"Earlier, you offered me food, something to eat," she said in a low, almost inaudible, voice. "Does that offer still stand?"
"Of course!" He replied. "You know that I love to cook and it will be a privilege, nay an honour, to prepare a dish for a scion of the truly God-like, Mrs Chandrasekhar. What is it to be? The omelette? Prosciuto and peccarino or Spanish, with fresh peppers, shallots, tomatoes, garlic, mostly from my own garden, and just a hint of fresh basil leaves? I just cannot believe how long I have kept that supermarket-bought plant alive and healthy and productive."
"Both?" she asked.
"A four egg omelette, nothing less will convey the ingredients!" He said with a shout. "You had better be up for it! Come, let us away to the kitchen, the palace of culinary beauty!"
She was astounded by his attitude, his demeanour; never would she have thought that he would have acted in this way; so friendly, so benign, so eager to please. He had every reason to hate her; the foul bitch that must surely have hurt him so.
He ushered her out of the studio and down the same raptor lined corridor that led to the stairwell. She went more slowly than she had done on the first occasion, no longer so eager to see his paintings, no longer impatient for his studio, and now looked more closely at each photograph. Each bird peered out from the image as though they were eyeing the spectator, or the photographer, with, as Fleming once remarked, 'A view to a kill'. There was a raw and potent power in their eyes, the manner in which they gazed through and beyond the sharply hooked beak, cruelly notched or festooned, from the dense shadows of the eyebrow ridges, the moustaches. Each bird had been given a name, many from Norse mythology, Freyja, Fricka, Mjølnir, Wotan and some with names of a more playful bent, Bloggins, Eegit, Moley and Cloudberry. The names were inscribed in script-like writing, copperplate, on the mounts, which distanced the photographs from the glass of their frames together with dates, sometimes with one or more usually with two; they made a fitting panorama to the entrance to the studio.
"My babies, my children" he said distractedly. "Some living, but most long since dead; the smaller raptors, the hawks and falcons, seldom live as long as even a large dog, let alone a cat, even if they are well cared for; there is also the ever present danger that they will decide that you no longer suit their purpose and so they will bugger off, raking off at fifty miles per hour into the distance, never to be seen again, I generally don't track them or attempt to find them. If they wish to venture off into a world in which their well-being is solely the province of their own expertise and skill and they no longer desire to be beholden to the whim of some human with day-old chicks and SA37, who am I to deny them. I suspect that they, like all animals, birds, reptiles, insects, merely hanker after the sex, which is, in the main, denied them here."
He led the way down the steep staircase, keenly aware of the need to keep a firm handhold on the rail; a few visitors had taken tumbles down these stairs and he was mindful of the ease with which it might be done and the bracing that his slight frame needed to prevent a fall from someone behind him.
He led the way into the kitchen but not before glancing in on Rory and her pups, who had now moved from the shelter of her foreleg and were duly laid out along the bitch's stomach and eagerly sucking at the teats; he hoped that she would treasure these few, all too brief, days, in her own canine fashion. The pups would soon grow razor-like teeth and nursing would become a painful, but nonetheless necessary, occasion.
Stepping in to kitchen, he bade her sit on her former stool and, without asking, poured her another gin and tonic, although this time with a twist of lime as well as the traditional lemon.
"I have decided," he said. "Peccorino would not be good inside of the Spanish Omelette, so I will add it as a light dusting; otherwise both you shall have! Rather than an omeltte, a frittata; a little longer to cook but without the pitfalls of a too-runny versus a not so runny French omelette, which is so a matter for personal taste. Would you like some music to pass the time, while I chop and prepare? I have most types of music in my collection, although if you have a liking for techno, industrial or disposable 'pop', I fear that there will be little more than 15 minutes' worth."
"Do you have anything from the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries?" She asked. "Bach, Vivaldi, Handel, something like that?"
"Ah, a woman after my own heart!" he said. "I have Bach, JS and CPE, Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, Corelli, Tartini, Boccherini, Albinoni, both the Scarlatti brothers; if it's Italian and from that period, I have got it, almost certainly, somewhere on CD!"
"I have never heard of Boccherini, so lets try him."
She had not noticed the iPod nestling in its 'Sounddeck' cradle, hidden as it was behind a giant, bright red food mixer, an infernal and diabolic mixer in the style of a 'Kenwood Chef'; a food mixer only recently arrived from Hell. As he toyed with the iPod's dial, he intoned the word "Rostropovich" a number of times unver his breath. As the music cascaded over her, Boccherini's first cello concerto, the sonorous tone of Mstislav's instrument touched something deep within her and she began to well up once more. He was now busy at the refrigerator, crouching down to reach inside, plucking vegetables from deep within and tossing them into a small wicker basket, much like a child's plaything, and he did not notice her tears. She rummaged in her handbag for some tissue and blew her nose.
She replaced the tissue in her handbag and noticed that he had now moved opposite her, across the wide island which ran down the centre of his vast kitchen. He had taken two large frying pans from the rack above where she sat and a large knife from the wooden rack at the side of the immense butcher's block, set into the work surface to the left of the seven ring hob. He was laying out the small basket of vegetables; chestnut mushrooms, two small green peppers, not much bigger than a large, green chili, garlic, a shallot, a shallot bigger and unlike any that she had seen in the supermarket, some green beans, two strips of prosciuitto wrapped in cling film, a block of peccarino and a jar filled with oil and wedges of something red which she did not immediately recognise. As he raised his eyes, he caught her looking at the jar and the look of puzzlement on her face.
"Oven baked tomato wedges," he said. "I prepare then in batches, fresh from my little plot; they keep for about two weeks in oil in the fridge and make a welcome change from ordinary salad tomatoes in a green salad. They're great in a Gurkelsalat as well, sprinkled with some ground toasted cumin seeds; the taste of the charring on the skins makes a nice change from the acid blandness of the cucumber!"
Drawing a butcher's steel from somewhere out of sight, he proceeded to sharpen his knife in bold, dynamic strokes with well practised hands. As he chopped the ingredients into small pieces, she became mesmerised by the speed and seemingly careless abandon with which he wielded the knife.
"Don't you ever cut yourself, going so fast?" she asked. "That knife looks exceedingly sharp."
"Sometimes." he replied. "But long years of practice make it less likely with each passing year. Besides, it's a really good party trick if you can pull it off; it never fails to impress the ladies, doomed forever, as they are, to chop with knives too small and too blunt for purpose because they never learnt how to use a steel." He smiled.
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