Comfort and Joy

by India Knight

‘There isn’t a problem,’ I say. ‘I just fear the jinx if I tell you too much.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say in the first place?’ says Flo. ‘The jinx, we can understand.’

  ‘God, yes,’ says Evie. ‘Totally mustn’t jinx. We’ll speak no more of it.’

  ‘Also, I haven’t told Sam yet,’ I say. ‘So. Hushed beaks. But mainly, it might not go anywhere, and thus I fear the jinx.’

  ‘Gotcha,’ says Flo. ‘But can I just ask – why isn’t he married? Is he, like, twenty-five?’

  ‘Ew, toyboy,’ says Evie. ‘Bit suburban, Clara.’

  ‘Bit “Hello, big boy, I am a lady of a certain age and I am wearing my lucky negligee.” Ack,’ says Flo.

  ‘No, no. He has been married, but he isn’t any more,’ I say.

  ‘Hm,’ says Evie. ‘You’ve been having sex, obviously. I do believe it is the thing to which our mama alludes. You glow with sex, Clara. You are like a glowing beacon of the goodness of sex.’

  ‘Eve!’ says Flo, giggling. ‘You’re so mad.’ She turns to me. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Not answering any more. Respect the jinx,’ I say, and we all go laughing up the stairs.

  ‘Deep breath,’ says Flo, taking my arm as we enter the sitting room.

  4

  25 December 2010, 11.30 a.m.

  Our sitting room is big and square, and on an ordinary day you would find it airy and pleasantly spacious. Today, there’s already nowhere left to sit, and the presents – the obscene tsunami of presents, which has been added to by every new guest – has by now pretty much engulfed what remains of the floor space: people are standing about like little person-islands, an ocean of packages at their feet.

  Kate and Pat are sitting together on the sofa, champagne flutes in hand. Pat’s flute contains brandy mixed with lemonade: she doesn’t drink wine of any kind, claiming it’s ‘too strong’ (she also claims that salad leaves are ‘too scratchy’, gesturing to her throat and wincing as she says it; I note this isn’t a problem with jumbo bags of crisps). She and Kate are screaming with laughter, God knows what at. You wouldn’t think they had an enormous amount in common, but it’s like this every year: BFFs, or at least best friends for Christmas. They’re practically sitting on each other’s laps by the end of the day. I think the love strikes because Kate makes no concessions of any kind when she’s talking to Pat. So if she’s just been cruising around the Aegean on Max’s yacht (Kate prefers to say ‘boat’), she assumes Pat is familiar both with island-hopping and with yacht-life generally. Pat likes this approach very much, and picks stuff up incredibly fast, including all the detail of Kate’s social circles: ‘Ah yes, that’ll be the one that got divorced because in the end she couldn’t make herself sleep with him,’ she’ll say. ‘Even though he was so rich.’

  ‘Exactly, Pat,’ Kate will say. And then they’ll both howl with laughter.

  Robert and Sam are by the fireplace, engaged in earnest-seeming conversation; I briefly wonder, paranoiacally, whether they are talking about me and my disastrous failings as a spouse: ‘And then she got fat.’ ‘She’d sorted that out by the time she met me. With me it was more, she just got boring.’ ‘Well, yes, she got boring with me too, obviously.’ ‘She started complaining.’ ‘Yep, yep, I hear you. She got the whining degree with me, but the doctorate with you.’ ‘I wish you’d warned me.’ ‘Well, you seemed very into her.’ ‘I was, then.’

  Jack is perched on the arm of another sofa, his laptop balanced on his knee – I expect he’s busy wishing every one of his 829 Facebook ‘friends’ a happy Christmas. Charlie is rifling through the presents like a locust, pointing out to a desperately overexcited Maisy which ones are hers, while Maisy dances around, begging her brothers and anyone else who cares to listen to let her open ‘just one teeny-tiny present’.

  ‘You have to wait till everyone’s here, Maise,’ Charlie says. ‘It might be tomorrow.’ He sees her face fall and adds kindly, ‘Not really. If you’re good it’ll only be about five more minutes.’

  ‘Your daddy is over there,’ says Maisy. ‘He is talking to my daddy.’

  ‘I know,’ Charlie says.

  ‘Your daddy is Robert,’ Maisy continues. ‘And my daddy is Sam.’

  ‘Yep,’ says Charlie. ‘Got it in one, clever-ass. What are you?’

