“This tree,” he said to Florence. He shook his head. “I like a tree. A proper one.”
“It’s not worth quarrelling over,” Florence said. “They only came in with Prince Albert.”
“Nonsense,” Colin said. “It’s a pagan custom.”
“I didn’t know you were a pagan,” Sylvia said, returning. “I thought you were an agnostic.” She sat down and wiped her hands on her paper napkin, and looked expectant. Impelled to goodwill, Colin placed two parcels before her, and doled out the same to Florence.
“Well,” Colin said. “Another drink, anybody? Such largesse. I always think this is the nicest moment. I mean giving, of course, as well as receiving.”
“It’s a pity you weren’t a vicar,” Sylvia said.
“If I were a vicar, Sylvia, we should have even less money than we do, and certainly none to spare for presents.”
“Really, do you have to go on like this?” Florence muttered. They composed their faces to amiability. From upstairs came Alistair’s long-drawn and hideous wail; his sisters were pinching him and calling him pig. There was a loud, almost shocking rending of paper, as Sylvia pulled out of its wrapping the bottle of scent Colin gave her every year.
“A new one,” she said. “You’ve bought a new kind.” She opened the box, prised it out, unscrewed the cap, and began to dab the scent on her wrists.
“Steady,” Colin said. “Don’t waste it all.”
“This was imaginative of you, Colin,” Florence said.
“I thought, oh, you know, try a change.” He looked modest.
“I don’t think I was praising you,” Florence said. “I think I was being sarcastic, really. Have you actually bought her the same each year?”
Sylvia held her wrist to her nose and inhaled deeply, closing her eyes. They snapped open, and a flicker of surprise crossed her face.
“Well?” Colin demanded. He was eager to get on with his own parcels.
Sylvia hesitated, and proffered her wrist.
“Very nice,” Colin said. “Very nice indeed.”
“Let it warm up on your skin, Sylvia,” Florence suggested. “That might make all the difference.”
“I hope so,” Sylvia said.
“It wasn’t cheap,” Colin said. “It wasn’t bloody cheap, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He thrust his chair back, glowering.
“I know,” Sylvia said quietly. “I know the prices of perfumes.” Because I walk around the shops and covet them, she might have added. “It’s my skin. It doesn’t suit it.”
“Well, surely it cannot be intended to smell like that,”
Florence said. “They must take into account that people have different skins. One would think so.”
“I don’t think they took mine into account,” Sylvia said.
“Look, I’m sorry. I’ll get you something else. How was I to know? Oh, Sylvia, for God’s sake don’t start crying again. It
is
Christmas.”
Sylvia took out a handkerchief smeared with gravy. She applied it to her heated face and smudges of mascara and tan foundation adhered to it as she patted her skin vigorously.
“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.” She whimpered and sniffed. “Just…it’s only once a year…and I’ve been working hard to get the dinner and make everything nice, and I don’t feel myself—” With a neat and surprising movement she slipped under the table. Florence gave a cry of alarm, and half-rose from her place. “It’s all right, I’m only picking up these peas from under Karen’s chair before they get trodden in the carpet. Stay where you are.”
She sniffed loudly again, hidden under the cloth. Relieved at the return to normality, Colin handed Florence her book token. Sylvia had given him a blue shirt with a matching blue and white tie, pinned together under their cellophane wrapper. He thought this a very neat idea, because he always had trouble matching shirts to ties, and had to call on Sylvia to do it for him. She would be out of patience, because she was trying to get the children fed with their breakfasts, and she would snap at him, and fling his clothes across the room; but if he chose for himself she would mock at him at the breakfast table, and ridicule his efforts. His first thought was how much simpler life would be with this innovation; then immediately he saw something sinister in it. Was Sylvia preparing him for life alone? Did she know something, and had her words been more, that morning, than a vicious stab in the dark? He saw himself alone, crushed by alimony and abandoned by Isabel, spending his Christmas in a dirty bedsitting-room, with a bottle of milk on the table, and the cheapest kind of card, from each of his chil
dren, scrawled hastily and collapsed in the draught from the cracked window. A tin of fruit and a walk about the street; such a complete and vivid picture of his future desolation came to him that tears of self-pity welled up into his eyes. Sylvia did not notice. She was staring at Florence’s gift to her, twelve plain cream linen tablenapkins, requiring to be washed, starched, and ironed.
