He’s not going to be picked out as clever, but he knows something that not all five-year-olds know. In three months’ time, seeing me sitting lost across the other side of the room, he will hurtle towards me, and hug me. Tightly. So tightly.
In three months’ time, Carine will come close to me and she will hiss, Where is the little baby? Her parents, grandparents, the waitresses in the restaurant will point to the sky and say, ‘He’s with baby Jesus.’ She will not be brushed off with nonsensical platitudes. With her piercing brown eyes, with her beetle brow, she will not stop asking: Where is the little baby? She will wait till other adults are out of hearing; she knows I’m the weakest link. She has a sibilant whisper, she comes right up to my face: Where is the little baby?
Months pass. I am pregnant with another little boy. She will come up to me, suddenly remembering, and she will say, Where is the little baby? And—how can I forgive myself for this—I touch my plump stomach, and I say, Here.
What do we eat? Now I’m not sure. It is gourmet. It’s two-star Michelin. What I remember most is a pâté which has tiny little mushrooms, truffles, and I observe the appalled faces of our hosts as I carefully separate them out: I do not like mushrooms. We’ve had four courses—crudités, pâté, consommé, quenelles—and we are yet to come to our main. Ben, beside me, has had enough. He wants it over. He doesn’t want to be in France. He doesn’t want haute cuisine. He doesn’t want to be among strangers, with Robert and me the only people he knows in this odd, cruel new world. He doesn’t want any of this baffling, mind-blowing, nonsense.
‘Where,’ says Ben, ‘is my bloody meat?’
EIGHT
We’re at the Holiday Inn. Which is the same sort of ironic misnomer as Sunshine Crescent and Happy Valley. Lonely travelling salesmen, widowers, and cash-strapped families packed into a Family Room aren’t really on holiday. And ‘inn’? Where are the low beams and generous log fires?
And it’s Christmas Day. Later we’ll board a cheap flight back to New Zealand. Really cheap, because it’s assumed that most people have better things to do on Christmas Day than cram themselves into economy class.
We’re holiday inning near Heathrow Airport. Benedict is 10 months old and, as usual at Christmas, I’m pregnant. Three babies in three years. The next one will be the first to be born in New Zealand. We are going back to family, to a job at the university in Palmerston North.
We have Christmas dinner at midday in the dining room. Robert has spent the morning in the vast indoor pool with Benedict. The sole swimmers. Now in the dining room there’s just us and a thin smattering of disconsolate lost souls. There’s a large tree, probably not a real one, and for our entertainment the hotel has hired a conjurer. His clever acts are met with peals of laughter. From just the one source. Banging his spoon on the tray of his highchair, our baby finds him hilarious.
That night we stand at the Pan Am counter and try to make sense of a person telling us that yes, Benedict is indeed on my passport and yes, I do indeed have a visa to visit the US. But, explains the conscientious staff member, as if speaking to a total fuckwit, the visa was issued before he was born, therefore he does not have a visa. He can fly through America but he can’t leave the airport.
‘Is there someone we can ring? The American ambassador?’ asks Robert optimistically.
There is no one to ring to check this ludicrous fact. They’re all in front of splendid fires toasting baby Jesus with glasses of fine port. So we rebook to fly straight through.
At the airport in Los Angeles, where we were expecting to spend a few days, our prepaid hotel and our visit to Disneyland our Christmas present from Robert’s parents, the person on the desk says he’s never heard anything so ridiculous. Of course my visa applies to Benedict.
Too late: our bags are going straight through. Benedict sits in a pod on the wall in front of the first row in economy class and doesn’t sleep at all. He enjoys the other passengers in the same non-judgemental way as he enjoyed the hapless conjurer. He doesn’t cry once. He’s too busy waving and smiling and clapping. It’s reciprocal.
At Auckland Airport I phone my parents, now living in Devonport, and I say, ‘We’re back.’ And my mother says, ‘How fabulous! Oh how fabulous! We’ll be there as soon as we can!’
I think, When did she swap corker for fabulous?
