The Four Beauties Page 9

  ‘Herr Untermeyer loves England,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘Except for the sausages, eh, Herr Untermeyer!’ Mr Wilbram gave a brief, harsh crackle of a laugh. ‘Not the sausages.’

  ‘Not the sausages?’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘No? Not the wurst?’

  ‘He thinks they are very bad,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘Very bad.’

  ‘Bad. Bad. Very bad,’ Otto said. ‘Most bad. Most.’

  ‘Good God, what’s wrong with them?’ Uncle Freddie said. ‘I get raring hungry at the thought of them. When can we eat, dear?’

  ‘Bad, the sausage, very bad. The wurst, in England, very bad. They are not ripe.’

  ‘Ah, ah! We have had this before,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘By ripe – I should explain – he means they have no flavour.’

  ‘They have not the strong!’ Herr Untermeyer said, suddenly making gestures of powerful vehemence with his clenched massive lardy fists, so that for a moment or two Aunt Leonora recoiled, positively alarmed. ‘They have not the force! You understood?’

  ‘The melons,’ my Aunt Leonora suddenly said, in one of those typically inconsequent moments of hers that both charm and dismay, ‘weren’t quite as ripe as I should have liked them – they’re a little bit tricky as late as this in August. So we have to begin without them, I’m afraid.’ With those long, disengaging teeth of hers she flashed at each of us in turn, a separate disarming smile. ‘Aren’t I lucky? Four men. Shall we go in before everything gets cold?’

  ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!’ Uncle Freddie said. ‘The good old Kate and Sidney.’

  There were always moments when Uncle Freddie, fired by an extra glass or two of something, particularly red-currant wine, was liable to become harmlessly jocular, but now I thought I detected in the cold goodness of Mr Wilbram’s eye an answering glint of disquiet, as if Freddie had been guilty of a spasm of blasphemy.

  Undeterred, ripe-faced and famished, Freddie stood at the head of the lunch table, brandishing a knife and fork over the steak and kidney pudding like a priest preparing a sacrifice.

  ‘Nothing like the good old Kate and Sidney!’

  ‘Kate and Sidney?’ Mr Wilbram said, his cold good eyes fixed on the puffed white crust of the pudding, large as a football, his voice again frosty, as if once more a slight blasphemy had been committed.

  ‘Gate und—’

  Herr Untermeyer too looked confused, pink, questioning eyes on the pudding, from the crust of which Uncle Freddie now proceeded to cut a generous slice, so that steam rose forth.

  ‘I never heard it called this before,’ Mr Wilbram said, rather as if he had just heard that some alien clause had been introduced into the Sermon on the Mount. ‘ “Kate and Sidney”—?’

  ‘It’s a kind of joke,’ I said.

  ‘Rhyming slang,’ Uncle Freddie said. ‘By God, the crust’s beautiful. Apples and pears. Trouble and strife. Tit for tat. Plates, please, plates. Where are the plates?’

  ‘Right in front of your eyes, dear.’

  ‘We have this special kind of slang,’ I started to explain to Herr Untermeyer, who looked increasingly bewildered. ‘Tit for tat: hat. So you get titfer. It’s a joke – a scherz,’ I said, this being the only German word I could think of that meant light. ‘A joke-scherz,’ I repeated several times. ‘You see?’

  Herr Untermeyer, who had been standing at attention all this time, said he did not understood.

  ‘Oh! do please sit down, everybody,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘And stop prattling,’ – this to me, quite sharply, as if I had been guilty of more or less continued flippancy. ‘The wine is far more important. Show Otto the wine.’

  ‘Wasser, bitte,’ Herr Untermeyer started to say and for one uneasy moment I thought that the carefully chosen Deidesheimer Hofstück ’59 might after all go unappreciated. ‘Pliss may I—’

  ‘Oh! yes, I’m sorry,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘It’s my fault. Herr Untermeyer has to have a glass of water. He has tablets to take.’

  ‘For the hard.’ Herr Untermeyer tapped his chest several times. ‘Also when the bad wind is blowing. From the East—’

  ‘I’ll go, I’ll go,’ Aunt Leonora said and then as suddenly gave the water-fetching task to me. ‘You go. I must hand the vegetables. We have no help, Otto, you see.’

  When I got back to the lunch table again, a glass of water in one hand and a bottle of the Deidesheimer Hofstück ’59 in the other, Herr Untermeyer had a private array of bottles set out in front of him, one containing green pills, one pink and two white.

