by India Knight
Well, not the last bit, obviously. But the rest – well, it’s possible, I think, smiling to myself at my own idiocy as I paint Nigella’s maple-syrup-and-butter mix onto the bird’s H-cupped bosom. Not necessarily probable, granted. But at least he texted. He texted! And even as I’m smiling at myself, there’s a twinge somewhere in my abdomen, a little dart of hope. I think the penultimate sentence of the text probably doesn’t denote an imminent proposal – let’s get a grip here. And obviously I don’t want him to marry me, because I’m married already. But still.
Daubs of butter, bacon on the breast, and – God, my back: I’m bent in two, like a crone – the bird goes into the oven. I turn my attention to the potatoes. We had a massive peeling session yesterday evening – me, the children, various rellies and friends who were hanging about – but I think the potatoes suffer from being peeled and left in water overnight, and frankly, if it were down to me, we’d chuck the turkey and feast on roast potatoes and bread sauce. So here they are, all four kilos of them, and here I am with my peeler in my hand and a cup of tea at my side, Radio 4 in the background, enjoying the last few moments of solitude I’ll have all day.
I know exactly what’s going to happen in approximately ten minutes. It is what always happens, and what will continue to happen until the End of Days (I push that thought right out of my head, because it makes me feel unpleasantly claustrophobic. I used to have it a lot, usually in various domestic contexts: I’d look at Sam sleeping, and think, ‘Until the End of Days,’ and sometimes I’d feel panicky and short of breath though I know I should have felt comforted, secure, safe, bathed in the golden glow of eternal matrimony. But let’s not go there again). Anyway, what will happen is that Pat will come downstairs and she won’t have put her teeth in yet. Yes, I know – they’re her teeth and if she wants to walk around with a broken-looking, caved-in face, it’s her lookout. And maybe the teeth are uncomfy; in fact I expect they are – how could they not be? Nevertheless, I will be temporarily irritated. I will also be irritated by the fact that, despite my having bought her four different dressing gowns over the years, she will choose to come downstairs in her sweet, old-lady, see-through nightdress. Why are sweet, old-lady nighties never sufficiently opaque? Buttoned up to the neck, cuffed to the wrist, virginally white, starched-seeming, practically Amish – but you can always see the bosoms. And the … I don’t know what to call my mother-in-law’s vagina. I don’t understand it: my own nighties – less Amish, more flesh-exposing – are as densely woven as you like. I could stand in front of Klieg lights and nobody would see anything. Pat’s nighties, not so. Good morning, Pat, and – hey! Long time no see! – good morning to you, Pat’s tits and arse. Greetings, o loins.
And here she comes. ‘You should have told me you were up,’ she says, toothlessly. I can see her nipples. ‘I’d have come down and helped.’ She turns her back to get to the kettle, and yup – there is Pat’s arse, glinting pearlescent through the fabric. And then she turns round again and … oh God. There it is, clearly visible and – help me – drawing my eye to it like a magnet.
I am suddenly filled with a sort of carpe diem vigour. If you can’t carp the diem on Christmas Day, when can you? So after I’ve kissed Pat good morning and wished her a merry Christmas and stuck two pieces of bread in the toaster for her (I’ve cleverly remembered to buy her the plastic white bread she likes; she can’t eat wholemeal bread because she says the seedy bits remind her of ‘wee moths’), I say, boldly, for the first time ever in the seven years I’ve known her, ‘Pat. You know your nightie’s completely see-through?’
‘Is it now, darling?’ says Pat, looking down at herself. ‘Aye, so it is. Most of them are. D’you have any red jam? I don’t like marmalade.’
‘Here,’ I say, fetching the jar. ‘But, Pat?’
‘Yes?’ says Pat.
‘Do you not feel … do you not think maybe a dressing gown?’
‘You don’t mind, do you?’
Tricky question. Admitting I mind suggests I am somehow affronted by Pat’s parts, which – though true up to a point – isn’t something I want to emphasize. I mean, what a downer for her, on Christmas morning, to feel her genitalia are somehow spoiling the vibe.
‘Me?’ I laugh, like this: ha ha ha. ‘Me? Of course not. We’re all the same, as I’m always telling Maisy.’
‘Oh good,’ says Pat, sitting down to breakfast, so that all I can see now are her practically bared breasts.
