May We Feed the King

Apple green. Apple red. This page bursts with primary colour. Just £3 each; a fruit bowl made cheaply.

There is the most beautiful ham slice, with a pollen-like breadcrumbed perimeter. Slices of white lard curling almost imperceptibly at the edges, as if cut and left on the side to dehydrate.

The new potatoes (boiled) look like nothing more than beige lumps, overly shiny – disappointing, given the utter lack of complexity of a potato – but the small potatoes (unwashed) are so faithful you can almost feel the fine grit of them in your mouth. 9

~

The chicken leg (whole, cooked) is one of the few items I consider flawless. It is, unlike so many other items, perfect for those rare installations with no barriers or ropes, in which the items and the viewer will be in thrillingly close proximity. Once, quite without warning and close to the deadline, the dwelling of a witch-hunter was added to a large-scale commission I was working on at a living museum. I crammed his desk full of well-burnt candles to show that this was a man with zealous commitment to his work, and that he’d pore over evidence in the dead of night like a wolf over a pile of bones. I wanted the windows spotless, the curtains always pulled aside. The rats remained cowering in the corner, not daring to approach, so chilling was his aura. The reins for his horse hung by the door next to a worn-out whip. But the food – the little I would allow him – I put off thinking about until the last moment, because I knew I had no choice. The budget was spent by then, and all I had available in my stock to suit the time period was the whole chicken leg. Every fibre of my being cried out against giving it, this perfect meal, to this man. But in the circumstances there was no alternative – he had to eat.

~

The website’s artichokes lack adequately defined scaliness – they are altogether slightly too smooth – but they have real spirit to them. From a distance they pass, but they would never survive scrutiny. In some cases, this is no bad thing. It all rests on the context.

The beef tomato – ‘low in stock’ (i.e. discontinued) – is a joke and may as well be a squeezy ketchup bottle. This I know without 10having seen one in the flesh. I have wondered in the past about writing to the supplier about this particular item, which in my opinion is so crass that it risks letting down their entire outfit. This is something I would have been more inclined to action a few years ago, before my great lesson in perspective.

The chewet – a small meat pie – appears so real you could pick it up and take a bite – I actually sniffed the first order I received. Even now, when manipulating its position in a scene, I step back to observe its new placement and find I am smelling the hand that just touched it, quite without realising.

There are nine options for replica eggs. They include the coveted double yolk (fried), a neatly folded golden omelette and a perfect whole fresh brown egg. A poached egg, with a cloudy film of white across the yolk, looks perfectly done (£15). This is possibly my favourite page, glowing yellow like a farmhouse kitchen. Perhaps not coincidentally, my relationship to eggs, of all the foods, has been most affected by my work. What I mean by this is that they are the only item for which the replica has eclipsed the real thing, which I now handle in a cavalier manner. I expect brown eggs to bounce. After cracking the shell, I often anticipate that the yolk and albumen will slip out white, flat, already fried. The desire to penetrate the white belly of a poached egg on a friend’s plate with my finger is often close to irresistible. But it does not yet fully overwhelm me – when it does, I will take it as a sign that I have lost my grip.

The herb section is scantly stocked and the greens dim, but I would never use replica herbs in my work anyway, when real ones add 11such scent to a room. I have yet to experience a soundscape which truly brings life to a space; when you can unquestionably hear the clanking of pots and the cleaving of bone, the cook shouting for more flour, your brain is not compelled to fill those gaps. But scent – scent is depth, and depth is a dark pool we may dive into.

I often deploy the ‘fresh herb’ test to gauge the success of a scene I have created. It is thus: if the herbs betray that the replica food is an illusion, it is a failure, and I start again.

~

As for spices, people might think historic diets consisted only of cloves and maybe black pepper, but the reality is that the rich had access to pretty much anything. Ginger, cinnamon, saffron, bay and anise were hugely popular, the food richly spiced, the recipes elaborate and complex.

More than once, doing the rounds of historic buildings of particular importance or interest to me, I have observed what could have been a breathtakingly elaborate kitchen scene dressed with no more than some potatoes, a slab of meat and a pile of vegetables, as if the wealthy lived like the poor. This is what happens when people don’t call in the professionals.

