Martin Walker - The Crowded Grave

He began by setting a pot with salted water on the stove to boil for the vegetables, put a spoon of duck fat into his frying pan and tore some of the bread he sliced that morning into generously large croutons. Then he grated the rest into bread crumbs, sliced and squashed some garlic and began blending it into a paste with some olive oil and the defrosted red peppers. The croutons were fried until they were golden, and he placed them inside the oven for the interiors to dry fully.

“I like watching you cook,” she said, adding a small splash of Bergerac Sec to her Perrier. “You never seem to pause, one movement flows into the other.”

“It’s just practice,” he said, adding the navets and carrots and spring onions to the boiling water and beginning to grate a block of Parmesan cheese. He set his timer to five minutes. “What do you eat in Paris?”

“I wake up with orange juice, have a croissant for breakfast in a cafe, a bowl of soup or salad at lunch or sometimes just some fruit if I’m working through,” she said. “In the evenings, restaurants or dinner parties two or three nights a week and the rest is omelettes, pizzas and takeout Chinese or Vietnamese. My refrigerator would break your heart, just milk, eggs and orange juice and frozen pizzas in the freezer.”

“What about those things you learned to cook with me?”

“Once a month, I try to give a dinner party, usually all women, and spend a day attempting to read my handwriting from that notebook where I wrote down your recipes.” He turned to her, pleased at the thought of her cooking his dishes. She shrugged in return. “You’d be surprised how few women still cook in Paris, at least the ones I know, with jobs like mine. When I go to a dinner, it’s usually catered or bought in from a traiteur. It’s the way we live now.”

“Reminds me of that Prevert poem in the book you sent me, ‘Dejeuner du matin.’ ”

“I know it, about the guy who sits and stirs his coffee and says nothing and has his cigarette and says nothing and puts on his hat and goes and the girl is left crying.”

“It hardly sounds like France,” he said.

“Paris never was France,” she said. “Sunday brunches are fashionable now, champagne and orange juice and eggs Florentine and bagels with smoked salmon. Waffles with maple syrup are suddenly all the rage. When I got back to the office from the convalescent home, they’d bought me a waffle maker as a welcome-back present.”

She held out her glass for more Bergerac Sec. It was mainly wine now. He took the rouille and grated cheese and croutons to the table and began making the beurre manie, whisking butter and flour together to make a paste that he added, little by little, to the navarin until he judged the sauce thick enough. The buzzer sounded on the timer, and he added the vegetables to the stew and left it to simmer gently while he served the soup into two bowls and followed her to the big table in the living room. He brought the glasses, lit the candles and sat.

“Bon appetit,” he said, and her lip trembled.

“If you knew how often I remembered you saying that when I was in the hospital,” she said, and tried to laugh. “Those history books you sent me brought me back to earth, but I’m glad you read the Prevert.”

He stirred rouille into his soup, added some cheese and croutons and raised his glass to her.

“It’s good to see you at my table again, and I really appreciated the Prevert, even when a poem made me think of you.”

“Which one?”

“ ‘L’automne,’ ” he said, and recited:

Un cheval s’ecroule au milieu d’une allee

Les feuilles tombent sur lui

Notre amour frissonne

Et le soleil aussi.

“Yes, that one,” she said, her voice wistful, looking into her wineglass. “And the one about the sun disappearing behind the Grand Palais, and my heart following it.”

He recited:

Comme lui mon coeur va disparaitre

Et tout mon sang va s’en aller

S’en aller a ta recherche.

“How do you remember them?” she asked softly.

“It was the kind of schooling I had, old-fashioned provincial teachers, lots of things to learn by heart,” he said. “I can still recite Napoleon’s speech at the battle of the Pyramids about how forty centuries looked down upon them. Come on, enjoy your soup while it’s hot,” he said, changing the mood. He knew it wasn’t his schooling that made him remember the poems. It was reading and rereading them aloud on wintry evenings as Gigi slept before the fire and thinking of Isabelle in the hospital with her thigh smashed by a bullet.

“They weren’t crazy, those teachers. A pity we’ve lost all that.”

“I must have been one of the last generation to be taught that way.” He removed the empty soup bowls and came back with the casserole. He raised the lid and the scent of thyme and rosemary from the bouquet garni he’d made began to fill the room. He excused himself and went out to his herb garden, turning on the outside light to pick some of the new parsley that was emerging. As he returned, Bruno smiled at the sight of Gigi slipping out past him to patrol the grounds, pausing by the chicken coop with his ears up and one paw raised, a good sentry going on duty.

He tore up the green leaves to sprinkle them on each of the plates she had served.

“This looks wonderful and smells better,” she said. “I can’t think when I last had navets. It reminds me of my childhood. Is that where the word navarin comes from?”

“Some say it comes from the battle of Navarino against the Turks, but I prefer to think it comes from the navets. You can use any spring vegetables but if you don’t include navets, then it’s not a navarin,” he said, pouring the red wine from the carafe. “Tell me more of your life in Paris. I can’t really imagine it.”

“There hasn’t been much of it. Not long after I started in the minister’s office, I was sent to Luxembourg to get into the bank accounts of that mysterious food company that turned out to have been set up by our own defense ministry. You remember that?” She began to eat. “This food is wonderful, and this wine. It’s your usual Pomerol, no?”

He nodded. “It’s the ’03, from the heat-wave year, so it won’t last much longer.”

“Mmm… delicious. After a month or so in the office they deployed me to London to liaise on joint operations against illegal immigration, and then I got shot at Arcachon and was in the hospital for nearly two months. I could still be on convalescent leave, but I was bored and they let me come back to do office work.”

“Friends?” he asked, and offered her a second helping. She shook her head, but held out her glass for more wine.

“Some from school and childhood who’ve moved to Paris,” she said. “Some other women who were at the police academy with me and a few colleagues in the office, that’s about it. There’s a book club at the ministry that I’m thinking of joining, and I go to a lot of movies, usually the version originale to improve my English.”

“And where do you live? You gave me the address, but what’s it like?”

“Just a single bedroom apartment off the rue Beranger, near the boulevard Voltaire in the Troisieme. But I have my eye on a small house, one of a row of artists’ studios with lots of glass, just off the rue de la Tombe-Issoire near the Metro Alesia. I went to a party there and fell in love with the place, but I can’t afford it yet. If you come and visit me, I’ll take you there to see it and walk you round the parc Montsouris.”

“Not named after our own Communist councillor, I imagine,” Bruno said. “He always asks after you, by the way. You made a conquest there.”

“A Communist admirer, just what my career needs.” She smiled. “There’s another Prevert poem, not in the book I gave you, about two lovers embracing in a tiny second of eternity, one morning in a winter’s light in the parc Montsouris of Paris.”