Vinegar Soup Read online

  ‘Finished?’ she said, after a long time.

  ‘Finished,’ he sighed. He squeezed the towel. A trickle of water rolled down her leg and collected in beads between her toes.

  Someone rang the bell.

  ‘It’s the police!’ gasped Veronica and pulled down her skirt.

  ‘It’s Frank,’ said Gilbert, glancing at his watch. He groaned, stood up and went to unlock the door.

  Frank marched impatiently into the dining room with his arms full of library books. ‘You’re closed,’ he said in surprise.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gilbert. ‘Watch your step – the floor is wet.’

  Frank slithered through a puddle, skated across the room, hit the counter and ran upstairs. A few moments later he was standing in the kitchen.

  It was too quiet. Gilbert was sitting at the table, pretending to fill ketchup bottles. Veronica sat beside him, eating a stale slice of chocolate cake. A cupboard creaked on its hinges. A fly prickled across the ceiling.

  ‘What happened?’ demanded Frank. He stared at Gilbert and scowled.

  ‘I had a little accident,’ said Veronica, but her words were muffled with cake.

  ‘What?’ said Frank.

  ‘A little accident!’ shouted Gilbert.

  ‘What?’ insisted Frank.

  ‘I fell down,’ said Veronica, avoiding his eyes.

  ‘Where?’ said Frank.

  ‘Go and ask Olive if she wants some milk,’ said Gilbert, pointing at the door with his bottle of ketchup.

  ‘She’s still asleep,’ said Frank.

  This scrap of news seemed to galvanise Gilbert. He banged the table with his bottle. ‘It’s time to get back to work,’ he shouted. He pushed back his chair and lumbered into the dining room. Veronica jumped up and followed him. Frank stood alone in the kitchen and stared at the stockings draped on the back of her chair.

  Gilbert never told Olive about the fight. It was a secret to share with Veronica. In the days that followed he chased her around the cafe, trotting at her heels like a foolish old dog. He wore clean shirts and worked every day in his best Sunday shoes. He baked elaborate pastries which he wrapped in ribbon and left in her room. He was bewitched. When she laughed he glowed like a lantern. When she frowned the light was snuffed from his face. The days became dreams through which Veronica beckoned him with a glance, a smile and a flick of her skirt. One night, burning with fever, he called out her name in his sleep.

  ‘Wake up!’ screamed Olive. ‘Wake up!’ She kicked off the blankets and pulled him out of his dreams by his ears.

  Gilbert, eyes closed, half-unconscious, leaned across and tried to nurse her in his arms. ‘What is it?’ he mumbled. ‘It’s only a nightmare… I’ll fix your pillow… go back to sleep.’ He sat up in bed and searched for the bedclothes.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ howled Olive, shrinking from the sweep of his hands.

  Gilbert opened his eyes and blinked. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You’ve been fiddling,’ sobbed Olive. She seized the pillow and pulled it roughly into her arms.

  ‘I haven’t touched you,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘No,’ she howled. ‘You’ve fiddled with that waitress.’

  ‘Veronica?’

  ‘Yes,’ sobbed Olive. ‘Veronica.’ She trapped the pillow with her elbows and knees and buried her face in the feathers.

  ‘Fiddled?’

  ‘How could you do it? Sleeping next to me and your head full of thoughts. Grunting all night like a dog. Tossing and turning with a mucky grin on your face. How could you do it?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ soothed Gilbert. ‘I haven’t touched Veronica. And what makes you think she’d take an interest in me? She’s only sixteen.’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  ‘She’s only seventeen. She wouldn’t want an old rascal with a big belly and no teeth.’

  ‘You’ve still got your teeth,’ said Olive, flustered.

  ‘I look after them.’

  ‘Exactly,’ sniffed Olive. ‘It’s time you started to act your age. I don’t blame the child. I blame you. You’re as bad as my father – he chased women. It was idolatry killed my mother.’ The memory made her shake her head and burst into tears. She punched the pillow until it shrank with a gasp between her thighs.

  ‘You’ve been dreaming,’ said Gilbert gently. He tried to reach out and stroke Olive’s neck.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ she howled. ‘You give me the willies!’

  ‘Olive…’

  ‘Go away! Leave me alone! Where are you going?’

  Gilbert was on the floor and groping for his slippers. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he growled.