MY GREAT LESSON IN PERSPECTIVE

Around three years ago, while visiting a stunning property, I observed on the periphery of a distinctly mediocre kitchen-table scene three grey plastic fish lying perfectly parallel to one another in a rectangular ceramic dish. The fish looked like something from the chew-toy aisle of a pet store – one-coloured, a seam visible at the belly, their fins not distinct entities but part of the same mould as the body. Their eyes were utterly dead, but not as eyes which had once held life. I waited until the room was empty, then I removed the fish and walked away with them in my bag. This was during what I now think of as my past life – towards the end of it, in fact. And I can admit that the bluntness of this solution reflects something of my state at that time. My situation, the pain of it, was something I had no choice but to exist within. But the fish, how unacceptable they were in the scene, that I could do something about. So, I curated. Back at home, I took the fish out of my bag, observed them lying lifeless on my bed, and put them away in a drawer. I uncovered them some weeks later and moved them 13again, to a less visited cupboard. But the fact of their presence in the house persisted, like a low hum. Eventually I gifted them to the child of a friend – they were disproportionately huge in their play kitchen, and the friend seemed somewhat horrified by the scale of them, but the child was delighted.

ALL WORK IS HOLY

I work to one guiding rule when I create my scenes. Within this rule are contained all the others pertaining to colour and balance and space. It applies whether I am working on a table scene for two littered with small hints of intimacy – food and drinks and cutlery left askew – or on a bedroom scene, with its focus on linens and tucked coarse bedding, the careful placement of materials for ablutions. It’s the same for a huge feast scene with metres of spilling platters; the same for the cell of a monk who owns nothing but the clothes on his back, a holy book and the meagre stub of a candle.

The rule is this: it must appear as if the person or people have just left the room. The viewer must feel as if the air is alive with their energy, that they only just missed them, that they will be back at any moment. If this isn’t the case, the scene is no more than an arrangement of objects. The scene is dead.

PEEKING THROUGH A CRACK IN THE CURTAIN AND SEEING ANOTHER CURTAIN

When trying to make sense of what I do, people sometimes say to me, Did you want to be a painter?

No I didn’t, is always my reply.

~

People also ask me why I do it – a line of questioning which naturally follows when I have confirmed that the calling is not a particularly lucrative one, nor in overwhelming demand.

I suspect that to pick too much at the scab of the question would be to kill the magic, so I tend, at this point, to squirm my way out of the conversation. I ask them why they do what they do, as if it is equally reasonable to levy this line of questioning at a city worker, knowing their answer will be predictably unsatisfying, knowing that the unsayable answer is money. 16

But what I do know, and rarely tell people in conversation – conversation being as it so often is the death of imagination – is that creating these scenes fills me with a feeling unlike any other.

I remember the first time this happened.

Browsing for sofas with my parents in a furniture superstore on a weekend – I must have been six or seven years old – I came upon a living-room scene with a three-piece suite, a standing lamp and a coffee table upon which was placed a television remote and a bowl full of plastic grapes. I approached the bowl, squeezed a single grape flat, and watched it expand back to its original grape shape. I don’t remember the colour of the sofa, how soft or hard it was, whether the TV was large and impressive, what we ate for lunch that day, whether my parents told me off for anything I did, if there was rain, snow, sun, distress, treats, or clouds with no sky between them. I remember seeing the fruit bowl, reaching out for the grape to confirm its fakery, not caring that it didn’t become pulp between my fingers. Preferring that it didn’t.

In that moment, I was overcome by the sensation that I was in someone’s living room, in their life. That they would enter, demand to know who I was and what the hell I thought I was doing there. Their eyes would burn with panic, which would settle into something closer to a desperate questioning – a questioning I could not satisfy, being as I was a vision manifested in a place and time out of my control.

I was transported – I loved it. 17

~

Do you think a part of you wants to escape your own reality?

This question has been levelled at me more than once, always by people who believe themselves particularly insightful or who, if you ask me, would be better off spending their energy asking themselves the same thing. My response is often withering. This is something I’m aware of and that I have tried, as I age, to control.

When my circumstances changed, and it became plain to those around me that I was floundering, my work served as a kind of conversational solace. Tell me what you’re working on, people would say when it dawned on them that the questions had run out, and there was no other comfort to offer. In this way, my work has sustained me when people could not.

IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING

The difficult thing about what I do – and it is the only drawback I have unearthed in more than two decades – is that when my scenes are ready, when they are perfect, I have to accept that I cannot control how people interact with them.

Some examples:

THE ROOM WITH GLASS EYES

Back to the palace celebrating its unspecified 750-year anniversary. I visited the venue during a normal Monday when it was open to the public.

