The Last Banquet

by Jonathan Grimwood

  The abbey at Mont Saint Michel is on a rocky outcrop reached at low tide by a causeway. Stone walls run round the base of the island making it a fortress. Indeed, it once withstood an English siege and was both rich and famous in its time. Now it is near dilapidated and a handful of monks hover at the back of the cathedral like unhappy ghosts. Jerome’s family have been patrons of the abbey for centuries, and with the death of Jerome’s father that spring he inherited the title his elder brother would have had, had he not been killed in the siege of Prague the previous winter. Jerome is now comte de Caussard, and Mont Saint Michel’s best hope of money to rebuild the abbey roof and pay for candles to burn in front of its altar. A choir has been borrowed from Rennes cathedral and shipped to the island, along with the local bishop to perform the service. We meet, attend the service, eat our feast and sleep on the island. ‘Tradition,’ Jerome says.

  ‘One so old,’ Charlot mutters, ‘that no one can remember it.’

  Jerome scowls, and is swept away by Eugenie who rushes across to find out what is wrong. It is those awkward minutes before a feast when the lower tables are settling themselves and those at high table wait to go in. ‘We’re teasing him,’ I say. Whereupon she looks so appalled that Jerome grins, uniting himself with us in complicity, and lets Eugenie drag him to the far side of the room to talk to the abbot. The only difficult moment comes when Virginie and Emile meet, her nod so cold he blushes.

  ‘Why me?’ he demands of me later.

  ‘You set the bet.’

  ‘And you all took it.’

  ‘Not me. And not Charlot, obviously.’

  Emile looks mutinous until I stare at him and he glances away, realises Virginie is watching and his mouth tightens still further. ‘Jerome took it.’

  ‘Jerome’s Jerome,’ I say.

  It was a stupid thing to say. I should have still been angry with Jerome, had been angry with Jerome, brutally angry at the time, with the fury of a young man who thinks no one should touch, or even think of touching, or have ever touched, the woman he loves except him. But Jerome was Jerome. Even then at his own wedding his eyes noted the women around him. Not hungrily but contentedly, like a lion in the grasslands lazily confirming it lives in a world where there will always be another meal.

  I followed Emile across the room to where he’d gone to sulk. ‘Make your apologies,’ I said. ‘That’s all it will take. Say you were younger. You were stupid. You wish to say sorry and hope she can let bygones be bygones. We all make mistakes . . . ’ Instead of understanding, he shook my hand from his arm.

  ‘Have you suggested Jerome does the same?’

  ‘He didn’t set the wager.’

  Emile’s face grew cold. ‘No. He simply took it. Apparently, that’s entirely different. Obviously, it’s a difference you can’t expect people like me to understand.’

  This time when he walked away I let him go and watched him join Thérèse, who stood in a window overlooking the darkening sea, her dress a little richer and a little more showy than any other. Marriage had made Emile rich. In time the death of his father-in-law would make him richer still.

  ‘You were right to let him go . . . ’ Charlot pushed a glass into my hand and grinned at my expression as I took a sip. ‘Apple brandy,’ he said. ‘Finer than the best cognac.’ His voice mimicked Jerome’s exactly. ‘To go with the magnificent feast.’

  The last hundred and fifty years might never have happened given the food Jerome served his guests. Perhaps in Normandy it didn’t. Louis XIV would have been appalled. But Henri IV would have recognised the meal instantly. I was surprised Jerome let us have forks and didn’t make us eat with our knives off rounds of gravy-soaked bread. What the food lacked in subtlety it made up for in quantity. A whole ox, roasted over a fire pit, was dragged in, still on its spit, on a cart made for that purpose. Whole boars and whole deer, endless pike roasted in long clay pots and herons on wooden platters. It was a feast in the old style and as tasteless and poorly cooked as anything I’d eaten since leaving the academy.

  ‘Your face,’ Charlot said.

  ‘Don’t encourage him,’ Virginie hissed.

  ‘The bread is good,’ I said.

