Oliver sabotages Barbara's catering order

Oliver’s sabotage of Barbara’s Greek Embassy catering order turns a private quarrel over his orchids into a threat to her livelihood. His method is calculated to make the food impossible to identify or defend: seven loaves are altered with different seasonings, and the order’s guests encounter the consequences before Barbara can understand what happened.

Retaliation and preparation

The immediate grievance is the destruction of Oliver’s orchids. He regards Barbara’s attack on the plants as a crime against defenseless things, distinct from an injury directed at him, and tells himself that she must be punished. In the kitchen, which he recognizes as her domain, he searches among the equipment and food without yet having a specific plan. The movement from grievance to sabotage is deliberate: he carries his anger into the place where Barbara works and makes her food the instrument of his revenge.

The opportunity is waiting in the refrigerator. Oliver finds seven neatly wrapped silver bricks of meat, removes them, and checks their contents by smell. He takes ginger, curry powder, and salt from the spice rack, applies them in large quantities, kneads them through the mixture, and reshapes each loaf to fit its foil wrapping. He varies the treatment from loaf to loaf, including substituting sugar for salt. The variation is central to the prank: rather than spoil one item in a way that might be isolated, he sets up a series of strange tastes that will leave Barbara’s customers disputing what has gone wrong.

After preparing the food, Oliver goes to the sauna and mourns the orchids there. The contrast is stark: the plants remain the object of his grief, but he takes pleasure in the retaliation he has arranged. His sense of injury recedes as he considers his answer to Barbara’s earlier message of death. The sabotage is therefore not an accidental mishap in the kitchen; it is an intentional response in the couple’s escalating exchange of injuries.

The banquet and its immediate consequences

The consequences reach Barbara through a humiliating report from the Greek ambassador’s wife. She has been summoned to the embassy at seven in the morning. The ambassador and his wife meet her in the dining room, where the smell of vomit is unmistakable, and then lead her without explanation to the kitchen. Their faces are pale and their eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep. The scene makes Barbara confront the failed order before she has received any account of how it failed.

The ambassador orders her to taste the loaves. Barbara smells their peculiar odors, but receives no sympathy from his wife; when the order is repeated, she puts a lump of meat in her mouth and immediately spits it out. The ambassador accuses her of poisoning his guests and questions her competence as a caterer. Barbara is too shocked to explain herself, and humiliation leaves her unable to answer. The accusation turns Oliver’s kitchen prank into a public professional crisis: the person held responsible is Barbara, whose name and work are attached to the food.

Back at Harry Thurmont’s office, Barbara reports that the guests had been polite until two of them vomited, one directly onto the table. Thurmont tries and fails to conceal a smile, but Barbara insists that the episode is sabotage. Her recollection of the embassy visit supplies the concrete scale of the damage: the food smelled wrong, the ambassador made her taste it, and the clients treated her as the person who had poisoned their guests. She identifies a lost client and damage to the business she intends to make her livelihood.

Suspicion, proof, and legal limits

Barbara believes Oliver is responsible, but belief is not proof. When Thurmont asks what evidence she has, she hesitates. She says she believes in Ann, then recalls a fleeting sensation from Christmas Eve: she had sensed Oliver’s presence in the library, just below conscious awareness. The memory offers a possible connection, not evidence she can present to establish who altered the loaves. Her suspicion has sharpened, but her recollection remains uncertain.

Thurmont warns that the incident will not produce the result Barbara wants. They might harass Oliver, he says, but the case will not succeed in a way that satisfies her or get him out of the house. Barbara expects that Oliver will have to admit what he did under oath; Thurmont rejects that confidence and tells her that practicing law herself will only make her an object of ridicule. His response exposes the difference between knowing what happened and being able to use it to change the terms of their separation. The ruined order gives Barbara a grievance, but not the leverage she seeks.

What the sabotage reveals

The argument also brings Barbara’s own retaliation into the open. In her anger at Thurmont’s dismissal, she admits that she destroyed Oliver’s orchids. She tells him that Christmas was already ruined, that she had been throwing out buckets of foam, and that seeing the plants made her angry. She wanted them injured, she explains, but did not know for certain that the substance would kill them. She had previously told him about the Christmas-tree fire but omitted the orchids; the confession supplies Oliver’s grievance with a cause while also complicating her claim to be only the injured party.

Thurmont calls for discipline and asks for something more damaging and bizarre. Barbara objects that she cannot lock up her food and asks why Oliver should be allowed to interfere with the work on which she plans to live. The episode thus links their domestic conflict to the practical conditions of her independence: a professional order can be attacked through the shared household, while the legal response may not remove the person she suspects. Oliver’s choice to adulterate all seven loaves transforms an intimate score-settling into a public failure for Barbara, and her inability to prove it leaves the retaliation unresolved.