And Benedict throws up all over a Japanese girl who has just asked if she can take him on her knee.
NINE
My sister Deborah and I cook well together. It is quite a talent, this. Although inclined to argue—she believes in home truths, I’m always right—we know that whoever’s house it is is chef, and the other is sous-chef. Other than my granddaughter Flora, seven at the time of writing, there is no one I cook better with.
In 1983 we are the last of the four siblings left in New Zealand, though as Deborah is married to Henk, whose entire family is in the Netherlands, there’s always the chance that she too will bugger off. Michael has gone to live near Daphne’s family in Yorkshire, and Wendy has gone with her Canadian husband to live in Ontario. The map of the world above the kitchen table has a lot to answer for.
Deborah and Henk, Freia and Nicholas have come to spend Christmas with us. We have lived in our Californian bungalow in Palmerston North for seven years. When we buy it we love the plaster ceilings and the leadlight windows. We don’t love the mean aluminium-framed window that the previous owner has installed behind the kitchen sink. And we don’t love the fact that a substantial washhouse leans against the sunny back of the house. One day several of our friends bring their children round, and we give them all ice creams, and they watch the man in the truck with the giant crane hooking the crane to our washhouse, swinging it high above the lawn and the trees, and putting it carefully down behind the garage. Before this happens Robert and his father have put piles down for it to land on.
When Benedict and Gemma, aged two and one, go to sleep one night, there’s a normal door that used to lead to a washhouse. They’ve seen the washhouse swing through the air, and the next morning they wake up to something different. Benedict, sodden nappies down by his knees, toddling out from his bedroom and into the kitchen, recoils like Charlie Chaplin. His world view has been challenged. Where a normal door used to be there are now french doors that we’ve bought from the place where people who demolish buildings sell the leftovers. The past two decades have been their boom-time. Robert and his father have passed an evening usefully installing them.
I still find this capability extraordinary. One of my father’s stories was how he went to woodwork classes at night school for five years and, he’d say, pointing to the wonky bookcase, I made that.
A few weeks later, Robert uses bricks that we’ve bought from the same place, and makes a terrace outside the french doors.
Fiona Farrell comes round and says we really should buy the convent that’s come on the market. We go and look, our four children racing up the stairs to the long attic where children like ours would and should play inventive and wonderful games. There are 22 bedrooms, where young nuns for the past half-century could have well lain in narrow beds, contemplating the crush they had on the priest who led them to giving up their lives to marry Jesus. We work out how many families we would need to buy it. We ring up the next day to make an appointment to see it again but, too late. It has already sold. Southern Cross has bought it, to demolish it and build a new private hospital.
Our hatred for them for destroying one of Palmerston North’s few beautiful historic buildings segues into another more practical emotion. What will they be doing with the bits?
With floorboards that nuns have knelt on, and wooden windows, some clear glass, some made by one of Palmerston North’s best leadlight makers, Robert with help from our friends Gerry and Mike assembles, as if from Lego, the most beautiful conservatory ever. It has replaced the brick terrace which is so treacherous in winter, and it runs along the whole length of the back of the house, facing the north.
The man
from the council comes round to check it out. He doesn’t know what to make of it. We have studied what you have to pay to have permission for, and what you don’t. I’m open and friendly. ‘It’s a veranda,’ I say, ‘which we filled in with these old windows.’
‘I dunno,’ he says. ‘This one’s in the too-hard basket.’ He walks thoughtfully along its length, totally bemused. ‘Tell you what,’ he says, ‘I’ll sign it off. But you’re lucky!’ he calls over his shoulder, hurrying to his truck.
Years pass. It’s Christmas. Deborah and I cook, the children play, and Henk does the vacuuming, so thoroughly, in his Dutch way, that it has become a perpetual bar to be aspired to: vacuum like Henk did. Deborah and I are cooking, and I say, ‘I still hate that window, why have we lived here for years and years and still not done something about that window?’
