Comfort and Joy

by India Knight

  It all seemed like such a good idea. I was at the hairdresser’s last month leafing through the kinds of magazines I never buy any more. It was late November and it had, by that point, been raining solidly for nine days: proper, award-winningly miserable English weather, without even one crisp, cold-but-sunny morning to atone. In the right mood, I can totally work with torrential rain and it being dark at half past three: I embrace fires and endless cups of tea and blankets on the sofa and making cakes, and I quite like it. But it was still term time, our car was at the garage waiting for a part that seemed to elude capture, and walking Maisy to and from school in the deluge before going to buy food in the deluge before going about my normal business in the deluge began to get me down. The boys were like sun-starved plants longing for photosynthesis, setting off for their own schools in inadequate rainwear – they really needed to be wearing wetsuits and rubber balaclavas – and coming home looking like drowned rats every afternoon. We all got colds, so the soundtrack to all of this was sneezing and honking and coughing, with the odd up-at-2-a.m.-to-administer-Calpol-and-Tixylix-to-Maisy thing thrown in. Our house was awash with tissues, which I kept forgetting to remove from pockets before doing the laundry, with the result that everyone’s clothes had a light and unshiftable sprinkling of white fluff on them.

  We were weary, it is fair to say. The mood was bleak. My own mood wasn’t helped by the knowledge that Kate kept trying to show me various bits of paperwork that had been sent through to her following the death, nine months ago, of my biological father, Felix. I didn’t ever want to run across a field and into his arms, but it’s a bit odd suddenly losing the possibility of access to half your DNA – to say nothing of suddenly being half orphaned. I kept batting her off, with her documents and her forms that needed signing: if I thought about it too hard it slightly melted my brain.

  Jack started it: we were having breakfast one morning, watching the miserable torrents of rain outside – it was so bad that I was contemplating letting them off school on compassionate grounds, just so their poor bones could get a chance to dry out – when he said, ‘You know what would be really nice? To go somewhere a bit warm for Christmas. Not, like, somewhere flash – just somewhere it isn’t raining. Do you think we could, Mum? Please.’

  I said I understood the impulse, but that Christmas was sacrosanct. ‘We always have it at home,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Charlie, ‘but that’s mostly for us, isn’t it? The thing is, Mum, we get it. The whole trad Christmas thing. It’s really nice. We’ll always remember it. We can do it again next year. But, just once. Somewhere warm.’

  ‘Please Mum,’ said Jack again.

  ‘Christmas in the sunshine? In T-shirts?’ said Maisy, just before she sneezed. ‘That would be so, so cool.’

  I said I was very sorry and repeated my mantra, that Christmas happened at home, like it always happened and like it would keep happening until the end of time. Then Maisy and I swam to school.

  Anyway. So there I was in the hairdresser’s a week later, having my roots done. The weather hadn’t improved. There was a glossy travel magazine in my lap. And there it was: Marrakesh. Specifically, an article about a lovely-looking, newly done-up big old villa, a riad in the medina – the old town – with a little courtyard pool and orange trees in big terracotta pots. I love Morocco. Sam and I went there on honeymoon, as it happens. I fell into a kind of daydream for a while, and then I sat up straight and read the article. The house sounded divine and was alluringly photogenic. The flights only took three and a half hours. But then, most incredibly of all, the price for a week’s rental was not nearly as astronomical as the pictures of the house suggested: if you split it by the number of people it could accommodate, it was actually affordable. I photographed the letting agency’s number with my phone and when I got home an hour or so later, I called them, on impulse. I had a feeling. And my feeling was right: the house was available from Christmas Eve, for seven nights: they’d had a cancellation that very morning. I barely even thought about it: I booked it. It felt like fate. And then I rang round my relatives and quickly booked a bunch of the cheapest flights I could find, which, despite the dates, were very cheap indeed – I don’t suppose that many people go and spend Christmas in a Muslim country. And then I stared into space for ten minutes, gasping at my own audacity. I’d broken all my Christmas rules in the space of fifteen minutes.

  And so here we are. It’s going to be great – of course it is. I am the boss of Christmas and I decree that it shall be so. But first we have to get there. I wonder if it’s too early to take my sedative. I really hate flying – not so much the bobbing along in the sky bit as the acute claustrophobia, the massed, helpless humanity hurtling about sealed inside a metal tube.

