A Dwarf Kingdom by Nicolas Freeling

Author:Nicolas Freeling
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Three

“It doesn’t terribly matter, I shouldn’t think,” on Vera’s confession that she’d forgotten about lunch, forgotten the shopping, wasn’t very sure about anything. He did though have vague feelings of hunger. They were both pretty far out, he supposed, from the secure shores of reality. Known as being At Sea. “We’ll go out and eat somewhere.”

Fidgeting with the driving seat of the car—no not like that; try again—he remembered his sea-water cure: there’d been a lovely quiet girl, name of Frédérique, who used to massage him. ‘Your back is hard like a board.’ What would she say to it now?

Vera’s heart sank when he took the road out to the point, lurched into a deep abyss when he turned the car into the parking she had left half an hour before. But she had said she would control herself. Now’s the moment to show she meant it.

“Food here’s said to be good. Won’t be a lot of people. Are these my keys, or yours?” He had no thoughts at all. The sketchiest notion that knowing nothing about an adversary, anything you learn about his familiar surroundings is to the good: for what good that may do … but he’d have to have something to eat, before tackling Jacky. Which was close by, and it might as well be something good. Try out Jacky’s cooking. Expensive place but wasn’t it the moment to put out more flags? Poor Vera, might it take her mind off the misery? There wasn’t a table free ‘with a view’ but a blandly varnished headwaiter escorted them—this is better really; one can see the room. Comfortable, Castang? Nobody can sneak up in your back. Like something out of Ernest Hemingway.

It would be some decorator’s taste: yes but Framont would have approved it; thought it necessary, but felt at home with it. This made the difference, to one’s own morale.

A bad room, badly proportioned: the food will never taste really good without a properly high ceiling. Good restaurants are simple, and for preference even shabby. This was a thoroughly French vulgarity, of shot silk and cut velvet, of gilded wrought iron and morocco leather and none of it better than a micron thick. Every detail that minute fraction wrong. Veneers of exotic wood instead of honest native walnut; the curve of a chair leg that scrap too far. The certainty that it isn’t real gold leaf, that the leather has been split and planed and chemically faked; no honest Moroccan goat but a cow that dropped dead of old age. Castang felt contempt and this was what he needed.

But the food was a pleasant surprise. The mode in such places for pederast dainties—les Mignons, les Délices—has passed but pretentiousness has only changed costume. There were some horrors, and when he asked for water there were eight different sorts including the one from Wales, but the fish had a robust local sound, and he had to eat fish because of Jacky. A good wine to gladden Vera’s heart; he’d have just one glass of it.

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