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Six eggs! Surely six was too many? Six eggs, six tablespoons of sugar, one cup of black breadcrumbs, ground cinnamon and butter.
Hmmm. Was it too rich?
More to the point, was it vulgar?
Nothing vulgar could ever be allowed in an Elspeth Allen cookbook. The name was right though. In fact the name was damn good – Black Bread Pudding. It had a ring to it. Something that had grown out of grinding poverty and, over the centuries, matured into a dish fit for the tables of the affluent and discerning.
What about three eggs and three tablespoons of sugar? Charlie looked at his watch. Half past seven. It was Sunday, the day Elspeth gave herself the treat of a long lie-in. She wouldn’t be up for another hour. Time for a cup of tea and then back to it.
Charlie Bronski put aside being Elspeth Allen, got up from his desk and went to the kitchen. While he waited for the kettle to boil he thought about the recipe. Three eggs, three sugars and what? It needed something. The answer came just as the kettle boiled. Alcohol. But not just any alcohol, Polish vodka. Perfect. Booze was always good, people liked booze, and Polish vodka was bloody brilliant.
He returned to the desk with his tea and resumed work on the latest Elspeth Allen cookery book, Poland in an English Kitchen.
He wrote out a provisional list of ingredients. At least it didn’t have cream. It seemed to Charlie that half of the recipes in the old second-hand cookbook he was plundering needed eggs and cream. And this was from the Soviet era when even bread was supposed to be scarce! What a bloody country! Not that excess was bad. Excess was usually good. The success of the books he wrote in his wife’s name was based on the simple idea that readers, while reading, liked to feel good. And reading an Elspeth Allen cookbook did more than make you feel good. It made you feel rich. For a while, in your head, you became a part of the glitterati, the fashionable dinner-party set.
Charlie stopped writing for a moment. The sentence that had started it all drifted back into his mind. His wife had come across it in an old Victorian gardening manual she had bought and when she came on it she had to stop and read it out loud to him.
‘No matter how small your garden, do try to keep at least one acre for trees.’
From that single sentence Elspeth Allen’s ‘The World in an English Kitchen’ series had been born.
Charlie smiled. Maybe this black bread thing could use a touch of that sentence, a touch of naive extravagance. He reached out to the bookshelf, pulled out a copy of Tanners wine catalogue and turned to the Gin and Vodka section. The entry chose itself immediately, nearly jumped off the page at him – Wisniówka cherry-flavoured Polish vodka. He looked in the right-hand column. Pricey for vodka but with a perfect name, just what he was looking for. If he couldn’t do something creative with that, he’d bloody well eat his own Black Bread Pudding.
He put the catalogue down and got back to work. After a while he heard the bathroom door open and close. Elspeth was up. Soon he would have to stop, but he still had time to get a bit more done. He looked back at the yellowing page of the old book and read aloud.
‘Line the buttered pan with breadcrumbs.’
Line it how thick and, if any thickness at all, how do you make the ones not held in place by the butter to stay up? Or does it mean just line the bottom of the pan? He sat back, annoyed. He hated it when the recipe he was stealing made it difficult for him. He tried again but the problem remained. How thick, and how would you make the bloody things stick?
He decided to give up and closed the book. It was almost time to finish anyway, he would sort it out later from another book. He looked at the cheap, plain black cover. It was just bad writing. It failed the first and greatest rule of all ‘How To’ books – always assume your reader has the intelligence and initiative of a retarded field mouse with emotional problems. Spell it all out, every single step, spell it out so even a moron could follow it.
Oh well, he’d deal with the breadcrumbs when he had a go at the damned thing. He began to close down the computer.
‘Morning, darling. Am I making something nice?’
Charlie turned round. Elspeth stood in the doorway in her dressing gown with disordered hair, holding a mug in her hand.
‘Not really, this is for your new series, “Recipes to Poison Hated Relatives With”.’
Elspeth pulled a face.
‘Oh no, I can’t have that.’
‘And why is that, my love, have you no hated relatives?’
‘Plenty, but I can’t have an Elspeth Allen book where the title ends with a preposition.’ She came to the desk and looked at the screen of Charlie’s computer. ‘Will I like it?’
Charlie pressed a couple of keys and the words disappeared as the computer shut down.
‘Not really, it’s got six eggs and you serve it with ...’ He opened the old book at the bookmark, ‘“whipped cream or whipped sour cream.” I knew it. Cream. It always turns up somewhere.’
She took a sip of tea and looked over his shoulder at the recipe.
‘Black Bread Pudding. But surely black bread is made with mud or something? Not even six eggs and whipped cream could redeem mud.’ Elspeth took her tea to the settee and sat down. ‘It doesn’t sound much like the upmarket stuff I usually dish out. Still, it’s your book and you always seem to know what you’re doing. You’d better start getting ready or we’ll be late.’