  ‘A clever-ass,’ Maisy says.

  People are still arriving: here comes Ed, Flo’s husband, shepherding in their two-year-old twins, who waddle in giggling and make straight for the snacks. Flo kindly let Evie choose the twins’ middle names, so they are called Grace Moomin (after the Moomins) and Ava Timothy (after Timmy, the dog in The Famous Five). Unlike Flo, Ed didn’t appear over-impressed with these choices at the time. ‘But what can you do,’ as Evie said, ‘if someone simply refuses to see the goodness? I wonder if I should have been more modern, maybe gone with something like Gruffalo or Iggle. Ah well, next time.’

  ‘My aunties!’ Maisy screams, hurling herself at my sisters, who shower her with kisses, one to each side of her. ‘Like a sandwich,’ Maisy says happily, ‘and you’re the bread and I’m the ham. No, the cheese. No, the cucumber. No, the egg.’

  ‘I wish your mummy had let me choose your middle name, Maise,’ says Evie. ‘It would totally be Egg.’

  And here come Tamsin and Jake (still together, and getting married next year) and Maisy’s great crush, Tamsin’s daughter Cassie, who at seven is a whole and significant year older and therefore an object of purest admiration. They are followed by Hope, travelling solo except for the laptop from which she has become inseparable: having worked her way through most of the dating sites with predictably unhappy – and occasionally downright grotesque – results, Hope has recently become obsessed with Facebook, which has opened up entire new worlds of disastrous flirting possibilities for her. (‘It’s different on Facebook,’ she claims. ‘You meet friends of friends, so you know they’re going to be okay.’ It doesn’t seem to bother her that the online definition of ‘friend’ is ‘someone you’ve never actually met in the flesh’.) She goes to perch next to Jack, recognizing a fellow social networker. Perhaps they’ll sit there side by side, and send each other special Facebook Christmas gifts.

  Everyone is eventually gathered – Robert’s mother and stepfather have arrived, as have Sam’s old friends Laura and Chris, who he’s asked this year for moral support. They’re currently standing in the middle of the room looking slightly overwhelmed and in need of support themselves, as well they might: there are an awful lot of us and it would be easy enough to feel swamped at the best of times. Which this isn’t. It is a weird time, though today the weirdness is on the back burner, because it’s Christmas. Sam moved out eight months ago, though he’s living locally and is around most days, to see Maisy. She seems to be coping remarkably well with the new arrangements: the only evidence of any disquiet is her constant stating and restating of people’s relationships to each other. Poor thing: in the context of our family, it’s as though she’d asked for a six-piece, chunky wooden puzzle and been given a white Rubik’s Cube.

  ‘You can open a present now, Maisy,’ I tell her. We walk – well, I walk, she hops – to the tree holding hands, trying not to step on people or gifts. While Maisy tears into wrapping paper festooned with jaunty reindeer, I start distributing presents to everybody else, so that they each have a little pile to open. Sam tops up glasses; Cassie passes around plates of canapés; Ed is in charge of bin liners to stick the debris in, because if you’re not careful the sea of presents transforms into a sea of wrapping paper that things get lost under. The noise is unbelievable: you’d think we were having a party for a hundred, though at a party for a hundred there would be fewer children’s squeals and less beeping from their battery-powered new toys.

  When everyone seems happily ensconced, kissing each other thank you, holding things up delightedly and pronouncing that they love their gift – ‘I LOVE MY GIFT!’ if you’re one of my sisters; ‘You’re that good to me,’ if you’re Pat (tearful); ‘Charmin
g. Anyway, as I was saying …’ if you’re Kate – I go down to the kitchen to check on the roast potatoes, which disloyally, given how devotedly I love them, challenge me every Christmas, presumably because the giganto porn-turkey is absorbing all the heat; I need to swap them from the bottom to the top of the oven. Sam’s down there too, unexpectedly (in the kitchen, I mean, not nestling among the spuds), feeling around the medicine drawer.

  ‘I’m looking for headache pills,’ he says. ‘Do we … do you have any? Would they be in here?’

  ‘They should be. It’s a bit of a mess in there. You have a sore head?’

  ‘Little bit,’ he says. It strikes me – for the first time, oddly – that he looks a lot like Captain Von Trapp from The Sound of Music. Except younger, obviously. And real.

