Ingredients: 4 ounces butter, 1ounce cornflour, 2 ounces icing sugar, 4 ounces plain flour, vanilla essence, pinch salt.
She lets him lick the bowl while the biscuits cook in the oven. There’s just enough of the sickly sweet mixture for him to swirl round and round then taste from the wooden spoon. He puts his tongue into the bowl as she checks the oven. The kitchen is a warm comfortable womb on these afternoons. From the shelf the old brown Bakelite radio announces in its strident voice —‘Portia faces life — for those who are in love and for all those who can remember.’
He wonders if this Portia is like his mother.
The wood stove purrs like a contented cat. She lifts its circular cast-iron lids to drop in mallee roots from the firebox, clanging the lids down with the little metal tool. Then stands at the table and boxes the pastry around the big brown bowl, pulling it back and forth like a concertina, coaxing its sticky shiny bulk into soft plasticine sheets onto the floured board ready for steak and kidney pies.
Afternoon sunlight creeps up the leadlight door, then fingers its way slowly in red and blue shimmers along the wall of the passageway toward the front bedrooms.
Method: Cream together the butter and icing sugar, add vanilla essence. Using the back of a wooden spoon, work in the sifted icing sugar, cornflour and salt. Roll into small balls between the palms of the hands, place on a greased tray; flatten each with the back of a fork.
Cook in the upper half of a moderately hot oven (375deg.F) for 10-15 minutes until golden.
They arrive at the beach for afternoon tea. Knobbly hands in her lap.
‘Have I been here before?’ she asks.
‘It’s where you grew up,’ he says and helps her from the car.
She heaves herself off the seat, grasps her walking frame, then sprints like a runner off the blocks, as she always does.
‘Hang on Mum, not so fast.’
He’s brought Melting Moments and pastries already oozing cream and jam into the cardboard container. She eats some Melting Moments and a pastry. Now there’s cream on the corners of her mouth and as he wipes it off, she asks for another cup of tea. He hopes she won’t need to use the public toilets — they were so filthy last time.
They sit side by side and gaze silently toward the flat pewter sea of the Gulf. She tells him again about the night the jetty blew down.
‘Didn’t a chimney blow down on the house too?’
‘No, dear I don’t think so. Dad wouldn’t have let that happen.’
He wonders if she means her dad or his but doesn’t ask.
‘Dear, can I have another cup of tea?’
Perhaps he should take her home, just to be on the safe side. There’s icing sugar sprinkled down the front of her blue cardigan.
Filling: Combine 2 tablespoons icing sugar, 1 dessertspoon condensed milk and lemon juice.
The only way to feed her now is with the nasal gastric tube. To make sure it’s in place, two orderlies take her on a trolley for an x-ray, and bump the doorway of her room. ‘Jesus, be careful can’t you,’ he shouts.
Later, when the nurses leave, she wrenches out the tube. He is surprised at the strength in those purple-veined hands, now curled like a pair of sleeping pigeons on the pillow. They insert a tube again and when nobody is looking, she pulls it out.
He tries to appear calm and explain to the doctor that she is dying. Why am I the one to do this, he wonders?
In the end, she dies alone after he has gone home for a quick Chinese takeaway—chicken and vegetables with steamed rice.
Serving: When cold, join with filling. The children will love these as a special treat.
He finds the recipe book amongst what remains of her belongings; everything fits into two cardboard boxes. Recipes tumble from the pages—steamed fruit puddings from the Women’s Weekly, a fruitcake recipe, handwritten by her friend Delia and there’s that toffee recipe she made for every school fete. An avalanche of boiling jams, baking cakes and biscuits, with that wonderful smell of home cooking rising from the pages.
He sees her now in
3 comments:
Very Poignant.
cV
From a small domestic moment, memory unfolds of a young mother and child to the ageing and death of the mother. This is the language of poetry; rhythmic, visual and distilled. It is a loving tribute to a mother, captured in the everyday of the kitchen, the woodstove and the simple pleasures of making biscuits and pies. But there is nothing ordinary about this story. It beautifully evokes familial relationships in Australia post WW2. It is also about memory, its comforts, how we preserve it in words, and the confusion and grief at its loss. A truly "Malouf moment". Yvonne
Very beautiful and evocative writing, quite moving.
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