  He took a blanket from the floor, dragged it downstairs and made a bed beneath the counter. No one tried to stop him. He lay down among the crates and bottles and glared into the gloom. What was he doing here? Why had he waited? Why had he wasted? So many years at the Hercules Cafe. Time past. Count the winters. What happened? Nothing happened. Sam Pilchard kept walking. France, Spain, across Gibraltar and down the coast of Africa. He worked for a time in Nigeria. Letters from Lagos. Onionskin paper. Settled at last in Bilharzia.

  Write him a letter. Don’t wait. Buy a ticket and join him. Count the winters. Fifty years old. How much more time to serve? Ten. Twenty with good behaviour. Time to look after yourself. A man should begin with a good night’s sleep.

  He wrapped the blanket over his shoulders and shuffled sadly to the window. Out there, beyond the Hercules Cafe, far away, past the endless rain, there are pygmies hidden from the night among the stems of giant orchids, faces painted with bone-ash and blood. Serpents coiled around the knees of sleeping elephants, baboons dancing, wild dogs screaming, panthers grinning at the moon. Girls prancing naked to the sound of drums, breasts bouncing, buttocks swelling, feet stamping the red dust. Out there, somewhere, Sam Pilchard, happy, drunk and fat as a walrus, asleep in a heathen’s hammock.

  It’s cold. Dark. Cruel draught under the door. Rattles the window. This blanket smells funny. What is it? Mothballs. A man can’t sleep like a dog on the floor.

  At dawn he crept back into the bedroom, dressed himself in his one good suit and hauled a suitcase from the wardrobe. Shirts, shoes, socks and vests. Olive woke to find him packing recipe books.

  ‘Where do you think you’re going?’ she demanded. Her face looked crumpled and her eyes were pink with sleep.

  ‘I’ve finished,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m going away.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Who cares?’ he shrugged. No time to argue. Slip away before Frank wakes up and asks questions. Don’t look back. Boat train from Victoria Station. Find a bed in Paris tonight.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m going to look for Sam Pilchard.’ He snapped the locks on the suitcase and carried it to the door.

  ‘But you haven’t seen him for years. You don’t know where he lives – he could be dead,’ she said, scowling at him suspiciously.

  ‘I’ll find him,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘You won’t find him in those slippers,’ said Olive. Gilbert swore and searched for his shoes. When he reached the stairs Frank and Veronica were waiting for him.

  ‘Are you going away?’ said Frank. He was wearing baggy striped pyjamas that hid his hands and feet. He raised an arm and wagged his sleeve at the suitcase. He looked baffled.

  ‘Yes,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘When will you be back?’ said Veronica, wrapped in a church-white dressing gown.

  ‘I don’t know… I might be gone for a long time,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Take me with you,’ urged Frank.

  Gilbert looked down at the boy and his heart began to break. The tears bubbled into his eyes and blinded him. He sniffed and wiped a hand across his face. He wanted to snatch Frank into his arms and kiss him, find his hat and steal him away.

  ‘Sorry, Frank. You have to stay and look after Olive. When I settle down I’ll write to you and then, perhaps, you can come out and visit me.’

  ‘Whe
re are you going?’

  ‘Africa,’ said Gilbert, pulling at his suitcase.

  ‘Africa?’ hooted Veronica. ‘How are you going to Africa?’

  ‘Walking,’ shouted Gilbert as he hurried downstairs.

  ‘Good riddance!’ screamed Olive.

  ‘Stop him!’ pleaded Frank.

  But Gilbert was already marching through the dining room towards the shuttered door and the street. ‘Too late,’ said Olive, as they heard the door slam behind him.

  ‘How are we going to manage without him?’ asked Veronica.

  ‘You’ll learn,’ sighed Olive.

  Frank couldn’t believe it. He knew he was dreaming. He pattered up and down the corridor, waiting to wake up in the warmth and safety of his own bed.

  ‘I’ll look after the kitchen,’ announced Olive. ‘Frank can help at the counter. Go and get dressed and we’ll sort everything out.’

