The Night We Met

by Zoë Folbigg

  Flora mostly kept quiet, remembering Christmases of her childhood fondly: the time Daniel dressed up as Santa for the school grotto; going to see Frozen when she was ten; Warren the shire horse at the Guildington Christmas market, trussed up in jingle bells and taken for a walk on Christmas Eve with the Town Cryer.

  ‘Do you remember, tesora,’ said Maria, scooping plump and pink cranberry sauce onto her plate – a curiosity she only enjoyed in England. ‘When you were little and your papa would take you to the Pirelli Christmas parties…’

  Olivia nodded and smiled, a face full of chestnut stuffing.

  ‘That time the reindeer ate your corsage?’

  Heads all turned to Olivia.

  ‘A real reindeer, Mummy?’ Sofia asked, excitedly.

  ‘It was real. La verità!’ Maria howled, bringing her hands to her cheeks as her dyed black curls bounced. ‘The reindeer was so still Olivia thought it was a stuffed model.’ Mamma Due told the story, even though she hadn’t been there – the Pirelli parties were Nancy’s domain, so she interjected.

  ‘You should have seen your mother’s face when the reindeer moved. The shock!’ Nancy clapped her hands together and Sofia’s mouth hung open. ‘It tried to eat the flower brooch on your mummy’s lapel, and her little face crumpled! She’d never cried so much.’ Nancy chuckled behind her hand. ‘It could have been worse, it could have been Signore Carelli’s wig…’

  Maria and Nancy laughed across the table to each other. Flora couldn’t help but smile. Silvia looked on in awe at Olivia’s mothers, and Daniel’s dad John worked up a meat sweat and searched for one of the three gravy jugs on the long table as if it were a puzzle.

  ‘Remember last year, Mamma, the Elf on the Shelf ate all the chocolates from the tree, in one night?’ said Sofia, half bemused, half annoyed. Daniel suppressed a guilty smile while Olivia gave Flora a knowing look as if to say, shhhh.

  ‘Elf on the Shelf?’ scoffed Bertie, as he stacked five pigs in blankets onto his fork. ‘You don’t believe in Elf on the Shelf, do you?’

  Annabel scrolled through her phone looking at the influx of emails about Boxing Day sales.

  ‘Huh?’ asked Flora, whipping her head towards her cousin in disbelief, giving him her most scathing of teenage stares – to shut him up more than anything.

  ‘Next you’ll be saying she still believes in Father Christmas,’ quipped Annabel in a flat voice, eyes still fixed on her phone screen.

  The clatter of cutlery silenced. The conversation stopped. Flora turned sharply again, this time giving her aunt a scornful frown.

  Sofia looked up. Puzzledom and heartache fluttering across her face.

  ‘Ummm…’ Her voice wobbled.

  Bertie, who was heading towards 15, wore a waistcoat, slicked-back hair under a wonky Christmas cracker hat, and a knowing expression. He blinked furiously as he took great pride in educating his younger cousins.

  ‘Don’t tell me you still believe in Father Christmas?’ he puffed. He turned his large face towards Flora, whose reproachful look was all the answer he needed to shut up. He turned back to Sofia, his cheeks flushed but his face defiant.

  He’s not really going there, is he?

  ‘Bertie, shhhh,’ hushed Matt. ‘Not the time.’

  Bertie ignored his father, as was his custom.

  ‘I knew Santa wasn’t real when I was, like, five.’

  ‘Bertram!’ snapped Silvia. ‘Shush.’

  While Annabel preferred the company of a book or her phone to people, she was never more present in the room than when someone else was disciplining Bertie.

  ‘What?’ Annabel glowered at Silvia, who kept her disappointed gaze firmly on her grandson.

  ‘What?!’ gasped Sofia. ‘You’re saying Father Christmas doesn’t…?’

  Nancy and Maria shot each other a look.

  The atmosphere turned suddenly as prickly as the holly centrepiece Nancy had picked from the garden.

  ‘Oh please!’ Annabel snorted, as she shot her mother-in-law a sideways look. She’d relied on Silvia to look after Bertie all these years, but she still couldn’t stand it if she ever told him off, which wasn’t as often as she ought to. ‘Let’s get some perspective here…’

  ‘But he came last night!’ Sofia protested. ‘He brought stockings! He left a narwhal Fingerling!’

