Sustenance E-Book

Elizabeth Wassell

• Herausgeber: Liberties Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Who is Lily Murphy? She has platinum-blonde hair but dark eyes; she was born in New York to the daughter of a ballet dancer, but educated in England, and now she is a restaurant critic in Dublin. In Sustenance, we journey into Lily's world of sumptuous meals, but also into her troubled past, where the dinner table was heavy with menace. And we meet Nicholas Savage, the brilliant chef with whom she falls in love, but who, like Lily, harbours a dark secret.

Leseprobe

Praise for Elizabeth Wassell …

[Dangerous Pity] subtly interfuses different genres, including the Künstlerroman, American émigré fiction in the manner of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and the existential novel à la Simone de Beauvoir or Jean-Paul Sartre … a poised, archly post-modern and compelling novel.

The Irish Times

A smart, stylish, sensitive and often funny novel.

Sunday Independent

Wassell guides the reader effortlessly through the interactions between the characters as their actions drive them to an explosive denouement.

Books Ireland

Sustenance

Elizabeth Wassell

This book is for Seamus O’Connell, chef extraordinaire,some of whose dishesare described in these pages

and for

Dave Caffrey

(1947–2007)

his splendid table, from Allihies to Paris

The author thanks the following for their invaluable culinary advice: Sharon Jones, Fr Ken Letts, Sibyl Montague, Birgitta Saflund, Sean Sweeney and Paolo Tullio.

Special thanks to Dick F., Linda P., and Dan B. And to J. M., as always.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Part One Dublin, 2000

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Part Two

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Epilogue

Copyright

Prologue

My grandfather, who had once been a ballet dancer, lived in a jewel casket of an apartment near Carnegie Hall. He had plundered the theatres to furnish his rooms: a crimson canopy billowed above his bed; all kinds of properties, from scimitars to tasselled shawls, decorated the walls. There were pictures of Nijinsky and Tamara Karsavina and himself as a golden young man dancing for Balanchine. A burnished samovar commanded the kitchen. Whenever I visited him he served me caviar, black bread and strong tea in a glass, and, later, when I was considered old enough, chilled vodka in a tiny pewter cup.

With his stories, my grandfather spirited me to White Russia, to willowy ballerinas and temperamental choreographers, to banquets at the Russian Tea Room where ageing dancers wept on Balanchine’s shoulder and young dancers were toasted with glasses of vodka, to dressing rooms full of the slightly disgusting smell of sweat mingled with face powder, to rivalries, love affairs, hours of practice, to bruised limbs and deformed feet concealed by tulle and silk.

My mother was a seemingly respectable woman, disdainful of her father’s louche friends. Yet she herself had absorbed some of their worst qualities. She was an emotional tyrant, capricious as any fey ballerina, but without the redemptive grace of talent. She encouraged me to believe that she was the centre of my world, and I did believe it, at least when I was very small, fearing her tantrums as if they were the auguries of some terrible loss, an abandonment that would leave me out in the cold forever.

Ah, but my grandfather’s demi-monde life was my refuge, with its aromas of passion, scandal, genius, sojourns in foreign countries. I loved it as much as I hated the suburban house in which I lived with my parents. I hated the television’s fluttering blue glow, I hated the cries of children playing on their lawns at dusk while fireflies blundered in the uncertain light; I hated the smell of barbecues, the supermarkets and garage sales, the absence of style.

Given his half-Irish, half-Italian ancestry, I suppose my father should have been melodramatic, or dipsomaniacal. In fact he was a colourless man who worked in an office, too anxious for peace to protect me from my mother.

It is a November night in Manhattan; I am fourteen. My grandfather and I are having dinner in the Russian Tea Room. My grandfather eats very little, not because his appetite is small, but because he fears growing fat – he would feel marooned from himself if he let his slim dancer’s body bloat into old age. He has an imperious head and large grey eyes. His name is Jacob. Although he is a Russian Jew, he prefers simply to say that he is Russian.

At fourteen I am too thin, with no qualms about eating blini and caviar. Grandfather is allowing me to drink a glass of vodka. I feel as though we are in a play:

Lily’s uncle, the Count, has taken her to an opulent restaurant in St Petersburg, where they drink vodka and eat caviar served by waiters wearing Cossack tunics. Ladies and gentlemen bustle in, brush snow from their cloaks, bow to one another and cry, ‘Good evening, Ivan Mikhailovich!’ or ‘Greetings, Natalia Sergeiovna!’ Lily is preparing to ‘come out’, to lower herdécolletage, put up her hair, and attend balls. Her uncle, the Count, is lecturing her on Society while she gazes demurely at her plate.

