Home life
After the party
Alice Thomas Ellis
We had what I hope I may describe as a most enjoyable luncheon party yesterday. I rose at dawn to cook the potatoes and keep an eye on the sky. If it had rained it would have been catastrophic since Someone had lost count of how many people he had asked, so had the children and so had I. It would have been like the Underground in the rush hour if we had been constrained to fit indoors. As it was, everyone went in and out and up and down the spiral staircase, clutching plates of food and glasses of wine and talking animatedly. The cats didn't like it much, but then they hadn't been invited. The daughter was a bit silent too, having just had some horrific injections in prepa- ration for her holiday in Benin. She is also too young to drink and it is always pretty lowering being in the company of people primed with wine when you are yourself stone sober. She surveyed us rather coldly over the rim of her glass of Coke and asked me what, in view of her state of health, she could eat. Terrine of turkey,' I offered wildly, 'potato salad, beans in mint, spicy ham, egg mayonnaise, brie and biccies?' She declined them all and settled, I think, for a bowl of muesli followed by ice-cream.
At one stage before night fell I realised that we had some left-overs. It was tropi- cally hot, the fridge was full and I could almost see them decaying under my nose. I made up little parcels for those who could be bothered to accept them, and then, since I cannot bear waste, I plonked a whole lot on a plastic dish and we took it down the market to give to the winos sitting under the cinema wall.
This simple, economical and charitable move gave rise to some discussion. One person was anxious lest we inadvertently found a proud wino who would throw it at us, but I thought this unlikely. Few of them are so stupid as to be proud and the food was more wholesome than the remains of the Chinese take-sways which they lift out of the municipal bins. The other school of thought arose from the Protestant view that the derelict should not be encouraged; that to those whom God loves He gives a semi-detached with a garage and an ornamental cherry in the front garden, and that those who have nothing have nothing because He doesn't like them. If one followed this line it would of course be disrespectful to the Lord to give things to people he had chosen to reject. No one said all this in so many words but the feeling was there. I have tried but I cannot think of a single aspect of Protestantism which either appeals or makes any sense to me. I think it is only prudent to be polite to beggars because they might so easily turn out to be God or one of His angels in disguise. When the time came you might find them standing in glory at the gates of Heaven, and what would you say then?
Two old men accepted our chicken pie with grace and courtesy and I hope they enjoyed it. I never want to see another chicken pie as long as I live. Having cooked a few tons of food I don't want to see my own cooking again for a few weeks. It was fortunate for me that Jennifer brought a dish of chicken in tarragon because otherwise I might well have starved to death by now. Washing up I discovered an uninvited guest. Perched on the rim of a mug was a simply colossal snail. We stared blankly at each other in the gathering darkness and I don't know which of us was the more disgusted. Luckily for him I still had a grain of charity left. I gripped him firmly by his shell, detached him from the mug and slung him over the wall into my neighbour's garden.
Previous page
