‘Oh God, sorry,’ she gasps, looking around for paper towels, but there’s only beautiful cloth napkins, which she doesn’t want to cover in gravy any more than the tablecloth.
‘Don’t worry, dear. I put a little dish under the boat, just in case of accidents like this.’ Haf knows she must mean in general, but also it feels like a concession made specifically for her lack of spatial awareness, which... she doesn’t know how to feel about, really. Luckily, the gravy slop didn’t spill over the dish, so she has to be thankful for that at least.
Carrying a freshly opened bottle of red wine, Kit walks around the table, slowly filling everyone’s crystal glasses. As she leans over to fill Otto’s glass, Haf’s eye is drawn to her cropped brown checked trousers. Even in winter, the gays love a bare ankle. It makes her giggle, but when Christopher tilts his head at her as if to ask what she’s laughing at, she turns it into a cough. He’s not told her much at all about Kit – how on earth could she explain that she’s amusing herself thinking about queer coding without revealing exactly how she knows that?
‘Do you want some?’ Kit asks Haf, standing so close to her that Haf can smell the peppercorn spice of her perfume. ‘It’s a Pinot Noir, not too heavy.’
Unable to form a coherent reply, Haf simply nods.
God, she needs to stop acting like an absolute dork in front of the Calloways. At least in the bookshop, only the bookseller bore witness to her embarrassing behaviour.
Kit takes her seat and Haf realises she’s going to have to stop studiously staring at her throughout this meal. What is the middle ground? Looking? She feels like she’s forgotten how to justlookat a person normally, which she’s already bad at because, really, who even likes eye contact, anyway? Never mind looking without thinking about touching or kissing.
Get your head in the game, she tells herself, taking a hurried sip from the glass of water in front of her. She needs to do something that’s not looking at Kit or thinking about looking at Kit, and oh God, she can hear herself and she sounds like she’s lost it.
Act straight, that’s what Ambrose would tell her to do.Act like you’ve never fancied a girl in your life. Definitely not the one sitting opposite. Nope. Nope, nope.
‘Shall we raise a glass?’ asks Otto, lifting his glass into the air.
They all cheers, but it’s a polite, restrained one. Not the kind of cheers where everyone insists you must look deeply into everyone’s eyes as your glasses clink together or it’s bad luck, thankfully. Never mind Kit, that feels like too much sudden emotional intimacy with Christopher’s parents.
As Otto gets up to carve the meat, Haf takes stock of the food in front of her. Esther has prepared a haunch of roast beef with a mustard crust, along with a pile of crispy roast potatoes, bright orange carrots and jewelled red cabbage. It’s the kind of feast that they would sometimes have for Christmas Day dinner at home. There are Yorkshire puddings at the end of the table but it’s not the single tray-bake monstrosity her mother would make for Christmas, but the perfectly shaped and surprisingly delicious individual ones that look like they’ve come from M&S.
Haf hasn’t had a roast dinner in ages. They take so long, and she’s not really got the attention span for cooking, not something that requires timings upon timings that all stack together so that everything is magically finished at once.
‘This looks amazing, Esther, thank you,’ Haf says, taking a plate with thin, rare slices of roast beef from Otto.
‘It’s Welsh,’ she says with a smile, presumably meaning the beef.
Soon plates of sides are passed around, horseradish and redcurrant sauces dolloped on plates, and gravy swirled on top.The food is genuinely delicious – she wasn’t just sucking up to Esther. Perhaps that’s how they can bond? It’s probably not the best thing to hear, that her new potential daughter-in-law’s cooking skills sound like they rival Otto’s propensity to burn liquids, but maybe she can teach her? She files this away for later.
Christopher and Kit quickly revert to their small talk. It’s kind of weird – they don’t leap to sharing embarrassing stories or talk about mutual friends. It’s all very polite. Given recent bookshop-based activities, maybe that’s for the best.
‘I didn’t realise you were coming down early?’ says Christopher to Kit. ‘We could have caught the same train or something.’
‘Me neither,’ she says, slicing a roast potato in half. ‘But we met our delivery deadline early, and I realised there was an opportunity for me to sneak off before someone tries to rope me into something else. I was going to do a few more bits in town, but Laurel rang me so I decided to hop on the next train home.’
Didn’t Christopher say Kit and Laurel were best friends? Haf feels a tiny pang of guilt as she realises she’s only started really paying attention to the tiny titbits she’d heard about his sister since she realised who she was. Before then she was content to just hopefully find a comfortable middle ground together.
Either way, she should probably still join in; it’ll ingratiate her with the parents at least.
‘What do you do?’ Haf asks with an airy smile.
‘She’s a high-flying architect,’ answers Otto proudly, but Kit cringes at the interruption.
‘I don’t know about high or flying, but yes. I’m an architect. I work at a small firm in London,’ Kit answers in clipped tones.
‘Woah,’ says Haf, not really meaning to sound quite so wide-eyed, but she genuinely hasn’t met an architect before. Her only frame of reference is moustachioed Tom Selleck inThree Menand a Baby, who she realises Otto bears a striking resemblance to.
Kit gives her a raised eyebrow as she takes a sip of wine.
‘I mean, that’s really cool. You must be really smart and have gone to school for a long time?’
‘Yeah, I did it in about nine years—’
‘Takes most people ten,’ adds Esther smugly.
‘You know, it’s funny, Haf,’ Kit begins, and for a brief moment, Haf is both thrilled to hear her name in Kit’s mouth and terrified about what is going to follow. But instead, Kit looks pointedly at her parents in turn. ‘I didn’t know I was so good at throwing my voice. I mean, I knew I was good at it, but wow, I am practically a prodigy.’
