A Few Green Leaves by Barbara Pym Page A

a sharp knife,’ Emma said.
    Tom had stayed silent, remembering the foolish way he had quoted Leigh Hunt to Emma when she had been picking roses for the flower festival. Adam had, as usual, outdone him.
    ‘In Greece cucumber is cut in chunks, thick chunks,’ said Daphne. ‘It makes a lovely salad, with tomatoes and plenty of oil.’ She cast about in her memory for the Greek word for this particular salad, failed to remember it, but then decided that nobody would have been interested anyway.
    ‘Greek food is not one of my favourites,’ said Adam, smiling. ‘One would hardly go to Greece for the cuisine – just as one wouldn’t go to some churches for the music. A beautiful country, of course,’ he smiled again as if at some private joke, ‘but not a treasury of gastronomic memories.’
    ‘Well, no, that isn’t what you’d go to Greece for, as you said,’ Tom agreed. The sight of the mousse – the ‘shape’ – in its flowered dish had brought a memory of another kind, the picture of Emma as he had seen her some months ago now, holding that same dish in her hands as she stood in the window when he passed by.
    Still on the same subject, Adam now invited them to guess where he had once enjoyed ‘a most memorable sole nantua’.
    His hearers were not familiar with the most celebrated fish restaurants, so there were no informed guesses. Only Beatrix ventured to suggest that it must have been somewhere in France at some unexpected place, perhaps a shabby little bistro or quayside café, with oilcloth on the tables, the sort of place where lorry drivers went.
    ‘The decor was unpretentious, certainly,’ Adam said, ‘you’d hardly expect it to be otherwise – in a clergy house.’ He turned to Tom. ‘I don’t know whether you ever visited Oswald Thames and his set-up at St Luke’s? They had a quite remarkable housekeeper in those days.’
    ‘I knew about St Luke’s, of course,’ said Tom, rather stiffly, ‘though I never went to the clergy house.’
    ‘This housekeeper was a man – Wilf Bason – and by no means a good plain cook,’ Adam smiled, obviously remembering another private joke. ‘I was only a fledgling curate then, but my tastes were already formed.’
    ‘Sole nantua,’ said Isobel, firmly bringing the conversation back to the point. ‘That’s a sauce, is it?’
    ‘Yes, made with crayfish,’ Adam explained. ‘You would poach about a dozen small crayfish in a court-bouillon with white wine and herbs.’
    ‘Mortlock and his friends caught crayfish in Somerset,’ said Tom but nobody took up the reference, Adam remarking that the flavour of Somerset crayfish would hardly be up to a nantua sauce.
    Emma served the next course and poured Liebfraumilch, hoping that Adam would refrain from comment on the wine and the possible origin of its name. She now wished she had not invited him, not having realised how he would monopolise the conversation. Even when the subject of food was abandoned, Adam turned to her with a coy reference to her ‘visitor’, the gentleman who had been seen with her at the flower festival.
    Beatrix shot a quick glance at her daughter on hearing this, but the subject was not developed. Emma brushed it off with the information that he had been ‘only an anthropologist’, somebody she had known for a long time, as if this could dispose of any romantic possibilities.
    ‘No doubt he was studying village life and the interaction of its inhabitants in a festival situation,’ said Adam sarcastically. ‘One knows the kind of thing.’
    ‘It’s such a pity to bring that kind of thing into the country,’ said Isobel obscurely. ‘There’s so much else to be studied – history, for example’ – here she glanced hopefully at Tom, who instinctively drew back – ‘and natural history, wild life. I always love a walk in the woods.’
    ‘We must remember that,’ said Adam gallantly.
    ‘Do you see many foxes here?’ Isobel asked.
    ‘Oh yes – and you can find