Cold Preserves

The knife is sharp. It’s sharp. You can hold it next to your ear and hear its sharpness. It’s so sharp you can cut yourself just thinking about it. Carlos is good at knives.

The square packet on the draining board is oozing blood. It trickles down in a thin line and makes fantastic patterns in the water at the bottom of the sink.

It’s good to be doing this properly at last. I’ve been waiting a long time and now I’m about to do it. I was stupid not to have thought of it before. Such a lot of people had to give me ideas. Valerie and Carlos and even – God help us, even Mrs Ashbrook-Pembleton-French.

It all sounded so good at the beginning. We fought like cats to get here. The hottest resort in the brochure, the highest, the most expensive. The snow like cocaine, the air like champagne. The après-ski women wrapped head to foot in mink. The coolest ski bums in the Alps. In a word, quality.

And in the top resort, the top chalet. This one. Rare exotic woods that smell of honey. A wall of glass looking across the valley towards the sunset. Two saunas. Unlimited free drinks before dinner. In a word, quality.

Quality. Quality. And… a catering budget that would shame a prep school. Or a prison. The whole magical experience jeopardised by some bean-counter back in London whose mother brought him up on Wall’s sausages.

The boss had the decency to sound embarrassed. ‘Sorry, Fee, fuel costs have gone up so everyone’s budget has to take a hit. You’re clever, Fee, you’re a genius, Fee, you’ll cope.’ So of course I cope. I’m clever. Osso buco. Belly of pork. Cuts of meat I’m ashamed to be seen buying: I tell the butcher they’re for my dog. Braised gristle and boiled gristle and after five hours of slow cooking there’s a smell in the kitchen like a glue factory. I disguise it with spices and the guests are all grateful and yes I’m a genius but it’s heartbreaking because I know what I could really do for them if only I could. Five weeks I’ve been here, five weeks, and not one simple honest rump steak in all that time.

So now I’m unwrapping the bloody packet. A kilo, a glorious kilo of fillet. My knife floats through it soundlessly like a ski through powder. I make the slices. Regular. Even. Parallel. Perfect. Organic, grass-fed fillet steak, hung for twenty-one days, half my week’s budget gone on a single piece of meat. The butcher was shocked, I saw the look he gave me. She’s mad. That’s what he was thinking.

I’m not mad. I love to make people happy, that’s the thing. It doesn’t matter if I’m cooking for a friend’s dinner party, or catering a deer-stalking week in Scotland, or doing this. I like to take people out of the dreary microwaved existence of the rest of their grey little lives. I like to show them a bit of magic. I like to show them how things can be. I like to enchant them till the week they’ve spent with me seems like the only real life and the other fifty-one weeks they have to crawl through are just… a parenthesis.

‘We aim to give our guests an experience they will remember for the rest of their lives.’ They said it on the web site. They said it in the brochure. That’s why I applied. They said it at the final interview, when we had to cook a demonstration meal for them (there was no word of budgets, then). Their aim is my aim, that’s why I fought for this job. That’s why I put salt in my best friend’s orange and Grand Marnier soufflé when she wasn’t looking – because I like making people happy. That’s why I’ve suffered so terribly all these weeks. That’s why I’m ecstatic that at last I can serve our guests a dinner they’ll remember for the rest of their lives. I can guarantee it. The rest of their lives.

I taste the Jerusalem artichoke soup. It’s a symphony. I put it to one side to cool. At the last minute I’ll heat it up and put the scallops into it, just long enough so they’re delicately set like the white of a soft-boiled egg. One scallop per person. They’re a pound each up here – no wonder, think how far from the sea we are – but happily there’s no need to count. Not tonight.

Venetia says I’m middle-class.

On days when we’ve finished our chores early we all get together on Venetia’s balcony to sunbathe. Venetia says I’m middle-class, the way I moan about money the whole time. I say it’s all right for her, she had a party of lesbian vegans for a fortnight and now she’s going to be in surplus the whole season. Venetia pushes her hair back and rolls her eyes and we both look at Val and we both remember Val’s having it off with the butcher on a regular basis which means she has no problem with her budget and we both say nothing except Venetia, and Venetia says, ‘And how is the butcher’s meat, Valerie dear?’ and we have to change the subject rather quickly so no-one says the word ‘hung.’