Charlie closed his laptop, tidied his desk and got up. He knew Elspeth liked to be early for Mass. There was only one Sunday Mass, said in the small function room of a local hotel which, many years ago, had been bought by a French couple. Over the years the number of Catholics in and around Nyborg had grown until there were enough of them to justify a priest coming from Copenhagen to say a Sunday Mass for them. The French couple had gladly provided a venue but made sure the Mass finished just nicely for people to stay on at the hotel, have a drink, then have lunch. As the couple refused any payment, many of those who came to the Mass felt it only proper to stay for a drink or a meal. Charlie and Elspeth ate Sunday lunch there about once a month and, as the cooking was excellent, staying was never any kind of penance. By accident or design, the way things had worked out, the couple were well rewarded for their generosity.
‘Why can’t we have our own priest and use a proper church? Churches get shared these days. If we used one of the local churches maybe we could have Mass at a time that suited us. Not that I mind having to eat there but having to stop ...’
‘Oh, Charlie, don’t moan. I know you only became a Catholic to please me.’
‘No I didn’t. I became Catholic because you convinced me ...’
Elspeth got up and grinned at him. ‘That my father wouldn’t permit my marrying any non-Catholic.’ Charlie followed her into the kitchen. ‘And we’re lucky to have any kind of priest come to us. Nyborg isn’t exactly a Catholic place, is it. If Father Mundt didn’t come, it would mean going to Copenhagen or Odense. And here we get the bonus of Mass in English.’
Charlie put his arms round her waist as she washed out her mug and gave her a gentle hug.
‘Whatever you say. I’ll get the ingredients for that recipe out so I can make a start when we get back, then I’ll get the car out.’
He got out six eggs and the sugar. Start with what the recipe says and see how it goes. After he had collected everything he needed and put it on the work surface he left the kitchen and stopped by the door to the bedroom, where Elspeth was doing her hair.
‘It’s odd though, isn’t it?’
‘What’s odd?’
‘A German priest living in Denmark who speaks fluent English. Don’t you think that’s odd?’
‘Not really, Denmark hasn’t any native Catholic community to speak of, so the priests have to be foreign. And why not German? Germany’s just across the border.’
‘And I suppose everybody speaks good English these days.’
Elspeth turned from the mirror.
‘They do in Denmark. That was one of the reasons we chose it, remember? Now get the car out, or we’ll be late.’
Charlie walked to the hall, put on a light overcoat, then went back through the house and out the back door. He stood for a moment looking at the view. At the bottom of their garden, beyond the low fence, was a narrow band of rough grass and beyond that, the beach. It was a calm day with a gentle breeze blowing in from the sea and he could just hear the sound of wavelets gently lapping against the white sand. Beyond the beach lay a blue expanse –the Storebælt, the southern reach of the Kattegat which separated Denmark from Sweden and eventually led into the Baltic.
He loved this view. He loved the whole place. To his left began a wood where the pine trees came down to the beach. To his right was the strand, a favourite summer bathing and picnic resort of locals and visitors alike. Back from the beach was a line of neat bungalows, all looking across the sea to a hazy view of land peeping over the horizon. Beyond the strand, reaching out from the edge of the small town, was the Great Belt Bridge. From where Charlie stood, it looked so thin and fragile; a long ribbon barely above the water, held up by two narrow suspension towers. It grew smaller and smaller as it headed away across the wide channel that separated Nyborg from the neighbouring island of Zealand. The sun shone from a cornflower blue sky. Everything looked perfect on this fine autumn day.
Charlie felt happy. He decided that after Mass they would give lunch at the hotel a miss, come home, walk along the beach or through the woods and have a beer and lunch somewhere. He went round the side of the house to where it faced the road and opened the up-and-over garage door. He got into the car. Elspeth arrived and stood on the drive ready to close the garage door once the car was out. Charlie turned the ignition key. For a split second nothing happened. Then a voice came from the car’s sound system.
‘Bang, you’re dead.’
Elspeth looked round, startled, as the car door banged open and Charlie ran at her shouting.
‘Get back, get away from the car.’
But she just looked at him stupidly and didn’t move.
Charlie grabbed her and began pulling her away from the garage. ‘For God’s sake get away from the fucking car.’
Elspeth tried to pull away from him, shocked by his swearing and frightened by his roughness and his words. She began struggling to free herself from his grip when the garage dissolved in an ear-shattering explosion and they were both thrown to the ground.
The last thing Charlie heard before he hit the floor was Elspeth’s scream. Then a deep black pool opened at his feet, and he slid in.