Look at the couple at the table in the alcove by the window, the table which is given only to the restaurant’s regular customers.  They are obviously talking about the food.  The man will take a mouthful, savour it, and then pronounce on it.  The woman stretches forth her fork to give a second opinion.   They seem to be eating from each other’s plates rather than their own.  The forks swoop across the tablecloth like scavenging birds.
He is the sum of many good dinners.  He has a round face, like a well-scrubbed schoolboy, horn-rimmed glasses that are inclined to slide down the nose, and an air that all is well between him and his stomach.  His companion is also round of face, but she is pretty with it.  Her eyes narrow into new moon crescents when she laughs, and her dark blonde hair lies loose on her shoulders.   She looks well-fed and well-loved.  She dives in on the last cep on his plate.  Their forks clash.   They laugh.   The waiter, enjoying their enjoyment, pours them more wine.
Lucy had not always looked so round and healthy.   When she met Humphrey her face was what you would call sculpted, with haunted, hungry eyes.  She had not realized till then that she had been starving all her life, first through her mother’s exigency and then through her own as she strived to retain her reedy figure.   Until Humphrey came along, she had equated the hollow feeling in her stomach with lack of love.  One dinner with Humphrey proved that most mental anguish can be assuaged by a good meal.
“Do have the mousse de foie de canard,” coaxed Humphrey on their first date at a new restaurant in Soho with a celebrated chef trained at Taillevent in Paris.
She tasted a dish that sent her into a trance of forgetfulness.   The richness and the lightness of it . . .She felt it slide down to her stomach, imbuing her with warmth.   Humphrey ordered her an entrecote – underdone and garnished with the marrow of beef.  The marrow was of a melting subtlety, of an indefinable yet exquisite flavour.   She had never tasted anything so attractive.
Lucy ate her way into marriage.  Their wedding day picture shows a healthy and happy pair, Humphrey’s face glowing, Lucy’s serenely satiated.   Both had double chins when they laughed.   Occasionally Lucy thought with bemusement of the barren mealtimes of her childhood.   Thursday’s macaroni cheese, Friday’s fish pie.   She remembered the bleakness that had settled in her along with the macaroni.   She had once said, aged eight, and faced with another plate of it: “Food is a penance.”
“Cooking is a penance,” her mother had retorted, “as you will find out before you’re much older.”  With Humphrey there was little cooking.  He discovered early on in their marriage that they ate better by eating out, though there were occasional evenings at home, trying out the buffalo mozzarella from Luigi’s deli with the sun-dried tomatores and the extra virgin olive oil.   After one such evening Lucy nuzzled up to Humphrey in bed and said:  “Thank you for saving me.”
“What’s that?” asked Humphrey absently, his attention taken by the new guide to Bordeaux wine he was reading.
“For showing me how to enjoy life – I never realized how simple it was.”
On some of the restaurant outings they were joined by Humphrey’s friend Babbington, a City banker and in gourmandism his equal.   A rounder version of Humphrey, his face shone with the accumulation of years of good living.  On those evenings the conversation would revolve entirely around food.  Humphrey’s eyes would gleam behind his glasses as he recalled a superb meal at a little French restaurant he knew off the Charing Cross Road.   Babbington remembered a sumptuous dinner at the old Mirabelle together with the wines they had tasted.
“And after that a 1966 Richebourg, followed by a 1953 Chateau d’Yquem with the soufflé Grand Marnier.”
Both men were silent for a moment, savouring the memory.   The waiter’s pen was poised in mid-order.   “The mille-feuille au chocolat et framboise for me,” said Humphrey.  “And what will you have, Lucy?”
“I couldn’t eat another thing,” said Lucy.   The men stared at her and Babbington, disconcerted, looked at Humphrey, who exclaimed:  “Nonsense, Lucy, we can’t have people abandoning their dinner halfway through.  It wouldn’t happen in France.   Why are the English so puritanical?”
