Correctly Attending to the Artichoke

I should say at the outset that the evening of the Candlemas Dinner at the Bellingham Society was, by any reasonable standard of measurement, a triumph. I am aware that certain accounts have circulated — accounts I would characterize as incomplete, or perhaps composed by individuals who were not, as I was, in full possession of the relevant social context — suggesting that the evening ended badly. I wish to correct this impression. The evening ended exactly as evenings of that calibre tend to end, which is to say with cheese, port, and a series of revelations that the unprepared might mistake for catastrophe but which I, from my position of comprehensive understanding, recognized as the natural culmination of a very particular kind of English social event.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin, as the Bellingham Society itself would insist, with first principles.

The Bellingham Society for the Appreciation of Dining was founded in 1847 by Sir Peregrine Bellingham, a man about whom two facts are reliably known: he possessed the largest private collection of fish forks in the British Isles, and he died of gout. The Society met four times per year in a panelled room above a wine merchant’s in St. James’s, where it had been meeting, with the stubborn institutional inertia of a glacier wearing a cravat, for the better part of two centuries. Membership was by invitation. The invitation was by consensus. The consensus was by a process that no one had ever described aloud and which operated, as far as I could determine, on the same principle as weather: everyone experienced it, no one controlled it, and complaining about it was considered vulgar.

I had been admitted to the Bellingham eighteen months prior to the Candlemas Dinner, on the nomination of Rupert Fanshawe-Greville, who was at that time my supervisor at the Courtauld and who collected protégés the way other men collected stamps — with a connoisseur’s eye and a fundamental indifference to the feelings of the collected. Rupert had, I believe, nominated me for reasons that reflected well on his broadmindedness. I was his proof of concept, as it were. Look, his nomination seemed to say to the assembled Society, look what standards I maintain even when the raw material arrives without the usual packaging.

I should clarify that I am from Tottenham. Not the Tottenham of estate-agent brochures, which is always described as “vibrant” in the way that a euphemism squats where an honest sentence should be, but the actual Tottenham, which in 1997, when I was growing up, was vibrant only in the sense that things were happening, some of them on fire. My mother ran a hair salon on the High Road and my father drove a minicab, and I had arrived at the Courtauld by the route that certain scholarship children take, which is to say by being so conspicuously bright that the machinery of social reproduction briefly malfunctioned and let me through, the way a turnstile sometimes admits a person who has not paid if they follow closely enough behind someone who has.

I tell you this not because it is relevant to the Candlemas Dinner — it isn’t, not really, or at least not in the way some people have suggested — but because I want to establish that I understood the Bellingham Society. I was not some bewildered outsider. I had studied the codes. I had, if you will, done the reading.

The Candlemas Dinner was the Society’s most formal occasion, a black-tie affair with seven courses and a toast to the Founder, whose portrait hung above the fireplace looking as though he had just consumed something that disagreed with him, which, given the historical record, he almost certainly had. The seating was arranged by the Secretary, a man named Giles Trevithick-Poole who managed the table plan with the strategic intensity of a NATO general and the social instincts of a wasp at a picnic. Where one sat said everything. The head of the table was reserved for the President. The foot was traditionally occupied by the most junior member. The middle — the equator, as Rupert called it — was where the real game was played.

I had been seated, at the previous three dinners, at the foot. This was expected. This was proper. One served one’s time at the foot as a kind of social apprenticeship, pouring wine for one’s neighbours and laughing at the right moments and generally performing the function of an agreeable piece of furniture that could also hold a bread plate. I had performed this role, I believe, with distinction. I had poured. I had laughed. I had held bread.

But the Candlemas seating chart — which arrived by post three days before the dinner, on a card so thick it could have been used to shim a table leg — placed me at the equator. Seat fourteen. Between Lady Cressida Mountjoy-Phelps and a visiting professor of oenology from Burgundy whose name contained enough syllables to qualify as a sentence. I read the card three times. I held it up to the light, as though it might be a forgery. I telephoned Rupert.