  She looked at me. ‘That’s all you have to say? The bread is good?’

  ‘Freshly baked, good yeast, not too much salt. With a slight sense of oil in the aftertaste, like an echo from a low note.’

  Virginie sighed and Charlot grinned. ‘You deserve each other.’

  We watched him slip away towards a door into the courtyard. It was possible he was visiting the latrines or else simply wanted air. ‘His turn next,’ I said.

  ‘His turn?’

  ‘I’m married, Emile’s married, now Jerome. Charlot’s turn surely?’

  ‘After my father dies . . . ’ Her look was considering, on the edge of comment. We had been married two years, nearly three. We were happy in bed and in each other’s company, and happy enough together not to grudge the other solitude if it was wanted. I suspected that Virginie was pregnant again, but she had still to say, and after the miscar­riage of our last child I would wait rather than ask. ‘Charlot is hard to know.’

  ‘I know him better than anyone,’ I said, hurt.

  ‘Better than me?’

  ‘Well, better than anyone but you.’

  ‘And I know him not at all.’ Virginie shrugged. ‘I doubt sometimes that he knows himself. My brother will not make a good husband. And he will make his match only after my father has died. It is their final battle. The first of my father’s desires for him he has been able to refuse.’

  ‘Your father has someone in mind?’

  Amusement crossed her face. ‘Of course he has someone in mind. He probably had someone in mind before Charlot was born. My brother’s revenge is his refusal to marry while my father is still alive.’

  ‘Revenge for what?’

  She shrugged away my question as if it were irrelevant, unless she simply thought the answer was obvious, and told me what I’d already guessed. She was three months pregnant and hoped we could return to Chateau d’Aumout more slowly than we’d travelled on our way here, as the travelling made her sick and she feared for the child. We made love slowly that night, with her sitting above me and moving gently, as her doctor had suggested for the previous pregnancy after she’d crossly dismissed his idea that I take a mistress and leave off troubling her until after the birth. It made no difference. We lost the baby at five months, as we had lost the one before. We lost the one after that in the sixth month and I began to wonder if Jean-Pierre was to be our only child. The doctor insisted Virginie’s body needed a rest and this time we both listened. In the privacy of my study the doctor opened his leather bag and pulled out a scrap of leather, resting it on the desk in front of me.

  ‘This is among the finest made.’

  Reaching for his offering I unrolled it and looked at the ribband around the lower edge and the crude stitching at the top. Maybe my face revealed my thoughts, as it often did, which had been a frequent nuisance at school and remained one still.

  ‘I can assure you it is of the best quality.’

  I thanked him for his kindness, assured him my comptroller would pay his fees promptly and showed him to the door. He bowed. The man could find his way out. He had been here often enough. That evening, as supper was finishing, I told Virginie I would be going to Paris for a week and asked if I could fetch her anything while I was there. It was as if I’d said I was leaving her forever. She abandoned her chair, pushing past a footman who only just stepped back in time, and fled the room, her feet hard on the stairs. Her sobs as I made my way along the corridor to our room were as loud as I’d ever heard.

  ‘Virginie, open the door.’

  ‘I won’t. You can’t make me.’

  I considered putting my shoulder to the door and decided the wood was too thick and the hinges too heavy f
or that to do anything but bruise my muscles and my pride. It would be absurd to send for a man with a hammer and I felt ashamed for even thinking of it. ‘Virginie,’ I said. ‘Please. Let me in.’

  There was a heavy silence and I was listening for her refusal when the key turned in the lock and she opened the door a fraction. ‘I hate you.’

  ‘At least tell me why.’

  ‘You know why.’

  ‘You want to come to Paris too?’

  ‘And help find you a whore? Marseilles must be full of them. Why do you have to go to Paris? Or have Jerome or my brother shared their dirty little secrets? Have they told you where to find the best brothels and gaming dens?’

  ‘This is absurd . . . ’

  ‘Don’t you dare call me absurd.’

