MR QUODE'S PIECE DE RESISTANCE

Then it was time for the main course. Mr Quode went out with the trolley to fetch it from the kitchen. Everyone else began drinking from the next glass, the glass of ruby-red liquid. They were getting quite intoxicated by now, with flushed cheeks and swaying heads and woozy eyes. I felt quite intoxicated myself.

When Mr Quode wheeled in the main course, I almost vomited at the sight. It was piled up in an open dish on top of the trolley: hot steaming purply-red coils, smothered in a sauce of greenish slime. The smell was unspeakable, a sort of rich ripe rottenness.

'Ma piece de resistance !' Mr Quode proclaimed proudly.

He moved around the table and served it out with tongs. He lifted it up in three-foot-long sausages, then deposited it with a great flourish onto our plates. The greenish slime fell off in spots and clots all over the lace tablecloth.

'Ah!' cried Mr Caulkiss. 'We haven't had this for over four years!'

'And with a new sauce too!' added Mr Quode.

When he had finished serving, he sat down once more beside me. His frilled shirt and black trousers were now spattered with food stains. He picked up one end of a sausagey thing, and bit off the top with his teeth. Inside was a sort of thick stodgy mash, mottled with little white lumps.

'This is the chopped nuts with oatmeal and chives,' he said, holding it up for me to inspect. 'See? Only partially digested!'

He popped the end of the thing into his mouth and began to suck. The stuffing moved slowly up the tube. When he had drawn off a whole mouthful, he stopped for a while and swallowed. Then he took the thing out of his mouth and again held it up. Now there was a new kind of stuffing visible inside the opening, yellow and soft and paste-like.

'This,' he said, 'is from the previous day's ingestion. Cabbage and honey and artichoke. It's the cabbage that makes the yellow colour. But much more fully digested. You'd hardly know it was cabbage at all, would you!'

He started sucking again. I sipped at my drink. I found that the smell of the ruby-red liquid at least covered up that other foul smell. But not for long. Soon Mr Quode had sucked his way through to yet another kind of stuffing. Once more he held it up for me to inspect. A thin fluent ooze this time, brownish-grey and smelling worse than ever.

'Half way through now,' he explained. 'Chopped mince and onion and cheese. See? That's the diet I fed them on Friday last week.'

I couldn't keep quiet any longer. I had to know.

'What do you mean, fed them ? What are these things?'

'What are they? Oh, didn't I say? These are moncelles d'agneau en daube a la Provencale . Or in translation if you must, the upper intestinal tracts of specially-fed sheep. Voila !'

'Sheep's guts?!'

'Moncelles d'agneau . Six different flavours, each in a different stage of digestion. It's taken twelve days to prepare the animals for this dish, you know!'

'Eat up, Mr Smythe,' Mr Caulkiss called out from the top of the table. 'Offal is particularly good for the blood!'