Single shots: Henry VIII and his wives teapot

Dawn spreads its amber on the waters of the Thames on the morning of Catherine Howard’s execution. She looks pale, on the verge of fainting as she climbs the steps to the scaffold. Dark crescents under her eyes betray a sleepless night spent in morbid ritual: she is said to have practised placing her neck on the chopping block brought to her cell at her request. She has been helped up to the spot of her death but clings on to a macabre version of courtly propriety by tremulously proclaiming her punishment “worthy and just” before execution. Her soon to be widower, Henry VIII, is not there to witness her act of contrition, having sunk into morbidity and bouts of overeating in the wake of her persecution and trial.

It is exhausting to be a monarch of such unyielding will. It is trying to stand on the right shoulder of God where you were perched by divine law upon birth: the weary loneliness and the precipitous fall nobody can ever share with you. Everything looks like treason from that height. How many wives must be confined, capitally dismembered, or simply dismissed to quench this thirst for the absolute certainty of glory and succession?

Catherine Howard, like Anne Boleyn before her, is ultimately sacrificed at the altar of Henry’s boundless vanity. All for nothing: God will make sport of Henry’s desire for a male heir by killing his only son and successor, Edward VI, aged fifteen. A pubescent corpse before the Virgin Queen takes to the throne.

Tea will only arrive in England a handful of years after Elizabeth’s death in 1603.

So:

Catherine had to endure the chill of a February morning at the scaffold without its comforting stirrings.

Anne, before her, was shunned and shattered like glass by her king in ignorance of its reddish translucency, which might have reminded her of the colour of the hair of both her predecessor, Catherine of Aragon, and her successor, Jane Seymour.

Henry could not distract his gout nor warm the gloom in his spirits with its steam.

Its aromatic bitterness never touched the parched lips of Edward as he succumbed to a fever.

It is not hard to imagine Catherine Parr, tight lipped and plump chested, nestling a cup of tea in her ivory fingers on the day of His Majesty’s burial. Yet this did not happen either.

The fragments of the story of Henry VIII and his many wives would make for macabre panels on this ceramic teapot if this teapot had not done what history is wont to do: consign cruelty to its cursory place; turn the tyrant into a quaint relic; blend barbarity and civilisation like you would the finest tea leaves from China in a porcelain pot.

Tea break

“I think it is ‘ne-pawl’, yeah. I think that is the correct pronunciation.” The man in the grey fleece puts the newspaper down, looking up, a benign but quizzical smile spreading across his jowly face peppered with a five o’clock shadow. He is waiting for the final nod that will seal the debate.

“But I think you can also pronounce it ‘ne-pahl’. I think that is also right. That’s the way they say it on RTE. I think both are correct. Wouldn’t you say?” The older man’s questions are always rhetorical, although most ignore this feature of his speech just as they have grown accustomed to his crystal clear pronunciation and perfectly parsed sentences.

“Ah well. RTE. What do you expect? It’s because “a” in Irish is “ah”. That’s why they say it that way. It has always been ‘ne-pawl’. You cannot trust the RTE pronunciation to be correct.” The man from the North in the blue shirt with the firmly fastened top button and matching indigo tie smiles wryly, letting his sarcasm bounce off the polished surface of the older man’s manners.

“I´d say both are correct.” The older man iterates, and then glances at the picture on the front of The Irish Times once more and, deftly deflecting the trajectory of the last volley he was served adds, “The clothes she is wearing are so colourful. You would not think of anything tragic looking at those vibrant colours. The colours you see in Asia…“ And for a moment his sentence trails off, uncharacteristically bereft of his usual fluency as he takes a sip of his tea, “…it’s a whole different culture.”

“That it is.” Says the man in the grey fleece and he pushes the plate of shortbread biscuits towards the older man, who is trying to reach them across the veneered oak table.

Like a crab in a crevice

In the last couple of years I have pondered the aging process. It is easy to put your finger on age as a compendium of physical collapses: one day you are going up the stairs and your knees start to creak and what once was reversible is now with you for good. On a night out in a crowded bar where some exciting new band is yodelling the city’s dernier cri you find yourself yearning for your coverlet and hot water bottle. Another day you start to sit downstairs on the bus because your shopping bags are particularly loaded and never make it up again to the front seats on the upper decker.

It is much harder to fix aging as a mental process. In my mind, I am the same person I have ever been and the first few times I registered a differential and deferential treatment from those younger than me, I was slightly perturbed. A line had been drawn that made it indecorous for me to stray to the other side of the age divide. It was frustrating because I could still read the codes that those of previous generations could not decipher: I knew what was behind a t-shirt, a nail varnish, the flickering light of a website, I could hear a snippet of music and have a sense of communal recognition.

Then the sourness of those moments when youth, that very far away very small print that you are usually unable to read, comes in sharp focus and you realise that it is written in a language that you cannot decipher any more. This happened to me in a city centre café where I was having coffee and cake a couple of days ago: wandering around an airy room with high ceilings, my eyes finally settled on the young girl sitting two tables away from me: late teens, long unkempt but very healthy and clean hair of lustrous gold-brown, clear complexion; her attention is fully concentrated on the plastic knife she is using to dissect a cheesecake brownie that she has taken out of the paper bag that she is using instead of a plate. She is holding a take away coffee cup with her slender fingers crowned with chipped dark nail varnish. And I realise that I cannot read this girl. I simply cannot settle the question as to whether she is saving money by ordering take away and yet having it indoors, or whether she prefers the lighter packaging, or whether she is in thrall to America’s love affair with everything deciduous; Or a mixture of all three. What is not in question is that she looks graceful doing something that would mark me as odd. She is young.