‘But, you know … other people,’ I say. ‘The boys, and Sam, and …’
‘Sam’s seen it all before,’ Pat says cheerfully of her sixty-something nudity. I have no idea of what goes on any more. Perhaps they watch Sex and the City together starkers.
‘I, er, right. But the boys, and people are going to start turning up in a bit, and I just think, I just wonder …’
‘Ah, they’re just my wee diddies,’ Pat says. ‘I’ll go and get dressed in a minute. Now, what can I do to help?’
And that is the start of Christmas morning.
Everything happens at once, as it always seems to on Christmas morning. The children open their stockings after breakfast – I make them wait until then these days – and they all seem gratifyingly delighted with them; Jack and Charlie don’t eye up Maisy’s with any discernible dissatisfaction. And then there’s a mini-lull, where it feels almost like an ordinary day, if we had ordinary days and lived in an idealized world. The house is calm, the children are in their rooms playing with their new things, everything is clean and shiny and there’s a delicious smell. It is, frankly, blissfully domestic. Pat has put in her teeth and put on some underwear, as well as some clothes. There’s champagne chilling on the balcony, what with the fridge still being crammed to capacity (I don’t know why I buy stuff as though we were going to be under siege for days: the shops re-open tomorrow). King’s College carols are streaming through the house via my computer; we even have a fire going in the sitting room. It’s all extremely charming: a perfect scene, really. And I am delighted as I look at it. All that haring around, all that effort, and I think the result is worth it. Here we are: it’s Christmas Day and the surface, at least, is gloriously lovely.
My former husband, Robert, is the first to arrive. He’s been living in New York for the past three years, and Paris before that, which means the quality of his presents is really excellent. And I’m pleased to see him, too, obviously. Robert has gone, pretty much seamlessly, from being my husband to being my very good friend; we speak two or three times a week and hang out with the children when he’s in London for work, which is every four weeks. It helped that I had already met Sam just before we separated: it cut the time I spent wailing and weeping. It also helped that I wasn’t entirely inclined to weep and wail for long, once the shock of being dumped had passed. That’s the main thing, really, about dumpage – the humiliation. Is that an awful thing to say? It’s what I felt, at any rate. Twenty per cent sad; eighty per cent crushed with humiliation. Just really embarrassed, as though I’d farted exceptionally loudly, fusillade-style, at a very quiet wedding (an apt analogy, that – in all the time we were married, I was never aware of Robert having any bodily functions of the evacuative sort. He pooed in secret. For eight years).
Which isn’t to say that being dumped doesn’t suck, even when nothing very dramatic happens and you just peter out for no very good reason. You’re like a stiletto when everyone’s wearing wedges, all alone and unloved, gathering dust at the back of the wardrobe, not yet knowing – because you’re too busy feeling miserable, and, er, also because you’re a shoe and your brains aren’t that huge – that your time will come again. I don’t mean that my time with Robert will come again – Jesus, what a thought – but rather that you don’t realize, when you’re a shoe, that everything is cyclical. At some point you – shunned shoe, shoe of shame, shoe with the wrong heel and the unfashionably pointy toe, shoe with shoe-babies – will be in demand. You will be the shoe du jour. Sure, as Pat says, as eggs is eggs. But it’s
pointless telling a shoe that at the time of its despair.
‘Hello, Clara,’ says Robert. ‘You look gorgeous. Merry Christmas.’
‘My mummy always looks gorgeous,’ says Maisy, who has appeared at my side, wearing a pair of felt antlers on her head and a dress with an appliquéd Christmas pudding on the front. ‘It’s because she has beautiful boobies. Daddy has hairy boobies, because he is a man. You’re not my daddy, Uncle Robert. Come and see my presents now please.’
Robert sweeps her up and gives her a kiss. ‘Boobies?’ he says, raising an eyebrow at me. Robert’s innate fastidiousness, which is legendary – he edits fashion magazines, and this has only made him worse – extends to language. ‘Why not “knockers”, while you’re at it? Or “jugs”, like the trusty print companion of my teenage years?’
‘I didn’t teach her “boobies”,’ I say. ‘Obviously. She learned it at school. It could be a lot worse.’
‘Come on, Uncle Robert,’ says Maisy, already halfway back up the stairs.
