“Where was that?” I asked warily.
Coe laughed. “Not here. Not at Lejeune. Don’t worry. It was in London.”
“How come you can speak Dutch?”
We turned right and crossed a square that lay, gleaming like a tortoiseshell, under the light of the streetlamps. Outside the entrance to a town house, two men were having a silent conversation. One of them was making short, stabbing gestures in the air with a lit cigarette.
“I am the result of a marriage between a Dutch mother and a British father. Here, in this city, is where I grew up. That is to say, I lived here until the age of six or seven. Then we returned to England. My mother…” His voice acquired a tenderness that surprised me. “My mother loved to speak Dutch with me. She was a lonely woman. Just like your mother.”
I opened my mouth, but no sound came out.
“My father sent me to boarding school. From then on it was the usual route. Cambridge, in my case. The classics, that was to be my…ah…future. Et in Arcadia Ego. Yes. Brideshead Revisited, that sort of thing.” He made a gesture with his left hand as if he were shooing away an insect, only in slow motion. “Dutch Englishmen, English Dutchmen, they are an exceptional breed. Ever read Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End? No, probably not. You’re a bit too young. Learn English, young man. I’ll give you the book as a present. Tietjens, the protagonist, is just such an Englishman, of Dutch descent. Like Tadema, the painter.”
I was trying desperately to remember everything, the names he mentioned, the book titles, the right way to eat asparagus, and that elegant young lady in a Cossack hat…it was a whirlwind of words, names, and thoughts.
“Ah, here we are. Now listen carefully.”
We were standing in front of a richly ornamented mansion whose windows glowed with festive yellow light. There were people sitting at tables, waiters walking back and forth carrying trays. In the marble foyer stood a boy who couldn’t have been much older than I was. He wore a suit like an organ grinder’s monkey and was thumbing mindlessly through a small pile of paper on a mahogany table.
“I haven’t come here simply to treat you to dinner. I expect you to learn something. And another thing…” He paused, as if to convince me of the importance of his mission. “It is my job to eat in this sort of restaurant and then write about it. That is why we mustn’t let anyone know that we are not like the other guests. From this moment on, you are my young nephew. I am your uncle.”
I grinned so broadly that, for a brief moment, Coe looked at me in amazement. Then he nodded. “Come,” he said, “gird yourself for battle, Telemachus.”
After Coe had refused a small square table against the wall, saying we hadn’t come here to play cards, we were seated at a spacious, round table in the middle of the room. Although he had emphasized the confidential nature of our mission, this apparently didn’t mean we had to be inconspicuous. Not that there was much chance of that. Coe’s entrance made many heads turn. Coe’s detachment was contagious.
My mother had squeezed me into a jacket that had once been my father’s and looked strangely aristocratic, an impression that was enhanced by the bow tie she had knotted around my neck before we left the house. But any discomfort I might have felt disappeared the moment I entered the dining room. Coe’s presence, the combination of self-confidence and imperturbability he exuded, was so irresistible that I thought of all the reasons I could have for not caring what the rest of the world thought of me.
I was just a boy, at the end of my first year of secondary school, raised somewhat carefully by a father who wasn’t very interested in the world and a slightly absent mother, but there were some things I did know. My father had taught me to read and speak English at a very early age (probably because he himself could barely speak the language when he flew over in his glider) and my mother had raised me with the notion that everyone had to fend for himself. The result was that now, on the eve of my thirteenth birthday, I could cook, do the laundry, mend clothes, and speak English. What she hadn’t counted on was that I would come to love cooking, so much so that, for the past two or three birthdays, my parents had felt obliged to give me cookbooks. (And I read them. I read them the way other people read novels, and if I read a novel I preferred the ones in which there was eating and drinking, so I could convert the dishes and meals into recipes. My mother had once told me that cookbooks weren’t meant as reading matter or novels as cookbooks, but I had replied that I got just as much pleasure and had just as many adventures reading Elizabeth David’s Italian Food as The Wind in the Willows). Was I in a position not to care what the rest of the world thought of me? Sitting here with Humbert Coe, in the best restaurant in town, I wasn’t yet able to say “yes” with as much confidence as I would have liked. I knew, with the unshakable certainty of a child, that my parents loved me, but because of my near invisibility outside the house I didn’t know whether people appreciated me, or they loved me. Although I was never bullied at school I didn’t have any real friends. And the fact that I was able to answer my teachers’ most enigmatic questions, but not the most obvious ones, didn’t make things any easier.
Our menus arrived. Coe leaned back in his chair, menu in his right hand, the index finger of the other pressed against his temple.
Barely two weeks after