  The cafe opened as if nothing had happened. Olive worked in the kitchen, spoiling soup, burning bacon and slicing her fingers into sandwiches. Veronica stalked the dining room. Frank sat under the counter and refused to come out. A strange silence hung over them. Veronica haunted the tables, scribbling orders and juggling plates with a look of absolute doom on her face. Frank was too shocked to speak or even pick at the plate of broken biscuits that Olive put down for him. Olive, alone, seemed unconcerned by Gilbert’s escape. She crashed and smashed around the kitchen as if the poor man had never existed. Frank was furious.

  ‘When will he come home?’ he demanded whenever Olive passed the counter. He didn’t understand what had happened to Gilbert but he felt that Olive was somehow to blame.

  ‘I don’t know, Frank,’ she snapped back at him. ‘Forget about it and do some work.’

  Frank sat and sulked. He knew Gilbert wouldn’t want to leave him alone with Olive. He would send a message, a signal, and find a way to help him escape. He had a notion that Gilbert’s sudden departure was part of some marvellous secret plan. At any moment someone would walk into the cafe, search him out and press a scrap of paper into his hand. Follow this man. Eat this message. Gilbert. But at four in the afternoon and still no word he began to grow desperate.

  ‘Let’s go and look for him,’ he whispered to Veronica.

  ‘He’s gone to Africa,’ she said.

  ‘But he’s walking,’ said Frank. ‘He can’t be far away.’

  Veronica bent down and stroked his face. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered and kissed him.

  That night they gathered at the kitchen table to eat burnt hamburger. Olive remained unrepentant but she looked tired. Her ankles were swollen and she had managed to slash a thumb. The rag she had used to bind the wound was oozing soup and gravy. In a few days she would be swaddled in dirty bandages.

  ‘What happens if he never comes back?’ complained Frank as he crunched morosely on his hamburger. ‘What happens if he gets murdered in Africa and nobody finds him and we wait and wait for years because we haven’t heard about it?’ The tears were brimming in his eyes. He began to choke. Veronica slapped his shoulders.

  ‘Oh, shut up, Frank!’ shouted Olive. ‘I don’t care what happens to him. He’s not going to Africa. It’s all a pigment of his imagination. I’ve had enough of the silly old devil. I wouldn’t have him back if he came crawling through that door on his hands and knees. And it’s time you were in bed. I want some help tomorrow.’

  Frank went to bed but he couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking about Gilbert walking down the street to Africa. It didn’t make sense. He hadn’t taken his frying pan. He must be in trouble. Something must be wrong. If he hadn’t returned by morning he would have to go out and find him.

  Gilbert came home at midnight. He was drunk. He had lost his suitcase. He managed to unlock the cafe, stagger into the dining room and collapse among the tables. There was a crash of sugar bowls. Olive and Veronica flew down the stairs in a moment, their faces mad with moonlight, their dressing gowns open and beating like wings. They dragged him into the kitchen, pulled off his clothes, one, two, three, wrapped him in blankets and left him to sleep on the kitchen floor.

  ‘Welcome home,’ whispered Frank in the dark, smiled and fell asleep.

  6

  That summer Gilbert repainted the Hercules Cafe. He painted the window frames blue. He wrote Delicious Hot or Cold, on the glass, in thick, black letters and edged the words in gold. He scoured the drainpipes, cleaned out the gutters and changed the locks on the door. When he had finished with the view from the street he mounted an attack on the dining room. He painted the chairs red and turned the tables green with a cheap and evil-smelling paint that refused to dry and marked his customers for life. He whitewashed the ceiling and scrubbed the walls as if he were trying to scratch through to the sunlight.

  At night Olive watched him prowl the house, planning assaults on the furniture. He knocked down cupboards and bathroom cabinets, built loose shelves and tilting wardrobes, raised floors, lowered ceilings, and turned the doors around on their hinges.

  ‘You’ll do yourself a mischief,’ she warned him.

  But Gilbert snorted, swung his hammer and continued to rebuild the scenery. If you can’t change your life change the wallpaper. Build your own castle. Every man a king in his own backyard.

  ‘You’ll cut off your fingers,’ said Frank as he watched Gilbert hack at a length of skirting board with a long, blue chisel.

  ‘They’ll grow again,’ said Gilbert cheerfully.

  ‘That shelf is crooked,’ said Veronica, squinting over his shoulder as he struggled to engage the final screw in a mess of crumbling plaster.