“Ah,” said Rupert. “Yes. Good. They’re moving you up.”

“Moving me up,” I repeated, in the manner of a man who has been told that he can, in fact, breathe underwater, and is deciding whether to test the theory.

“Don’t overthink it, Kwame. Wear the right shoes. Do you own proper shoes?”

I owned shoes that I had purchased from a shop on Jermyn Street after researching, with the diligence of a doctoral student, exactly which shoes the other members wore. They were oxblood Oxfords with a closed lacing system. They had cost me three hundred and forty pounds, which was approximately one hundred and seventy times what my father’s shoes had cost, and they were, I had been assured by the man in the shop, correct. He had not said “correct for what.” He had not needed to. Correctness, in this context, was self-evident — or rather, it was evident to anyone from whom it did not need to be explained, which was the whole game, which was always the whole game.

“I own proper shoes,” I said.

I arrived at the Bellingham at seven-fifteen, which was — I had calculated — late enough to avoid the awkwardness of being first (a position that implies eagerness, which implies need, which implies that one does not quite belong) and early enough to avoid the rudeness of being last (which implies that one has somewhere better to be, which implies that one does not quite value what is being offered, which is worse). The ideal arrival, I had determined through eighteen months of careful observation, was to enter the room when it was approximately two-thirds full, at which point one could drift into a conversation already in progress with the easy buoyancy of a man who has always been here, who has in fact just stepped away for a moment and is now stepping back, as though the room had been holding his place.

I drifted. I stepped. I entered a conversation about grouse.

“The thing about grouse,” said a man whose name I had temporarily misplaced in the coat check of my memory, “is that they’re not really sporting until the Glorious Twelfth. Before that, they’re practically suicidal.”

I laughed. I did not know anything about grouse. I knew, however, that the correct response to a statement about grouse was laughter followed by a half-nod, as though one were accessing a fond personal memory of grouse, and then a slight redirection of the conversation toward wine, which was safer territory because wine was the one subject on which my education was genuine. I had read every issue of Decanter for the previous two years. I could discuss malolactic fermentation. I could discuss terroir. I could discuss terroir while appearing not to try, which was the real accomplishment.

“The Burgundy situation this year,” I said, in a tone that suggested the Burgundy situation was causing me mild personal concern, like a friend who had made an unwise marriage.

“Dire,” said the grouse man, whose name now returned to me — Hexham, Sir Aubrey Hexham, something to do with hedge funds, a face like a well-bred potato. “Absolutely dire. Frost in April. The Côte de Nuits is basically a crime scene.”

“A crime scene,” I said, nodding, allowing the phrase to settle between us like a shared confidence. I had, in fact, read about the frost. I had read about the frost the way I read about everything to do with this world — with the comprehensive, slightly desperate thoroughness of someone preparing for an exam in a subject they have chosen to love, or have loved because they chose it, which is perhaps not the same thing, though at the time I did not think to make the distinction.

Dinner was called at eight. We filed into the dining room, which was arranged in the Bellingham’s traditional configuration: a single long table, candelabra at intervals, the silverware laid out with the geometric precision of a military parade that had been to finishing school. I found seat fourteen. Lady Cressida was already seated, examining her place card with the expression of someone who has opened their front door to find a census taker. The visiting Burgundian professor was settling into seat fifteen with the gravitational deliberation of a man who had been paired with wine his entire life and had absorbed its tendency to take its time.

I sat. I placed my napkin on my lap. I aligned my water glass with my wine glass in the manner prescribed by the third chapter of a book called Table Matters that I had read twice and then hidden behind a row of art history monographs on my shelf, the way a man might hide a self-help book behind Proust. I was ready.