‘Are you okay?’ says Robert, more solicitously than one might have expected.
‘I’m delirious,’ I say. ‘Everything’s fine.’
‘Good,’ he says, hanging up his coat. ‘I’ll just take these presents up and see my children. And I’ll make you a drink. My mum’s about half an hour away. Nice rack, by the way. As we say in the twenty-first century. Or boobies, if you must.’ And, with a snigger, he runs up after Maisy. He’s very annoying, my former husband, but he still makes me laugh. (I never, ever wonder – literally, not once – what things would be like if we’d stayed together. I don’t think he does either. We were rather well matched, in that respect.)
Robert is followed by Kate, my mother, a vision in what appears to be – bold move, even by her standards – real fur. She is accompanied by my sisters, Evie and Flo, who are respectively thirty and thirty-two; Max, Kate’s fourth husband, is en route from Devon, where he has spent the morning with his own grown-up children and grandchildren, and won’t get here until teatime. I’m making it sound like my mother and sisters walk through the door in a normal, walking-through-the-door kind of way. What actually happens is, they sort of explode into the hall, thus:
‘Who’s got the truffle?’ This is Kate. ‘Hellodarlinghappy-Christmas. Flo! Did you get the truffle?’
‘I have it in a little pot of rice, packed all sweetly,’ says Flo.
‘Like a little special egg, in a nest,’ says Evie, who is wearing a silver lamé vintage dress of great beauty and dragging a vast stack of presents behind her on a red plastic sleigh.
‘Yuck, eggs,’ says Flo. ‘Hen periods. Sickness. Don’t say eggs, Eve.’
‘Eggs,’ says Evie, smiling an angelic smile.
‘God, how I loathed periods,’ says Kate, taking off her coat and handing it to me, her trusty major-domo. It is real fur. ‘The bliss of the menopause. You should write about it, Clara. I don’t know why people moan about it – there is literally nothing nicer.’
‘Everyone is saying periods,’ says Evie. ‘Periods, periods. Can they stop? It’s kind of grossing me out.’
‘Get in and shut the door, it’s freezing,’ I say, kissing them all. ‘Happy Christmas!’
‘Oh God – yes! HAPPY CHRISTMAS!’ yell Evie and Flo.
‘Happiest of Christmi,’ says Evie, catching my eye – an old family joke dating back from childhood, when Evie thought it was spelled ‘Christmus’.
‘The truffle needs to go in the fridge right now,’ says Kate. ‘Clara! Right this second. The truffle. The fridge. They must meet and become one.’
‘I read that the menopause gave you vaginal dryness,’ says Evie to Kate. ‘That wouldn’t be good.’
‘No,’ says Flo. ‘That would be very challenging.’
‘Except,’ says Evie, ‘there’s always lube.’
‘Vaginal dryness! Absolute nonsense,’ says Kate. ‘You should never believe anything you read. All journalists lie. They’re paid to lie, basically.’
‘Um,’ I say. I’ve been working on magazines since I was twenty-one. ‘Hello. I’m here.’
‘Shameful profession,’ says Kate. ‘Ghastly. But never mind. The foul deed is done. Though I still don’t understand what was wrong with medicine.’
‘Kate. I’m forty-one years old. Bit late to retrain.’
‘You’re looking rather well on it, I must say,’ Kate says. ‘I was worried you’d be all sort of broken and hideous. Or that you’d have gotten fat again. It’s so much harder to shift at your age. Have you had Botox?’
‘No.’
‘A man?’ Kate is staring at me beadily; if she had antennae, they’d be quivering.
‘Don’t ask Clara if she’s had a man,’ says Flo, taking off her woolly hat and tousling her hair. ‘We’re still queuing in the hall and it’s not appropriate at all. Though, Clara, have you?’
‘A man!’ This is Evie, practically shouting and hopping up and down. ‘Is there a man? Oh, I knew it. Well, I hoped it. I prayed it.’
‘Hello, Kate,’ says Sam, coming down the stairs with a glass in his hand and looking rather stern. His eyes are very blue. ‘Evie, Flo. Happy Christmas. What have you done with your children?’
‘Oh pooey,’ says Evie. ‘Me and my shit timing. Sorry, Sam. Hello! Happy Christmas.’
