We finished our fish, and the maid came round removing the plates. As he spoke, he leaned closer and closer to her, seeming in his eagerness almost to impinge upon her, and the poor girl leaned as far as she could away from him nodding politely, rather desperately, and looking not at his face but at the topmost button of his dinner jacket. He was half turned towards her, smiling at her, telling her, so far as I could gather, some story about a chef in a Paris restaurant. He was completely engrossed in conversation with Mike's eighteen-year-old daughter, Louise. I could almost feel him waiting for the moment when Pratt would take his first sip, and look up from his glass with a smile of pleasure, of astonishment, perhaps even of wonder, and then there would be a discussion and Mike would tell him about the village of Geierslay.īut Richard Pratt did not taste his wine. I could see him give a rapid furtive glance down the table each time he dropped his head to take a mouthful of whitebait. 'A charming little wine, don't you think?' he said. His little sermon about Rhine wine and Moselle was a part of this thing, this culture that he sought. So he was seeking now to become a man of culture, to cultivate a literary and aesthetic taste, to collect paintings, music, books, and all the rest of it. In his heart he knew that he was not really much more than a bookmaker-an unctuous, infinitely respectable, secretly unscrupulous bookmaker-and he knew that his friends knew it, too. To be precise, he was a jobber in the stock market, and like a number of his kind, he seemed to be somewhat embarrassed, almost ashamed to find that he had made so much money with so slight a talent. Mike Schofield was an amiable, middle-aged man, but he was a stockbroker. But a Moselle-ah!-a Moselle is exactly right.' A Rhine wine will kill a delicate claret, you know that? It's barbaric to serve a Rhine before a claret. A lot of people serve a Rhine wine instead, but that's because they don't know any better. 'Great thing about Moselle ,' he continued, raising his voice, 'it's the perfect wine to serve before a claret. 'I doubt whether anyone else in the country has any of it at the moment,' he said. He had visited Geierslay personally the previous summer in order to obtain the few bottles that they had finally allowed him to have. He said that this wine we were drinking was something unusual, that the output of the vineyard was so small that it was almost impossible for a stranger to get any of it. He leaned over and whispered to me that Geierslay was a tiny village in the Moselle, almost unknown outside Germany. He had set the bottle in front of me so that I could read the label. Mike got up and poured the wine himself, and when he sat down again, I could see that he was watching Richard Pratt. The meal began with a plate of whitebait, fried very crisp in butter, and to go with it there was a Moselle. Tonight I felt sure that the little game would be played over again, for Mike was quite willing to lose the bet in order to prove that his wine was good enough to be recognized, and Pratt, for his part, seemed to take a grave, restrained pleasure in displaying his knowledge. Pratt had accepted, and had won both times. Mike had then bet him a case of the wine in question that he could not do it. Pratt had replied that that should not be too difficult provided it was one of the great years. The tall candles, the yellow roses, the quantity of shining silver, the three wineglasses to each person, and above all, the faint scent of roasting meat from the kitchen brought the first warm oozings of saliva to my mouth.Īs we sat down, I remembered that on both Richard Pratt's previous visits Mike had played a little betting game with him over the claret, challenging him to name its breed and its vintage. The moment we entered the dining-room, I could see that the table was laid for a feast. And this one, clearly, was to be no exception. I had been to dinner at Mike's twice before when Richard Pratt was there, and on each occasion Mike and his wife had gone out of their way to produce a special meal for the famous gourmet. 'A prudent wine,' he would say, 'rather diffident and evasive, but quite prudent.' Or, 'A good-humoured wine, benevolent and cheerful slightly obscene, perhaps, but none the less good-humoured.' He refused to smoke for fear of harming his palate, and when discussing a wine, he had a curious, rather droll habit of referring to it as though it were a living being. He organized dinners where sumptuous dishes and rare wines were served. He was president of a small society known as the Epicures, and each month he circulated privately to its members a pamphlet on food and wines. THERE were six of us to dinner that night at Mike Schofield's house in London : Mike and his wife and daughter, and my wife and I, and a man called Richard Pratt.
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