“Ruined, ruined!” Avery ran through the carpeted hall, pulling off his cashmere scarf and dropping it as he went. Gloves fell on the Aubusson, his coat on the raspberry satin sofa. Tim strolled along in the wake of all this turbulence, picking up Avery’s things and murmuring “Bad luck for some” when he came to the gloves. He stuffed one into each pocket of the coat and hung it up in the tiny hall next to his own, amused by the contrast between the Tattersall check with its garland of turquoise cashmere and little chestnut fingers sticking beseechingly up in the air, and his own somber dark grey herringbone and navy muffler.
Avery, already wrapped in his tablier and wearing his frog oven mitts, was pulling the le Creuset out of the oven. He put it down on a wooden trivet and eased the lid off a fraction of an inch at a time. While hurrying home, he had made a bargain with the Fates. He would not question Tim about the source and content of the previously mentioned phone calls if they would keep an eye on the daube. Avery, knowing the superhuman restraint that would be necessary to stick to his side of the agreement, had felt an almost magical certainty that the least the other party could do was to honor theirs. But running up the garden path, sure that he smelled a whiff of carbon on the cold night air, his certainties evaporated. And as he ran with quailing anticipation through the sitting room, he became firmly convinced that the bastards had let him down again. And so it proved to be.
“It’s got a crust on!”
“That’s all right.” Tim sauntered into the kitchen and picked up a bottle opener. “Aren’t you supposed to break that and mix it in?”
“That’s a cassoulet. Oh, God …”
“For heaven’s sake, stop wringing your hands. It’s only a stew.”
“A stew! A stew. ”
“At least we won’t be able to say there’s not a crust in the house.”
“That’s all it means to you, isn’t it? A joke.”
“Far from it. I’m extremely hungry. And if you were that worried, you could have come home earlier.”
“And you could have come to the theater earlier.”
“I was doing the Faber order.” Tim smiled and smoothed the irritation from his voice. With Avery in this state, it could be midnight before a morsel crossed his lips. “And the phone calls were from Camelot Antiques about your footstool, and Derek Barfoot rang asking us for Sunday lunch.”
“Oh.” Avery looked sheepish, relieved, grateful, and encouraged. “Thank you.”
“Look. Why don’t we use this spoon with the holes in-”
“No! You’ll never get it all!” Avery stood in front of his casserole like a mother protecting her child from a ravening beast. “I’ve got a better idea.” He produced a box of tissues and lowered half a dozen with slow and exquisite care into the crumbling top layer. “These will absorb all the bits, then I can lift the whole thing off with a fish slice.”
“I thought it was in the topsoil where all the goodness lay,” murmured Tim, going to the larder to get the wine.
The larder was really Avery’s domain, but it had a deep, quarry-tiled recess with a grilled window onto the outside wall that made it beautifully cool and the perfect place for a wine rack. The tiny room was brilliantly lit and crammed with provisions. Walnut and hazelnut and sesame oils. Olives, herbs, and pralines from Provence. Anchovies and provolone; truffles in little jars. Tins of clams and Szechuan peppercorns. Potato flour and many mustards. Prosciutto, water chestnuts, and a ham with a wrinkled, leathery skin the color of licorice hanging from the ceiling next to an odoriferous salami. Tiny Amaretti and snails. Tomato paste and matron paste, cured fish and lumpfish, gull’s eggs and plover’s eggs, and a chili sauce so hot it could blast the stones from a horse’s hoof. Tim moved a crock of peaches in brandy, took a bottle from the rack, and returned to the kitchen.
“What are you opening?”
“The Chateau d’lssan.”
Chewing his full marshmallow lip (the tiny drop of reassurance re: the phone calls having already vanished into a vast lake of more generalized anxiety), Avery watched Tim twist the corkscrew, press down the chrome wings, and, with a soft pop, pull the cork. Avery thought it the second most beautiful sound in the world (following hard on the easing of a zipper), while having a terrible suspicion that for Tim it might be the first. Now, looking at the flat dark silky hairs on the back of his lover’s wrist glinting in the light from the spot lamps, noticing his elegant hands as they tilted the bottle and poured the fragrant wine, Avery’s stomach lurched with a familiar mixture of terror and delight. Tim took off his suit jacket, revealing an olive-green doeskin vest and snowy shirt, the sleeves hitched up by old-fashioned elasticized armbands. Then he lowered his narrow, ascetic nose into the glass and sniffed.
Avery could never understand how anyone who cared so passionately about what he drank was not equally fastidious when it came to what he ate. Tim would consume anything that was what he called “tasty,” and his range was catholic to say the least. Once, stranded for an hour in Rugby station, he had demolished cheeseburger and chips, several squares of white, spongelike bread, a lurid pastry with three circles of traffic-light-colored jam, two Kit-Kats, and a cup of pungent, rust-colored tea with every appearance of satisfaction. And he did not even, Avery had reflected while toying miserably with an orange and a glass of lukewarm Liebfraumilch, have the excuse of a working-class background. (Tim had declined the wine on the grounds that it was not only likely to be the produce of more than one country, but liberally laced with antifreeze to boot.)
So why, Avery sometimes asked himself, as he leafed through his vast collection of cookbooks, did he labor so long and ardently in the kitchen? The answer was immediate and never changing. Avery prepared his wood pigeon à la paysanne, truite à la creme, and Jraises Romanof out of simple gratitude. He would place them before Tim in a spirit of excitable humility, because they were his supreme attainment, the very best his loving heart could offer. In the same manner he ironed Tim’s shirts, chose fresh flowers for his room, planned little treats. Almost unconsciously, when he went shopping, his eye was alert for something, anything, that would make a surprise gift.
He never ceased to marvel at the fact that he and Tim had been together for seven years, especially when he discovered the truth about his friend’s background. Avery had always been homosexual, and had innocently supposed that Tim’s experience had been the same. Then he discovered that Tim’s understanding of his true nature had come painfully and gradually. That he had regarded himself as heterosexual as a teenager, and bisexual for several years after that. (He had even been engaged for eighteen months while in his early twenties.)
The acquisition of this knowledge had thrown Avery into a turmoil of fear. Tim’s assurances and his reminder that this had all happened twelve years ago had done little to calm a temperament that was volatile by nature. Even now, Avery would watch Tim without seeming to, looking furtively for signs that these earlier inclinations were reasserting themselves, just as a showily colored plant occasionally reverts to its more pallid origins.
Avery reasoned thus because he could never, ever, in a trillion zillion years understand what Tim saw in him. For a start there was the physical contrast. Tim was tall and lean with hollow cheeks and a mouth so stern in repose that his sudden smile seemed almost shocking in its sweetness. Avery thought he was like a figure in a Caravaggio painting. Or perhaps (his profile at the moment looked alarmingly austere) a medieval monk. Nicholas had said he thought that Tim, although emotionally lean, was spiritually opulent. This was not what Avery wanted to hear. He didn’t give a fig for spiritual opulence. Give him, he had replied, a nice filet mignon and a fond caress any old day of the week.