Only we can’t change it, really, and I find myself whining again that the guests eat everything I give them, there are no leftover scraps left to freeze and make that final-night they’ll-be-too-drunk-to-notice isn’t-she-clever budget-balancing saves-one’s-bacon press-of-a-Magimix terrine. Val looks a bit bored by this and she says, she says to me if I’m really stuck there’s always ways, and she recites this little verse:

There was an old man of Zermatt
Who was really exceedingly fat.
Because we were thinner,
We had him for dinner.
Now what could be nicer than that?

‘Don’t be silly, dear,’ says Venetia, ‘Fee’s oven is much too small, he wouldn’t fit. Now then, everyone move round.’ Venetia’s determined to come home with an even tan. Fair’s fair, it’s her balcony.

Yes, my oven’s small, but it’s more than just that. I love my guests and I’ll do anything to make them happy even if I suffer for it.

Take that Mrs Ashbrook-Pembleton-French. She came in my very first week when I was all new and excited. Her and her small son William, who’s dyslexic or hyperactive or ADHD or something. A menace, whatever. No, I remember, it was dyspraxic, because I remember wondering if I should tell her that dyspraxia might still do it in parts of Chelsea but all the best people’s children in Notting Hill are pre-diabetic now. Kinder not to in the end, I thought, she’s invested so much in it. So when he filled everyone’s boots with snow I agreed with her that he couldn’t help it, poor mite. And when she gave me a jar of William’s special jam, all fruit no sugar and it grows whiskers if you don’t keep it cold, I squeezed it into my fridge somehow (a chalet fridge is never empty) and I put some of my own things outside on the window-sill and if I got my fingers numb, well, I got a warm glow at the same time. As they say: cold hands, warm heart.

At the end of that first week they all said thank you and signed my visitors’ book and when I’d changed the beds and put the bedclothes on to wash I sat down and read what they’d all written. And there it was, in the middle of the page, in big round illiterate ballpoint handwriting. There it was. Just two words. Two words for all my labour:

COLD PRESERVES

And that was that. Apparently I hadn’t warmed up the jam enough before giving it to the dear dyspraxic darling and his teeth got all chilled.

I’d have cut the page out neatly and started again, only the same page had an adoring eulogy from David the shy actuary. It was almost a proposal of marriage, really, and that was so sweet because he’d spent all week staring at his shoes whenever I was near, I don’t believe he even knew what I looked like. Anyway once I thought about it maturely I thought that Mrs A-P-F had damned herself more than she’d embarrassed me. Those big round wobbly letters like a retarded schoolgirl. That word ‘preserves.’ God help us, she probably has a couch at home instead of a sofa! And serviettes.

Damn, I’ve cut the last slice crooked. It’s my fault for thinking daggers about the A-P-F. That slice’ll have to be for me, then.

No, I love my guests. I respect them. They work hard and they struggle and save up and they come here to have something special in their lives and I do my best to give it to them, as much as I can. I respect them for their hard work and they respect me for mine and they offer to help with the dishes (naturally I say no) and they leave their beds nicely made in the morning and I put a chocolate on each of their pillows to thank them for it when they come home after skiing.

Now I’ve sliced the meat and I’ve opened the foie gras tin and I’m cutting it into slender batons. One stick lies in the middle of each slice like a corpse on a rug. I wrap the meat round the foie gras and fold it over, top, and bottom, to make a parcel. I stab two cocktail sticks in to hold it all together, and then on to the next one.

Once they’re all rolled up I’ll have to sear them in a red-hot frying pan so that they don’t lose all their juices and dry out in the oven. I hate that bit. Kitchen full of smoke and droplets of hot fat flying everywhere.

Carlos says that when he fries steak he does it topless because it saves having to wash his clothes. I’d like to be able to watch that one day. No lustful intent, this is Carlos. Carlos is a dear. He wears his wedding ring proudly and he sends all his money home to his wife – their first baby’s due in June. He has three jobs here that I know of and whenever anything heavy or dirty needs doing, somehow Carlos is always around to help. He’s not angling for tips or anything, he really genuinely enjoys helping people. Just like me. Even that dreadful Mrs Ashbrook-Pembleton-French had to admit it, when he carried her and William’s skis all the way up from the lift station because she was too cheap to take a taxi. ‘Carlos is so obliging.’

