Erin Kaye - The Art of Friendship

‘We’ve all been there,’ said Clare, nodding her head at Liam. ‘Haven’t we?’

‘Oh yes,’ he agreed. ‘I insult people on a regular basis, don’t I, pet?’ he said and laughed. Then he added hastily, his face colouring, ‘Not that I was insulted, you understand. No, not in the least. I just meant…I…’

His voice tailed off and there was an awkward pause. Their efforts to mitigate Pete’s crime only served to embarrass Janice further. They were too nice to be honest. Janice took a deep breath.

‘He was unforgivably rude to you and for that I must apologise,’ said Janice. ‘And I wish I could put it down to drink but I can’t. He was completely sober. I asked him to apologise but he simply refused,’ she said blankly, laying out the bare facts. The temptation to invent excuses for him was great. But she would not spare herself the censure that was rightly hers.

‘Taxi for McCormack,’ hollered a rough male voice from the hallway and the relief on the couple’s faces was obvious.

‘Come on, Clare,’ said Liam. ‘We need to go.’

‘God, yeah!’ said Clare, suddenly flustered. Her bag slipped and she juggled it and the coat until she had secured them both safely in her arms again. ‘Well, Janice. It was a fabulous party. Thank you so much,’ she said with a broad smile, placed a kiss on Janice’s cheek and then they were gone.

Janice, grim-faced, headed for the kitchen, looking for Emma, only to find out that she had gone home early, ostensibly with a headache.

Later Janice sat alone in the drawing room as Keith saw the last guests to the door. She nursed a glass of water, her shoes at her feet. The room had been cleared of glasses and bottles and the bar dismantled. The furniture needed to be put back in place, ornaments reinstated where they had been removed for safe keeping, and the room given a good clean. But there was little real damage, bar a few spillages on one of the rugs. Nothing that couldn’t easily be rectified.

She wished the same could be said of Pete. That the blots on his character could be shampooed out like the stains on a carpet. But she feared his nature was too ingrained now. This realisation shocked Janice for, up until now, she had always held out hope that Pete would somehow be redeemed. She had been doing so all his life.

From the very early days when, as a toddler, he bit other children so hard he left bruises, right up until tonight, she had told herself it was a ‘stage’ he would grow out of. And Keith was happy to buy into that fallacy too. They mistook Pete’s maliciousness for mischievousness, cunning for cleverness and deviousness for precocious development. They shut their eyes to the fact that his behaviour didn’t improve with the years. It just became more covert as he gradually began to understand what he could get away with, and what would get him into deep trouble.

And, when the hoped-for brothers and sisters for Pete failed to arrive, they, Keith especially, indulged him. If they had been able to have children together Janice wondered if it would’ve made any difference to the way Pete turned out. He wouldn’t have been so spoilt, but somehow she doubted if his character would’ve been fundamentally different. So much of character was down to genes, wasn’t it? Janice bit her lip and blinked back the tears. At one time she had convinced herself that good parenting would be enough to overcome the curse of Pete’s legacy. And she had been proved wrong.

Keith came into the room, let out a long, weary sigh and collapsed onto the elegant green sofa opposite Janice. He rested his elbow on the arm of the couch and rubbed his brow with forefinger and thumb, as if smoothing out wrinkles.

‘I’m knackered,’ he yawned. He kicked his shoes off and put his feet on the coffee table.

‘Me too,’ said Janice, exhausted by the emotional rollercoaster of the last few hours. She rubbed the tender red welts across the arches of her feet – the painful price of fashion.

‘Do you think everyone enjoyed themselves?’ asked Keith, resting his head on the back of the sofa.

‘Everyone except Clare and Liam. And Emma, the waitress, ’ said Janice, her anger reignited.

‘What are you talking about, Janice?’

Janice, feeling suddenly chilled, pulled a beaded beige cashmere throw off the back of the sofa and draped it across her shoulders. ‘Pete.’

Keith sighed loudly. ‘What’s he done now?’ The uninterested tone of his delivery irritated Janice. Her husband was always quick to jump to Pete’s defence.

Janice rolled her shoulders to ease the tension across her upper back and took a deep breath. She told Keith what had happened and tried not to colour the story with her opinions and prejudices.

‘Oh, Janice. Is that what had you storming out of the cloakroom with a face like thunder?’ he said when she had finished. Janice felt herself bristle with indignation. ‘It sounds like nothing more than a case of high jinks to me. And that’s hardly a crime on New Year’s Eve, is it?’

Janice took a deep breath and counted to five. Getting Keith to understand that there was something wrong with Pete was an uphill battle. ‘He assaulted that girl right in front of my eyes. And it isn’t so much what he did to Liam. Yes, I can see how it might sound like a harmless prank. And handled the right way, perhaps it might’ve been funny. But it was the way he did it. He wasn’t joining in the fun, he was poking ridicule at one of our dearest friends.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘I’m sorry, Keith,’ said Janice stiffly, ‘but you weren’t there. There was this awful silence and people didn’t know where to look. Everybody was embarrassed. And Liam was furious.’

‘You’re imagining things.’

‘I’m not,’ she said patiently.

‘Well. Look,’ said Keith. He removed his feet from the table, leant forwards and held his hands out wide, palms upwards as though weighing the truth in them. ‘Did Clare and Liam say anything to you about it? I saw you talking to them just before they left.’

‘No,’ said Janice and shrugged her shoulders. ‘Of course not. They’re far too polite to criticise their host’s son. I apologised to them though.’

‘And what did they say?’ said Keith.

‘They made out like it was nothing,’ she was forced to admit.

‘There you go then,’ said Keith, dropping his hands and relaxing back into the seat again, barely managing to keep the smile off his face.

Janice was reminded yet again of the pitfalls of arguing with a barrister. Keith had a way of rounding an argument into a corner, like a sheepdog. And once he had you cornered, you felt just as stupid as a sheep. She gripped the edges of the wrap and pulled it tighter, like a swaddling blanket.

‘I always said you let him wind you up too easily, Janice. The trick with Pete is not to let him know he’s got to you.’

Ignoring this comment she said, ‘And what about him molesting that waitress? You’re not going to shrug that off too, are you?’

He said, ‘Again, I think you’re over-reacting. Maybe they were just messing about – both of them. I don’t know. But a quick grope in the hallway hardly constitutes sexual assault.’

‘She didn’t ask for it, if that’s what you mean, Keith. It wasn’t like that. It was totally inappropriate. She was horrified and when I went looking for her later on, I was told she’d gone home.’

‘Her going home may have had nothing to do with Pete.’

‘You’re not taking me seriously, are you?’ she said, balling her fists in frustration. ‘You never believe me when it comes to Pete.’

‘I never believe you,’ he repeated, nodding his head slowly. ‘Hmm.’ This was one of his favourite devices in a debate. By drawing attention to her inaccurate generalisation, he was attempting to divert the argument into a siding. She knew what was coming next. ‘Do you think it’s fair to say that “I never believe you when it comes to Pete”?’