Group Feast

by Josephine Saxton

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Time Travel

Synopsis

Cora Caley - A woman of fantastic beauty and wealth. A woman who had been denied nothing. Now her most incredible enterprise had been completed. She had transformed acres of Australia' hot and arid desert into lush greenery and in its midst had built The House - a house of unequalled grandeur. And to crown her latest and most splendid achievement she was going to be hostess for the perfect party. She had spared nothing to ensure absolute elegance and lavishness for her guests. Yet, as the party began Cora felt a tremendous sense of failure (she knew Plan X would most assuredly have to be instituted). The party was failing, but only because it somehow seemed to culminated the terrible vacuum of Cora's own life. She was doomed to emptiness and she was terrified. As the party progresses she is confronted by ex-husbands, former lovers, her sister, her daughters, servants and to all she seems on the verge of madness. Maybe she is, but then again maybe her own realization of the sterility of her life is her one sane thought - maybe it is her lifeboat. Weaving through reality and fantasy, Cora reveals herself as Everywoman struggling not only for happiness and love, but for the certainty of her own definite and meaningful character.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 185

Sample

“I am probably the richest woman in the world,” thought Cora Caley, with what could only be a great deal of satisfaction; how is it possible to have such a thought as that, for it to be true, and to not feel satisfaction?

“And I am about to give an incredibly lavish party for a very select group of my special friends,” she whispered aloud with more satisfaction.

She was standing on one of the lawns of her great House, the last of the sun glamourising what was already glamourous, both in herself and in the House. She was a middle-aged woman, but one of those rare creatures who in less fortunate lives than Cora’s had been were snapped up to be film actresses, so that the world could gape at the renewal of the myth of ageless woman. Cora’s hair was as black as the day a damp mat of it had first emerged, to be stared at by her older sister Bella with horror and disgust.

“Ain’t she ugly!” had been the first words spoken over her, and she had at that moment begun a long career of eliciting comments about her beauty, to wipe out that frightful welcome. Once the purplish tinge had flushed away, Cora had been quite a nice baby. By the time she was five she was more hated, loved, admired than any other girl anyone who knew her had ever known. She was simply quite ravishingly beautiful. The older sister, a girl of great beauty herself, had to be content to live in the shadow cast by Cora’s magnificence. By the time teenage reached Cora, the elder sister had unhappily married the first man who asked her in desperation, to have a little love, to have a wedding day, where she would be the centre of attraction. As Cora had been chief bridesmaid, the whole idea had been a total failure. Cora and her sister had not seen each other for many years. They had nothing to say to one another. The rich are friends with the rich, mainly, and Cora’s sister was not rich at all. Cora did not care. Something in her still recalled the slight.

She wore a transparent gown which fastened with silk ribbons over lace undergarments, and her feet were bare. There was still plenty of time before the guests would begin to arrive, and in that time Cora meant to inspect as much of the gardens and the House as she had time for, and then to make sure that all the catering was going perfectly, and then to have a marvellous bath and elaborate toilette, so that she should begin greeting people in as perfect a physical condition as possible. There would be no visible fault with Cora Caley that night.

She was a widow. She intended to remain a widow. But she intended to have to put up a good fight in order to remain a widow. There was no man quite good enough for her, but several should try to prove otherwise. She would be justified in her aloneness!

“I think my House must surely be the most remarkable house in the world,” she murmured, walking towards it. The grass beneath her feet was springy but not spongy, her toes did not squelch even slightly. It had been laid on several suitable drainage layers; all the square miles of lawn had been made in this way. First the broken pot, then the clinker and ashes, then the peat and sand, then the compost. Then the selected seeds. No rye grasses. Which meant that in all the square miles of Cora’s lawns there was not one blade of couch grass, not one thistle, not a daisy, and no moss. The green needles, closely packed, stood side by side like a vegetable army, bending their backs willingly beneath any foot chosen to walk upon them by Cora. Fed twice a year, watered every day, vacuum-brushed clear of fallen leaves, worm casts, and litter, they were the finest lawns—in the world? She could not quite be sure of that, not being personally acquainted with all lawns, but she was fairly sure. Rich men in Bermuda sprayed their lawns with water all day and all night, and achieved an unrivalled brilliance of green. Irish lawns flourished under the aegis of nature, but were neglected by their owners in favour of another turf, and English lawns as a rule were too small. Here, in Australia, there was space to do whatever one wished, providing one had the money. So, in the middle of what had been the Outback, almost in Northern Territory, there grew the finest—probably the finest—lawns in the world.

