Saturday morning: you wake and wonder for a millisecond which weekday it is, and in an instant you realise. The express train you are on has pulled into some unexpected rest stop.
The day before I had rung a café in the hills to make a booking for five, having failed to book online.
‘We don’t take phone bookings,’ the woman who answered had said. ‘Or online for that matter,’ she had added, as if the place had achieved some kind of victory over the digital age. ‘Just turn up, and the attendant will take your name and give you a time when a table should be free.’
How would they know, I had wondered.
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As far as the view goes, Melbourne ends at the hills, a purplish blue graph that looks like the season’s temperature variations written across the sky. Today the graph was clouded so you couldn’t see the highs and lows.
East, east, east: we drive what is virtually a direct line across Melbourne. Bell Street, Eastern Freeway, Maroondah Highway, Boronia Road. Mountain Highway ascends to where the photinia and the viburnum are twice the size of their city-garden counterparts. Then the road runs through The Basin, a small village-like cluster of shops built in a hollow on a three-way roundabout intersection. After this oddly-named piece of civic whimsy, the road narrows, winding its way around hairpin bends for eight kilometres of forest before ending dramatically, triumphantly, at a T-intersection: Sassafrass, the village, not the plant or the hallucinogenic drug. Sassafras sits on both sides of a bitumen stripe that winds down from the top of Mt Dandenong, like a carnival slide.
It had rained overnight. The smell of eucalyptus was heavy in the humid air as we got out of the car. A breeze was fussing in the trees, throwing down watery splatters.
Miss Marple's Tearoom was as conspicuous as a Tudor inn in a eucalypt forest, so we didn’t miss its mansard roof, oak beams and white casement windows. A clipboard-wielding attendant, guarding the door, was wrangling a knot of customers waiting for their ETAs. She told us a table would be free in twenty minutes, so to kill time we walked up the street and into a second-hand book store called Through the Looking Glass. I was starting to feel like I was in Wonderland or Llandudno, or on a movie set.
*
Twenty minutes later we sat down at an oak table amidst white-washed walls, oaken beams, low ceilings, sash windows, and fireplaces. Around us seemed to be as many staff, black-and-white uniformed, as diners. It was retro charm without being twee. We ordered. When the food came out the ‘theme’ pre-conceptions dropped like bodies in an Agatha Christie novel. I forget who had what. We were talking about cinema - having just sat through several Japanese films at the Nova Cinema’s Kurosawa festival. In brief, there was an artfully overflowing cottage pie in a baking dish topped with a mountain of mashed potato, itself dripping with melting cheese and butter; an entrée serving of cauliflower soup in a large tureen accompanied by a bread roll that could have fed three; a Pimlico pastie the size of a small submarine; and a ploughman's lunch that could have fed his horse as well. After the main courses one of the teenagers ordered bread and butter pudding; the normally horizontal dessert was vertical, a geographical impossibility that piled sweet custard, dough, cream, jam and probably several other saporous but unidentifiable sweet ingredients into a vase big enough to hold eighteen yellow roses. The middle teenager had the unlikely-sounding Vicar's Folly, an agglomeration of butterscotch ice-cream, shards of honeycomb, chocolate pieces, whipped cream and caramel fudge oozing over the lot. I don't know how they got it through the door from the kitchen. Then there were scones.
More about the scones tomorrow. I’m tired. It’s been a long year and I didn’t even write about the Melbourne Cup.
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