Trick or Treat (12 page)

Upon her wings presents the god unshorne

See how Aurora throwes her faire

Fresh quilted colours through the aire:
Get up, sweet-Slug-a-bed, and see

The Dew-bespangling Herbe and Tree.

That sounded like good advice. I put on some clothes and went forth to the Flagstaff Gardens, found a tree with deep shade, and sat down to read my book and watch the people going past. It being Saturday, there were a lot of children and dogs, but I could put up with some rough company for the pleasure of the sun, the open air, and the red and gold of the Flagstaff cannas, which almost hurt the eye and left orange after-images on the retina.

I walked back into the city and decided to buy my lunch at Uncle Solly’s New York Deli. Solly was not there, but several of his charming nephews were. They bore a family resemblance: tall, slim, darkish, and very friendly.

‘Corinna!’ one hailed me. ‘You looking for lunch? How about some of Solly’s salt beef, fresh sliced, on a bagel, and maybe a little pickle or three?’

‘Sounds good,’ I agreed. ‘Are you John?’

‘You’re confusing me with my cousin,’ he said. ‘I’m Yossi. How’s Daniel?’

‘Largely absent,’ I said frankly. He looked concerned, which was nice of him.

‘You don’t have to worry about that Daniel,’ he told me, handing over the bagel and adding a free extra pickle. ‘He’s all right. Just busy, is all. I bet.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ I replied.

I took the bag, and went out. Back, this time, to Insula, where the roof garden had several lunchers. The rose bower was bursting into blossom with Cecile Brunner thornless pink flowers. I sat down with my paper bag near Therese Webb, who laid aside her tapestry to welcome me and pour me a cup of chai. She makes it with milk and sugar in the Indian

manner and it’s superb, rich and fruity and spicy.

‘So how’s Daniel?’ she asked.

I was getting tired of the question. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, as crossly as one can while drinking the questioner’s chai.

‘He didn’t look well when I last saw him,’ she explained.

‘I’m dining with him tonight,’ I answered, to deflect further enquiry. ‘How’s the tapestry business?’

‘Doing well,’ she said.

I felt a cool nose touch my hand. Carolus, the regal King Charles spaniel, was requesting a little of my salt beef. I detached a small piece. He ate it with condescension and returned to his cushion. He is not a greedy dog.

‘Carolus, really,’ said Therese. ‘A dog with your lineage, for shame.’

‘One small bit of salt beef in homage,’ I said, stroking the silky ears. Carolus is exempt from my usual strictures on dogs. He is more like a feline than a canine, anyway. He is a perfect pet for a craft worker, being all colours of autumn and furred in the very best plush.

‘Corinna, have you felt...well, odd, lately? In Insula?’ asked Therese.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As though there’s someone watching. But all my bolts have been bolted and all my locks have been locked. I think it’s the high magical ambiance that’s making us uneasy. Meroe’s got a hundred witchy relatives visiting.’

‘I suppose that could be it,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Carolus always barks if there’s someone at the door, and he hasn’t barked, so...’

‘There’s no one there,’ I said bracingly.

‘And I keep hearing this little song,’ she confessed.

‘Wassail, wassail?’

‘Yes, how did you know?’

‘I’ve heard it too. Out in the alley, early in the morning. But when I look for the singer they aren’t there. And I don’t think it’s supernatural. It’s one of those acoustic effects you get in cities. I have no doubt that the singer is a human.’

‘You’ve heard it too, that’s a relief,’ said Therese, picking up her tapestry. It was red waratahs on a green field, very eye-catching. ‘I thought I was going mad.’

‘If you are, I’m coming with you.’

‘Always delighted to have your company, my dear,’ she said comfortably. ‘I was thinking of this for Cherie Holliday’s room, what do you think?’

‘She’s still in love with pink,’ I said. ‘And going into interior design on her own account. It would suit the Prof’s Roman couch, though.’

‘And Nox would look very decorative asleep in the middle,’ said Therese.

A tiny black kitten, Nox ruled the Professor with an iron paw, not even bothering to conceal it in a velvet glove. She had begun life in the roof garden where her mother Calico had dined on rats, then spent a distressing week in the air conditioning ducts, subsisting on condensation and mice. Once rescued, she had clearly formed the resolution that the rest of her life was to be lived in luxury and was enforcing this with an uncompromising view on cheap cat food and substandard accommodation. Which meant she ate only gourmet treats and slept under Professor Monk’s chin, not in the padded cat bed which Meroe had lent him.

