by Sue Townsend
I’m sorry to relate this, diary, but I mouthed silent obscenities into the phone while writing ‘To Mum from Adrian’ on a gift tag.
Netta then said, ‘Even Daisy can’t lift Marigold’s spirits.’
I said, ‘Daisy’s there?’
Netta said, ‘Yes, all my girls are home for Christmas this year.’
I said that I would come over to Beeby and bring Marigold’s Christmas present.
Netta said, ‘We’re all very fond of you, Adrian,’ and put the phone down.
At about 4.30 my father rang again to say that my engagement had appeared in the Leicester Mercury on the family announcements page and that people had been ringing Wisteria Walk non-stop to ask about Marigold. He said, ‘Your mother has took it hard, Adrian. She’s gone to bed with a double dose of Prozac. She’s not stuffed the turkey, nor nothing.’
I ran to the corner and bought the Leicester Mercury. The notice was in a box. It stood out prominently on the page. It said:
Michael and Netta Flowers
are delighted to announce the engagement
of their precious daughter Marigold
to
Adrian Mole.
We wish them peace and spiritual fulfilment
for the future.
Wedding arrangements to be announced at a later date.
The Leicester Mercury has a circulation of 93,156, with an estimated readership of 239,000. My blood ran cold.
I realized on the way back to the bookshop that most of the shops along the High Street were closed. I had intended to run out at lunchtime and do some Christmas shopping and now it was too late. I had a few moments of madness. One was when I ran into Habitat and asked if they sold sledgehammers. Another was barging into HMV and begging to be shown the Johnny Cash section.
Some of our customers were equally panic-stricken. By 5.30 we were the only shop open on the High Street.
A crowd of drunken builders who had been drinking all afternoon when they were meant to be shopping for their wives and girlfriends stormed in and asked for help with choosing suitable books.
Between us, Mr Carlton-Hayes and I off-loaded our entire stock of cookery books, including a signed Delia Smith and a Rick Stein complete with his dog Chalky’s pawprint.
One of the builders, a plasterer, bought a book on falconry for himself and said he would be back after Christmas to look for similar titles. Before he left the shop, he noticed the plaster around the fireplace ‘looked dodgy’ and offered to stop by some time in the new year and give us a quote.
I locked the door and turned the closed sign to face the street. A frantic dark-haired woman ran up to the door and shouted through the glass, ‘Do you sell replacement bulbs for fairy lights?’
I shook my head and mouthed, ‘Sorry.’ My heart went out to the poor woman.
Before I left, I selected a few books for my own family, Pandora and Nigel.
When I showed Mr Carlton-Hayes the announcement in the Leicester Mercury he said, ‘I never believe anything I read in the papers, my dear.’
I have just rung Wisteria Walk and asked if I was still welcome tomorrow. My father answered. He lowered his voice and said, ‘Things are bad here, son. Rosie’s phoned to say she’s not coming for Christmas. Your mother’s upstairs crying and playing Leonard Cohen at volume ten.’
I could hear Leonard Cohen in the background, croaking out a song about sex and death.
My father said, ‘I’d love to see you tomorrow, son. I need somebody to help me through the day.’
As I drove to Beeby on the Wold, I caught occasional glimpses of families preparing for Christmas Day. I thought about William in Nigeria and Glenn in his barracks in Aldershot, and hoped that they had checked their emails, where I had posted electronic Christmas greetings. In my heart I knew that they would have preferred a proper card.
Marigold was in her Cinderella coach bed. It is a tragedy of her life, and mine, that she is one of the ugly sisters. She gave me my Christmas present and insisted that I open it in front of her. It was the loft doll’s house. She had made many additions since the last time I saw it. It had a swan on the balcony and there were two children. The boy looked like me and the girl looked like Marigold. The detail was amazing. She had made a minuscule Dualit toaster and a cafetiere.
She said, ‘Do you like it?’
I said, ‘I don’t know what to say.’
She said, ‘I’ve worked day and night on it. I’ve hardly slept. That’s probably what made me ill.’
I said, ‘You must rest now. Stay in bed over Christmas and I’ll see you in the new year.’