  I set the glass of water in front of him and at the same time prepared to show him the Deidesheimer Hofstück ’59. A rich and seductive odour of meat pudding filled the air. Assailed by this, by the sight of the wine-bottle and by the enforced necessity of pill-taking, Herr Untermeyer sat in further confusion, painfully beset by the opposing forces of denial and indulgence, his large frame breathing heavily.

  ‘I hope you will like the wine, Herr Untermeyer,’ I said and to my relief he turned on the bottle with a gesture of hardly concealed joy, actually caressing it with his fat fingers. ‘Ah! is guht. Is very nice. From my part of Germany. You understood?’

  In the same moment Aunt Leonora set in front of him a plate generously heaped with pudding, mashed potatoes flecked with parsley butter, French beans and cauliflower, the whole caressed by the rich dark gravy of the Kate and Sidney.

  As Herr Untermeyer gazed down on this with an almost tortured expression of pleasure and anticipation I heard Mr Wilbram plead with Aunt Leonora in a whisper almost deathly:

  ‘A mere half of that for me, Mrs Elphinstone. A mere half. Less if possible. Even less. I am not a very great eater.’

  As Mr Wilbram’s frame bore a sharp resemblance to one of those pallid marble effigies, horizontally embalmed for ever in stony piety, that one sees in churches, it was impossible to imagine that he ever ate much at all, except perhaps toast and dry cornflakes.

  ‘Would you please try the wine, Herr Untermeyer?’ I said.

  ‘You know you’re not really supposed to, Otto,’ Mr Wilbram said.

  ‘Ah? You say?’

  ‘Verboten, Otto,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘Verboten.’

  ‘Mit the pills, yes, yes. I can do. Is all right.’

  ‘No, no. Verboten. Remember now. You told me yourself. One glass and then verboten.’

  ‘No, no! Mit the pills,’ Herr Untermeyer said, ‘is guht. Is all right.’

  Mr Wilbram shook his head with a gesture of sad goodness, gloomily exhorting Herr Untermeyer to remember that after all it was he, not Mr Wilbram, who would suffer.

  In answer Herr Untermeyer suddenly tasted the wine with a positive gasp of pleasure.

  ‘Wunderbar!’

  ‘Well, well, have it your way,’ Mr Wilbram said. The tone of his voice was that of one icily delivering judgment.

  ‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you. You remember the attack in Traben last year?’

  ‘That,’ Herr Untermeyer said, ‘was not the same. Was different on that occasion. Was then the lieber. Now, mit the pills, the lieber is guht. The wein I can in little bits take now.’

  ‘All right, all right. It’s on your head,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘It’s on your head.’

  ‘Oh! come, a little wine after all,’ Aunt Leonora said, ‘for thy stomach’s sake. It maketh glad the heart of man, surely. And anyway this is something of an occasion. Nothing like wine for warming up the international fellowship, is there? We saw that at the Hirschen, didn’t we, Otto?’

  ‘I’ll bet it wasn’t backward in flowing forward at Traben last year either,’ Uncle Freddie said. ‘By God, the Kate and Sidney’s good. Sorry if I’ve started.’

  ‘Oh! yes, do start, Otto,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘Please don’t let it get cold.’

  Herr Untermeyer at once struck into the steak and kidney pudding with the enthusiasm of a man long deprived of nourishment. The pills stood before him forgotten. The gross nature of his pleasure was now and then reflected in monosyllables richly content and sometimes,
unlike the English sausage, ripe. ‘Schön!’ was one of these and ‘Budding’ another.

  ‘How you call this budding again? A joke?’ Herr Untermeyer turned on from the depths of his stomach a positive diapason of voluptuous approval and pleasure. ‘This is not joke. This is himmel! Was is this flesh?’ he said, holding up a succulent square of steak speared at the end of his fork. ‘How is this called?’

  ‘Not flesh,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘Meat. Steak.’

  ‘To rhyme with Kate,’ Uncle Freddie said.

  ‘How is this. Ah! this you call it? Kate? How you say like that? Kate?’

  ‘No, steak,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘Steak. Kate is a figure of speech. So to speak.’

  ‘So? Kate budding, so? This I love. This is himmel, Frau Elphinstein, himmel. My bestest congratulations on your kitchen. Danke. I give you Schniff!’

  ‘Schniff!’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘Schniff! Oh! how that word takes me back.’

  ‘The chords of youth,’ I said and raised my glass of Deidesheimer Hofstück ’59.

  ‘What was that?’ she said sharply. ‘I’ve told you before. Don’t mumble so.’

  ‘I was simply praising the pudding.’

  ‘Oh! were you? All I can say is it sounded a funny sort of praise.’

