Green Grass by Raffaella Barker

her, ‘Of course it’s marvellous he’s such a cook, even if he does hate animals. It must be a price worth paying. After all, just imagine how awful it would be for everyone if you had to do it all.’
    Laura appreciates the double edge of this thrust, and grins invisibly into the phone, thinking, ‘Touché’, but saying, ‘I know, I realise it’s extraordinary. It’s one of his compulsions. He can’t help it, it’s the Jewish momma in him trying to get out. The maddening thing is that the children don’t like the wild flavours he creates, and of course he won’t listen or adapt. He’s a megalomaniac in the kitchen. I have no role beyond skivvy. I’m a tweeny, in fact.’
    Laura’s mother is baffled. ‘A tweeny? Are you? Do you mean the ones on television? How odd of you.’
    She sounds displeased. Laura is not living up to expectation at all with nonsense about children’stelevision characters and a husband who cooks better than she does. Not that Anne herself ever brought Laura up to cook. Oh dear me no. She was destined for the halls of academe where filthy food is served to intellectuals who use it merely as fuel for the engines of their minds, and have no sensory pleasure in it. Such a shame she decided not to pursue her studies further. Anne had always hoped Laura would stay in America and do a PhD after her master’s degree, but of course she met Inigo. Maddening, but there we are. She wasn’t doing anything proper like history after all, but a PhD in film – well, it would have been something for Anne to tell her colleagues at Trinity. She listens to Laura again.
    â€˜Oh come on, Mother, that’s what they used to call the maids who worked between the kitchens and the rest of the household. You can’t have forgotten.’
    Laura hates herself as she utters the last sentence, but she cannot help it. In her family, a piece of knowledge imparted is a prize beyond gold. Throughout her childhood her mother, a history don specialising in The Age of Enlightenment, dispensed argument and raised questions, instead of cooking roast chicken and mashed potato. Of course Hedley and Laura, and their vague wispy father, were fed, but food was never meant to be enjoyed, not when there was reasoning or language to relish.
    Clouds of steam billow above the stove as Inigo removes the lid from a pan of boiling water and begins to slide lengths of spaghetti beneath the surface. Dolly drifts into the room. Her hair is tousled, she has no shoes on, and is yawning mightily, as if she has just got out of bed. In fact she has been lying on the floor in the sitting room with her headphones on and her homework open in front of her, making a pyramid out of paperclips.
    â€˜Lay the table could you, Doll,’ says Inigo, glancing up at her with a smile from his cooking. ‘I doubt I’ll get Fred to do it, he’s too angry with me.’
    From the tether of the telephone, Laura sees the troubled look on Fred’s face as he glances between his father and his sister, and sensing his need of support, she says to her mother, ‘I must go, I’ll tell you about Hedley and his plans for Tamsin’s birthday tomorrow.’
    Inigo pours a trickle of oil into the bubbling pasta, laughing with Dolly over an incident at school. His glance flickers up to Fred and away again: he is punishing him with exclusion. Laura’s temper rises fast, irritation spilling over so she has to bite her lip not to shout at Inigo. Maybe it would be better if she did shout at him, instead of shielding him from the frustration his behaviour causes. Fred scowls and sits down at the furthest seat from his father. Laura sitsnext to him, rumpling his hair and winking at him as Inigo serves them. It is Inigo’s idea that they all sit down to eat together each evening. He likes to preside over his family, and he likes to be appreciated by them; without