“Oh hello!” she said cheerfully. “I know you. Rachel, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. I felt the size of a thimble. “Rachel Murray, I did your noir seminar.”
A man, her boyfriend or husband, looked very excited about this. “Oh my God,” he said, his arm around her. “We’re having dinner with one of your students?”
“Ex-student,” I said. “I’m actually graduating soon.”
“This is a dream come true,” the boyfriend or husband said. “I’m always desperate to sit in on one of Anne’s classes, but she never lets me, says she’d get performance anxiety. I’ve always wanted to know just how good a teacher she is.”
“Oh, well,” I said, not sure what exactly he wanted from me. “She’s very good.”
“Let me quiz you,” he said. “Let me see how good Anne actually is.”
Dr. Sheehan squirmed a little. “Don’t do that to her, Con. She doesn’t want to be quizzed on her night off.” She looked at me apologetically. “Don’t mind him, Rachel.”
Con was a bit drunk. It seemed he was that kind of man, the man who showed up too early to a party and drank everything in sight. I knew this character from my own house parties and was surprised to see that they didn’t change in later life.
“All right, I won’t quiz her; just tell me what you know.”
“Know about what?” I answered uncertainly.
“Noir. Film noir.”
I felt like a child who was being asked to sing their party piece. I was desperate for Dr. Byrne to come and rescue me.
“Well, ah,” I began. “The visuals of film noir were based heavily on German expressionist painting, on the use of light to convey mood.”
“Oh, Annie, you are good!” Con said. “German expressionist painting!”
I wanted to die. I looked at Dr. Sheehan. It seemed like she wanted to die also. For the first time in a week I wasn’t thinking about being pregnant.
“That’s enough, now. How are you, Rachel? Sit down.”
I heard the front door slam, then the heavy footsteps of Dr. Byrne.
“I’ve got the booze,” came his call. “Everyone can relax. We have enough to take out a baby elephant.”
Ciara shouted, “That’s no way to talk about yourself, Fred.”
Then Deenie’s voice. “Just in time. The starters are ready.”
“Should we all sit down?”
“Let’s all sit down.”
The UCC gang, terrible Con and I filed into the kitchen. The table near the window had been folded out and dressed with white cloths. Some people came in from the back garden, where they had been smoking. Everyone had to pinch around the wall to find their seat. There were place cards at each setting, and some of the cards had nicknames on them, like “Boots” and “Woofter” and “The Nose.” Some of them were normal, and just said “Anne.”
I wondered if Deenie had a nickname for me that I wasn’t aware of, because I could not find my name. I was the last person standing in a room full of seated people. It was then that the Harrington-Byrnes finally saw me. Ten weeks pregnant in a mint-green tea dress that, on reflection, was not as dressy as it should have been.
“Rachel,” Dr. Byrne said. He was opening a bottle of wine, his face frozen in shock.
Deenie was plating the scallops, and looked up. Her white face became scarlet, her expression dead, her hands still.
“Rachel,” she said.
“Hello.”
I had only been in the house ten minutes, and had suffered so much humiliation already. I wanted to cry.
Then, with as much joviality as I could muster, I said: “Have I got the wrong night?”
Everyone at the table was peering at me in confusion. There were fourteen other guests, and two chairs for the hosts. There was no chair for me.
The fair-haired editor spoke up. “Were you going to make your intern eat in the garden, lads?”
“No,” Fred said robotically. “Rachel. Lovely to see you. Aideen…forgot to tell me she invited you.”
“Well,” I said awkwardly. “Here I am.”
He disappeared to his study and dragged an office chair to the top of the table. Deenie started passing out plates of scallops with black pudding.
I tried hard to disguise my horror. The office chair loomed over the other chairs, and if I sat on it I would be on display for the whole meal.
“Rachel, you take my seat,” he said, with false cheer. “I’ll take the throne.”
At least half of the guests were dying of second-hand embarrassment. I slowly lowered myself into Dr. Byrne’s place. I started replaying the phone conversation with Deenie in my head. She had invited me, hadn’t she? Was I suffering from pregnancy brain already?
Everyone had resumed a kind of awkward chatter, too polite to ask what on earth was going on.
Deenie had definitely called me. Otherwise, how would I even know this dinner party was going on? Maybe she had told me about the dinner party, but had mentioned it in passing, and I misinterpreted it as an invite. Maybe she had told me, but had found some tactful middle-class way of asking me for catering help, and I thought that was an invite.
But I was sure, sure as the ten-week-old foetus in my stomach, that Deenie had phoned me to ask me to this dinner party. She’d even said I might make some contacts. She said I was part of the team that had made Little Fire. I had the book at home. It thanked me for policing the vibe.
Right now, I was murdering the vibe. Some advanced scallop mathematics went on in the kitchen, and I was passed a plate with one scallop on it, while everyone else had two.
The fishy odour mixed with the earthy smoke of the black pudding. My stomach turned over, and I took a long sip of water, wanting desperately to gag.
“Sorry,” the woman next to me said. “I think that’s my water glass.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I murmured, and grabbed for my own, the glass that was supposed to be Dr. Byrne’s.
The drunk man started blithering away about how he thought he would be a great lecturer, and felt as though he had missed his chance. This eased the tension somewhat, and the group started talking about all the silly things they would teach.
“I can always get a pen to start working again after it’s gone dry,” Ciara said. “I could teach a course in that.”
“I’ve seen every episode of Keeping Up Appearances,” someone else said. “I would do a course on class tensions in post-war Britain.”
They had clearly thought about this before.
“What was the name of the brother-in-law again? Something weird. Otto.”
“Onslow.”
“Onslow!”
Deenie and Dr. Byrne were chatting politely to people on either side of them, but neither looked at me, or at each other. I wanted desperately to leave, but I had enough social sense to know that leaving was the only thing I could do that was worse than staying.
So I stayed, and I mashed up my scallop with a fork, and thought: No matter how bad this is, it has to end. Dinners always end, eventually. That’s the thing about dinners.
The main course came out of the oven, and each of us was passed a clean warm plate. The fishy smell was replaced with the heavy odour of meat and onion and hot wine.