she had almost ended up shouting at her son. But she was so furious about the way he had tried to use Lily to blackmail her into doing something which she knew would be disastrous.
The conversation had unsettled her, though. David, even by his absence, could still sour the atmosphere between her and Stephen. The phone call had not been an auspicious harbinger for the week ahead.
? The Shooting in the Shop ?
Two
“So how many people are coming to your open house?”
“I’ve no idea. That’s why it’s called an open house.”
Carole couldn’t be doing with this. “You must have some idea…roughly…”
“Well, I can guarantee it’ll be more than ten and less than a thousand.”
Jude was being far too skittish for her neighbour’s taste. “But surely you have to think in terms of catering?”
“There’ll be plenty of nibbles and things.”
“And hot food?” asked Carole, hoping for an answer to the sit-down meal question.
“Oh yes, some hot food,” replied Jude, with infuriating lack of precision.
“And drink?”
“Certainly drink. Plenty of wine.”
“But the invitation says ‘until the booze runs out’.”
“Yes.”
“Well, the time at which the booze runs out is going to depend on how many people are there, isn’t it?”
Jude nodded and immediately went into a parody of an old-fashioned maths teacher. “If it takes three men twenty-five minutes to empty a seventy-five centilitre wine bottle, how long will it take twenty-five men to empty the same bottle and, working at that rate, how many bottles would be required to keep a party of sixty-three people going for three hours and seventeen minutes?”
“I do wish you’d treat this seriously, Jude. And, incidentally, you clearly have done a numbers check. You said you were expecting sixty-three people.”
“No, I didn’t. That was just a random example for my pretend mental arithmetic challenge.”
“Oh. Well, you should have thought about it. Your open house is the day after tomorrow, you know.”
“Yes, I do know. But come on, it’s only a party, nothing to get hung up about.”
Though Carole Seddon would never be heard to use the expression, for her a party was exactly the sort of thing to get ‘hung up about’. She sniffed. “Well, I would want a bit more information about numbers for any social event I was catering for.”
Someone of less benign character might have made some sharp riposte to that, but all Jude said was, “It’ll be fine, I promise you.”
“And you’re confident you’ll have enough to drink?”
Jude grinned mischievously. “I’ll have enough till it runs out.”
“But you don’t know when that’s going to be. Suppose someone arrives at the party after it’s all run out?”
“I promise you, there’ll be plenty.” Jude ran a chubby hand through the blond hair piled up on her head. She was dressed, as ever, in an array of draped garments which embellished rather than disguised the contours of her ample body. “I’ve got plenty in,” she went on, “and a lot of people will bring bottles, anyway.”
“Oh, is it a ‘bring a bottle party’?”
“No.”
“It didn’t say it was on the invitation.”
“It didn’t say it was because it isn’t. It’s just that when you invite people to a party, a lot of them do instinctively bring along a bottle.”
Another thing of which Carole would have to make a note. And another moral dilemma. What kind of bottle should she take along to the open house? Jude, she knew, had a preference for Chilean Chardonnay, but would her other guests like that? And then again, what sort of price level should one aim for? Carole rarely spent more than five pounds on a bottle of wine, but when her contribution joined the others on the Woodside Cottage sideboard, she didn’t want to be shown up as a cheapskate.
“Anyway,” said Jude, slurping down the remains of her coffee and picking up her tatty straw shopping bag from the ultraclean floor of the High Tor kitchen, “I must get on. Bit more shopping to do.”
“For the open house?” asked Carole, still intrigued by the stage management details of the forthcoming event.
“No, I’ve got most of that. A few presents outstanding, though.”
“Oh, I’ve done all mine,” said Carole, instinctively righteous. “Well, I’ve done Stephen, Gaby and Lily. Those are the most important ones.” The last sentence was a bit of a cover-up. They were not only the most important ones, they were the only ones. Carole didn’t buy presents for anyone other than Stephen, Gaby and Lily. For many years the only name on the list had been Stephen. But she didn’t want to admit that, even to Jude. Once again there loomed the awful fear of being pitied.
“What have you got for Lily?”
“Oh, she’s easy. There are so many things out there for little girls. I got her some lovely baby outfits from Marks and Spencer. Their children’s clothes are very good, you know. And not too expensive. I checked the sizes with Gaby, but of course, being Marks, she can exchange them if she doesn’t like them.”
“Oh.” To give something on the assumption that it might well be changed seemed to Jude to be a negation of the principle of present-giving. She spent so much time matching the gift to the personality of its recipient that no one ever contemplated returning one of hers.
“That’s what I do with Stephen too,” Carole went on briskly. “I always give him two Marks and Spencer shirts. And I put the receipts in the parcel.”
“So that he can change them?”
“Yes.”
“And does he often change them?”
“How would I know?”
“Well, if you see him wearing a shirt you recognize as one you gave him, then you’ll know he hasn’t changed it.”
“I’d never thought of that.” But now she did think of it, Carole realized she
“And what about Gaby? What have you bought her?”
“Oh, toilet water. Lily of the Valley. You can never go wrong with toilet water.”
Jude’s plump face screwed up in disbelief. “Toilet water? You’re giving your daughter-in-law toilet water?”
“Yes,” Carole replied defensively. “Toilet water’s always a safe present.”
“A safe present for a maiden aunt fifty years ago, perhaps. But Gaby’s in her early thirties. If she opens her present on Christmas morning and finds she’s got toilet water, she’ll be depressed for the rest of the holiday.”
“We don’t open presents till after lunch on Christmas Day,” said Carole primly.
“Well, whenever she opens it, a bottle of toilet water is going to have the same effect.”
“Are you suggesting I should give Gaby something else?”
“Of course I’m suggesting you should give her something else. And you should give Stephen something else, too.”
“But what’s wrong with his shirts?”
“They are totally impersonal. They could have come from anyone. Come on.”
Carole’s pale blue eyes blinked behind her rimless glasses. She didn’t think receiving a present that could have come from anyone was necessarily such a bad thing.
But she felt her thin hands grasped in Jude’s plump ones as she was pulled up from her chair. Her dog