“Have the strawberry bavarois,” suggested Babbington helpfully.  “It’s quite light.”
A moment’s contemplative pause, then Humphrey sighed:  “Ah! France. . . now there’s a country where they really know how to live.”
Over the months of their marriage Lucy’s waist continued to thicken, but the hollow feeling in her stomach, which had been stifled by so many good meals, returned, a nagging discomfort that survived the most lavish dinner.   She and Humphrey, for the first time, quarrelled in a restaurant.
“It’s time we went on a trip to France,” said Humphrey.   “London restaurants have been disappointing of late.”
 
So Humphrey began to map out a gastronomic expedition rather as a general might plan a campaign.  He settled down of an evening, comparing entries in the Michelin with those in the Gault-Millau, and calculated distances with an atlas.   Advance phone calls were made to reserve highpoints of the tour in restaurants with cooking stars.  The first was roughly two miles from the port at which they disembarked.   Humphrey believed in getting off to a good start.
The Manoir d’Antin was an excellent beginning.   After a kir in the garden where pigeons strutted like portly gentlemen, they adjourned to the Norman baronial hall for a lunch of courgette flowers stuffed with salmon mousse and truffles, a rack of lamb with delicately arranged parcels of spinach, and a Normandy apple pie flamed with calvados and doused with cream.
They continued their gastronomic tour with dinner in a gilded Michelin rosette restaurant on the Loire followed by lunch the next day at a simple auberge in Charente.   Then on to Perigord, home of the truffle and foie gras.   They ate slices of foie gras frais arranged in slivers on a plate with glinting crystals of aspic.   They ate truffles with foie gras in choux pastry, foie gras in terrines, truffles and foie gras in salads.
“No goose can possibly feel as stuffed as I do,” said Lucy.  They were by now in Gascony, a land untainted by nouvelle cuisine.   Terrine and boudin noir were followed by a cassoulet of confit d’oie, then the obligatory cheese course and a tourte gasconne flavoured with armagnac.   Humphrey read aloud from the Gault-Millau in order to decide where to have lunch the next day.   Lucy sat in a torpor listening to the flowery description of pressed duck.  In her stomach was a log-jam of the previous day’s meal.   She felt the undigested confit d’oie move upwards in search of space.   She rose from the table, walked swiftly to the toilet at the back of the café and was copiously sick.   “You poor old thing,” said Humphrey when she told him.  “You’re not beginning to flag, are you?”
The next morning Lucy woke early, while Humphrey continued to snore gently beside her.   She opened the shutters and looked out at the smooth sanded square and the plane trees.   Two men were chatting, one in blue chambray, the other in a black beret.   They were archetypal French, yet she could not imagine them searching frenetically for new tastes, for finer vintages.   The gluttony she and Humphrey had embarked on was a quest for the ultimate sensation, a search for the foody Holy Grail.   It was a quest her body was no longer capable of following.    She looked down at the rounded stomach that jutted against her nightdress.   There were rolls of fat at her waist, what was left of it, and her stomach was as distended as that of a woman in a Hieronymus Bosch painting.   She looked down at the sleeping Humphrey, pink-cheeked, peaceful, his body flaccid and relaxed under the bedclothes, last night’s caneton a la bigarade in the final stages of digestion, his kidneys changing chateau-bottled Bordeaux into urine.   It occurred to her that she had not the least desire to make love with Humphrey ever again.
At breakfast Lucy muttered: “Crise de foie,” to sympathetic Madame, and ordered weak tea and a piece of baguette.   Humphrey had an extra pain au chocolat with his coffee.
The sunflower fields of the Touraine, vibrant yellow against the sky, signalled the final days of the tour.   Humphrey decided to make a detour to deepest Berry for dinner at a restaurant avec chambres  which was “vaut le voyage.”   The open Touraine landscape gave way to heavily wooded terrain.   Branches of oak trees overhung the road, the leaves, heavy in mid-summer growth, obscuring the sun.   The high rocky verges gave the impression of driving through a tunnel.   Behind a stone wall the tower of a monastery was visible.
