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“Do him three,” Wendy insists. “He’s a growing boy.”
“I’m not sure I am,” I tell her.
Barbara Jane, who is clutching her coffee like it’s the One Ring and seems to be the only member of her family who isn’t a morning person, gives me a nod. “What you’ve done, Mum, is confuse Sam with Gaston fromBeauty and the Beast.”
Wendy looks affronted. “What, the candlestick?”
“That was Lumiere,” says Jonathan.
“Then who was the clock?” asks Uncle Johnny.
Agnieszka looks up from the sink where she’s still engaged in a small tussle with Wendy over whose job it is to clean the mugs. “Cogsworth. The teapot was Mrs Potts. I don’t think anyof the other furniture had names.” She gets thoughtful. “Except Fifi, the feather duster with whom it’s strongly implied Lumiere is in a sexual relationship.”
“Well, I don’t know,” says Wendy, with a sad shake of her head. “I can’t keep up.”
“She can’t keep up,” echoes Les. “But I think Barbara Jane’s right, love, if he wants two eggs he should have two eggs or the last’ll just go to waste.”
“Sausages?” asks Uncle Johnny.
Jonathan, my knight in shining pinstripes, sweeps to the rescue. “What if you just give him two of everything?”
Uncle Johnny gives a grin that on a younger man would look impish. “Right so two eggs, two sausages, two hash browns, two rashers of bacon, two slices of black pudding, and two baked beans.”
“Aregularhelping of baked beans,” Jonathan corrects him. “And probably two slices of toast?”
I agree because at this stage agreeing is by far the quickest option. “Where did we even get all of this?”
Jonathan heaves a sigh that’s more long-suffering than he’s really entitled to given he’s not been suffering very long “They went out this morning.”
“Well, you had nothing in,” Wendy tells him. Then she immediately tells me: “He had nothing in.”
That gets an in-the-know nod from Agnieszka. “He never does. I’ve been cleaning this kitchen for years. I don’t think that refrigerator has ever been used.”
“In our defence,” I point out, “we weren’t expecting company. And the fridge is getting used now, it’s packed full of Christmas stuff.”
Uncle Johnny turns briefly from the hob. “Still no excuse not to have black pudding.”
From her perch at the end of the breakfast table, Barbara Jane is still looking like she’s resenting every second of this. “Does anybody actuallylikeblack pudding?”
“Too good for black pudding, now is she?” Uncle Johnny asks the room in general.
“Everybodyis too good for black pudding.” Barbara Jane goes back to the kettle and starts making herself another coffee, though I don’t think it’ll help her much. “Who in their right mind makes a sausage out of blood if they’ve got the option to make it out of literally anything else.”
“Isn’t pretty much everything you put in a sausage awful?” I ask. “At least with blood you can narrow it down.”
She looks genuinely nauseated. “Fair point. Just toast for me, Johnny.”
“Have some bacon.” Uncle Johnny pokes at the contents of the bacon pan, which are sizzling invitingly. “You need feeding up.”
“Why?” The expression in Barbara Jane’s face would’ve curdled the milk in her coffee if she didn’t take it black. “Are you going to sell me at auction?”
Somehow passing up the opportunity to speculate how much his sister would fetch on the open market, Jonathan grabs a plate and heads for the condiments. “I might go the toast route as well.”
“What is up with your kids, Les?” asks Uncle Johnny, apparently bemused at the state of an entire generation. “Didn’t you teach them to appreciate a proper breakfast?”
Jonathan pauses mid-butter. “I can’t say what’s wrong with BJ—at least not in less than an hour—but I do need to get to work.”
Uncle Johnny, it seems, isn’t letting the slight against his breakfast craft go so lightly. “Aren’t you the boss? Can’t you show up when you like?”
