Page 29 of Between Us

No, wait – you’re being infected by Joe!she told herself.What did Dev teach you?A few things, properly done, is much better than a nervily assembled mish mash of a dozen.

Gina rehearsed the menu, which included ‘dressed red leaves’.

‘Is that a salad, when in Urmston and not Umbria?’ Meredith said.

‘It’s chicory! I suppose leaves means no blue cheese or sweetcorn or ranch dressing.’

‘Ranch dressing, I could snort it,’ Anita said mistily, a woman whose appetite was closer to Meredith or Roisin’s.

There was tiramisu for afters.

‘The genius of it is, it can pretty much all be done in advance,’ Gina said. ‘All there is to do before we sit down is frying the arancini balls, then cooking the spaghetti.’

Hunterstarting at nine meant an easy breezy approach to it wasn’t wise. Gina had timings written on a scrap of paper affixed to the towering fridge: they were having a ‘baby’s tea’ starting at six, to avoid jumpy clock watching.

At half five, Roisin lit the taper candles on the long mahogany table in the grand dining room, surveyed the huge window with its view onto the lake beyond, and sighed. You could serve Joe’s old skint writer’s dinner of ‘Prison Ramen’ in here (ramen noodles plus Wotsits) and it’d seem like a feast.

‘Reckon you can get Deliveroo to Benbarrow?’ Matt said, as they sat down, hurriedly adding, ‘Not that I want to!’

Roisin placed the red table plonk at intervals down therunner in the centre. Gina wasn’t present, still putting the finishing touches to their balls.

‘Lol. No, of course not,’ Joe said. ‘Imagine the poor wee fella cranking his bike up the path. Your rider tip would need to be a king’s ransom to make them take the job. Everything would be stone cold.’

‘We’ve found the one drawback of owning this place. No takeaways,’ Matt said. ‘Who knew the super rich can’t get takeaways.’

‘Your private chef probably takes the sting out of it,’ Dev said.

Roisin went back to the kitchen to collect the starter plates and she, Anita, Gina and Meredith entered carrying them, to applause.

‘Porcini arancini,’ Gina said, as they began.

‘Pleasing rhyming,’ Matt said, and she smiled at him before remembering she currently hated him, her face twitching and dropping in a comical manner.

‘Really nice, G,’ Roisin said, after a few mouthfuls. ‘I can say this without self-praising because I was only involved tangentially.’

‘Really good,’ everyone murmured in agreement.

‘Great balls of fire!’ Dev said, having caught an especially molten lava bit of gruyere, grabbing for his water.

It didn’t take very long to consume two of them and Roisin once again regretted not taking an interest in the decisions on scale in the preceding weeks. Her job meant the group WhatsApp often pinged away for an hour before she was able to look at her phone.

‘That’s left me pleasantly peckish for my main,’ Joe said to Roisin, who glowered at him as she cleared the plates.

Meredith and Roisin were thrashing the men at pool, while Anita was off taking ‘mood board’ photos of the house, until Gina appeared in the doorway of the games room, looking agitated.

‘Can I borrow you?’ she said to the women.

She led them back towards the kitchen, wailing, ‘the spaghetti’s not fucking cooking!’

They broke into a trot across the hallway to keep up with her speed.

‘It must be, it’ll be some posh bronze dyed stuff that needs longer, that’s all,’ Meredith said.

‘Try it!’ Gina said, gesturing at the double-handled mega pan on the Aga hob.

Meredith, and Roisin each hook-a-ducked a strand out of the rolling boil and chewed contemplatively, preparing to tell Gina in meltdown mode that it was merely al dente andexactly how the Italians eat it.

Ugh. Roisin had to agree, it was like chewing a chalky shoelace. It tasted raw. Hot and raw.

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