The misunderstood artist

“You must tell me the story of how you two met,’ Victoria instructed her younger brother David and his guest across the dinner table rather than ask how, which was very much in keeping to her belief that being overly polite and dancing around finding out what you wanted to know was a complete waste of everyone's time. Always better be direct and firm especially where her brother was concerned who'd do his level best to waltz his way out of anything despite the fact he'd been cursed with two left feet. David looked at Jen as if to say do you want to tell the story or shall I? Even that momentary pause was too much for Victoria. “Jennifer you tell it because if David does it by the time he's finished the dinner will be cold and even the dogs will turn their noses up at it.”

David glared intently at his sister in disgust but her eyes were solely fixated firmly on his date and heeded him no attention whatsoever. 

“Please, call me Jen.” 

“Well if you insist though please note you're not to call be Vicky on any account.”

“Oh,” came the startled reply as she wondered what she'd done wrong. 

“Don't worry it's not you, the very sound of it puts my teeth on edge like a knife across a plate.” 

“Oh… okay, well as long it's not me, that's good. Well, we literally bumped into each other… or not quite literally as the case may be.”

If Jen could read minds she'd have heard Victoria saying to herself ‘well yes I can see what David sees in you, clearly another ditherer in his own mould. Do hurry up dear the potatoes are beginning to get cold.’ Instead she was already having to feign a smile of indifference and tried her best to look as interested as when she had originally broached the subject, patience not being one of her virtues. 

“It was my fault, I was walking with my head down lost in the pages of a book and not paying attention to where I was going and David happened to be coming round a blind corner at the exact same time as I was and thankfully he stopped in time before we clattered into one another, but he made this loud noise, like a woah-ing sound and I was so startled that I jumped and threw the book high up in the air and he plucked it out of the sky before it even had a chance to fall.” 

“Good lad, glad to see all those hours practicing catching the cricket ball as a child paid off Davey my boy,” came a voice from the end of the table. 

“Don't encourage him Daddy,” Victoria quickly retorted and rolled her eyes despite the message not having been for her. She was still very much top dog in the offspring stakes and happy to snarl and bare her teeth and claws as and when required even at the old man. 

David raised his hand in thanks at the old man assuming his sister wouldn't notice, he nodded in turn acknowledging the gesture and smiled and Victoria, the all seeing eye clocked both and sighed loudly. 

Jen thought about laughing aloud at seeing Victoria's face but wisely decided it was probably best not to and instead continued the tale. 

“David was being terribly British about the whole thing and kept apologising and I'm ashamed to say I was being terribly American and let him take the blame.”

“I mean in fairness Jen you did compliment me on the catch so…” David said butting in. 

“Quite right too, safe pair of hands that boy,” Daddy added from the other end of the table and for a moment it looked like Victoria was about to bang her cutlery down on the table in a physical demonstration of her annoyance but somehow she rose above it and regained her composure. The old man willed their house guest on from the end of the table “do go on dear,” and he shovelled a fork full of food into his mouth and got back on with the business of chewing. 

“Well David looked at the book and went to read the authors name out loud and got as far as John le,” and at this juncture an excited voice said “Carré!” through a half chewed mouthful quickly followed with a “sorry, mustn't talk with ones mouthful,” and the old man lowered his head so he couldn't meet contact with anyone else's eyes and only the perceived safety of his plate. 

“I see your father has better tastes than you David,” Jen tells him raising her right eyebrow at him for added effect as her head tilts forward and holds his gaze with her own. He shakes his head in the same manner as Victoria did seconds early. Must be a family trait Jen thought to herself. 

“Do we need to do the next bit?” David asks her as if throwing himself on the mercy of the jury of one. 

You could hear the old man desperately trying to chew his mouthful faster to give himself permission to speak at the end of the table and in the end decided by the grace of God he'd just swallow it and hope he didn't choke to death, which thankfully he didn't. “Christ don't tell me boy that you didn't know how to pronounce Carré. Why did me and your mother bother sending you away to all those fancy schools?”

“I assume it was to learn how to catch,” David replied which the old man found quite amusing which he demonstrated by chuckling and waving his knife unwieldy in his son's direction rather excitedly. 

“Your father clearly knows you well David. How were you going to say it?”

“Carré,” he says in the correct pronunciation lying through his teeth. “Besides Jen,” proving that some of his education must at least have been worthwhile “you yourself finished his name for me.” 

“Get used to it boy, your mother's been finishing my sentences for the best part of 50 years now!” His father rather stupidly blurts out before his brain had a chance to catch up with his mouth and warn him off saying it. 

His dear wife Anne who up until this point hadn't uttered a word since they had all sat down gives him a look that says just you wait, you'll be paying for that one for a week. It's a look the old man knows all too well and doesn't have to see it as he could already sense it. 

“Quite the wordsmith isn't he? Such wonderful turns of phrases,” the old man follows up by saying hoping to quickly steer everyone, especially his good lady wife away from his faux pas seconds previously. 

“Exactly!” Jen replies enthusiastically and everyone else in the room wonders if she's sat with the right man at the table. 

David pipes up with his well rehearsed defence “When I enquired as to whether he was a good writer, you replied that the man was an artist and I simply misunderstood your reference and took it to mean that he was more renowned for his painting than his literary output.’ Even Victoria managed to smirk at her brother's stupidity. 

“Well thankfully for you Dumbo I clarified my point.”

The old man laughed and muttered a bit too loudly “Dumbo, hah hah, yes very good. The boys got big ears and can be a bit thick now and then. Yes, very good.”

Realising all eyes are on him especially those of his son he stares at his plate again hoping they'll quickly avert away from himself, still very much a naughty schoolboy himself at heart despite having said goodbye to his glory years and certainly not au revoir as they'd never be reacquainted. 