Marigold said, ‘But we’ve hardly seen each other since we got engaged.’
I held her hand and said, ‘We’re not really engaged, are we, Marigold?’
She said, ‘No, not without a ring.’
I gave Marigold her present and asked her not to open it until the morning. I did not want to see her disappointment – it was a rare unsigned copy of Offally Good!, my cookery book, published as a tie-in to the TV series.
Marigold held her hand out and pulled me down towards her. I caught my shin on the side of the coach bed, the loft doll’s house was knocked over and Marigold, our two children and I were knocked on to the floor.
Before I left Marigold’s bedroom I said very clearly, ‘So you agree, we’re not engaged?’
She nodded and sank back into her pillows.
Daisy was downstairs in the drawing room, shivering next to a miserable log fire.
I said, ‘Did you know that there is not a single healthy fire in the whole of Dostoevsky’s oeuvre?’
She said, ‘I’ve never read Dostoevsky, and with good luck and a fair wind I shall never have to.’
I felt strangely liberated and asked her to name her favourite books. She said, ‘I spend every waking moment living at first hand. I’m the narrator and star of my own life. I’m hungry for everything. I don’t want to live vicariously through books. I want to touch, taste and smell life.’
She took a glass from the mantelpiece and drank. I realized that she was very drunk. She wobbled a bit on her high heels.
She said, ‘I knew Marigold would get you. She always got her own way when she was a kid. You don’t love her, do you?’
What sounded like a small choir was singing ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ in the next room.
I answered Daisy’s question by shaking my head.
She said, ‘Tell her quickly and get it over with. She doesn’t want a long engagement.’
I said, ‘I’ve told her that we are not engaged.’
Daisy said, ‘So you’re free, are you?’
I said, ‘I’ve just remembered who you remind me of. It’s a thin Nigella Lawson.’
She said, ‘I remodelled myself on Nigella last year. Had the boobs done, the hair dyed, the lips plumped up. But I’m no domestic goddess. I loathe domesticity.’
She reached out and removed my glasses. I felt as though I were standing naked in front of her.
She said, ‘I like the way your hair curls on the back of your neck.’
I said, ‘I meant to go to the barber’s.’
She said, ‘No, don’t cut it.’ She stroked the back of my neck and said, ‘I know you are honouring a dead dog tomorrow or something, but do come for Boxing Day lunch. I need an ally.’
‘The Holly and the Ivy’ came to an end and we moved to opposite ends of the fireplace.
When I put my glasses back on, the world seemed to be suffused with colour.
Wednesday December 25th
Christmas Day
Woke with the usual adult disappointment that there was not a sack of toys at the end of my bed. The sky was grey and it was drizzling. Why can’t the weather give us a break for once and snow on Christmas Day?
As I drove to Wisteria Walk, I passed a few kids trying out their new Christmas presents. A man in pyjamas and a dressing gown was supporting a kid on a bike along the pavement. A little girl in a nurse’s outfit was pus
hing a doll’s pram behind them. They didn’t seem to mind the rain.
The atmosphere in my parents’ living room was more Pinter than Dickens. There was a Christmas tree in the corner of the room but it was a scraggy affair and looked as though it was apologizing for its almost bare branches. My mother had done her best with three sets of Christmas lights, baubles and tinsel. I was pleased to see that the ‘bell’ I had made out of an eggbox and a pipe cleaner when I was seven had been hung in a prominent position at the front of the tree. I sensed that my mother was depressed.
She said, ‘My heart’s broken, Adrian. I was so looking forward to Rosie coming home for Christmas.’
I asked where Rosie was. Then I remembered she wasn’t coming.
‘In Hull!’ she shouted indignantly. ‘Nobody spends Christmas in Hull!’
My father said, adding to the misery, ‘It’s William I miss. Remember him last Christmas, Pauline. He loved that drum kit we bought him.’
My mother said, ‘Please, George, don’t mention that precious little boy’s name. I can’t bear to be parted from him.’
‘And I’ll miss having a few drinks with Glenn,’ said my father. ‘He was somebody to go to the pub with.’
