Angel Cake

by Helen Harris

  At the top of the stairs, everything was black and she wondered for a moment if she had passed out. Then it occurred to her that the light bulb on the landing must have gone. She would never get round to replacing it now. The thought sent a little spurt of panic through her and she hurried forward into the front bedroom as though she might be struck down at any moment. Her attempts at furniture removal had left a few clear spaces in the bedroom, but there was still plenty up there to choose from. She pottered about for a while, picking things up, examining them and then deciding that she could no more bear to part with them than with some bit of her body. That went for a hand mirror which was so fly-blown it made you look as though you had the measles, a cut-glass vase and a string of pinkish paste beads. Eventually, she thought of going to look in the back bedroom where there was nothing much but junk, discarded furniture and a wardrobe full of clothes which she never wore any more. It smelt a little stale in there, she was displeased to notice, and she made a few feeble clapping gestures with her arms to stir the air. She poked around amidst the stacked clutter and then, out of idle curiosity, she looked into the wardrobe. The obvious present hung right in front of her: a ginger fox fur, missing one glass eye. Despite its age, it was in much better condition than Alison’s and although the trimmings – the eye, the little folded paws and the black sealing-wax nose – were a bit battered, the fur itself was intact. It wasn’t even something which Leonard had given her, since she remembered treating herself to it one bitter winter in Manchester. But she couldn’t give the girl a fur – a fur, that was the height of extravagance. She shut the wardrobe and, after a minute or two, rather angrily left the bedroom. She would give her a card and maybe some sweets. The fur dangled in her mind’s eye as she climbed downstairs; in her imagination, it draped itself around Alison’s neck and its nonchalant crossed paws bobbed in the wind as she sped away on her bicycle. Alicia was furious. She wished she had never seen the fox. For the rest of that week, it kept popping up in her mind’s eye where she wasn’t expecting it, and irritating her no end. She wasn’t going to give the girl a fur which had cost her good money in its day, and that was that.

  On Wednesday, Pearl came and was a welcome distraction. Not that Alicia’s harsh attitude to Pearl had mellowed, but at least she gave Alicia something different to be displeased about. Alicia was sick of hearing about Pearl’s wretched boy. It was touch and go whether he would be allowed out of hospital for Christmas and every week Pearl brought her the latest bulletin. It sounded as though he ought really to stay in there; his leg wasn’t mending as it should but, according to Pearl, he was ‘making the nurses so mad’ that they would be glad to get rid of him. Christmas in Pearl’s family sounded like a madhouse. Her eldest daughter and her two children and her husband, her second eldest daughter and her two children, Pearl’s two sons and her husband all gathered for a Christmas lunch which started in mid-afternoon and lasted until the early hours of Boxing Day. Pearl told her what she was cooking for them and it sounded like nothing on earth to Alicia. It annoyed her intensely that Pearl should characteristically suffer from overcrowding at Christmas, too much festivity, too many dinner guests, seasonal good cheer bursting out of the tight confines of her council flat, while she, Alicia, stayed cold and alone in her empty house.

  After Pearl’s visit, she spoke to no one until Friday when, with the weekend coming up, she decided to make a trip to Mr Patel’s. The fox came sharply back to mind on her way there because she passed a person wearing a much smarter newer one. Maybe hers wasn’t such an extravagant present to give to Alison after all? She was in a filthy temper by the time she reached Mr Patel’s.

  He was as serene and smiling as ever. ‘Hello, hello, you can’t keep away from here?’

  Alicia cut him dead because she was too short of breath to give a crushing reply. She chose her items carefully – she didn’t trust his prices – and was delighted when she found a jar of fish-paste which had not been marked up to 38p like all the others, but was still 34p. She took her basket slyly to the till, ready to be insulting if Mr Patel dared to charge her the new price. He smiled at her kindly. ‘Starting to stock up for Christmas?’

  For an awful moment, Alicia thought he might be making fun of the few items in her wire basket. But the silly smile on his face looked quite sincere.

