Page 44 of Old Girls Go Greek
‘That sounds like a group directive to me. We’d better comply or she might turn nasty. Have you had a good afternoon?’ he said as we scanned our menus.
‘We had some local wine. It was four euros from the supermarket.’
‘And was it nice?’
‘It depends what you mean by nice,’ I said. ‘We didn’t have any tasty nibbles specially selected from local suppliers to complement it.’
He chuckled. ‘That’s where you went wrong, obviously.’
I laughed too, feeling more at ease.
‘There is a lovely looking menu in their actual restaurant. I was looking on their website,’ he said at last. ‘I thought we might go there one evening, if you like? It was just an idea.’
‘Count me in! That sounds great,’ I said, and I took a deep breath, hoping the others hadn’t overheard him. ‘But how would we get there? We don’t have a car.’
It was funny talking like this with him, using the ‘we’ word about a man again. It made me feel rather odd.
‘Local bus? Taxi?’ he said.
He turned back to his menu, and so did I.
‘Fish with purple potato salad and black garlic ketchup,’ Dennis announced loudly from his end of the table. ‘That sounds colourful. I bet you wouldn’t get that in Lower Begley.’
‘Steak and asparagus,’ Will said. ‘I like the sound of that.’
I was reminded of the mournful Fifi in the West Midlands, who undoubtedly would have blown a gasket if she had heard this.
In the end I decided that as I was wearing a black t-shirt, I was safe ordering linguini with tomatoes and clams. Undoubtedly I would splatter some of it over myself, but no one would notice.
It took a long time to take the order for our food, as people kept asking for substitutions and changing their minds when they heard what other people were ordering, but at last we were left alone with some carafes of iced water and house wine.
‘I’m not drinking this evening,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve had enough for one day and my taste buds need a chance to recover from the wine we had earlier.’
‘Good idea,’ he said, ‘me too.’
How nice that he didn’t think he had to persuade me to change my mind. Unless I was the designated driver, Malcolm had always protested when I said I didn’t want a drink. Calling me a killjoy or boring. Which perhaps I had been. To me, wine had been something to do with a celebration, not just something to be knocked back.
‘Done any painting yet?’ Will asked.
I pulled one of the long, thin breadsticks out of the jar on the table and bit off the end.
‘Nothing,’ I said defiantly, and he grinned.
‘Drawing? Sketching? Creating the outline for something?’
I shook my head. ‘None of the above.’
‘Thought about it?’
‘Nope.’
He took a sip of iced water.
‘Jillian would say we are lazy.’ He grinned.
‘Not lazy, I prefer to think of it as selective participation.’
He laughed. ‘Good for you. That sounds far more acceptable. But we will be getting a very bad end-of-term report from Jillian at this rate.’
