Chapter 34 #2
“This is lovely,” said Peter. And he didn’t mean to, but he said it in such a kiss-of-death way. When you said This is lovely about a wide, mixed spread of food somebody else had made, it meant you wanted to be nice but couldn’t actually think of a single specific good thing to say.
James Royce-Royce had been meticulously working his way through the bulgur wheat and pomegranate salad.
“Would you like the tiniest bit of professional advice?” he asked, and then without really waiting for a reply went on, “Because you’ve chosen a recipe with quite a lot of pomegranate, it would have been a good idea to include something to balance out the tartness of the arils. A touch of Greek feta, maybe?”
With incredible composure, especially given how much effort he’d put into getting those arils out in the first place—I think, I still wasn’t sure what an aril was—Oliver said, “Thank you, James. That’s a good tip.”
“These pitas are wonderful,” offered Amanda, folding a notably sparse helping of subpar hummus into a little mini-wrap. “I tried making my own once, but I could never get them this warm and even.”
Oliver didn’t flush, but he did look slightly sheepish. “That’s very kind of you, but they’re store-bought. I just heated them in the oven.”
Some part of me knew I shouldn’t say, “And a damn fine job you did too.” The trouble was, that part wasn’t my mouth.
Fortunately, I was spared having to witness the cringe I’d spread, because our doorbell went and I shot up to get it so fast you’d think my chair had caught fire.
“Sorry we’re late.” Tom was already taking off his coat. “You remember how our babysitter got scrofula?”
“It wasn’t scrofula,” yelled Brian from inside.
“No no,” said Bridge cheerfully. “Turned out it actually was. He’d been on holiday to a high-risk area.”
“So we lined up another one,” Tom continued as I led them through to the dining room and everyone got settled, “but she went on one of those Jack the Ripper walking tours.”
I leaned back in the chair I’d just reclaimed. “If this ends in a murder…”
“Don’t be silly.” Bridge dived supportively into the grainy hummus. “She eloped with the tour guide.”
Tom nodded. “I’d say it was a shock, but Chel always was a sucker for a girl in a top hat.”
“Anyway,” Bridge went on, “the next one won an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris and cancelled on us, the one after that broke both legs in a car accident, the next one fell into a cage full of hyenas—”
“My God.” James Royce-Royce clapped his hands to his mouth. “How ghastly.”
“Oh, she was fine.” Unlike his wife, Tom was avoiding the hummus. “Apparently, hyenas only normally attack humans if they feel threatened. But she was really shaken up and didn’t want to be babysitting immediately afterwards. Then the next one—”
“Hang on”—I raised a finger—“how many babysitters did you go through for this?”
“Fourteen,” said Bridge. “Bit of a ’mare really.”
From there, things eased into a comfortable fine-ness.
The tragic mediocrity of the starters had taken a toll on Oliver, but everybody else was politely ignoring it and throwing themselves into the kind of conversations you had when you’d unwittingly drifted past the stage of being used to group hangs.
We’d done a pretty good job—okay, an all right job; okay, a job—of keeping up with everyone on an individual basis, but the dynamics were different when it was all of us, or even a medium-size subset of all of us, and we were kind of rusty.
Once we’d consumed all of the excessively arilly, or possibly insufficiently feta-y salad and disappointing hummus and spice-denuded crackers we could reasonably want, Oliver began to clear the table for the main.
“Next”—Oliver was still anxiously stuck in cooking show voiceover mode—“we’ll be serving shish barak with pine nut oil and a green salad. ”
“You know, you don’t have to do the announcing thing,” said Jennifer. “It is strictly optional.”
“Oh, but it’s so much more fun,” replied James Royce-Royce. “Really, it’s the reason I became a chef in the first place.”
James Royce-Royce gave a rare smile. “It’s true. He does it at home.”
“What?” asked Tom. “For every meal?”
“Meals. Snacks. Cups of tea.”
“That’s a lie.” James Royce-Royce made a gesture of extravagant outrage. “I do not do it for tea.” He paused. “Well, unless it’s tea and biscuits.”
Emerging from the kitchen, Oliver began laying out shallow bowls full of fancy dumplings for the meat eaters, and a tiny rice-and-lentil dish for himself, the name of which I had listened to once and then promptly forgotten.
“Now this,” declared James Royce-Royce, “looks very special.”
And it did. The starters had come out iffy, but the shish barak, as far as I could tell, had worked extremely well.
As it should, given Oliver had spent the last week risk-managing all the potential fuckups and making at least one trial batch a night.
To be honest, it meant I was kind of sick of shish barak, but, as party sacrifices went, I could live with it.
Peter, having finished his first dumpling and started his second, was nodding enthusiastic agreement. “Really good. I mean really, really good.”
“Especially for a man who doesn’t eat meat.” James Royce-Royce seemed to be experiencing genuine foodie joy. “Without being able to taste as you go, this is excellent.”
Finally beginning to relax, Oliver nodded a polite acknowledgment of our friends’ praise and said, “Thank you.” Looking demurely down, he took a bite of his own meal.
He got about two chews in before he paled, set his fork to one side, and spat something into a napkin with far more delicacy than it should have been possible to spit anything into anything.
“Is,” I asked, “is everything okay?”
His expression unreadable, Oliver took a knife and began picking through the contents of his lentil-and-rice bowl. Finally, he turned to Jaz and said. “Jasmine, did you put lamb in my mujadara?”
Jaz had a wicked little smile. “Yes,” she replied. And then, as Oliver’s jaw began to clench and his lips began to get very thin and very tense, she went on, “See how that worked? You asked me. I told you. I may be traumatised, but I’m not a fucking liar.”