  ‘It’s very noisy upstairs, and hot too. Here, let me have a look. Could you just check on the potatoes?’

  ‘Funny how quickly you become unused to things,’ says Sam, grabbing the oven gloves. ‘When you live on your own. I mean, this – it’s just a ramped-up version of normal house noise, isn’t it? It’s not that bad. But it’s given me a headache.’

  ‘Here,’ I say, putting two Nurofen on the worktop, which is covered in stray crumbs from the bread for the bread sauce. ‘It might not just be the noise, you know. That’s giving you a headache, I mean. Do you like it?’

  ‘The headache?’

  ‘Living alone. The solitude.’

  ‘Yes, I think so. I get a lot done. It’s very peaceful. Calm. I miss Maisy. And the boys.’

  ‘You can borrow the boys any time,’ I say, heading for the fridge. ‘Have them to stay. Adopt them, if you like.’

  Obviously he wasn’t going to say he missed me, the mother of the people he misses, and still – technically – his wife. I wouldn’t have particularly liked him to say it, either: awkwardness. Except, clearly, I would, because now I’m narked by the omission.

  ‘They’re still a bit pale. The potatoes,’ he says, giving them a shake.

  ‘They’ll be okay. The thing to remember is that they always are, in the end.’

  ‘Like you,’ says Sam, mirthlessly. He gulps down the headache pills.

  ‘Sam. First, don’t compare me to a potato, it’s really exceptionally unflattering. And second, you have absolutely no idea whether I’m okay or not,’ I say, trying not to sound exasperated. If there’s one thing I really dislike, it’s being told what I’m like by people who aren’t me. I especially dislike the assumption that a person knows me better than I know myself.

  ‘I observe that you are,’ he says. ‘You’re very good at holding it together. Always were.’

  Wrong thing to say. Just because I’m not doing ugly crying with nose stuff doesn’t mean I have no feelings, the git. Second, it’s so easy to tell someone what they’re like – it exonerates you from having to do any thinking or empathizing: ‘Oh, Clara, she’s absolutely fine, because she’s really good at holding it together. Me, on the other hand … Me, I’m sensitive.’ I mean: fuck off. Three, there are reasons for me being good at holding it together – which I don’t deny I am – and he knows what they are, so he shouldn’t pretend that my ‘holding it together’ is simply what happens, a default setting, how I was born.

  We’re interrupted by the doorbell – it’s Niamh, a friend of Sam’s, who has popped in for a drink before her own family Christmas. She gusts in, followed by a wave of cold air, kisses us both hello and then disappears to the loo. When she’s been in there for more than three minutes, Sam catches my eye and the atmosphere in the kitchen lightens considerably. He starts laughing before he says anything, shaking his head at me at the same time. ‘You’re so loopy, Clara,’ he says. ‘You’re obsessed.’

  ‘What?’ I say innocently.

  ‘And now I’ve caught that thing off you, and I find myself thinking it too,’ he says, still laughing. ‘Even though it’s completely deranged.’

  ‘I just think it’s so rude,’ I say.

  ‘She can’t help it,’ Sam says, now properly laughing out loud. ‘People can’t. It’s just, you’re so deeply weird that you notice. I can’t believe you’ve contaminated me into thinking it too.’

  ‘As I’ve told you nine million times before,’ I say, ‘people absolutely can help it. It’s called sphincter control and we all have it, unless we’re gravely ill or gastrically disabled.’ I’m laughing too now, but I do think I’m right. Etiquette tip: don’t go to people’s houses for a drink, rush in, wave hello and immediately – or, frankly, at any point – go and take a long, leisurely dump. Just don’t. You are an adult. Go before you leave home, and if you’re suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to poo – well, hold it in. It won’t kill you. It’s really uncharming to come and crap all over somebody else’s lavatory when you’re only going to be there for an hour or two. It is the definition of bad manners. I’d understand if Niamh had travelled some huge, looless distance, but she only lives twenty minutes away. Why couldn’t she poo before she left home?

  Plus, another thing about pooing in other people’s loos is that everyone knows you’ve pooed. You might as well cancan back into the room, doing jazz hands and singing, ‘Hey everyone, I done a crap.’ And that’s okay, in a way: I mean, we all go. But for me – and maybe I am loopy – I picture the person on the loo, and when they come back for their pudding I think less of them and feel faintly disgusted.

