The Dinner Guest

by B P Walter

  I think I pulled a face at that. ‘Yes, she’s mentioned it a few times. I did think it was a bit unusual for a woman of her age to be spending the evening in the company of a bunch of young men discussing naughty novels.’

  Matthew grinned. ‘Who says our novels are naughty? We have an eclectic range. And anyway, it isn’t just us and Meryl. There’s also Jerome; he and Meryl must both be in their sixties. And there’s Anita, too.’

  ‘Jerome?’ I asked, raising an eyebrow. ‘Not Jerome Nightly?’

  He nodded with a smile. ‘The one and only. Doesn’t act as much these days. Just a few cameos in the odd romantic comedy. He and Meryl go back a long way.’

  ‘And Anita? I don’t think I know her.’

  Matthew took a sip of wine and looked a little pained. ‘She’s a bit of a downer, I’m afraid. Jerome’s daughter-in-law, although we think she and his son have now split. It would have been more normal for her to distance herself from her father-in-law a bit when she left his son, but for some reason she still turns up. Has a bit too much wine. Moans a lot about whatever book we’ve read. Makes digs at Jerome.’

  ‘Is she our age?’

  Matthew laughed. ‘Good Lord, no. About fifty. Only twelve years younger than her father-in-law; that’s what made her marriage to his son Harry a bit strange. A nine-year age gap between them, I think.’

  I helped myself to more wine. ‘That’s not such a bad age gap. I’ve seen worse.’

  Matthew had a knowing glint in his eye. ‘Are you referring to you and your aristocratic ex?’

  I leaned back, laughing a little. I liked that he was teasing me so early on. ‘There was little more than a decade between me and my aristocratic ex, as you call him. And that’s the largest age gap I’d ever consider workable.’

  Matthew was still smiling. ‘Well, only one year between us.’

  I felt a prickle of something along my arms. A buzz of anticipation. A trembling of destiny, someone a bit kookier than myself might say. The feeling of the tectonic plates of one’s life shifting towards a new future.

  ‘Indeed,’ I said.

  I went home with Matthew that night. We became an item almost immediately. That vague, ‘seeing each other’ period never really happened to us. I was introduced to Titus the following week, who was an angelic child and seemed devoted to Matthew. I started to spend more time with the two of them in their apartment near Marble Arch within the month. Moved my stuff over bit by bit. Matthew got used to my habit of leaving half-drunk mugs of tea, odd socks, and old newspapers about the place. I tried to get used to his neatness. And very quickly, after I sold my Eccleston Square flat, our two separate lives became stitched together into one. Everything fitted wonderfully. But still, I never joined his book club. It just seemed odd, a bunch of people – such different people at various points in their lives – meeting to discuss a book they’ve probably only skim-read. Or worse, studied word for word so they could have really in-depth discussions about a character’s motivation and emotional journey. I mean, I love Meryl, and she’s always seemed very fond of me, but the thought of her debating the latest Rushdie with an ageing film star and his bitter daughter-in-law … well, the whole thing seemed too bonkers to comprehend. So I resisted Matthew’s charming efforts to make me join, and the years went by and I just never caved in.

  Until, of course, Rachel came into our lives.

  ‘I just don’t understand why now? Don’t get me wrong, you’re very welcome to join. It’s just never seemed like your sort of thing before. I thought that was why you’ve always arranged to be out when the meeting’s here.’ Matthew said all this as he stepped out of the shower, slipping a little as he hopped over the mat and back into the bedroom. He started drying himself with the towel, beads of water flicking onto me as I sat on the bed, only half listening. I didn’t know why, but I had a strange underlying sense of anxiety about the evening. Matthew seemed to suspect exactly why though.

  ‘Is it because of her? Rachel? Is that why you’re coming?’

  I looked up at him and shrugged. I’d been filtering an image on a photography app. It didn’t really need any more work on it, but I felt oddly restless and needed something to focus my mind.

