The Dream Room Page 4

  Something similar happened to me, with food. One day we were eating a sauerkraut casserole that tasted different than usual. I asked my mother what she had done, but she was unaware of having done anything special. As she was telling me this, the taste broke down, in my mind, into its components and I knew she had used cumin. When I asked her this, she frowned, then remembered that she had, in fact, on the advice of the greengrocer, added cumin to the sauerkraut.

  But it was true that Humbert Coe had had something to do with it.

  In a certain sense his influence began before I was born. That was a long time ago, during the war, when he taught my father to eat Marmite, had him taste wines that most people would never be able to taste again and explained to him how one could recognize a good restaurant and what day of the week one should eat there. Because of this I was the only child who took Marmite sandwiches to school, was given, at an early age, a glass of wine on festive occasions, and would, for the rest of my life, find it hard to dine out on a Monday.

  The first time Humbert Coe came to the house, I didn’t actually meet him. I only heard him.

  One night I was woken up by the doorbell. My father stumbled down the stairs to the front door. There was a long silence, then a cry, unintelligible but clearly surprised. Two pairs of feet came up the stairs, the living room door opened, and I heard my father’s voice. He was laughing. I hadn’t heard him sound so cheerful in ages.

  I lay there for a while wondering who it was and why my father sounded so happy, but soon sleep drew me back into her warm, dark embrace and everything faded away.

  The next morning there was a man sitting at breakfast who was so enormous that I stopped dead in the doorway. The doors to the balcony were open and a gentle breeze blew in, smelling of freshly mown grass and morning dew. The stranger smiled the indulgent smile of a fat man. He leaned back slightly in his chair, placed his hands on the tabletop, and spread his fingers. They were big hands, and his fingers were plump, yet at the same time they were the hands of a man who knew how to touch things—and people—with tenderness. He wore a light-colored suit and a sumptuous, high-necked burgundy waistcoat that on anyone else would have looked pretentious but, on him, only emphasized what he was: a man who demanded quality, without reservation.

  “You,” he said, as one of the fleshy fingers moved and seemed to be pointing at me, “you must be young…”

  “Have you two met?” My father was standing in the doorway. He gave me a nudge in the back. I went up to shake the visitor’s hand. “This is Humbert Coe. We’ve known each other since the war.”

  I couldn’t imagine this big man sitting in the cramped cockpit of a Hurricane or a Spitfire. Even if they had given him a Mosquito…

  “I was a bit more slender in those days,” said the visitor, who saw my frown.

  My father laughed. “Mr. Coe wasn’t an airman. He was a spy.”

  Coe roared with laughter. “Spy…You mean, someone who was unfit to do anything useful and was dropped behind enemy lines in the hope that he would find something there to keep him occupied. The very word ‘espionage’ reminds me of Manhattans, hard-boiled eggs with Beluga…”

  “Humbert, everything reminds you of Manhattans and hard-boiled eggs with Beluga.”

  They laughed.

  Coe flipped open a cigarette case and held it out to my father. As they were lighting up, he tapped his cigarette lightly against the case. I stared at him, but he didn’t seem to mind. There was a contented smile on his lips. He looked like the kind of man who was accustomed to having people stare at him, and who had not only grown used to it, but even come to appreciate it.

  The smell of fried eggs drifted in from the kitchen. My mother had already set plates out on the table and poured coffee. Behind her, the frying pan sputtered and crackled on the stove.

  My father and Coe talked. The visitor held his head to one side as he listened. Everything he did, breathing out smoke from his cigarette, listening, smiling, watching, drinking, he did with care. He was slow, but his slowness seemed to be the sort of deliberation that stemmed from an inherent need, or one developed over the course of many years, for the sake of precision.

  The plates on the table were filled, fresh coffee was poured, the cigarettes were stubbed out. We were just about to begin eating when the visitor folded his hands, bowed his head, and sank into a brief silence. I regarded him with amazement. When Coe looked up, he sought my eyes and winked. My father, who had seen the wink, grinned and said: “I’ll bet you two have a lot to talk about, Humbert. This boy is on his way to becoming the family cook.”

  The fat man arched one eyebrow.

  “Julia still isn’t too keen on the idea.”

  My mother pursed her lips.

  “She thinks a boy his age should go to school and learn things, not stand around in the kitchen cooking.”

  Coe nodded thoughtfully. “Twelve? Thirteen?”

  “Twelve,” I said.

  He let his head rock back and forth in approval. “That’s the age when it happens. When did you begin to fly, Philip?”

  My father mumbled something about “expensive hobby,” but admitted that from the time he was eleven you could nearly always find him sitting on the fence around the glider field. Coe leaned back contentedly.

  “A talent,” he said, “is, at the start, nothing more than a somewhat obsessive interest. But with careful guidance, it can develop into that exceptional skill to which we generally refer when we speak of talent.”

  My father stared at him for a while. Then he turned to me. “When Humbert was still on our base, he would hang around the kitchen all day pestering the cooks. He used to say that the misery of war was no justification for half-cooked potatoes.”

  They laughed.

  “But it’s true, Philip,” said Coe. “Certainly in times of need, food prepared with care can be a great consolation. It is my fate that I had to be raised in England, where the art of cooking is rarely taken seriously. Even though the British gastronomic culture has brought forth such magnificent dishes! Need I elaborate on Yorkshire pudding? The summer puddings with fresh fruit and bread fingers that dear old Cook used to make each summer? Warm scones with clotted cream? Potted salmon!”

