“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 nowholdinga 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 leastslightlyless 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 madeoh isn’t he sweetnoises 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 thebadsort of tense, Oliver appeared in the doorway again. “You arenotturning 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 sayfuck, 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. Thesalad had come out well, or as well as a saladcouldcome 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.”
