by Maeve Binchy
‘Who then?’
‘The girls at school. One of my friends said you must be after father for his money.’
It hadn’t really got any better.
When she was ten, Alison had come to stay for a weekend and had tried on all Jenny’s clothes and used all her make-up. It wouldn’t have mattered so much if every single lipstick had not been twisted out of shape, and every garment marked with make-up.
‘She was only dressing-up, all little girls like doing that,’ David said, his eyes pleading.
Jenny decided not to have their first row on the losing battlefield of the stepchild. She managed a smile and planned a lengthy session at the dry cleaners.
When Alison was eleven, Timmy was born. ‘Did you forget to take your pills?’ she asked Jenny, when her father was out of the room.
‘We wanted him, Alison, just as your mother and father wanted you.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Alison had said and Jenny’s heart was leaden. It was true that she had wanted the child much more than David had. How could this monstrous stepdaughter have found her vulnerability?
When Alison was twelve, she was expelled from school. The counsellor said that it was all to do with feeling her father had rejected her. She must be allowed to spend more time as part of his life. David was out at work all day, and so was Jenny; they treasured the time they took together with Timmy. Time when the quiet Swiss au pair went to her room and left them to be a family. Now they had Alison on long visits sulking, yawning, contributing nothing, criticising everything.
When she was thirteen, she didn’t want to come near them, which was bliss, except that it made David feel rejected. Jenny worked in a publishing house. She told colleagues ruefully that she could see why there were so many books on step-parenting; she had read them all and she could have written half a dozen more. But none of them had ever had to face anything like Alison.
When Alison was fourteen, her mother died. Suddenly and unexpectedly, after a routine operation. David had gone to Alison’s boarding school. ‘I expect you’ll have to have me now,’ she had said to her father.
David said it had nearly broken his heart to think that his only daughter considered herself a package to be passed from one place to another.
Jenny forced herself to think about Diana, dead before she was forty. Dead without ever having lived properly. She put the thought of Alison to the furthest part of her brain. She knew it would spoil everything. There was going to be no happy ending in this story, no one would walk hand in hand into the sunset swearing undying friendship. She would do it, she would do it for David, and, oddly, for the dead Diana whom she had feared and mistrusted in life. If Jenny were to die young, she would like some other woman to look after Timmy, to try to make a life for him.
She slaved as never before over their Christmas party. Sometimes she got up ludicrously early in the morning. David would come down to breakfast and find a smell of cooking in the kitchen, even though all the mess had been cleared away.
‘You are a funny little thing,’ he said to her, giving her a squeeze.
Jenny was not funny, nor was she a little thing. She would look at herself thoughtfully. She was tall, not as willowy as Diana, but tall. She was deadly serious about her family and her work. Why was it the action of a funny little thing to get the party right? He used to tell her how much he loved it, that he had always been one for ceremony and for celebration, but Diana had never wanted to bother. But Jenny would pick no fights, manufacture no rows. Not at the festive season.
Alison arrived a day earlier than she was expected. Jenny came back from work and found her halfway through eating a tray of intensely complicated hors d’oeuvres. Each one had taken three minutes to assemble, they would take one second to eat, and Jenny had made sixty of them, shaping the curls of filo pastry with endless patience, and leaving them to cool before freezing them. It represented three hours of her life. She looked at Alison with pure hatred.
Alison looked up from behind the curtain of hair. ‘These aren’t bad. I didn’t know you were a homemaker as well as a career woman.’
Jenny’s face was white with rage.
Even Alison noticed. ‘These weren’t for supper or anything were they?’ she said with mock contrition.
Jenny took the deep breath that all the books on step-parenting seemed to recommend. It was so deep it reached her toes. ‘Welcome home, Alison,’ she said. ‘No, these weren’t for supper . . . not at all. They were just something for the party.’
‘Party?’
‘Yes, on Sunday. We have the family. It’s a tradition.’
‘I think things have to be more than just three or four years to be a tradition,’ Alison said.