What are we really talking about, in the Russian Tea Room on West 57th Street in Manhattan?

My grandfather is indeed lecturing me on Society. What he says is, ‘You can get away, Lily, if you want to. You can live in Europe, where there is courtesy, culture – unlike this country where people make things up as they go along.’

I look at his determined mouth. ‘How can I go away? We aren’t rich. And you know my mother wouldn’t let me.’

My grandfather’s arm describes a crescent in the air; for an instant I see a ghostly scimitar. ‘I will handle your mother. And you won’t need money. Your youth is your wealth. As is your beauty.’

I know I am considered beautiful, more for my colouring than anything else. What astonishes people about my looks is that my hair is extraordinarily fair, of a hue fashion magazines call platinum or ash-blonde: silver rather than gold, closer to the moon than to the sun. But my ‘doe-shaped’ eyes are so dark a brown as to seem black, and I am told that against their darkness my hair shimmers and my skin is lustrous as pearls!

Yet I believe but for this accident of colouring I would not be beautiful. It could also be argued that my face is merely bizarre, that I am simply an anomaly since my kind of colouring is so rarely found in nature. As it is, my grandfather’s theatrical friends caress my cheek and murmur praise in French or Russian. And my grandfather himself often gazes at me in his fierce, seagull-like way, and declares that my beauty will bring me fame and fortune. This prediction at once pleases and troubles me. It makes me feel yet again like a character in a play or an old-fashioned novel: the young heroine charged with promise, poised for romance. Yet a derisive voice in my head reminds me of my origins, the dull truth of my life, and assures me that I will never escape.

But, through my grandfather’s connections, it was arranged for me to complete my education at a boarding school in England, at reduced fees. So I did get out, although, although …

At first I was exhilarated, an escaped convict, a refugee in reverse. Destiny had not been pitiless after all, had not consigned me for eternity to a bleak suburban life, to an unstable mother and an awkward father. And I had never liked America’s hard landscape, so empty of history, while now, from my dormitory window, I could see moss-brocaded stone walls, ancient oaks, a Norman church, fields of gorse and hawthorn: such a deep landscape, even if it was not my own.

I was popular with the other girls because they considered me exotic, and I cultivated this perception, emphasising my Russianness just as my grandfather had done, and capitalising on my looks as he had instructed. And I was happy, moving among these girls who had been born into an old society, who lived in houses so ancient they bulged and sagged, who spoke in fluting English voices.

Still, the harsh New York accents of my father echoed in my head, as did the raucous voices of my Jewish relations as they argued politics across laden dining tables, slurping their soup, throwing up their hands in agitation. I pictured my hometown, which was really a kind of no-place, with its traffic lights depending from cords above the highways, its fast-food restaurants, despoiled landscape of gaunt trees and concrete playgrounds. I pictured those places, and was afraid my life in England was a lie in which I would be discovered, that I would be punished, banished from my own dreams, made to go back there, to that noisy prison.

At seventeen, I accompanied my school friend Vivian and her parents on their Christmas holiday to Nice. Vivian’s father, a kindly painter, liked me in his vague way for my looks. ‘Really, Lily,’ he would suddenly exclaim, staring at me through his thick spectacles as though he had never seen me before, ‘really, someone should paint you. You’ve got black eyes but your hair is pale as glass.’ Only he never did paint me. He painted abstracts, solid-looking triangles and squares placed asymmetrically on immense canvases, which sold quite well. Vivian’s serene mother was the editor of a woman’s magazine.

December was balmy in Nice, the sky glossed with a marine radiance, the sea varying in colour from turquoise to lapis, the poplars and pewter olive trees vivid on the slopes. Because it wasn’t hot, there were blessedly very few tourists.

In a haze of delight, Vivian and I wandered through vieux Nice, gazing at the sun-scoured houses painted gold or russet and scrolled over with wrought iron balconies. We stopped at cafés and marvelled at how different they were from English pubs, which struck us as somnolent compared to this bustle: the hiss and sputter of coffee machines, the deft movements of the waiters, the men at the zinc drinking pastis and talking heatedly. These men stared at us in candid admiration, their eyes limpid with sex. Unused to such scrutiny, we tried to laugh in a sophisticated way, feeling thrilled yet obscurely ashamed.

