by Maeve Binchy
Avril indulged herself. They could get up later, they could have breakfast in their dressing-gowns. Cup after cup of tea watching the video of ‘Fawlty Towers’. The episode of Manuel’s rat. They all loved that. There would be no sneaking glances at the two good armchairs to see how it was being received.
They could all have a short walk and wear old clothes and maybe go somewhere with a bit of mud and point things out to each other and laugh. Like they did on ordinary days. Not walking at granny-speed and fielding a battery of granny-interrogation and point-scoring. They need watch neither Pope nor Queen. Their Christmas messages would be in their own family. The turkey would taste better when it didn’t have to be analysed and explained and apologised for. They could have Greek yoghurt with the Christmas pudding, which they all loved instead of making a brandy butter for show. The children could laugh out loud at the jokes in the crackers instead of nodding sagely with the grannies that it was a sin crying out to heaven for vengeance buying crackers that were such poor value.
Noel too felt a surge of resentment towards his two brothers and his sister who never thought of having mother for Christmas. Not even once. It’s tradition that she goes to Noel and Avril, they all said with huge, guilty relief, and gave her bottles of sherry and fleece-lined hot-water bottles plus tiny boxes of liqueur chocolates which she was instructed to keep for herself and which she did.
And couldn’t Avril’s sister in Limerick take Mrs Byrne? Just once, just one year? Why did it have to be a tradition? The old bats would even like a change, a bit of variety, Noel thought despairingly.
But it was too late this year to think about it. The plans would have to be made long in advance, and it must never be allowed to look like . . . well, to look like what it was.
Avril and Noel looked at each other and for once they didn’t reach out to pat, to reassure, to remind each other of a lifetime shared and to underline that one day wasn’t much to give up. For the first time, it did seem too much. The day that everyone was meant to enjoy; and their family seriously believed that it wasn’t meant to be a day for children.
The feeling lasted through the days that led up to Christmas. The children knew there was something wrong. Their mother and father, normally so full of requests and pleas and urgings, seemed to have lost the Christmas spirit somehow.
They didn’t even have those embarrassing, middle-aged hugs and hand-pattings that used to go on.
When Ann or Mary or John asked about plans for the grannies they got scant answers.
‘Will we bring down the screen in case Granny Byrne feels a draught?’ Ann asked.
‘Let her feel a draught,’ her mother said unexpectedly.
‘Where’s the magnifying glass for the television guide?’ John asked on Christmas Eve. ‘Granny Dunne likes to have it handy to see the small print.’
‘Then let her put on her bloody glasses like the rest of us,’ said his father.
They were very worried about them.
Ann thought her father might be having the male menopause. Mary wondered whether their mother might be having a mid-life crisis. She didn’t know what it was but there had been a program about it on television with lots of white-faced women of their mother’s age saying they were going through it. John thought they were just in bad tempers like teachers at school got into bad tempers that seemed to last half a term. He hoped his parents would get over it. It was very glum with them like this, biting the heads off everyone.
The night before Christmas the family sat beside the fire. They all wanted to see the same film; in a few minutes they would turn on James Stewart. There would be no sense of peevishness about who sat where, about the position of honour nearer the fire or nearer the set. Nobody was hunting for a magnifying glass or a draught excluder.
Noel and Avril sighed.
‘I’m sorry about the grannies!’ Avril said suddenly.
‘It would be nice if you could have normal Christmas Days like other children do,’ said Noel.
Their three children looked at them in disbelief. This was the first time that an apology had ever been made. Usually they had been told how lucky they were to have two grannies and even luckier that these grannies came for Christmas Day.
They had never believed it, of course, but it was like crusts being good for you and fast food bad for you—they heard it and accepted it as something people said. It had been said for so long now it was part of the scenery. Much easier to listen to and ignore than this new unease between their parents and this sudden revelation that grannies were not a good thing after all.
Ann and Mary and John didn’t like it. It changed the natural order of things. They didn’t want things changed. And certainly not at Christmas.
