Vivienne’s sideVivienne wanted a browned edge on her omelette. She announced the preference as scandal before tea, conceding the pleasure of a soft middle while insisting on the crisp part that argued with a fork. Two omelettes would settle the difference. She would cook her own, although the confidence involved had so far enjoyed the considerable advantage of an empty pan. First, she wanted the pepper and directions to the knives. Opening six drawers and pretending to admire their handles would not count as helping.
Vera directed her to the top drawer beside the sink and supplied a board. The pepper should become strips; she liked evidence that it had survived. She accepted two omelettes with a further condition: each would taste the other's. Separate preferences need not mean separate experience. Then she yielded the first use of her pan, catching herself before ownership became a culinary qualification. Had Vivienne ever tossed an omelette, she asked, or had the relationship remained one of threats? Vivienne admitted one success and other occasions on which she had folded the evidence. A spatula would protect Vera's ceiling from ambition.
The pepper went into butter, half of it reserved for later. Vivienne kept the strips moving and asked Vera to crack the eggs. She liked having Vera beside her, occupied with something practical. Their hands had work to do, and neither had to furnish the whole occasion with talk. Yet Vera's quiet contained something. Vivienne listened more carefully. Three notes, perhaps. Was Vera attending to the kettle, or was that a tune? The question interrupted no grand declaration. It caught something already happening between the chopping and the beating of eggs.
Vera claimed the tune, including responsibility for its absent fourth note. She invented these fragments while cooking and generally lost them by the washing-up. Before Vivienne could furnish this one with words, Vera asked her to leave it alone long enough to discover its direction. She could already see the temptation on Vivienne's face: a song about a woman regretting a hat seemed dangerously near. Would she hum back only what she had heard? For the moment, Vera wanted an accurate listener beside her, someone who could preserve the small phrase without immediately giving it a clever costume.
The imaginary hat suffered Vivienne's disappointment. She tried the notes, heard that her last one had gone too high, and tried again. While she listened for confirmation, the pepper became ready for half the beaten eggs. She had not expected to cook to music nobody else knew. She liked it, and she could also recognise the temptation to improve it simply because she could sing more loudly. That was not the same thing as knowing where it ought to go. Had her second attempt come closer? Vera answered that it was exactly right.
Then Vera attempted a fourth note herself and rejected it. The result suggested a kettle refused a loan, an assessment made more timely by the actual kettle boiling. She would make tea; Vivienne should watch her browned edge. Amid those small divisions of labour, Vera told her something more consequential. Usually she stopped humming when somebody entered the kitchen. With Vivienne there, she had continued without noticing. Hearing the unfinished tune was different from being offered a performance. The fragment had escaped before Vera arranged herself for company, and she liked having Vivienne hear it before it became good.
Vivienne withheld applause, though she could not entirely abandon the kettle's financial troubles as material for a future verse. Her omelette was brown underneath. She folded it, made a small tear, and declined to treat the damage as an occasion for a curtain. Plated, it could surrender a crisp corner to Vera while the pan changed hands. Vivienne wanted to hear the three notes again tomorrow, after her own song. She wanted to discover whether she remembered them away from the pepper and the work that had first accompanied them.
Vera agreed: if she forgot, Vivienne could begin. She tasted the offered corner and liked it without surrendering her own preference for a soft omelette. Butter and the remaining pepper went into the pan over lower heat. Tea waited, and Vera urged Vivienne to take hers before it became formidable. Then she returned to the care Vivienne had taken with the melody. She had noticed that Vivienne had left her notes intact. Now she wanted an addition. Hum the three again, she asked, and choose a fourth. Vera would listen and decide whether she wanted to follow.