It was in Nice that I learned to love food. Vivian’s parents were gourmets, but they loathed formal restaurants, which they considered pretentious and boring, so for our capacious evening meals we favoured the inexpensive restaurants familial that encircled our small hotel. These restaurants had names like La Petite Biche, or L’Aristocloche (because it was close to the basilica), or Le Restaurant Angleterre (because it was in the rue d’Angleterre, and also as a tribute to Nice’s august history of tourists strolling along the Promenade des Anglais.) In them, I grew used to the flavours of the region: the pungency of niçoise olives, which are purple-black and small as currants; chunks of goat’s cheese marinated in olive oil; salade niçoise dressed with that same strong oil; delicate fish like loup and dourade royale simply grilled and perfumed with fennel; daube de boeuf in a sauce rich as chocolate.

Vivian’s father was never autocratic except in the restaurants, where he insisted that his daughter and myself overcome what he called our ‘childish squeamishness’ about dishes like calf’s brains, veal kidneys, roast rabbit, tripe sausages, and steaks left blue in the middle. And after a period of nibbling gingerly at our food while he stared at us through ominously narrowed eyes, we did, finally, overcome our misgivings, enjoying everything he ordered for us and washing it all down with pichets of the local red wine – which, to our delight, Vivian’s mother let us drink freely.

But it wasn’t only food that I came to love in Nice; it was restaurants themselves, restaurants as a phenomenon, so to speak. I realised in France that restaurants are a kind of theatre; that each table is an oasis of privacy amid all the public clamour, that because of their peculiar intimacy (people confiding, confessing, laughing, quarrelling), restaurants are ideal for observing human nature, that they are, simply, exciting. One evening, the table across from our own was occupied by a beautiful couple – a woman with a lissom figure and sloe eyes and a man whose black skin had the violet lustre of aubergines. Throughout their meal, they caressed each other’s faces; at one point the woman put her head in her hands and wept.

In another restaurant, there was always an old man eating alone. He was small and feeble and trembled the whole time, as though buffeted by an internal gale. Each night he took an elaborate meal, lifting his knife and fork in palsied hands, which shook so fiercely we were afraid that the food would tumble into his lap, yet he always managed to ferry each morsel into his mouth. He drank Campari from his own bottle which the plump waiter kept underneath the bar for him, and which he diluted with Perrier. And each night the proprietor would help him to the door and even onwards: an errand of mercy?

One evening, at one of our favourite restaurants, an elderly American couple occupied the table beside us. Glancing over, I recognised them as working-class New Yorkers; the man short and morose, with pouches beneath his lugubrious eyes, and the woman too plump and too bedizened, her hair coloured a vulgar orange, her arms festooned with bracelets. Something in me contracted with embarrassment and – yes – fear. I am not like you, go away.

All through that meal, they fascinated me. They had no table manners and found fault with everything. It was as though they were not in the South of France at all; they were so impervious to the society that surrounded them, and to the marvellous food. They could have been in their local deli, eating pastrami on rye and complaining about the world. ‘What about Myrtle?’ asked the woman at one point, ‘Should I invite Myrtle?’ This about some party they were intending to throw on their return to the States.

The man looked at her with his glum, extruding eyes. ‘Nah. She’s a cold fish.’

‘When Bernie died she didn’t go to the funeral.’

The man waved his hand contemptuously. ‘That’s what I told you. She’s a cold fish.’

Cold fish? Were fish ever warm? And couldn’t this sour man find any other metaphor?

When they had gone (after nibbling discontentedly at their dessert and showing no courtesy to the staff), I said to Vivian’s father, ‘Did you notice those sullen people beside us? They were so loud, and so ungracious to their waiter.’

‘No,’ he answered bemusedly, ‘I didn’t notice they were rude. I looked over at them once or twice. They seemed a nice old pair.’

I wasn’t sure why, but I felt rebuked, somehow.

Another day, over aperitifs in the local café, while Vivian read a magazine and her parents discussed their painter friends, I took out my little diary and began to write about the restaurants; how they looked, what the proprietors and waiters were like, the food and wine. As I wrote, I became intensely aware of my surroundings. The usual suspects had collected in the café: the middle-aged lady who was forever at a table in the back, eating a salad while her dog slumbered at her feet; the bespectacled man consulting racing forms; the three men with caps and grizzled faces, like characters from Fanny; the sad-eyed blonde who drank glass after glass of pastis by herself.