  ‘Nothing wrong with the shelf,’ said Gilbert. ‘I blame the wall.’ He made mistakes but they didn’t worry him. If a shelf was crooked or a cupboard twisted he was happy to knock it down and start again.

  It was a puzzle to Frank how a man who fried hamburgers in a kitchen all day found the strength to work around the house at night. And Gilbert never stopped working. Long after midnight, when Olive was safe and snoring under the bedclothes, when Veronica was soaking in the bath, when the cafe was empty and only cats roamed the dark and silent streets, Frank would go downstairs to check the doors and find Gilbert on his hands and knees in the dining room, painting a box or building a bench. Then they would sit together drinking coffee and talk about the world. Gilbert would smile and yawn until his eyelids drooped and his chin sank slowly against his chest. But Frank could never persuade him to put down his tools and rest. It was a mystery how the man found the time to sleep.

  The answer was simple. Gilbert didn’t sleep. Olive took to her bed without him and he was already working in the kitchen before she was awake. Sometimes his pillows were rumpled but often they remained untouched. If Gilbert ever closed his eyes she never caught him. She scolded him for his neglect but she was happy to be left alone. It seemed they had reached an understanding and she was thankful for it. No more monkey business with those great hands everywhere pinching and pushing birthdays and Christmas any excuse and you wake to him moaning and trying to feel you under your nightdress never so much as a please or thank you enough to turn a woman’s stomach it can’t be healthy so much poking despite what they say on the television I’m too old for all that nonsense and whatever happened to soften his sausage thank the Lord and don’t ask questions.

  Gilbert continued to hammer out his frustrations and gradually his work improved. Doors stopped sticking. Floors stopped creaking. Varnishes dried and screws retained their threads. Success gave him confidence and that made him ambitious. At the beginning of November and before anyone could stop him he moved the ovens, knocked down the larder and started to rebuild the kitchen.

  The customers sat at tables covered in rubble and honked complaints above the sound of the sledgehammer. The soup was peppered with nails. The eggs were scrambled with plaster flakes. Olive took fright.

  ‘They don’t eat – we don’t eat,’ she shouted, searching for Gilbert through a haze of brick dust.

/>   ‘Patience,’ he roared. ‘I’ll soon be finished.’

  He liked to boast that the Hercules Cafe had remained open throughout the alterations and it was true, although for nearly a fortnight they had served nothing but coffee and Veronica’s toast. No one complained. The toast was such a success that when the kitchen was ready for business again nobody wanted a proper cooked meal. Gilbert blamed the dining room.

  ‘They can’t see what’s cooking,’ he concluded. ‘We’ve got to work on their appetites.’

  ‘What’s wrong with my toast?’ said Veronica sharply. She was proud of her work and pleased she had made Gilbert jealous.

  ‘There’s no money in toast,’ explained Gilbert. ‘If we want to succeed we’ve got to make them feel really hungry.’

  ‘They can look at the blackboard,’ said Olive. She stared mournfully at the board behind the counter.

  Sink Your Teeth in the Famous Hercules Hamburger.

  ‘That’s no good,’ growled Gilbert.

  ‘What’s wrong with my board?’ said Frank. He had spent hours composing the message in a long and complicated scrawl of red and blue chalks. He thought it was rather good.

  ‘Most of the buggers can’t read their own names!’ shouted Gilbert.

  ‘There’s no need to fly off the angle,’ said Olive.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Veronica. ‘You’ve got to make ’em hungry. At the Heavy Hamburger they used to have a giant revolving hamburger in the window. A big, fat bastard running with ketchup and cheese. At night it used to light up and swell and throb and make a pathetic little squelching noise. People couldn’t believe it. That hamburger used to hypnotise ’em. They walked into the place with their mouths open and we used to stuff ’em with food. Easy.’

  ‘You can’t force the food down their throats,’ argued Olive.

  ‘But you’ve got to show them what’s cooking,’ insisted Gilbert.

  ‘You mean you’re going to carry your frying pan to their tables,’ scowled Olive, slapping her apron.

  ‘No. But instead of letting them just sit there, picking their noses and watching their coffee grow cold, we’ll show them the food.’ He marched across the room, waved his hands at the counter and sketched an imaginary mountain of food. ‘A big display. They’ll walk into the place, sit down and there’ll be a big display staring at them. They’ll soon get the idea.’ He stared around the dining room, rubbed his head and grinned.