“Very much.”
A man opened the oysters at the bar of the restaurant and we watched him doing it. They were Coichesters, medium-sized, plump. A waiter brought them to us. The wine waiter opened the Clos Vougeot Blanc. We began the meal.
“I see you are chewing your oysters,” I said.
“What do you expect me to do?”
“Swallow them whole.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “When eating oysters, the primary pleasure comes from the sensation you get as they slide down your throat.”
“I can’t believe that.”
“And then again, the knowledge that they are actually alive as you swallow them adds enormously to that pleasure.”
“I prefer not to think about it.”
“Oh, but you must. If you concentrate hard enough, you can sometimes feel the living oyster wriggling in your stomach.”
A. R. Woresley’s nicotine moustache began twitching about. It looked like a bristly nervous little animal clinging to his upper lip.
“If you examine very closely a certain part of the oyster,” I said, “just here . . . you can see a tiny pulse beating. There it is. D’you see it? And when you stick your fork in . . . like this . . . the flesh moves. It makes a shrinking movement. It does the same if you squeeze lemon juice onto it. Oysters don’t like lemon juice. They don’t like forks being stuck into them either. They shrink away. The flesh quivers. I shall now swallow this one--isn’t he a beauty? . . . There, down he goes . . . and now I shall sit very still for a few seconds so as to experience the sensation of him moving about gently in my stomach . . .”
The little bristly brown animal on A. R. Woresley’s upper lip began jumping around more than ever and his cheeks had become visibly paler. Slowly, he pushed his plate of oysters to one side.
“I’ll get you some smoked salmon.”
“Thank you.”
I ordered the salmon and took the rest of his oysters onto my plate. He watched me eating them as he waited for the waiter to bring the salmon. He was silent now, subdued, and this was how I wanted him to be. Dash it, the man was twice my age, and all I was trying to do was soften him up a trifle before dumping my big proposition in his lap. I simply had to unsettle him first and try to dominate him if I was to have the slightest chance of getting him to go along with my plan. I decided to soften him up a bit more. “Did I ever tell you about my old nanny?” I asked.
“I thought we came here to talk about my discovery,” he said. The waiter put a plate of smoked salmon in front of him. “Ah,” he said. “That looks good.”
“When I went away to boarding-school at the age of nine,” I said, “my dear old nanny was pensioned off by my parents. They bought her a small cottage in the country and there she lived. She was about eighty-five and a marvellously tough old bird. She never complained about anything. But one day, when my mother went down to see her, she found her looking very ill. She questioned her closely and Nanny at last admitted that she had the most awful pains in her stomach. Had she had them for long, my mother asked her. Well, as a matter of fact, yes, she had had pains in her stomach, she finally admitted, for many years. But never as bad as they were now. My mother got a doctor. The doctor sent her to hospital. They X-rayed her and the X-ray showed something quite unusual. There were two smallish opaque objects about three inches apart in the middle of her stomach. They looked like marbles. Nobody at the hospital had any idea what these two objects might be, so it was decided to perform an exploratory operation.”
“I hope this is not another of your unpleasant anecdotes,” A. R. Woresley said, chewing his salmon.
“It’s fascinating,” I said. “It’ll interest you enormously.”
“Go on, then.”
“When the surgeon opened her up,” I said, “what do you think he found these two round objects to be?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“They were eyes.”
“What do you mean, eyes?”
“The surgeon found himself staring straight into a pair of alert unblinking round eyes. And the eyes were staring back at him.”
“Ridiculous.”
“Not at all,” I said. “And who did they belong to, those eyes?”
“Who?”
“They belonged to a rather large octopus.”
“You’re being facetious.”
“It’s the gospel truth. This enormous octopus was actually living in dear old Nanny’s stomach as a parasite. It was sharing her food, eating well--”
“I think that’ll do, Cornelius.”