  She beat her fists against my shoulders but let me pull her close and suffered me to hold her after a slight struggle. Her mouth was open and her face twisted to an ugly mask as she sobbed into my coat. Like all her dark moods the storm was fierce but brief. The face she raised to me was tear-streaked but calm.

  ‘If you must,’ she said.

  ‘If I must what?’

  It was, she told me later, my apparently wilful stupidity that convinced her I had no idea what this argument was about. Except that by the time she raised her face for me to kiss her gently on the lips, I did. It seemed Dr. Albert had told Virginie we should have no pregnancies, but her previous reaction to his suggestion that a mistress might lighten her load had dissuaded him from telling her how we could achieve this, while sharing a bed and remaining man and wife. She’d assumed I’d agreed to take my comfort elsewhere.

  ‘And what was I meant to do?’

  Pushing her back on the bed, I lifted her petticoats and put her hand between her thighs, folding one of her fingers inside her. ‘I believe this works.’

  Virginie swiped at me with her free hand and then pulled me close to kiss. She closed her eyes so she couldn’t see me watch, kept her finger where it was and finally bit hard on my shoulder to muffle her cries. When she was done and her breath returned she opened her eyes and swiped at me again for grinning. Then allowed me to take her finger and suck it clean. She tasted salt as tears and I could tell every­thing she’d eaten in the previous two days.

  ‘And you?’ she asked.

  I rolled her onto her front and rode the crease of her buttocks, wiping her clean and curling up behind her when I was finished, my arm folded so my elbow rested on her hip and I could cup one beautiful breast.

  ‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I always will.’

  I left for Marseilles the next morning, having agreed with Virginie that Marseilles would be as good for what I wanted as Paris, being a port and near Italy, a place Virginie believed libidinous and licentious; both qualities likely to encourage trade in what I sought. I kept from her that what I wanted was not the thing, but a man who knew how to make the thing. I travelled quietly, in as much as a man who travels in a coach and four with his arms gilded on the side and his coachmen in livery can travel quietly. The mayor heard of my arrival within the afternoon and offered me the use of his house. I had to explain my presence in his city was a matter of delicacy and I’d be grateful for his discretion. He bowed himself out of my chamber, which was the largest on the upper floor of the hotel I’d chosen, and left still offering me any assistance I might need. If he left also with the idea my visit to his city was officially unofficial then that was his choice.

  The city stank so richly I spent my first morning simply losing myself in tiny back streets as I hunted down the source of the smells. Strange fruits were piled high on barrows in a market peopled almost exclusively by Moors and other sorts of North Africans. I bought two or three of each fruit, asking for and noting down the name and making notes of the taste, texture and consistency. Wild-looking goats hung in a window, throats cut and bodies gutted, but unskinned and still with heads and hooves. I asked where they came from, meaning the country, since I didn’t recognise them as French, and my question was misunderstood. I left with the name of a market in the port area. The first recognisably French man I asked for directions told me a gentleman like me didn’t want to go to a place like that. So, smiling, I made my other request and he offered to guide me to a brothel he knew where the girls were clean and willing and the price reasonable. Having thanked him, I asked again and he said he knew three men who made redingotes Anglaise and I told him to take me to the best.

  We parted ten minutes later outside a workshop that stank of sulphur and rotting meat and he took his coin and my thanks. I wondered if he was one of the mayor’s men sent to keep an eye on me and decided it didn’t matter. Inside a small Italian scowled, noted the quality of my clothes and found a smile instead. Light streamed through a glassless window from a squalid courtyard behind and a brazier in the yard billowed yellow smoke while a boy thrust one hand into the smoke and kept his head turned away. Seeing my gaze, the Italian told me I’d come to the right place, he made the best baudruches in the world.

  ‘I need you to teach me how . . . ’

  His gaze was unreadable as I looked round his grimy workshop. I’d gutted enough animals to identify the entrails in a bucket as sheep. The yellow smoke was sulphur, its stink unmistakable. A second bucket full of milky liquid rested on a bench, with short lengths of small entrail floating on its surface, and a long knife honed thin from sharpening showed I’d interrupted him in the middle of scraping a section of entrail clean. There is little enough space between cooking and chemistry, and this obviously combined both.