“Un pays qu’on dit la France profonde,” Lucy read the entry on Berry from the guide book.   “Un pays de sorciers et legendes.   Sounds dangerous.”
“No area which has a restaurant with such write-ups can be bad,” said Humphrey.  
Lucy looked up the entry for La Reserve des Gourmands and said:  “Oh Lord, this is the one with the pressed duck.”
The hotel was in the main square of the town, a tall, grey-stuccoed building with gables.  On the front was written in gothic script La Reserve des Gourmands.   They got out of the car and the slamming of its doors echoed through a square empty of people.  Inside, the hotel was clad in dark stained oak.   Panelled walls, carved staircase, dark polished floor-boards; it was like being inside an oak tree, surrounded by wood and silence.   A polite but profoundly reserved woman in grey blouse and skirt showed them to their room.  Like the hall, it was panelled in oak and in the centre was a bed with carved wooden posts.  Well, said Humphrey, you had to do something with the oak trees that infested the area.
They set off for a stroll before dinner.  In most towns there would be people passing by, an occasional café bar, a rumble of traffic.  But the overwhelming impression here was of emptiness.   No other car had arrived in the square, no one was out and about.   As they walked the deserted streets past shuttered windows, it was as if they had arrived in the aftermath of a catastrophe.  The street led to a church with a soaring medieval spire, the proportion of which seemed out of scale with the small town.  By the door was a noticeboard with a gothic script heading that read: “L’histoire de Chenier Saint-Sepulcre et ses environs.”
“This is cheerful stuff,” said Lucy, peering at the script.  “It says this town was hit by the Black Death in 1450 which wiped out two-thirds of the inhabitants.   Do you think that’s why it’s so empty?”
She read on and a veritable carnage through the centuries emerged.   There had been the Hundred Years’ War against the English, who had savagely massacred the townspeople.  There had been the Huguenots, slaughtered in their beds, and another plague in the 17th century.
“Here’s something about tumbrils,” she said, peering at the convoluted script.   “The French Revolution.  Tumbrils to the guillotine in the main square.  And a reference to the Resistance.  A hundred men rounded up and shot in the square in 1944.  First les sales anglais and then les sales boches.   No wonder they’re not welcoming.”
As they walked back to the hotel, the oppressiveness of the past overshadowed them.   They passed through streets where people had been dragged from their houses to be shot, guillotined, or hacked to death.   Inside the houses, even now, the townspeople seemed to be waiting for the next disaster.
“The dinner’s bound to be good,” said Humphrey eventually, his voice resounding in the listening silence.
 
Back at the hotel they found the dining room empty apart from a young couple at a corner table who were whispering to each other.   After the summer evening outside, the panelled room was shadowy, the light filtering through the curtained window.
The head waiter, a young man with old eyes and sleeked-back hair, showed them to one of the tables, and presented them with two parchment menus, headed in similar gothic script to the notice outside the church.   Humphrey, who had seemed momentarily despondent, brightened as he read the menu.
No nouvelle cuisine here,” he said.  “They believe in the ancien regime.   This will be our last Michelin star dinner before the ferry, so let’s go for the menu gourmand.”
Lucy felt satiated simply by reading the menu.   The nausea that had stricken her earlier on the tour was never far away.   She looked through the hors d’oeuvres for something that was not rich, and her eyes were caught by the words, “Le Plaisir du Chef.”   The dish so named sounded, from the description, like a tete de veau terrine or brawn.  She said:  “If it’s the chef’s pleasure, it should be good.  I’ll try it.”
“And grenouilles to follow,” suggested Humphrey.
“Frogs’ legs?  I’d rather die.”
“You mustn’t be so prejudiced.   You can’t leave France without having frogs’ legs.  I’ll have some as well.”