My mother said, ‘And it’s the anniversary of the new dog’s death. Christmas Day will never be the same again. I will never forget the sight of that poor dog choking to death on a turkey bone.’
The presents were still unopened under the tree. I added mine and we sat around talking about past Christmases and toasted absent friends with Safeway’s Bucks Fizz.
At 11 o’clock my father put on the Russian hat with the ear flaps that he wears in the winter and said that he had to go out and fetch something. I watched him get into his second-hand camper van and drive off.
I said to my mother, ‘I’m surprised you let Dad wear that hat, Mum. He looks so weird in it.’
She said aggressively, ‘Mozart, Van Gogh and Einstein were not conventional men.’
I went into the kitchen and stuffed the limbless and wingless turkey. There were still some ice crystals inside the bird, but quite frankly, diary, salmonella poisoning seemed quite a welcome prospect.
At 11.30 my father returned, carrying a large cardboard box on which he had stuck a polyester red-ribboned bow. The three of us stood around the tree. He passed the box over to my mother and said, ‘Happy Christmas, Pauline. I hope this makes up for what Adrian did last year.’
The box was obviously heavy and my mother quickly put it down on the coffee table. She opened the cardboard lid and a strange-looking puppy peered out. It was the most peculiar dog I have ever seen. It looked like Rod Hull’s Emu with a Kevin Keegan perm. It started slobbering all over my mother’s face in a disgustingly unhygienic manner.
My mother and father bent over the new puppy as though they were worshipping the Messiah. I hardly got a look-in for the rest of the day. I was merely the galley slave who had killed their last dog.
My Christmas presents were the usual tat. The worst was from my father: a golf set that consisted of three golf balls, a tiny golf ball ‘towel’, a pewter tankard inscribed ‘The 19th hole’ and a pair of dimple-palmed golfing gloves.
My father said, ‘I know you hate golf, but I didn’t know what else to get you.’
*
My mother let me in on the secret of the ‘Mole Christmas gravy’.
‘I was hoping to pass the secret recipe on to Rosie, but since she’s not here,’ she said bitterly, ‘I’ll pass it on to you.’
She told me the secret in the kitchen with the door closed.
‘You boil the turkey giblets in three pints of water with an onion, a carrot and a potato. Then you strain the liquid and some turkey juice from the roasting pan, and dissolve two chicken Oxos in a cup of the hot liquid. Next mix a little Bisto in an eggcup –’
‘Why an eggcup?’ I queried.
‘Because,’ she said scornfully, ‘you don’t want the gravy too thick, do you? Add the ingredients together, carefully simmering for a time, until voilà! You’ve got the Mole Christmas gravy.’
I was incredibly disappointed. I told her that I had expected to hear about a magic ingredient, some rare and exotic spice I’d never known of, something available only at Christmas time, bought after dark from a mysterious foreign woman.
My mother said, ‘No, all the ingredients can be bought in the Co-op.’
This is another boyhood illusion shattered.
My mother urged me to ring William in Nigeria. I did so reluctantly. He told me that his stepfather, Wole, had bought him a new bike. As he chatted on about his new life, and his half-brothers and sisters, I felt a powerful longing to hold him in my arms, and sniff his skin, and hold his sticky little hands. I wondered if the stepfather had been pushing William and his bike along a dusty pavement in Lagos. Perhaps I shouldn’t have given him up so easily.
I told him about the new puppy and he asked me if it had a name yet. I told him that it was a Mole tradition that dogs were not given a name.
He said, ‘You won’t kill the new dog, will you, Dad?’
I told him quite firmly that I had not killed the last one.
My mother took the phone from me and my father crowded next to her. I left the room and sat on the stairs. It is a horrible thing to see your old parents crying. The hall was full of packing cases and boxes. The bed I had slept in since childhood had been dismantled and was leaning against the wall.
I was reheating the Christmas gravy when Glenn rang me on my mobile to say that he was being posted to Cyprus. I asked him if I would see him before he left and he said no, he was leaving tomorrow morning at dawn. I didn’t like the sound of that word ‘dawn’. It was suggestive of urgency and danger and I felt my stomach churn with fear for him. I tried to sound normal and asked him if he’d received his Christmas present.