  If my own praise was odd and whispered, that of Herr Untermeyer continued to be splendidly articulate. Between gargantuan mouthfuls of meat and vegetable and crust he hardly paused for breath. Nor, for a man who wasn’t a very great eater, did Mr Wilbram, I thought, appear to be doing badly either. Spots of gravy actually dribbled down the front of his shirt as he pushed his loaded fork into his mouth. Only now and then, as if some force in him slightly disapproved of the enjoyments of the flesh, did he suddenly desist, glance genially at Aunt Leonora as if in fear that his plate might be empty before that of Otto, and then forge on again.

  He need have had no qualms about the plates; Otto’s was white and clean while Mr Wilbram was still mopping up the last forkfuls of kidney and potato.

  ‘Now, now, come along, everybody. I want none of it left. More for you, Otto? Yes!’

  ‘Schön! Schön! Schön beyond speak. No? That is not right?’

  ‘What is right then? Unspeak? – unspeakable?’

  Uncle Freddie and I laughed aloud and Aunt Leonora, beaming with those long, impossible white teeth of hers, said:

  ‘Oh! you’re quite a dear, Otto. You’re really a great dear. You don’t change a scrap. Give Otto more wine. And I won’t say “No” either.’

  ‘Better open another bottle, dear boy,’ Uncle Freddie said. ‘That’s if there is a second?’

  ‘And a third,’ I said.

  ‘Good show. There’s a certain something about this German wine.’

  ‘Oh! we drank oceans of it at the Hirschen, didn’t we, Otto? Positive oceans.’

  ‘Wein we may have in Germany. Guht wein. Much wein. But not this budding. No.’

  Soon, I noticed, even Mr Wilbram was enjoying that certain something in the German wine. Its influence rose about the lunch table like a breath of flowers. We schniffed exhaustively. Aunt Leonora schniffed to the Zugspitze and Herr Untermeyer, actually standing up, glass upraised, schniffed to England, and to my great surprise, ‘the gliffs of Dover’. This gliffs of Dover had, it seemed, moved him immeasurably.

  ‘From the sea, from the ship, I am seeing this gliffs. So white. They are so schön and white and I am weeping.’

  ‘May I in return,’ Mr Wilbram said, ‘pledge our faith in Germany? Perhaps I ought to say the new Germany?’

  ‘I think you’d better,’ Aunt Leonora said, in one of those charmingly swift diplomatic thrusts of hers that are always over before you can do anything about them. ‘To hell with the old. I mean the Nasties. You know what I mean.’

  ‘That,’ Mr Wilbram said, ‘is what we are all trying to forget.’

  ‘You may be,’ she said, ‘but not me.’

  On this very slightly discordant note she got up from the table and started to clear the dishes, urging us all at the same time to stay where we were, and then presently went off to the kitchen, whispering as she passed me:

  ‘Brandy or rum, do you think?’

  ‘Rum,’ I said. ‘It burns better.’

  As we waited for her return I drained the second bottle of Deidesheimer Hofstück ’59. This led Uncle Freddie to praise it, not for the first time, as a wine that one could drink a good deal of and not feel the difference.

  Herr Untermeyer strongly agreed. ‘That is so. You are not feeling it. Not in the head. Not in the legs. Only in the hard. How do you say this? – this wein is like – how are you saying? – a lieder?—’

  ‘A song.’

  ‘A song, jawohl. That is so. A song. A song for the hard.’

  ‘Brings back the good old days, I’ll bet,’ Uncle Freddie said. ‘Slopes of the Zugspitze and all that. I often wonder what you got up to on that mountain.’

  ‘International fellowship,’ I said.

  Any glint of remonstrance in Mr Wilbram’s eye was promptly extinguished by the entrance of Aunt Leonora, bringing the Christmas pudding, bearing it aloft like some blue-flamed dark head on a charger.

  ‘My God, she’s well alight,’ Uncle Freddie said.

  ‘It’s the rum,’ I said. ‘Far better than brandy.’

  ‘Let’s have a drop more on, dear boy,’ Freddie said. ‘Don’t let her die down. Splendid show.’

  As Aunt Leonora finally bore the flaming pudding to the table Uncle Freddie and I raised an appropriate cheer. Herr Untermeyer, pink eyes transfixed by this newly offered sacrifice, actually clapped his fat hands, delighted as a child at the rum-fed flames.

  ‘Looks marvellous,’ Uncle Freddie said.

  ‘I only hope it will be good,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘I always think they taste better for keeping. Don’t you think so, Mr Wilbram? Does your wife keep yours?’