  ‘Gracious me, no,’ she lied. ‘I shall have to go up to the supermarket for that. I’ve got my visitor coming again.’

  Mr Patel waggled his head approvingly. ‘No one should sit alone on Christmas Day.’

  Alicia was livid. How dare he, she thought wildly. How dare they all? And furiously she snatched down a bag of sweets from the selection hanging beside the till and flung it on top of her shopping. ‘That too,’ she snapped. Alison would jolly well have to make do with that.

  *

  Looking back to last Christmas, my spirits are lifted by what a long way Rob and I must have come. When I remember last year’s frigid first encounter with my mother, the awkwardness, the worry, I am positively cheered to realize how much further on we must be.

  Rob and my mother: what an ill-matched meeting that was. Ever since my father left, my mother has had nothing more to do with men. She dresses in shapeless beige hermaphrodite clothes; she has withdrawn into a closed world of household worries, library books and her garden. She views the men that I – oh, very occasionally – bring home with at best suspicion and at worst outright hostility. She gave Rob one long look, registered his open-necked rough woollen shirt with his chest hair curling at the top button, his heavy-soled walking shoes and his restless hands balled in his corduroy trouser pockets and she washed her hands of him. It was immediately clear to her that he was one of my aberrations – there had been others before – and she would waste no further effort on getting acquainted with him. Perhaps that was easier than if she had seen him as a real threat and risen to it with bristling hostility. For the three days that we spent with her, she royally ignored Rob. When at last he began to grow impatient and drank too much and spoke up rudely for himself, my mother looked in his direction with vague distaste.

  This year, we are staying in London. We talked it over last week and we decided that, of all the options open, this was the one which Rob thought was the best. We will drive down to my mother’s for Christmas lunch only – with ear-plugs, blinkers and gags, Rob says – but otherwise we are going to spend the holiday together here. A renewal of love for him at this decision, combined with the prospect of four days off for Christmas, a renewal of love for him, combined with the coloured lights on Christmas trees and carol singers six flights down through the entry-phone; suddenly everything seems so straightforwardly fun again that I am overwhelmed with seasonal high spirits and lying in bed in the dark, listening to the wind and the sharp shots of the central heating, I find myself wondering what on earth can have made me worry so much in recent weeks.

  In the fortnight leading up to Christmas, Rob seems to have broken through the difficulties he was having with Print-Out. You can always tell when this has happened because he goes all noisily funny, hyperactive, quick and jokey, boisterously making fun of the world and of me, working himself up to a peak of elated self-satisfaction from which he plunges. He even told me about bits of the play in bed. I find this very difficult to respond to. I am frightened of saying the wrong thing and either having a bad effect on the play or, just as bad, upsetting him. I told him once how hard it was for me to respond to the disjointed pieces of Print-Out out of context and how scared I was of saying something destructive. Rob was quite surprised. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t take it so seriously,’ he told me. ‘I shan’t be in the least affected by anything you say, I promise you. Look at it this way; I’m just using you as a sounding board for stray ideas.’

  Rob even came with me to the museum Christmas party. I never thought he would. But breaking through his difficulties with Print-Out put him in such an exuberant, expansive frame of mind that he decided to shelve his prejudices and come along
for a laugh. And the great event, the meeting between the two irreconcilable halves of my universe which I had long dreaded, passed off excellently.

  The museum Christmas party is one of those events which has a mythical dimension. What actually happens there is fairly subdued and small-scale, but the stories which grow up around it are legendary. A girl called Rowena Weatherall is supposed to have drunk fruit cup from a goblet of eighteenth-century Murano glass. Mr Perry from Ceramics is supposed to have seduced one of the departmental secretaries upstairs on a High Victorian chaise-longue.