‘What are you writing?’ asked Vivian’s pleasant mother. When I showed her, her editor’s eye narrowed appreciatively.

‘Why, this is quite good, my dear. I could even put this in the magazine, in the travel section or perhaps the restaurant column.’ She lowered the page and smiled at her husband. ‘Really, this is awfully good, what Lily has done. It’s almost a kind of new genre, a restaurant review that is dramatic, nearly a short story, so full of lavish descriptions and things. Yes, we could do something with this.’

And so began my career as a restaurant critic, first in London and then, after a few fits and starts, Dublin.

Part One

Part I

Dublin, 2000

Chapter I

Cliona’s Restaurant

Dublin 2

by Lily Murphy

Tarnished Alice-in-Wonderland mirrors throw a silver light over the room. And there is a sombre glow from the immense bronze statue that stands beside the bar, of a boy with scalloped curls proffering a wine cup to the restaurant at large. Overall there is an impression of Edwardian opulence; one could imagine a portly merchant prince sauntering in amongst the orchids that decorate each table, accompanied by a lady with jewels in her hair. They would eat oysters and drink champagne, as a prelude to other matters, presumably.

So. This restaurant is camp, but not in an arch, snide way – more in a funny way, with a relaxed staff who are amused by their customers. Moreover the food is relatively inexpensive, which could be another reason, in addition to its campness, that Cliona’s attracts such an intriguing crowd: fewer captains of industry than one might expect, and more offbeat types. And the glowing room complements them. Three exquisitely dressed young men and one bedraggled man in jeans are eating mussels and talking seriously, their fingers gleaming with butter. At another table, a lone woman with hair flowing down to her hips is reading Dante’s Paradiso. An illustrious Irish writer is drinking wine and speaking softly with a man who is probably his publisher. Three slightly tipsy elderly ladies are giggling in a corner, beneath one of the vast mirrors.

The food at Cliona’s is pretty wonderful. There is a starter of spinach and lardons salad, which would be fairly ordinary but for the perfectly poached egg balanced on top, its white slightly pleated, like rumpled silk, its yolk the faultless dome of the very fresh egg, until the fork pierces it and it flows lush and gold over the bright green spinach and chunks of bacon. The other starters are also good: home-made terrine of duck en croute; asparagus lightly cooked and topped with olive oil, red and black peppercorns and ragged leaves of parmesan; mussels done like escargots with garlic, parsley, and butter.

For the main course there is a delicious confit de canard, its skin delicate as puff pastry; a beautiful casserole of sweetbreads and mushrooms; excellent John Dory with an emulsion of basil; and a few decent if unexciting pastas.

The desserts are uniformly splendid, and there is a generous plate of Irish farmhouse cheeses.

But the highlight of Cliona’s is Cliona herself. A tall young woman with an almost Slavic face (high cheekbones and elongated eyes like two palm fronds), she has the ideal temperament for an owner-chef of a popular restaurant. Nothing flusters her! During one of our dinners, a lady across the room began to complain about her pasta. ‘It’s not properly cooked,’ she shrilled. ‘It’s all hard.’

Despite the fact that the restaurant was thronged, Cliona herself hurried out of the kitchen, pushing back a tendril of hair that had come loose from her chignon. Her apron was covered in sauce, and there was a smudge of parsley on her cheek. But in a calm voice she explained to the lady that, at Cliona’s, the spaghetti is cooked al dente, as the Italians do it.

‘I don’t care how foreigners do it,’ cried the woman, her voice full of disdain for those Italian heathens who know nothing about how to cook pasta, ‘I like my spaghetti properly soft.’

Unruffled, Cliona took the plate back into the kitchen, where another fresh one was prepared, probably boiled for about an hour according to the lady’s wishes.

The simple fact is that this is a good restaurant because the food is way above average, and, despite the sumptuous room, the prices are below average. Plus it is unstuffy. And, incidentally, the wines are also decent and reasonably priced.

*

Lily’s editor was a taut, shrewd woman whose style of dress reflected the attitudes of her magazine. The Londoner’s London was not a city of towers, steeples and parks; it was a city of shops and restaurants. And with her beautifully cut dresses and hair, her manicured hands and her expensive jewellery, Lily’s editor looked perpetually like a prosperous lady who has just been shopping and is looking forward to lunch at a chic restaurant.

