Let it be known at once: a bowl of cherries, however unadorned by pastry or cream, is still very much within Lady Crumbleworth-Fitzgerald’s jurisdiction, for fruit of this lacquered, near-imperial darkness deserves the same rigorous scrutiny one would apply to a soufflé. The cherries before me are heaped with a carelessness that I can only describe as aristocratic — piled high in their cream-and-gold bowl as though they simply could not be bothered to arrange themselves more modestly, stems splayed in every direction like the legs of footmen who have all collapsed at once after a particularly long ball.
The colour, I must say, is doing a great deal of work here — that deep garnet-into-near-black hue, catching the light in such a way that several specimens appear almost lacquered, as though dipped by some unseen hand in the varnish reserved for the finest dining tables at the estate. One does admire the glisten upon their skins; it speaks of freshness, of juice straining valiantly against taut flesh, of a fruit fully prepared to ruin a silk blouse at the slightest provocation.
I shall confess a particular fondness for the stems — those wiry, defiant little stalks reaching out in all directions, some still clutching their pale, dried leaf-tips like tiny flags of surrender. It lends the whole arrangement a kind of unkempt grandeur, the fruit-bowl equivalent of a duchess who has just come in from the garden and refuses to apologise for it.
On Provenance: One does wonder where cherries of such deep, almost theatrical hue are truly grown, for Geoffrey — who tended the estate’s own cherry trees for the better part of thirty years and held passionate, occasionally tearful opinions on rootstock — would never have permitted fruit this dark without interrogating its lineage personally. I do hope this establishment has its own Geoffrey somewhere, quietly furious about something agricultural.
A triumph of nature, unceremoniously dressed, and worthy of nine and a half out of ten crumpets.