  ‘Charrrrlie? Hello?’

  There was something about the way he sometimes said my name, extending the Rs a little and making it kind of sing-song-y, that had always irritated me a little.

  ‘It isn’t because of Rachel. Why would it be because of her?’ I didn’t look at him properly as I said this, just glanced up quickly, then carried on with colour, contrast, and shadow reach.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw him pause, then heard the sound of him towelling his hair. It’s strange how quickly things can change. There was once a time when I wouldn’t have been able to sit still with him standing naked so close to me. I’d have been pulling him close to me, the scent of his shower-gel-scrubbed skin sending ripples of attraction through me, a desperation to get him onto the bed and have his long strong legs wrap around me almost impossible to ignore. But, like a string of Christmas lights that have lost their vibrant once-new glow, here the feeling of arousal fluttered briefly and dully through my body, then faded as quickly as it had arisen.

  Christ, I thought to myself as Matthew finally moved away from me to pull on a pair of boxers from the chest of drawers, have we really reached this stage already? A sense of disinterest and indifference around each other’s bodies? We were only in our mid-thirties, for fuck’s sake. Was this really when things started wilting and dying?

  ‘I’m not coming because of Rachel.’ It was a lie, and I think he knew it. If I ever lied to him, whether it was about my whereabouts (‘I’m just working at the moment,’ a.k.a. watching Netflix on my iPad in the study) or sorting out the clothes to take to the dry cleaner’s (‘Sure, all done,’ a.k.a. I’ll get around to it soon), I’d feel this strange ripple of electricity in the air, which remained present even when we weren’t in the same room. It was like my mind punishing me for stepping over some of my most closely held values: loyalty and honesty.

  ‘And you’ve read the book?’

  I sighed a little in frustration. ‘Yes, I told you. When we were on holiday. Look, I think I even Instagrammed it. Hang on.’ I switched over to the app on my phone and began scrolling back.

  ‘I don’t need photographic evidence…’

  ‘Well you’re getting it, whether you like it or not.’ I did a sort of mock-annoyed voice to show I wasn’t really pissed. Was I pissed? I wasn’t really sure how I felt. I had this weird, slightly vertigo-inducing sense that we were on the verge of something not exactly pleasant. A feeling of foreboding I hadn’t felt as strongly as this before.

  Titus was doing his schoolwork in his room while we got the house ready before the book club members descended. ‘What are you working on?’ Matthew asked when the boy made an appearance to steal a slice of cake.

  ‘Wars of the Roses,’ he replied, dangling on the door frame, stretching his arms. He’d grown tall recently and was in that stage some teenage lads go through when they’re a long tangle of limbs, not used to their own height, or the fast-paced changes their bodies are going through. I was the same at Titus’s age. I’d been so ravenously hungry. Every second of every day. And always felt as if I could run a mile or four, even at 11pm after a long day of school and rugby. Titus wasn’t quite like that though. His appetite didn’t seem to have changed that much, and he was never one for exercise outside of his school sports. In fact, thinking about the amount of physical education his school put upon him, maybe that wasn’t very surprising.

  ‘I’m going to head back up. Have a nice time with your book friends,’ he said, sloping off.

  ‘Don’t go to bed too late!’ Matthew called back up after him.

  ‘Can’t hear you, Fathers!’ came the predictable reply.

  He always liked to call us that collectively: ‘The Fathers’. Matthew sometimes complained it made us sound like people of the church.
Titus had leaped on this, occasionally referring to us as Father Matthew and Father Charlie with mock deference, sometimes with a hint of an Irish lilt to his voice. The rest of the time, he called Matthew ‘Dad’ and used ‘Dad’ and ‘Charlie’ interchangeably with me – usually if he needed to make specific reference to one of us. Matthew had naturally been ‘Daddy’ all the way through Titus’s early years, since he was the only father figure the child properly knew. When I came along, I was just ‘Charlie’ for a time to the sweet little five-year-old who always greeted me with such joy when I came round to visit his dad. And then, quite suddenly, and seemingly without prompting, he’d started to call me ‘Daddy Charlie’.