  Rob wore his one and only suit and I knew from the way he behaved at the outset that he was just going to have a good stare and drink rather a lot to quell his strongest reactions. People from outside are always the greatest attraction at the party; husbands and wives and girl-friends, because at least they are a novelty, people bringing an unknown ingredient into the rather dull mixture of colleagues whose conversation you know by heart. So Rob was straight away surrounded: girls from my department who wanted to take a look at him; Mr Willis, the Press Officer, politically probing. Rob acquitted himself beautifully, joking, smiling, wittily retelling his stock television stories. Through my three glasses of vinegary wine, I looked across the room at him and loved him, the amusing brilliant centre of attention who, by some freak of fate, was mine. Even potentially the most awkward meeting – between Rob and Mr Charles – went more or less without a hitch. I knew Mr Charles would never have come up of his own accord but perhaps perversely, considering how awkward I thought it would be, I wanted Rob to meet him, so I engineered a meeting by suggesting to Rob that we went and got some supper while Mr Charles was at the buffet table. They greeted each other reservedly, Mr Charles asking with impeturbable courtesy, ‘And what is your field?’ Rob answered a bit brusquely, ‘Television, actually,’ and Mr Charles quite took the wind out of his sails by commenting, ‘Ah, you must find us a very arid scholastic lot.’

  That was on the Thursday before Christmas Eve. On Christmas Eve, Rob and I went round the supermarket together, which we normally never do, usually just buying up bits and pieces from the late-night shops, and we loaded up with everything we thought we would need for four days of closeted Christmas binge. It was such fun, even though the place was crowded beyond belief: net after net of oranges, and breakfast croissants partly baked, to finish off yourself in the oven; deliberately un-Christmassy things, chosen by Rob, such as a hundred and one ingredients for a bumper curry and exotic vegetables and wholemeal pasta. Standing in the queue at the check-out, it must have struck us simultaneously how domesticated we seemed and we swapped shame-faced grins. ‘Mr and Mrs Wright prudently stocking up for the festive season,’ Rob said wryly. He has never said anything like that before, not even as a joke.

  Beginning on that note, Christmas could not fail to be a success, I thought. Late on Christmas morning, we drove down to my mother’s in Rob’s car, the Jagannath. Maybe my mother is mellowing with the years or maybe her welcome was part of a wider strategy which I have not yet worked out, but she was almost warm to Rob.

  There was holly and mistletoe in the house, which looked rather silly actually since it was such a mild Christmas, and the table was set like an illustration from a pre-war hostess’s manual which I had once given her. She had prepared a full-scale Christmas lunch and there was not one but two presents for Rob.

  In the car on the way back, we speculated on what the cause of the thaw could be and I reproached Rob with not having risen to the occasion.

  ‘You might have kissed her thank you,’ I said to him. ‘And you should have called her Margaret when she asked.’

  Rob got very irritable and began to drive in such a way that I pressed my feet to the floor and held my breath.

  ‘Don’t you start!’ he retorted. ‘I thought we’d got that rigmarole behind us for another year.’

  Rob and I have very different attitudes to Christmas. I like the enduring traditions: the Christmas tree and the flaming pudding, the ribbon-tied parcels and the cotton-wool snow. Rob can’t stand the cheap commercialism. So all the way back to London, I refrained from exclaiming over the holly wreaths hanging on polished country front doors and the pub bow windows decorated with aerosol snow, while Rob, still irritated by my reproaches, tutted and groaned at each one we passed.

  It was quite late by the time we got back. We weren’t really hungry of course, so there wasn’t much point in making dinner. We watched the Christmas inanities on television for a bit and then Rob said rather restlessly, why didn’t we go out for a walk before bed?

  The streets were almost sinisterly quiet, as if some huge catastrophe had hit London. We walked down on to Holland Park Avenue and then through the side streets on the other grander side. In some of the big white houses, the curtains weren’t yet drawn and we commented on their lavish lamplit interiors as we walked past. I said I thought they were rather lovely, with their candelabra on the dinner tables and museum-sized paintings in gleaming gilt frames. I was taken aback by the violence with which Rob contradicted me. ‘They make me sick,’ he snapped. I looked round at him in dismay; his ferocity told me more clearly than any number of his theoretical tirades how far apart our fantasies must be of our remote old age.