‘They’re in the car,’ says Flo. ‘Hi, Sam. Merry Christmas.’
‘And to you. Lovely to see you all,’ says Sam. ‘Are they going to stay there?’
‘What?’ says Flo, shedding her flat boots and slipping into massive four-inch heels: I never understand how Flo can actually walk, let alone run around after two little twins. ‘Que? Oh, no. Ed’s bringing them inside in a minute. They fell asleep and we didn’t want to wake them because they really need a nap.’
‘Go upstairs,’ I say. ‘Take your presents. You’re making a traffic jam. Sam, would you sort out drinks for everyone? And – hang on – there are some canapés somewhere, you can take them up too.’
‘Probably in the fridge, where this truffle belongs,’ says Kate, like a woman obsessed. ‘Give me your arm, Sam. Lead on. Is your mother here? I long for her.’
‘I’ll bring them up,’ says Flo. ‘The snacks. Go ahead. I just want to talk to my sisters quickly.’ We huddle into the kitchen.
‘Sorry about saying “Is there a man?” ’ says Evie, looking contrite. ‘Me and my giant beak.’
‘It’s okay,’ I say.
‘But is there?’ says Flo. ‘Clara, we must know. We can’t sit here all day not knowing.’
‘In agony,’ says Evie. ‘In ABSOLUTE AGGO, Clara.’
‘Tell us,’ says Flo. ‘We beg it.’
I should perhaps point out that both of my sisters hold down responsible jobs, and that none of us talks like this except when we are with each other, and particularly when we are with each other and our mother. We just slip back into the jokes and cadences of childhood, the shorthand. It’s comfortable, but I don’t think that’s the only reason we do it. It’s also comforting. My sisters are as obsessed with Christmas as I am, and there’s a reason for that: our childhood Christmases, our Christmi, when everything was fine, and before everything went wrong and Kate and Julian, the girls’ father, split up in seismic fashion. The golden Christmases that we all try to recreate each year, along with the feeling that we are loved, safe, happy and that nothing bad will ever happen to us again. At this late stage, it would be fair to say that hope springs eternal in the Huttish breast.
‘There isn’t a man,’ I say, grinning. ‘No man. Manless.’ I make a sad, upside-down face, but the grin won’t entirely go away.
‘I can tell from your face that thou lieth, Clara,’ says Evie.
‘I’m not lying, Eve.’
‘You are totally lying,’ says Flo. ‘Your pants are on fire.’
‘They are burning your bottom as you speak,’ says Evie. ‘Singeing your poor buttocks. “We burn,” they cry.’
‘Why are you so nosy?’
‘Becau
se we love you,’ says Flo.
‘I love you too. But I’m a grown-up – you don’t need all the deets. And anyway, it’s been going on a while and it’s complicated. I met him a year ago. We spoke on the phone, and emailed. Very modern. He was working abroad at the time. But now he’s back in London and we’ve been … seeing a bit of each other.’
‘Clara!’ says Flo. ‘Oh my God. Please tell me the man isn’t married.’
‘Oh no, noooo,’ says Evie, clutching herself around the waist. ‘We always said that was the one thing we’d never, ever do.’
‘Clara,’ says Flo, her dark eyes on mine. ‘Stop laughing. It’s not at all funny. You told us. When we were little. You said, a person does what they have to do, but they never nick people’s spouses, because it is sordid.’
‘And you said,’ says Evie, ‘that it was a monstrous betrayal of one’s own gender, also really bad karma.’
‘It is,’ I say. ‘You reap what you sow. Christ, I sound like Pat.’
‘It’s still true, though. Hurry up and tell us so we can stop feeling sick,’ says Evie. ‘I want to go and say hello to Pat. And I want to squidge Maisy. And the boys. And everyone. They will all be squidged. And I want to know you’re not shagging a married man.’
‘Why’s it complicated?’ says Flo.
‘You don’t owe anything to Sam, and besides you two split up ages ago,’ says Evie. ‘Quel est le problème?’
‘We only split up eight months ago, Eev. Hardly ages. It’s not entirely non-weird. First Christmas and all that.’
‘You are obfuscating,’ says Flo. ‘Is the man married?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then,’ says Evie, with a theatrical sigh of relief. ‘Je répète: quel est le problème?’