So while we cook Christmas dinner, Robert and Henk work out that all they need is a saw, a crowbar, and a bit of this and that, and while Deborah and I make stuffing for the chicken from apricots and cashew nuts, peel an infinite number of potatoes and kūmara to roast, and top the strawberries for the pavlova, just inches away from us they cut a decent-sized hole in the kitchen wall. And they take out the window.
TEN
At last. A real Christmas.
Since May, we’ve been living in Montpellier, near the Mediterranean. We have taken Benedict, 13, and Gemma, 12, from their schools, from their grandparents, from their friends in Palmerston North, to the south of France. So Benedict can see the country where he spent his first year. So Gemma can see where she began.
We rent an apartment in the avenue des Arceaux, which runs along beside the Arceaux, an aqueduct, which looks like the Roman Pont du Gard in the nearby town of Nîmes, except it is in fact quite modern—a replica, built in the eighteenth century. It still carries water to Montpellier. We look out at it from our third-floor apartment. It’s not, in theory, accessible, with heavily bolted gates at either end, but one day we see two cyclists riding along the top of it. We wave, applauding their audacity, our feet flinching with vertigo. They wave joyfully back.
The children go to a collège, Clémence Royer, the equivalent of Years 7 to 10 in New Zealand. Gemma sits in class and, in her neat girls’ handwriting, she carefully copies down everything from the blackboard, even though she doesn’t understand a word of it. She changes the way she writes decimals: not 5.8 but 5,8. Number 1 now has a rakish lean and a little tick at top left; it looks a bit like a 7 used to. Now 7 has a dash through it.
Benedict decides that if he ignores it, it will go away. He sits in class and reads. He’s mad on fantasy. We move steadily towards financial ruin as we buy him books almost daily from the foreign-language section of the Fnac bookshop. It is built over seven levels and the floor has painted lines in different colours which take you to the appropriate section. Follow blue for foreign fiction.
Someone mentions that about 100 metres down the road from our apartment is the American Centre of Provence, and it has a library. It’s not only Benedict’s life that is saved; I have all day available to me to devour what I’ve been missing out on by working full-time. It is a wonderful library: the books are chosen by a garrulous gay man from San Francisco who takes advice from his sister. She and I have identical taste. And there seems to be scant competition: a new Margaret Atwood, a Barbara Pym arrive in the morning, and go home with me by lunchtime.
Slowly they adapt, but the fact that young people learn a foreign language so easily turns out to be a myth when you’re 12 and 13. Benedict is sad. We search hopelessly for a solution. It’s not being able to communicate that is the problem. It’s more than just words. I know how he feels; I am yet to meet anyone who shares that most significant thing—the same books read in childhood. The same music. The same movies. I miss being able to eavesdrop. Even his English lessons at school are hard; unlike French children, who can strip a sentence back to its parts, he has no idea how to conjugate a verb in his own language. His teacher’s concept of colloquial English differs from his experience—in her idea of England, children are still exclaiming I say! And, Jolly good! The only thing we can do is pull in any cash we can find and enrol them into a language school, a three-week intensive course. There is a language school right beside the American library. Everyone else is adult, but that’s no problem. When that’s over, we’ll take them to England for Christmas. And, after Christmas, Benedict will go on a ski trip with his class.
We walk through Montpellier and they bounce along with a new energy and are greeted affectionately by a Syrian doctor who flies helicopters for Médecins Sans Frontières. A few minutes later there’s a doe-eyed young man who’s got a sports car, because he’s a millionaire!
And now we are on our way to my brother’s in Yorkshire, to have a true northern hemisphere Christmas. As soon as we’re on the ferry everyone is speaking a language that we can listen to without even trying.
We drive straight to Sandhurst in Kent, where our friends Jill and Terry live. They’re English, but in the early seventies, when Robert and I were first married, they both taught in Palmerston North. In 1976, when we left Lyon and went back to Palmerston North, our Benedict was a similar age to their Christopher, and Jill and I went to a playgroup with other young teachers who’d had babies.