“Blimey,” Sylvia said. “Real serviettes, Florence. I always have paper ones, you know, when there’s company, otherwise I don’t bother with any.”
“Ah well,” Florence conceded pleasantly. “Of course you’re not newly-weds now. When you are putting your household together these gay little informalities are excused you, but as we get older, and established, it is not always becoming to be casual.”
“Why didn’t you put a message in them?” Sylvia asked. “Just to make the point? A little motto, like you get in the crackers?”
“We never had linen at home,” Colin said.
Florence caught his eye. She looked betrayed. “No?”
“No.”
“Your memory is at fault, Colin.”
“’Tisn’t.”
“I think it is.”
“We had paper.”
“Oh,” said Florence drily, “if you are right, I must have learned it out of books.”
Sylvia had been extravagant. She had bought Florence a cookery book, lavishly illustrated, called
Entertaining for Two: Menus for Candlelit Evenings
. Her second present showed how long she thought these evenings were likely to last, for it was a candlewick dressing-gown, of a spinach shade and a formidable stiffness.
“And this is your other one from me, Colin.”
It was a Five-Year Diary, with a lock and key.
This time he saw the implication immediately. She felt he had secrets. She knew he had. She was laughing at him, asking him to place them between covers of leatherette. It was hardly the world’s most secure object; she could have bought another identical, with the same key. He was damned if he would write anything in this book. He turned it over admiringly in his hands.
“How did you think of this?” he asked her. “Very useful. I never miss not having a diary till about April, and then I really need one, and there aren’t any in the shops.”
“I don’t think you’re meant to put your engagements in it,” Sylvia said. “It’s not that kind. You’re supposed to put down what you do, so that you have something to look back on.”
“That’s right,” Florence said. “You will be able to look back at the date and see at a glance that this day four years ago, you were at the dentist. For example.”
“I hope more will happen than the dentist,” Colin said. “I hope there will be more than that to record. You know,” he said, with a strained chuckle, “there’s a saying that only virgins and generals keep diaries.”
This epigram left the company listless. Renewed howls erupted from upstairs. Virgins and generals, he thought; and I need the sentiments of the former and the strategic sense of the latter. Or perhaps it is the other way round.
At ten o’clock, Colin drove Florence home. There was too little drink in the house for him to be the worse for it, and he was under the necessity of saving some of it to get him through the rest of the holiday.
As Florence got out of the car, her presents balanced in her arms, she said, “I wonder what sort of day the Axons have had. I do feel guilty about them, in a way.”
Colin wished she would shut the car door. He was getting frozen.
“Goodnight, Colin. Thank Sylvia for me.”
“Don’t mention it, Florence. Goodnight. Merry Christmas.”
She slammed the door and started towards the gate. Colin watched her until she was safely inside her front door, and turned the car for home. He thought of Isabel, not of the Axons. He stopped at a telephone box. There was a delay before she answered and her voice sounded chilly, remote, and strained.
“Oh yes. Merry Christmas,” she said. “Yes. Goodnight.”
He imagined he heard her father’s questions in the background. He hoped he did; that she would not be so curt for no reason. Better if he had not made the call; if he had only dreamed of doing it.
The house was silent when he let himself in, with the foreboding silence of places struck by disaster and bound to be struck again; criminal neighbourhoods, earthquake zones, the more popular battlefields of Europe. The children had been downstairs and the floor of the living-room was littered with their cast-off toys—plastic hand-grenades, broken railway tracks, battered dolls with torn frocks and twisted necks.
Sylvia had gone up to bed, exhausted by the day. He followed her. She was in her nightdress, sitting on the bed, a torn Christmas wrapper lying beside her. Grotesquely, she waved to him with both hands, like a performing bear. She had found Isabel’s sheepskin mittens.
“You were going to surprise me,” she said coyly. “I wondered what on earth they were.”
“Do they fit?”
“Oh yes, they fit anybody. Lovely. I’ve always wanted some of these.”
