Eden Falls by Jane Sanderson Page A

obscure or remedy the fact that a coddled egg had just taken fifty-four minutes from the moment of ordering to its arrival at the table. Lady Millbank – for it was she who had waited, in a state of mounting disbelief – knew very little about the culinary arts, but she did know that an egg, carefully placed in simmering water, took six minutes to reach perfection. Her brother’s grilled kipper had come quite promptly, and although he had refused to eat it until the egg was brought, Lady Millbank suspected that she had been singled out by the hotel staff for special ill treatment. The waitress, a large elderly woman with a lumbering gait, had taken the order with a palpable lack of interest. There had followed a long period of inactivity, during which Lady Millbank and her brother had quite run out of conversation. Then the kipper arrived, delivered by a boy who appeared to be dressed for school, in grey shorts and socks. The kipper had grown stone cold while a further stretch of time was endured in suffering silence. When the original waitress had finally wandered back into the dining room with Lady Millbank’s breakfast, she had carried the egg on a plate, holding it out at arm’s length as if it were a small bomb. She had placed it rather fiercely on the table and looked Lady Millbank directly in the eye.
    ‘An egg, missus,’ she had said. ‘That all?’
    Really, her insolence was quite threatening.
    ‘I’m not at all sure that we’re safe in our beds,’ Lady Millbank said to Charles when the waitress was out of earshot. ‘That woman gave me my egg with an attitude of naked loathing.’
    Charles laughed, and his sister regarded him icily.
    ‘Sorry Mildred,’ he said. ‘Bone in the throat.’ He made a short pantomime of expelling the phantom obstruction.
    ‘How can you laugh, Charles? Is my life of so little importance to you that the idea of my throat being slashed as I sleep is comical?’ Her chin wobbled and her voice cracked.
    ‘Oh, I say,’ said her brother. ‘Steady on.’
    ‘Truly, the negroes look daggers at me and I’m quite sure I’ve done nothing to offend.’
    Charles considered his options. He could tell his sister the truth, which was that she had not yet herself shown a scrap of courtesy to anyone, for anything; that she was rude, imperious, ungrateful, querulous and universally disliked. Or he could finish his kipper. He tucked in.
    In the kitchen, Ruby had finished the breakfast service and was making lunch for the hotel staff. Roscoe had been and gone. Today, Ruby’s shift had started two hours before school, so her boy had come with her and had been put to good use. He had sat at the table folding linen napkins into sailing boats, the way the white boss liked. He had spared Batista’s swollen feet by carrying some of the food through to the diners. He had helped Ruby chop scallions, and had stirred a slick, sharp butter and vinegar sauce that the English poured over their eggs. It looked like yellow grease, he had told his mother: it is, Ruby had said. She kept to hand a great tome of a cookbook, to which she was forced to refer many times a day as she picked her way through the obstacle course of English classics. Roscoe – a reader, even before he started school – liked to open it at random and laugh at the names of the dishes and their ingredients, reading them aloud to the kitchen in the solemn voice of a scholar: jugged hare, bubble-and-squeak, eel pie, plum pudding. Mrs Beeton sounded interesting, Roscoe thought; she added thoughtful, informative notes. This morning he had read about the barberry, a fruit so sour that even birds refuse to eat it.
    ‘Like the tamarind, Ruby,’ he had said to his mother. ‘Mrs Beeton says so. Listen.’ He adopted his reading voice. ‘“In this respect, it nearly approaches the tamarind. When boiled with sugar it makes a very agreeable preserve.”’
    Ruby had smiled at the words. Very agreeable preserve: such elegant English. She