The Dinner Guest by B Walter (best short books to read txt) 📕

and rugby. Titus wasn’t quite like that though. His appetite didn’t seem to have changed that much, and he was never one for exercise outside of his school sports. In fact, thinking about the amount of physical education his school put upon him, maybe that wasn’t very surprising.

‘I’m going to head back up. Have a nice time with your book friends,’ he said, sloping off.

‘Don’t go to bed too late!’ Matthew called back up after him.

‘Can’t hear you, Fathers!’ came the predictable reply.

He always liked to call us that collectively: ‘The Fathers’. Matthew sometimes complained it made us sound like people of the church. Titus had leaped on this, occasionally referring to us as Father Matthew and Father Charlie with mock deference, sometimes with a hint of an Irish lilt to his voice. The rest of the time, he called Matthew ‘Dad’ and used ‘Dad’ and ‘Charlie’ interchangeably with me – usually if he needed to make specific reference to one of us. Matthew had naturally been ‘Daddy’ all the way through Titus’s early years, since he was the only father figure the child properly knew. When I came along, I was just ‘Charlie’ for a time to the sweet little five-year-old who always greeted me with such joy when I came round to visit his dad. And then, quite suddenly, and seemingly without prompting, he’d started to call me ‘Daddy Charlie’.

The day he first did this was etched onto my memory. It was the weekend I was properly moving into Charlie’s Marble Arch flat. It was a Friday evening and I was driving the last remaining bits of my stuff over from Eccleston Square. It wasn’t long after Matthew’s mother had died in a car accident in the Highlands. He’d been back and forth between Scotland and England and it had been a difficult time for him, coping with all that and having a child to bring up, especially since his mother was the only close family he had left. That day, he was cooking a romantic dinner for the two of us and I was fantasising about the herbed cod and salad he’d promised, along with something to drink – something ice cold, since the hot Friday air was unforgivably stifling and the traffic around Victoria gridlocked. To make matters worse, the air-con had broken in my car.

When I’d finally got to the apartment block and was in the lift, the concierge on the desk having helped me with my bags, I was hot and irritable and annoyed that I was nearly half an hour late. But when I stepped into Matthew’s air-conditioned apartment, a sense of calm came across me. The place was cool, warming and comforting and just so right. And there he was, sitting on the sofa with Titus on his lap, reading a picture book, my godmother, Meryl, sitting next to him, laughing along as Matthew did the voice of a monkey or something in a high-pitched voice. He’d always been the more playful one of us. The more naturally paternal. I can make adults feel at ease without much effort, but it took me longer to get used to being a parent. Charm doesn’t get you very far when a stroppy nine-year-old feels his bedtime should be moved later. He looked up and saw me, and his smile filled his face in the beautiful way it always did. ‘Look who’s here,’ he’d said to Titus, and the child had looked round and beamed, and shuffled off Matthew’s lap and shouted ‘Daddy Charlie’s here!’

I have to admit that the thought of that moment years later would still cause me to choke up. Meryl had taken Titus off our hands that evening for a night of Disney movies at her house, but to be honest, I would have been cool with him staying. Because that joyful exclamation of ‘Daddy Charlie’ made me realise how special this whole thing was: this was the start of a new part of our lives. All three of us, together.

Anita arrived first for the book club. The one member I had the least wish to talk to turned up a good forty minutes too early. Sometimes she arrived with Jerome, her father-in-law, if he asked his driver to stop off at her Pimlico home on the way from Mayfair, but it meant a bit of a detour for him and sometimes she decided to walk. Her reconciliation with his son Harry five years ago, after their four-year estrangement, had forced Jerome to treat her more like family again rather than a distant acquaintance he wished he could be rid of. Harry, meanwhile, refused point blank to join the book club and apparently saw it as the perfect opportunity to go drinking with his fellow TV-producer chums in oh-so-trendy bars in Soho.

‘Charlie, darling, what are you doing here?’ Anita asked when I opened the door. She looked at me as if a trained leopard had just greeted her on the doorstep. ‘Lovely to see you too, Anita,’ I said, smiling at her. She gave me a suspicious look, stepping past me with purpose and then handing me the coat she had over her arm. ‘I walked,’ she said, as if this explained her early arrival. ‘Now, where’s Matthew? What’s going on? Why are you here?’ She marched onwards towards the kitchen, no doubt homing in on the warm lights and smell of baking.

‘Good evening, Anita,’ Matthew said, looking up from adding a touch of icing sugar to one of the cakes he and Titus had baked earlier. ‘You’re early.’

‘Yes, I know, I walked,’ she said again. ‘Tell me, why is your husband here? I thought he hated books?’

I made a sound whichI hoped conveyed polite disagreement. ‘I don’t hate books. I’m not a monster.’

She gave me another glance of distrust, then turned back to Matthew. ‘I think there’s enough sugar on that now, or we’ll all have type 2 diabetes by the end of the night. Now, is anyone