He goes through to the hallway and calls upstairs. ‘Martha? Marth, can I have a word please?’
She emerges, radiating suspicion, from her room. ‘What is it?’
‘Nothing, hon. Nothing really. I just wanted to say thanks for looking after Fin tonight?—’
‘That’s all right.’
‘No, love, I really mean it,’ he says, wanting so much for things to feel right here, so he can be free to enjoy the night. ‘I appreciate it,’ he adds. ‘You really are a brilliant girl. Thanks so much for holding the fort.’
16
‘This can’t be right,’ Lena mutters out loud. They mustn’t have been listening properly when Michael was dispensing instructions. No wonder, with the workings of a five-oven Aga being explained in under a minute and then him rushing off, anxious to catch that flight.
Lena exhales forcefully and, for the third time, she rummages through the entire contents of Michael’s freezer in the utility room. There are vegetables and raspberries and fish fingers and oven chips and a small supermarket-brand broccoli quiche. In the bottom drawer she unearths individually wrapped choc ices and a few loose sweetcorn niblets. But none of the promised home-cooked dishes for them to defrost in time for dinner tonight.
‘Are you sure they’re not there?’ Pearl crouches beside her.
‘Yes, unless I’m going completely mad.’ Lena looks at her in panic as they both straighten up and assess the situation. ‘So much for Michael’s systems. What are we going to do for dinner tonight?’
Pearl grimaces and now Shelley joins them in the utility room. ‘There are no labelled meals?’
‘No!’ Lena announces.
‘Oh, God.’ Pearl’s gaze flicks to the wall-mounted chalkboard on which Michael has written the guests’ meal choices.
SAT 1 mush 1 chick 2 lamb. All crum.
SUN 1 chick 2 sal 1 mouss. 2 A pie 2 stick.
‘What does it all mean?’ Lena stares at it.
‘Well, there’s chicken and lamb…’ Pearl suggests as if they are at the initial stage of a crime investigation.
‘Yes, I get that,’ Lena says impatiently. ‘But what kind of chicken and lamb? And what’s “mush”?’
‘And “crum”, “stick” and “mouss”?’ Shelley frowns at the board.
‘Mousse?’ Pearl offers.
‘Maybe,’ Lena says, ‘but what kind, and where the heck is it?’
‘There must be some other place.’ Shelley looks around the room in panic. Fridge, freezer, cupboard and a rack of hooks piled with jackets; that’s about it. There’s another fridge in the kitchen but they have already checked it out. She glances briefly at the pile of wellies in a giant wicker basket, and then opens the rickety cupboard. Here are the promised waterproof trousers – several pairs all neatly folded – plus a selection of woolly hats, scarves and gloves. But of course there’s no pie in there, nor a mousse.
‘Shit,’ she murmurs. ‘But look, we’ve got time. The family’s not arriving until two-ish so we have hours to figure something out.’
Lena checks her phone. ‘Well,twohours, Shell. It’s nearly twelve already?—’
‘Yes, but dinner’s not until evening, is it? So there’s no need to panic.’ In her seventeen years of virtually single-handedparenting, Shelley grew accustomed to her kids’ friends bowling up unexpectedly, and could stretch out meals to almost biblical degrees. Great cauldrons of chilli and rice were her speciality. Those gargantuan dinners are a thing of the past now, as apparently Martha and Fin would find it mortifying to have their friends sit and eat at their family table. In fact, Shelley is no longer allowed to interact with their friends at all. But she is still programmed to serve the needs of famished children, and is unfazed by the prospect of catering on an industrial scale. ‘We can go through what there is,’ she continues, ‘and figure out what we can cook. We’ll just say there’s been a change of menu?—’
‘We can’t do that!’ Pearl exclaims.
‘Why not?’ Shelley asks.
‘Because they’vechosentheir meals.’
‘Well, they can un-choose them! Not the end of the world, is it? How many times d’you eat out and they say sorry, the thing you wanted is off?—’
‘But not everything,’ Pearl protests. ‘I’ve never gone out to dinner andeverything’sbeen off?—’
