Free Dandy Gilver and a Bothersome Number of Corpses by Catriona McPherson Page B

match. I suspected from the look of the pot’s outside what it contained, and very soon my nostrils told me my guess was accurate. It was a pan of beef dripping slowly warming up for things to fry in.
    As to what might be fried, once Joe had changed his striped blue apron for a white one, long enough to reach the top of his boots and wide enough to meet at the back of his considerable girth, he fetched an enormous bowl from the cold larder, washed his fingers in water from a kettle – hot enough to make Alec and me both wince, although Joe just chuckled and shook his reddened hand dry – and started breaking off little pieces from a mound of dough which was mushrooming inside the mixing bowl like a puffball.
    All the time he worked he was talking, and soon the strange sing-song of his voice, as odd as it had sounded when first I had heard it, came to seem quite natural so that I would not have said he had any accent at all.
    ‘She is gone like the setting sun,’ he said. ‘Like the sun she will return, but I cannot deny she is gone. Gone from my arms but not from my heart. I work too hard. I leave her too long and she is lonely. I do not blame the poor child. She is a child to me. Fifteen years since I marry my sweetheart and she is still that sweet girl to me. So, my friend, you will find her and bring her home and I will rejoice and I will never again work so hard and let my sweet love be lonely. Eat, eat, eat, eat!’
    For the fat had got hot and into it he had dropped little spoonfuls of his mixture, watching them (as tenderly as any mother watching her children at play) before fishing them out again and laying them down gently on a plate of sugar. He rolled the plate around until the sugar was crusted all over the little puffs of pastry, and then he tipped the first one onto a clean plate for me.
    ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait,’ he said. He poured me a tiny cup of evil-looking black coffee from a fat little pot which had been spluttering on another gas ring, then he swept his arm down like a starter at a race meet and said it again. ‘Eat, eat, eat, eat.
Buon appetito
. Enjoy!’
    And despite the fact that I knew it was fried in dripping, and the fact that I had eaten my breakfast along with Alec and that the coffee was strong enough to give me goose pimples, I
did
eat – and it was the tastiest little pastry I had ever had in my life. Light, warm, sweet, almost salty – just far enough from being salty to make one yearn for another bite to see if the salt was
there
. I finished it, licked my sugary fingers as delicately as I could, and craned forward to peer at the pan of hot oil.
    Joe Aldo burst into a cascade of delighted laughter.
    ‘That is it!’ he said. ‘That is the secret. The genius in the lamp, and only a true cook can rub it! I make them one little bite too small. Just one tiny little bite too small and no one, no one, no one, no one ever refuses another. Hah!’
    Alec wagged his finger at me and laughed along and I managed to muster a sheepish smile too. I sipped another incendiary mouthful of the black tar Joe Aldo called coffee and asked for a second pastry like a good girl, not wanting to spoil his fun.
    When there was a pyramid of them on a plate between us and the fat little coffee pot was sitting on the table too, at last Joe moved the shimmering pan of fat back from the gas ring (setting it on the windowsill, I noticed, where it was sure to taint the wash hung on a rope in the tiny back yard). He removed his white apron, put on the striped one again and went back to his potato peeling, flicking the potato off the knife with an expert twist and plunging his hand into the bucket up to his elbow, wetting his rolled shirtsleeve and not noticing.
    ‘So,’ he said. ‘I am a bad husband, working and working and never a rose, never a song, never a dance in the moonlight for my lovely wife. Not since her birthday, February, have we danced together in an empty room.’ I took in my stride this hint