The Devil's Larder

36

THERE IS no greater pleasure than to be expected at a meal and not arrive.

While the first guests were standing in the villa’s lobby with their wet hair and their dry wine, their early efforts at a conversation saved and threatened by fresh arrivals at the door, he was driving slowly in the rain along the coastal highway, enjoying his loud absence from the room, enjoying first the cranes and depots of the port, and then the latest condominiums, the half-glimpsed bypassed villages with their dead roads, the banks of coastal gravel, the wind, the darkness and the trees.

While they were being seated at the dining table and were thinking — those who knew him — Lui’s always late, he was taking pleasure from the water on the tarmac, the old movie romance of the windscreen wipers and the dashboard lights, the prospect of the speedy, starless, hungry night ahead.

At what point would his sister, or her husband George, dial his home (discreetly from another room) to get only the answerphone and leave the message. . What? Was he OK? Had he forgotten that they’d asked him round to eat with friends? Would he come late? Was he aware what trouble he’d put them to? Would he arrive in time to charm the sweet young teacher that they’d found and placed at his left elbow?

At what point would his plate, his napkin and his cutlery be gathered up and two women be asked to shift their chairs along to fill his place and break the gendered pattern at the table?

At what point would his hostess say ‘It’s not like him at all’?

While they were eating in his absence — a sweetcorn soup, a choice of paddock lamb or vegetarian risotto, Mother Flimsy’s tart with brandy — he was driving with one hand and, with the other, breaking pieces off his chocolate bar. He was dreaming repartee and dreaming manners of a king, and being far the smartest, sharpest person in the room.

While they were sitting in his sister’s long salon, for coffee and a little nip of Boulevard Liqueur, and getting cross about some small remark their host had made at their expense, Lui reached the hundred-kilometre mark that he had set himself. He took the exit from the highway, slowed down to drive the narrow underpass — sixty sobering metres of bright lights, dry road, wind-corralled litter, a couple sheltering — and turned on to the opposite lane. He headed back towards the town and home, another hundred k, a hundred k less cinematic, less romantic, and more futile than the journey out.

The rain, now coming from the right, presented unexpected angles for the car. It tilted at the windscreen with more percussion than before. He had to put his wipers on their fastest setting. The smell was weather, chocolate, gasoline. The skyline warmed and lifted with its fast-advancing lights, those attic rooms, those bars, those streets, those television sets, those sweeping cars and cabs, those marriages that brighten up the night.

His eyes were sore and tired. His mouth was dry. He’d have to concentrate to take his pleasure from the drive, his safe and happy absence from the room, his prudent, timid, well-earned thirst. He put a steady glass up to his lips and sipped. Dipped his spoon into the sweetcorn soup. Chose the lamb. Nodded at the windscreen wipers for a second helping of the tart. How witty he could be, how certain in his views, how helpful with the wine, how neat and promising. The pretty woman on his left extended her slim arm and squeezed his hand by way of thanks for his good company, and slipped out of the room into his car, a passenger, an absentee, the gender pattern at the table restored. He broke his chocolate bar in half and shared with her the unfed, midnight journey into town.