Surrounded by the cup, saucer, plate and cutlery that tie me to the table in this cafe, I feel as outmoded as a venerable dowager drinking from a china cup in an ancient tearoom.

Honest tea

You may be able to chart a map of a person’s psyche by the choices they make when they travel. Every individual has his or her own psychogeography comprising the places they have visited, those they won’t visit, and the ones they long to travel to. Join the dots and you will begin to see the shape of their yearning, their love, their prejudices, and their fear. Let me unroll a map of the world in front of your eyes; I close mine and my finger takes me to the places I wish to visit over all others: here’s Mongolia, a place that I skirted when I was in Siberia; there’s Alaska, a challenge to my urban pedigree and sensitivity to the cold; Buenos Aires in Argentina, where Julio Cortázar, a hero of mine, grew up, and above all others, Japan.

When I was a child my parents sold their apartment in Madrid to a Japanese couple with a son. Even then, when the only foreign country I had visited was Portugal, I could tell that these people came from a place very much unlike Spain. They spoke fluent Spanish and were well acquainted with Spanish culture, the husband was a tour guide and played Spanish guitar and the wife worked for a Spanish airline, but their manners made them stand out: they were unfailingly polite and discrete and they held what I thought was a melancholy smile every time we met them. My parents invited them to an asador to have roast lamb: they loved Iberico ham. They reciprocated by taking us to a Chinese restaurant. I expect there were no Japanese restaurants in Madrid in the 1980s or perhaps they thought Japanese food would be too much of a challenge for us. Their son gave me a wooden doll in a lacquered kimono holding a parasol. He said her name was Yuki, meaning “snow” in Japanese. I told him we had the same name in Spanish, Nieves. Now I live in Ireland, a place where a name like Yuki would make you the bull’s-eye for all sorts of bullies, but back then I thought it was wonderful, and I told everybody about my doll and her name. The Nakamoris, for that was their family name, finally moved in before Christmas. We moved to a much bigger apartment with views of the snowy mountains. Amongst my belongings Yuki took pride of place on my new vanity table. She is still there in my parents’ house.

A few months after our move we returned to our old neighbourhood to say hello to some friends and we called in to the Nakamoris. Only the mother and son were there. She wasn’t expecting us, which I suspect is a definite no-no in Japan, but she was gracious and sat us down and offered us some tea and sweets. Hospitality revolves around food in most cultures: tea and cake or biscuits in Ireland; olives, cheese, almonds and a beer in Spain. Ms. Nakamori gave us Turkish tea and Japanese quince paste, a challenge to a Spanish child’s palate. I was far fussier with food as a child than I am now but I knew, instinctively, that refusing the food was not an option. Perhaps it was that melancholy smile suggesting an underlying sadness that I did not wish to awaken; maybe the transformation of the sitting room I knew so well in somebody else’s hands told me that I had to play by different rules, or perhaps my parents had mentioned that the Japanese were fond of ceremony and ritual and being an obliging child I did not want to spoil the occasion. I will never know but as I held the sickly sweet quince paste in my mouth praying it would vanish before I had to swallow it I had my first proper encounter with an alien culture.

The experience left an indelible impression: I think I learnt that being in the world sometimes requires suppression as well as expansion, a lesson that a Spaniard must of necessity learn at some point if she wishes to be a true cosmopolitan. I also realise now that some of the mores I identified as culturally Japanese resonate with my own make up: a love of ceremony and ritual; a recognition of the fragility of the individual ego vis-à-vis society; an appreciation of subtlety and indirection. I would not claim to know much about Japan now: I really enjoy their food ­–on which, incidentally, Spanish Jesuits had a definite impact introducing the Spanish custom of frying in batter, “tempora” or tempura as the Japanese call it; I love Murakami’s fictions and Ozu’s films; I took a foundation course in Japanese a couple of years ago. I am still deeply intrigued by Japan.

Not long ago I met the Japanese tourist liaison officer in Ireland. An attractive and stylish woman in her early thirties, she loved traditional music and played the fiddle, and spoke impeccable English. I don’t remember her name so I will call her Yuki. Yuki’s job is to support Japanese visitors in difficulties. These often involve various kinds of cultural shock. Every year a Japanese student staying with an Irish family will have some sort of break down because he or she finds the family too direct or intrusive. I wonder how many tourist liaison officers they need in Spain if Japanese visitors find Ireland a bit of a handful. Five hundred of them may find themselves with their hands full around the clock.

The night I met Yuki we ended sitting next to each other in a pub and as she did not know most people there I spent an hour or two conversing with her. She told me about her job, and perhaps because of my childhood encounters with Japanese culture, I asked her a question I had long wanted to ask: if I was invited to dinner in Japan, I said, how would I know when they wanted me to leave? She paused to think for a second and then answered: “You don’t. You’ll never know.” I laughed, and then Yuki added: “Except in Osaka: Osakans are very abrupt. They have this special kind of tea that they take out after dinner to signal that they want you to go.” Thinking about this, I could marvel at a culture that considers the serving of a cup of tea as a sign of eviction abrupt but I prefer to think that Osaka tradition confirms something I have known all along: food speaks its own language. Listen and learn.