The first course was a consommé, which is to say a soup that has been through the same rigorous social filtering as the members of the Bellingham themselves — everything coarse removed, everything cloudy eliminated, until what remains is a substance of such refined clarity that it is practically invisible and tastes of its own good breeding. I consumed it correctly. I am certain of this because I had practised consuming consommé. I had, during the weeks before the dinner, eaten consommé alone in my flat in Finsbury Park, spooning it away from myself in the approved manner — always away, never toward, the spoon gliding across the surface of the bowl like a punt on the Cam — while watching tutorial videos made by a woman called Margaret who had, according to her website, trained the household staff of three ambassadors.

It was during the second course — a terrine of foie gras that sat on its plate with the compact self-assurance of a small expensive dog — that the evening began its ascent toward what I can only describe as complexity.

Lady Cressida turned to me. She had the kind of face that is described in novels as “handsome” — not beautiful, but assembled with such architectural confidence that beauty would have been beside the point, like putting fairy lights on a cathedral. She was, I had been told, the daughter of the eleventh Earl of something, and the wife of the fourteenth Baron of something else, and her manner suggested a woman who had been introduced to a great many numbered men and found the sequence unedifying.

“You’re Rupert’s, aren’t you,” she said. It was not a question. It was a classification.

“I have the privilege of working with Rupert, yes.”

“He collects, you know. People. He’s collected one from every — well. Every sort. It’s his thing.” She said this while looking at me with the particular directness of someone who has confused candour with good manners. “Last year it was a Romanian. Terribly bright. Went back to Bucharest. Before that there was a girl from — where was it — Wolverhampton.”

I understood what she was telling me. I want to be very clear about that. I understood completely, and what I felt was not the embarrassment she might have expected but something closer to satisfaction, because her assumption was wrong. I was not one of Rupert’s collected things. I was here because I had earned the right to be here, because I had studied and prepared and mastered every code this world could throw at me, from the spoon to the shoe to the proper angle at which to hold a conversation about grouse. Lady Cressida could not see this because Lady Cressida had never had to learn any of it, and people who have never had to learn a thing cannot distinguish between those who know it naturally and those who know it thoroughly, and it is the latter, I would argue — I would strenuously argue — who know it best.

“How lovely for Rupert,” I said, and turned to my foie gras.

The artichoke arrived during the fourth course.

I should explain that the fourth course was listed on the menu — which was printed in French, because English, while adequate for legislation and romance, has always been considered insufficient for the serious business of lunch — as Artichaut Vinaigrette. This was, in plain language, a whole globe artichoke served with a small bowl of dressing. It sat on my plate like a vegetable grenade, its leaves fanning outward with the implacable composure of something that knew it was about to ruin my evening.

I had not prepared for the artichoke.

This was an oversight. This was, in the catalogue of oversights I have committed in my life, the one that glows most vividly, the way a navigational error glows on a captain’s chart after the ship has already found the reef. I had prepared for consommé, for terrine, for the fish course (sole, eaten with a fish knife, which is the flat one), and for the cheese (which I knew arrived after dessert, not before, because this was an English table, not a French one, a distinction that functions as a small cultural shibboleth designed to identify anyone who learned their dining from a Continental source). But the artichoke — the whole, architectural, leaf-by-leaf artichoke — had not appeared in any of my tutorials. Margaret, for all her ambassadorial credentials, had failed me.

I watched Lady Cressida. She reached for a leaf with the practiced ease of someone dismantling a bomb she had dismantled a thousand times before. She pulled. She dipped. She drew the leaf between her teeth with a motion so fluent it seemed to have been choreographed by someone who understood that eating, at this level, was a performance, and the performance was of not performing.

I reached for a leaf.

Here is what I did not know, and what I need you to understand I did not know, because the not-knowing is central to what followed: the outer leaves of an artichoke are not eaten whole. One scrapes the flesh from the inner base with one’s teeth and discards the rest. The fibrous upper portion of the leaf is, culinarily speaking, a husk. It serves no nutritional or gustatory purpose. It is there to be removed, like scaffolding from a finished building, and placing it in one’s mouth and chewing it is approximately as advisable as eating the scaffolding.

I ate the scaffolding.

