Monday 6th September 2010

You won’t believe it!

Val came round today to do that chair cover. He’s de-bottled.

It’s been pending since January. Such perfection is sought that the thought alone of the work commands immediate re-bottling or resumption of  uninterrupted alcohol consumption.

But this morning Val arrived in triumph with his silken pieces cut, piped, bumped and sewn to perfection to fit over the harsh turquoise rep chosen by the Gay Grandmother in 1975 to cover the parts of an armchair that her mother hadn’t been arsed to do needlework for in 1930. That’s rubbish of course. The Gay Great Gran was wagnerienne and would have been a concert pianist had she not lost the top of a finger (her own) in a mangle. She followed Tristan with a score at the Garden. Her son was a famous actor with a mistress. In girlhood she saw Brahms.

‘I’m going to put on a day-time tiara,’ Val said. It is a phrase of Peter York’s to name a head-band to free the face of hair for work. After lunch, Googling: ‘Who was Clarrie Grundy’s father? Was it Jethro Larkin? When did he die? Did Flaubert write The Sentimental Education?’  Meals with Val always require a reference library. Yesterday he made a marquis au chocolat, recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Choc, butter, eggs, expresso coffee, tiny amount of flour. We recalled that in youth Anthony Mottram (my now estranged best friend from schooldays) and I devoted many hours to imagining the shortest conceivable pastry: 1lb butter, a teaspoon flour and so on. Mottram had a mania for making Gateau St Honore at one time, the most complicated patisserie ever attempted in a home kitchen.

Val set himself the task of summing up the plot of Madame Bovary in a sentence: ‘Idiotic woman ruined by her upholsterer.’  But I think doctors come into it somehow. All afternoon Val upholstered, stitching on the silk pieces over the rep to give new life to G-ma’s tapestry of 80 years ago. Twice blood was drawn, once staining but Val got it off with spit, leaving a tiny watermark. ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘it must bear the wounds of its making.

Well, actually the fine phrase came to me later.

Val's Sublime Upholstery - In Progress

Val's Sublime Upholstery - A Finished Part