“To make a verdant pasture in the wilderness, to cause it to flow with milk and honey, to be full of manna, to find fruits springing up in the sand, all that cannot be evil and decadent, Father,” Cora had said to her dying parent, who had to the end been sternly against Cora’s plans for her House. He had always tried to rule and direct her life, had only failed to succeed in his iron control when Cora had finally accumulated sufficient money to out-buy his hopes for her. When he was dead she had bought off the solicitors, achieved a change in his will’ so that he should not be buried in the graveyard of his choice, but had been cremated and scattered on the Yorkshire moors. Cora had watched everything, been witness to the last draft of ash as it blew across a dreary hillside.

“Good-bye, Father,” she had murmured, and straightway flown back to her desert to look over the plans for an additional wing to what was becoming more of a palace than a mere house. But she called it a house. “The House” was its postal address, and nothing ever went astray, so famous was the place, but as private as any island or prison, too, for its acres were edged with an impenetrable vegetable lace. First the unwelcome visitor met with a forest of closely growing prickly pear, then a dense quarter-mile of fearful hawthorn and blackthorn, transplanted there almost fully grown from England, clawing deep into leaf mould that had also been flown over by the thousand ton. Then a thirty-foot wall of perfectly smooth marble blocks, nine feet thick, topped with bristling needles of toughened glass. Her private airfield was outside of this defence—she had decided finally that she did not want to have to shoot down any unwelcome plane, and she could if she wished. Great guns, radar—they were ready. Cora had said at one point during the building of the House that she would allow no person to visit her except he be amusing; she would tolerate bores no longer. All who came in through the one great gate were invited, or they were tradesmen. If anyone ever thought to land on her lawns by helicopter, then she had twelve armed men ready to surround it to investigate that person before Cora herself need even know anything of their business.

This evening, she had decided, she would prepare herself for the party in the plainest of all her bathrooms. Sometimes she wished to be reminded of her origins, and so had caused to be built a replica of the bathroom of her parents’ first home in Yorkshire. It had been a council flat, like a group of prison cells, made even worse by the wallpaper, and the bathroom had just sufficient room in which to turn round to reach the towel hanging at the back of the door. It was all here, in perfect reproduction; the pebbly glass of the window with rusting green frame, the roughened surface of the bath itself with a brown mark beneath the imperfect taps, the plastic bath rack with cheap sponges, the wallpaper with large pink roses, hideously drawn, and the tiny square mirror with scarlet plastic frame. The horrid contact between wet foot and apple-green linoleum was muffled with a hand towel, which was then shaken out and hung by the hand basin to dry. Cora smiled to think of her own perversity at choosing this bathroom on this night, when she could have the choice of a couple of dozen others, each rivalling the next in luxury. Some were in better taste than others, granted, but all gave pleasure in one way or another. She had taken a protracted sauna that morning so did not fear for her cleanliness; the piney heat had sweated all dirt from her skin and the snow outside had stimulated her to screams of physical delight. Six tons of pure white snow, in the middle of Australia, for Cora Caley to roll naked in, under the scorching blue sky, snow deep enough to last a quarter of an hour before it was changed into steam! Yes, a bath. She would make a gesture to finer things with a bottle of horse-chestnut bath essence, but more than that, no. And then she would lock up that room, no guest should stray in there. No guest knew that Cora Caley still bathed in poverty, from time to time.

