The food was arranged with equal meticulousness and style: Chilli Bourbon Meatballs with Grape Jelly, arranged three on a plate, on bamboo skewers stripped at the top and tied into interesting knots. Yes, really! Her Beef Bourguignon was utterly gorgeous, strewn with parsley, melting with carrots and mushrooms. I ate sparingly but really, I could’ve shovelled two helpings down, which says something for me. Meanwhile, the men just kept eating and talking—about Fred Williams, about profit margins, about the forthcoming American art exhibition (which they were disparaging before they’d even seen it). They seemed not to have noticed the effort June had gone to. I raised my glass to her secretly as the cutlery scraped away on the plates. But then, listening to the men, all of a sudden I lost my temper. Maybe it’s the book I’ve been reading, the one Edith sent me, but I said: ‘For god’s sake, gentlemen, could we make a proper bloody toast to June for this fabulous dinner?’

Jo put his glass in the air at once and said she’d better not open a restaurant because he’d be in serious trouble. Mr Parish was obviously not in the mood because he ignored me and kept talking to Jo. June collected the plates, and I got up to help, and we rinsed them at the sink. Then she got another bottle of wine from the cellar and brought it to the table. Mr Parish looked at it and nodded and she uncorked it and poured it and the men talked on and June and I started a little quiet conversation about Owen and how excited he is to be in Grade 2. Then all at once, we were arrested in our talk by what I can only describe as an expostulation. Mr Parish was spitting bits of wine out through his teeth into his wine glass and looking apoplectic. ‘Jesus June,’ he shouted. ‘There’s cork in this wine!’

June got up, swift as anything, apologised profusely and, rushing over to the kitchen, poured the offensive beverage down the sink. Opened another bottle. Got her husband a napkin (to spit into more genteelly). Rushed around to check neither Jo nor I had an atom’s worth of misplaced cork bobbing around in our dregs.

Mr Parish had recovered by this time. ‘I’ve told you,’ he said to June (patiently now), ‘not to use that corkscrew. It strips the cork. There’s a perfectly good new one I bought you and I don’t understand why you continue to persevere with the old one.’ He smiled through teeth at me and Jo. ‘Darling.’

Well, I accepted this as him making amends, but I was probably a bit tipsy now and I was feeling quite cross about everything.

We went on. We ate dessert. They talked about Fred Williams and Fred Cress and Donald Friend. Mr Parish put on his glasses and got some slides from his library and he and Jo held them up to the overhead light. He returned to the library and came back with a book of prints. Each print was protected with waxy tissue paper. They drew back the tissue-paper and inspected the originals.