  Everyone seems to arrive at the same time. There’s Sam, looking bleary-eyed, accompanied by Pat, who is wearing a comedy-enormous sombrero and practically trotting with excitement on her size-four feet: the general effect is ‘jaunty donkey’. ‘This is great,’ she says, kissing me and Maisy and waving to the boys, who are still leaning comatose on their own trolley, bickering weakly. ‘Is this not great? This is great. Morocco! Africa!’

  ‘I like your hat, Pat. Yes, it’s going to be great,’ I say, giving her a hug. ‘Good Lord, is all this luggage yours?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pat. ‘I’m not keen on that foreign food, so I just brought along a few bits and pieces from home. Couple of wee pies. And toilet paper. Plenty of that. They have those toilets where you squat down and pigs are waiting underneath to eat your business.’

  ‘I’ve tried telling her,’ laughs Sam. ‘She won’t listen. And she’s brought an unbelievable number of presents,’ he adds, kissing my cheek and taking Maisy off me. ‘Hello, my lovely girl,’ he says to her.

  ‘Hi,’ I say. This is possibly the most ancient joke in the world, but it makes me laugh like a simpleton every time. I also like saying ‘Thanks’ when the three of us are in a room and Sam says ‘I love you’ to Maisy.

  Sam rolls his eyes. ‘The old ones are the best. Hi, Clara. I see you’re not doing too badly on the luggage front either.’

  ‘A mere five suitcases,’ I say. ‘Nearly one for each day of the week. Mostly presents and, um, Christmas stuff.’

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t pack a tree and baubles. I can’t believe you organized this,’ Sam says. ‘I’d have bet money on you never, ever spending Christmas anywhere other than at home.’

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what came over me. But I’m so pleased everyone else liked the idea. And that they could all come.’

  ‘Where’s Robert?’

  ‘Meeting us there. He managed to get a direct flight.’

  ‘Yoohoo!’ yells somebody. ‘YOOHOO, Clara, Sam, Maisy, Pat, Jack and Charlie!’ The other people in the queue turn round to stare at my sister Evie, who is channelling a kind of Talitha Getty vibe with loosely pinned-up hair, a silk kaftan, enormous hoop earrings and half a ton of kohl in each eye. She is wearing an enormous parka on top and a pair of green woollen mittens on her hands. ‘Pat! Your hat! The beauty!’

  ‘Just a wee sombrero,’ Pat says shyly but looking very pleased. ‘For my holidays, like.’

  ‘I’m absolutely mad about it,’ says Evie. ‘Hello, everybody. Merry Christmas Eve. Hello, people in the queue staring at me. Merry Christmas Eve to you too, guys.’

  Flo, Ed and the twins are next. The twins are dressed as princesses under their bulky coats; Ava is wearing a crown and Grace is waving a sceptre around with some force. Maisy perks up at the sight of them and all three clamber onto one of my trolleys, installing themselves among the suitcases.

  ‘My children are hell,’ Flo says. ‘They literally haven’t slept. They wouldn’t have breakfast. They insisted on coming in costume. They’re like crazed beasts. I wish we could put them in a suitcase. I’d cut holes in it first so they could breathe, like when you carry guinea-pigs home from the pet shop. Otherwise they’d suffocate, which would be awful. Also, we
brought too much luggage. It’s mostly gifts. We’re going to have to pay a massive surplus charge.’

  ‘I think we all are,’ I say. ‘And take some deep breaths. Where’s Kate?’

  The queue for the check-in provides me with my answer, now turning almost as one in the direction of the Departures entrance. Ah yes, here’s Mummy. She is wearing her floor-length fur coat (it was Granny’s, I found out last year – not that this appeases anyone), enormous dark glasses and has tied her hair up in an Hermès scarf. She literally cuts a swathe – people actually move out of the way – as she approaches Counter B6. Kate’s trolley is piled high with two reasonably normal suitcases and – good grief – two trunks, each one gigantic, as though she were a missionary moving to the Congo. Max, her husband, is a reverent five feet behind, smiling to himself, which is pretty much what he does: smile to himself and make business deals on his BlackBerry.

