A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)(26)

It wasn’t that I couldn’t prepare food. I had done so, often, for myself. Sandwiches, wraps, a salad. Things that required assembly more than art. I had grown up with a housekeeper, which was the sort of privilege that made one into an ornament, a useless decoration of a girl; I had never in my life made something for someone else that wasn’t a cup of tea. True, I could download a food app on my phone or leaf through one of the cookbooks Leander kept on the counter (though I didn’t want to consider why he owned a copy of 38 Meals for Your Picky Toddler), but I was intelligent. I was capable. I could figure this out for myself.

An hour later, I nudged open the bedroom door, carrying a tray.

Watson sat up on his elbows. “What do you have there?” he asked, his voice coated in sleep.

“I made you breakfast.”

“How domestic of you.” He picked up his glasses from the bedside table and put them on. “That’s—that’s a rather large plate you’ve got there. Plates?”

“This is tray one of four,” I said, placing it at the end of the bed.

He blinked at me. Perhaps he was still tired.

“Don’t begin eating until you see all your options,” I told him, and went off to fetch the next platter.

By the time I’d arranged it all on my coverlet to my satisfaction, Watson had roused himself appropriately. He’d put on one of my oversized sleep shirts—CHEMISTRY IS FOR LOVERS—and poured himself a cup of coffee. That surprised me; he usually took tea.

“I need real caffeine to deal with this.” He lofted a piece of toast. “Can you explain this?”

“Salt, fat, acid, heat.”

For a long moment, Watson inspected it. “Holmes,” he said. “This sort of looks like cat food. So you should maybe explain.”

“I read it this spring, in a magazine, in that facility in London.” I sat down in my armchair, resisting the urge to light another cigarette. “I was supposed to reconfigure my relationship with food, you know, and so my therapist as an experiment gave me a stack of cookery magazines and told me to pick out what sounded ‘good.’ None of it did. All these garish close-ups of food arranged in pans, as though they were strange decomposing art. But one of the chefs they interviewed, some Danish man, said that the only thing you needed to know to cook was that every dish had to balance ‘salt, fat, acid, and heat.’”

“And you stopped reading there.”

“The brain can only hold so much information,” I reminded him. “If that was all I needed to know on the subject, I could move on to studying something interesting, like blood spatter.”

“And so what am I holding?” Watson asked, gesturing at me with the toast.

“That,” I said, “is tinned herring, cottage cheese, lemon juice, and a green substance from a jar with a rubbed-off label that smelled like tomatillos and motor oil.”

“I see,” Watson said, his expression perfectly blank. “And this one?”

“That is bacon, egg, avocado, sriracha”—he was already putting it into his mouth—“and a drizzle of Diet Coke.”

Watson only paused his chewing for a moment. “It’s not bad,” he said, mouth full, and went in for another slice.

“I added lemon. I know you like a lemon with your soda.” I sat back. “The rest of those are in similar permutations; the bread was an easy vehicle for their delivery.”

“Their delivery.”

I ignored him; I was enjoying spinning out my train of thought. “I wake before you. I should make breakfast. Therefore, I thought we could determine what you like for breakfast this way, all at once, rather than my undertaking a series of trial and error over the next few weeks.”

He smiled at me, all rumpled and covered in crumbs. “So you’re planning for the long term, then?”

“I am,” I said hesitantly.

“Well then. This one,” he said, holding another toast happily aloft, “looks like anchovy, carrot, and fig. And . . . pickled pig’s feet. Bombs away.”

WATSON ATE ON THE BED; I ATE QUICKLY IN THE KITCHEN. He swapped his glasses for contacts, and we both put on our boots, and the two of us were out the door by ten. Oxford, outside, was in all its May glory; Watson was waxing rhapsodic as we walked up the block, winding our way away from the college.

“Does it just smell better here?”

A bus had just braked hard in front of us, coughing out a cloud of exhaust.

“Better than where, exactly?”

“Than Sherringford,” Watson said, laughing, “or New York. For sure better than New York. Like, there aren’t bags of garbage along the streets baking in the sun, here.”

“How would you describe it, then?”

“Home. Or a home,” he amended. “And you?”

To me, Oxford was a patchwork—the corner of our road smelled like the chip shop (grease and fish and the occasional hot-sugar smell of a Mars Bar in the deep fryer), and the next road down was fresh soil from someone turning over their front garden for the summer, and St. Genesius like grass and the river and dust, and the High Street, where we were headed, like commerce.

“Commerce?” Watson grinned at me. “That’s pretty metaphorical, for you.”

“It’s a marker. Everything has one. I need to be able to differentiate where I’m going in the dark, or in case I’m blindfolded.”