Gibbous House 75

'Good day, once again, Miss Pardoner.' I said, evenly.

The reporter, clearly not having recovered himself sufficiently, merely grunted and airily waved a hand. To be sure, he looked a little puce yet.

'Good day, Gentlemen: I trust these poor comestibles will satisfy? They are little enough - but the best that could be assembled.' Miss Pardoner responded.

In fact, they were the makings of a good, if simple, repast. The cheese embodied a pan-european variety: the still-novel Roquefort, Parmesan, Emmenthaler, Camembert and Cheddar. With the exception of this last, it was scarce credible that such cheeses could be found in Northumberland - much less in the kitchen of Gibbous House. They seemed bare of any mould, save of course the blue in the Roquefort. Many a London table would have been pleased to offer such. The cold meats were more prosaic by comparison: for the most part being the residue of some earlier roast. The ham hock had a suspicious silvering in the pink: that aside the rolled beef appeared moist and the lamb looked as though some degree of shepherding had -after all- been done by the late Cullis . There was more of the blood sausage from breakfast, sliced cold, blackly crumbling around pellucid, glistening fat. There were freshly baked loaves, so hot as to steam, despite the fine weather.

Miss Pardoner made as if to serve. I waved her to her seat once more.

Taking a knife to one of the loaves, I sliced thickly and placed two generous portions on a plate. Spurning the use of a cheese parer, since the cheese was indeed in a remarkable state of freshness, I took up the handles of the cheese wire and noted how much more effective it would be than a yellow scarf. Miss Pardoner laid a hand on mine:

'Just Roquefort, sir. I find cheese so insipid. I prefer meat.'

Her tone was innocent of any guile, although, perhaps inevitably, the corner of her mouth gave an infinitesimal twitch. I cut a generous portion of the blued cheese and placed it with a spatulate knife on her plate. The cheese itself glistened and I was reminded of beads of perspiration on a lover's skin. Miss Pardoner declined the ham, asked for her beef to be from the rarer end of the joint and demanded a further two slices of the blood sausage than the two I had already apportioned.

Mr Allan appeared yet to be in a funk and made no response when I gestured at him with cutlery and plate. Mine own selections reflected Miss Pardoner's tastes and I found that a pleasing thought.

Since both my ward and I had handled our cutlery with some efficiency, I was quite despairing of any libation to accompany our victuals, when Maccabi finally arrived with a decanter of something a little too pale to be claret. Still I was grateful when he poured the three of us a glass, although I was sore-tempted to upbraid him as he spilled a drop on the admittedly greying white of my shirt cuff. No matter, his own clothes would be on my back soon enough. Edgar Allan drained his glass before I had taken a sip and held it forth for replenishment. Maccabi complied and departed with an indecipherable look at Miss Ellen Pardoner.

Miss Pardoner addressed the reporter:

'Are you quite yourself, sir?'

His visage betrayed that something troubled him more than a little, his reply had the tone of a wistful child who has lost some shiny gewgaw:

'I am quite sure I no longer know.'

For myself, I was sure I no longer cared.