But then, Mum’s proudest boast is that she hasn’t put on foundation for minimum of forty years. No time.
As usual, her eyes are like hawks, taking in everything in one quick up-and-down glance.
‘So here you three are!’ she eye-rolls at us. ‘Now come on, girls, stop all your bickering. I need some help. Chief Justice Henderson has just arrived; Toby, would you be a pet and entertain him? And, Madeline, I know Douglas McGettigan has to be the single most boring man in the Northern Hemisphere, but he’s sitting all alone; anyone that’s actually met him before won’t go within six feet of him. Can you look after him for me, please? Chat to him about his golf handicap, he enjoys that.’
As the other pair scarper, I get thrown a familiar, vaguely exasperated look.
‘Angela, you let your sister goad you, and you really shouldn’t, you know. You just got to stop rising to the bait every single time. How often do I have to tell you?’
I mumble something vague into dishwasher along the lines of Madeline being a back-knifing cow and Toby being worse than useless, but Mum swishes off, too much in distracted hostess mode to pay much attention.
The minute she’s out door, I pour myself a very large glass of Prosecco and knock it back in a single gulp.
Then check that there’s plenty more bottles in fridge. If I’m to survive today, I’ll be needing lots, lots more where that came from.
Dining room chez Blennerhasset, 3.45 p.m.
Dinner served. Determined somehow to survive and live to tell the tale. Mum and I jointly cooked, but then we’re the only ones round here who eat normally and still gain weight. The other three are like bleeding rakes.
3.55 p.m.
Conversation turns to a personal injury case Dad presided over in the District Court few months back, where Toby was a junior counsel for plaintiff. Toby won, record settlement. Got in the papers and everything, one or two scuzzy tabloids even lapping up the whole father/son thing. Dad was utterly mortified by all the fuss, but I’m prepared to bet good money Toby still has all press cuttings framed and mounted in his downstairs loo. Strongly suspect he thinks it’ll boost his chances of landing a quick shag.
But if you weren’t involved in said case, and if you don’t happen to get the legal terminology, it’s all deeply, deeply boring, so while Toby’s telling yet another ‘hilarious’ lawyerly anecdote, I surreptitiously whip out my mobile from my jeans pocket and check it. Just on the off chance Simon has news. Or better still, in case Kitty herself has miraculously resurfaced. Who knows? Maybe having crashed out on someone’s sofa for past twenty-four hours? And now with nothing more than a minging hangover and a hilarious tale to tell?
Course I’ve tried to check if Kitty is by any chance visiting her foster mum, but can’t. Already made two sneaky phone calls to Foxborough, Mrs K.’s nursing home, when I was holed up in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. No answer, though. ’Course not, it’s Christmas Day. Who in their right mind would be working on reception Christmas Day?
Mum’s straight on to me. Asks me why I keep glancing down at my phone every few seconds. Then tells me to put the phone away, that it’s rude.
3.56 p.m.
Golden chance for Madeline to get yet another jibe in.
‘You know, Angie, you can just say if all this legal chat is a little bit above your head. We can always change the subject and talk about, ooh, let’s see now … what’s happening in the lives of the Kardashian sisters? Would that be a little more up your street? Or maybe the latest news from the catering industry?’
‘I was actually checking to see if there was any word from Kitty,’ I fire back, throwing her what I only hope is a scalding look.
The whole table give long sighs and eye rolls. Yet again. All in lawyerly agreement I’m totally overreacting to whatever’s going on. The gist of what they think is that Kitty’s spending the day doing whatever suits her and clearly has better things to do than making phone calls. Yes, even to the best friend she stood up on her birthday.
Relations between la famille Blennerhasset and Kitty are as follows: both Mum and Madeline are the only people I’ve ever met totally and utterly resistant to her laid-back, chaotic charm. Instead, the pair of them have her down as a notoriously unreliable, uneducated, lunatic flake-head from the wrong side of the tracks, whose worst crime in their eyes is that she’s a bad influence on me and has been ever since the day we first met. They hold her wholly responsible for my not obediently trailing after every other Blennerhasset since the Civil War and subsequently spending my days mouldering away in the law library. (Where I’d doubtless have ended up either an alcoholic by now, or else on hard drugs. Fact.) Mainly because it was Kitty who first encouraged me to stop always doing what was expected of me, but instead to follow my own dreams, and to live my best life.
Which is why, not long after graduating, I took myself off to post-grad film school, to study as a freelance director. Which is kind of why, after years of great gigs coming in, I’m now suddenly unemployed. (Film production is what you might call a soufflé business, and this is not a good economy to be in the soufflé business, trust me.)
Dad and Toby tend to be slightly more under Kitty’s spell, though every now and then Dad will remind me he still hasn’t forgotten about the time she filched a bottle of his Château Margaux for a piss-up we were both going to. Happened when I invited her to stay here one Christmas all of four years ago and he still hasn’t let it go. And I know right well Toby has a crush on Kitty, I can tell by way he blushes like a wino whenever she’s here and he keeps asking her if she’d like to swing by his flat sometime, to check out his fifty-two-inch Blu-ray plasma screen.
‘She’s clearly gone to visit that foster mother of hers down in Limerick,’ Mum is telling me, ‘so just relax and don’t let that girl ruin your Christmas, like she ruined your birthday.’
‘She didn’t ruin my birthday,’ I say loyally, to an exasperated eye-roll back at me.
‘I’m sorry, love, but it’s no secret that Kitty Hope is not exactly my favourite of your friends.’
‘Mum’s quite right, you know,’ Madeline pontificates, ‘so just stop harping on about what did or didn’t happen to Kitty and wait till she gets back to you. Knowing her, she probably forgot all about you and spent the day at some more interesting Christmas Eve do. Be perfectly typical of that nutcase you insist on hanging around with. Oh God, will you ever forget the time that she—’
But Dad interrupts. ‘Scan not your friend with microscopic glass; you know his faults, so let his foibles pass.’
Dad’s a great man for quotes, but I rarely have the first clue where they come from. Nice, though, to think he’s temporarily forgiven Kitty over the nicked Château Margaux incident.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ I smile gratefully back at him.
‘You know, I’m certain there’s absolutely nothing for you to worry about, pet,’ he says, leaning forward and gently patting my hand. ‘One of a thousand things could have happened to Kitty yesterday, you know. She’ll be in touch, you just wait and see. Never assume something is wrong until you have concrete evidence in front of you.’
Subject dismissed as far as everyone concerned.
Long pause, the table filled with sounds of nomnomnom noises, then Mum suddenly pipes up, sounding worried now.
‘Are you absolutely certain that you and she didn’t have some kind of falling out?’
I nearly splutter on a Brussels sprout.
‘Mum! There was absolutely nothing like that, I promise! Come on, you know how close Kitty and I are. We’ve never had a single cross word in all the years I’ve known her!’
Almost the truth. Only ever had one tiny blip with Kitty, in seven otherwise row-free years. In my defence, it wasn’t entirely my fault either. It was Kitty’s idea to