Someone showed me to the room that I would be working from. It was a beautiful space – all original flooring and beams, hanging tapestries on the walls which had retained their colour remarkably. Along the left-hand wall, an impressive desk sat in front of the largest window, bathed in light. The back wall, to my right, was cluttered with many stacked chairs, a dehumidifier and various props and displays for school visits. A life-size cardboard cut-out of a knight in armour imploring, ‘Guess how much my chainmail weighs!’ A kitchen worker, hands in apron pockets, declaring, ‘The court eats 250kg of mutton a day!’ An attendant, staff in hand, confiding, ‘It is my job to guard the King’s bedchamber at night.’ Straight ahead of me, punctuating the space between the desk and this paraphernalia, were six windows, portals to the gardens. 21

The person who’d brought me to the room handed me a single door key and left me to settle in, telling me someone would return in half an hour to give me a tour. I was free to leave anything I liked in the room. The archivist would be on site the next morning and had made their day free for me. This courtesy did not go unappreciated.

I set my bag on the table and circled the room, pausing at each window to look down on the gardens. They were vast, divided into sections that dated back to the palace’s most recent renovation some five hundred years ago. In the foreground, rectangular hedging encased the flower beds, which congregated around the central fountain. A block of shrubbery divided these ornamental gardens from the potager garden, itself punctuated by high arches. Nothing but green to see at this time of year, but beautiful nonetheless, and perfectly symmetrical. The final window overlooked the maze which – in line with the fashions of the time – I could presume obscured an aviary. There were perhaps forty people navigating the maze’s walkways – in constant motion, not unlike bees in a hive. I watched them until I heard a knock at my door. Two volunteer guides, prompt and cheerful, had arrived to fetch me for the tour. They wore matching T-shirts, mid-blue like a school uniform.

One of them was newer than the other, who had given her time freely to the house for fifteen years and knew its every shadow and fold. Where her eyes scanned every inch of the place, reaching for details and facts and interesting stories that caused her to glow as she relayed them to me, the newer team member lacked any palpable sense of connection to the rooms and grounds. They were 22remarkably similar in appearance, but the fervour of one compared with the dispassion of the other rendered them as a silk rose in bloom and a paper carnation, its green stem wrapped around twisted wire.

STAY BEHIND ROPE AT ALL TIMES

I asked to first be shown the cellar and buttery. Starting in the windowless bowels and moving up through the building gives me the feeling of being a scuba diver slowly rising for air. I was then taken to the kitchens, pantry and larder. Will you want to see the storerooms? they asked. Of course, I replied.

The pace of the tour was a little too fast, so I slowed my walking slightly and the guides fell in line.

We walked through the royal bedchambers, extensive quarters for the nobility granted permission to reside at court, the great hall, its antechambers, up and down narrow staircases and through further corridors, sub-rooms, the council chamber, the garderobe, and on.

We ended in the palace gardens, beside the large pond.

You’ve never had scenes arranged here before? I asked. The experienced one replied that there used to be a few, but they were done 24by the volunteers, so they were pretty basic and everyone felt they were cheapening the rooms. I agreed: In that case, better to have nothing at all.

At this point, before I had begun my work in earnest, the tour had a purely practical function. I noted each twist and turn, each room in relation to at least two other rooms so that I wouldn’t need to be escorted again. It was what I call a ‘blank tour’, in which I didn’t allow the rooms to speak to me, or permit myself to notice any small shifts in the air.

Did I have any questions, they asked. I did not.

CONSIDERATION

After my tour had finished, I walked the palace corridors alone, passing through rooms but not loitering. I noted when the air grew lighter and denser, where the chills sat, sensing its bloody corners. When light caught a certain window, or moved in a beam across a hallway, I would marvel, before wondering how many others had done so before me. I acquainted myself with the many portraits, allowed myself to enter into a dialogue with some of them. I inspected the tapestries, found their imperfections, imagined hands working. I ran my fingers over carvings in doors and panels.

I touched stone so cold it seemed wet, wood as soft and warm as melted wax.

~

One room in the servants’ quarters, both in its dimensions and in its atmosphere, though not at all in its appearance, took me back to the first commission I accepted after my life as I knew it had ceased to exist. I was only weeks into the devastation of it, but still 26I had to work. The tiny rooms in an almshouse needed to be recreated as if for the nuns who would once have lived there. They had slept, prayed, committed scripture to heart, wept, all in their one room. Each room would be different, of course, as we people are, but when you are representing lives which were dictated by order, obedience, humility and the forgoing of earthly pleasures, there is only so far you can go.

I arrived and entered the first dwelling, the one furthest from the communal dining hall, and therefore the most modest. It was completely empty, the white stone walls and silver-grey flagstone floor giving it the feeling of being inside a shell.

In that room, I arranged a small wooden table centrally and added a white tablecloth, one well-worn wooden chair and a very low stool. A plate of replica bread (small, tough-looking rolls), an open book (uses for common herbs), a closed Bible (palm-sized, leather-bound), a pewter cup with a handle. A wooden walking stick, a ladder leading to the upper level – more a nook than a mezzanine – which consisted of a narrow bed a foot or so below the ceiling. I hung a bushel of dried sage on the wall.

