Eleanor made a gesture that took in the flat, its pale washed walls, the smooth neutral floors, the expensive ceiling-to-floor curtains which framed the iron-grey view of the river. ‘It wouldn’t go,’ she said lamely. ‘And I don’t want the work, dropping needles and having to water it …’
‘I’ll water it,’ he said firmly. ‘And a bit of mess doesn’t do any harm. I’ll sweep up.’
Eleanor had a strong sense that she had lost control of the conversation, and Eleanor never lost control. ‘I don’t think you quite understand,’ she said, her voice very cold. ‘My husband and I have not ordered a tree, and we don’t want a tree. We never have a tree or any Christmas decorations. We’re not Christians, we think that Christmas has become absurdly over-commercialised. We never even have a turkey …’
‘No turkey?’
She shook her head.
‘No mince pies? No Christmas pudding? No stockings, no presents? No decorations? No carols? No candles in the windows? You poor child!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why on earth should you deny yourself these things?’
Eleanor glanced around the flat, as if its pale stylish décor would answer him. ‘I think we’re rather too sophisticated for that sort of charade.’
‘Sophisticated?’ He said it as if it were the name of a rare and perhaps fatal disease.
‘Yes.’
He shook his head. ‘My poor girl, my poor girl.’
Eleanor opened the door a little wider. ‘I’m very sorry but we don’t want your tree. And now, I’m very busy, so perhaps you would go …’
‘But I’m here to stay!’ he announced as if it were delightful news. ‘I’ve come for Christmas! I’m Robin’s Uncle Nicholas, from the old country.’
‘What?’
‘That’s why I brought the tree,’ he said. Gently he leaned it against the wall and wiped his hands on his disreputable reddish jacket. The tree filled the little hall with its powerful green presence. ‘It’s my little gift. To my hostess.’
‘Rob didn’t say,’ Eleanor protested faintly.
He chuckled. ‘Because he didn’t know!’ he exclaimed. ‘A surprise, you see! I just had a sense – you know how it is – that it was time the two of you had a visitor, and had an old-fashioned Christmas.’
Eleanor briefly closed her eyes. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? And I’ll telephone Rob. He’s at the gallery right now. But I know he’ll want to come straight over.’
She showed the unwanted guest into the living room and seated him on the white leather sofa before the broad panoramic view of the river. A light sleet was blowing against the picture windows and the overhanging sky was grey. The steely colours of the view matched the white and off-white of the living room. This room had once been featured in a house design magazine as the most coolly elegant in London; and Eleanor and Rob had never changed it since that day except to get everything dry-cleaned, almost continually.
Eleanor telephoned from the bedroom, so the old man could not hear her. ‘Rob? You’ll have to come here. There’s a man who says he’s your Uncle Nicholas, and he thinks he’s staying with us for Christmas.’
There was a brief astounded silence.
‘My who?’
‘Your Uncle Nicholas.’
‘What? My mother’s cousin? We used to see him all the time when we were kids.’
‘Well he’s here now.’ Eleanor kept her voice low. ‘And he’s brought the most appalling vulgar tree with him.’
‘A tree?’
‘An enormous Christmas tree. He clearly thinks he’s doing us a favour. It’s huge and bushy, and it …’ Eleanor broke off. She could not put into words how disturbing the tree was, how its passionate green life seemed to challenge and contradict the little apartment where everything was made from plastic, or vinyl, or steel. It was as if the old forests which had grown here long before bricks and concrete and cement had suddenly broken through and were alive and powerful in the very heart of the city.
‘I’ll come straight away.’
‘Good,’ Eleanor said shakily, and went back into the living room. The old man was standing opposite the window and tapping the wall with strong firm taps. When Eleanor came in he turned and beamed at her. ‘You’ve got a fireplace here!’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it! Listen!’
He tapped along the wall and the dead sound of thick plaster suddenly echoed.
‘We boarded it over! We have underfloor heating. We don’t need a fire!’
‘You need something alive in the room,’ he said. ‘A little movement, a little colour. Something to come home to – a place for the cat to sit.’