  ‘You wish to manufacture and sell condoms?’

  ‘I want to know how they are made, how long they last, what is the best quality that can be produced.’ Pulling out my notebook, I reached into my pocket for my tiny silver inkwell, flipped open the lid and fitted a nib to the shaft of a pen, putting them all on the cleanest section of bench I could find. My actions convinced him I was serious.

  ‘My secrets are expensive.’

  ‘More expensive than other men like you?’ The price was unimportant, within reason, but there are certain rituals to be observed when dealing with someone like this.

  ‘There are no other men like me,’ he said flatly. ‘I am the best.’

  ‘Which is why I am here and not with them.’

  He smiled, flattered. And named a price for his knowledge that was probably double what he expected but still less than Virginie would spend on a single dress. We settled on a little less but still enough for him to believe he’d driven a hard bargain. As we worked—and he taught me as a master teaches an apprentice, by showing me how and then making me try for myself—he lectured me on the value and uncertain history of condoms. They were named for an English earl who gave some to his king, in an effort to stop him having so many bastards; they were named for a French Colonel Cundum; they were old as history itself; they were relatively new. It seemed their history was whatever the customer wanted it to be. ‘Take the lamb’s intestine and wash it in water for several hours . . . ’ He scowled as my mouth opened for a question and then he shrugged. I was paying him.

  ‘Does it have to be lamb?’

  ‘Lamb is traditional.’ He considered the point. ‘But I can see no reason why you should not use another animal if the idea of lamb offends you.’

  I nodded for him to go on.

  ‘After washing, mash it gently in a weak solution of lye.’ He tapped the bucket of milky liquid. ‘And then turn it inside out and mash it again. After that, scrape away the sticky membrane very, very carefully, and then we do this.’ He took the scrap of entrail from me and led me outside, where he used wooden tongs to hold my offering and threw a small handful of sulphur onto a hot plate, pushing the tongs into the smoke. ‘Now wash it in soap and water, blow it up to check for holes and tie it off at six or seven inches. You have a baudruche.’ The man looked at my offering, and rolled his eyes. ‘One so
bad I doubt I could even give it away but a baudruche all the same.’

  ‘And how do I make it better?’

  ‘You practise.’

  ‘No, how do I make it better than the ones you sell? How do I make it cleaner, thinner, more supple? How do I make it better?’ He sighed. Another gold coin later I left with the knowledge of which bit of entrail was best to use, and a secret method for preparing this bit supposedly known only to the condom-maker to the Ottoman sultan and the man teaching me. I also left with the address of a glassmaker who would and, apparently, frequently did make dildos for the finest families. The glassmaker was where I headed early next morning, and it was only after explaining exactly what I wanted, which was a life-size dildo, no larger and no smaller, correctly shaped and mounted upright on a wooden base like a small statue, that I found the market the Moors had mentioned, in the shadow of a shipyard.

  ‘That,’ I said. ‘What kind of goat is it?’

  The old man I addressed looked for help to a boy who hurried over to act as his grandfather’s translator, or great-uncle’s, or whatever the relationship was. They were undoubtedly family, sharing cheekbones and mouths in the way Charlot and Virginie shared deep-set and ridiculously beautiful eyes. ‘It’s a sheep that looks like a goat.’

  The animal’s horns were large and swept out and back­wards, its throat, chest and front legs covered with long yellowy-brown hair. Its tail hung to its heels. It looked like a goat to me. ‘Smell it,’ the boy said at a whisper from the old man.

  The old man was right. The animal lacked a goat’s distinc­tive stench and, now I looked closely, it lacked the beard as well. Other than that, it was so goat-like as to be indistinguish­able. Nearby stood two bleating kids and their mother. ‘What do you call them?’ I wrote Arudi in my notebook and agreed on a price for their delivery to my hotel, payment on delivery.