Chapter 34
I understood why Oliver’s first instinct, when I pointed out the exonerating ball evidence, was to run to the stove and deal with the rice pan. I sort of understood why his second instinct had been to take over sautéing the onions.
But I’d have thought the instinct to apologise to Jaz for not having her back would have occurred to him at some point.
“Are you not going to say you’re sorry?” I asked.
“To Jasmine?” Oliver was still distracted by the onion pan. “I realise she was upset, but as I said, I wasn’t accusing her of anything.”
I tapped the cricket ball on the kitchen table distractedly. “Okay, but she clearly felt like you were accusing her of something.”
Oliver half turned, and I got the strong feeling that Catty Oliver was about to enter the building. “So I should go to her and say, ‘I’m sorry you felt like I was accusing you’? That’s the kind of thing that ends YouTube careers.”
“You could say, ‘Sorry I didn’t believe you.’”
To his credit, Oliver seemed to consider this one. “I suppose I could, but she responded with hostility, and I’m concerned if we reinforce that, it will just lead to her acting out more and worse in the future.”
“Oliver, she’s a human being, not a naughty puppy.”
He seemed to consider this one too. “Even so, we can’t reward her for swearing at authority figures.”
I was about to protest that we weren’t only supposed to be authority figures.
That our job had to include making her feel safe and cared for and supported and not just disciplined.
But then I heard footsteps on the stairs and clammed up for fear of saying something out of context that would make everything worse.
With hindsight, she came into the kitchen almost uncharacteristically calmly.
When she went to work putting together the fillings for the shish barak, I got an I-told-you-so-ish glance from Oliver.
I was sure he was taking this as evidence that his firm but fair parenting stance was paying off, but I felt uneasy.
Not so uneasy, mind you, that I wasn’t almost immediately distracted by the realisation that people who didn’t ordinarily live here were about to come into my house.
Maybe it was a side effect of sharing the space with Oliver, maybe it was a consequence of hating myself less than I used to, but either way the moment we were officially Expecting Company—and Oliver’s dinner was nice enough and high-effort enough that it moved things definitively into the Company zone—even my normally slovenly brain got hyperfixated on every dusty surface, unswept corner, and un-put-away coffee mug.
Which meant when our guests arrived, I was giving the toilet a last-minute scrub.
“Hang on,” I yelled downstairs, “with you in a second.”
As quickly as I could manage, I flushed the loo, returned the brush to its holder, and pelted downstairs.
“Nice gloves,” said Peter when I opened the door with my Marigolds on. “But if this was a sex party, you should have told us in advance.”
I tugged ineffectually on one yellow finger. “No, absolutely not. Just a regular no-sex dinner party. Come in.”
Jennifer and Peter hung their coats in the hall and followed me through to the dining room, where Oliver met us still slightly rumpled and mid-cook.
“Hi, Oliver”—Jennifer gave a warm, friendly grin—“Luc was just telling us this was a fetish party.”
Oliver laughed. It was, I couldn’t help noticing, his good with people laugh, which was a whole lot less sincere than the I have utterly failed to pretend I don’t find this funny laugh I usually went for.
“Lucien,” he said with mock severity, “it was supposed to be a surpr—” An alarm started beeping in the kitchen, and I thought I could smell something just a little bit burny.
“One moment, make yourselves comfortable.”
“Not sex-comfortable,” I added, although honestly, my still only half-off rubber gloves weren’t selling it.
“Now I’m kind of offended,” said Peter, and I couldn’t tell if being so flippant represented a total inability to read the room, or exactly the right ability to read it.
And before I could make a decision, the door went again, and Oliver stuck his head out of the kitchen with a, “Lucien can you—”
I finally got the second glove off and then realised I was now holding a pair of Marigolds with no convenient or inconspicuous place to put them down. “On it,” I called over my shoulder as I let in the next couple.
“Helloooo,” trilled James Royce-Royce, flinging his arms about me in an archetypally Royce-Royceian embrace while behind him James Royce-Royce waved a silent “Hi.”
In the dining room, Oliver—well aware that he was come-dine-with-me-ing for a professional—appeared once more in the doorway. “Starters will be ready in a few minutes, and I’m sure the rest of the guests will be arriving soon.”
“Except Bridge,” I added, “who will almost certainly be late.”
Oliver gave me a hopeful look. “You never know, maybe things have gone really smoothly this time.”