In January of 2000 she had called Lily into her office where, swivelling in her immense black chair before her immense and tidy desk, she had said, ‘Don’t ask me how it happened, but Ireland is hot these days.’

‘So hot, it’s cool?’ murmured Lily.

‘Exactly,’ replied the editor, clearly unaware (as usual) of any irony in her protégé’s comment, which was one of the things Lily liked, and also disliked, about her.

She went on, ‘Dublin is full of money, which means full of restaurants, apparently some really good restaurants, although I don’t suppose one has ever associated Ireland with good food.’

‘Well, England doesn’t have the world’s best culinary reputation either,’ the partly Irish Lily felt compelled to observe.

Her editor answered promptly, ‘But England has had its moneyed classes for centuries, and the wealthy English have always eaten well: Dover sole, prawns, lamb and strawberries in season. Whereas Ireland is only just now coming into its own, economically speaking.’ She put her elbows on the desk and narrowed her eyes. ‘I’d like you to cover the restaurant scene in Ireland. I’d like you to move to Dublin, stay a while, a good long while, travel up and down, from Belfast to Cork to wherever, you know? How about it?’

Lily thought. She thought that she was getting a bit tired of London, which seemed to be growing ever more strident and pushy, like a version of New York. And she was also getting tired of the stubborn presence of Jacob and her mother in her imagination. She considered her diffident father, and how, through him, she was one-quarter Irish. She thought that she was lonely: she hadn’t had a proper boyfriend in two years. She thought about Dublin across the sea: a sea change. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I’d like to try Ireland.’

‘Good, though you’d better be careful. They’re a savage lot, the Irish.’

Lily regarded her equably. ‘They managed to produce Yeats, and Joyce.’

‘Oh, Joyce, with his incomprehensible books. I believe Virginia Woolf absolutely detested them.’

Lily genuinely couldn’t tell if she was being teased. ‘My name is Murphy, you know.’

‘But you aren’t really Irish, are you?’ Twirling a pencil in her fingers, she seemed to reflect. ‘In fact one doesn’t know exactly what you are, my dear.’ Then, with her tight smile, ‘Which is, of course, part of your charm.’

In Dublin, Lily finally had her hair cropped short. For a long time she had been feeling oppressed by it, as though it were literally eclipsing her. She was thirty now, but over the years its colour had neither dimmed nor darkened, and when she walked along the street with that silver banner flowing down her back, attracting all kinds of attention – well, it had begun to be a drag. When she realised that certain colleagues were referring to her as ‘the one with the hair’, she’d begun to see that it was time to do something about it.

‘Short, please,’ she’d told the hairdresser, looking steadily at him in the mirror. She had felt uncomfortable in the salon because it was so like a hospital, full of docile women in blue gowns being ferried from washbasin to chair, where the professional waited, smiling consolingly before his array of instruments.

‘Right,’ he had said, his bluntness complementing her own, narrowing his eyes to ponder her head, refraining from banal talk about the weather, just getting to work, asking her to tilt forward so that she could feel the cold touch of his scissors on her nape.

‘I’ve released the wave,’ he announced with satisfaction when it was over. ‘I bet you thought your hair was straight? It was only that it was so heavy, it hadn’t a chance to curl.’

Now, a day later, surveying herself in the mirror, Lily still was not sure how she felt. Her hair had been transformed into a welter of loose waves. She stared and stared, feeling, as always, uneasy about her so-called beauty, nearly certain it was just a trick of colouring, of light and shadow. Sometimes she thought this was the truth of all her life, that it was a trick, a lie, a dream. She had done this before, had stood before the mirror in silent communion with herself, asking her image that adolescent question, but asking it with real perplexity: Who am I?

She roused herself, and hurriedly put on a jacket, since it was an unusually cold April evening. She was going to dinner for her column, going alone, since she had not yet made friends in Dublin.

At the table, she swept off her beret, shook out her new curls, and lowered her head to contemplate the menu, deliberately meeting no one’s eye since dining alone was problematic – for a woman. Lunch was all right; you could be an office worker gobbling a meal between appointments. But people still considered a woman having dinner on her own in a fashionable restaurant either mysterious or pitiable. Sometimes Lily liked it, the speculation that would encircle her, the quick glances from neighbouring tables, while she ate her solitary supper. But tonight she was feeling shy, perhaps because Dublin was new to her. The waiter appeared, and she ordered avocado and prawns, grilled salmon with fennel and a half-bottle of Macon Villages. It was an extensive menu; she would have to come here again.

