“I tell you what,” I said, “have you ever tried smoked porcupine?”
“No,” they all said in unison.
“Well, it’s delicious if it’s done properly. And I have a hunter who’s constantly bringing me porcupines which he hopes that I will buy from him. As they have been caught in those awful steel snares that they use, the porcupines are always too badly damaged. I buy them and put them out of their misery and feed the meat to my animals. However, occasionally I send a bunch of them down to an old boy I know called Joseph — this is beginning to resemble an ecclesiastical conference — and he smokes the porcupine over special wood and herbs which he refuses to reveal to me. The result is quite delicious.”
“You Protestant swine,” said McGrade, “you’ve been concealing this from us.”
“Only because there’s not enough porcupine to go around,” I said. “However, I had two brought in to-day that had been so badly savaged by the trap that I had to kill them. I was going to feed them to my animals but in view of this dire emergency I could send them down to Joseph and have them smoked and we could then have them on toast for what Mary so prettily calls the entry.”
“I’m becoming more and more convinced,” said McGrade, “that you’ve got real Irish blood in you. I think it’s a masterly idea.”
“But you can’t give the D.C. porcupine,” said Mary in horror.
“Mary dear,” I said, “you don’t tell him its porcupine. You tell him it’s venison. It’s so subtly smoked that anybody who’s got a palate like a D.C. could not possibly tell the difference.”
Martin now checked his notebook.
“Well,” he said, “what are we going to have for afters?”
“I do wish you wouldn’t keep using that vulgar phrase,” said Robin, “it takes me straight back to Worthing, where I had the misfortune of being brought up. What you mean is ‘what are we going to have for the next two courses?’ ”
“Well, that’s what he said,” said Mary. “I do wish you wouldn’t keep picking on him. We’re here to help him.”
Robin raised his glass in solemn salute to Mary.
“Saint Mary, I am devoted to you for many reasons, the principal one being that I want to plumb, before we part company, the depths of your ignorance.”
“Really, you men are so stupid,” said Mary crossly. “I thought we were supposed to be discussing what else we were going to eat.”
“Can we work on the assumption,” said McGrade, “that he will probably die after the smoked porcupine and so it’s not worth considering the other two courses?”
“No, no,” said Martin, taking him literally, “we must have something else to follow.”
“A wake,” said McGrade, “there’s nothing like a good Irish wake for getting everybody in a mood of frivolity.”
“Now, look. Shut up and listen to me,” I said. “We start with some smoked porcupine. I then suggest groundnut chop.”
Everybody groaned.
“But we always have groundnut chop,” said Robin, “it’s the one thing we all live on. It’s our staple diet.”
“No, no,” said Martin excitedly, “that’s the reason I bought Jesus’s hat.”
The others, this not having been explained to them, looked slightly puzzled.
“You mean he makes a really good groundnut chop?” I inquired.
“Yes,” said Martin, “best I’ve ever tasted anywhere.”
Goundnut chop could only be described as a sort of Irish stew made with whatever meat was available and covered in a heavy sauce of crushed peanuts, served with a whole mass of tiny side dishes which the Africans called “small, small tings”. It could be delicious or it could be a disaster.
“Well, if Jesus can do the groundnut chop,” I said, “Pious is awfully good at doing the small, small things. So that settles that as the main course.”
“What confection can we have as a sweet?” enquired Robin. We thought for a moment and then looked at each other. “Well, really,” said Mary despairingly, “I think we’ll have to fall back on the old stand-by.”
“I know,” said McGrade, “flute salad.”
Flute salad was an inevitable part of our diet — so called because of the African’s inability to pronounce “f” and “r” together without lisping.
“Yes, I suppose it will have to be,” said Robin dismally.
“There are several quite nice fruits at the moment,” said Mary, “I think we could make something rather special.”
“Excellent,” I said, “now the whole thing is settled.”
“Then drinks and coffee on the veranda and we’ll get the old bastard into bed as quickly as possible,” said McGrade.
“I do hope,” said Martin earnestly, “that you will not drink too much and become your unpleasant Irish self. That could undo the whole evening.”
“I shall be a model of propriety,” said McGrade. “You’ll be able to see my halo very clearly shining over my head as I tell him about all the bridges that have fallen down and all the roads that need to be repaired.”
“Don’t say anything like that,” said Martin, “after all, I will have just been showing him how beautifully the place is run.”
“One often wonders,” said Robin pensively, “how England ever kept her Empire going if the English carried on in the imbecile way that we have been carrying on to-night. Anyway, I’m going back to chop and to attend to my candelabras.”
He got to his feet and wandered off, then suddenly rematerialised.
“By the way,” he said, “I haven’t got a white tie and tails. Does it really matter?”
“Oh no,” said Martin, “no, no, but if you come in a jacket and tie, after the first five minutes we all get so hot that we have to take them off. Just as long as you come in them, that’s the important thing.”
Oh, God, I thought. The only tie I possessed at that time was sitting in a suitcase some three hundred miles away. Still, that was a minor problem, which I dealt with the following morning.
When Pious brought me my sustaining early morning cup of tea and I had removed one squirrel, four mongooses and a baby chimpanzee from my bed — which they shared with me, from their point of view, out of love and affection but from my point of view simply because I didn’t want them to catch chills — I told Pious to go down to the market and buy me a tie.
“Yes, sah,” he said, and, having organised the rest of the staff about their duties, he strutted off into town to return some time later with a tie that was so psychedelic that I felt it would have a detrimental effect on the D.C.’s eyesight. However, Pious assured me that it was the quietest tie in the market and I tried to take his word for it.
Needless to say, the next couple of days were very trying on everybody’s nerves. McGrade, being very proud of his roads and bridges, had noticed to his horror that the drive up to Martin’s house had several large pot-holes in it and so he had borrowed all the convicts from the local jail to fill these in and regravel the whole drive so that the entrance began to look like a medium-sized but extremely elegant country house. I had gone down to see my old man, Joseph, and persuaded him to smoke the two porcupines for me, and I also contacted my hunter who promised that the day before the D.C.’s arrival he would go into the forest and get what flowers he could. Robin had ransacked the United Africa Company’s stores but was in despair at not being able to produce anything of real merit, for as the boat had been unable to go up-river he was running low on the sort of esoteric delicacies that we thought worthy of a D.C. However, his pride was immense when he announced to us that he had discovered — and God knows why they were there in the first place — three small tins of caviar which were left over from his predecessor.
“I don’t know what they’ll be like,” he said, looking at them glumly. “They must have been here at least three years. We’ll probably all die of ptomaine poisoning, but anyway it’s caviar.”
Mary, very cleverly, having discovered that Martin’s house did not contain a single vase for flower arrangements, had gone down to the market and bought five rather elegant calabashes. She had also worked out fifteen ways of trying to make soufflés with the aid of Jesus, all of which were totally impracticable and which we had to crush unmercifully underfoot.