‘This is our sixth Christmas together, so I suppose that feels like a tradition.’ Jenny’s shoes were hurting, she wanted to take one of them off and beat her stepdaughter senseless with its high, sharp heel. But she felt it would have been both unseasonal and counterproductive. There was no way Jenny was going to enjoy this Christmas; what she must try to do was to contain it. She tried to remember that phrase people used—what was it? Damage limitation? . . . she had never known quite what it meant. Had it something to do with saving what you could? She often found at work that, if you thought of something quite irrelevant and allowed your mind to click through the motions, then it prevented you from flying off the handle.
She saw Alison looking at her with interest. ‘Yeah, I suppose six years is a tradition,’ Alison agreed, as if she were struggling to be fair.
A glow of sympathy towards the girl began to shine through the mists of dislike and resentment. But Jenny was too experienced to mistake it for the swell of violins surging at the end of the movie.
‘About the party,’ Jenny said. ‘Are there any of your mother’s relations that we might ask?’
Alison looked at her in disbelief. ‘Ask here?’
‘Yes, it’s your home now, they are your relations too. We want to make it a family Christmas, we would be very happy to have them.’
‘What for?’
‘For the same reason that anyone asks anyone under their roof at Christmas, for goodwill, for friendship.’ Jenny hoped her voice wasn’t getting tinny, she could feel the edge developing. She willed her eyes away from the tray of canapés that she had worked on so meticulously. The crumby, mangled remains. Even those that had not been eaten were somehow used-looking.
‘That’s not why people have Christmas parties, it’s for showing off,’ Alison said.
Jenny took off her shoes and sat down at the table.
She reached out for the perfectly formed pastries with their exquisite fillings. They tasted very good.
‘Is that what you think?’ she asked Alison.
‘I don’t think it. I know it.’
Jenny did a calculation in her head: fourteen now, she might be with them until she was eighteen. With any luck, this school might not expel her so it was only the school vacations and half-terms they had to consider, four Easters, four summers, four Christmases. Timmy would grow up in the shadow of this moody girl. He would be a grown-up, seven years old by the time Alison left their home. She would lose these lovely years because of the hostile girl who sat at her kitchen table. She wondered what she would do if it were a problem at work. But that was not a useful road to go down. If Alison had been a mulish, mutinous junior, she would have been sacked or transferred with such speed that it would have electrified everyone. She contemplated telling this discontented girl that life, far from being a bowl of cherries, could often be a bed of nettles and that everyone had to make their own happiness. But Jenny was familiar enough with teenagers to know that they wouldn’t share that kind of pain as an older woman might. Someone of Alison’s age would shrug and ask why bother?
She wondered was there a chance that Alison might be into the bonds of friendship? Should she offer to exchange some blood with her and swear eternal solidarity? But, sadly, she remembered the school reports. They had all stresse
d how much Alison resented any of the school conventions, even those enjoyed by her peers. No, the sisterly loyalty act didn’t look as if it would work.
She ate her fifth canapé, thinking that this now represented a quarter of an hour’s work early that morning. Soon David would be home, tired and anxious to have a restful evening. She hadn’t even seen her beloved Timmy since she came in the door. All over the country, families were getting ready for Christmas, some of them certainly had tensions . . . but not one family in the entire land, had Alison. The time bomb. Theirs for four, long years, ready to explode at any time.
She saw Alison’s luggage strewn all over the place. She would have to get an agreement with David that Alison keep everything in her room. Her room! Nothing had been done to it. In fact, it was filled with boxes; worse still, packets of fir cones, and a huge canvas bag of holly sprigs. If ever the child was going to feel unwanted and unwelcome, it would be because of Jenny. She had intended to leave many, many clothes hangers and a small understated vase with greenery and a couple of flowers as a welcome . . . nothing that could be considered showy or vulgar or uncool, or whatever were the favourite hatreds of Alison this festive season.
She had been silent as she had been glumly rejecting every possible method of relating to her stepdaughter. Alison must have noticed the lack of chatter. Her eyes followed Jenny’s and landed on the luggage.
‘I suppose you want me to take all that out of your way,’ Alison said in the voice of a martyr who had met a particularly unpleasant torturer.