“Yes. Yes you did and thank you for doing so,” David replies now wishing he'd been the one to tell the story because despite what his sister may have believed, his version was so much quicker and not much more than - he'd walked round a corner, made her jump, caught her book, felt incredibly guilty as the colour had drained from her face with fright and had offered to buy her coffee and something sugary on the side to get the colour back in her cheeks to which she'd kindly accepted the offer of. No, Jen's retelling was always much longer though the Dumbo part was a new knife in the back and his father's laugh another to boot. Victoria's notorious eye rolls he could deal with just fine however having survived a lifetime of them already. Well a lifetime minus a day having only met his sister 24 hours after birth and her reaction had been to take one look at him and roll her eyes and say “urrrrr,” most unenthusiastically and proceed to get annoyed upon being told by their parents that they couldn't send him back despite her daily protests that only stopped somewhere around the time he'd reached the age of 13. 

David hoped the pretence of chivalry might help him having to fight his way out of a deeper hole and put his knife down on his plate and placed his right hand on top of her left which was planted palm down on the table. “Jen my dear your food is getting cold, let me take over the telling of the story.”

Jen smiled warmly back at him warmly as if hugely appreciative of her new man and his good manners. She picks up her cutlery and allows just enough time for David to think he can deliver the cliff notes when she instructs him “don't think you're going to tell it the way you did last time you were asked mister skipping all the best bits!”

The look of resignation was instantaneous on his face. A chortle followed from the other end of the table but this time it was from his mother, who added for good measure “She's got you sussed and worked out in record time my boy.”

‘That she clearly has’ David thought to himself and so he did as he was told. He told them how upon accepting his kind invitation, deliberately adding the word kind to make himself sound better, she'd made him wait in the coffee shop for the best part of fifteen minutes before she'd finished the book she'd been so engrossed in that had meant she hadn't known of his existence rounding the corner. How, as she read he was trying to think of clever quips like ‘boy that's why they call books page turners,’ but each one he turned over in his mind sounded worse than the first. Finally she put the book down and the first thing to come out of his mouth was simply “Good read?” And it was here she has told him that he was an artist and that's where the misunderstanding on his part arose. “You had the most beautiful turn of phrase, what was it again?” He asked her, first making sure she'd finished her mouthful and could answer him politely which she dutifully did. 

“I believe I said something along the lines of clarification which went ‘the man's an artist and paints words on the pages as beautifully and delicately as Monet painted with his brush onto canvass, which David, if I remember correctly, you seemed to be quite endeared with.” 

“I believe I was yes. Thank you.”

“You're most welcome kind Sir, please continue.”

“Must I?”

“Yes. Yes you must.”

David sighed fully resigned to his fate. Well if I must he thinks as he trudged off with the shackles clanging around his feet like the condemned man off to meet his fate. 

“It was at this point Jen looked at me in a manner…” he stopped and let his brain search for the right words.

“Care for me to demonstrate?”

“Oh erm…” was all he could reply, panic stricken like a small boy caught leafing through the women's underwear section of the Littlewoods catalogue when such things still existed as they had done when he was still a child himself. 

Without waiting for an answer Jen neatly put down her cutlery on top of her plate, placed her right elbow on the table and propped her chin up with her palm, opened her hazel eyes up wide like a car's headlights on full beam and held his gaze encapsulated by her mere presence. Or so she liked him to believe, like an expert fly fisher she was actually just patiently waiting for him to hook himself on to the end of her line. 

Victoria felt the sudden urge to vomit her food back onto her plate, instead her manners stopped her short of actually doing so. 

“Oh she's clearly hypnotised you there my boy,” his father either helpfully or unhelpfully points out depending on whose ears the message was being received by. 

“Then what did you do David?” Jen asks not moving from her pose but lifting both her eyebrows this time and locking them in place until his cheeks were flushed with red. 

“Must I?”

“Oh please. I insist,” Jen replies and lowers her eyebrows and allows a big knowing smile to creep across her face. 

David puffs his cheeks out, skews his mouth up for a bit and then only after a deep breath which he then held like a diver about to put his head under the water did he admit to what he had done next. “Then I moved my coffee cup up to where I thought my mouth was, still maintaining eye contact at this juncture…” his sentence tails off as if appealing for a final stay of execution. Please show me mercy in my hour of need. Yet he found none. Now playing the role of the judge, slammed her gable down and delivered the one word verdict. Guilty but delivered aloud as “and?”

“And…” there was another pause. Another deep breath in. “And I promptly missed my mouth and deposited the contents onto my crotch instead.”

Well this was met with much merriment from all four corners of the table for quite some time after to the extent that even David, still with his cheeks flushed red, conceded that maybe it was funny after all and joined in with the laughter. Victoria decided there and then that Jennifer or Jen as she preferred to be known as, was more than a match for her little brother and garnered her approval without yet confirming it verbally. The old man had given his own long before, simply on the basis she'd been reading Le Carré and his long suffering good lady wife had done the same at the point she knew that Jen had got him sussed out and wouldn't take any nonsense from her boy. 

Jen didn't manage all of her dinner before it had grown cold but it turns out Victoria had been wrong as the dogs wolfed down the leftovers and they seemed to like the newcomer as much as everyone else had done around the dinner table but maybe not as much as David had done at the point he'd missed his mouth and by some minor miracle she had given him her real telephone number and agreed to meet up again. She won extra brownie points by offering to help clear up but the old man stole her before she could lift a plate and the two instead swapped notes by the fireplace like decades old friends and besides the house rules had always been the men do the dishes which with one man down and hiding from his duties meant that David was left to do it all by himself. Not that he seemed to have minded much after his families most positive of joint reactions to Jen.