I can sense Bernard smiling supportively across the table at me, but as ever on these occasions, I fail to shine.
‘Well, emm, I’m afraid I’ve just been a bit busy with work and with all the wedding planning lately to get to the theatre …’ is all I can say by way of an answer, trailing off lamely.
Yet more silence, but as mortifying as it is to feel them mentally delegating me into the social slow lane, I remind myself that it’s not exactly a barrel of laughs for poor Bernard whenever he has to spend an evening at my family’s house, either.
By contrast, whenever he comes to visit us there’s precious little chat about arts and culture, instead he’s forced to listen to my dad and my younger sister Gracie holding hot debates, which regularly spill over into out and out shouting matches, about whose team is doing best in the Premiership. Dad’s a staunch Man. Utd man, Gracie is a lifelong Arsenal supporter, whereas the nearest thing Bernard’s ever come to a football match is when he has to park his bike close to the training pitches around the back of City College.
To make matters worse, the very first time I brought him back to our house for dinner, I’d forgotten to fully brief the poor, unsuspecting guy. Which of course meant I never got the chance to explain that watching Match of the Day was sacrosanct viewing in our house.
‘Alright if I turn the telly box off?’ Bernard asked politely when we all gathered in our tiny sitting room after dinner, oblivious to the fact that Dad and Gracie were glued to the match and that the whole dinner had been scheduled so they wouldn’t have to miss a single minute of it. ‘Far easier to chat when the dratted thing is switched off, don’t you think?’
The hot glare Dad gave him would have turned a lesser man to stone.
Nor are things any better for Bernard if he’s forced to make polite conversation with my mum, who if she were ever to enter Mastermind could probably take ‘great soap operas of our time’ as her specialist subject. No kidding, the woman not only watches Eastenders, but avidly follows Coronation Street and Red Rock, as well as Home and Away. And even more astonishingly, she’s actually able to keep fully up to speed on each and every one of them. Bernard, on the other hand, doesn’t even own a TV so more often than not he just sits through evenings at our house with a look of painful resignation on his face.
‘Imagine not owning a telly in this day and age,’ Mum muttered after one of these excruciating family dinners. ‘His house must look like it’s just been burgled.’
Anyway, back to the Pritchards, and now Beatrice is looking over at me, like she’s finally hit on some common ground that she and I can chat about.
‘Oh, you know what, Tess? I’ve just thought of something you can most definitely help me with,’ she says triumphantly from the top of the table. I smile hopefully back at her as she knocks back another gulpful of G&T, hoping against hope that this might be something I can contribute at least two words to.
‘Tell me this, dear,’ she goes on. ‘I was in the library the other day and some schoolgirls came in, full of chatter and clatter and whatnot. They kept talking quite loudly about some sort of cultural phenomenon that I’m terribly afraid has completely passed me by. Pop culture, you know, far more your field than mine. But I found myself consumed with curiosity, so I thought, I know, I’ll ask Tess.’
‘Erm … ask me what?’ I ask, silently praying I have something halfway intelligent to say here.
‘What in God’s name is a Kardashian?’
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m genuinely fond of my in-laws to be, I really am. And I know for certain that Beatrice didn’t mean to be patronising.
I’m sure it’s just the way it sounded, that’s all.
*
Hours later and with Bernard three sheets to the wind after a few sherries too many, he and I are bundled into my little car on our way back to his house, where I’m staying tonight. I instantly turn on the heater to try and thaw myself out a bit after the last few hours sitting in sub-zero temperatures. But then no member of the Pritchard family ever seems to feel the cold and I don’t think they’ve switched their heating on since about 1997.
‘Was that deadeningly boring for you, sausage?’ Bernard yawns sleepily from the passenger seat.
‘No! Not at all!’ I say a bit overeagerly. ‘Beatrice and Desmond are absolute dotes.’
‘Good, good, good,’ he yawns back at me and knowing that he’ll probably be sound asleep inside of thirty seconds flat, I switch on the car radio. It’s just midnight and there’s a late-night chat show on, one of those programmes that’s a big, shouty mess, where callers ring in to give out about water charges or else to gripe about whatever story is dominating the news that day. So I start to listen in, thinking if nothing else, at least it’ll keep my mind awake.
‘You know, I never liked that Kate King,’ a woman is sniping over the phone to the show’s host. ‘If you ask me, Damien King is well rid of her. I’ve never come across greed like it! Hanging on to a painting that’s worth nearly a hundred million euros, when I’m sure her husband has her more than well provided for in their separation? Wasting the Guards’ time with that? Some people are shameless and in my opinion, I only hope she gets what’s coming to her.’
I turn up the radio, hoping it doesn’t wake Bernard, but he’s snoozing peacefully away, completely oblivious. There’s just something about Kate King that makes me sit up and pay attention. She’s always in the news, she’s one of those people who’s forever looking out at you from news-stands and on the cover of glossy magazines. In fact it’s impossible to sit in a waiting room anywhere in this country and idly flick through a copy of a social magazine without seeing her beautiful, sculpted and very definitely lifted face gazing haughtily back at you.
The woman’s been a media darling for decades now, ever since she first started out as a model. Even more so since she managed to nab Damien King, one of the wealthiest men not just in this country, but in the world. So for years she wasn’t just beautiful and famous, but the trophy wife of an actual billionaire, and apparently with no intention of not rubbing peoples’ noses in their obscene wealth.
On paper, I think, eyes focused on the road ahead, there’s never been any reason to dislike the woman and yet the weird thing is that everyone does. For years she was just too upfront about her glittering lifestyle, and it stuck in people’s throats. In the worst throes of the recession, it was like the Kings were going out of their way to flaunt their obscene wealth in everyone’s faces; the private planes, the statement homes, his fortieth birthday party that according to the papers cost over two hundred thousand, all while people who lived near the Castletown estate, not two miles from her front door, were having their homes repossessed.
Kate King is almost like a Marie Antoinette character of our age; you mightn’t particularly like her and yet you still feel this irresistible pull to read all about her.
And like most of us, I vividly remember reading about her being in breach of a number of court orders about a year and a half ago now. Something to do with this painting, A Lady of Letters, or whatever it’s called – a priceless Rembrandt, apparently. The one Damien King was prepared to bring charges against his own wife to get back.
Or ex-wife, I think, correcting myself. Because if Your Daily Dish and The Goss and just about every other online journal I scan through these days are to be believed, Kate and Damien have been living separate lives for years now and are just biding their time apart till they can officially divorce.
I’m a bit behind with the news these days, what with all the wedding planning, but I know from my most gossipy pal Monica, who’s obsessed with the Kings, that Damien has apparently shacked up with another woman,