  Mr Wilbram said he rather thought not. They were rarely at home for Christmas. He suddenly ran his finger round his shirt collar, looking flushed and discomforted. Wasn’t it rather warm, didn’t we think? Would anyone mind if we opened a window?

  It was rather warm, Aunt Leonora suddenly confessed, and while Uncle Freddie was feeding the expiring flames on the pudding with more rum I went to the window and opened it, surprised to see how the day had flowered from an early morning fogginess, clothed in softest white cloud, to a blazing afternoon. The hills shone golden with a purity of light that only the marriage of sea and late summer could give.

  ‘Perfect afternoon,’ I said. ‘Splendid for walking.’

  Uncle Freddie gave me a sharpish sort of look, which I ignored, and Aunt Leonora said while I was up would I hand her the cream? As I picked up the cream-boat from the sideboard I heard Mr Wilbram say:

  ‘I don’t want to put a damper on things, Mrs Elphinstone, but I feel I ought to say that Herr Untermeyer has an engagement at five. He’s christening a bus.’

  ‘Good God, man,’ she said, ‘since when have buses had to be christened?’

  ‘It’s a joint Anglo-German effort,’ Mr Wilbram said. ‘The two towns have shared the cost, Traben and ours. It’s for the old people. Excursions and so on. It’s going to be called The Lorelei. It’s Herr Untermeyer’s idea.’

  ‘The chords of youth again,’ I said.

  ‘What did you say?’ Mr Wilbram said, ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’

  ‘Oh! take no notice,’ Aunt Leonora said. ‘In any case there’s plenty of time for the bus. It isn’t two o’clock yet. You’ll want to walk your lunch down, won’t you?’

  Mr Wilbram, I thought, didn’t look at all as if he wanted to walk his lunch down.

  ‘Ah! the fire is now out,’ Herr Untermeyer said, rubbing his hands.

  ‘Drop more rum do you think?’ Uncle Freddie said and was about to feed the dying flames a second time when Aunt Leonora waved him aside and started to cut generous wedges of Christmas pudding, at the same time saying to Herr Untermeyer:

  ‘Now, Ot
to, you’ll taste this? Something very specially English. They don’t even have it in Scotland.’ What this had to do with it I simply couldn’t think. ‘I’m sorry there aren’t any good-luck charms. But then we’re grown-up, aren’t we?’

  ‘This also is a budding?’

  ‘Yes, but for Christmas.’

  ‘Ah! so? But Christmas it is not now. It is now summer.’

  ‘Yes, but we saved it from last year.’

  The expression on Herr Untermeyer’s face clouded from mere bewilderment to fogged mystification. The Christmas pudding steamed with richness. Aunt Leonora drowned a mountainous wedge of it in cream, Uncle Freddie topped up the wine glasses and Mr Wilbram further complicated things by saying:

  ‘I suppose it’s something left over from pre-Christian times. I mean the dried fruit and all that. The feast of the Winter Solstice and so on. Very little for me, Mrs Elphinstone, please, very little. I’ve really had an excellent sufficiency.’

  ‘I admit it does blow you up a bit,’ Uncle Freddie said.

  ‘Winter?’ Herr Untermeyer said. ‘Winter? Why you now say winter?’

  ‘Oh! you’ll soon walk that off,’ Aunt Leonora said and carved Mr Wilbram a slice of pudding, darkly rich and steaming, as generous as Otto’s, topping it with cream. ‘Anyway you can always run down the hills. If not up them.’

  With dismay Mr Wilbram picked up his fork and started to toy with the pudding. His normally pallid effigy of a face had already turned a rich, sweaty rose. At the same time it was restless, I thought, even melancholy.

  By contrast Herr Untermeyer sucked at his lumps of pudding as eagerly as a baby sucks at a dummy-teat. Cream ran down his chin. Currants slipped from his spoon. His tongue, like that of an eager dog, leapt out and licked up morsels and dribbles with the deftness of a conjuror, with no pause for either word or breath.

  Once Aunt Leonora remarked that it was a treat to see people eat. The pudding, I had to admit, was a poem, if rather a stolid one, and presently I began to feel my own face expanding, over-fed with rum, fruit, and cream, into a flushed, almost feverish bag, my eyes moist and somnolent.

  With much scraping and sucking, Herr Untermeyer left his platter clean – licked would almost have been the appropriate word – and then, glass suddenly high, schniffed the budding, red lips spluttering a sentence half-English, half-German, in which I several times caught, I thought, the word ‘engels’.