Chapter 9
“Oh dear,” said Oliver, coming into the kitchen. “Am I being punished?”
I dumped a can of chickpeas into a pan of summer vegetables that were supposed to be roasted but looked more charred and shrivelled. “No. I’m making you dinner. Because I love you”—my voice was getting faster and smaller as I went on—“andalsoweneedtotalkaboutsomestuff.”
“Who are you and what have you done with Lucien O’Donnell?”
“Very funny.” Tossing a can of tomatoes after the chickpeas, I squinted into the depths of my sad and soggy veg. “What does a simmer even look like?”
Oliver peered over my shoulder. “Not like that.” He reached past me and turned the hob up and, once the tomato juice had started bubbling, back down. Then he gave me the softest peck on the cheek and asked, “How was Spud today, by the way?”
“Good,” I said, nodding. “You can check the Shit List if you like.”
He gave a low chuckle. “I do actually trust you. Now if you’re okay to keep an eye on that, I’m going to change out of my work clothes.”
Privately, I always kind of liked the moment just before Oliver changed out of his work clothes.
When he looked all buttoned-up and serious but just on the edge of becoming not buttoned-up and serious.
But my personal fantasies weren’t quite a reason to make the man I love sit around all evening in an uncomfortable shirt.
Well, not unless it was a special occasion.
I kept an eye on the vegetables while Oliver nipped upstairs, although I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to be keeping an eye on them for.
I gave them a halfhearted stir and watched in culinary despair as one of my aubergine fingers fell into two limp halves held together with a stringy skin that used to be purple.
Still, it was the thought that counted.
Figuring it wasn’t about to get any better, I dished up two bowls of vegan gunge, scattering coriander over the top like a cushion over a stain on the sofa.
As I carried them through to the dining room, I heard a “Who’s a good boy?
” from the study, and then Oliver emerged in full At Home with the Blackwoods mode.
Which was to say, he was wearing a slightly more comfortable shirt and slightly less formal trousers.
“I think it’s a good sign,” he said, “that Spud’s already going into his pen voluntarily.”
I plonked Oliver’s bowl in front of him. “He’s hiding from my cooking.”
“Well, that still means he views his pen as a place of security.”
“Do you need a pen?”
Oliver gently forked up a lump of what might have been pepper, might have been courgette, or might have been a bit of undissolved stock cube. “No no, this is lovely. Thank you.”
“It’s not lovely,” I said, “it’s disgusting. We both know it’s disgusting.”
“It’s lovely that you tried.”
I wasn’t sure what it meant that I didn’t find that patronising.
Maybe it was the raw sincerity with which Oliver said it.
Or maybe it was just that having a realistic sense of each other’s weaknesses was an important part of an adult relationship.
At least I hoped it was because I had a lot of weaknesses to have a realistic sense of. “We could still get a takeaway.”
“Certainly not. You made this. We’re eating it.”
“Okay, now I feel like I’m being punished.”
“If so”—Oliver smiled across the table—“it’s entirely self-inflicted. Now what was it you wanted to talk about?”
I squirmed. “Umm, it might actually be a couple of things.”
“I assume one of them is to do with you sleeping on the floor the past two nights. I’m a little worried I don’t know what the other is.”
“It’s not a big deal,” I said, casually dismissing my medium- to long-term employment prospects in order to focus on a dog. “There’s a chance CRAPP might be falling over.”
Oliver’s smile was neatly put aside in favour of just the right level of here for you but not freaked out. “I’m surprised to hear that. I thought the Beetle Drive went well this year.”
“It did. But most of our funding came from the earl, and he’s sort of…snuffed it.”
“Sort of?” Perhaps he was following my lead, but Oliver let his smile creep back just fractionally. “You mean he’s only snuffed it a little bit?”
Okay, that hadn’t been the right time to hedge. “No, he’s definitely snuffed it all the way. Died. Had funeral. Buried. Full Solomon Grundy Weekend experience.”
“I’m sorry.”
I shrugged. “I barely knew him.”
“But he was quite a character.”
“I mean, as far as I can tell, his only interests were sex workers and dung beetles.”
One of Oliver’s eyebrows twitched wickedly. “So a typical British peer?”
“Apparently he died on a bouncy castle with three strippers.”
“So”—Oliver’s eyebrow remained wickedly in place—“a typical British peer.”
I loved Mean Oliver, and Oliver knew I loved Mean Oliver, which meant this was probably a deliberate attempt to cheer me up. “It’s also possible,” I went on reluctantly, “he didn’t leave a will. And if that’s the case, we might be kind of fucked.”
