Tomorrow morning Anne and Jim are driving up from Derbyshire, and Richard from Cambridge, in good time for Christmas dinner, which is really a late lunch. Marcia and Peter and their two children will join us, so it will be a big party. Richard’s presence is a bit of a last-minute surprise. He phoned up this morning to say he’d like to join us, but would have to drive back to Cambridge the same evening. I shall try to persuade him to stay the night.There is too much fog about on the roads - worst of all in the Thames Valley, apparently. Heathrow is immobilised, flights cancelled, travellers sleeping in the terminals.Trains are consequently overcrowded and roads jammed. This mass multi-directional migration in midwinter is insane. All our bedrooms are spoken for, but I can rig up a camp bed for Richard in my study. I haven’t seen him for months.
25
th
December
. Another Christmas Day is nearly over. It’s ten past eleven. Richard declined with thanks my offer to make up a bed for him here in my study, and has driven off back to Cambridge, so I am able to make some notes on the day before going to bed myself. A lot of people have already retired, exhausted by hours of compulsory festivity and each other’s company: Fred (who has certainly earned a long rest) led the retreat at ten, accompanied by her mother, followed by Giles and Nicola (who said they were woken up by their teething baby last night), and Anne, who needed no excuse, for she looks heavily pregnant - hard to believe that the birth is still two months away. Marcia and Peter went home with their offspring hours ago. At ten-thirty Ben, Maxine and Jim settled down to watch a classic Hollywood film noir on the television. Dad, who slept - and snored - in the drawing room for some time after lunch, with a newspaper over his head, was inconveniently perky this evening. The film was not to his taste, and after a few critical remarks about the depressing effect of the black-and-white photography and the melodramatic style of the acting, designed to persuade the others to switch over to something lighter and brighter, which failed to have the desired effect, he turned his attention to me and began a rambling series of anecdotes about his life as a dance musician. The amount of cigarette smoking going on in the film revived memories of Arthur Lane’s addiction, his trick of pinching out fag ends between his foot-operated cymbals and the famous occasion when he set fire to his bass drum while the band was playing ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’. ‘And did I ever tell you about Sammy Black’s wig? A lovely trombonist Sammy was, but he wore a terrible wig . . .’ If Maxine had not been otherwise occupied, she might have been an interested auditor, but I had heard all the stories before, several times. I was desperate for some peace and quiet, longing to prise the hearing aids, which I had been wearing all day, out of my hot, sweaty earholes, and to enjoy a spell of silence. So after about a quarter of an hour I pretended that I was going to go to bed, which persuaded Dad that he should go too, and having seen him to his room I bade him goodnight and slunk back downstairs to my study.
Went the day well? It could have been worse, I suppose, but it didn’t pass without some squalls and squabbles, conflicts and complaints. Dad woke early, came downstairs to make himself a cup of tea, and set off the burglar alarm. I had gone to bed and to sleep before the others came back from Midnight Mass, and Fred set the alarm on the assumption that I had reminded Dad about it, whereas I thought we had agreed not to set the alarm with a houseful of guests and to rely on locking and bolting the external doors - a misunderstanding no doubt caused by my hearing problem. I didn’t hear the alarm go off for the same reason, and was woken from an early-morning doze by Fred’s elbow in my ribs and a grunted command to do something. I found Dad at the bottom of the stairs, in his dressing gown and slippers, with a hand cupped to his ear and a puzzled expression on his face. ‘Hallo, son,’ he said. ‘Can you hear a funny noise?’
I de-activated the alarm, and phoned the security company to tell them it was a false one. ‘Have a nice day,’ said the man who took my call, when he had taken down the details. ‘Well, it hasn’t been an auspicious start,’ I said. He laughed uncertainly. I don’t think he was sure what ‘auspicious’ meant. I expect he was feeling sorry for himself at being on duty on Christmas Day, but I imagined him sitting all alone in a quiet, warm office, with a book and a portable radio to hand, and only the occasional telephone call to disturb his peace, and I envied him.
I made Dad some tea in the kitchen and gave him a digestive biscuit with it. ‘Ain’t you having breakfast, then?’ he said, inspecting the biscuit with a disappointed expression. ‘It’s too early,’ I said. He looked at the clock on the wall. ‘Blimey! A quarter to six! Is that all it is?’ He hadn’t got his teeth in so he dipped the biscuit in the tea before mumbling it between his gums. ‘I’m going back to bed,’ I said. ‘What will you do?’ ‘I suppose I could take half a pill,’ he said. ‘Get another couple of hours’ kip.’ I encouraged him in this plan, and escorted him upstairs. I crept into our bedroom and into bed. Fred muttered something which I didn’t hear but assumed was an accusing question about the alarm and Dad.‘Don’t let’s talk about it now,’ I said, snuggling up to her, not from any tender or amorous impulse but simply for animal warmth. I find it’s the best way to get off to sleep again when I wake early. It worked, but it didn’t seem very long before she got up herself and went downstairs to prepare the turkey and put it in the oven. It’s an enormous bird, and she believes in slow cooking.