‘It’s your day too, you know,’ Avril said.
‘More yours than theirs, in fact,’ Noel’s face was eager to explain.
In the firelight his three children looked up at him. They were going to hear no explanation. No accusations about aunts and uncles who didn’t do their fair share. No words like burden and nuisance. Not at Christmas time. They had to speak quickly to prevent things that shouldn’t be said being spoken.
‘We thought that we could record Star Trek III, and sort of give them an update on who they all are, you know—Kirk and Spock and Scotty,’ said John.
‘And Granny Byrne might be in one of her remembering Dracula and Frankenstein moods,’ Mary said hopefully.
Ann, who had grown up this Christmas and understood almost everything, suddenly said in a gentle voice, ‘And there really couldn’t be much room for them in any other inn or they would have gone there, so they’re lucky this is the best inn in town.’
The Civilised Christmas
IT HAD BEEN A CIVILISED DIVORCE, PEOPLE SAID. WHAT DID THAT mean? It meant that Jen never said a word against Tina, the first wife, the beautiful wife who had run away and run back half a dozen times. It was civilised because Jen wrapped Stevie up in his scarf every Saturday and took him by two buses to Tina’s house without complaining. She smiled an insincere smile as Tina, often in a housecoat, always lovely, came to the door. Tina used to ask her in at one time but Jen had always said no, thank you, she had some shopping to do. Tina would repeat the word ‘shopping’ in wonder as if it were a very unfamiliar and outlandish thing for someone to do on a Saturday. When Stevie’s visit was over Tina put him in a taxi, and Jen took him out of it and paid the taxi driver. Tina had a house, a terraced house, she had a three-piece suite with beautiful flowers on it, she had a mirror with a big gilt frame in her hall, but she never had the taxi fare home for her son.
They said it was civilised because Tina hadn’t contested the custody. Her job took her away from time to time—she was a casino croupier and was often called on to go to big functions in the country. Her hours were unsuitable, much better not to try and rear an eight-year-old boy, better for the child. And anyway, the boy’s father wanted the child so much, let’s be civilised about it, Tina had said. Martin was so delighted that there was no battle, he had started to think almost warmly about Tina. Stevie loved going to see his beautiful mother and her bright chatty friends. It was all much better than the days when Mum and Dad had been fighting and crying. They had told him it would be better this way and they were right. Mum had bought him a computer so usually he spent the time at that when he went to Mum’s house. All the people have wine and sandwiches and they would come in and watch him and say wasn’t he marvellous. Mum had a big bottle of apple juice all for him, as well as the sandwiches, and she used to ruffle his hair and say he was very brilliant and very handsome, and that he would look after her in her old age when all her looks and her friends had gone.
Mum’s friends would pat him on the back approvingly and it was all very grown-up and exciting. Mum even realised that he was old enough to take a taxi on his own. She would run lightly down the steps and whistle, a real ear-splitting whistle, and passers-by would smile, as they always did, at Mum.
At school, people asked Stevie was it awfu
l, his parents being divorced, and he said no, honestly, it was fine. He saw them both you see and they didn’t fight; he was welcome in two places. And in the pub where Martin had his half-pint on the way home from work, the kind motherly woman who polished glasses and listened to life stories asked him if it was all working out and if the boy was settling down with his new mother.
‘Uh, Jen isn’t his mother,’ Martin said happily. ‘Nothing is ever going to replace his real mother, he knows that, we all know that.’
The woman smiled as she shone up the gleaming brass on the pumps and said it would be a happy world if everyone was as civilised as Martin and his wife.
This would be their first Christmas together. Jen, Martin and Stevie. Jen had planned every detail to make it perfect. She worked in a supermarket for five hours every Saturday morning, a tiring job particularly at this time of year. She worked the cash register and sat in a cold, windy part of the store where the doors were always opening and the December wind came biting around her shoulders. They didn’t like her wearing a jacket so she wore three vests and a small jumper under her nylon coat. She looked much fatter than she did at school where she was the secretary in a nice, sensible, wool dress. The school had central heating and nobody leaving doors open.
