Grace's Table Read Free Page A

week of the day’s celebration.
    â€˜Yes. Along with Ada and Kath.’
    He nodded, face impassive, typically hiding what he really felt.
    â€˜One day,’ Grace said, and rested her hand on his arm.
    He’d laughed then, a rich, generous sound despite his exclusion. ‘Let’s hope it happens sooner than later. It’d be nice if one of us could put in an appearance at the funeral of whoever goes first.’
    â€˜I’d show up anyway if I were you,’ Grace said. ‘You’ve earnt a seat on a pew.’
    She put her hands back to work on the lamb, cold after the warm thought of resting them on Jack’s arm.
    The lamb was slow-cooking in the oven, the timer set for two hours.
    â€˜I’ll make a start on the mint sauce,’ Grace said and moved to the sink, half-filled it with water.
    Earlier, she’d picked a large bunch of mint from the old cement tub by the tap at the back of the house. She dropped the mint into the water now and swept it about, separating the sprigs. A money spider made its way to the surface from the submerged greenery and tried to scramble up the sink. Grace gave it a helping hand and it scuttled off across the bench. Behind her, she could hear Susan moving a pebble of fresh nutmeg across the grater.
    â€˜I’ve never put nutmeg in a béchamel sauce.’ Grace worked the mint leaves up and down in the water, picking off webs and browned leaves as she spotted them.
    â€˜I’ve never made mint sauce,’ Susan said.
    Grace had never bought it. Just as Mother had never bought tinned peaches.
    Peaches had been one of Mother’s favourite bottling fruits. The seasons at Harvest could be measured each year by the number of Fowlers Vacola preserving bottles that filled Mother’s pantry shelves. If they were lined up three and four deep, then it had been a good year. The years there were few were the years Grace recalled wearing shoes too tight and jumpers too thin.
    She’d looked upon those tall glass jars with their metal lids clamped down tightly on red rubber seals, and marvelled at the colourful patterns her mother had the patience to create. Deep maroon plum orbs pressed against the glass like eager faces and golden peaches, layered in symmetrical convex halves, forming hilly landscapes all the way to the top. There were sauces, chutneys and pickles too, made during times of plenty, plus pears, quinces, cumquats and stubby pieces of fibrous rhubarb. The change of seasons could be mapped in that pantry from summer blackberry jam through to winter pickled onions.
    There had been a peach tree in Grace’s city backyard once, but it was a tree she came to despise. The people who sold them the house had praised the tree’s fruitfulness. Grace was thrilled. Back then she still believed a well-stocked pantry said much about a woman. Each August the tree teased her with its weighty display of pink flowers. But by late October, when all the blossoms were gone and the fruit should have been plump with promise, they were still hard and ill-formed little nuts of bitterness. No amount of fertiliser or mulch helped; the tree continued to mock her optimism.
    One year, in a state of frustration, or madness perhaps, she harvested the pathetic crop anyway, determined they’d be eaten. She spent some time rubbing the fuzz from each, tossed out the ones with grubs and blemishes, and kidded herself that what was left looked better than usual. She pricked each fruit to its stone with a skewer then stewed them whole in sugar and water.
    The failure of the exercise was revealed early when they refused even to give up their skins. And the one she cut to try was tasteless. Feeling she’d be doubly damned by the tree if she wasted the two pounds of sugar in the syrup as well, she went to the greengrocer and bought peaches. She stewed those sunny fruits in the syrup but the pleasure in eating them was spoilt by the ones she’d thrown out.