Humphrey ordered the dinner and they settled down to wait with glasses of kir and amuse-gueules.   A pall of reticence hung over the restaurant.  Like an English tea shop, Lucy thought.  Or a morgue.  The wheeled trolley could be heard clearly, pushed to their table by a white-jacketed waiter.   On top of the trolley were two large plates covered by silver domes.  The waiter placed each one carefully befor ethem, then lifted the covers and stepped back.   Lucy looked at what lay before her on the plate, her eyes taking in forms that her mind found hard to comprehend.   Finally she said:  “Well, there’s no mistaking it, after all.  That is a head I have before me.”
Arranged on either side of the plate were two thick semi-circles edged by grey skin the consistency of leather and lined with a layer of off-white fat, attached to which were pieces of flesh.   In the centre of the plate lay a large tongue, dull crimson in hue, surrounded by pale, soft-looking lumps.  Irregular shapes in batter that resembled onion bhajis were scattered around.
“Humphrey,” said Lucy.  “I cannot eat this.  We do not have a chef in the kitchen.  We have a serial killer.”   Even Humphrey looked taken aback by the novelty of the dish. He asked the waiter to explain it, and the various objects were pointed out.  Yes, said the water, that was indeed the tete de veau, there was the calf’s tongue, the sweetbread from the pancreas, and the onion bhaji-like things were beignets de cervelles.
“Well, Lucy, you have a real little treat there,” said Humphrey.
“Humphrey,” said Lucy, “I cannot eat this.”
“You can’t spurn such an original offering.  Give it to me.”  Humphrey exchanged with her the mussel soup he had ordered and set to work on the dish.  Lucy watched out of the corner of her eye as the tete de veau and its appendages disappeared down Humphrey’s gullet, while he exclaimed over the feast.  Scraps of brain and pancreas decorated his tongue when he opened his mouth.  A piece of the calf’s tongue was visible between his teeth.  He cleared the plate, leaving only two semi-circles of skin lined with fat.
“That was original,” he said.  “I wonder what he’s going to do to the frogs’ legs.”
“They’ll probably come with the frogs attached,” said Lucy, but the chef had gone to another extreme.   Arranged in a neat circle on their plates around a pool of sorrel sauce were small pieces of white flesh of the upper thigh, each speared with a cocktail stick like a prosthesis.
“Maybe he’s an orthopaedic surgeon manqué,” murmured Lucy.   She picked at the cocktail sticks and imagined the chef skinning each leg, carefully cutting the thigh bone and inserting the splint.  Eight legs on each plate, a total of eight frogs.   A pile of 16 discarded leg ends and skin.  She wondered what happened to the rest of the frog and a graphic picture came to mind of a tub of legless frogs, their pale upturned bellies still palpitating.
“I can’t eat this, Humphrey,” she said.
“The chef is going to be disappointed with you,” said Humphrey, looking seriously displeased himself.  “I’d better help you out.”
And he removed four frogs’ legs from her plate.
Lucy’s next course was a guinea fowl with a stuffing made of pigs’ trotters.  Humphrey had chosen escalope of duck and its liver.  The sauce made from the blood of the pressed duck was almost black.  Humphrey tasted it and glowed.   Soon only a few smears of darkness remained on the plate.  He suppressed a belch.
“That was delicious, though perhaps a little heavy after the Plaisir,” he said.   “You’re not eating much of the farcie.  Let me try some.”
Humphrey finished the pigs’ trotter stuffing and Lucy picked at the guinea fowl.   The waiter left them for a digestive pause then carried in the cheese board, bringing with it a wave of pungency.   Humphrey chose a gently oozing Camembert, an active-looking Roquefort and a Munster.  A ripe, rotting smell rose from his plate.
