"All right, ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats for this evening's performance," I called out, indicating that the dinner was ready.

Adam laughed.

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I was pathetically pleased.

There was a general shuffling and scraping of chairs as everyone sat down.

Adam looked totally incongruous as he sat at the table, completely dwarfing his chair, looking ridiculously square-jawed and handsome.

I placed the salad that I had prepared in the center of the table. Then I put the pasta and sauce on plates and brought them over to the diners. The arrival of the food threw Mum, Dad and Helen into a bit of a quandary. The fact that it was homemade made Dad and Helen suspicious.

Quite rightly.

God knows they had every reason to be suspicious after the ways they had suffered in the past. I suppose it was too reminiscent of all Mum's disasters.

And naturally Mum was only too happy to foment trouble. If she encour- aged them to refuse point-blank to eat it, it would mean that I wouldn't cook any more dinners and the old order would be restored, thereby letting her off the hook.

When Helen's plate was put in front of her she made noises as if she was vomiting. "Uuuugggghhhh!" she said, staring in disgust at her plate. "What the hell is that?"

"Just pasta and sauce," I said calmly.

"Sauce?" she screeched. "But it's green."

"Yes," I confirmed, not for a second denying that the sauce was green. "It's green. Sauce can be green, you know."

Then Adam came to the rescue. He was tucking in with great gusto.

I suppose he was one of those penniless students who can go for months without getting a square meal and so would eat just about anything. But he was acting as if he was enjoying it. And that was good enough for me.

"This is absolutely delicious," he said, charmingly cutting through Helen's histrionics. "You should really try it, Helen."

Helen glared at him. "I'm not touching that. It looks revolting."

Dad, Mum and Helen stared, with held breath, their faces frozen with horror, at Adam as he swallowed a mouthful of food, obviously waiting for him to die. And when, after about

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five minutes, he was still alive and not rolling around on the floor like a victim of the Borgias, screaming to be put out of his misery, Dad ventured a try.

Now, I would love to be able to tell you that one by one every member of my family picked up a fork and despite their earlier prejudices were won over to my fancy cooking. But I can't do that.

Helen, with great shudders and contorted face, noisily refused to touch it, in spite of the beautiful Adam giving it his seal of approval.

She made herself some toast.

Dad ate a little bit and declared that no doubt it was lovely but that his tastes were humble. That he couldn't possibly appreciate such exotic and sophisticated food. As he said, "I'm a simple man. I never even tasted lemon meringue pie until I was thirty-five."

Mum also ate a little bit but with a martyred air. She made it very clear that to waste good food was a sin.

Even horrible food.

Therefore she ate it. Her attitude seemed to be that we were put on this earth to suffer and that this dinner was sent to her as some kind of penance. But at the same time she was hard-pressed to contain her glee at Dad and Helen refusing to eat it. Every so often she would catch my eye and it was obviously a bit of a struggle for her to maintain her poker face.

Though she would rather have died than admit it, she was thrilled.

Then Anna arrived home.

She wandered into the kitchen looking very pretty in a rather ethnic, ethereal kind of way, all trailing scarves and long crocheted see-through skirt and colorful jewelry. She had obviously met Adam previously.

"Oh hi, Adam," she said breathily, obviously delighted, flushing with pleasure.

Does he make every woman he comes into contact with blush? I wondered.

Or was it just our family?

Somehow I suspected not.

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What hope could there be for a man so young who had such an intense effect on women? He could only grow up to be a complete and total bastard. Expecting women to weep, faint, scream and fall in love with him as easily as breathing. He was far too handsome for his own good. A disfigurement or two wouldn't have hurt at all.

"Hi, Anna." He smiled at her. "Nice to see you again."

"Er, yes," she muttered, blushing even more and knocking over a cup.

Conversation wasn't exactly scintillating at the dinner table. Helen, never the hostess with the mostest at the best of times (unless we include the hostess with the mostest rudeness), had picked up a magazine and read through dinner.

"Helen, put down the magazine," Dad told her sharply, obviously em- barrassed.

"Shut up, Dad," said Helen in a monotone, not even looking up.

But every now and then she would look up at Adam and give him a witchy little smile. He would look at her, totally enchanted, and after holding her gaze for a little while, smile back at her.

You could have cut the sexual tension with a breadknife.

Anna, never a great conversationalist at the best of times, seemed to be completely struck dumb by Adam, such was her awe. Any time he ad- dressed a question to her, she just simpered and giggled, hung her head and acted like some sort of village idiot.

It was quite annoying, to be honest with you. He was only a man, and a very young one at that, for God's sake. Not some sort of deity.

Mum and Dad pushed their food nervously around their plates. They didn't talk much either.

Dad made a brief stab at talking to Adam.

"Rugby?" he murmured at him, as if he was in a secret society and he was trying to find out if Adam was a member also.

"Sorry?" said Adam, looking quizzically at Dad, desperately trying to figure out what he was trying to say to him.

"Rugby?"

"Em, er, sorry, but what do you mean?"

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"Rugby? Do you play it?" Dad decided to lay his cards on the table.

"No."

"Oh," Dad sighed like a deflating balloon.

"But I like watching it," said Adam gamely.

"Ah pshaw!" said Dad, practically turning his back on him, making his disappointment felt with a dismissive wave of his arm. And that, I suppose, was the end of that fledgling friendship.

For some reason I felt that it was my responsibility to talk to our visitor. Maybe it was because I had gotten used to being in civilized society, where guests were treated like guests. Where if someone invites you to dinner they don't throw you in with a crowd of strangers and completely ignore you.