  ‘Hello, Clara!’ Kate starts shouting from about forty feet away. ‘Are you going to the gym? What on earth are you wearing? Leisurewear, I do believe. Mine eyes. Comfort is not all. Pat – your hat! Beyond divine. Oh dear, look at this monstrous queue.’ She’s now about thirty feet away but feels no apparent need to lower her voice. ‘I absolutely loathe airports, do you? Ought to be poetic – romance of air travel and all that – but, no. Rather reminds me of the thing someone said about Dunkirk, or do I mean the Somme? “My dear, the people! The noise!” That’s how I feel. Hello, Sam. Clara says you’ve stopped being peculiar to her – marvellous news. Hello, grandchildren. Boys! Alertness! Posture! If I can manage it, being as I am an antique, anyone can.’ True to her word if not to her passport, Kate is now officially sixty-five, five years older than her real age, for vanity purposes.

  ‘Yo, Nan,’ says Charlie, because he knows it annoys her.

  ‘Kate, short for Katharine,’ bellows Kate. ‘Not Nan, short for Banana.’

  ‘Wotcha, Kate,’ says Jack.

  The people in the queue stare at Kate. She waves benignly back at them, like the ruler of a small principality surveying her dear serfs.

  ‘I’m approaching!’ she shouts. ‘Coming through. En départ pour le Maroc. Make way.’ I sometimes wonder whether Kate has a secret cocaine habit. How else to explain being this full-on at six in the morning?

  ‘Everyone’s staring at us,’ observes Maisy, not inaccurately. I barely notice any more. Every time we’re together in a public place, we basically become the floor show. You get used to it after a while.

  ‘I know, darling,’ I say. ‘We’re making rather a lot of noise, I think.’

  ‘Like a circus,’ Maisy says, ‘and we’re the seals.’

  ‘Yes, a bit like that. No, darling, don’t honk. It doesn’t help. Look, here comes Cassie.’

  Jake and Tamsin – now married – are headed towards us, with their own inevitably gigantic pile of luggage. Jake is wearing a cowboy hat at a rakish angle; it’s made out of some kind of hide. Though I’m still occasionally startled by Jake’s sartorial choices, and though I wouldn’t fancy any of his sex-chat (brrr), I have revised my opinion of him. Tamsin has never been happier, and he’s turned out to be an unexpectedly wonderful stepfather to Cassie, who took her time thawing but who now appears delighted with the first father she’s ever had, really. When he made a speech at their wedding, Jake devoted ten minutes to saying what a great little girl Cassie was, and how much he loved her, and how he might have cocked up with his own children but wasn’t planning on making that mistake again. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Cassie smiles nearly all the time now. All three of them do. Maybe that’s the trick: marry grandpas. Also, he is the stepdad who can’t run away, because he’s too old. Bonus.

  Half an hour later, having finally checked in – and had to traipse round to the Freaks With Macro Luggage counter to pay our excess-baggage charges, which come to roughly the same amount as the actual flights – we’re all ensconced at a fish and chip restaurant, a poor choice given the ungodly hour but the only place that could accommodate us. (‘No room at the inn,’ Kate said, turning away from the vaguely brasserie-ish place we’d initially made a beeline for.) My children all eschew breakfast in favour of jumbo portions of haddock and chips – it’s not yet seven in the morning – and seem enormously perked up by being thus nourished. Jack and Charlie resume their bickering, and Maisy does her favourite thing of wandering about the restaurant in search of the roughest family she can find. Having located them – the dad is drinking pints, the mum’s on what looks like shots (it’s always seemed odd that airports serve alcohol so early in the morning: surely it just makes the cabin crew’s job harder?) and the rest of the brood are busy seeing how many four-letter words they can cram into a sentence – she stands by their table, gazing upon them in absolute admiration. Her eyes are literally shining with love. Maisy also does this on beaches: she finds the roughest tattoos – prison-style, ideally – the most litter, the greatest embarrassment of empty beer cans, the music that’s blaring the most antisocially from the loudest radio, and then she goes and stands there, longing to be asked to join the party (which, often, she is). It’s been the bane of many a summer, because eventually I have to go and get her back, which involves toning down my accent and putting on what the boys like to call my ‘taxi voice’, whereby my usual 60:40 mix of ‘middle class’ and ‘London’ transforms into 20:80 or, in extremis, 10:90. The children make fun of me, not least because I do it brilliantly – even though they had learned to do it for themselves by their tenth birthdays. It’s funny, I don’t know of any other capital city where the natives are masters of accent fluctuation, or where accent fluctuation is a daily necessity. I’m so adept at it that I can no longer do it in the other direction – up the middle class and mute the London – which is probably for the best.