I pulled out my phone and opened Are the Straights Okay (Dinner Party Remix). “Her last message was twenty minutes ago and it reads, ‘babysitter disaster start without us.’ Only it’s all in block caps and none of it is spelled right.”
“Perhaps it won’t be as bad as she thinks it is,” Oliver replied, with more hope than expectation. “It’s usually at least slightly less bad than she thinks it is.” Something else was beeping. “Back in a second, I have pitas warming.”
Before anyone could say anything about pitas or food in general or, indeed, any fucking thing, James Royce-Royce whipped out his phone. “Have I shown you the pictures of Baby J on his tricycle?”
Honestly, I couldn’t remember. Also, what did he think we were going to say to that?
Actually, James, we’ve all seen enough pictures of your fucking infant to last us until we’re dead, rotted, and dug up a hundred and forty years later to make way for a new block of flats.
On top of which, I was pretty sure looking at pictures of somebody else’s adorable son right now was the last thing Peter and Jennifer wanted.
They’d tried another round of IVF at the end of last year, and it had gone about as well as all the rest. But when James Royce-Royce swanned into the dining room and asked the exact same fucking question, they put brave faces on and made oh isn’t he sweet noises with the best of them.
Although since Brian and Amanda were the next couple to arrive, the best of them was a pretty low bar.
“I thought”—Brian peered over James Royce-Royce’s shoulder—“that this party was going to be a baby-free zone.”
“Physically,” Oliver called through from the kitchen, “but not conceptually, unless you really want me to institute penalties for thought crime.”
“I’m game,” said Amanda, thumping a bottle of Stroh 80 onto the table. “Anybody who mentions babies does a shot.”
Jennifer eyed the bottle. “You know, I think I might actually be up for that.”
Looking very close to being the bad sort of tense, Oliver appeared in the doorway again. “You are not turning this party into a drinking game. Besides, there’s a minor in the house.”
“Fuck, really?” Brian looked almost personally betrayed.
“I’m fourteen,” Jaz yelled from the kitchen.
Brian heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank fuck. That’s old enough we can say fuck, right?”
“No,” insisted Oliver.
“Yes,” insisted Jaz.
“Like, I think it’s a can-but-probably-shouldn’t kind of situation?” I tried. Which I had meant as a compromise but which just seemed to annoy all three of them.
Since everybody who wasn’t expected to be Bridge levels of delayed—or, I suppose, in our new normal of most people coming as at least a couple, Bridge-and-Tom levels of delayed—had arrived, Oliver began serving the starters.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re going to have to start, or everything will be completely ruined.”
Jennifer slid into one of the slightly mismatched chairs and laid a napkin on her lap. “If anyone would be okay with that, it’s Bridge. I don’t think she’s eaten a starter since we were in sixth form.”
“At uni,” I said, “we used to tell her things began an hour earlier than they really did. The problem was she worked it out, so we stopped, but then everybody’s sense of time was—”
“So,” announced Oliver, accidentally cutting me off, “we’re opening tonight with a meze of Levantine-themed dishes.”
With Jaz’s honestly surly assistance, he started setting out various bowls and plates laden down with the fruits of his (and Jaz’s, and to a much, much lesser extent, my) day of labours.
The results were, and I say this despite my intense pro-Oliver bias, mixed.
The salad had come out well, or as well as a salad could come out, which meant it was…
fine, but even I could see that the hummus looked grainy and the spices were falling off the za’atar crackers.
Rationally, I’m sure Oliver knew that he wasn’t in competition with our friends.
And that he definitely wasn’t in competition with James Royce-Royce, who, lest we forget, had once made a sausage plait for the queen.
But the thing about dinner parties was that they were always at least a bit of a personality test. We hadn’t held one for a while, which upped the pressure a lot, but the last one had been at Bridge’s, pre-baby, and she’d just made a massive pasta bake, given us all bowls, and told us to dig in.
And the one before that had been at Priya’s, and, over her girlfriends’ protestations, she’d prepared no food at all and insisted we just order takeaway like, as she put it, “normal people.”
Then again, Brian and Amanda had done a three-course medieval banquet, and Peter and Jennifer had done something quite similar to what Oliver was attempting.
Although I think the big difference there was that Peter and Jennifer are both low-key foodies, so neither of them was working with a giant Luc-shaped millstone around their neck.