Travels with Tarquin

The Debt to Pleasure (1996), by John Lanchester, has a preface and its very first sentence may pull you up short and sharp. ‘This is not a conventional cookbook.’ ‘Wait, what?’ you’ll be forgiven for thinking. ‘But I grabbed it from the fiction shelves! If I’d wanted a cook- book I’d have bought a damned cookbook.’

Already you feel off-balance. Don’t fight it. This is a novel, dark and funny, but it is laced with, yes, recipes, some detailed, some only roughly sketched. You are now in the hands of Tarquin Winot, epi cure, aesthete, Olympic-standard fabulist and snob. You have board- ed the Portsmouth-to-St-Malo ferry and are about to accompany Tarquin on a meander through France to his house in Provence – ‘hardly more than a shack really’, he insists. It is midsummer but he, perversely, wishes to discuss winter menus. On the topic of blinis he is strict. They must be made with buck wheat not flour. His descriptions of the various colours of caviar read like a Farrow & Ball paint chart: dirty battleship; occluded sunflower. You are persuaded to make blinis correctly in future, but meanwhile the maestro has moved on, digressing into childhood memories. His actress mother ‘did motherhood’ as one might endure a long but financially lucrative run in The Mousetrap. Perhaps you feel a pang of sympathy for Tarquin, the neglected child? This will pass. If, like me, you are interested in food, you may become so absorbed in his exhaustive explanation of bouillabaisse, its history and preparation, that you miss a fleeting reference to the cause of death of his parents. Not to worry. You’ll get another chance. When dispensing practical advice, Tarquin is very credible. I quite bought his W. H. Auden method for preparing a dry martini. Mix the vermouth and gin at lunchtime and store in the freezer until the cocktail hour. This eliminates the undesirable diluting effect of ice cubes. It makes absolute sense. Scattered among the recipes are occasional hints of where Tarquin is leading us, literally and figuratively. His life has been punctuated by tragedies. As the body count rises, you may even start to imagine the neck-prickling ‘pchanggg’ of the Devil’s Chord. There is the in- explicable self-destruction of Mitthaug, the Winots’ Norwegian cook, who stepped in front of a train (Parson’s Green, District Line) in full view of young Tarquin. Also the suicide of his family’s loyal maid-of-all-work, Marie-Theresa, who launched herself off the Pont Neuf with her pockets full of rocks. Marie-Theresa could turn her hand to preparing good plain food on Mitthaug’s day off and after her death Tarquin misses, in particular, her Irish stew: scrag end or bone-in shank of lamb, onions, bay, marjoram, thyme, salt and two varieties of potato, one firm-fleshed for slicing, the other floury so that it disintegrates and thickens the unctuous meaty goo. A recurring thread in this tapestry of loss is his bitter disdain for his brother, Bartholomew, also now deceased. In life Bart was a moderately successful sculptor. Tarquin charts what he perceives as Bart’s social decline from painter to sculptor. Whatever next? Street cleaner? Lavatory attendant? Journalist? Now, to his withering astonishment, someone actually intends writing Bartholomew’s biography. Dining in St-Malo, we have our first sighting of a young British couple, honeymooners, who have caught Tarquin’s eye. His interest in them seems at first to be random. Then the tiny hole he drills in his copy of Le Monde, the better to spy on them at breakfast, suggests something else. What is he up to? His culinary digressions come heavily seasoned with show-off affectation: the classics, arcane cultural references. He’s such a clever- clogs. Very sound on omelettes, however. Never wash your cast-iron pan. We are drip-fed the few facts we have about Tarquin but then, how reliable is anything he tells us? Is he having us on about the green and ochre check suit he wears with a cerise shirt and a blue and yellow polka-dot bow tie? Has he really broken into the honey- mooners’ hotel room in order to discover their travel itinerary? Why not show an avuncular interest and simply ask them where they’re going? Or is he just a lubricious old sheet-sniffer? But here are a couple of interesting nuggets: for this tootle through France, he has brought along a selection of wigs. We know this because he’s finding them itchy. Also that his real name is Rodney. Readers familiar with The Rape of Lucrece may find his choice of the name Tarquin of passing interest. His unhurried route takes us south-east, along the Loire. We visit Chinon, briefly. He is a fan of its wine, an ‘expressive, stalky Cabernet Franc’. But the town and castle, mere shadows of their former glory, are now invaded by (ugh!) tourists and their caravans. With the Peugeot sunroof down, wig cast aside and enjoying the breeze playing on his shaven head, Tarquin makes an unplanned detour to a little-known château (dull and crowded with jostling ignorami) and comes dangerously close to running into the honey mooning couple. Too soon, too soon! He avoids them by making his escape through the Sortie Interdite but even in this moment of panic, he is gratified to note that the guard who challenges him assumes he is a fluent French speaker. Such things matter to Tarquin. As we near Provence, he pays a lengthy homage to garlic and to its culinary apotheosis, aïoli garni, with its array of accompaniments: boiled eggs, asparagus spears, peeled fava beans, warm new potatoes in their skins, tomatoes, haricots verts and perhaps a few gently simmered escargots. Tarquin can make your mouth water. He can make you long for a glass of chilled rosé and a perfectly ripe peach. The town of Apt is famous for its excellent farmers’ market, so for a gourmet of Tarquin’s exacting standards, well worth the half-hour drive from his house in St-Eustache. He buys eggs, carrots, salad potatoes, rejects some ‘merely adequate’ peppers, accepts a free bunch of basil, examines the Cavaillon melons, then ventures towards the bric-à-brac stalls. The sun is hot, the lime trees offer scant shade and the mood of Tarquin the Epicure shifts. Ears pricked, eyes peeled, he senses that his prey is close by. The honeymooners. Laura, the radiant but endlessly chattering bride, and Hugh, her plodding and portly groom, walk straight into the arms of Tarquin the Hunter.