‘About your room . . .’ Jenny began.
‘I’ll keep the door closed,’ Alison groaned.
‘No, not that . . .’
‘And I’ll keep the music down,’ she said, rolling her eyes.
‘Alison, it’s the room, I wanted to explain . . .’
The girl stopped in her bag-laden trudge to the bedroom. ‘Oh God, Jenny what is it now? What else can’t I do?’
Jenny felt so tired she could cry.
‘I just wanted to explain what there was in there . . .’ she said in a weak voice. Alison had opened the door.
She stood, looking around her at all the preparations, the trimmings and the garnish for a festive Christmas. She lifted a fir cone and smelled it. Her eyes went all around the room as if she couldn’t take it all in.
‘We didn’t think you were coming until tomorrow,’ Jenny apologised.
‘You were going to decorate my room,’ Alison’s voice was husky.
‘Well, yes. Well, with whatever you thought . . . you know,’ Jenny sounded confused.
‘With all this?’ Alison looked around her.
Jenny bit her lip. There was enough greenery in that room to decorate a three-storey house, which was what they lived in. The child couldn’t possibly have thought it was all for her bedroom. Then with one look at Alison’s radiant face, she realised that that was exactly what the tall, rangy, pre-Raphaelite with the wild hair and the sullen mouth was. She was a child. A motherless child who was going to have her room decorated for the first time.
In publishing, they always told you that the best decisions, the best books, came by accident, not by dint of long and clever planning.
‘Yes, well, with most of it. I thought we’d make it look really nice, nice and welcoming for you. But now that you’re here . . . maybe . . .’
‘Maybe I could help?’ Alison said, with eyes shining.
It wouldn’t last forever, Jenny knew that. The road ahead was not lit with soft, flattering lighting like a movie. They wouldn’t fall into each other’s arms. But it would last a little bit. Maybe through the party and through Christmas Day.
She heard the sound of her son running to find her.
‘Where were you, you didn’t come and see me?’ he called.
She picked him up in her arms. ‘I was just welcoming your sister home,’ she said, almost afraid to look at Alison’s face.
Alison leaned out and tickled Timmy with a frond of ivy.
‘Happy Christmas, little brother,’ she said.
The Ten Snaps of Christmas
MAURA LOVED CHRISTMAS. JIMMY ENDURED IT. WHEN MAURA was a child, they used to make a great fuss of it, an advent calendar opening a window each day, the Christmas cards examined with all the verses read aloud, then each one threaded on coloured string. They would start talking about the tree as early as October, and every present was lovingly wrapped and labelled and laid under the tree for at least a week’s squeezing and prodding in the hope and even fear of finding out what it was.
When they got married, at first Jimmy thought this was very endearing, he used to kiss her on the nose and say she was sweet. As the years went by, Maura noticed that it had become less sweet, like so many things. So she kept her sense of Christmas excitement a secret that she hugged to herself and the babies as they arrived one by one. This year there was only Rebecca for Santa Claus. Rebecca was four, John and James and Orla were far too old. But you couldn’t be too old for trees and lights and candles and a holly wreath for the door. Maura worked alone and happily, and didn’t burden Jimmy too much when he came home from work in the evenings. She only consulted him about what big present each child was to get.
James was ten, he would get a bicycle. John was eight, he would get the electronic game that had been much hinted at. Rebecca would get a dozen small, noisy things—she wasn’t old enough for the big present yet, but Orla . . . what would they give the tall fourteen-year-old? Maura said she thought Orla might like a voucher for clothes in that trendy shop where her school friends spent hours just looking in the window. Jimmy thought that Orla might like a typewriter and a quickie typing course. They could come to no meeting of minds over this at all. Maura said to give anyone a typing course for Christmas was like giving a woman a diet book or a subscription to Weight Watchers. Jimmy said to give a child a voucher for a shop like that was like a licence to buy perverted transsexual clothing with a parental imprimatur. It had better be neither of these. They decided they would give her a Polaroid camera. The kind that would take pictures instantly, there and then. Festive for the season and urgent for today’s generation. So that was what they bought, and wrapped it in many other boxes and corrugated paper so that Orla prodded it a hundred times and still had no idea what it contained until the day itself.
