by Maeve Binchy
Helen leaned over and gave Nick a kiss. He reached for her but she leaped smartly out of bed. That was another thing that you couldn’t do in Mother’s house. It felt wrong, you had the notion she could come in the door at any time. Anyway there was plenty of time for all that back home.
‘I’ll make us a cup of tea instead,’ she said.
‘All right,’ Nick grumbled.
Her mother was in the kitchen. ‘Wouldn’t you think he’d get up and get you a cup of tea?’ There was a hard, thin line of discontent. Helen reminded herself to watch it, she must not allow herself to become defensive, she must let no note of anything mutinous into her voice.
‘Oh we take it in turns,’ she said lightly.
‘A lot else he has to do. Any man in his position should be glad to make you tea and take it up to you—honoured to be let make you tea.’
‘Look while I’m here why don’t you go back to bed too and I’ll bring you a cup.’
‘No, I’m up now. I might as well stay up. It’s back to normal for me now that you have to go. I thought you were going to stay till the New Year at least, and Miss O’Connor was saying that she was surprised . . .’
‘Yes, she has a great capacity for being surprised, I’ve noticed that,’ said Helen, banging out the cups and saucers. Then she remembered. Only five more hours. Be nice, be calm. Nobody except us gets hurt in the end.
‘Did she have a nice Christmas herself, Miss O’Connor I mean?’ she asked in staccato tones.
‘I’ve no idea. She goes to a sister. She’s all she has.’
The kettle was taking an age to boil.
‘Does he lie in bed all day at home now? Does he get dressed at all?’
Calm, Helen. Slow. Fix on the smile. ‘Oh we usually get up about the same time you know. One day I make the breakfast, the next day he does. Then we take Hitchcock for a walk and I get the bus, Nick gets a paper and goes home.’ Her voice was bright and sunny as if she was telling a tale of an ideal lifestyle.
‘And has he turned his hand to cooking even?’
‘Oh yes indeed. Well you saw over Christmas how much he likes to be involved with everything.’
‘He only carried plates in and out from what I could see.’
The kettle must have two holes in the bottom of it, no container ever took three hours to boil. Helen smiled on and fussed with a tray.
‘Trays is it? There used to be a time when two mugs of tea did fine in the morning.’
‘You have such nice things here, it’s a pity not to use them.’
‘I suppose he can’t wait to get his hands on them altogether. I saw the way he was admiring that cabinet. Fetch a good price he said.’
‘I think Nick was trying to reassure you, Mother, you said that you had no possessions, no antiques. Nick was pointing out to you that you do have nice pieces of furniture.’
‘He’s in a poor position to point anything out, a man who did what he did. I wouldn’t thank him for pointing things out to me.’
‘That would be a pity, Mother.’ There was steel in her voice. Helen knew she was on the thinnest ice yet. Usually it had been hint and innuendo. Now it was being said straight out.
‘No, I mean it, Helen, to humiliate you and me. To make us the object of pity here. Don’t think that everyone doesn’t know. Everyone knows. It’s only because I have always been on my own, always had to bear the burden that I’m able to do it again.’
‘I don’t think it’s a humiliation for me or for you that Nick is redundant. All over the country people are being laid off work. The one it’s worst for is Nick, and we’re lucky that we have something coming in. And that we don’t have five children like some of his colleagues do.’
‘Well that’s another thing. Ten years married and no children, just a dog with a ridiculous name, Hitchcock. Who would call a dog a name like that?’
‘We thought it was a nice name, and we love him. And we don’t inflict him on you, now do we? He’s in a kennel, looking out, waiting for us.’
Wrong. Wrong. She shouldn’t have said that. It showed an eagerness to be away. Too late to try and retrieve it. Was that actually a sound out of the kettle, did it intend to boil after all?
‘I don’t know how you put up with it, Helen, you who had everything. I really don’t know how you take it all, instead of having some spirit.’