‘My dears! How too, too unlikely!’

He proffers an irresistible invitation. A lazy afternoon by his pool, dinner under the stars and then a farewell breakfast with a view from the patio across to the hilltop town of Gordes. Divine. Now we can start to join the dots. Laura is Bart Winot’s potential biographer and this ‘chance’ encounter in the marketplace of Apt gives her the opportunity to try, after three previous, unsatisfactory attempts, to interview Tarquin about his brother. While Hugh swims, walrus-like, and flops down poolside with a book, she presses Tarquin again for some childhood memories. She is, he tells us, a laundry-list type of biographer. She wants the whens and the wheres. Dates, schools attended, awards won – ‘a dreary chronicle of externalities’. Over an aperitif, Laura pushes on with her questions. What, if it’s not too painful to recount, were the tragic circumstances that killed Tarquin and Bart’s parents? This time, you’ll be paying attention. The barbecue charcoals glow and dim to white ash, bubbles tinkle, almost subliminally audible, in the champagne flutes, and the sea bass is ready for eating. It is an altogether delightful evening. Next day, while the honeymooners sleep, Tarquin rises early. With his wicker basket, his mushrooming knife and a thermos of Twinings English Breakfast tea, he sets off for his favourite but top-secret spot for foraging. He finds exactly what he’s looking for, the vital ingredient for his guests’ breakfast before he sends them on their way. Amanita phalloides, though possessed of a faintly unwholesome smell, is said to have a pleasant, nutty flavour. Poor lumpen Hugh, allergic to eggs, may not be able to enjoy mushrooms in an omelette but he can certainly take them on hot buttered toast. Breakfast finished, bags are packed and loaded into the rental car, grateful farewells are said. Laura adjusts her seat and the rearview mirror, starts the engine. Next stop, Arles, one of Bart Winot’s former homes, where she can continue her research. The death cap mushroom is the deadliest fungus known to humans. Emperor Claudius is believed to have been killed by death cap, administered by his wife Agrippina. Twice, according to Suetonius. But Suetonius wasn’t aware of the death cap’s nasty quirk. The symptoms of poisoning – nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea – begin up to twenty-four hours after ingestion, long enough for people often not to associate their illness with having eaten the mushrooms. Drinking plenty of water alleviates the symptoms, good health is restored and the victims resume their – say – empire-ruling or honeymoon, unaware that a devastating and irreversible sequence has been set in motion. Liver failure, kidney failure, coma, death. At his garden gate Tarquin raises his hand in valediction, watches the car disappear down the dusty track and returns to his house to wash the breakfast dishes. Not the omelette pan, of course. Probably safest to toss that.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Laurie Graham 2025