As the morning passed the smell of the roasting turkey filled the kitchen and seeped out into the dining room and front hall and could be faintly sniffed even in my study. ‘Mmm! What a delicious smell,’ the newly arriving members of the family party exclaimed as they took off their coats and shed their burdens of wrapped presents, though personally I find it falls only just short of faintly nauseous on the olfactory scale. Still, the morning was all right, on the whole. Dad slept till gone nine, which meant I was able to read yesterday’s paper over my breakfast before I had to make his and sit with him while he ate it in his dressing gown, and there was just time to get him upstairs and out of sight to wash and dress before people started to arrive. Anne and Jim were the first. I was glad to see that she looked well. Jim looked as he always looks, genial but detached, slightly spaced out, though he assured me once that he never smokes grass before lunch. Although he was only a child in the Sixties, he looks and acts like a fossilised relic of that era, wearing his hair shoulder length, dressing always in denim, and sporting one of those long straggly moustaches that were popular on the West Coast during the Summer of Love. Cecilia can hardly bring herself to look at him without flinching. He and Anne have been together for eight years now. I must admit that he wouldn’t have been my first choice as a partner for my daughter, and I sometimes feel he is living off her rather than supporting her, but she seems happy with the relationship, so I keep my doubts to myself.
I took Anne into my study and asked her how she was. ‘Fine, just a bit of backache,’ she said.
‘And the baby?’
‘Kicking. He’s fine.’
‘How do you know it’s a he?’
‘I had a scan. I knew you’d be pleased.’ She could tell by my expression.
‘Well, you know . . . My first grandchild. Perhaps the only one. Not much sign of Richard producing any progeny . . . and I don’t suppose you’ll risk having another at your age, will you?’
‘Well, we’ll see how this one goes,’ she said.
She looked very like her mother at that moment, when Maisie was carrying Anne herself, except that Maisie used to wear tent-like smocks, whereas Anne follows the modern fashion for flaunting her swollen belly, sheathed in a tight-fitting top above matching trousers. The fluffy ginger hair, the round face, the hesitant smile, and the two vertical worry lines in the middle of the forehead, were just the same. It was always said that Anne took after her mother, whereas Richard was more like me.
‘And how are you, Dad?’ she said.
‘Oh, all right. Getting deafer and deafer.’
‘You seem to be managing all right.’
‘It’s quiet in here.’
‘And what about Rick? Is he coming today?’
‘Yes, he’s coming.’ The doorbell chimed at that moment. ‘That might be him,’ I said.
But it was Marcia and Peter and their children. It’s a cliché, of course, that children are an essential ingredient of any celebration of Christmas, but like most clichés it is true. Adults, even sour and cynical ones like me, can at least for a while see Christmas through their innocent eyes and recover some sense of the wonder and excitement we experienced ourselves long ago. Lena entered the house with a beatific smile on her face which shone like a reflected sunbeam on everything and everybody that she encountered, while Christmas had made Daniel more solemn and dignified than ever, though there was a visionary gleam in his eye. ‘So what did Father Christmas bring you, Dauphin Daniel?’ I asked him, crouching down to bring myself to his level. ‘Father Christmas bringed Daniel an icicle,’ he said. ‘An icicle? That doesn’t sound like much of a present,’ I said. ‘A
tricycle
, Desmond,’ Marcia said, and everybody around us laughed. One thing we deafies can do at a party is give people a few laughs with our mistakes, and I did not begrudge them this one. Daniel, however, didn’t laugh, but turned his wide eyes on the grinning grown-up faces with a puzzled and faintly disapproving air. ‘And it’s “brought”, not “bringed”, Daniel,’ his mother added. ‘Father Christmas
brought
you a tricycle.’ Being a teacher (though of maths not English), Marcia thinks it her duty to correct her children at every opportunity. Of course Daniel’s mistake was perfectly logical and shows that he has already mastered the way to form the past tense of regular English verbs. You’ve got to grasp the rules before you learn the exceptions.
There was a discussion, which almost turned into an argument, about whether presents should be exchanged before or after lunch, and in the end a compromise was reached whereby each person should open one present immediately (to assuage the impatience of little Lena in particular) and the rest would be opened after lunch, when Fred and others engaged in the preparation of the meal would be more at leisure. Then it was time for drinks - champagne and Buck’s fizz, Giles having brought a case of Bollinger as a house-gift (an index of the size of his Christmas bonus) - which put everybody in a good mood, as the first drink of the day usually does.
