‘You’re so angry,’ she’d chided last time he’d complained. ‘It’s very unattractive.’
05:20
He was holding the lime-green digits in view, and gave a little moan as they flicked to 05:21. He had been stretched over this mental gridiron for what felt like hours, tossing and turning until he was scorched on all sides. No chance of sleep now. Ella was snoring away beside him on her unassailable barge of slumber. Rage swept through him. YES he was angry! Here he was, lying in bed worrying, scrolling back through the week wondering what steps he could take to improve things between them; and here she was, impervious, complacent, sleeping like Queen Log.
Surely she should make an effort too? If she loved him? Didn’t she see how unfair it all was? Surely she’d noticed how his vitality had had to be progressively tamped down, year on year, since the arrival of their first child? This unilateral decision to preserve her life in its pristine state within their marriage – untrammelled by domestic duties or family admin – when had it been taken? How had he been persuaded into colluding?
Well, it was either that or leave. She wasn’t going to give an inch.
He loved her, he wanted her respect. He knew she loved him too, really; what puzzled him was how she could be happy to exploit him in such a blatantly unequal set-up.
‘I know you’ll do things if I nag for long enough,’ he’d said to her on their last holiday. ‘What I really want, though, is for you take on some of the worrying. Some of the actual work, the thinking and feeling.’
‘But I know you’ll do that for me.’ She’d smiled. And she’d been right.
So it was generally agreed that men were nicer than women, less selfish, more caring; men had been awarded the moral high ground. Big deal! And was that supposed to make everything all right? He twisted in the dark, the acid reflux of injustice rising in him. The world wasn’t going to change just because he wanted it to, though, was it. The world was woman-shaped – get over it!
07:10
When he woke up, everything was exactly the same as it had been the night before. Of course it was; unimaginable that it wouldn’t have been. And there would be absolutely no point in dragging any of these night thoughts up into the daylight, he decided as he drew the curtains; nothing was going to change. This was the way things were. This was the natural order.
Kentish Town
‘What can I say,’ said Nancy, ‘but, sorry. The Chimes was my choice. I remembered it from a story tape years ago in the car and all I can say is, it was better that way.’
‘Yes,’ said Estella. ‘I almost gave up after that unbelievably boring long-winded first sentence. Though by the end I was glad I’d stuck with it.’
‘Oh good,’ said Nancy. ‘The thing is, it needs to be read aloud. It needs an actor, a really gravelly strong voice and lots of hammy emphasis.’
‘Sorry, I haven’t read it,’ said Dora. ‘Let alone had it read to me. I’ve been doubling up for one of the other GPs in the practice who’s been off sick then the moment my head hits the pillow I’m out like a light.’
The three of them were sitting round Nancy’s kitchen table in Kentish Town. It was the last book group meeting of the year, and they were two down (Nell had flu, Lizzie’s father had broken his hip), while Rashmi had just texted to say she’d been held up at work but hoped to come on later.
‘Have you got a banana?’ asked Dora. ‘I’m starving, I’ve come straight from the surgery.’
‘You should have cancelled,’ said Nancy, reaching for the fruit bowl. ‘You must be exhausted.’
‘Cancel?’ said Dora. ‘No chance. If I’d gone home I’d have had to cook for them all. And I wanted to see you! This must be the best value night out there is, meeting old friends somewhere warm that doesn’t cost money or need booking in advance, out of the wind and rain.’
Their book group was of the kind only possible in a big city where individual members need not impinge on each other’s worlds socially. They knew and trusted each other well enough from their monthly meetings over the years to be able to speak with a frankness that couldn’t be afforded elsewhere. Indeed, they knew rather too much about each other now to be able to bring their respective families together for any length of time.
‘Here’s to old friends,’ said Nancy, pouring more wine. ‘And here’s to the Tackleton Road School gates too all those years ago, without which we might never have met. Would you like some nuts and raisins, Dora? Toast? Cheese? I broke up last Friday and I’m not going to touch my marking till January so I’m all right; but you must be extra busy with all the seasonal viruses. When do you stop?’
‘Christmas Eve,’ said Dora.
‘Me too,’ said Estella. ‘And I’ve got the dreaded office party tomorrow night.’
