Page 10 of Just for the Season

‘Hmm. I haven’t noticed it before.’ Ellie presses the doorbell hard again, just as the door is opened by Rob, Miranda’s husband.

‘Oh, hello,’ he says. ‘I didn’t know you were coming. How lovely to see you both.’

We exchange hugs with him and then he ushers us into the kitchen, where it’s immediately apparent why we couldn’t hear any party noise.

We’ve just arrived in the middle of dinner.

‘Your birthday party?’ Ellie asks Miranda, brow furrowed.

‘Next Saturday,’ Miranda says, laughing.

I’m not laughing. I’m glaring. Rob is still standing, with Ellie and me. Around Miranda’s long (to-die-for), polished walnut dining table are Miranda, her four kids, two other kids, and bloody Marcus, the queue man.

‘You.’ I point at him. ‘You are like a bad penny. A very bad penny. You just keep turning up. I do not want you to keep turning up.’

Miranda does a stop-talking, hand-across-throat motion and swivels her eyes a bit.

I peer at her, confused.

‘Why are you doing that?’ I ask.

Miranda sighs. ‘So that you’ll stop talking.’

‘Oh.’ I’m even more confused now.

‘This,’ says Marcus to the girl on his left, ‘is the woman who took your carrot cake.’

‘Are you joking?’ I begin. I don’t get the chance to finish my sentence, because Miranda’s mouth forms into a silent oh, and then she stands up and takes one of my hands and one of Ellie’s and tugs us back into the hall and towards the front door.

‘I love you both very dearly and you know that under any other circumstances I’d invite you to stay, but Marcus just finished telling us about carrot-cake-gate and he really hasn’t taken to you, so I think just on this one occasion you should go. Because it’s a dinner for Ruby’s birthday. She’s Libby’s best friend so we thought it would be nice to do something for her here. I’m so sorry and I’ll see you both very soon, yes?’

‘Okay,’ we both say, as she bundles us back out of the front door.

‘Have a nice evening,’ Ellie adds.

‘I’ve never been thrown out of a friend’s house before,’ she whispers loudly to me once we’re outside.

‘Me neither,’ I say. ‘It was bloody Marcus’s fault.’

‘I think it was,’ she says.

And then we trudge back up the lane to her house, agreeing very loudly the whole way that men – all men – are shit, and that I was extremely right about Marcus the queue man being a bad penny.

4

MARCUS

‘Were they drunk?’ asks Ruby after Miranda’s got rid of Ellie and the cake woman.

‘Shhh,’ I mouth. Sam is only eleven, as is Ethan, Rob and Miranda’s older son, and their two youngest are only six. They don’t need to hear about drunkenness. Miranda’s cooked a birthday meal for Ruby, whose best friend Libby is Miranda and Rob’s oldest child, and our two families are eating together; it all works perfectly because Sam is best friends with Ethan.

‘The woman you stole the cake from is very pretty,’ Ruby continues. ‘Really beautiful. Like film-starry. Like the kind of beauty you can’t describe because it’s unique to her. Her face is like a perfect heart shape.’

‘That is exactly right,’ Miranda agrees, pointing a breadstick at Ruby for emphasis.

I exert huge self-control and do not point out that chances are the woman would be a lot easier to deal with if she were less beautiful and seemingly entitled. My ex-wife, while not the same type physically, had that same level of beauty, and she’s spent her entire adult life behaving appallingly and getting away with it.

‘Weren’t you supposed to be apologising to her next time you saw her?’ asks Ruby.