  Just as we’re about to board I get a text from Hope – she’s flying out to Ibiza from the same terminal and we’d hoped to hook up for a coffee, but it is not to be. She sounds extremely cheerful, though. She’s going with Phil, the half-naked man she ‘met’ on Facebook last year and whom she has been happily dating since the spring. Just goes to show how much I know. I do worry, though, about my friends and compromises. I also worry about my own ability to ever contemplate them.

  The flight is as hideous as you would imagine – horrible plane, horrible squashed seats, horrible food, horrible enormous queue for the loo the second the horrible food has been consumed – though I am desensitized via the judicious swallowing of a sedative, which makes me so woozy that I don’t even have the energy to talk: I just zone out in my seat, trying to control my urge to dribble. And then, just like that, we’re disembarking at Marrakesh airport, where it’s a balmy 19 degrees and still only late morning. I am astonished by air travel. Astonished. I know it’s the twenty-first century and even babies are used to long-haul flights, but I genuinely marvel every time at the fact you were in place A not so long ago and now you’re in place B, in a whole other country – continent, in our case. It strikes me as one of those things that is actually a proper miracle – albeit one that can be explained – and that we all take it for granted: if I had my way, the entire passenger list would whoop and punch the air and maybe faint in thrilled amazement every time they landed. Air travel blows my mind. Actually, any kind of travel that isn’t walking blows my mind: I cheer at getting in a car in London and ending up in Cornwall six hours (though occasionally more like nine) later, too. And trains! Trains are my favourite, particularly sleepers. The boys find this extraordinarily funny every time I mention it – which I do every time I travel – but I know that I am right and that they, and everybody else, are simply horribly blasé. Happily, today Pat shares my shock and awe.

  ‘That’s grand,’ she says, ‘being here so quickly,’ and I smile at her and say I quite agree.

  ‘Mum’s flipping out about planes again,’ says Jack to his brother with a snigger.

  ‘Because in her day they only had mammoths,’ says Charlie, ‘and it took ages to get any
where and it was really itchy sitting on them.’

  ‘And they were so poor they couldn’t afford a dinosaur,’ says Jack. ‘She used to stare all sadly out of her cave and wish they had even a small diplodocus, like the other families. But no.’

  ‘She could only sit and dream of pterodactyls,’ says Charlie. ‘Poor Mum. Hard life. But it made her stronger.’

  ‘Did you, Mummy?’ asks Maisy.

  ‘No. Your brothers are being silly.’

  ‘Nice to be here though, Mama,’ says Jack. ‘Thanks for bringing us. Blue sky!’

  And indeed there is. After we’ve cleared customs and waited an age at the luggage carousel – our assorted trunks and suitcases look like they need a plane of their own – we saunter out into the glorious day and into two eight-seaters sent by the letting agency. The children sit at the back, their noses pressed up against the glass, as we make our way into Marrakesh, through the new town (‘Camels! Mum! Camels! Horses! A sheep!’) and from there into the warrens of the old city. It’s at this point that the excitement really kicks in.

  ‘It’s a wee assault on the senses,’ says Pat, who has been studying the guidebook. ‘So it is. Everything’s that different.’

  ‘Look at the colours,’ says Kate. ‘So beautiful. People in the West really have no idea.’

  ‘They’re all brown,’ says Pat.

  ‘I mean the buildings and the clothes,’ says Kate.

  ‘Aye,’ says Pat. ‘They’re colourful.’

  We twist and turn through the crowds before coming to a slow crawl down a little lane, boys on scooters on either side of us – one holding a chicken under his arm – the sides of the road crammed with people, and eventually arrive in front of a pair of massive old wooden doors. An elderly man in an embroidered white djellaba is standing outside, waiting to welcome us in. ‘Home,’ I say. ‘For the next week. Merry Christmas. Out we get.’