, to go with the fish, and told him where to find it in the pantry. As he opened the bottle, I met Max’s narrowed eyes.
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t trust anything I cooked,’ I said guilelessly.
‘I have enough for everyone,’ John announced, sloshing his linguine into a colander. Max turned his hostile stare onto John, who said impatiently, ‘I don’t give a damn whether you eat it or not, Max, but it surely must have occurred to you, as it has to Dr Bliss, that poisoning is an extremely slow and chancy method of incapacitating a large-sized group.’
Max thought this over, and as the truth of it dawned, his cheeks turned the colour of fresh liver. ‘But you were the one,’ he began.
‘I just threw that idea out to liven things up,’ John said. ‘Have a kidney.’
The pike was delicious. I guess the kidneys were too. The gang polished them off and gobbled up everything else in sight, including the remains of the pike, which I magnanimously contributed. Fish is no good the second day anyway.
‘Oh, dear,’ John said, surveying the scraped plates. ‘I ought to have made meatballs too. Never mind, we’ll have them tomorrow night.’
This hopeful suggestion hung twitching and dying in midair like a hooked fish. Max grunted and pushed his chair from the table.
‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ I said, as the rest followed suit. ‘I cleaned up one mess today. It’s your turn for KP.’
I honestly didn’t expect this order would be obeyed, but after a moment Max nodded. ‘Sir John will oblige.’
‘Sir John’ looked mutinous. ‘It’s not fair. I did the cooking.’
For a minute it appeared the situation was going to develop into one of those all too familiar family squabbles, like the ones my brothers and I had every day of our lives. ‘It’s your turn tonight. No, it’s not, I did it yesterday. You did not, I traded with you Tuesday . . .’
Max banged his fist on the table. ‘Hans.’
‘
I decided to get out and leave them to settle it. The argument broke out again as soon as I left the room. Somehow I was not surprised to see that John had also slipped out.
‘Shall we take a little stroll in the garden?’ he asked.
‘That’s what I had in mind. A solitary stroll.’
Trotting to keep up with me, he remarked, ‘I sense a specific source of annoyance, over and above the general vexation I seem to arouse in you. You’d better tell me what it is; we can’t work efficiently while you are nursing some fancied grudge.’
I spun around. He ground to a halt and ducked, just in time to avoid the fist I shook under his nose. ‘Annoyance? I never had a very exaggerated opinion of your morals, but after seeing the end product of your latest caper I am not inclined to add myself to the list of victims.’
‘Ah – Georg.’
‘Georg,’ I agreed.
‘I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I told you I was not responsible.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