By the time they reached the dessert, the whispering couple in the corner had quietly left the room.  Not a restaurant with much atmosphere, said Humphrey, but at least the lack of customers had brought the full concentration of the chef to bear on them.   Lucy had chosen peach with raspberry coulis for dessert and Humphrey the delice aux trois chocolats.   On his plate rested a large tulip of bitter chocolate filled with a mousse of dark chocolate, a white marquise and a chocolate ice cream.  The tulip was surrounded by a pool of chocolate sauce.   Humphrey tried the different textures, one after the other, and pronounced  it most original.   Beads of sweat were forming on his forehead.   He took out his handkerchief and mopped his brow.   “This room has become extraordinarily warm,” said Humphrey.  “I think a little chilled Beaumes de Venise would not go amiss.”
More chocolate, in the form of cocoa-dusted truffles, arrived with the coffee.  The head waiter asked them, his expression solicitous, whether they had enjoyed the meal.
“Un repas magnifique, Presque stupefiant.  Mes compliments au chef,” exclaimed Humphrey.   The old eyes of the young man turned to Lucy and he observed:  “Mais Madame n’avait pas beaucoup d’appetit.”
Humphrey commiserated with the waiter over Lucy’s lack of appetite and ordered an armagnac.   The sweat was beginning to run down his face in rivulets.  He stumbled as he got up from the table and his hand clenched at the cloth.
“Let’s have a breath of fresh air before bed,” he muttered.  
As they walked into the hall, the door at the far end opened, releasing billows of steam.  Through the steam they could see a tall, thin man dressed in white, wearing a chef’s hat.  He stood there in an almost tangible silence, staring at them.   His eyes, dark, piercing and malign, burned in his hollow-cheeked face.  In his hand he held a carving knife.  For a moment his eyes met Lucy’s and she was mesmerized by their force.  It seemed that they were rooted to the spot in a frozen tableau.  Then, quite suddenly, he vanished back into the kitchen.   A puff of smoke escaped through the closing door.   “There you are, Lucy,” said Humphrey.  “You rejected his Plaisir, and he’s not at all pleased.”
At two in the morning Lucy awoke with the clarity of one whose digestion is frenetically active.   The room was in darkness, the air close and over warm, the curtains a barrier to the night air.  She got out of bed, stumbled over Humphrey’s shoes and inched her way to the window.  She drew aside the curtain and leaned on to the windowsill breathing in the air outside.  The square lay before her, its emptiness illuminated by a full moon.  The tumbrils had once rolled here, bearing their victims to execution.   Tumbrils that had arrived with living people and had left with headless corpses. 
And now she heard in her mind the sound of the waiter’s trolley.  The tumbrils, filled with bodies, were grinding through the square even now.  Tumbrils full of headless calves, limbless frogs, pigs without trotters, ducks crushed in presses.  A succession of maimed and tortured animals passed before her eyes.
The sensation of sickness, the desire to rid herself of the evening’s ingestion was overwhelming.  She made her way back through the darkness to the bathroom, closed the door behind her and switched on the light.  For some time she sat on the lavatory, staring at the tiled walls.   As she waited, aware of a tide rising in her stomach, the door opened and Humphrey stumbled in, his short-sighted eyes staring fixedly, an expression of agonised concentration on his face.  She realized he was about to be sick into the lavatory on which she was sitting.   As he reached it, his eyes focused on her and he wordlessly changed direction for the basin.  He leaned over, opened his mouth and out, as if furious at having been trapped in his body, flowed the entire meal.
Out in a noxious mélange flowed the delice aux trois chocolats, the Camembert, the Roquefort, the duck’s liver, the frogs’ legs, the sorrel sauce, and then, with a definitive and prolonged glop, the whole of le Plaisir du Chef.  Finally he raised his head from the basin, his face glistening with sweat, eyes watering with the effort.  “I think I overdid it,” said Humphrey faintly.
The following year Humphrey went on holiday with Babbington, for a gastronomic tour of the Cotes de Rhone and Provence.   A year later he and Lucy were divorced.  She has regained the slimness that was hers before she married Humphrey.  Her well-sculpted face has not a trace of its former self-indulgent softness.   Her figure is positively reed-like.   Lucy is now a vegetarian.   She cooks an excellent macaroni cheese.
end