  The day he first did this was etched onto my memory. It was the weekend I was properly moving into Charlie’s Marble Arch flat. It was a Friday evening and I was driving the last remaining bits of my stuff over from Eccleston Square. It wasn’t long after Matthew’s mother had died in a car accident in the Highlands. He’d been back and forth between Scotland and England and it had been a difficult time for him, coping with all that and having a child to bring up, especially since his mother was the only close family he had left. That day, he was cooking a romantic dinner for the two of us and I was fantasising about the herbed cod and salad he’d promised, along with something to drink – something ice cold, since the hot Friday air was unforgivably stifling and the traffic around Victoria gridlocked. To make matters worse, the air-con had broken in my car.

  When I’d finally got to the apartment block and was in the lift, the concierge on the desk having helped me with my bags, I was hot and irritable and annoyed that I was nearly half an hour late. But when I stepped into Matthew’s air-conditioned apartment, a sense of calm came across me. The place was cool, warming and comforting and just so right. And there he was, sitting on the sofa with Titus on his lap, reading a picture book, my godmother, Meryl, sitting next to him, laughing along as Matthew did the voice of a monkey or something in a high-pitched voice. He’d always been the more playful one of us. The more naturally paternal. I can make adults feel at ease without much effort, but it took me longer to get used to being a parent. Charm doesn’t get you very far when a stroppy nine-year-old feels his bedtime should be moved later. He looked up and saw me, and his smile filled his face in the beautiful way it always did. ‘Look who’s here,’ he’d said to Titus, and the child had looked round and beamed, and shuffled off Matthew’s lap and shouted ‘Daddy Charlie’s here!’

  I have to admit that the thought of that moment years later would still cause me to choke up. Meryl had taken Titus off our hands that evening for a night of Disney movies at her house, but to be honest, I would have been cool with him staying. Because that joyful exclamation of ‘Daddy Charlie’ made me realise how special this whole thing was: this was the start of a new part of our lives. All three of us, together.

  Anita arrived first for the book club. The one member I had the least wish to talk to turned up a good forty minutes too early. Sometimes she arrived with Jerome, her father-in-law, if he asked his driver to stop off at her Pimlico home on the way from Mayfair, but it meant a bit of a detour for him and sometimes she decided to walk. Her reconciliation with his son Harry five years ago, after their four-year estrangement, had forced Jerome to treat her more like family again rather than a distant acquaintance he wished he could be rid of. Harry, meanwhile, refused point blank to join the book club and apparently saw it as the perfect opportunity to go drinking with his fellow TV-producer chums in oh-so-trendy bars in Soho.

  ‘Charlie, darling, what are you doing here?’ Anita asked when I opened the door. She looked at me as if a trained leopard had just greeted her on the doorstep. ‘Lovely to see you too, Anita,’ I said, smiling at her. She gave me a suspicious look, stepping past me with purpose and then handing me the coat she had over her arm. ‘I walked,’ she said, as if this explained her early arrival. ‘Now, where’s Matthew? What’s going on? Why are you here?’ She marched onwards towards the kitchen, no doubt homing in on the warm lights and smell of baking.

  ‘Good evening, Anita,’ Matthew said, looking up from adding a touch of icing sugar to one of the cakes he and Titus had baked earlier. ‘You’re early.’

  ‘Yes, I know, I walked,’ she said again. ‘Tell me, why is your husband here? I thought he hated books?’

  I made a sound whichI hoped conveyed polite disagreement. ‘I don’t hate books. I’m not a monster.’

  She gave me another glance of distrust, then turned back to Matthew. ‘I think there’s enough sugar on that now, or we’ll all have type 2 diabetes by the end of the night. Now, is anyone going to answer my question?’

