The Friend She Didn't Expect

It was Kettle who walked her out, although neither of them, at the time, would have said that this was what was happening. He stood up when she stood up, which was, in that room, the closest thing to a declaration; he picked up his cookbook and tucked it under his arm in the manner of a man who had been picking up that particular cookbook and tucking it under that particular arm for long enough that the book had, over time, developed a slight curve to fit him. He nodded at Maro, who did not look up but moved her finger. He did not nod at Penn. Penn, for his part, had returned with relief to the project of being seen, and did not require farewells.

In the vestibule the small woman who took names without writing them down looked at Kettle and then at Iyla and then back at Kettle with an expression Iyla could not read but which Kettle, evidently, could, because he said, "Yes, Edith, I am, and yes, I will," and Edith, who had not, on the face of it, spoken, made a small satisfied noise and pointed at the door with the pencil.

"What did she say," Iyla said, on the pavement.

"She said I was leaving with you, and she said I would behave," Kettle said. "Edith does most of her conversing without inconveniencing the air. It saves her, she says, a great deal of breath, which she prefers to use on biscuits."

It had begun, while they were inside, to rain in the way November rains in this city, which is to say not very much and entirely without conviction, as if the sky had been asked to do it and had agreed only to be polite. Kettle, without comment, produced from his coat a folding umbrella the size of a paperback, opened it over Iyla without making any visible show of having done so, and began to walk in a direction which was not, she noticed, the direction of any tube station.

"Are we going somewhere," she said.

"We are going," he said, "to a place where they make a leek and potato soup which is, on the whole, defensible. It is four streets. You may, if you wish, refuse. It is, I have been told by a number of women, what one is meant to do, on a first afternoon, with a person one has just met in a building one is not, yet, sure about."

"What did you tell them."

"I told them," he said, "that I had not, on the whole, been listening." He glanced at her, sideways, under the umbrella. "I am telling you now, in the interests of full disclosure, because Maro has just spent forty minutes telling you about the tax, and the tax is, in part, paid in trust, and I do not, on the first afternoon, intend to take any from you that I have not earned."

"That," Iyla said, "is the most elaborate way anyone has ever asked me to lunch."

"I am," he said, "an elaborate person. It is my one quality. I overcompensate, on the conversational front, for the fact that I read cookbooks. People expect a cookbook reader to be, on the whole, a bit thick. I have found that the easiest defense is to talk slightly more than is strictly comfortable, in slightly longer sentences than the situation requires, until they give up and let me eat in peace. You are welcome, by the way, to give up at any time."

"I'm not going to give up," Iyla said.

"No," he said, mildly. "I didn't think you would. Maro liked you. That is, by the way, a thing that has happened perhaps four times in the building's recent history. You should not, on the whole, take it personally. But you should know."

The place, when they got to it, was the size of a generous cupboard and had three tables and a counter and a woman behind the counter who looked at Kettle the way one looks at a recurring expense one has, over time, come to be fond of. They sat at the table in the window. Kettle did not order. The soup came. There was also bread, which Iyla had not seen Kettle ask for, and butter, which was on a small plate with a small knife, and which Kettle pushed, without ceremony, halfway across the table so that the small knife was pointing, neutrally, at neither of them.

"So," Iyla said. "Kitchens."

"Kitchens," Kettle said.

"Only kitchens."

"Only kitchens." He tore a piece of bread. "I have, in seven years of doing this, gone into perhaps a hundred and twenty kitchens. I have come back, each time, with a thing I did not have when I went in. Mostly the thing is a smell. Occasionally it is a method. Twice it has been an actual physical object — a wooden spoon, once, with a burn on the handle that I did not put there, and a small pot of mustard the colour of which does not, I have established, exist in this country. I do not, as a rule, bring back food. Food does not, I have found, travel. It arrives looking like food and tasting like the idea of food, which is an entirely different thing, and is not, in my experience, worth the trip."

"Why kitchens," Iyla said.

He considered the question for slightly longer than she had expected.

"Because I am good at them," he said, eventually. "And because they are, on the whole, the part of a book that the writer was not trying to impress anyone with. People lie, in books, about the big rooms. They write the drawing room as they would like to have one. They write the bedroom as they would like to be seen in one. They write the kitchen as it actually is, because they have, by the time they get to the kitchen, given up. The kitchen is where the truth, in a novel, hides. It is also," he added, "where the bread is. I am, I should tell you now, primarily motivated by bread."

"Penn would tell me you've narrowed yourself."