‘I can’t say I feel that much sympathy,’ said Nancy. ‘A party in a newspaper office has got to be more glamorous than warm white wine in polystyrene cups in the Staff Room. You probably wear cocktail dresses!’
‘Like hell we do,’ said Estella. ‘That was my last coup, by the way, five hundred words in forty-three minutes flat: how to survive the office party. Don’t drink too much, don’t sit on the photcopier, wear a sparkly hair-slide. ’Tis the season to churn out the same old stuff as last year and the year before and the year before that.’
‘Bah humbug,’ said Dora, laughing. ‘That’s what Christmas is about, Estella, that’s what people want – for it to be the same! It’s reassuring, the tree and the turkey and something Dickensy on in the background.’
‘Don’t even mention that man’s name,’ growled Estella. ‘It’s all his fault, Christmas. This week I’ve had to do a round-up of the latest Scrooge-themed stocking-fillers and write a piece about how the great writer dumped his wife complete with quotes from some Harley Street doctor pronouncing on the male menopause.’
‘The main reason I chose The Chimes, of course,’ said Nancy, ‘was to avoid A Christmas Carol. Someone said they wanted something Christmassy to read in December …’
‘Not me,’ said Estella.
‘No, Lizzie, I think it was; and when I suggested M. R. James, Nell said she was spooked by ghost stories. But I simply couldn’t face Scrooge in his nightgown and Marley’s wretched door knocker all over again, having taught it three years running to Year Ten on the basis that it’s one of the shortest on the list and some of them might actually get to the end of it.’
‘That was the best thing about The Chimes,’ said Estella. ‘It was short. Eighty pages.’
‘… and what it really boils down to, A Christmas Carol, is: buy a turkey, save your soul,’ said Nancy. ‘Whereas The Chimes has got alcoholism and prostitution and all sorts of topical issues.’
‘Ding dong,’ sang out Dora.
‘That must be Rashmi,’ said Nancy, getting up from the table. ‘Help yourselves to wine.’
Rashmi had come in a black cab straight from Canary Wharf.
‘Great shoes,’ said Estella, once the round of kissing was over.
‘I only wear them because I have to,’ said Rashmi. ‘It’s because I’m five two without them and the guys I work with are patronising enough as it is – I don’t want them patting me on the head too.’
‘I simply couldn’t get through the day if I had to wear heels,’ said Nancy. ‘Like air hostesses in the old days. I’d be in agony.’
‘You have to be tiny if you’re going to wear stilletos,’ said Estella. ‘Nearer eight stone than nine. I know these things, I’ve done a feature on them, it’s all to do with centre of gravity and pressure per square centimetre.’
‘That reminds me, I’ve got some mince pies waiting,’ said Nancy, turning the oven on.
‘I hope you went ahead without me,’ said Rashmi. ‘I haven’t read the book, it’s been round-the-clock at work.’
‘Right, that’s fifty–fifty,’ said Estella. ‘Nancy and I have both read it, you and Dora haven’t had time, so why don’t we get Nancy to go into teacher mode and tell you two what it
was all about, with the odd ad lib from me?’
‘Sounds good,’ said Rashmi, taking a large sip of wine and slipping off her shoes.
‘He had a smash hit with A Christmas Carol when he was thirty-one,’ said Nancy, ‘and he wrote The Chimes the following year to capitalise on this success. He had whole roomfuls of people sobbing when he read it to them. But even his very first novel, The Pickwick Papers, has all those festive scenes in Dingley Dell and he wrote that when he was only twenty-four, so he was obviously mad on Christmas from the start.’
‘Abnormal,’ said Estella.
‘Pickwick,’ said Rashmi, ‘that’s the one on the Quality Street tin, right? The little fat guy?’
‘Oh when my boy Ollie was two I used to call him Mr Pickwick,’ said Dora. ‘Stumping round on his stout little legs and a great big smile on his face. Not that I ever read it.’
‘You don’t need to, really,’ said Estella. ‘It’s just there, isn’t it, like Shakespeare. To be or not to be. Please, sir, I want some more. Same sort of thing.’