Richard arrived at this juncture, somehow managing to get into the house without ringing the bell, and sidling into the drawing room so unobtrusively that I didn’t notice him until Fred pointed him out to me. He was standing just inside the door, examining a painting on the wall like a guest at a party who didn’t know anybody. I beckoned him over to the sideboard where I was dispensing the drinks. ‘Richard! Happy Christmas!’ I said, pouring him a glass of champagne. ‘Same to you, Dad,’ he said. He held the glass critically up to the light, sniffed the exploding bubbles, sipped and nodded approvingly. ‘Nice temperature,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you a couple of bottles of Savigny-les-Beaune,
premier cru
,’ he went on. ‘They’re in the hall. I shouldn’t open them at lunch - they won’t be appreciated. ’ He was dressed exactly as I used to dress forty years ago, in a tweed sports jacket and grey flannels, a discreetly checked shirt and a plain dark tie. He was the only man in the room wearing a tie - even I was wearing an open-necked sports shirt, and a rather dashing suede waistcoat that Fred gave me last Christmas, in honour of the occasion. I noticed his hair was getting thin - something he must inherit from Maisie’s father, who was already quite bald at our wedding. ‘So how are you?’ I said. ‘Fine, fine.’ ‘How is low-temperature physics?’ He smiled. ‘Interesting,’ he said. He tried to explain it to me once.The object apparently is to get the temperature of substances down to a point as near as possible to absolute zero, which makes particles behave in odd and interesting ways. I remember him saying:
‘You have to identify the energy within a given substance and then devise a way of removing it.’
It seemed to me a strange and obsessive sort of quest, a kind of reverse alchemy. We chatted for a while about his drive up. Little Lena tugged my sleeve. ‘Grandma says will you check the table,’ she said. I went into the dining room where Fred and I had constructed an irregularly shaped surface around which thirteen adults and two children could be seated by joining our extended dining table to a card table, and covering them with overlapping cloths. I checked the glasses and the cutlery, and opened some bottles of wine to breathe.
There were rather too many women endeavouring to help Fred in the kitchen, with conflicting views about how the ingredients of the meal should be cooked and served, and several of them were slightly tipsy from the champagne, so that some dishes were overdone and some underdone and I was instructed to start carving the turkey before all the vegetables were ready, and Fred had forgotten, or I forgot (there was disagreement about whose responsibility this had been) to warm the dinner plates in the device we have for this purpose. By the time people were seated there was some danger that the main course would be tepid rather than hot, so I suggested that they should start eating as soon as they were served, but Cecilia asked plaintively if we weren’t going to say grace first, so we had to stop serving ourselves and adopt suitable expressions and postures, while Cecilia closed her eyes and joined her hands and intoned a grace - all except Dad, who had not noticed her intervention and carried on cutting up his dinner. This happens every year: we forget that Cecilia likes to say grace before Christmas lunch, and she deliberately doesn’t remind us until the last minute so that she can make everybody feel chastened or edified or otherwise put in their place.
‘I think it’s a great shame that grace before meals seems to be dying out even among practising Catholics,’ Cecilia declared, as she unfolded her napkin and prepared to eat her dinner.‘My late husband used to say grace before every meal even if there were only the two of us at table.’ I looked at Jim and winked.We had a bet last Christmas predicting how many times during the day Cecilia would use the phrase ‘my late husband’ (it was nine, and I won). The grace gave the food a further opportunity to cool, a fact to which Dad tactlessly adverted by asking if his portion could be warmed up a bit in a frying pan and volunteering to carry out this operation himself. His table manners are an inexhaustible source of amusement, irritation or embarrassment, according to one’s point of view. He doesn’t feel that a dinner plate is equipped for its function unless it has a generous smear of mustard and a small hill of salt on the rim, irrespective of the ingredients of the meal, and it is no use telling him that mustard doesn’t go with turkey or that too much salt is bad for you (though we do, every year). Nor is it any use handing him a salt mill - either he twists it the wrong way, causing it to come apart and scatter crystals of sea salt all over the table, or he labours with increasing impatience to grind out enough minute fragments to make a perceptible heap on the edge of his plate. Fred was so irritated by this procedure on one occasion that she provided him with a half-kilo plastic container of Saxo salt beside his plate at the next meal, but so far from taking the hint, or any offence, he thanked her for the thought. I had remembered to place an old-fashioned cruet with a salt cellar and a pot of prepared mustard within his reach at table today, but forgot that he would also require a slab of white bread, spurning the warm ciabatta rolls provided as being too crusty for his false teeth and contaminated by bits of indigestible olive, and I felt obliged to fetch a slice of white loaf from the kitchen in spite of Fred’s injunction that I should stop fussing and sit down.