Lunch without a bitter taste

What fine age do you need to reach to feel grown up enough to manage the complex situations life flings at you? Forty-five? Sixty? Ninety?

It was 12 o’clock and a great friend, her marriage now in ruins, was on her way round with her little daughters and new partner. It wasn’t the line-up I had originally invited. I wasn’t sure about the new addition – I wasn’t entirely sure about times, dates and overlaps, and the old line-up had felt like home – but, as hospitality is my middle name, I didn’t want to disgrace myself. Or perhaps only a little bit.

I am loyal to a fault. I carry on feuds for years after the original parties have moved on or even made up. I sometimes see good friends chatting amiably to their mortal enemies at parties and wonder why I have been left nursing all the outrage and upset on their behalf.

Embarking on the lunch preparations, I reminded myself of a woman who came into a bookshop where I used to work and asked me for a present for someone she only quite liked. I fired her with questions: did she want a book that would make the person feel bad? Feel sad? Did she want the plot of the book to mirror events in their relationship and subtly or even blatantly convey disapproval or ambivalence, in which case could she furnish me with clues? A tome with an insulting title, such as Fay Weldon’s rather good early novel that I read with brown paper wrappers because it was called The Fat Woman’s Joke?

Laying the table for my guests, I tried to think of a few almost imperceptible slights for my pal’s new partner. I wanted to be impeccable, but with the softest hint of a sneer that only I would register. I wanted to unnerve, but not overtly. I wanted to shimmer with mild hostility underwritten by some semblance of welcome.

I would bombard them both with mixed messages. It was a tricky tightrope balancing act worthy of the big top at the Bouglione’s Cirque d’Hiver.

I was just about to unfurl my best Irish linen double damask tablecloth when I thought, “No, I’ll use the one left over from Boxing Day.” That would learn ’em. It was most certainly, as Henry James would have it, “wanting in freshness”. Then I found a bottle of unpromising wine I had won in a tombola (pistachio ticket number 85) and went to the fridge and brought out not quite enough racks of lamb. (Well, enough for everyone to have a good first helping, and half the people to have seconds, but certainly not a surfeit.) I felt my cheeks flush with an odd mixture of pride and shame. It wasn’t full-scale battle but it was psychological warfare on a par with, I don’t know, a very occasionally dripping tap.

. . .

Fifteen minutes before their ETA I mentally rehearsed conversations with my guests. I sat them in tiny children’s chairs at the naughty table and loomed over them.

“Look guys, what were you thinking?” I reprimanded. “I know that often the one thing about human behaviour that makes sense of everything is the thing that nobody tells me, but even so ... ” In my imagination they hung their heads. “Sorry, Susie,” they chorused. I nodded grandly.

I picked some rosemary and oregano and thyme to roast with the Sicilian tomatoes and then decided just to use the thyme, so as not to dilute my stern message. I put on a country music radio station where every song seemed to be about stolen moments and obsessive love – “Heaven’s just a sin away” – and then switched to a showtunes station: “It’s not his face but such a lovely face/ So if some night you’re free ... ” I found a more general station and there was Stevie Wonder singing that great anthem of deception, “Lately”.

A terrifying thought stole over me: what if they were bursting with happiness? These things can be catching you know. Eventually, I found a phone-in instead, where people were discussing what to do with unwanted Christmas presents but even that seemed a bit loaded so I decided on no sounds.

The doorbell rang and as my daughter answered it I quickly replaced the bad tablecloth with the good one. I put some more meat on. I threw in the extra herbs. My favourite entertaining style is lavish and informal. All human people in the right and in the wrong need friends. I know I do. Am I right?

susie.boyt@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/boyt