There was a slight hesitation, then he said, ‘Yes, Dad, thank you. It was just what I wanted.’
He is such a kind boy. I will forgive him for telling me a lie. The sad truth is, diary, that I forgot to send him a Christmas present. I was planning to blame this unforgivable oversight on ParcelForce.
When I told my parents that Glenn was going overseas, my mother’s face drained of colour. She said, ‘Not Iraq!’
I told her that Glenn was too young at seventeen to be sent to Iraq, but he was old enough to go to Cyprus. However, diary, I don’t like to think about the boy being out of the country, not with the world in such turmoil.
At 5 o’clock there was a one-minute silence for the dog that I was accused of murdering at that hour exactly a year ago today.
At the end of the silence I said, yet again, ‘I did not give that dog a turkey bone!’
But it was obvious that neither of my parents believed me.
My mother went outside into the garden and put a poinsettia plant on the dog’s grave. When she came back in, my father gave her a piece of kitchen towel with which to wipe her eyes.
He put his arm round her and said, ‘Do you want me to dig him up when we move, Pauline?’
My mother said, ‘No. He was happy in the back garden, pulling the washing off the line.’
They smiled fondly at the memories, though I remember my father going berserk when the dog had pulled his best jeans off the line and dragged them through the mud.
After eating a slice of Yule log and cracking a few of the easier nuts, I went home and left them watching a video of Christmas 2001, which mainly consisted of a William Mole drum solo, but they didn’t seem to mind the din.
Thursday December 26th
Boxing Day
I woke with a sense of excitement, but couldn’t remember what I was looking forward to. Then I remembered. I would be seeing Daisy Flowers at Beeby on the Wold.
It annoyed me that Marigold always came out to greet me before I had a chance to park the car. I like a moment on my own to compose my thoughts before I enter another household.
She held a twig of mistletoe above our heads an
d kissed me on the cheek. She was wearing a full-skirted, sequined dress, more suitable for Come Dancing than Boxing Day lunch.
I managed to sit next to Daisy, who was elegant in black. She asked me how Christmas Day had been. I said it had been hell.
She said, ‘It couldn’t have been worse than here. Poppy’s hair got caught up in the Magimix when Mummy was creaming garlic mash. And Daddy got drunk on his foul mulled wine and started to cry about Mummy and Roger Middleton.’
Netta Flowers handed round home-made crackers. She said, ‘I can hardly bear to see them destroyed. It took me weeks of working until the early hours to make them.’
I pulled a cracker with Marigold. The novelty was a plastic ring with a gaudy pseudo-ruby stone. Marigold asked me to put the ring on the third finger of her left hand.
When I did so she shrieked, ‘Look, family, look, family, I’m properly engaged.’
How we all laughed.
Netta said, ‘I’m sure as soon as the jewellery shops open Adrian will be buying you something rather splendid. Perhaps a large cluster of diamonds would suit you, Mazzie.’
I realized then that Marigold had not informed her family that the engagement was off.
A strange thing happened to me. I disassociated myself from my surroundings. I seemed to hover above the table. Voices sounded as if they were coming from afar.
I can now see, sitting here in the silence of my loft apartment, that I was in a state of acute anxiety this afternoon. If it hadn’t been for Daisy holding my hand under the table, I might well have broken down. I am like a man who is trapped in a grain silo – the harder he digs, trying to get out, the more the grain pours in, trapping him still further.
Friday December 27th
My parents moved to the top left-hand corner of a windswept field today. Their address is The Piggeries, The Bottom Field, Lower Lane, Mangold Parva, Leicestershire. Most of their furniture and possessions have been put into storage, though to be quite honest, diary, it would have been kinder to the furniture to have put it out of its misery by setting fire to the lot.
We battled against a north-east wind to erect the tent. It was dark long before the last peg had been battered into the muddy ground. We sat in the back of the camper van with the new puppy while my mother made tea on the tiny Calor gas stove. The wind screeched and moaned around the vehicle and rocked us as though we were in a cabin cruiser on the high seas.