  The absolutely worst thing that can happen – the thing that makes you want to end the acquaintanceship right there, if you’re me – is if someone you don’t know especially well comes to your house, craps, and leaves a floater. That, my friends, is the end as far as I am concerned.

  Sam and I had a row about this once. We were on a plane and lunch had just been served. Or what passed for lunch, at any rate. Anyway, the second it was over – literally, the second – an enormous queue started forming for the loo. I said, unwisely as it turns out, ‘My God, these people are like animals. Food passes through their alimentary canals and they immediately have to defecate. They’re like hamsters.’ I pointed out that you didn’t get the lav-stampede if you travelled business class, and Sam accused me of being a horrendous snob. I don’t care. It’s true. The cheaper the flight, the bigger the queue for the toilets after feeding time. ‘You’re unbelievable. You’re basically accusing people like me of being in some way anally incontinent,’ Sam had said, which made me laugh a lot – he wasn’t laughing at all, which made it much funnier. He slightly spoiled his point by then joining the queue, throwing me pitch-black looks as I sat convulsed in my seat, making toothy little hamster faces at him.

  We’re both standing there, laughing like a pair of village idiots – too much, really, but I guess it’s relief at the lightening of mood as well as the simple goodness of trusty poo laffs – when Niamh comes back into the room. ‘That’s better,’ she says, fatally. Sam emits a strangulated sort of noise; I am aware that my face is weirdly contorted with the desire not to actually start barking with laughter, like a dog.

  ‘Let’s go up,’ I say.

  We are a bit much, I think to myself – not for the first time – as I cast my eye around the sitting room. Laura and Chris are still looking startled, Chris’s mouth having just fallen slightly open at the sight of Pat, extravagantly bejewelled around the neck thanks to Kate’s present. ‘You really shouldn’t have,’ says Pat. ‘It’s too much. I don’t know what to say.’ Kate has given Pat a pearl necklace, the pearls huge and a beautiful, nacreous grey-pink. The gift is perfectly judged: the pearls shimmer beautifully against Pat’s pale skin, and – this is very Kate: she loves luxe but hates ostentation – you’d only know they were the stonkingly expensive real thing if you were some kind of pearl expert.

  ‘Don’t go on, darling,’ Kate says to Pat. ‘But I’m delighted you like them. I chose them particularly carefully. You have that lovely colouring – I didn’t want to get ordinary white ones, in case the whole effect was too revoltingly albino.’

  ‘I love them,
’ says Pat happily.

  ‘And I love this,’ says Kate. ‘I love the fact that you made it yourself. I’m enormously flattered and touched.’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ says Pat. Her present to Kate is a hand-crocheted tissue-box holder, vividly turquoise and topped with an enormous orange starfish.

  ‘It’s divine,’ says Kate, squeezing Pat’s arm. ‘It’s the present to beat.’ It is entirely possible that Kate means this.

  I notice that Sam has positioned himself near ‘his’ friends – I always thought they were ‘our’ friends, but anyway – and is saving all his terms of endearment, his ‘darlings’ and ‘babes’ and so on – for his old mates Niamh and Laura. When I take him my gift – a shirt from his favourite tailor that I spent ages choosing – and present my cheek to be kissed, I also notice that he has some trouble with the question of physical contact with me. I stand there, waiting – not for Clara’s especial kiss from her especial Sammy, but because kissing thank you is what everyone in the room is doing once every five minutes. But kiss comes there none.

  ‘Thanks very much, Clara,’ he says. ‘It’s lovely.’ Then he just stands there, grimacing faintly, his face a rictus and his body rigid. It’s galling, to be honest. It’s particularly galling because Laura and Niamh are practically being snogged thank you for their presents (whisky and shaving stuff), and because he keeps patting and touching them: he’s always been very physically demonstrative. Now I think about it, there hasn’t been a kiss hello in all the times he’s dropped round to see Maisy, or indeed a kiss goodbye. I am suddenly annoyed about this. Indignant. I am vexed. It’s only my cheek. I’m not asking him to kiss my bottom.

  ‘Sam,’ I say. ‘Aren’t you going to give me a kiss? To say thank you for your really nice shirt?’

  He stares at me. It’s not a loving stare.

  ‘You want me to kiss you?’

  ‘Yeah. With tongues,’ I say, which is probably a mistake, but which seems amusing at the time.