  Bertie guffawed with wet and mocking lips.

  ‘If that’s what you want to believe, sweet…’ Annabel said knowingly, without an ounce of sweetness in her downturned mouth.

  Enough.

  Olivia threw her weighty knife and fork down onto her plate with a crash that made everyone jump.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, acknowledging the smash to her daughters. Olivia put her hand to her brow and pushed her hair back, trying to calm down, but she was livid.

  ‘Santa is very real, Sofia.’ Olivia said it with such fervour, the anger of a lioness, that Sofia would have believed anything her mother told her right now, but her mother’s temper disconcerted her, so she gave her dad a quizzical look, searching for comfort in his eyes. Daniel nodded gently, concurring with his wife.

  ‘So will you just fuck off?’ Olivia said, holding both hands out as if begging to the sky.

  ‘Mummy!’ gasped Sofia.

  Matt laughed, almost in shock.

  Flora inhaled a deep breath.

  Silvia, Nancy and Maria froze.

  Bertie looked up in disbelief.

  John waved an empty gravy jug nervously, as he realised now wasn’t the time to ask if there was more.

  Annabel looked up, her face pale and pained, her small features and downturned mouth open and rounded like a Polo mint.

  Sofia clasped her hand to her mouth as silence fell on the table for what felt like an eternal minute.

  Daniel tried to conceal the admiration in his eyes.

  Nancy stood and graciously started to pick up the empty plates, not stopping to check if anyone wanted seconds or thirds.

  But Olivia’s gaze remained on Annabel, at the far end of the table, who was looking back at her with the shock and discomfort of confrontation.

  Three months ago Olivia had had brain surgery. A month ago she finished a draining course of radiotherapy. She and Daniel had just cooked Christmas dinner for eleven people, and Annabel had turned up sullen and empty-handed.

  Annabel gasped, a small whistle of disbelief echoing through her Polo mint mouth.

  ‘Wha—?’

  ‘I said, will you just fuck off?’

  Matt put his head in his hands. Daniel looked at Sofia sitting opposite him and winced apologetically.

  Olivia stood up, pushed back her hair, and pointed accusatively down the table.

  ‘My girls have had an extremely tough six months. Sofia has been SO looking forward to Christmas. We all have. And you try to ruin it?!’

  ‘I just—’

  ‘Don’t come into our house and sit on your lazy arse, scowling at my children, sneering at food you would never dream of going to the effort to cook, and tell my daughter that Father Christmas doesn’t exist.’

  Flora looked both in awe and embarrassed. She wondered if someone might mention Father Christmas doesn’t exist, but knew that wasn’t the point.

  ‘How dare you! How dare you try to suck the life and joy out of everything and contribute nothing?’ Olivia didn’t take her eyes off Annabel, who broke her stare to look for her handbag under her chair and start gathering her things. She didn’t realise she was scooping the party hat and novelty paperclip into her bag, along with her phone.

  ‘Oh Olivia, no, no…’ said Silvia, back in primary school headteacher mode, despite having long since retired. ‘That’s not necessary, I don’t think Annabel meant to… I don’t think you meant to say that…’

  Maria stroked Sofia’s hair from the seat next to her, while Bertie sat, wet lips still drawn open, as he looked from Olivia to his mother and back again.

  ‘I absolutely did!’ said Olivia, exhaling an air of relief.

/>   ‘Now, now,’ said Matt, putting his palms mid-air in front of him, to suggest everyone simmer down.

  ‘Well, what does she contribute Silvia? You’ve looked after Bertie, after school and in the holidays. Your summer holidays. Always working like a donkey, cooking Sunday lunch for them, spending your retirement ferrying Bertie around the place. I hope she’s contributing something, that she’s grateful to you at least…’

  John nodded at his empty plate, as if Olivia might have a point.

  Silvia was paralysed, not wanting to say the wrong thing, wishing this awful situation wasn’t happening. Olivia looked back to Annabel, now standing at the other end of the table.

