Gentleman's Relish Read Online Free Page A

notice. After smiling, smirking then grinning encounters beside toiletries, Kosher and home baking successively, the evening had ended in Perry cooking Douglas lamb noisettes in a pink peppercorn sauce. Smug and yawning twelve hours later, he made them scrambled eggs and bacon. It took only two more dinners for Douglas to move in.
    It was a love expressed as Perry knew best, in generous helpings, judiciously seasoned. Over four years, Douglas added running and secret dieting to tennis as he fought in vain the extra poundage that Perry’s devotion was heaping on him. Then he fell ill and for three years after that, Perry became an expert in nutritional coaxing as he tried in vain to stave off Douglas’s inexorable spells of weight loss, vanished appetite or nausea. The most innocent foods – yoghurt, bread, cheese – would suddenly be branded as enemies. His ingenuity was stretched to the limit. Whenever Douglas was in hospital, Perry would cook a portable supper for them both and make a point of their still sharing an evening meal there, even if Douglas could manage no more than a spoonful before sinking back on the pillowsin defeat. Never had the preparation of food carried such an emotional charge for him.
    Douglas’s was the second funeral feast he had cooked, beating tears into cake batter, anger into cream. He intended it to be his last.
    After Douglas there had been men occasionally, but no more lovers. Perry’s experience of desire had always been so bound up in the pleasures of the table that he found it hard to surrender for long to any romance that was not essentially domestic. Then the hole in his domestic routine was unexpectedly filled.
    A stroke after a hip operation left his father incapacitated. There was a gruesome council of war in which the brothers, abetted by child-worn wives, agreed that residential homes were both soulless and ruinously expensive. Perry had room in his house. Perry had experience of home nursing thanks to his ‘lodger’s’ long illness. They would each pay a nominal monthly sum to their younger brother and he should take their father in. He had never declared his sexuality, assuming it would be taken as read and, as they confronted him with their tidy plan, he sensed it was too late to do so now. He had allowed them to assume he was merely a bachelor, a eunuch with a way with sauces. He had allowed them to assume that, for all their initial doubts, his work for CID meant that he had been vetted as ‘sound’. Playing hard to define, he hadplayed into their hands. He could hardly turn around and complain that visiting a speechless, incontinent, not to say unmusical parent on him would starve a love life that was already gasping for sustenance.
    At first it seemed like an abominable invasion of his privacy. The old man might have lost control of tongue and bladder but retained his bullying nature and store of indignation. Gradually, however, Perry saw that there was no cause for fear. He was in charge now. He decided what the old man could and could not eat, when he would bathe, when he could watch television and, indeed, what he would watch. To cover the long hours he spent at work in the police laboratories, he took pleasure in hiring just the sort of camp, Irish nurse his father would loathe. Said treasure wore a uniform he described as Doris Blue. He was delighted when Perry confided that his father had been sleeping with men on the sly all his married life and was a wicked old flirt with wandering hands. Perry often came home to find the two of them watching films in which men loved men or women tap-danced and sang their hearts out. The nurse would be watching, at least, and singing along where appropriate. Perry’s father would be merely staring, aghast, in the direction in which he had been so mercilessly wedged with scatter cushions.
    Perry opened them an account at a specialistvideo library. In twelve months his father was exposed to