“Do we want fish?”
“Just as you wish’m,” she said, standing still in front of me.
She made no attempt to suggest anything.
“I’ll come,” said I, “and see him myself.”
I found a pert-looking male child writing his name on the pantry window-sill and whistling.
“What fish have you got?” I asked.
“Plaiceakecoddensole,” he replied, eyeing me up and down.
I ordered something—anything to convey the idea that I spoke with knowledge and deliberation. The greengrocer behaved like an uncle, and told me that, whatever else I went without, a nice cauliflower was a thing I should never regret buying. I expected him to add that it would last a lifetime and clean again as good as new.
During this time Ruth had disappeared into the back kitchen, whence she brought what at first I took to be a bucket of castor-oil and a dead rabbit. With the rabbit (which turned out to be her favourite dishcloth) she then deluged the table from the contents of the bucket, and the kitchen was filled with a warm smell of wet onions. When she had “cleaned up” as she called it—which meant that after her septic operation on the table she swept the etceteras on the floor into a heap and drew the fender over them—we discussed the question of food.
One of the trials of my life is the necessity for devising three relays of food immediately after a good breakfast. It makes me feel as though I were the owner of a yard full of turkeys, whom it is my painful duty to prepare for a daily Christmas. James enjoys his breakfast and forgets about it, returning after a hard day’s work to a dinner as unpremeditated as that which the ravens brought to Elijah; not so mine, which brings with it haunting memories of yesterday’s sorrows. I cannot share his enthusiasm for a vol-au-vent which I have so often met before in less happy circumstances; I feel about it as an undertaker might who should meet his clients masquerading in a ballroom. James came home at one o’clock, and we went indoors at once, as he has only a short time to spare in the middle of the day. The table was not laid.