‘If I could get Nick a good job in the morning there’s no one who’d be more delighted than myself.’ She had the smile of a simpleton on her face now, willing her mother to drop the conversation, to go no further down the path where she was leading.
‘I don’t mean just about the job. I mean about the other thing,’ her mother said. And now it was said it had to be acknowledged.
‘Yes?’ Polite, interested, but giving nothing away.
‘Don’t yes me, Helen, you know what I mean. The woman. Nick’s woman.’
‘Oh yes, well that’s all over now.’ Still light, no evidence of the heavy lump of putty gathering in her chest.
‘What do you mean it’s over? It’s not like Christmas that it’s here and then it’s gone. It’s not simple like that.’
‘It is really, Mother, that’s exactly what it is.’
‘But how can you let him get away with it? How can you bear him with you after . . . after all that?’
‘Nick and I are very happy, we love each other, that was just something that happened. It was a pity that people got to know about it but they did.’
The kettle had boiled. She scalded the teapot.
‘And you go on as if nothing has happened, after all that.’
‘What is the alternative, Mother? Just tell me. What else would you like me to have done? What would you have liked, Mother, if I had asked you?’
‘I’d like for it never to have happened.’
‘So would I, so would I, and I think so would Nick and so would Virginia. But it did happen.’
‘Was that her name, Virginia?’
‘Yes, that’s her name.’
‘Well, well. Virginia.’
‘But tell me, Mother. I’m interested now, what would you like me to have done. Left him? Got a barring order? Tried to get an annulment? What?’
‘Don’t raise your voice at me. I’m only your Mother who wants the best for you.’
‘If you want the best for me then stop torturing me.’ Helen’s eyes filled with tears. She went upstairs with the tray of tea. ‘I’ve blown it,’ she sobbed to Nick, ‘on the last bloody morning, I’ve blown it.’
He laid her head on his shoulder and patted her until the sobs ceased.
‘Let’s put some brandy in our tea,’ he said ‘and get back under the covers before you become a relic of the Ice Age.’
It would have been nice if nobody had known about Virginia. Helen knew. She had known from the start, but had said nothing. She thought that it would not last. Virginia was young and pretty and silly and worked in Nick’s office. That kind of thing happened all the time; very, very rarely did it break up people’s marriages. If the wife was sensible and kept her head. Only confrontations were dangerous and why make a perfectly decent, honourable man like Nick choose between his practical wife Helen and the pretty, little Virginia? Why not take no notice and hope that Virginia found some other man? That is precisely what would have happened and was about to happen and it would have all been past history, if it hadn’t been for the accident.
It was two Christmases ago and there was Nick’s office party. Helen had begged him not to take the car. The place would be full of taxis. Why have the responsibility? They had argued good-naturedly about it at breakfast. They worked out milligrams, how many would make you drunk. They agreed that they could both drive a car perfectly after four times the permitted amount but some people couldn’t so that was why the rules had to be so strict and the limit made so absurdly low. He had promised that if they all got really bad, he would leave the car there and sneak in for it the next morning.
Helen knew that his
romance with Virginia was coming to an end, she had been happier then than for a long time before. She realised that Nick wasn’t staying out so late, there were less furtive phone calls. She congratulated herself on having weathered the storm.
At seven o’clock, Virginia had telephoned her very drunk and tearful. Virginia had asked her to be especially nice to Nick over Christmas because Nick was a wonderful person, a really wonderful person, and would need a lot of consolation. Helen agreed, grimly thinking that the only thing worse than being sober and receiving a telephone call from a drunk was to be the wife receiving a telephone call from the mistress. The combination of the two was heady stuff.
A little later, Nick had phoned saying he hoped that some of the girls hadn’t phoned her saying anything silly. Helen said it was all incomprehensible but please don’t drive home. Nick said he had to drive this silly girl home, she was making a fool of herself. He hung up before Helen could beseech him to get a taxi.