He, of course, loved it. He had bought her a little red harness into which she allowed him to strap her for her daily constitutional in the garden. She had already given Mrs Pemberthy’s rotten little doggie Traddles such a look when he came barking up to her that he had retreated behind his mistress’s lisle-clad ankles and whined, while she shrieked at Professor Monk to call off his nasty cat. Nox was a familiar, like Belladonna, and such animals are formidable.

I wandered down to my apartment for a shower and to dress in nice clothes for Daniel’s dinner. What to wear? I could not compete with long legs and curls. Finally I found loose black trousers, a white kurta, and a filmy cobweb drape which Therese had made of fine feathery thread in silver and purple. It had a tendency to shed but it looked beautiful. And after all, it wasn’t going to be shedding in my house, but that grotty flat of Daniel’s, which could do with some colour in the decor.

I found a bottle of cab sav, a wine suitable for any food, and one of white and loaded them into my backpack. I fed Horatio and the Mouse Police, watched the news, which was no worse than usual, watched the other news, which was even worse than usual and full of North Korea and snipers and climate change, and then I could delay no longer. I dragged my unwilling feet out into the lane and set off for Elizabeth Street and Georgiana Hope’s dinner party. I didn’t want to, but I went.

Perhaps it might not be as bad as I feared. In fact, unless she stripped naked and ravished Daniel in front of my eyes, it couldn’t be as bad as I feared. I climbed the stairs of the Build
ings slowly, carrying my backpack with my two bottles of wine, moving like someone invited to the deathbed of a dear friend.

The office had been cleaned, but it still looked agreeably rumpled, as though Sam Spade had just clapped on his fedora and gone out with the mysterious woman diffusing a Parisian scent. The mysterious woman, however, emerged from the other room wearing, I swear, higher heels than last time, the tightest of blouses in lime satin, a simply schoolgirl grey bubble skirt and the first pair of seamed stockings I had seen since I caught Audrey Hepburn on the Late Late Late You Are Severely Insomniac Movie Show.

‘Danny! Corry’s here!’ she called over her shoulder, not greeting me at once. ‘And you said she wouldn’t come!’

‘Not so lucky,’ I murmured, handing over my bag.

She peeked inside. ‘Oh, Australian wine,’ she said.

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‘This is Australia,’ I replied firmly. ‘This is your vin du pays, if you are staying.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Do come through. I’m just putting some finishing touches to the food. Danny can entertain you.’

‘Hello, Danny,’ I said, not without a touch of malice. ‘Why not entertain Corry by opening this bottle?’

‘Why not?’ he answered.

He had dressed up for the occasion, I saw, in the charcoal-grey shantung suit which Kepler had coaxed a Chinese tailor into making for him. The distressed artisan had complained the whole time that he did not have any patterns for giants, just ordinary sized men, but Kepler had persisted and Daniel was worth dressing. The Mandarin collar outlined his smooth throat and I had to fight down the urge to fling myself into his arms and kiss him so thoroughly that it might take weeks to reach his toes. I could tell that he was thinking the same thing. I began to blush. I touched his cheek.

‘I miss you,’ I whispered, which was not at all what I had been going to say. I forgot what I had been going to say, something sharp and modern and sassy, I have no doubt. Possibly even feisty.

His smile, which had warmed, warmed further and he reached out a hand to me just as Madame ankled back into the room and called us to the table.

Said table was laid with a new white cambric cloth. A new set of David Jones’ pure white dishes, ditto Flatware new cutlery, Bistro One new glasses, and salt cellar and pepper grinder just out of the box from House. If Daniel was paying for all of this, she had set him back a couple of thousand dollars, which I didn’t know that he had. I had never, in fact, asked about his finances. It didn’t seem to be any of my business and it still didn’t, so I sat down, opened my crisp white (new, double damask) napkin and said, ‘Smells good!’

‘I quite like your market,’ she replied, ‘but there’s nowhere to match the Food Hall at Harrods, or even Sainsbury’s, here,’ she commented. I refrained from a shriek of outrage on behalf of Myer, David Jones and multiple remarkable food shops within easy staggering distance, because she was putting down a serving dish (new, white) full of prawns which looked like they’d had the same sort of day as I had: enough to make you curl up and lose your head. I took one. There was a dipping sauce which had a suspiciously familiar green tinge.

