Page 6 of Mad About You

Jonathan’s brother Martin Junior and his wife Mel walked in behind them, with a scowling, skinny Barty in shirt and tie. He went to a private school and his parents dressed him so smartly he looked like a kid from another era, who might buy sweets with shillings and play conkers.

‘My goodness, Harriet?! I didn’t recognise you! I thought Jon had a new woman!’ Martin Junior said, double taking.

‘Isn’t it extraordinary!’ Jacqueline chimed in.It?

‘Seeing you in a dress is so unfamiliar it’s like … like you’re indrag,’ he said, chortling, and Harriet was momentarily speechless at the rudeness, as everyone fell about.

‘Yes, doesn’t she look incredible?’ Jon said, deploying his selective hearing. Why did she feel so undermined by Jon?I’m not asking for their approval.

‘Why is Aunt Harriet in fancy dress?’ Barty said, looking up at his mother, and everyone whooped at this precocious wit.

The standard Barty MO was to direct borderline offensive questions about the company to his parents.Why don’t Uncle Jon and Aunt Harriet have children?was a supposedly innocent query last Christmas, over the prawn cocktail starter.

‘Because they’re not married,’ was the snaky answer from Barty’s grandmother, which Harriet itched to correct. Harriet had no moral objection to marriage; she just had no interest either. Doing it purely as a favour to someone else, and to meet society’s expectations, seemed wrong. She’d been quite clear with Jon on this from the start, before he got the chance to start dropping hints. And whenever the subject came up again, she reiterated her stance:nope, not for me. Not now. Not ever. It wasn’t personal to Jon, but it was personal to her.

‘Harriet says you told them about the green threat,’ Jon said to his mum, as they took their seats and marbled ham hock terrines were placed in front of them, Jon’s absent of its decorative leaf of Little Gem.

‘Oh, so it’s blame mother if they forget, is it?’ Jacqueline chortled in more faux-merriment, shooting Harriet a look.

‘Jon asked me if I’d told them and I said you said you’d do it,’ Harriet said.

‘I’m only joking, goodness!’ Jacqueline chided, waving her hand at Harriet as the waiter topped her glass up. Sniping passed off as humour, Harriet characterised as over-sensitive if she defended herself? The Jacqueline Barraclough bingo card would be fully dabbered tonight.

‘A toast, I think!’ Jon said, picking up his Malbec, once everyone had theirs, and Barty was noisily sucking on a Coke with a straw. ‘To our wonderful mother and father and their marvellous achievement of forty years of happy marriage. Your ruby anniversary! May we all be so fortunate. And so patient, hahahaha.’

As they raised their glasses, Harriet could see Martin Junior’s slapped-bum face at his brother hogging the limelight.

‘PerhapsDadwants to say a few words?’ Martin Junior said, pointedly, but his father paused in swilling the grog to say: ‘My wife speaks for me, that’s how we’ve made it forty years,’ so his gambit failed.

‘Thank you for organising this. I have such wonderful sons!’ Jacqueline said.

‘Time for our gift, I think?’ Martin said, and gestured with a head nod at Barty. ‘Go on!’

Barty looked stubbornly blank until Melissa leaned down and whispered urgently in his ear. Barty slid off his seat, walked to the back of the room and collected a gift-ribboned shiny rectangular package. Amid much cooing, he handed it over silently to his grandmother.

‘For me?!’ Jackie said.

‘What do you say, Barty?!’ Mel trilled from the far end of the table.

‘Happy anniversary, Grandma,’ Barty mumbled sullenly, before stomping back to his chair.

She tore the paper off to reveal a framed photograph of their wedding day, a young Martin and Jacqueline stood on registry office steps. Martin with a thatch of hair, then dark brown; Jacqueline in an unusually tasteful, simple Eighties wedding dress in pale mocha satin, a long veil fixed to her head with an Alice band.

‘Oh Marty! Melly! And Bartholomew, of course. You shouldn’t have!’

Barty looked like he agreed.

‘Look, look what they did for us,’ Jacqueline said, turning the picture to face Jon and Harriet, as if they didn’t witness the gift-giving.

Harriet said: ‘You look gorgeous! That dress really suited you,’ glad to be able to be both honest and positive.

‘You’d have loved my going-away outfit, Melissa, I had this super little swing coat,’ Jacqueline said, to make it clear she only had one stylish daughter-in-law.

‘Yes, didn’t Mum look bloody smashing on her big day?’ Jon said, and put his hand over Harriet’s, looking at her with proprietorial adoration.

That was the moment Harriet felt a whisper of strange foreboding, a psychic disquiet, that she chose to ignore in favour of more wine.

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