We’re to stay with Terry and Jill for two days. On the first day we are going to London, as Terry is singing Handel’s Messiah as a member of a choir made up of dozens of small choirs from the Home Counties. I’m smug that my children are seeing England living up to the story I’ve attempted to entrench in their childhood, though I’ve been less successful than my mother was in mine. We go in a bus to London. We go through Lewes. We are with Jill’s mother, and she says, ‘There’s a Women’s Institute here … the Lewes Women’s Institute …’
Semi-detached brick houses obligingly line our route. Christmas trees lurch forward so we can see them in full-twinkle in bay windows. People wearing warm coats, scarves and hats walk dogs. Black taxis, no doubt driven by people reciting The Knowledge in Cockney rhyming slang, idle with diesel-fuelled rumbles at the traffic lights. We’re in Oxford Street, and Pātea has clearly given the street its lights back, as it glitters with ostentatious glamour. There’s Harrods, its windows yet again upstaging Kirks’. There’s Prince Albert carved in stone, and that impressive round building where our bus is pulling in to discharge us is the Albert Hall. We climb the stairs in a cosy fug of sanctimonious sentimentality. It is, after all, Handel’s Messiah, sung by at least a thousand rosy-cheeked people, and what more can we say about how Christmas is meant to be? That distant little round face with the discreet comb-over is Terry. Then it’s the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, and Gemma nudges me hard and says, ‘We sing this at school! We sing this at school!’ And she means Intermediate Normal in Palmerston North, not Clémence Royer in Montpellier.
Jill and Terry, in quite a seriously evangelical way, have found Jesus since going home. Their pastor, who we meet on the bus, is much quoted. He is ominously charismatic, and Jill in particular is in his thrall. But Handel asks no more of us than to revel in his music.
We frantically wave goodbye. From now on it is just Christmas cards, culminating in the one not many years later from Terry saying that quite recently Jill came home early from her school feeling unwell. She lay on her bed. But by the time he got home she had died. An aneurism. The next year, another Christmas card. He is fortunate, he writes, to have had the kind company of a woman who worships in the same church. They are soon to be married.
And finally, we are in Yorkshire for Christmas, with my brother and his family. There is everything and nothing to talk about. Some things are off-limits. He is happier to talk about the curved lines of a seventeenth-century chair than how his childhood was affected by Dad going away for those war years. Whether or not our parents had a happy marriage. He is happy to reminisce, but his stories are anecdotal, pleasure comes from a carefully thought-out punchline. He loves to laugh till he weeps, and is disin
clined to discuss our shared family: he has an aversion to what he thinks of as talking behind people’s backs, whereas I am fascinated by the human condition, driven to analyse, and think the best way to criticise other people—constructively, of course—is well and truly out of their hearing.
He thinks their current prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, has been the answer to England’s problems. He’s delighted in the disempowerment of trade unions; he’s believed in the show of strength that was the Falklands War. All around the parts of the world where Christmas is celebrated, Christmas Day with slammed doors and tears before bedtime will be common enough, but on this occasion it’s just easier not to debate.
Michael and Daphne have two sons, James and Dominic, both a bit older than our two. We are staying in their home in York while they are in their weekend cottage in the grounds of what used to be Daphne’s family farmhouse. We travel out to them daily, through the lanes with their stone walls. North Yorkshire is achingly beautiful. The gigantic old trees are leafless. It’s winter, just like it should be, though disappointingly there’s no snow, so no snowman with a tartan scarf like Rupert Bear’s, with coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose. We drive through villages where stone cottages snuggle. It’s Christmas Eve, and dark falls early.
We’re having what Michael now calls supper at their cottage. There’s a knock on the door, and who should be there but candle-bearing carol singers? There’s a photo of Michael and me listening to ‘Silent Night’. When moved, we, like our father, are inclined to fold our arms and look at the floor. Same shaped noses, with same rosy hue, one set of brown eyes, one set of blue eyes, matching in their sentimental moistness. And behind us, a perfectly decorated, perfectly shaped, Christmas tree.
13.
I KNOW
THEM
SO WELL
In which I discuss my longstanding relationship with the royals
Someone's Wife Page 12