There but for The Read Free Page B

Anna.
    Very expensive, Anna said.
    She winked at the going child.
    Bye, she said.
    Brooke was nine, apparently, and lived round the corner in the student flats. Her parents were research fellows or postgraduates at the university.
    Obviously not ours, Genevieve Lee said. Very cute, though. Quite precocious.
    Genevieve Lee poured the coffee and told Anna about the night of their annual alternative dinner party, which was something she and her husband, Eric, usually held at the beginning of the summer before everybody disappeared for the holidays. Once a year they liked to invite people who were a bit different from the people they usually saw, as well as the friends they saw all the time, Hugo and Caroline and Richard and Hannah. It was always interesting to branch out. Last year they had invited a Muslim couple; the year before they had had a Palestinian man and his wife and a Jewish doctor and his partner. That had resulted in a very entertaining evening. This year an acquaintance of Hugo and Caroline’s, a man whose name was Mark Palmer, had brought Miles Garth with him.
    Mark is gay, Genevieve Lee explained. He’s an acquaintance of Hugo and Caroline’s. We thought Miles was Mark’s partner, but it seems not. Probably for the best, because if they were partners there’d be an outstanding age difference between them, twenty years, more maybe. They apparently go to a lot of musicals together. Mark Palmer loves musicals. They tend to, don’t they? He’s in his sixties. He’s Hugo and Caroline’s friend.
    Genevieve Lee went on to tell her that Brooke’s parents, the Bayoudes, had been invited too, and had also come along, though they’d recently moved here not from anywhere in Africa but from Harrogate.
    Anyway, we were all having a lovely supper, Genevieve Lee said. Everything was going really well, until after the main course, he just stood up and went upstairs. Well, we thought, naturally, that he was going to the bathroom so I waited the sweet course, which was complicated in itself, because I needed to torch the brûlées. But he didn’t come down. Fifteen minutes at least. Possibly more, because we were quite happy, just drunk enough to be happy; that’s another thing about him, he wasn’t drinking, which always makes you self-conscious if you go to dinner or if you hold a dinner and someone’s not drinking and we all, I mean everyone else, is. Anyway, I put the coffee maker on, did the scorching, served everybody else, left them to get on with it, popped upstairs and knocked on the bathroom door and asked him was he all right. Of course he didn’t answer. Of course he wasn’t in the bathroom at all. Of course he’d already locked himself in our spare room.
    He really virulently disliked what you’d served for starter and main, then, Anna said.
    Genevieve Lee got quite excited.
    He’s like that, is he? she said. Other people eating scallops and chorizo would have upset him that much?
    Ah, well, I’ve no idea, no, I was just, you know, making a joke, Anna said.
    It’s no laughing matter, Genevieve Lee said.
    No, Anna said. Of course not.
    You have no idea how awful this is for us, Genevieve Lee said. There is lovely, lovely furniture in there. It is a really outstanding spare room in there. Everybody who has stayed there has told us so. This last thirteen days has been hell.
    Hell on earth, yes, I can imagine, Anna said.
    She looked hard at the wood of the floor.
    So then Eric went up, Genevieve Lee said. He knocked on the bathroom door and had the same response as I’d had, no response at all. When the coffee was poured and we were all, all nine of us, actually getting a little worried about him, his friend Mark, the man who’d brought him here in the first place, went up. Then he came down saying he’d tried the bathroom and that its door wasn’t locked, and that there was actually nobody in the bathroom, the bathroom was empty. So Eric went up to check, and then so did I. Completely empty. So