Before she took her bath though, she must inspect what she could of all the preparations, and hear reports from servants. She did not want anything to go badly wrong, although when there were to be almost a hundred guests, with a least three thousand comestibles to choose from, and every known drink on earth besides, something was sure to be amiss. She intended nevertheless that it should be nothing serious. At the same moment as she began to walk over the lawn to the House, a group of servants drifted across the lawn to meet her. They would conduct her around the main dining rooms, answer any of her questions. Leading the groups was Joachim, a tall, ancient, black man.

“Joachim, you have come to tell me that all is ready?”

“Yes, madam. It is prepared, the planes are ready to leave when you have given the word.” The hired teams of servants who had come to prepare the feast were to be flown to a specially built hotel on the northern coast for the night. Cora wanted no tittle-tattle from hired servants about the goings-on at her party. Now that they had done the work of preparation, they waited for her to signal thanks. In the morning they would return at her signal to clear away the remains. Those that stayed were Cora’s resident crew of servants, plus a fleet of waiters whose life histories had been investigated by a team of specially hired psychiatrists, so that she felt confident in their powers of discretion. They came from all over the world, and they were mainly women. It had transpired that the least likely people to spread gossip were women whose lives had entertained great tragedy due to a wagging tongue. Women whose husbands had been betrayed in war, women caught in adultery because of the loquaciousness of a neighbour, women whose careers had been ruined at the revelation of some unsavoury news out of their past. They were also women who had already revenged themselves on the world in some suitable way, so that Cora had little to fear from them. They sat in uncommunicative pairs in the three airliners, drinking iced drinks. Cora allowed Joachim and his chosen aides to conduct her around the dining rooms. First they went through her earlier phase of architecture, from the time when she had first discovered that one can actually do whatever one wishes with concrete. All the rooms in this wing were either reproduction Gothic or designed by a team of the apostles of Guardi. Here was the great hall before her, air-conditioned to perfection, and on a hundred tables arranged in the form of a huge rose was a feast from a medieval castle. Seven swans were filled with seven turkeys, which were filled with seven geese, which were filled with seven capercaillies, which were filled with forty-nine songbirds from the coast of France. The spaces were filled with almonds and crab apples and each huge swan’s perfectly roasted skin was patterned with a sign, a replica of Celtic strapwork designating the mystical significance of Four, skilfully executed in a paste of sour cream from Bulgaria, pounded with rare white truffle. Cora herself had invented this medium, and ordered the designs to be copied from the Book of Kells. She intended that an old friend of hers, now become a Catholic Priest, should eat from these tables, and she wanted to intrigue him. She would regale him with the tale of the making of his dish as he ate it, she would watch his face. His chosen task in life was to look after starving African children, but he had accepted the invitation to dine with her tonight. All his journey was paid for and arranged. He should eat roast swan in her hall, and goggle at the Celtic cream she had invented. She began to laugh a little; oh, it promised to be a good party! There were a hundred bowls of salad to choose from, every one different. Her own favourite version of Caesar salad made with Yugoslavian goose eggs, Waldorf salad with walnuts from Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. Walnuts in Yorkshire were a rarity; Cora had managed to obtain three pounds of freshly picked walnuts from the trees that clung to the ancient walls there, and recalled as she had clapped the shells together in the kitchen the day twenty years before when she had made a day trip to the abbey with her second husband and her parents-in-law, the old woman miserable as usual, standing there in a glade by the ruined refectory, having to offer in the way of comment on the perfect weather, the magic atmosphere:

“I can’t pass water, Cora.”

But she was dead. Because of that horrid moment, something good would come to pass; if not water, then Waldorf salad. There were besides this the twenty best recipes that Cora and her chefs had been able to find for potato salad and salads Bagration, Magundy, Baba Gannoujh from the Lebanon.

She hoped that an old lover of hers would taste that with wonder, and recall with pleasure the nights they had spent together on the shores of the Dead Sea, floating in the sticky brine, making love in a dry cave, watching together the scarlet moonset, returning at dawn to his square white house to eat fabulous breakfasts washed down with goat’s milk and arak. They had never married, it would have been too much trouble. For both of them.