Jen saved the supermarket money to make it a great Christmas for them all. She bought crackers and table decorations, she bought mincemeat for the pies, she got the kind of tin of biscuits they would never have dreamed of buying normally, she bought a tin of chestnut purée and a box of crystallised fruits.
Jen wasn’t a great cook but she had planned their Christmas lunch so often that she felt she could now do it in her sleep. She even knew what time she should start the bread sauce. It would be the first real Christmas Day for Martin and Stevie, she reminded herself. The lovely Tina had never been very strong on home-cooking, and she liked to spend the festive season drinking people’s health in wine bars or restaurants and clubs.
Jen felt a wave of unease as she often did about Tina. She hoped there was no danger of Tina spoiling their first Christmas by arriving suddenly and being sweet. Tina being sweet was sickening. Martin seemed to forget how she had humiliated him so often and so publicly. How other men had been found sipping wine and eating dainty delicate sandwiches when Martin got home, tired from work. In the days when Stevie was a toddler and well out of the way in his playpen and a wet nappy, Martin could barely remember the number of times when Tina had disappeared, overseas, sometimes for weeks on end, or how her working hours in the casino seemed to stretch to mid-morning and Martin had been unable to go to work until she returned.
Tina had been able to think of Stevie alone in the house; Martin had not.
But nowadays, when Tina was so charming and undemanding, it seemed that he could no longer remember the bad old days. Tina was so unfairly good-looking: long legs, long, fair hair and whatever she wore looked marvellous. She seemed girlish and, in many ways, too young and irresponsible to be Stevie’s mother. Jen, on the other hand, appeared matronly, she told herself sadly, and as if she were the mother of many older children. Life was unfair, Jen was the same age as the leggy Tina, twenty-nine. Next year they would both be thirty but one of them would never look it, not even when she turned forty in ten years’ time.
Jen pinned up the Christmas cards, attaching them to ribbons and trailing them across the wall.
‘That’s nice,’ Stevie said approvingly, ‘we never had that before.’
‘What way did you put them then?’
‘I don’t think we put them at all. Well, last year Dad and I were in a hotel, remember, before you came along, and before that I don’t think Mum had much time.’ He was neither wistful nor critical. He was just seeing things the way they were.
Jen seethed to herself. Mum had no time, indeed! Mum who had no real job, who just played about in that casino, had no time to put up Christmas decorations for her husband and little son. But plain old Jen had time, boring Jen who worked in a school from nine to four. Industrious Jen who dragged herself and Tina’s son on two buses so that the boy could see his mother with minimum fuss. And took the money out of her own purse to pay for the taxi in order to keep the peace. But nobody ever said Jen hadn’t got time to do anything. There was no mercy, no quarter given, second time round.
Martin approved of the decorated house. He went round touching the sprays of holly and ivy over the pictures, the candle in the window, the tree which was waiting for them all to fill.
‘This is lovely,’ he said. ‘It’s like a house you see on telly not like a real house at all.’
It was meant as high praise. Jen felt a strange stinging in her eyes. It was a hell of a lot more real she thought when bloody Tina was here with her high-flying friends and her idiotic chat and no time to make a Christmas for anyone.
Well, at least this year like last, Tina would be miles away on a cruise ship dealing the cards, calling the numbers and looking divine for the passengers. That’s what she had done last year, just before the divorce was final. Jen had gone home to her mother who had warned her all through the five days of Christmas that it wouldn’t be easy to marry a divorced man and raise his child. Martin said it had been a lonely Christmas in the hotel, though Stevie had enjoyed the organised games. They had both thought it was better not to spring too much on him at once, let him have a Christmas alone with his father to show him there was some stability in a changing world. He had only been seven, poor little fellow. Still he had adapted very well, all in all. He certainly didn’t think of her as a wicked stepmother, and he didn’t cry for his golden-haired Mum. Jen just wished they wouldn’t think of her as so ordinary and of Tina as something special and outside normal rules.