‘Wasabi?’ I asked. I looked at Daniel. He knows I can’t stand the stuff. He shrugged.

‘I’m sure you’ll like this,’ said Georgiana. ‘There’s only a little touch of wasabi in it. Do try,’ she coaxed.

I tried. It was the same old wasabi, which exploded in my mouth and abolished my tastebuds. I muffled my scream of pain and swallowed, mopped my streaming eyes, then ate the rest of the prawn naked. It had an odd, grassy taste.

‘I’ve been having such fun with all these new spices—bush foods, they call them,’ she informed me brightly. ‘That one is lemon myrtle. Perhaps you might like the lillipilli or bush pepper ones better.’

I tried all three. They tasted foul. Bush spices are a condiment, not a food group. To be used sparingly. By the taste, I might have been chewing a branch. I wondered what to say but didn’t need to comment, because Georgie was enthusing about the dear old dead days in London with Daniel, and Daniel was replying. He tried to drag me into the conversation, but every time I said something, Georgie would block me out again.

The second course was contained in a perfectly round

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white (new) cup: three broad beans, a measure of greenish stock and a dollop of something white which I took to be yogurt. I swallowed the soup. The white substance was not yogurt or sour cream but horseradish, which scalded my mouth afresh. I wasn’t going to count this dinner as one of the great culinary delights of my life, I could tell.

I drank another glass of my good Otways sauvignon blanc and plotted dark poisonings. Georgie first, of course, but after that, how about the proprietor of Best Fresh? I still hadn’t met him, her or them, and I really ought to go and say hello. All bakers together, after all. They couldn’t be less amusing than Georgie’s conversation about London galleries. Which I knew, as it happened, a lot better than she did.

The next course was salmon, which had clearly died hard before being undercooked, smothered in a sauce made of pesto and kiwi fruit and wrapped inside a banana leaf. Kiwi fruit and fish? Well, it might be delicious...

It wasn’t. I noticed that this was clearly the slimmer’s version of dinner. I had already put a ritual curse on the inventor of cuisine minceur, so I didn’t need to do it again. Each tiny offering—three snow peas, three fanned leaves of radicchio, a transparent slice of fish—was laid with grave solemnity in the middle of a great big plate, as though that made them any bulkier. Or was this some comment on my weight? Surely even Georgiana Hope wasn’t that crass. No potatoes, avocado, nothing starchy: no bread of any kind.

Then came a salad. In a sparrow’s nest of leaves were three thin slices of rare steak. The dressing was a Thai concoction so hot that I had another glass of wine while trying to put out the fire. Meanwhile the conversation went on and I had had enough of it. ‘No, it’s in the Courtauld,’ I said, rudely interrupting her discourse on Italian naive painting. ‘It’s the large marriage chest, in the third room. You’ll recall that it has an icon of Christ Pancrator over the door? That room.’

I had eaten my three slices of steak so I poured another glass and went on, determined to grab some conversation with my only love. ‘My favourite is the Wallace collection. So interesting and individual. There’s been a tendency lately to put away most of the art works and display the remains very carefully—rather like this salad. Not a lot of substance, but very pretty to look at and one can appreciate every nuance of the flavour. But I much prefer the old-fashioned sort of museum, where all the things that the person collected are all crammed together and you don’t have to walk ten miles to see the Botticellis. I like Mr Wallace and his arms and armour and paintings and Mrs Wallace’s fire screens in Berlin wool-work.’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Daniel. ‘Like the Bourdelle Museum in Paris, where the painter’s studio is upstairs and the sculptor’s downstairs, and you can imagine the washing hanging out the window.’

Georgiana collected the plates and brought in dessert. It was a soupçon of coconut ice cream with nasturtium petals around it and a thin slice of mango. It was nice, if you like coconut ice cream. I ate it in one mouthful and Daniel and I continued to enthuse about crowded collections, and I began to feel better.

Over a demitasse (new) of very weak coffee from a home barista (his own) and a tiny curled sliver of chocolate-coated orange peel, Georgie settled the two of us down on the couch and began to interrogate me about Earthly Delights. Daniel was bidden to do the washing-up and I wondered that she had not yet made him buy a dishwasher.