Maura bought some heated hair-rollers for her mother, who came to stay for Christmas. Her mother was glamorous and fashion conscious in Maura’s mind; in Jimmy’s mind she was mutton dressed as lamb, a woman who refused to grow old gracefully. He never objected to her Christmas visit, but he didn’t look forward to it either. His own parents were kept at a safe distance, presents posted, and a call on Christmas morning to wish them the compliments of the season. Jimmy’s family was a lot less demonstrative.
Maura bought a nice Tara brooch for Marie France, the French au pair girl. Marie France had this disconcerting habit of wondering were things real silver or pure silk or was the wine vintage or if they had the best seats at the theatre. At least with something so obviously ethnic and Irish she could hardly complain.
Marie France was all right, Maura thought, a bit pouty and shruggy and eyes-up-to-heaven-ish, but maybe that was the way twenty-year-old French girls banished to learn English behaved. She did exactly what she was asked to do with Rebecca and about preparing the vegetables and vacuuming the downstairs but not one single thing more. Maura had often wished she had set out a slightly more demanding timetable, after all Marie France had a room of her own, three marvellous meals a day, and endless time to study as well as going to her course. But nothing, not even the minor sense of grudge towards Marie France could spoil Maura’s Christmas. She felt the familiar excitement just as soon as they started to play ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ and ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ over the tannoy at the supermarkets . . . and that was fairly early on. By the time the street lights were up, Maura was in a high state of happy fuss. Her mother arrived with a yet more outrageous outfit than usual; her friend Br
igid, who had left her husband again, wondered was it possible if she could join the family and Maura said, ‘Of course’, for Christmas was a time to be happy and Brigid had been a friend since school. Jimmy groaned a bit about Brigid. He said she was a nut case and that the husband was well rid of her, but he agreed that since she could only eat a plate of turkey and ham and since the day was ruined already by the presence of Maura’s mother then honestly he saw no objection to Brigid coming, and sure, sure if she brought her sleeping bag, why not, why not let her sleep in the sitting room on the sofa. Since the crazy mother-in-law was taking up the guest room, why not?
They sang carols on Christmas Eve. Maura closed her eyes in happiness and in gratitude for all she had. Her face was so happy that even Orla who thought it was yucky, and Grannie who thought it was over the top and Brigid who thought it was barking mad and Jimmy who thought it was pathetic, all joined in. James and John thought it was funny and sang one louder than the other, Rebecca thought it was a game and banged on her tambourine in what she thought was in time with the music.
Next morning after Mass they sat around in a circle while the presents were given out. Maura’s mother loved the hair-rollers and took a plug off one of the lamps immediately in order to try them out, Marie France shrugged and pouted over the Tara brooch, Jimmy was genuinely pleased with the anorak because he hated waste and he wanted one anyway, and Maura showed pleasure at the carpet sweeper which Jimmy said might be useful on those occasions when she didn’t think it worthwhile taking out the vacuum cleaner.
Orla was very quiet all morning as the gifts were being opened. Maura felt a pang of regret. Perhaps she should have fought harder for the voucher for the child. It was becoming harder and harder to talk to her but all mothers said the same about teenage daughters, and really, it was only now when she was well and truly married and had a grown family that she could relate properly to her own mother. Maybe that was one relationship that would never work. It would be the same when chubby, adorable Rebecca had a decade behind her. Orla wasn’t rude or surly like other people’s daughters. She never defied them or insisted on her own way. It was just that recently she seemed . . . well . . . a little bored with them. It was as if she didn’t rate them very highly as a family. Nothing you could put your finger on and certainly nothing you could say to Jimmy who thought the sun and the moon and all of the stars shone out of his eldest daughter. It would look like some kind of criticism, which it was not. Maura had decided on this occasion, as on many others, to say nothing. But she chewed her lip as Orla’s long, blonde hair fell over the well-disguised present and finally revealed the camera that would take instant pictures.