I ate it with, I should add, complete confidence. I placed the entire leaf in my mouth and chewed with the resolute determination of a man who has decided that this is how artichokes are eaten and who will not be dissuaded by the fact that the artichoke appeared to be fighting back. The leaf had the texture of a document that had been laminated for archival purposes. It did not want to be chewed. It resisted mastication with the grim tenacity of something that had evolved specifically to not be consumed by primates in dinner jackets.

Lady Cressida watched me eat the leaf. I am certain she watched because I caught, in the periphery of my vision, a small movement of her head, the kind of movement a person makes when they witness something unexpected — a bird flying into a window, say, or a man eating an artichoke leaf whole in a formal dining setting. But she said nothing. This, I understood, was politeness. This was the Bellingham code operating at its highest level: the refusal to acknowledge a difficulty, the smooth elision of the awkward moment, the social compact that says we are all, here, among friends, and friends do not comment on one another’s artichokes.

I ate a second leaf. I ate a third. Each one required more chewing than the last, a paradox I attributed to the natural variation of the vegetable rather than to any error in my technique. By the fourth leaf, I had developed a system: bite, suppress wince, chew with an expression of thoughtful appreciation, swallow with a motion that I attempted to make invisible but which, in retrospect, must have resembled the efforts of a pelican processing a particularly ambitious fish.

It was during the fifth leaf that I became aware of a silence. Not the ordinary silence of a dining room between courses — that companionable hush punctuated by the clink of crystal and the murmur of people discussing things that do not matter in voices that suggest they do — but a directional silence, a silence with a source, emanating from the middle section of the table and spreading outward like a stain on linen.

They were watching me.

Not all of them. Not obviously. The Bellingham did not stare. But there was a quality of attention in the room that I recognized — the quality of people who are witnessing something and have collectively decided not to intervene, the way one does not intervene with a wasp that has flown into one’s conservatory but instead opens a window and waits, with elaborate nonchalance, for nature to resolve the situation.

I put down my sixth leaf and reached for my wine.

“Tremendous things, artichokes,” said the man to Lady Cressida’s left — Hugo Something, a barrister whose surname operated on the same principle as an artichoke: several layers, not all of them digestible. “Used to have them at Eton. Frightful mess.”

“They are rather an undertaking,” said Lady Cressida, in a tone so carefully neutral it could have been used to calibrate scientific instruments.

“Do you know,” I said, and I said this with what I recall as perfect composure, the composure of a man who has absolutely not just consumed the inedible portion of a vegetable in front of thirty-one members of one of London’s oldest dining societies, “I find that the outer leaves have a particular character. A robustness.”

“Robustness,” repeated Hugo, in the manner of a man who has been handed a word and is examining it for concealed weapons.

“Fibrous, of course. But I think that’s rather the point.”

There was a pause. In the Bellingham, pauses were a form of communication, like semaphore flags on a ship that is choosing not to signal. This pause said: we have understood what has happened. We will not discuss what has happened. What has happened will nonetheless be remembered, with the institutional precision of an elephant that has been educated at Harrow.

“Quite,” said Lady Cressida, and returned to her artichoke, pulling each leaf with the delicate precision of a woman defusing the conversation one syllable at a time.

I want to be clear about what happened next, because the accounts that have reached me are, as I say, incomplete. The remaining courses arrived and departed with the stately regularity of trains in a country where trains are reliable, which is to say not England but the England of the Bellingham’s imagination, the England where things work as they should because the right people are operating them. The fish was consumed. The lamb was consumed. The Burgundian professor said something about tannins that made two men laugh and one man frown, and I nodded at the appropriate junctures, and the evening continued.

The port was passed. The port was passed to the left, which I knew. The cheese was served after the dessert, which I knew. The toast to the Founder was given by the President, and we stood, and we raised our glasses, and I stood and raised my glass with the rest of them, and I was part of it, I was inside the machine and the machine was running and I was, for those few seconds, indistinguishable from every other component.