  ‘You are repeatedly welcomed into other people’s warm and loving homes and you sit and sneer. And never give anything back. Or smile. Or ask how anyone is. You haven’t even acknowledged my little brain issue or asked how I am…’

  ‘Oh, so that’s what this is about!’ Annabel laughed bitterly. ‘I didn’t give you the attention you were seeking about your op?’

  ‘Ha!’ Olivia snapped. ‘Are you joking? Che stronza…’

  Daniel shook his head and shot Annabel his most disappointed of looks. His wife hadn’t had a brain tumour for attention.

  ‘I’m not going to be spoken to like that! Come on Bertram, get your blazer. Matthew, we’re leaving!’

  ‘Can I not even have any of Nancy’s trifle?’ Matt said, trying to make light of it.

  ‘NO!’ barked Annabel, her face apoplectic and rash-red, as she squeezed against the glass wall at the far end of the table.

  Matt edged out of his seat, looking longingly at his plate, as he stood up and gave his brother an awkward smile. Daniel averted his eyes and busied himself with the dinner detritus and turkey carcass in front of him.

  Maria, Sofia, Flora, Silvia and John sat gobsmacked while Olivia sat back down in her chair, gaze now fixed to the garden beyond Annabel’s empty seat, and continued to eat.

  In the kitchen Nancy put a tea towel to her mouth and pretended to be looking for something in the larder, to hide her face and stifle her cheer. Daniel walked over with a pile of plates.

  ‘I’ve got a system,’ Nancy said, looking busy, pointing to worktops and indicating where the empties and food waste should go, ignoring the elephant in the room. The stoic Scot kept calm and got dinner cleared as the front door slammed shut. Daniel looked at his mother-in-law and saw the twinkle in her eye.

  She’s back, they both thought.

  Thirty-Four

  April 2004

  London

  ‘Olivia Messina, well I never…’

  Olivia turned to the boy in her peripheral vision and realised he was in fact a woman. A woman from her past.

  ‘Vaani! Oh my god!’

  They had been standing side-by-side for a good five minutes, admiring a tattered cropped T-shirt, designed by Jamie Reid, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, with a Union Jack on the front, ripped, stitched and held together by safety pins – then modified by Johnny Rotten – in the Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the V&A Museum. As they’d stood studying the punk and power of their birth years, they hadn’t realised that the gold thread of school and university in their past, and the business of their future, bound their destiny.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Er, checking out Westwood,’ Vaani said, her usual curt tone not giving much time to silly questions. Olivia marvelled at her face. Vaani had barely changed in the almost twenty years since Olivia had first met her, in the large pristine garden of the large pristine International School. Back then, Vaani’s style was suitably Eighties and boyish: jumpers and sweatshirts in geometric stripes and patterns, peg-leg trousers that finished above her skinny ankles, soft brogues from the best cobblers in Milan. Eighteen years later, that Eighties aesthetic shone through in the cool of the gallery. Her chest was still flat and her haircut boyish, but womanhood brought an elegance to Vaani, her beauty startling and bare, but for a swipe of nude gloss on her full lips. Her eyes were as curious and as wide as they were in those early days, fresh from Mumbai, but now they contained a cynical glint, probably caused by London life.

  ‘I see you’ve been busy,’ Vaani said, nodding to the protruding belly poking out of Olivia’s mac.

  ‘Yes, eight months, I’m fit to pop.’

  Gone was the slight Italian twang Vaani remembered Olivia by at school and in their days at Central Saint Martins, before Olivia Messina disappeared from the social circuit and Vaani didn’t realise for weeks.

  Vaani felt bad when a mutual friend told her she had spotted Olivia back in Milan, that she had dropped out of college. But it was the summer holidays anyway, it’s not like she should have missed her around Charing Cross Road. And Vaani wasn’t in with that crowd. The white girls who did coke.

  ‘Wow, amazing,’ Vaani breezed, not showing much interest in Olivia’s pregnancy or impending birth. Although she did try hard to remember the questions she ought to ask.

  *

  Olivia felt fortunate to have fallen pregnant so soon after marrying Daniel. Only two disappointing periods later, she sat on the toilet in the back room of the East of Eden store on Carnaby Street, marvelling at the blue lines on the pregnancy test.