It wasn’t a huge amount of work. Nonetheless, when everything was in place in that first room, I was exhausted. In the weeks preceding that commission, every decision and every movement had drained me to empty. Now, I wanted nothing more than to stay in that room for a day and a night, to mirror the nun’s movements, to inhabit her entirely. To understand how she might have woken, eaten, bathed, prayed, talked, taken herself to bed. To better know if she craved wine or sex; whether you can crave something you’ve 27never had. As her, I imagined, my brain could be empty of its loud poison, my heart filled with nothing but simple devotion to a God I would be absolutely sure existed. As her, I would not even allow myself a second to question my life, my mousehole of a room.

I asked if I might sleep there, overnight, just once. The young project manager looked at me with humour, assuming it was a joke, then with pity, confusion. She said she would ask. She walked away fast, returned quickly. It was, regretfully, a no. She blamed the terms of the insurance.

~

Teasing out life in a dead space, though possible, is akin to making an animal from a folded paper napkin.

But the palace was teeming with life – it spoke to me, and I would speak back.

WHITE GLOVES

The next morning – a fresh day, like cutting into an apple. I drove to the palace, keen to swim once again through its chambers.

The archivist was waiting in a dim room. They always are. The better to protect the fragile pages, but, I suspect, they enjoy the drama of it too – their white gloves glowing as they beckon you inside, like a mystic bidding you come observe your future in a pale fire. I have levelled this suspicion at many an archivist over the years, and they have always reddened and appeared taken aback. On this occasion, however, I did not feel compelled to comment. There had been a second, upon entering, when I saw the archivist before they noticed me. Something in their face told me that this was a person to be taken seriously. It was without question.

Welcome, they said, and pulled a chair out for me. I thanked them for making the time. The archivist said it is always a pleasure to meet a curator, especially one bothering to take an interest in 29the history of the specific building. They asked me what I would like to see.

What is there? I asked.

Everything, came the response.

I felt my heart in my chest. I felt light with anticipation in a way I hadn’t for some time. Two years? Maybe three? How long had it been?

Everything meant: a detailed ledger which recounted the reign of each king and queen for the past half-millennium, as well as some records from the early Middle Ages; recipes spanning at least the same time period; detailed accounts of feasts, celebrations, coronations. The utter tedium of accounts and coffers and debts – hundreds upon hundreds of pages of them. Medicinal and botanical remedies, plans for the gardens, letters from foreign rulers and dignitaries. Prayers and poems and songs. Detailed instructions for fixing roofs, ridding the kitchens of pests, cladding a building damaged by storm.

The archivist said that the ledgers of the Kings and Queens read like a relentless catalogue of praise – sometimes insipid, rarely believable. More like reading about legends or saints than real people.

But there are a couple of notable exceptions, they said. 30

~

We were at the table, our heads bent as if to drink from this pool of knowledge, for almost two hours.

It was too much. I said so.

The archivist suggested we break for lunch. We could get a discount in the café – the food was good, fresh. I assured them I needed no looking after, that I could fend for myself, and excused myself to return to my room, needing space to order my thoughts.

POINT OF FUSION

I have a recurring dream:

I am in the courtyard of a seafood restaurant in a coastal town. It is an actual restaurant that I know and once ate in with friends. During this meal, one friend cracked the claw of a lobster and her face and chest were covered in a white spray, like paint. She sat frozen, with her eyes closed for a few seconds, steeling herself for the eventuality of the moment when she must observe the damage.

In my dream, the courtyard is empty, save for one person who sits alone at a small circular table. The person has an empty white plate in front of them, upon which I place two oysters (unshucked). The oysters have a good weight to them. One sits neatly between two pressed palms; it is gnarly, with a shell of numerous greys. There is a completely convincing line where the two halves meet, where the knife goes. I have never in real life found a replica to match it. 32

When I have placed the oysters on the person’s plate, I ask them, Why did you order the oysters? Are they a treat?

And they say, My friend has died and oysters were their favourite thing to eat in the sun, and I always refused to try one because I was worried I would have an allergic reaction or choke and make a scene somewhere nice. And I hate the look of them, I really hate the look of them. But now I’m trying to honour my friend by being brave, or letting them know that they were right, I should absolutely try something that so many people say is delicious. And my friend would always say ‘Come on! What’s the worst that can happen?’

I ask them how their friend died and they say, I don’t really want to think about it if that’s OK.

The person stares down at the oysters. They say, The longer I sit here the more upsetting it seems to be doing this without them. As if I’ve waited for them to die before listening to them. Like, how contrary does that seem? And they’ve been in the sun for maybe ten minutes now, which can’t be good?