Art Pact 178 - Honey and Marmalade

Well, I didn't know what had come over him! It seems such a little thing, but you can't watch someone eat breakfast for twenty years and not be surprised when they put honey on their toast instead of marmalade. I almost choked on my tea, I really did. Do you know, I've been putting that honey there for all that time and never seeing it used. It just used to sit there in its little gang: the marmalade, the honey, the strawberry jam and of course the marmite, and I never stopped to think that I could have just saved myself some time. He only ever used the marmalade. I could have saved myself - oh, I don't know, thirty seconds a day. How much is that? Let's see, three hundred and sixty-five days a year for twenty years, times half a minute. So three thousand six hundred and fifty minutes, plus a couple for leap years. Which is - hmmm, roughly four days?

Four days. What I couldn't have done in four days. What I could still do, if I could get them back from the clutches of time. Or perhaps I could have left them where they were, all nice and hidden. I could have saved them up for later use, like an old TV star hiding cash under his mattress. What is it they say about Las Vegas? What goes on there, stays there. I could have done so many things in those four days, and they've had stayed there in the past, hidden in the time it took me to get that useless honey, that pointless jam, that scorned marmite, and lay them out on the table next to the only thing he ever spread on his toast.

Of course, that was the day, so my surprise didn't last all that long. That was the day, you see, the day after I met Jemima at the day-care home, the day before we were supposed to go on our little employee's meal with the accountancy firm. You know the day. Squally, I thought, that morning, before breakfast. I looked out of the window and watched the blustery jets of rain wash back and forth over the swing-chair by the patio, and I thought: today is going to be a squally day. I don't know why. It must have been something they said on the radio, when the alarm-clock-radio was waking me up that morning. It sounds like a weatherman word. I watched it while I was laying the table - that's what I spent those thirty seconds on that day, opening up the cupboard and getting the whole gang of spreads together - I looked out of the window and watched the rain. What I could have done in that time! I could have been watching a lover wake up. I could have been greeting the dawn naked dancing around some standing stones.

Oh, listen to me. You must be thinking "how pedestrian!" You'll have done all that, back in the day, of course. There was time for that for your generation, before television and the rat race and digital watches and conformity. Oh, I'm not going to say you had it easy - that's a stupid thing to say even to the children. I'm sure some things were harder, a lot of things even. I can't imagine what I'd have done without indoor plumbing. Thank God I was born in a decent post-war house! And there's no denying that it's easier to come by the necessaries nowadays, but you know how it is - for every weight the world lifts off your back, it puts another one on.

Now the weight that breakfast was only a teaspoonful of honey. What's that, a couple of grams? But it was something, and so soon after I'd got the all-clear, I could feel it sitting there on my back. He'd never put honey on his toast before - what was it he used to say?

"Too sweet," he'd say. "Too sweet by half."

So he ate the marmalade, of course - sweet, but bitter too. Especially with those Seville oranges they put in it - so sharp! That was more his cup of tea, he said - that was just how he put it, his cup of tea. That time the shop nearby couldn't get marmalade for a week, he ate no toast at all rather than sully it with too much sweetness. That was just how he liked it, so you can imagine that this wasn't just some little thing for me to witness. It was like the sun coming up in the west, or water flowing uphill. It was something uncanny.

"Are you alright?" I asked him. Well, what else could I say?

He looked up at me, frowned.

"Of course I'm all right," he said. "Why shouldn't I be?" I said nothing. "What is it, is there something wrong with my face? Have I got something on my face?"

"You've not got anything on your-"

"Because you let me go to work last week with a milk moustache," he interrupted. "I told you that."

"You did tell me that," I said. He'd told me at some length. Silly fool, I'd thought at the time, but now I was beginning to wonder if there was some other reason he'd been so vociferous. "You told me that evening."

"I had a meeting," he said.

"There's nothing on your-"

"An important meeting," he said. "Clients. You know how tricky things are at the moment. Long hours."

"Long hours, of course," I said sympathetically.

"So if there's something on my face I'd want to know. In case I have a meeting."

"Do you have a meeting?"

"No," he admitted. "But I might have! Meetings are being called - emergency meetings! What if I have an emergency meeting, would you like me to go to it with a milk moustache? Looking like an idiot?"

"There's nothing on your face," I repeated.

"Good," he said. "Well."

He took another bite of his toast. His toast with honey on.