"Penn," Kettle said, "would tell a hummingbird it had narrowed itself, because a hummingbird, in Penn's view, has failed to also be an eagle. Penn does not, on the whole, understand specialization. He thinks it is a smaller version of generalism. It is not. It is a different shape entirely. A generalist sees the world as a buffet and tries, in the course of a life, to put a little of everything on the plate. A specialist sees the world as a kitchen and tries, in the course of a life, to learn what one thing is, all the way down. They are not, in the end, the same project. They do not even, I think, like the same people."

"And Maro."

"Maro reads cookbooks too," he said. "She would not, if asked, admit it. She has a Marcella Hazan in her bag right now. I have seen it. I have not, on the whole, mentioned it, because Maro is a person to whom one extends, in the matter of her own contradictions, a courtesy. She thinks reading for pleasure is a moral failure. She is, herself, a person who has been having, in private, a moral failure with a recipe for ragù for about three years. I find this, on balance, the most lovable thing about her. I have not, of course, told her so. She would, if I did, leave the building."

Iyla laughed. The laugh surprised her; she had not, she realized, laughed out loud, in the presence of another person, since before the apple. It came out of her in the unpracticed way a thing comes out of a person who has not used the particular muscle in a while, and Kettle, hearing it, did not look at her, which she understood, with a small grateful jolt, to be a kindness on the order of Maro's finger on the line.

"What do you do," he said, after a moment, into the soup, "when you go into Lentar. I am not asking for the tour. Penn will ask for the tour. Do not give him the tour. I am asking what you, specifically, do, when you are there, with your hands."

She thought about it. She thought about it longer than she had thought about most questions in the last month.

"I walk," she said. "I look at things. I — I have been, mostly, finding out what's there. There's a baker. There's a fountain. There's a man on a coin I didn't put there. I haven't, I think, done anything yet. I've been a — a tourist."

"That's the right thing to have been," Kettle said. "For the first month. After the first month it is, on the whole, a cowardice. You will know when. Don't worry about it now."

"What would you do," she said. "If you could make one."

He did not, immediately, answer. He ate a piece of bread. He looked out of the window at the rain, which had, in the way of such rains, decided in the last few minutes to commit, slightly, after all.

"I would not," he said.

"You wouldn't."

"I would not make a world. I would, if I had your gift, go into one kitchen in it, the one a baker leaves the back door of unlocked, and I would, in that kitchen, learn the bread. I would come home. I would make the bread, here, on a Wednesday, for the woman behind the counter at this place, who has a son who has been ill, and I would bring her the bread, and I would not, in the bringing, mention where it came from. That is, I think, what I would do with the gift if the gift were mine. I tell you this," he added, "not because I think you should do as I would do. You should not. You are an Author. I am a man who reads cookbooks. I tell you because Maro will tell you about the tax, and Penn will tell you about the glamour, and Saroya will tell you about the ethics, and nobody, in that building, will tell you that the gift is also, on a Tuesday in November, allowed to be small. It is allowed to be one kitchen. It is allowed to be one loaf. It is allowed, in fact, to be a joke between two people about a knife on a plate. The size of the gift is not the size of the use. People who confuse the two end, on the whole, badly."

Iyla ate her soup. The soup was, as he had said, defensible. The bread was better than that.

"Kettle," she said, after a while.

"Mm."

"Is that your real name."

"No," he said. "It is, however, the name I answer to. It was given to me, in the building, by Edith, on my first afternoon, on the grounds that I had, on coming out of my first trip, asked for the kettle before I had asked for my mother. She thought this was, on the whole, a recommendation. I have not, in the seven years since, given her reason to revise."

"What does your mother call you."

"My mother," he said, "calls me Christopher. She is, on the whole, the only person who does. I prefer, in the building and outside it, Kettle. Christopher is a name for a man who has, in his life, made larger decisions than I intend to. Kettle is a name for a man who, when asked what he wants to be, says: warm, and useful, and occasionally, on request, capable of a whistle."

"Warm and useful," Iyla said.

"And occasionally, on request, capable of a whistle."

She wrote it down. She wrote it down in the notebook, on the page after the page where she had written The knocker on my door is a hand holding —, and she did not, when she wrote it, explain to herself why. She thought, vaguely, that it belonged on the list. The list of small specific true things. A name, given by a woman who did not waste breath, to a boy who read cookbooks, who had walked her four streets in a not-very-committed rain under an umbrella the size of a paperback, and had told her, without making any visible show of telling her, that joy was allowed to be one kitchen.

When she looked up, Kettle was, with great seriousness and with the kind of attention the bread did not, on the face of it, deserve, buttering another piece. He pushed the plate of butter, again, a half inch toward her. She took the knife. She understood, taking it, that she had a friend, and that the friend was, in the building and outside it, going to be the part of this she had not, when she walked through the green door, thought to ask for, and the part, when the worse afternoons came, that she would be most glad she had.