‘We don’t have a cat,’ Eleanor said.
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Such a pity. But a fire is a companion in a way.’
‘I don’t need a companion,’ Eleanor said. Even to herself her voice sounded thin and lonely. ‘I have my work, and we go out most nights.’
‘To see friends?’
‘Business dinners, and private views, that sort of thing.’
‘Well you’re young,’ he said as if to comfort both of them. ‘And soon there will be babies coming along …’
‘We don’t plan on children,’ Eleanor said abruptly. ‘We don’t like them.’
He looked shocked. ‘You don’t like children?’
‘Oh, I don’t dislike them,’ she said hastily. ‘But we don’t want any. We don’t feel the need! There’s my career: I’m a freelance corporate designer, and Rob has the art gallery. We’re too busy for children, and …’ She looked around the white sitting room with the grey curtains ‘… we don’t have a lifestyle that children could fit into.’
‘No,’ he agreed. ‘They tend to make you fit in with them.’
There was the sound of the key in the lock. ‘Oh Rob!’ Eleanor said in relief as he came into the room.
They had parted on a quarrel in the morning, and usually they would not be speaking. But this was an emergency.
‘Hello,’ Rob said. He crossed the room to Eleanor, so they faced the stranger together.
‘I doubt that you remember me,’ the old man said. ‘It sounds as if you’ve forgotten everything you ever learned.’
‘Are you my Uncle Nicholas?’
The man grinned. ‘Little Robin!’ he said. ‘And I was afraid that the two of you were a lost cause!’
‘Now, I understand from Eleanor that you have nowhere to stay,’ Rob started.
‘Oh I have, I shall stay here.’
Rob laughed his professional laugh. ‘I wish you could. But unfortunately we don’t have a spare room.’
‘There’s the study,’ he suggested.
Rob shot a swift look at Eleanor which accused her of showing the awkward old man around the flat. She shook her head. ‘I need the study for my work,’ she said.
‘No you don’t,’ the old man said acutely. ‘You’ve got no work at all over the Christmas holidays – nothing till February, actually.’
Rob looked at Eleanor again.
‘That’s true,’ she admitted reluctantly. ‘But something could come up at any moment.’
The old man shook his head. ‘It won’t,’ he said decisively. ‘Companies are trying to save money, they won’t bring in freelance designers like they used to. Times are changing.’
This was so close to what Eleanor had been thinking recently that she gasped.
‘So I’ll sleep on the sofa in the study,’ the old man said.
‘I don’t really think …’ Rob started.
‘Till when?’ Eleanor demanded.
The old man smiled at her as if it were all agreeably decided. ‘Twelfth night, of course,’ he said.
Dinner was surprisingly pleasant. Eleanor and Rob usually fetched a take-away, or microwaved a ready-cooked meal from the delicatessen on the rare nights when they were both home. But while they were hidden in the bedroom, having an anxious whispered discussion about their unwelcome guest, he started cooking in the little white and steel galley kitchen. Saucepans which had been chosen only fo
r their shiny high-tech looks, were taken down from their carefully designed places on the wall, onions were frying, steaks were sizzling. By the time that Rob and Eleanor had emerged from their room, the kitchen was glowing with candlelight and redolent with the smell of steak, onions and new-made bread.
‘I thought I’d cook you a good dinner,’ he said. ‘To say thank you.’
Eleanor wanted to say something cold and cutting about the mess in the kitchen, but there was hardly any mess. She wanted to complain about the apartment smelling of cooking, but the scent of the lightly fried onions and steak was too good. He waved her to a place and she sat down, Rob opened a bottle of good red wine, the old man placed a plate of steak and sweet onions before her with a green salad on one side and warm new-baked bread rolls on the other. ‘Bon appétit!’ he said.
