Bernard Samson 1 - Berlin Game by Len Deighton

Author:Len Deighton
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Sterling
Published: 2011-08-01T18:30:00+00:00

14

I collected Fiona from her sister’s house that evening. She’d left a message asking me to take the car there, so she could bring back a folding bed that she’d lent to Tessa at a time when she’d decided to sleep apart from George. The bed had never been put to use. I always suspected that Tessa had used its presence as a threat. She was like that.

Tessa had prepared dinner. It was the sort of nouvelle cuisine extravaganza that Uncle Silas had been complaining of. A thin slice of veal with two tiny puddles of brightly coloured sauces, peas arranged inside a scooped-out tomato, and a few wafers of carrot with a mint leaf draped over them. Tessa had learned to prepare it at a cookery school in Hampstead.

‘It’s delicious,’ said Fiona.

‘He was yummy,’ said Tessa when she’d finished eating. She never seemed to need more than a spoonful of food at any meal. Nouvelle cuisine was invented for people like Tessa, who just wanted to go through the pretence of eating a meal for the sake of the social benefits. ‘He had these wonderful dark eyes that could see right through your clothes, and when he was demonstrating the cooking he’d put his arm round you and take your hands. “Like zis, like zis,” he used to say. He was Spanish, I think, but he liked to pretend he was French of course.’

Fiona said, ‘Tessa has cooked the most wonderful things for me while you were away.’

‘Like zis?’ I asked.

‘And meals for the children,’ said Fiona hurriedly, hoping to appeal to my feelings of obligation. ‘She has given me a gallon of minestrone for the freezer. It will be useful, Tess darling, and the children just love soup.’

‘And how was Berlin?’ said Tessa. She smiled. We understood each other. She knew I didn’t like the tiny ladies’ snack she’d prepared, or her supposed antics with the Spanish cookery teacher, but she didn’t give a damn. Fiona was the peacemaker, and it amused Tessa to see her sister intercede.

‘Berlin was wonderful,’ I said with spurious enthusiasm.

‘German food is more robust than French food,’ said Tessa. ‘Like German women, I suppose.’ It was directed at me and more specifically at the buxom German girl I was with when Tessa first met me, back before I married Fiona.

‘You know that German proverb: one is what one eats,’ I said.

‘Feast on cabbage and what do you become?’ said Tessa.

‘A butterfly?’ I said.

‘And if you eat dumplings?’

‘At least you are no longer hungry,’ I said.

‘Give him some more meat,’ Fiona told her sister, ‘or he’ll be bad-tempered all evening.’

When Tessa returned from the kitchen with my second helping of dinner, the plate no longer exhibited the finer points of la nouvelle cuisine. There was a chunky piece of veal and a large spoonful of odd-shaped carrot pieces that showed how tricky it was to slice thin even slices. There was only one kind of sauce this time, and it was poured over the meat.

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