  “Humbert…”

  He lifted his eyes and slowly returned from his dream of past delights. It was several moments before I realized that everyone at the table was looking at me. I was staring at the visitor, and my mouth was slightly opened. Coe studied me for a while and then began nodding, slowly at first, and then with the determination of someone who has thought up a good solution to a problem that has yet to be acknowledged as one. “Young man,” he said. “You and I are going out for dinner this evening.” He turned to my mother and lightly inclined his great head. “That is, if you will permit me, just this once, to take this young cook under my wing.” My father grinned. My mother frowned. “He’s still at school…This is an important year, the first year…”

  Coe whipped the yolk out of his egg and maneuvered it onto a piece of bread. “School comes first,” he said. “But if I’m not mistaken, it’s nearly summer vacation. And one evening…”

  “Let them go, Julia. It’ll be a good experience for the boy. What do you think?” He looked at me. I nodded, gravely enthusiastic. My mother produced a faint smile.

  “All right,” she said. “All right.”

  “LEJEUNE,” SAID COE that evening, as we crossed the canal in front of our house and walked into town, “is actually called De Jong. That is important information. It tells us that Mr. De Jong apparently doesn’t have enough confidence in the quality of his business to work under his own, inconsequential name.”

  He was wearing a hat with a pearl-gray band and flourishing an ebony walking stick with a silver handle. I hoped we wouldn’t meet anyone I knew.

  “Lejeune is, at present, the best restaurant in town, but Mr. De Jong seems to have his personality working against him. He insists that his customers order in French. Otherwise, he
claims, you might as well stay at home and have fish and chips for dinner. And he’ll walk straight up to a table to explain to a guest, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, the proper way to eat asparagus. Anyone who dares to order the wrong wine is taught a lesson right there at the table. Mr. De Jong, I think we can safely say, is a bit of a parvenu.”

  “How are you supposed to eat asparagus?”

  “With your hands,” said Coe. “Preferably from a napkin, while supporting the asparagus spear with a fork. Dreadful mess, and practically no one who can do it well anymore. As far as I’m concerned, you simply eat them with a knife and fork. Although…I did once see a young woman eating asparagus…” He placed the tips of his index and middle fingers against his thumb and gently kissed them. “I was referring to the young lady,” he said, flicking me a glance. “She wore a Cossack hat, which, fortunately, she kept on at the table, and she was the only one of her party who consumed her asparagus in the proper fashion.” He looked sideways and raised his eyebrows. “Are you shocked?”

  “No.”

  “Good. A man who is easily shocked cannot taste.” He gazed into the distance for a moment, his head tipped back slightly, as he strolled along, swinging his walking stick. “She wore a short black dress with nothing underneath. Mind you: one didn’t see that, one knew it.”

  Now I was shocked. I wasn’t sure I really liked seeing a man Coe’s age so obviously relishing, as he himself probably would’ve described it, the beauty of a young woman.

  “And she was hired.”

  I stopped short. Coe walked a few steps farther and then turned around. “Come, young man. We mustn’t be late. Yes yes, come. Hired. It does happen. There are prostitutes, and there are ladies whose company one can enjoy at a reasonable fee. She belonged to the latter category.”

  “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 the start of my first year of secondary school I trod dangerously close to the edge of the abyss when, one day, I gave an oral report about truffle hunting in Umbria and, later that day in answer to our Dutch teacher, who had asked us to tell her our favorite book, had said mine was Xenophon’s Anabasis. At recess, a group of my classmates began pushing me around. I had saved myself not by doing anything back, but by staring the boy who seemed to be the leader disdainfully in the eye. It hadn’t been a conscious reaction. I didn’t really know how to react. Just as I was about to lash out I saw, in embryo in the face of the boy opposite me, the features of a frightened little office clerk. That was the moment, I suddenly realized as I stared down at the menu and saw all those French names dancing before my eyes, that was the moment when I had suddenly felt strangely confident.

  Coe put the menu aside and studied the wine list, nodding thoughtfully. Then he returned to the menu.


  “It has always been my conviction that wine is the heart of the meal and that the rest of the meal must be built up around it. Do you drink wine?”

  I nodded.

  “Excellent. Then I suggest we start with a half bottle of gewürztraminer. I see here that they serve a rather old one. No doubt cellar remains, but that might well be to our advantage. An old Alsace, perhaps a bit past its prime, acquires a lovely golden color and a delightfully spicy taste with a trace of honey. After that…” He passed me the wine list and pointed to a column of names in which I could find the bottle he had in mind. “After that I thought perhaps a Savigny-les-Beaunes. Out of curiosity, mainly. I wonder how it got on this list. It may have been a flash of insight, but it could equally well have been a fit of madness. Eh?”

  I nodded again. I had drunk wine before, a festive glass on special occasions and sometimes, too, over the past few years, with a meal I had prepared, but I was certainly not the sophisticated drinker that Coe seemed to take me for. I had never drunk an Alsace and at the words Savigny-les-Beaunes I thought of old French nobility, the kind that had come down in the world because of exorbitant holidays in Cap d’Antibes and rash investments in Chilean copper mines.

  Coe left the choice of dishes to me. I ordered, as an appetizer, a salad of breast of pigeon, lamb’s lettuce, and walnuts, and for the entrée, lamb cutlets.

  “Only one appetizer?”