Dinner started moderately well. They had, after all, had some time to simmer down, and there were two outside, local couples, nearer our hosts in age, who had been invited to join the party, so, after an uneventful glass of champagne in the garden, the ten of us sat down at about a quarter to nine that night and at first made small talk as if none of the earlier episode had taken place. Indeed, I’m sure the newcomers, an army general with a nice wife and a nearby landowning couple, had no idea that their dear friends, Peter and Billie, had been playing out a touring version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf until just before they broke up to have their baths. The dining room was quite handsome, with excellent china and glass on the table and again, surprisingly good pictures. I would guess that Peter came from a family that had lost its estates but held on to a lot of the kit, which was quite common then. Or now, really. But I’m not sure there was limitless money left and I imagine Billie had cooked the food. In ungrand, rectory-type houses, even where the owners belonged to what used to be called the Gentry, there wasn’t nearly as much pulling in of temporary catering staff in the Sixties as there is today and most hostesses felt compelled, perhaps by some lingering war ethic, to do the work themselves. I have said before that the food was seldom much good and would often depend on ghastly magazine-printed receipts, as women then would cut these out and paste them into kitchen scrapbooks, printed especially for the purpose. The cooking done, it was quite normal to ask a couple of local women to come in and help serve it and wash up and so on, which was exactly what had been arranged on this particular night. We’d got through the first course easily enough, the obligatory salmon mousse that appeared in those days on almost every dinner table with taste-numbing regularity. It was followed by some sort of escalope in a glutinous sauce, covered in sprinklings of this and that, and with carrots cut into terrifying rosettes, which again we survived. But before the pudding made its appearance came the first rumblings of trouble. I was about halfway down the table, in my usual, junior position, when I saw the soldier’s wife, Lady Gregson, turn to Sam Hoare who was sitting on her right, as the maid removed her empty plate. ‘Wasn’t that delicious?’ she said, which could hardly be considered contentious.
Sam opened his mouth to agree, but before he could do so his host, on Lady Gregson’s other side, cut in, ‘It was more delicious than it was original, but that’s not saying much.’
‘What?’ Billie Mainwaring’s voice sliced through the atmosphere, silencing most of the rest of us, even those who didn’t know what was going on.
Lady Gregson, who was a nice woman but not an exceptionally clever one, now took the measure of the situation and spoke before Peter could answer. ‘We were just saying how much we enjoyed the last course.’
But Peter had been tucking into his excellent claret for quite a while by this time and clearly some sort of dam within him had at last given way. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I always enjoy it. Every time you produce it. Which is more or less every time anyone is unlucky enough to dine in this house.’ At which moment, with slightly unfortunate timing, one of the maids arrived at Lady Gregson’s left, which placed her next to Peter’s chair. She was holding a platter of what looked like white cheesecake. ‘Oh God, darling.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Not this again.’
‘I love cheesecake.’ Lady Gregson’s tone was now becoming harder, as if she, sensing a whiff of rebellion, were determined to impose order on the gathering whether we liked it or not. She was the kind of woman who would have been very useful at Lucknow.
‘What about the strawberries?’ Peter was now staring straight at his wife.
‘We’re having cheesecake.’ Billie’s voice had all the animation of the Speaking Clock. ‘I didn’t think we’d want the strawberries.’
‘But I bought them for tonight.’
‘Very well.’ There was a quality of tension in the air that reminded me of one of those films, so popular in that era, about the threat of nuclear war, a universal obsession of the time. The Big Scene was always centred on whether or not the President of Somewhere was going to press the button and start it. Having let the moment resonate, Billie spoke again: ‘Mrs Carter, please fetch the strawberries.’
The poor woman didn’t know what to make of this. She looked at her employer as if she couldn’t be serious. ‘But they’re-’
Billie cut her off with a raised palm, nodding her head like a fatal signal from a Roman emperor. ‘Just bring the strawberries, please, Mrs Carter.’
Of course, there are times when this sort of thing comes as a relief. As most of us know, there is nothing that will cheer a dreary dinner party more than a quarrel between a husband and wife. But this incident seemed to have acquired an intensity that made it slightly inappropriate as guest-pleasing fare. It was all too raw and real. At least we did not have long to wait for the next act. In the interim the rest of the company had taken the disputed cheesecake, but nobody had begun to eat. I saw Sam give a quick wink to Carina and, on my left, Terry’s chair was beginning to shake with smothered giggles. Apart from these slight diversions we just sat there, divining that, in the words of the comic routine, we ain’t seen nothing yet. Mrs Carter reentered the room and went to Lady Gregson’s side with a bowl of strawberries, but as she began to help herself it was absolutely clear to everyone present that the fruit was completely frozen, like steel bullets, and had just been removed from the freezer. The wretched woman dug in the spoon and put them on to her plate, where they fell with a metallic noise like large ball bearings. Mrs Carter moved to Peter, who carefully spooned out a big, rattling helping. Clatter, clatter, clatter, they sounded as he heaped them on to his plate. On went Mrs Carter to the next guest and the next, no one was passed by, no one dared refuse, so the hard, little marbles fell noisily on to every plate in the room. Even mine, although I cannot now think why we didn’t just refuse them, as one might refuse anything in the normal way of things. With a puzzled look Mrs Carter retired to the kitchen and then began the business of eating these granite chips. By this time you may be sure there was no conversation in the room, nor anything remotely approaching it. Just ten people trying to eat small round pieces of stone. At one stage the General seemed to get one lodged in his windpipe and threw his head up sharply, like a tethered beast, and no sooner were we past this hazard than the landowner’s wife, Mrs Towneley, bit down with a fearsome crack and reached for her mouth with a cry that she’d broken a tooth. Even this did not elicit a Governor’s Pardon from our hosts. Still we crunched on, particularly Peter who bit and chewed and sucked and smiled, as if it were the most delicious confection imaginable. ‘You seem to be enjoying them,’ said Lady Gregson, whose destiny that night was to make everything worse, just when she sought to do the opposite.
‘It’s such a treat to eat something unusual,’ said Peter. ‘At any rate in this house.’ He spoke loudly and clearly into the silent crunching room. Inevitably, all eyes turned to his wife.
For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to respond. But she did. ‘You fucking bastard,’ said Billie, reverting to her standard vocabulary when enraged, although actually this time she spoke quite softly and the words were rather effective despite their lack of originality. Next, she stood and, leaning forward, picked up the bowl holding the remainder of the icy inedibles. With a gesture like throwing a bucket of water on to a fire, she flung what was left of the frozen fruit at Peter, in the process spraying the rest of us, as well as the table and the floor, with sharp, bouncing, painful little missiles. She finished by lobbing the bowl at him which missed since he ducked and shattered against an attractive George IV wine cooler in the corner. In the pause that followed you could hear only breathing.