Cora lifted a silver salad-server and tentatively pushed a leaf of Cos lettuce. It was springy, rampant. There would be not one limp mouthful. The evenings that could be totally ruined by a mouthful of limp lettuce! Not here, not under her roof.

Cora lifted a finger to her lips.

“Sssh!”

It was very quiet in the great hall. She was satisfied.

“Is it as quiet as this everywhere, Joachim?”

“Yes, madam. All is well from that point of view.”

That was the wonderful thing about Joachim, he knew what one meant, he was practically telepathic. Cora meant there to be not one fly or other insect at the party. A fly settling on a dash of mayonnaise could ruin a person’s appetite. It should not happen tonight.

“Well then, let us move on.” The group of inspectors moved on; Nicolette, in her traditional black-and-white, who had been with Cora since she had first been able to afford servants, Alice, in her pale blue nylon overall, who had come later but stayed, thick-set and quiet and efficient and pale, grey-ginger hair crinkly and cropped, and Charles, whose unfailing good taste had helped Cora in her choosing on several occasions. Sometimes Cora had been able to divine exactly what it was that she desired by first consulting Charles and then expending effort to decide the exact opposite of this advice.

As they walked along they passed one other of her servants, a man taller than any of them, tough-jawed and unmistakably Australian: fair-haired, pale-eyed, athletic, and sunburnt, but two things in his face, human and animal, each with two aspects. There was cruelty and cold malice there that was animal and yet could not be anything but human, and there was sheeplike stupidity there that was human and yet could be nothing but animal. Cora nodded at him, murmuring his name: “MacBaines?”—and made herself not to hurry past and hid deftly her terrible excitement. Damn that man, he was the male sex itself, and yet she could not really even dream of doing anything except repel his advances had he ever made any to her. It was just something about him that made her think that he … but what vanity, to imagine that every man who looked on her fancied her. That MacBaines, maybe he would have to be dismissed, he was really much too disturbing to have around.

“Joachim, are you sure everything is clean?”

“Yes, madam, it is all clean. Every angel has been washed with anti-static fluid within the last forty-eight hours.” For him to say that was to say enough. The ceiling of the corridor through which they now passed was clustered with gesso angels, every feather in their wings stood out in detail. If every feather on those modelled wings was clean, then the whole house was clean. Still though.

“Absolutely sure? Not a finger mark?”

“Not a finger mark. All quite perfect.”

Cora sighed with relief. If one had guests to a house, then the least one could do was to have the place clean. True, they would all be gone shortly after breakfast, and none of them was intended to sleep, although several beds had been prepared for the casualties—the older people, the unwell people, and those that fell under the stress of drink. But people would reach into most corners of the house, they would be free to explore where they would; they should find nothing unsavoury: no webs of dust, no greasy marks, no blots or puddles or smears, no animal excreta of any kind, no vile odours, no fumes, no scratches. Everything that should in its nature shine, such as glass, marble, polished wood, steel, and silver, should reflect its maximum amount of light, and everything that should be fluffy and soft in its nature should be so; all cushions, velvet, brocade, linen, all should be just as they should be. If a swathe of white velvet, hanging from a golden pole at the side of a window, should hang with a crosswise crease, or should have the touch of a sooty finger—the guest who saw such would smile behind his dinner napkin and never forget. The party must be unforgettable, but it must be for the right reasons.

The corridor led to a totally different environment. Here was the pea-and-pie shop.

Echoes of her youth, dim and turgid, but there had been times when the pie-and-pea shop had saved her life! This was perhaps the most vulgar food in the world, coarse and rich. Black puddings, made from the blood of cattle, making the average Yorkshire or Lancashire man as fighting strong and obstreperous as any Masai warrior, although in truth by the time the blood puddings came to the dish they were cooked, and the Masai drank theirs. Love. . .