“It’s very unlikely.” Oliver had surrendered on the vegetable front, and I’d capitulated without a fight.
He gathered up the bowls and took them into the kitchen, where he loaded them immediately into the dishwasher because of course he did.
“This isn’t my area of specialisation, but even if he died intestate, his heir will probably let things carry on as they are.
Deliberately dismantling the life’s work of a dead relative would be… how can I put this? A look.”
Having followed Oliver in the least puppylike way I could manage, I leaned against the doorframe. “Thanks for putting that in layman’s terms for me.”
“Anytime,” he said, smirking.
God, how had I slept two nights on the floor without this man, without his eyebrows, and the eyes beneath the eyebrows, and his smirking and the lips that did the smirking, and his hands, and his arms, and… Okay, now I was just listing body parts I’d denied myself access to.
“Listen,” I tried. “About…”
There was a pattering of paws, and the tiny, fuzzy elephant in the room poked his head between my feet.
“About him,” I finished.
“Mruff?” said Spud.
And I knelt down to scratch him behind the ears, where he liked it best.
“Hello, Spud.” Oliver came over to join in the puppy scritching. “Have you been a good boy today? A good boy for Daddy Lucien.”
Daddy Lucien was sounding way less unnatural than I’d expected it to, but I protest-too-muched anyway. “Oliver.”
“Sorry.” He hid his laugh unconvincingly behind a cough and continued gently ruffling Spud. “Were you a good boy for Commitment-Phobic Dog Owner Lucien O’Donnell?”
I rose in order to escape Oliver’s entirely justified mockery and took up a serious pose with my arms folded seriously. “Oh, shut up. He was a good boy. He was and is the best boy. And that’s sort of what I wanted to talk about.”
“I don’t care how good a doggo he is,” said Oliver, working more gravitas into the word doggo than I thought was humanly possible, “he’s not sleeping in our bed, and you can’t stay downstairs forever.”
“I know. But I do actually think there’s a compromise here.”
Oliver and Spud both looked up at me, Oliver with a touch of impatience, Spud just, well, like a dog. “We’ve been over this. He needs to learn and we need to be firm.”
“Right. But I’ve been doing some reading—” I broke off because Oliver looked unflatteringly surprised. “Hey. I can read.”
“Yes, but you usually choose not to.”
“Is this about my literacy or our dog?”
“Both, it seems.”
“Okay, well,” I ploughed on, “one of the books, the one with the puppy on the front—”
“Lucien, they all have puppies on the front.”
“The puppy on the front doing this.” I raised a hand in imitation of a puppy giving paw. “And that book says that not wanting your dog to be sad is normal and sensible, and it’s okay to do things to make him less sad.”
“I’ve read all the puppy books, and none of them recommend sleeping on the floor in your study.”
Oliver could get unhelpfully stubborn when you told him you wanted to try, as Mum put it, the autoroute. “No, but it says it’s okay to let the puppy sleep in its den in your room for the first few days or weeks.”
“That might be what one book says, but it’s not the—”
“Don’t say ‘It’s not the consensus.’”
It wasn’t normal for him, but Oliver was looking almost petulant. “Well, it’s not.”
“Okay, but—”
“What’s more likely”—now he was crossing from petulant to argumentative—“that this one person has discovered an otherwise unknown technique for training a puppy without doing any of the emotionally difficult parts, or that everybody else is right and the book that happens to agree with you is wrong?”
I was beginning to get a sense of what Oliver was like in court, and it wasn’t a sense I particularly wanted to get more of. “I don’t think it’s really a right-or-wrong situation,” I told him, depressingly aware that he was better with words than me.
“Of course it’s a right-or-wrong situation. I do not want to be the kind of dog owner who can’t control their pet because they didn’t have discipline when it counted.”
Honestly, I’d been hoping this conversation would take more of a Why gosh, Lucien, you’re completely correct; how could I have been so foolish?
direction. But hoping wasn’t the same as expecting.
The worst of it was, I could almost hear the ghost of David Blackwood in Oliver’s voice.
The never-quite-unlearned lesson that hurt was good for you.
“Come on,” I said to Oliver and Spud both. “Let’s at least take this out of the kitchen.”
We went through to the study, and I opened the patio doors so that Spud could play in the garden, while Oliver sat on the step and I stood beside him, halfheartedly chucking a ball in Spud’s general direction.
“Could we at least try it?” I asked, finally.
“You really want us to dismantle the pen every night, rebuild it in our room, and then reverse the whole process in the morning?”
“I’ll do it.”