Nick had told her later that the drive was something he would remember for the rest of his life. The drive rather than the accident.
The streets seemed to be full of tension and danger, the lights of every car were hostile, there were drivers peering through windscreens in the rain, there were unseasonable hootings and abuse was hurled in a most unfestive manner.
Beside him, Virginia who had been sick was sobbing and clutching at his arm. She hadn’t meant to telephone Helen, but it came over her that Helen should be informed. Earlier that day she had told Nick she was going away for Christmas with someone else. Now she seemed full of regrets and second thoughts, she wanted reassurance that she had done the right thing at every turn. Nick was concentrating hard on the road and didn’t answer, she pulled his arm and the car swerved into the left lane, right into the path of a big truck.
Virginia lost two teeth, broke her shoulder and cracked two ribs. Nick lost his driving licence for three years, the firm lost the car, but since it also lost Nick and most of his colleagues some months later that wasn’t very important. The case went on and on, and insurance companies provided more and more explanations on each side, and Virginia gave an interview to a paper about how her chances of matrimony might well be lessened by her facial injuries and referred to having a fling with a married man in her office, a married man who had managed to destroy her life completely.
Somewhere in the world there is always someone who sees things in papers and brings them to the attention of other people, and somewhere there was somebody who managed to send it to Mother’s friend, Miss O’Connor, with the name of the firm and the coincidence of the accident and everything they thought Helen’s mother should know.
For two years, she had managed not to speak aloud about it, only making allusions. But this morning it had come out. And Helen hadn’t been ready.
‘I’m sorry,’ she snuffled into her brandy-flavoured tea. ‘You’ve been so marvellous, and now I’ve thrown it all away. She’ll sulk during lunch, and it’s all been wasted.’
Nick warmed his ice-cold hands on the nice cup of tea and brandy and stared ahead of him. Downstairs they could hear Helen’s mother banging the furniture about a bit. It was a message as clear as any drumbeat in a jungle, a message that she was annoyed and upset and that things would not be easy when they got up.
‘If only we didn’t have to come here. Just one Christmas, the two of us on our own with Hitchcock,’ Helen said wistfully.
Nick’s eyes seemed misty she thought or was the early morning brandy making her feel a bit dizzy.
‘I wonder how many milligrams there are in this tea?’ she asked.
More to cheer him up than anything else. He turned and looked at her. She had been right, there were tears in his eyes.
‘Remember that plate you broke here years and years ago,’ he said.
She was surprised. ‘Yes, the one that Mother made such a fuss about.’
‘Well, we mended it, remember, you held bits of the plate with eyebrow tweezers and I painted on the glue.’
‘And you couldn’t see the cracks in the end.’ She wondered why he was thinking of this, it had happened years ago, just another occasion when her mother had behaved badly and Nick had smoothed it out.
‘But when it was done she wanted to use it at once and we had to say no and put it high, high up so that it would have time to harden. It looked all right but it wasn’t really. You couldn’t use it. Touch it and it would all fall apart.’
‘Yes, we put it in one of those little plate stands?’ There was a question in her voice. What was he talking about?
‘If anyone came into the room and looked at that plate, they’d have said to themselves that it was a perfectly sound plate, they’d have no reason to think otherwise. But it wouldn’t have been. Not until the glue hardened. It was fine in the end of course, but for a long time it was only pretending to be a real plate.’
‘Well yes.’
‘It’s a bit the same here isn’t it? We’ve been pretending to be real plates in front of your mother. We won’t let her see any of the cracks or the glue or anything. We’ve been putting on such a brave face for her. We’ve not stopped to ask ourselves is it real or is it not?’ He had rarely sounded so serious.
‘Yes, I suppose it was a way to go. We could have endless discussions and analyses, about what happened and why, and where did we go wrong, but I don’t know. Would it have made things much better?’
‘It might have been more honest. You might have wanted to throw me out but couldn’t, not with us having to put on an act all the time for your mother, pretend that this was the successful, lovey-dovey marriage of the century.’