After the starter, she surreptitiously took out her little book and scribbled, Avocado just right, prawns fresh but slightly overcooked, sauce okay. Then she glanced round to make certain no one was observing her; it would not do for the staff to register that she was a restaurant critic, especially since she was as yet unknown in Dublin, whereas in London she had been forced, after a time, to concoct absurd disguises – dark glasses, floppy hats – coy as a film star.

With a small shock she noticed that the man beside her was also writing in a little book. Like herself he was eating alone, but there was a whole bottle of wine on his table as opposed to her modest half. She studied him furtively. He was about fifty-five, she thought, and over-elegant in the way of slight men who dress too fastidiously and impress you as fussy rather than dapper. A popinjay. And his narrow face and tapering beard gave him the look of a wolf. At the moment she observed this, he met her eye and threw her a lupine grin.

‘Reviewing, are we?’ he asked, still smiling in a teeth-baring way.

‘Hush,’ she answered brusquely, ‘please don’t blow my cover.’

‘I would never do such an ungallant thing. May I come to your table, dear lady?’ Without waiting for a reply he seized his wine bottle and moved to the chair across from her own. She nearly protested – before noticing that he was drinking an extremely rare Burgundy, way beyond her wine budget. You unscrupulous minx, she said to herself, You are going to let him stay because you want a glass of that La Tache!

The man extended his right hand and ‘Count Bartholomew O’Sullivan-Kelly,’ he announced, with another glinting smile.

‘Er – hello. I’m Lily.’

‘A-ha! I knew it. Lily Murphy, restaurant connoisseur and critic for The Londoner. I have seen your face in photographs. May I help myself to a soupcon of your delightful Macon Villages? Then we can call for another white, before savouring the piece de resistance, this absolutely splendid La Tache. Anyway, dear girl, what are you doing in Dublin?’

Disconcerted by this man’s deft patter, and by the impertinence with which it was so liberally seasoned, Lily answered confusedly, ‘I’m living here now. I mean, the magazine has asked me to be its restaurant correspondent in Ireland.’

‘A-ha!’ Count O’Sullivan-Kelly repeated. ‘Then you are both colleague and rival to myself. You see, I, too, am a restaurant critic, for Emerald Isle, an appalling name for a magazine, you would doubtless agree, with its mawkish American associations. Shamrocks and leprechauns! However, it pays rather handsomely.’

‘So I’ve noticed.’ She indicated his bottle. ‘The Londoner would never allow me to drink such a good wine.’

‘But your Macon Villages is quite nice, although it seems we have polished it off. Shall we try a half bottle of Chablis, while we wait for the main course?’

Lily murmured assent; she was not quite sure why, since the wine she had already drunk was going a little to her head. But for some reason she was warming to this curious man with his baroque name and flamboyant diction, deciding, in a wine-flushed way, that he was rather amusing after all, rather interesting, and, of course, as he himself had observed, a colleague. Probably it was only the drink inclining her to be expansive, along with her current loneliness, but she was suddenly ready to befriend him. And also ready, for some reason she did not want to analyse, to get a bit drunk.

The Count was saying, ‘I must tell you why gustatory journalism is my profession. I am a younger son, you see. My brother was given a purpose in life upon his birth, but I have had to make my own way in the world. And very early on, I realised that I loved a good table.’

The waiter came with their half bottle of Chablis. O’Sullivan-Kelly continued, ‘We grew up in a grand yet slightly mouldering house, and the kitchen was a disgrace. Even as a child, my heart grew heavy at mealtimes. The dining room was cold as a tomb, the conversation exclusively about horses, yet all that I could have borne, had there been any comfort in the plates put before me by our gloomy butler. But it was terrible, dear girl, terrible! Shoe-leather meat, watery vegetables, puddings that resembled the plump and unhealthy face of my nanny. Unendurable!’

Their main courses arrived. Lily examined her salmon, which was nicely crusty from the grill, then took a nibble of it, feeling self-conscious in the presence of another restaurant critic. The Count, she observed through her lashes, was doing the same, scrutinising his magret de canard then trying a piece, all the while throwing her covert glances. They both paused in their eating to scribble furiously in their books.

‘May I try yours?’ she asked. ‘It looks very nice. Would you like a bit of mine?’ She was uncomfortably aware that her offer sounded more suggestive than she had intended, but language about food is always fraught, if you weren’t careful, and it was hard to be careful while drinking such a strong wine.