‘Anyway,’ said Nancy. ‘Back to The Chimes. Instead of the Ghost of Christmas Past we have the Spirits of the Bells ringing out various New Year messages. Because it’s not actually Christmas in The Chimes but New Year’s Eve.’
‘New Year’s Eve,’ said Estella. ‘That’s another bummer.’
‘It’s certainly the busiest night of the year in Casualty,’ said Dora. ‘I was on A&E at the Whittington one New Year’s Eve, and in that single night I remember putting in six chest lines! There were more knife wounds and fractured skulls than you could shake a stick at. People staggering in from the pubs dripping with blood, still fighting quite often, it was pure mayhem.’
‘Lovely,’ said Nancy. ‘Meanwhile, let’s meet our hero, Trotty Veck. He’s a London ticket-porter. That was a sort of porter-cum-postman at the time – I looked it up – wearing a white apron and a licence badge and basically he would stand around by the church in all weathers waiting to run errands for small change.’
‘Yes, it’s good on him being cold and rained on,’ said Estella. ‘Trotty keeps warm by trotting everywhere rather than walking. Hence the name.’
‘I suppose the modern equivalent would be a motorbike courier,’ said Rashmi.
‘But everybody who wasn’t rich would have walked then,’ said Nancy. ‘Bob Cratchit lived in Camden and he walked into the City every day to Scrooge’s office; that’s what the clerks did, thousands of them from all the London suburbs, still half-awake, trudging off to work in the early morning.’
‘It must have been a bit like it was after the bombs on the Underground,’ said Estella. ‘Thousands of us plodding along in silence together. Hardly any traffic; weirdly quiet. It was so strange.’
‘He was a great walker himself, Dickens,’ said Nancy. ‘A steady four miles per hour, he needed it to let off steam. When he was writing he used to get so excited in his imagination that he’d have to tramp the London streets fifteen to twenty miles a night to calm down.’
‘Twenty?’ said Estella. ‘Are you sure? That would be, let’s see, five hours straight without any rests.’
‘I’d better read this book, I think,’ said Rashmi. ‘He sounds quite a dynamo. In Mumbai, by the way, the clerks come into work by train from the suburbs while their wives spend the morning preparing various little fresh dishes for their lunch. Then each clerk’s lunch is packed in stacking tins and collected by a man on a bicycle – another version of your Trotty Veck, it sounds like – but this bicycle man is called a tiffin-wallah. And there are thousands of them too, the tiffin-wallahs, all cycling like mad delivering individual wife-cooked lunches to the clerks every day.’
‘How amazing!’ said Dora in delight. ‘Imagine having home-cooked food every day! I just grab what I can on the run – I’m not fussy, sandwich, Mars Bar …’
‘Banana,’ said Estella.
‘Banana!’ said Dora, laughing.
‘Better than Trotty got,’ said Estella. ‘That’s what happens next: it’s cold and rainy and Trotty’s daughter brings him some hot lunch in a basket. And it’s tripe.’
‘Oh, surely not!’ said Dora. ‘It is Dickens, after all.’
‘No, no, the food in the basket is tripe! Stewed tripe.’
‘The stomach of a cow,’ said Rashmi. ‘They’ve started putting it back on the menu at some of the restaurants in the City but personally I’ve never been tempted.’
She wrinkled her nose and took a sip of wine.
‘My grandmother used to make it,’ said Estella. ‘Lots of onions. She read Dickens. Not much else except the Mirror and the People’s Friend, no other books in the house, but she did read Dickens. When I tried him once there, as a child, I said he was boring and she said, at least he wasn’t a snob.’
‘Anyway, nothing to do with the tripe, but Trotty’s been getting a bit existential,’ said Nancy. ‘He’s over sixty and he’s started wondering whether he even has the right to be alive if he’s poor and in debt. Let me see, where is that bit – I’ve marked it – here it is, about the poor. “I can’t make out whether we have any business on the face of the earth, or not. Sometimes I think we must have – a little; and sometimes I think we must be intruding,” he says. “We seem to be dreadful things; we seem to give a deal of trouble; we are always being complained of and guarded against. One way or other, we fill the papers.”’
