“Holler!”
“Oh, sure,” she muttered, starting to carry the remains of dinner to the kitchen. “You wouldn’t hear over the racket. And mark my words, Bob Smith, one day our boys will turn on you.”
The strains of a Saint-Saëns piano concerto erupted from a pair of gigantic speakers poised in the doorless aperture that led out of the kitchen. While Claire Ponsonby shelled raw shrimp in the ancient stone sink and picked the veins from them, her brother opened the “slow” oven of the Aga combustion stove, hands inside mittens, and withdrew a terra-cotta casserole dish. Its lid was glued on with a dough of flour-and-water to keep in every last drop of precious juice; depositing the dish on the marble end of the three-hundred-year-old worktable, Charles then began the tedious job of chipping the casserole lid free from its sealing of dough.
“I coined an excellent aphorism today,” he said as he toiled. “Gossip is like garlic – a good servant, but a bad master.”
“Appropriate considering our menu, but is the gossip at the Hug really that bad, Charles? After all, no one knows.”
“I agree that no one knows whether the body parts went to the incinerator, but speculation is rife.” He tittered. “The main object of gossip is Kurt Schiller, who blubbered all over me – pah! An ornamental Teuton, a furtive fumbler – I had to bite my tongue.”
“That smells divine,” Claire said, turning to face him with a smile. “We haven’t had a beef daube in God knows when.”
“But first, shrimps in garlic butter,” said Charles. “Have you finished?”
“Last one being deveined now. Perfect music for a perfect meal. Saint-Saëns is so lush. Shall I melt the butter, or will you? The garlic’s crushed and ready to go. That saucer there.”
“I’ll do it while you set the table,” Charles said, pushing a block of butter into his pan, the shrimps ready for their brief immersion the moment the butter boiled and the garlic was brown. “Lemon! Did you forget the lemon juice?”
“Honestly, Charles, are you blind? Right beside you.”
Every time Claire spoke in her husky voice the big dog lying with its chin on its paws in an out-of-the-way corner would lift its head, thump the floor with its tail, its lumpy blond brows rising and falling expressively in its gentle black face like an accompaniment to the music of Claire speaking.
The shrimps in Charles’s capable hands, the table set, Claire moved to the battered, stained marble counter and picked up a large bowl of canned dog food. “Here, Biddy my love, dinner for you too,” she said, crossing the room to where the dog lay and putting the bowl down just beyond its front paws. On its feet in a trice, Biddy gulped at the food hungrily. “It’s the labrador in you makes you greedy,” said Claire. “A pity the shepherd can’t tone you down. Pleasures,” she went on with a purr in her voice, “are infinitely sweeter when taken slowly.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” said Charles. “Let’s take an hour at least to get through our meal.”
The two Ponsonbys sat down one on either side of the wooden slab end of the table to eat, a leisurely process that was only interrupted when the LP record on the turntable needed replacing. Tonight was Saint-Saëns, but tomorrow might be Mozart or Satie, depending on the dinner menu. To choose the right music was as important as the right wine.
“I presume you’re going to the Bosch exhibition, Charles?”
“Wild horses couldn’t keep me away. I can’t wait to see his actual paintings! No matter how good the color prints in a book are, they can’t compare to the originals. So macabre, so full of what I don’t know is conscious or unconscious humor. Somehow I can never get inside Bosch’s mind! Was he schizophrenic? Did he have a source of magic mushrooms? Or was it just the way he’d been brought up to see not only his world, but the next? They thought of life and death, reward and punishment, differently than we do today, of that I’m certain. His demons ooze glee while they subject their hapless human victims to torture.” He chortled. “I mean, no one in Hell is supposed to be happy. Oh, Claire, Bosch is a genuine genius! His work, his work -!”
“So you keep telling me,” she said rather dryly.
Biddy the dog bustled over to put its head in Claire’s lap. Her long, thin hands pulled at its ears rhythmically until its eyes closed and it groaned in bliss.
“We’ll have a Bosch menu to celebrate when you get back,” Claire said with a laugh in her voice. “Guacamole with plenty of chili, tandoori chicken, devil’s food cake…Shostakovitch and Stravinsky, some Moussorgsky thrown in…An old chambertin…”
“Speaking of music, the record’s stuck in a groove. Fix the daube, will you?” he asked, moving to the never-used dining room.
Claire walked around the kitchen efficiently while Charles, now in his chair, watched her. First she took the tiny potatoes off the Aga hotplate, strained them in the sink, patted a dab of butter over them in their bowl, then carried the bowl to the table. The daube she divided into two pieces which she placed on two old Spode plates and put one between each set of knife and fork. Last to come was a bowl of blanched green beans. Not one container or plate clinked accidentally against another; Claire Ponsonby laid everything on the table exactly. While the dog, knowing itself unneeded in the kitchen, went back to its square of rug and put its chin on its paws again.
“What do you intend to do tomorrow?” Charles asked when the daube had been replaced by treacly black demitasse espresso and both of them were savoring the smell-taste of mild cigars.
“Take Biddy for a long walk in the morning. Then Biddy and I are going to hear that talk on subatomic particles – it’s in the Susskind lecture theater. I’ve booked a taxi there and back.”
“It should not be necessary to book a taxi!” Charles snapped, watery eyes gone dry with anger. “Those unfeeling cretins who drive taxis ought to know the difference between a guide dog and any other dog! A guide dog, piss in a taxi? Rubbish!”
She reached out, put her hand on his unerringly; no groping, no slipping. “It’s no trouble to book one,” she said pacifically.
The dinner menu at the Forbes house was very different.
Robin Forbes had tried to make a nut loaf that didn’t crumble ruinously the moment a knife hit it, and drizzled thin cranberry sauce over it to, as she said to Addison,
“Ginger it up a tad, dear.”
He tasted the result suspiciously and reared back in horror. “It’s sweet!” he squeaked. “Sweet!”
“Oh, darling, a tiny bit of sugar won’t cause another heart attack!” she cried, striking her hands together in exasperation. “You’re the doctor, I’m only a humble R.N. of the old-fashioned, non-degreed kind, but even nurses know that sugar is the ultimate fuel! I mean, everything you eat that isn’t built into new tissue is turned into glucose for right now or glycogen for later. You are killing yourself with unkindness, Addison! A twenty-year-old football star doesn’t train as hard.”
“Thanks for the lecture,” he said bitingly, ostentatiously scraped the cranberry sauce off his nut loaf, then piled his big plate high with lettuce, tomato, cucumber, celery and capsicum. No dressing, even vinaigrette.
“I had my weekly talk with Roberta and Robina this morning,” she said brightly, terrified that he would notice that her loaf was meat loaf from the deli, and that creamy Italian dressing lurked under her own modest salad.
“Did Roberta get accepted into neurosurgery?” he asked, only slightly interested.
Robin’s face fell. “No, dear, they rejected her, she says because she’s a woman.”
“And rightly so. You need a man’s stamina for neurosurgery.”
No point in going there; Robin changed the subject. “But,” she said chirpily, “Robina’s husband got a big promotion. They can buy that house they love in Westchester.”