by Tamar Cohen
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Felix is scowling at Petra from under that stupid hat of his. “It’s budget fizz, anyone can see that. Standards in this house have slipped, Madre.”
Oh, that’s just what I need today—Felix in one of his devil’s advocate moods.
“Yes, well, needs must,” I say.
“Needs must what?”
“Needs must... Oh, for goodness’ sake, Felix, stop being so pedantic, will you? And take off the hat inside.”
As if Christmas Day isn’t going to be difficult enough without him playing up.
Hettie’s husband, Ian, is in possession of the second armchair, next to my mother. “Your overflow pipe is dripping,” he remarks, gazing out the window. “You’ll be wanting to get that seen to before it gets much worse.”
Breathe in...that’s it...and out again. I’m standing in front of the cooking island that separates the kitchen from the diner bit. Chopping swedes. I have no idea what I’m doing standing here chopping swedes for a bunch of people who probably don’t even like swedes. I don’t want my house to be full of these people. I don’t want to look across my kitchen and see Ryan hunched over a beer, his skin the color of old white pants. I don’t want to see the difference a year has made to the faces of my children, the distance from last Christmas to this one mapped out in hollows and shadows and a certain wariness around their eyes. I don’t want to feel the crushing weight of Simon’s absence, or look in the eyes of a woman I hardly know and know she feels it, too. I don’t want to see the beautiful girl my husband produced with someone else, or think about his new baby growing in that other woman’s womb while my own shrivels up like a prune inside me. I want to go back to a year ago, yet how can I want that when a year ago it was all a lie? The woman who dressed the tree last year (a purple theme, if I remember), who picked up the turkey from the butcher on the high street (twenty-four pounds!) and who baked trays of mince pies for the annual Christmas drinks with the neighbors isn’t me anymore, if indeed she ever was.
I mustn’t make my life before into a fairy tale, mustn’t rewrite the past. I must remember the bad things as well as the good, the things that used to make me scream with frustration.
Remember that Christmas? How many years ago now? Four? Five? Opening up Simon’s beautifully shop-wrapped gift—a dress I’d picked out from that boutique on the King’s Road and set aside for him to pick up—and that dull thud of disappointment.
“It is the one you wanted, isn’t it, darling?” Simon said, noticing my expression. “The woman in the shop insisted it was.”
I looked down at the wisp of silk that I knew cost nearly four hundred pounds and felt an overwhelming wave of revulsion. Was that what Christmas had turned into? Opening overpriced presents I had chosen myself. I remember looking at Simon then, really looking at him in that way you don’t when you’ve been married twenty-odd years. Who are you? I thought. Who is this man who’s lived with me for all these years yet still gives me gifts like a stranger?
“Next time I wouldn’t mind something with a bit more thought,” I’d said. “Thought?” He looked at me as if awaiting a translation.
“Look, this is lovely. Well, of course it is—I chose it myself, so it jolly well ought to be! It’s just that sometimes it would be nice to know you’ve thought about me, even just for the half an hour it’d take to choose something I’d like. Just thirty minutes of thought, that’s all.”
“But, darling, I think about you all the time, you know that. And you know what you’re like to buy presents for. You have such set ideas about what you do and don’t like.” He was right, of course. The attic is still stuffed with wedding presents I’ve never allowed to be taken out of their boxes—monstrous vases in garish colors, electronic gadgets made from molded white plastic, a sofa throw in a wild paisley print. I had a wedding list, naturally, but some people will insist in going off-piste.
So it wasn’t without merit, Simon’s accusation. Yet still it grated.
“I suppose my husband used to buy you lovely presents for Christmas,” I call to Lottie, who’s sitting at the table next to Petra. I’m pleased with my light and conversational tone. I could be inquiring about the weather.
Lottie shoots me a wary look. “Of course. But don’t worry, he never spent much, if that’s what’s bothering you.”
So far we’ve managed to be surprisingly civil, the two of us, but our politeness is like a pair of borrowed shoes we’re itching to kick off.
I should stop there. On the other side of the table, Josh has that “Please, Mum, leave it” expression. But my fingers are clutched tight around the knife chopping the swede.
“What kind of things?” Chop, chop, chop. “What did he get you last year, for example?”
She’s sitting very upright now, sizing up the situation. Her hair is in two loose plaits. Plaits! At her age! And she’s wearing a dress that looks not unlike the sack the man delivers the organic potatoes in. Patterned tights and those black clumpy boots complete the look. Despite all that, I realize for the first time that she’s actually quite pretty. But there are violet shadows like bruises under her eyes.
“If you must know—and to be honest I don’t think it’s any of your business—last year he bought me a painting.”
My mind freezes. A painting? It doesn’t seem conceivable—something he picked himself, something that didn’t arrive already gift wrapped from an online store?
“He bought it from an artist friend of ours in Dubai. It’s of a woman’s back, just one curved line, really. He said it reminded him of me.”
It reminded him of me. She didn’t have to say that bit. She could have left that out. An artist friend of ours was enough. The rest is just overkill.
I mustn’t lose it. I must keep going. Keep calm and carry on, like on that tea towel Flora bought me a couple of years ago. That’s the way. Chop, chop, chop.