‘Yes, that’s a good bit,’ said Estella. ‘Faux naïf but in a good way. And that’s why the Spirits of the Bells visit him in the form of visions, to reproach him for not being more positive.’
‘The Chimes is all about how the rich don’t give a stuff about the poor, basically,’ said Nancy. ‘Dickens could see there was hunger and squalor everywhere in London; he could hear and read about it in the rest of the country, how children under seven were being put to work in the mills, the mines, for up to twelve hours a day; and he was outraged.’
‘In India,’ said Rashmi, ‘there are literally millions of bonded child labourers working twelve-hour days to pay off their parents’ debts. It’s a scandal but it goes on.’
‘Not that there isn’t poverty here any more.’ said Dora. ‘There is. You should see how some of my patients have to live. But it’s relative, isn’t it.’
‘Yes,’ said Rashmi. ‘It is.’
Estella dipped her head as if to stifle an incipient yawn.
‘On with the story,’ said Nancy. ‘Trotty’s daughter Meg wants to marry her intended, a strapping virtuous labourer, on New Year’s Day; but two random rich men – Alderman Cute and Mr Filer – advise her against this. They tell her she hasn’t got enough money to get married and would only have children who went wrong and a husband who left her destitute and herself be driven to ruin and suicide. The two rich men are quite funny because they’re so awful, going on and on about the good old times, the good old times, and being incredibly patronising to Trotty and Meg about the tripe dinner as well as everything else.’
‘So what does Dickens suggest?’ asked Rashmi. ‘A revolution?’
‘There is that cardboard character, Will Fern, isn’t there, Nancy, a bit later on,’ said Estella. ‘Another noble workman maddened by the Poor Laws and the rest of it. Near the end he’s threatening to go off and set fire to things.’
‘Yes,’ said Nancy. ‘But Dickens isn’t a revolutionary. Not the guillotine sort, anyway. No. He wants … a change of heart. He wants the people with lots of money to start minding about the people with not enough money.’
‘Yes, that would be nice,’ said Dora.
‘Scrooge gives the Cratchits a turkey?’ said Rashmi.
‘Exactly,’ said Nancy. ‘Philanthropy. And that’s what we’re being shunted back towards now. I can’t believe it. We had a perfectly good welfare state; the eighth wonder of the world, it was, far more impressive than putting men on the moon. Personally I think we knocked the Americans into a cocked hat when we invented the welfare state.’
‘Nancy,’ said Este
lla.
‘For a society to reach the point’, said Nancy, ‘where it considers its less fortunate or able members, and via taxation keeps them from starvation and homelessness and all the worst terrors of poverty – what a triumph! What dignity in it! Our parents were proud of it. Their parents, who lived through the Thirties, could hardly believe it. Even I remember regarding the state as my friend when I was at university because it was paying for me to be there, though it wasn’t fashionable to say so at the time. And now it’s all being dismantled and run into the ground and we’re being told to suck up to sponsors instead.’
‘Nancy!’ said Rashmi.
‘No,’ said Nancy, ‘we’re being sent back to the world of forelock-tugging and thank’ee kindly, sir. It seems so … Victorian. We’re not American, we’re not used to the idea of starting a college fund the minute we have a baby. We just don’t have that tradition, even if they never got beyond it.’
‘Nancy?’ said Dora.
‘We had free university education for the first time and assumed it would be the same for our children,’ continued Nancy, ‘particularly since the country had got so much richer in the interim. But no, the money we thought we were saving for our old age must now go to our children instead. And as for them, our children, they’re spending their vacations chugging the streets to help fund themselves through college. Chugging! That’s rich.’
‘Phew,’ said Estella.
‘Hmm,’ said Rashmi.
Nancy poured herself a glass of water.
‘What’s chugging?’ said Dora.
‘Charity mugging,’ said Nancy. ‘You know, when you’re collared on the street by a bright young man looking you in the eye and asking you to sign up for a standing order. Oh, I know, and it’s obviously nice when some billionaire wants to do good once they’ve got too much and can’t think what else to do with it – but surely it would be better if the system wasn’t arranged so that certain individuals can grab a great pile for themselves by exploiting everybody else in the first place?’
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