Venetia says he has a lunar face – it’s just like the moon, round and full of craters – but I don’t care. I get him in to sharpen all the knives once a week. I could do it quite well myself really, but it gets him in from the cold and I give him some of yesterday’s cake with some special liqueur cream added on top, and we have a good gossip. He even gave me a recipe for feijoada once. It’s a spicy bean stew with bits of smoky pork in it – a kind of choucroûte but with beans instead of cabbage. It sounded warming and filling. I tried doing it but I must have done it wrong because everyone got wind the next day, a foggy day it was too, and no skiing. Jerusalem artichokes can be inflationary as well, but of course this time it won’t matter.

Every time, I wish they didn’t have to go back. When they come home drop-dead tired after skiing and the melting snow plops into their mugs as they drowse over their tea, I look at their happy shining faces and think that this is how they ought to be. Then over dinner some idiot says something about home or the news and you can hear the greyness come into their voices. Wet streets and long commutes and long meaningless hours stuck in offices with bullies for bosses and morons for workmates. Pointless work that just anybody could do, if it needed doing at all in the first place. The white snow and blue skies and black runs and red runs and blue runs and green ones all fade into grey and grey and grey and grey and grey. I can see them crumple as they talk. I feel I’m watching a butterfly shrivel up and fade and squeeze back into its chrysalis.

‘An experience they will remember for the rest of their lives.’ That’s our mission statement. Except that three days after they’ve gone home it’ll be as if they’ve never been here. They’ll be exactly the same people they were before they came. As if they’d never lived at all.

This time I’m not going to let it happen.

The next two days’ skiing wouldn’t have been much anyway. The clouds have come in after a week of sunshine and tomorrow it’ll be totally clampers. Nothing will move. They’ll sit indoors and snipe at each other and get grumpy and read day-old newspapers and quarrel over what music to put on the state-of-the-art twin sound systems. Today was the best day. Today is the sort of day they should remember till they die.

Now I’ve scalded the peaches and skinned them and cut out the stones with a small sharp knife. Into the hole goes my own special bitter chocolate mixture. It’s the contrast in flavours that makes it a masterpiece.

Carlos brought me the powder. He says it’ll dissolve quite easily in the chocolate and the extra bitterness won’t be noticed. But I’ve added a bit of icing sugar as well, just in case. He says I mustn’t taste the mixture once I’ve made it and I must be sure to wash my hands thoroughly after I’ve done it, even under my nails. It’s lucky one of his jobs is cleaning at the pharmacy. Carlos is so obliging.

Tomorrow I’ll have some extra tidying up to do, but there won’t be any skiing so I won’t miss anything. More tidying than usual, but a lot more time to do it in before the new people arrive on Saturday. They’ll get bone-dry sheets and pillowcases, all perfectly ironed, no hurry, and the whole chalet will get a really good clean: no need to cut corners for once. If it all goes according to plan, perhaps this time next week I’ll try roasting a goose.

Carlos had me worried for a bit. We were laughing over my plan the other day – I think it was before he realised how serious I was – and then he stopped and said, ‘If they haven’t left, where will you leave them?’ He’s proud of his English, and quite right too, it’s better than mine.

He had a point. Somehow I hadn’t thought of that. I wouldn’t want the new guests to feel crowded or jostled or anything. It was a real problem.

I worried over it for a whole day, and then of all people it was that evil Mrs Ashbrook-Pembleton-French who gave me the answer. It was the day before yesterday. Carlos had delivered some heavy supplies and we were in the basement, sorting it out. Cheap wine, bogwash, things like that. It’s a big big space carved deep into the rock, so it never freezes in winter and it stays cool and dry all summer, and then I remembered that evil woman and what she’d written in my visitors’ book. It was wise advice:

‘Cold preserves.’

This story is taken from "The Snow Cow: Ghost Stories for Skiers" by Martin Kochanski, published by Universalis. ISBN 978-0-956319-0-6.

Copyright 2009 by Martin Kochanski. All rights reserved.

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Cold Preserves