’Til dinner do us part
Sophie’s husband’s retirement was not a welcome development – but would it push her over the edge?
Like most people who have been married for any length of time, Sophie had occasionally contemplated murder. One did not have to be a psychopath, surely, to imagine sometimes the satisfying clunk a frying pan might make against the back of a spouse’s cranium.
But it was not until Henry had retired that Sophie started to seriously consider the practicalities of homicide.
When he had been working, in the City, it was a rare night Henry got home much before 11pm, a rare morning she awoke before he left. Then, suddenly, he was always there. Every time you walked into the kitchen, there was Henry munching on a sandwich, mayonnaise collecting at the corners of his mouth. In the living room, reclining in his chair, cracking in his back teeth an ice cube from his tumbler of Laphroaig.
To her everlasting regret, it was Sophie who had suggested Henry might benefit from a hobby. He was only 50 when he retired, after all. Squash was what she had in mind. Conversational Spanish. What she had not anticipated was her husband reinventing himself as a food blogger. How she cursed herself for buying him the Michelin Guide that Christmas. Never had the idea been that they would visit these restaurants together. Had he really never noticed in all these years how much she hated going out to eat?
No, of course he hadn’t.
On Boxing Day, he announced his plan – they were going to “do” a Michelin-starred restaurant a week and he was going to write about it “on the internet”. The Star Man – that’s what he called himself – posting rambling reviews and uploading badly lit photos of each dish.
Seven long years so far – 381 meals,
1,674 courses. Most of them in temples to gastronomy so hushed all you could hear was a chorus of respectful mastication.
Cabrão was the one restaurant that had always eluded Henry. When the booking system went live each January, he would sit refreshing the screen and swearing for hours. Which was why, when he told Sophie he had something particularly special planned for their anniversary, her stomach lurched.
“After all,” he reminded her, “It is 25 years.” Her guts further tightened when she had caught him on Google Maps trying to work out how long it would take to drive from Lisbon airport to this remote part of the Serra da Estrela. In the event it had taken six hours, Henry chewing gum the whole way. And now here they are and all Sophie wants to do is scream. Instead, she smiles and smooths the creases out of the napkin on her knees.
“The trick with these,” Henry is saying, “is you take the head – like so – and in your other hand you’ve got the body and then you sort of twist it. Then… crunch.”
Sophie watches as her husband raises the decapitated shrimp to his moistened lips.
Shlurk.
“Now that,” Henry kisses his fingers, “is exceptional.”
A quarter of a million people per year try to book the table at which they are sitting, vie to sit on these two chairs in this monastic cell and eat this Michelin-starred food. Torture, she thinks. This is torture. Two waiters arrive, silent in homage to the Trappist monks who once lived here. One clears the table, another lays down two bowls of broth in which bob unidentifiable morsels. Henry cracks his knuckles before picking up his spoon and lowering it into the steaming liquid. Under the table, Sophie digs her fingernails deep into her left palm.
Schlup. Schlup. Schlooooop. Please God, make it stop.
Misophonia is the name of her condition.
Not that she had known it was a condition most of her life – Sophie had supposed she was just exceptionally irritable or her friends and family unusually illmannered eaters. But with her husband’s new hobby, the white-hot rage she felt when dining with him became so intense she took herself off to Harley Street. There is no treatment for misophonia. The doctor charged her £1,500 and suggested earplugs.
She had never told Henry. What could she say? Hers was the problem, the condition. It was just her bad luck that everything her husband did exacerbated it. That was a strange irony of the whole situation – when she summoned to mind all the unkind, thoughtless things that Henry had done and said to her over the years, none made her hate him as much as the sound he made drinking the milk from his cereal bowl.
“Twenty-five years,” says Henry. “Here’s to the next 25.”
Their glasses clink in the candlelight. Sophie forces the corners of her mouth upwards.
How many courses do they have left?
Still on the table are the tiny saws to slice the truffle-studded sourdough, the long, slimbladed knives for dissecting guinea fowl. Even so, they must be nearing the end now. Surely it’s almost time to make their way carefully up the steep stone steps to their bedroom at the top of the former monastery’s tallest tower?
As one waiter slips away with their plates from the last course another enters, bearing a tray. Henry’s face lights up. Sophie can feel her throat tightening. Oysters.
It is midnight. The meal is over. As he clears the table in the empty dining room, Jorge whistles tunelessly to himself, thinks about the drive home, wonders whether his wife will still be up when he gets there. He hopes so.
She always enjoys hearing about the odd people that eat at Cabrão. This pair tonight, for example. That was a relationship he did not give much longer. The looks she kept giving her husband. The secret glares. It is obvious what is on the cards for those two, he reckons. Luis disagrees. He claims this is what all English couples are like.
Jorge frowns. He checks his tray, the tray on to which he has been transferring used cutlery. He checks the table again. His frown deepens. There is only one of those little Japanese paring knives here.
It’s when he is down on his knees, looking around under the table, that from somewhere in the monastery Jorge hears briefly raised voices, then a silence, then some kind of thump, and then, after a moment, a scream.
She forces the corners of her mouth upwards