The Society for Forgetting Dinner

How it begins

The menu was addressed to Diana Wells in her own handwriting.

The paper was dated next Thursday.

She stood in the kitchen archive with a box of receipts balanced on her hip and read the three courses twice. Clear soup. Roast pear. Something called the necessary omission.

At the bottom, beneath the club's embossed crest, she had apparently written DON'T LET HIM SIT BESIDE THE WINDOW.

Diana had spent nineteen years cataloguing what the university fed its important people. She knew the private dining club's habits. It kept minutes of every toast and no record of a single meal. The distinction had seemed snobbish until now.

Julian Hart found her beside the cold store, still holding the box.

'You asked about the Latin on the crest.'

She gave him the menu.

He translated without difficulty. 'What is remembered belongs to us.'

'That's not reassuring.'

'It wasn't meant to be.'

He turned the sheet toward the light. A small grease mark showed through the paper. Diana knew its shape. It came from the broken hinge of the archive press, which she had cleaned that morning.

'Could someone have copied your writing?'

'Yes.'

'Could someone have dated it incorrectly?'

'Yes.'

'Good.'

'Except I haven't invited you to dinner yet.'

Julian looked at the seating plan printed on the reverse. His name occupied the chair beside the window.

Above them, the dining-room bell rang. Service would begin in twelve minutes. Diana could hear the kitchen staff moving faster, the familiar clatter of work that never appeared in the minutes.

Julian folded the menu.

'What happens next Thursday?'

She lifted the box onto the counter. Under the receipts lay another menu, dated twenty years earlier. The final course was the same.

For the first time, Diana wondered whether the club had failed to keep a record, or had learned exactly which record mattered.