A thin layer of resentment settles like mildew over us, turning us sour and ill-tempered. Outside the window, the promised White Christmas fails to materialize. There’s still a smattering of graying snow on the grass from the big fall on Monday, and the air temperature is freezing, as it has been for weeks, but the sky is flat and empty.
There’s a small commotion around the table. Lottie has spotted some marks on Petra’s arm, and suddenly everyone is glad to have something to focus on.
“I burned myself,” Petra explains, “taking a pizza out of the oven.”
At the far end of the table, Hettie is all sympathy. “So easy to do,” she agrees. “I did it last month, didn’t I, Ian, with that apple crumble?”
Ian concurs that she did indeed suffer a crumble injury.
“Extreme baking,” says Josh. “It could catch on.”
He is trying to make a joke, to lighten the atmosphere, but no one seems in the mood to find things funny.
Who are they, these people sitting in my kitchen talking such nonsense?
“I think we should have a toast,” says Petra merrily. “To absent friends.”
Everyone looks at her in surprise. It’s only two twenty-five. Can she be drunk already?
“Don’t be such a tit, Petra.” Felix’s voice is soft and low, a sign he’s getting angry. Oh, God, don’t have an argument here, you two. Not today.
“Well, I think a toast is a nice idea,” says Hettie, stepping in as peacekeeper. “To absent friends!”
But Petra is already pushing past her and out through the door to the hallway. I glance over at Felix. He has his head bent over the table so his dirty-blond hair hides his face.
“Is everything all right, darling?”
“Yes,” snaps Felix. “I mean, no... Oh, fuck it. I know I probably shouldn’t say anything, but Petra is pretty much losing it at the moment.”
“Losing it?” I say.
“You know—happy p
ills, tantrums, all the typical Looney-Tunes stuff. Those marks on her arm aren’t burns, you know, they’re self-inflicted.”
There’s an audible collective intake of breath. What? Perfect Petra. Not possible, surely. I feel guilty all over again for not phoning her back. Then cross with her for making me feel guilty. Then cross with myself for being cross with her. Maybe they’ll split up. Now I feel guilty about that thought, as well, and about the little lift it gave me. True, Petra and I have never really got beneath the surface of each other. But this? Making marks on her own skin?
As the others exclaim in dismay, the dismalness of it weighs down on me.
What hope is there for us all, if Felix’s beautiful, poised, good-hearted girlfriend with her little satin ballet pumps and her model-agency job and everything ahead of her, can find life so impossible that she has to do that? Are we all just presenting facades to the world, behind which we crack and crumble like the cellars of Victorian houses?
Oh, now Petra is back. Everyone look busy. Lottie begins a conversation with Hettie about Downton Abbey; Josh hunts for a charger for his phone in the everything drawer; Felix materializes by my elbow to help with the chopping, while Flora and Ian suggest answers to an end-of-year quiz Ryan is reading from yesterday’s paper.
Marooned on a high stool on the other side of the cooking island from me, her long legs wrapped around the stool’s chrome legs, Sadie blazes with quiet misery.
My phone beeps.
Overspent at Christmas? We can have £500 couriered to your doorstep right now.
“Another loan company,” I remark to no one in particular.
“Why are loan companies texting you on Christmas Day?” Felix wants to know.
“Oh, it’s not just loan companies,” I assure him. “Mortgage advisers, travel companies, VD clinics. They can’t get enough of me.”
Felix’s response is cut off by Ryan, who has sprung up from his seat. He has already consumed four of the six cans of Red Stripe he brought with him. In a Tesco carrier bag! How festive! He has reached that stage of inebriation where he clearly considers himself rather witty and believes others secretly share this view. The result is that he’s performing an imitation of Flora progressing along their local high street.
“She’s walking so slowly, she’s practically going backward,” he says, moving his skinny, etiolated limbs in an exaggerated slow-motion fashion across the kitchen floor. “And her eyes are swiveling around like this.” He flicks his eyeballs, crab-like, from left to right and back again.
I look at my daughter. She has a “good sport” expression plastered to her face, but she is rigid with embarrassment.
“I only did it the once,” she says. “I never should have told you...”
Flora, it seems, made the mistake of confiding in Ryan that sometimes, when she walks down a busy street, she scans the passing crowds so that in the event of there being a crime committed and witnesses sought, she’ll be able to provide a thorough description.
“One too many episodes of Crimewatch, I expect,” says Hettie sympathetically.
Flora nods, mute with misery. Don’t put up with it, I want to tell her. He shouldn’t do that to you. Someone who loves you shouldn’t try to make you look silly.
“Knob,” Felix whispers under his breath.
Sadie looks up, catches his eye and looks away. The back of her neck is livid red.
I notice Josh has also witnessed this exchange. His hazel eyes flick from Sadie to Felix and then back again. I remember what Felix said about getting to know Sister Sadie, and wonder if Josh is remembering it, too, and feeling nervous for the girl. He’s had plenty of experience of how it feels to be cast aside by his older brother...
Now Flora has got to her feet and is rummaging around in a huge carrier bag.