He was a good companion. Rob and Eleanor usually sat in silence or read magazines or newspapers at the dinner table, but this evening they enjoyed talking and listening. Uncle Nicholas had been all around the world; he had a fund of anecdotes from every country. And he drew them out to talk. Under his gentle prompting Eleanor found that she was talking about her childhood, about her powerful rebellion against her family that had driven her from Bolton to a London university, and from there into design work, when she had met Rob. Uncle Nicholas nodded, as if her exile from her childhood home and family explained much. ‘But what has happened to you, Robin?’ he asked. ‘When you were a little boy you loved colour and shape. I always thought you would be an artist, perhaps a sculptor?’
Rob grimaced and Eleanor suddenly saw that he was no longer a young man. For a moment he looked as grey as the kitchen walls. ‘I didn’t dare,’ he said. ‘The gallery seemed a safer bet, and now I make thousands of pounds on every piece I sell. Other people’s sculptures. Other people take the risk and have the joy of making the things. I only sell them.’
Eleanor heard him with a chill sense of the passing of time and promise. She had always thought that the gallery was a way for Rob to fill in time, while he prepared for some beautiful work of his own. But he had not carved a thing in ten years. Somehow he had passed from being a young man who might do anything, into a man who ran a gallery, and would never do anything more. And she? She had slipped from being a young woman full of ambition and commitment into a woman who would design whatever a company ordered. She was a woman who could lay grey on white on off-white and think that it was an agreeable environment. She had forgotten the deep rich colours of passion and certainty: of birth and death.
‘Pudding,’ Uncle Nicholas said cheerfully. ‘That’s what we need now.’
From the oven that had previously only ever been used for reheating meals from the restaurant delivery service, he drew a dish topped with golden sizzling sugary crumbs. ‘Plum crumble,’ he said.
The smell wafted across the kitchen like a serpent of temptation. Eleanor smelled the sweet delicious perfume of stewed dark fruit and the crunchy hot topping. ‘I really can’t,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I have to watch my weight.’
He put the dish on the table and poured golden yellow custard from the saucepan into a jug. ‘We need to build you up,’ he said firmly. ‘There’s nothing more important than that now.’
Eleanor had thought that the first dinner must have been a lucky fluke. The old man, as a new arrival, had been on his best behaviour, soon they would be irritated by his presence and overcrowded in the small flat. But as the days wound down towards the Christmas holidays it was not like that. He continued to be opinionated, wrong-thinking, old-fashioned, eccentric; but she found him companionable during the day. He insisted that he cook a meal every night, and that she come with him to shop for food. He led her down alleyways to fruit and vegetable markets that she had not even known existed, just around the corner from the flat. He took her to little shops where people greeted him by name and stocked the fresh produce that he liked. He took her to stalls where geese hung swinging from their necks, where tangerines – brilliant orange against the foil of their wrappings – were like jewels encased in silver. He bought holly in great rich bunches of green, sharp with yellow thorns, starred with berries of red. He bought cascades of waxy white mistletoe berries and showed her the thin pale leaves as tough as angelica. He insisted that they buy pounds of cranberries, a fat wax-paper-wrapped bowl of a Christmas pudding, bright vulgar wrapping paper, make-your-own cracker kits, indoor fireworks, candles, and chestnuts for roasting.
There she stopped.
‘How on earth are we going to roast them?’
‘Now don’t get upset,’ he implored. They rounded the corner and she saw the builder’s van parked outside their apartment block. ‘I took the liberty,’ he said gently. ‘That room does cry out for a fireplace. Think of it as my Christmas present to you.’
In panic, she raced up the stairs and threw open the door, but she was too late; where the smooth white plastered wall had been, was a wide generous opening rimmed with brass. They had a fireplace.
Eleanor moaned in horror.
Tactfully he ushered the builders out of the flat and produced a wood basket filled with logs and pinecones. ‘You mustn’t expect too much at first,’ he warned. ‘But I happen to be a bit of an expert in chimneys and this is a good one. As soon as it warms up it will draw wonderfully.’
Eleanor retreated to the sofa and drew her feet up under her. She pretended to look away from him, at the view of the river; but the room was reflected in the iron grey glass and she could see him, rubbing his hands at the chaos he was causing, laying a fire, setting a match to it, and then sitting back on his heels.
‘Do look,’ he invited.