  Boxing Day began well, although the small flaws of the day before remained like a bruise. We stayed in bed until mid-morning and then Rob made his bumper curry for lunch. But, all day, I had in the back of my mind: how was I going to get away when the time came round to visit Mrs Queripel? I hadn’t told her exactly when in the afternoon I would come, since I had known it might be difficult to get away. But I had promised her that I would come without fail and her present was waiting, wrapped, at the back of the drawer where I keep my jerseys. I had thought of two possible excuses; one was, mundanely, a walk, but then there was always the risk that Rob would say, ‘OK, I’ll come with you,’ and the other was delivering a forgotten Christmas present on my bicycle. He might ask why it had to be delivered so imperatively today, but I hoped not. He would tease me for my fussiness, but he would let me go. So, a little while after the curry, I exclaimed, ‘Oh no, I’ve forgotten to give the Dickinsons their Christmas present!’ (The Dickinsons are a family who live in Kensington, who are friends of my mother.)

  ‘Oh, drop it round in time for the New Year,’ Rob said casually. He was chewing pan, betel nut, which he is fond of after a curry, and he chewed in what suddenly seemed to me a particularly callous way.

  ‘I can’t,’ I declared. ‘I told Mummy about it yesterday. I know she’ll ring them, hoping for a compliment, and wonder why they haven’t said anything.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake!’ Rob said rudely.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said desperately, ‘but I really think I must.’

  I stood up and, after a moment’s anxious hesitation, I hurried out of the kitchen. I was in no way expecting Rob to surge into the bedroom after me, still chewing his betel, as I took Mrs Queripel’s present out of the drawer, and shout, ‘Why the fuck can’t you just say if you’re bored or fed-up? Why do you have to make up these pathetic little excuses?’

  I was stunned. Rob doesn’t care enough about things to shout, at least not personal things; he might shout about Chile or the bias of the media in an argument with Andy Ellis, but he has never shouted because of me. I stood frozen and looked at him in panic. ‘But Rob,’ I said, ‘it’s true.’ I even showed him my parcel. ‘Open it if you don’t believe me.’

  He looked at me for a moment as though he could quite happily smash both my parcel and me to smithereens. ‘Christ!’ he exploded and he went out and slammed the bedroom door behind him.

  I don’t know why I didn’t tell him the truth then. Surely that was the moment, surely it would have been easier? Instead I stole out guiltily, intending my silent get-away to be interpreted as hurt silence, and I pedalled off down the hill wondering what on earth we would say to each other when I came back.

  Really, it is almost as if old Mrs Queripel had a perni
cious influence. After my last two visits to her, I have come home in a state of mind designed to create friction with Rob. A fortnight ago, she got round to telling me about her honeymoon. Of course, it was absolutely pure unsullied bliss. Unlike the cheap imitation love stories of today, she informed me, her romance with Leonard had been ‘Made in Heaven’. Now I know perfectly well that is only an old woman’s fantasy, I know perfectly well she and Leonard were probably inhibited and fumbling and uptight. But something she said must have hit home. She tells the story so well, in the first place, that you tend to overlook the lashings of sentiment and the maudlin self-indulgence. All her rusty professional skills come into play and, sitting in that shadowy living-room, it is quite easy to get carried away. She said, ‘What Leonard and I shared isn’t granted to everyone, of course. A meeting of minds, it was.’ She smiled coyly. ‘And much more than minds. Yes, it must be sad for you all nowadays, with nothing special any more, nothing sacred.’ It’s all very well snorting with laughter, which is what I knew Rob would do if I told him about it; Mrs Queripel made me feel wistful. She made me feel that there was a right and proper way to conduct a love story and that Rob’s matter-of-fact approach with me was very second-best. She had experienced something really valuable, unique and wonderful, while mine was just the ‘Made in Hong Kong’ version.