‘Well, it’s been a pretty good marriage most of the time, hasn’t it?’ Helen said.
‘Is that you talking or is it you talking for your mother’s ears?’
‘It’s me talking, do you not think the same?’
‘I do, but I’m the villain, the cheat, the partner without a job, the drunk driver. I’m in no position to make definitions.’
‘Oh, Nick, don’t be so ridiculous, what’s over is over. I said that ages ago.’
‘No, you’ve got too used to pretending, you’re being too tolerant . . .’
‘Listen to me,’ her face flashed with anger. ‘When my mother attacks you, I feel a sense of loyalty to you so strong it almost sweeps me away. When she says one word against you, I become so fiercely protective you would never believe it. Perhaps she has done some good for us in that way because her every attempt to drive us apart only glues us together.’
‘Is it real glue; is it good, firm glue do you think, or are we only pretending to get alone fine?’
‘I don’t know how you test these things. We could go downstairs and fling the plate on the floor, for example, and if it broke we could say, ‘‘boo hoo, the plate wasn’t properly stuck together’’.’
He looked very pleased. ‘In a way your bad-tempered old mother has a lot to be thanked for. She stopped us making any decisions before the glue had hardened. It has hardened, hasn’t it, Helen?’
There was an almighty banging downstairs. The noise had increased in case it wasn’t being heard. Nick and Helen got up and tore the linen off the bed they wouldn’t have to sleep in that night. They heaved the furniture round the room for pure devilment and realised that for them there would be nothing gained by examining the cracks, and pulling them to see if they would come apart. Other people might want to talk it to death but they knew the face they had shown the difficult woman downstairs was a real face, and they only had four more hours of putting slightly phoney smiles on it. The kind of smiles a million other people were putting on their faces like children’s masks over Christmas.
The First Step of Christmas
JENNY AND DAVID GAVE WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS PARTIES. ALWAYS on the Sunday before. They asked the whole family, his and hers, they produced Timmy for just enough time for everyone to think he was adorable and never for that one moment too long when people would tire of him. They
made the party a huge buffet so that nobody was too trapped with anyone else. The house was festooned with decorations, usually real holly and real ivy gathered from the countryside where it was growing wild. There was nothing vulgar about their tree. Clever ribbons and angels and paper flowers, not expensive-looking packages. But everyone knew that somewhere, discreetly placed, were the gift-wrapped presents that must have poured in to a couple so loving and considerate as David and Jenny.
As the years passed, five Christmases to be precise, Jenny stood sometimes in her immaculate kitchen listening to the murmurs of appreciation. David’s first wife had never done anything like this. Oh, no one had been invited across the door in Diana’s day. Diana had been far too hoity-toity to bother with family.
That was Jenny’s reward. That was the glory for the weeks, no, months of preparation and planning and shopping and making it all seem so effortless. David had grumbled slightly when Jenny said they should have a second freezer, but then he wasn’t there when she made the mountains of mince pies and the stacks of savouries.
David didn’t know how Jenny worked in that kitchen on the nights he had meetings or had to stay out of town. He would never know. She would be as different from the beautiful, selfish Diana as it was possible to be. And her child Timmy would be an angel, not a devil, as Diana’s child had turned out. Not a dangerous, destructive girl like Alison.
Alison had been nine when Jenny met her first. Very beautiful, with untamed, curly hair almost covering her face. She had made no pretence at politeness.
‘How much did that cost?’ she had asked Jenny about a new dress.
‘Why do you want to know?’ Jenny was spirited from the very start.
‘I was asked to find out.’ Alison shrugged as if it didn’t matter very much.
‘By your mother?’ Jenny could have bitten out her tongue the moment she said it.
‘Heavens no, mother wouldn’t be remotely interested.’ The way she said it, Jenny knew she was speaking the truth; the lovely, lazy Diana would not have cared indeed.