The room was transformed. Instead of the grey and white the leaping firelight laid a patina of gold and bronze on everything. Eleanor caught a glimpse of herself in the grey-tinted mirror and saw that she was glowing, as if sun-kissed: glowing and rosy and warm in the firelight.
‘Say you like it!’ he insisted.
She wanted to tell him that the new hearth would have to be filled in again. That they could not be bothered with the work of a real fire, that they were people whose apartment had always been a fashion statement – and that the fashion was for minimalism, coolness, greyness, neutral tones. It could not possibly ever be gold and bronze and flickering light.
But she found she was smiling, flowering under the warmth, like a golden crocus that comes out of the darkest coldest earth on the most unlikely of wintry days. ‘I like it,’ she said helplessly.
Rob when he came home saw the firelight first, the flickering live warmth of it, on the cold vinyl floor of the hall. The whole apartment which had been a palace of ice was now glowing with a radiant warmth and scented with live pine. Then he saw the reflection of the firelight in Eleanor’s face which was warm and smiling. She looked as she had not looked for months, and Rob forgot the prestige of their off-white apartment, and forgot the critical appraising gaze of his colleagues, forgot too that what they had wanted was an austere look: a home in the colours of snow.
‘Gosh, you look cosy,’ he said, and flung himself down on the floor beside Eleanor and drew her to him, and smelled the perfume of her warm skin, the hint of smoke in her hair, and the delicious smell of roasting chestnuts,
‘The builders found this,’ Uncle Nicholas said, observing their sudden warmth with each other. ‘In the chimney breast, boarded up and hidden.’
He produced a small worm-eaten piece of wood, bleached like driftwood, but stained in small wavery grooves with blue.
Rob received it into his hands. ‘It looks like a figurehead,’ he said hesitantly. ‘How odd.’
Eleanor turned in the circle of his arm and stroked the rounded head of the wood. ‘The bit that comes out of the prow?’
‘Yes. But look, it is a woman and she is holding something.’
‘Is that her gown?’ Uncle Nicholas asked. ‘That blue?’
Rob ran his finger down the groove of her gown. It still held a trace of a bright beautiful b
lue. ‘It is,’ he said wonderingly. ‘D’you know, I think it is a Madonna. And she is holding a child.’
Uncle Nicholas said nothing, he just watched the couple on the other side of the fire, and when Eleanor put out her hand he sighed very gently, as if something very important had been accomplished. Eleanor stretched out to touch, not the smooth time-worn face of the Madonna, not the line of blue of her gown, but the tiny shaped form of her wooden baby at her breast. Eleanor’s hand cupped the baby’s head, as if she longed to feel a pulse in the little skull, and warmth beneath her palm.
‘I shall restore this,’ Rob said gently. ‘I can take some time off, I shall get some teak oil and some wood, and I shall restore this. And when I have made her as good as I can, I shall get some wood for myself and I shall carve. I should like to carve a Madonna and child, like this.’
Uncle Nicholas waited, but still Eleanor said nothing. For a moment he thought he had yet more to do, but still she touched the child and her face was suddenly open to hope.
It was the morning of January 6th and Uncle Nicholas, Robin, and Eleanor were having breakfast in the cramped little galley kitchen of the apartment. Eleanor was not eating, she was drinking tea. She said she felt queasy and odd.
‘It’s too cramped here,’ Robin said with sudden impatience. ‘I need a workroom, and a woodstore. I can’t carve on the sitting-room floor, I need a workspace.’
‘A studio,’ Uncle Nicholas suggested.
Robin checked at the thought. ‘We could never afford one in London … but perhaps in the country?’ he said. He glanced at Eleanor, she was sipping her tea with quiet concentration. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked tenderly.
‘I just feel a bit funny.’
Uncle Nicholas rose to his feet. ‘I think my job here is done,’ he said comfortably. ‘I’ll wish you a happy creative new year.’
‘You’re not going?’ Eleanor demanded. She had a sudden pang of impending loss. ‘You’re surely not leaving?’
Bread and Chocolate Page 17