his precision and the Welsh lamb flopped in even slices, each a quarter of an inch thick. His years of wielding the scalpel and performing small surgeries on lumps and warts and toes meant he was a confident carver of meat. Grace saw the lamb was lightly bloodied: in the middle of each slice was a large red spot. ‘Not properly cooked,’ her mother would have muttered critically if Grace had roasted the joint. But her mother said nothing. She wasn’t one to draw attention to her own failings or shortcomings in the kitchen.
‘Move the tureen of vegetables out of my way, please, Grace,’ her father requested, and she lifted the heavy tureen further away from the carving platter.
‘Thank you,’ her father replied. ‘And the gravy boat, please. It is also in my way.’
Wilfred was supposed to be here. An extra tablemat and a silver knife and fork had been laid for him in Madoc’s place. Her father had invited Wilfred by telephone – had shouted the invitation down the line. Grace had heard him while she was upstairs. Wilfred no doubt had shouted back his acceptance. They had waited three-quarters of an hour until it was a quarter to two, by which time the boiled vegetables had long since stopped steaming and started to toughen. Now it was painfully obvious to her, and to her father and mother, that Wilfred had proposed – but not meant it – and said yes to dinner – and not meant it. Was there a word for this, Grace wondered. Jilted? No, jilted happened at the altar. This was being jilted before the altar was even in sight.
‘Is this lamb from Green Grove Farm, Mrs Reece?’
‘It is,’ her mother replied curtly. There was the sound of the knife sawing into the bone. A small pool of thin blood gathered on the platter. Raw meat was dangerous. When a patient rushed to see her father bent double, clutching their stomach, and the sound of their retching filled the whole house, her father lectured them on what he called food hygiene: ‘The cleaner you are, the healthier you are,’ he was fond of declaring, and advised his female patients that it was better to singe the pie or burn the joint than to undercook it. ‘A burned dinner is safer than a raw one,’ he’d state. But now at the dining-table he was unforthcoming in the face of the uncooked lamb, unwilling to provoke his snappy wife.
Grace was trying hard to keep her thoughts under control and, to distract herself, began studying the picture decorating her dinner-plate. It was the Willow Pattern. Grace had read about it in her Olive Wadsley’s Weekly magazine: the blue man and the blue maiden, Chang and Knoon-shee, were crossing a bridge, Knoon-shee carrying her box of jewels, leaving the pagoda, fleeing her enraged father because he forbade their love. But Knoon-shee’s father would catch them and set the couple’s wooden house alight while they were sleeping. Her own father would do that! The two doves at the top of the plate were their spirits, flying to the realms of eternal happiness.
‘Mrs Reece, the dinner-plates, please,’ her father commanded, stroking his beard. Grace’s mother collected the plates and her father put a slice of meat on each one.
Grace looked again at the three fragile figures on the bridge printed on her side-plate, and it occurred to her that perhaps, instead, it was the father and the daughter who were chasing the young man. Perhaps Chang was fleeing from imprisonment in an unwelcome marriage. Perhaps he was looking to the Sugarloaf Mountain ahead, to his freedom and his future in a blue and white landscape, while the father and Knoon-shee were running futilely, doomed to never reach him – always chasing, never catching.
‘Pass the gravy, Grace,’ her father requested. ‘You’ve made a wonderful meal, Mrs Reece. Most pleasing,’ he said to her mother, adding appeasingly, ‘Delicious, just what the doctor ordered!’ He smiled artificially at his joke, trying to cajole his wife to smile. Mrs Reece gave a taciturn half-smile.
Thin blood seeped out of the undercooked lamb and over the bridge, the sea, the pagoda and the hills on Grace’s plate, then her mother slapped down a lump of grey mashed potato covering the tiny figures. Dinner finally began, although no one touched the meat, it being raw.
‘What an utter waste of food! This shoulder of lamb cost good money,’ her mother complained, addressing the empty seat, her voice high with