“A bit early for presents, darling, don’t you think?” I say, taken aback.
It’s only 2:00 p.m. We have always waited until at least three-thirty before exchanging gifts, sitting in the formal living room and picking presents one by one from under the tree while the turkey and vegetables do their business in the oven.
Felix makes a noise like one of Walter’s barks.
“You don’t seriously expect us to stick to Busfield family traditions, do you, Madre? I mean, have you actually looked around you? Does this look like a traditional family Christmas to you?”
He’s right, of course.
“I just thought it would be nice to be a bit more informal this year,” says Flora, hotly. “What with...” She makes a gesture with her hand indicating the crowded kitchen, the two extra guests, the absence of Simon.
“Fine.” I shrug, turning back to my chopping. “Whatever.”
The first present out of Flora’s bag is for Ryan.
“Hope you haven’t gone mad, doll,” he says, accepting his gift warily, as if it might explode at any moment. “You know we’re saving for a new bathroom.”
Idiot!
Inside the layers of tissue paper is a suit. Charcoal-colored and lined with purple silk. I look at the label. Crikey!
“It’s lovely and all that, doll,” says Ryan, stroking the material greedily. “But can we really afford...?”
Don’t finish that sentence, I urge. Just tell her you love it.
Now he’s fishing a rather soggy package out of the Tesco carrier bag, which still holds his other two beers.
“It’s not much.” He’s clearly embarrassed. “We did say we wouldn’t...with the bathroom and everything...”
“I don’t care if it’s not much, silly!” She makes a big show of prodding the poorly wrapped gift and holding it up to her ear to rattle it. “Soft and squidgy!” she says, clearly delighted to be able to rule out the Little Britain box set she got last year. My heart constricts as she tears into the wrapping.
Please, please, please, let it be nice, let him have chosen with care.
“Oh, how lovely!” she says, before she’s even properly opened it.
Ryan’s frown uncreases slightly. “I thought you’d like it,” he says. “You’re always complaining about the cold.”
Now Flora is gazing in silence down at her present. A matching woolly hat, scarf and gloves set. It’s a challenge to hold in the cry of outrage that forms in my throat.
“It’s brown,” Ryan points out unnecessarily. “You like brown.”
She might well like brown, you cretin. Brown leather sofas, brown eyes, brown skin. But not a bloody brown angora mix hat, scarf and gloves set. Or rather she might like it, from a coworker or a cousin, but not as a present from her fiancé on Christmas morning. Does he even love her? I ask myself suddenly, and remember Flora saying once she thought Ryan might believe there are actually four little words rather than three, so seldom does he say “I love you” without adding a “but” on the end.
“Oh, that’s...useful,” says Hettie, trying to help.
“Is it some sort of animal?” my mother wants to know, eyeing the fluffy brown heap with suspicion.
Flora is quiet. Something inside me tightens at the sight of her blue eyes gazing down on that ghastly hat. I must go to her. I must hold her. Make the hurt go away. That’s what Simon would have done.
To think he’ll never be here again. I’ll never again experience that warm glow of relief at seeing my husband comforting my daughter. It’s all up to me now. I must be all things to my children.
It’s too much responsibility. Too great a burden. Simply too much.
LOTTIE
Such an embarrassing present. The poor girl looks shattered. And look at the mother, blanching potatoes, completely oblivious. Ice in her veins, my mum would have said.
Oh, now Flora is distributing presents to everyone. Peach body scrub. Thoughtful of her. Was that tin of chocolates we brought enough? Ought we to have bought indivi
dual gifts? Ha! As if there’s the money for that!
Thank God Sadie and I exchanged our presents in private this morning. I think I was more excited than she was when she opened the silver necklace. I know she liked it—I’d seen her coveting it in the jeweler’s window—though all she said was, “Thanks, but I thought we were broke.”
Still punishing me, I suppose, for reading her Facebook page. We had a huge row about it—just as I’d thought we would. She accused me of snooping, of spying, of invading her privacy. I said I’m her mother and have a right to know what’s going on. I asked her about the cocaine. At first she refused to answer, but when I threatened to call Gabi, she admitted she’d had that one line. That was the first time she’d tried it, she swore, and she’ll never do it again, complaining it had burned the inside of her nose. She refused to give me the name of the boy—denied flat-out it was Josh. She said it was someone from college that she wouldn’t be seeing again, and when I pressured her, she told me I was trying to ruin her life, just like I’d ruined my own.
I shouldn’t have been disappointed about her present to me. It’s not as if I was expecting anything much, but a goat?
“It’ll keep a family in Africa going for years,” she told me. And of course, I don’t want to begrudge a family in Africa anything, but it did feel a bit like more punishment, that goat.
Look at her now, my beautiful daughter, sitting there so awkwardly on that stool. This was a mistake. We should have gone to Emma’s. I thought coming here might be good for us and bring us closer to Simon’s memory, but instead it just reminds me how much about him I didn’t know. The Simon I knew would never have been happy here in this Sunday-supplement house. All these gadgets—there’s even one of those extendable chrome shower attachments next to the kitchen sink—all this money, all this stuff. And that woman, blanching potatoes. I bet no one ever bought her a goat!