‘Keith?’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘I know now’s maybe not the time,’ said Janice. ‘But we need to talk about…’
‘There you are,’ shrieked Patsy, appearing from nowhere. She threw her arms around Janice and cried ‘Happy New Year!’ into her left ear.
‘Happy New Year, darling,’ said Janice, embracing Patsy. Her soft, maternal body was comforting – Patsy’s perfume enveloped her like a blanket. She didn’t want to let go.
Soon Janice was surrounded by well-wishers, and, when she looked over at him, so was Keith, his head thrown back in laughter, radiating bonhomie. Janice glanced through the door to the place in the hall where Pete and his friends had been only moments before. They had disappeared. It looked like the topic of Pete would have to wait.
Clare and Liam appeared suddenly, Liam with his navy sports jacket on and Clare carrying a black wool coat over her arm.
‘You’re not leaving already, are you?’ she said, disappointed.
“Fraid so,’ said Clare. ‘We need to get back for the babysitter.’
‘Our taxi’ll be here any minute,’ confirmed Liam. The people around them peeled away like onion skins until only the three of them were left.
‘Well, thanks for a great party, Janice,’ said Liam.
‘Yeah, thanks a million. It was fab,’ said Clare.
If Pete wouldn’t apologise to them, thought Janice grimly, then she would have to…
‘We’d better get going, Liam,’ said Clare, ever the worrier. ‘We don’t want the taxi driving off without us. They’re like hen’s teeth on New Year’s Eve,’ she added, trying to be lighthearted.
‘Liam. Clare,’ began Janice.
They stared at her, waiting.
‘I must apologise to you about Pete’s behaviour earlier.’
‘No, no, no. There’s no need,’ mumbled Liam, stuffing his hands in his trouser pockets and finding sudden fascination with his shoes.
‘None at all,’ said Clare, shaking her head and avoiding eye contact with Janice.
‘Just high spirits,’ said Liam, looking at his wife. ‘A few drinks too many, that’s all.’
‘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