She had lit a fire for them and they sat, all three of them around it, talking. For once, nobody asked what was on the television, Martin didn’t say he had to go out to his workshed, Stevie didn’t say he wanted to go to his room. Jen wondered why she had felt so uneasy about Tina and their Christmas. It was childish to have these forebodings. She laughed at the other school secretary who read her star sign carefully before taking any action each morning; people would laugh too at Jen with her premonitions and funny feelings that something was going to happen.
‘Tina rang me at work today,’ Martin said just then.
Martin hated being rung at work, he was on the counter in a busy bank, he hated being called away from his window. Only the greatest of emergencies would make Jen pick up the phone to call him. Surely it must have been the same with Tina, and this must have been an emergency.
‘Her cruise has been cancelled apparently so she’s not going abroad. Only told them at the last minute, and no money or anything. Very unfair of the company.’ Martin shook his head at such sharp practice.
‘So Mum will be at home at Christmas?’ Stevie was pleased. ‘Will I go over to see her in the morning or what?’
Jen found that her eyes were tingling for the second time this evening. Damn her. Damn Tina for ever. Why couldn’t she be ordinary? Why couldn’t she have found a man and lived with him and married him like ordinary people did? Why did it have to be this flapper life of cruises and casinos and clubs? And Lord, if it had to be that, why did it have to be this shipping company of all of them that had to fail? There had to be a reason. Now they would have to disrupt their nice Christmas Day, just so that Tina could see her son for a couple of hours. A son she couldn’t care about or why would she have given him away? It was so unfair. Martin was shaking his head doubtfully.
‘That’s the problem,’ he said looking from one to the other.
‘You see she had all her plans made to go abroad and she has nobody, nobody at all for Christmas. She doesn’t think she could stay in her house all alone. She doesn’t like the idea of being all alone for Christmas.’
‘Lots of people are alone for Christmas,’ Jen said suddenly, before she had time to think.
‘Yes, well sure they are. But this is Stevie’s mum. And you know Tina, sh
e likes to have a thousand people round her but they all think she’s going away.’
Jen stood up, pretending to fix the curtains which didn’t need to be touched at all. They didn’t seem to notice her.
‘So what will Mum do then if she doesn’t want to be alone? Will she go away somewhere else?’ Stevie wanted to know.
‘I think she will, she said she was ringing round a bit,’ Martin said.
Of course she was ringing round a bit, but who better to ring first than the kind ex-husband. Just to make him miserable and guilty, just to make him offer her Christmas Day with her son, with a nice meal cooked for her. Yes, obviously Tina would ring Martin first, the old reliable, always there. No matter if she ran away, she knew he’d take her back. Until he met Jen and found that life could be lived on a normal level.
It had taken Jen to open Martin’s eyes to Tina and her way of going on. But, Jen thought grimly, she mightn’t have opened them enough. It was hovering in the air between them. The invitation. It had to come from Jen, but she was not going to issue it. No, she was most definitely not. She would pretend that she hadn’t understood the tension.
‘Then I won’t be able to see her on Christmas Day?’ Stevie said.
Jen was bright. ‘If she had been on the cruise you wouldn’t have seen her anyway, remember?’ she said. ‘And you’ve given her your Christmas present and hers to you is under the tree.’
‘But if she has nowhere to go . . . ?’ Stevie said.
‘Oh Stevie, your Mum has a thousand places to go, you heard your father say just a second ago she has a thousand friends around her.’
‘I said, she likes a thousand friends—it’s a different thing.’
Jen knew what she would like to do at that minute. She would like to have put her coat on and walked out in the rain and wind. She would like to have hailed the first taxi she saw and gone to Tina’s house. Then she would have taken Tina by the neck and shaken her until there was only a flicker of life left in her body. Briskly she would get back into the taxi and come home to enquire if anyone would like drinking chocolate as a treat.