  I held my hands up in surrender. ‘I just thought it was time for me to join.’ I smiled at her, but Anita didn’t smile back.

  ‘You thought it was time? After all these years?’ She looked back in disbelief.

  I laughed a little. ‘How welcome you make me feel, Anita.’

  Matthew started talking before she could respond. ‘He’s not the only new addition. Did Jerome mention to you about our friend Rachel joining?’

  Anita approached the island counter, rounding on Matthew in a way I’d have found intimidating if I were him. ‘No, he did not. What do you mean, your friend Rachel? What Rachel? Not Rachel Evergreen? The one who had an affair with Sir Kenneth Lawford then sold her story to the Mail on Sunday?’

  ‘No, not Rachel Evergreen,’ Matthew said patiently, pouring Anita a glass of wine and handing it to her. He lifted a glass to me and shook it in question, and I nodded. ‘This Rachel is a new friend of ours.’

  ‘Friend,’ I said, taking my wine, ‘is an overstatement.’

  ‘So who is she?’ Anita asked, her head going back and forth between the two of us.

  ‘She’s someone we bumped into while out shopping. We ended up inviting her to our little gathering.’

  Anita lowered her glass. She looked at Matthew as though he’d just produced a gun. ‘Are you fucking serious? You’ve invited some random woman to join us at our book club? Someone you picked up whilst shopping?’

  I couldn’t help but smile at her consternation. ‘That’s about it in a nutshell,’ I said.

  She gaped at us both. ‘Well, I’m stunned. Where was this?’

  ‘On the King’s Road,’ Matthew said, patiently. ‘In Waterstones, appropriately. She’s new to the area, is a keen reader, and wants to make some friends.’

  I watched Anita chew on these details for a few seconds. ‘I suppose that’s not as bad as it could be. I was afraid you were going to say it was in Primark on the Archway Road.’

  Matthew scoffed. ‘There isn’t a Primark on the Archway Road.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she said, downing the last of her wine. ‘I don’t shop there.’

  ‘We’ve been saying for ages we should increase our numbers,’ Matthew said. I could tell he was trying to keep his impatience out of his voice. ‘Ever since Douglas and George married and dropped out, we’ve been a bit light on numbers.’

  Anita looked like she’d swallowed a wasp. ‘I cannot believe you thought inviting a random stranger was the right way to go about this. There are loads of more suitable candidates I could have thought of in an instant. I could have made a shortlist. We could have interviewed. We could have planned. We could have strategised.’

  ‘It’s … er … a book club,’ I said, quietly. ‘Not a by-election.’

  ‘Eileen Moran, for example,’ Anita continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘She’s got lots of time on her hands since her upholstery business had to fold due to tax evasion. Then there’s Louise Kellman, poor dear. If there was anyone who needed a distraction from the ills of this world, it’s her. Or Timmy! Darling Timmy Braythorne. He’s got nobody now his wife left him for her yoga instructor, and then his rabbits all died of myxomatosis. You know how devoted he was to those rabbits.’

  ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, Timothy Braythorne still lives in South Riding,’ said Matthew. ‘Rat
her a long way to travel for a book club.’ He’d finished with the cakes by this point and surveyed them with all the pride of Paul Hollywood.

  Anita rounded on me. ‘So why are you joining us? You haven’t said.’

  I’d had years to get used to Anita’s direct approach, but I still found myself wanting to shrink from her gaze. I explained to her that I’d read this month’s novel on holiday recently and thought it might be fun to contribute to the discussion.

  ‘Fun?’ she said, the word apparently new to her.

  ‘Yes, fun,’ I replied, smiling.

  ‘It hasn’t got anything to do with your Instagram has it?’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I said, partly wanting to mess with her. ‘I’ll be able to get a photo with you, won’t I?’

  She looked revolted. ‘Certainly not. I don’t know what sort of unsavoury types haunt your social media, but I certainly don’t want to be gawped at or slut-shamed or whatever they call it.’