  Positive.

  She called Daniel, beckoning him from The Guardian offices in Farringdon to the Liberty cafe off Regent Street half an hour later, under the guise of a stolen lunch.

  ‘Newlyweds’ prerogative,’ she had said.

  As they ate club sandwiches, a giddy Olivia slipped Daniel the blue and white capped pregnancy test under the table.

  ‘Positive!’ she declared. Daniel looked down at his lap and beamed.

  ‘Really?!’

  ‘Really.’

  She rummaged in her bag and handed him something else under the table. Another positive pregnancy test. And then another.

  ‘I did six,’ Olivia laughed. ‘All positive.’

  Daniel dropped his club sandwich on his plate and the three plastic sticks fell to the floor under the table.

  ‘Oh my god!’ he shouted, walking to Olivia’s side of the small table, dropping to one knee, and taking her face in his hands to kiss her.

  ‘Yes!’ she squealed between kisses.

  A table of two elderly American couples enjoying afternoon tea looked on and applauded.

  ‘Oh, did you see that Bob?’ said a woman in a pale green twinset. ‘He asked her to marry him!’

  ‘Wonderful!’ exclaimed the other woman.

  One of the men dabbed his mouth with his white napkin, while the other, the most frail of the group, pushed his chair back, painfully slowly, and stood up to walk over so he could shake Daniel by the hand. He was so old and so feeble, his approach took an excruciatingly long time, giving Daniel the opportunity to scoop up the used pregnancy tests and drop them in Olivia’s bag so they could go along with it.

  ‘Thank you!’ Daniel said with a hearty handshake, almost propping the old man up. ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world.’

  Olivia blushed demurely. For now, their baby would remain their exciting secret.

  *

  ‘Do you know what… it is?’ Vaani said with a crease in her nose, and they both broke into laughter. Olivia wasn’t offended by Vaani’s crispness. She had always found her economy with words and pithy sympathy refreshingly honest.

  ‘Yes, a girl. We think.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘Well, they never say for sure what you’re having.’

  ‘Oh. Well, is it a girl, a boy or a potato?’

  Olivia laughed.

  ‘The sonographer said “keep the receipt”, as they can get mixed up that way around.’

  ‘Oh right,’ Vaani said blithely. ‘Stunning exhibition, isn’t it?’

  The exhibition had been a triumph, the first ever complete retrospective from the textile and dress collections at the V&A, as well as Vivienne Westwood’s own archives: the towering platform shoes Naomi Campbell had tumb
led down the catwalk in; a 1972 T-shirt embellished with chicken bones; the clock from the old King’s Road store that had 13 hours and hands that travelled backwards. Westwood’s sartorial subterfuge shone through.

  ‘Yes, incredible. I loved the corsets!’ Olivia said assuredly.

  ‘You would,’ Vaani said with a joke roll of her eyes. Olivia’s style had always been more feminine, more dramatic than Vaani’s. ‘My friend curated it…’

  ‘Oh wow. Your friend did a good job.’

  ‘Yes. I could stand and look at these for hours. In fact, I have stood and looked at them for hours, I need a drink. Fancy one? I imagine you ought to get off your feet too.’

  Olivia was touched by Vaani’s uncharacteristic concern. Maybe the past six years had softened that hard shell.

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  *

  In the Gamble Room cafe Vaani tucked into a ham and Emmenthal baguette with vigour while Olivia tried to ignore her heartburn in favour of her quiche. She looked up at the majolica ceramic tiles that adorned the grand columns propping up three ornate archways, not knowing they would later influence her. She loved the coloured tin-glazes of the tiles, flashes of the Italian Renaissance in this very English corner of the world. She took a deep breath to steady what felt like a heart attack in her ribcage.

  ‘So are you back in London for good?’ Vaani asked, not noticing Olivia’s physical discomfort.

  Olivia pointed to her belly.

  ‘Yes, I’m kind of stuck here now.’ She laughed and tied her hair up in a bun on her head to ease the heat of being overdressed for a sunny spring afternoon. The hormones and heavy belly made her feel burdened. ‘I got married last year, we live in south London. Brixton.’