It was during the Loyal Toast — the second toast, to the King — that Giles Trevithick-Poole leaned across the table and said, in a voice pitched to carry exactly as far as it needed to carry and no further, which was the distance between his mouth and my ear and also the distance between his mouth and the ears of everyone within a four-seat radius:

“Terrific show, old boy. Rupert said you’d be a good sport.”

“A good sport,” I said.

“About the artichoke. Most people rumble it by the second leaf, but you really committed. Tremendous.”

I felt, at that moment, something shift — a small tectonic adjustment, like the settling of a building that has been standing for a long time on ground that was never quite as solid as it appeared. Giles was smiling. It was the kind of smile that in certain societies indicates warmth and in the Bellingham indicated that one was being managed.

“I’m not sure I follow,” I said, although I was beginning to follow, in the way that a man follows a path that is leading him toward a cliff and persuades himself, with each step, that the cliff is merely a scenic viewpoint.

“Rupert didn’t tell you? It’s a Bellingham tradition. New member at the equator always gets the artichoke. Whole thing. See how they handle it. Part of the — well, the —”

“The initiation,” I said.

“We don’t call it that. Sounds rather fraternity. We call it the progression.” He beamed. He had the face of a man who had never, in his life, been the subject of a progression. “And you were marvelous. Really. No one’s ever eaten six leaves. Roger Davenport managed four in ‘08 and we still talk about it.”

I considered this. I considered the artichoke, and the six leaves, and the silence, and Lady Cressida’s calibrated neutrality, and the care with which Giles had pitched his voice, and the precision of the word “progression,” which was doing the same work as the word “vibrant” in Tottenham estate-agent brochures — replacing an honest noun with a comfortable one, papering over the mechanism with a pleasantry.

“How charming,” I said.

I should like to record, for the sake of accuracy, that I did not leave immediately. I remained for the coffee. I remained for the digestifs. I laughed at a joke about a bishop and a Volkswagen that I did not find funny and whose punchline I have since forgotten, if it had one. I shook hands with Sir Aubrey Hexham and told him I hoped the Burgundy situation would improve. I thanked Giles for a magnificent evening. I thanked Lady Cressida for her company. I thanked Rupert, who was standing by the door with his coat on and who looked at me with an expression I have spent considerable time attempting to classify and have settled, provisionally, on “fond.”

“Good evening?” said Rupert.

“Splendid,” I said.

“You handled the artichoke beautifully.”

“I handled the artichoke,” I said, “in the only way it could be handled.”

Rupert considered this. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose you did.”

I walked to the Tube in my three-hundred-and-forty-pound shoes, and I thought about artichokes, and I thought about my mother’s salon on the High Road, where the women who came in on Saturdays for braids and relaxers spoke to each other with the directness of people who had no interest in being managed, and I thought about the progression, and I thought about what it meant that the Bellingham’s way of welcoming a new member to the inner circle was to give them something impossible and watch them fail at it, and I thought — I genuinely thought — how lucky I was to have been included in the joke.

Because that is what it was. A joke. A tradition. An old, harmless, affectionate tradition, the kind that binds an institution together, and the fact that I was the object of it meant, surely, that I was part of the institution, that I had been brought inside, that the progression was complete and I had progressed.

I tell you this now, writing it down in the particular light of a Tuesday morning in my flat in Finsbury Park, with the sounds of the High Road coming through the window — the buses, the Turkish bakery’s radio, Mrs. Adebayo’s daughter practicing violin in the flat above with the grim enthusiasm of someone who will one day be either very good or very tired — and I want you to understand that I am telling it accurately. I am telling it as it happened. I have not left anything out. The evening was a triumph, and the artichoke was a joke, and the joke included me, and I ate six leaves, which was more than Roger Davenport, and the silence around the table was the silence of admiration, and Lady Cressida’s neutrality was kindness, and Rupert’s fondness was genuine, and the Bellingham Society for the Appreciation of Dining appreciated me, and the shoes were worth every penny, and the consommé was spooned in the correct direction, and I did the reading, and the reading was enough.

I am almost certain of it.