What depth of the lover’s imagination are here plumbed? he asked himself. How are they formed and educated, men who give a mistress sheepskin mittens, all one size?
“Why didn’t you get some, then?” he asked her.
“Well…I didn’t like to.”
“I see you managed to get them to bed.”
“Alistair had a bit of a do. Screaming. He broke his sub-machine-gun. They quietened down, though. They’ve worn themselves out. Poor little pets,” she added fondly.
Colin did not comment. His thoughts on his children, heated by alcohol, were unseasonal. Sylvia could not have chosen a less opportune moment, but it seemed to her that nobody could be angry with fecundity on Christmas Day.
“Colin, there’s something I’ve got to tell you.” She watched him take off his tie, roll it up around his hand, thrust it into a drawer. “I’ve started another baby.”
He stared at her, his neck stretched and his chin tilted up, so that he could release the stiff top button of his shirt. For a moment she thought he had simply not heard her. His eyes closed momentarily, and his mouth opened, as if he were being slowly choked. The button slipped through its buttonhole; his hand, trembling a little, stayed in mid-air.
Sylvia held up her sheepskin paws defensively.
“I’ve started another baby.” He turned his back on her and walked to the window. He wanted to stare out into the night. He understood why, in books, people did this, but he pictured them in rooms worth striding across, gazing out onto blasted heathlands silvered by the moon. He laid his hand on the rampant ready-made daisies, on their lilac and pink, and tried to scoop them aside.
“Mind my curtain hooks, love,” Sylvia said.
The estate was shutting down for the night. The screaming children were tranquillised and the tipsy wives flicked off the fluorescent lights and climbed the stairs. Mountains of turkey giblets passed before their dreaming eyes. What will next year bring?
So either, Colin thought, I must tell her now, I must tell her now and pack a bag and go to Florence’s…he felt her behind him, waiting. At the same time, a great weariness crept up and engulfed him. He felt the weight of the winter, of the short
sterile days and early dark. Already, his affair was passing into the realms of fantasy. He, a history teacher, a married man; he did not have affairs. He was not attractive to women, he went to evening classes, no one would look at him. Duty with her steel teeth gestured to him from beyond the windowpane, obscenely inviting him to the realms of the just.
“Take your mittens off,” he said. “You look silly.”
Unwillingly, she extricated her hands, which now looked stupidly small and inadequate. She put the mittens on the bed, stroking them with one finger.
“Say you’re pleased,” she asked flatly. “I know you’re not, but just say you are.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s the only way to go on.”
“Oh, you say that. But we do go on. Pleased or not pleased.”
“It is your baby.”
“I didn’t for a moment suppose it belonged to anybody else.”
“I mean, you are responsible for it. It’s part of you as well as me. Draw the curtains. You’re letting the heat out.”
Colin turned away from the window. He could think of nothing to say. He sat beside her on the bed and patted her knee with small mechanical taps. Still his throat felt constricted, almost bruised. His face twisted in a horrid parody of emotional generosity. A clock struck. Boxing Day.
Evelyn felt so tired. Her arm ached, there was a pain in her chest, her legs felt too heavy to move. She sat by the electric fire and stared at her feet, puffy inside her old bedroom slippers. “You’ll have to get the dinner today,” she said to Muriel.
Muriel was in no mood for cooking. She was busy making her rhymes. The farmer’s wife, the blind clock mice, Jack and Jill and time to kill.
“You’ve got it wrong,” Evelyn said. Fatigue and hunger
pinched her into savagery. “You’ve got it all hopelessly mixed up. Sometimes I think you’re a mental case.”
Colin drove Isabel to the field where he had first made love to her, and pulled the car off the road. There seemed no danger of the wheels sticking in the hard frosty ground. He pulled out a small bottle of brandy and handed it to her.
“We don’t usually have this,” she said. She took it from him, tipped back her head, and swallowed a little. “I’ll be warm in a minute. It’s a good idea. We couldn’t do what we used to do. It’s too cold to uncover an inch of flesh.”
“Sylvia’s pregnant,” he told her. Faintly, the headlights of cars crept along the main road, like lost souls. She passed him back the bottle without comment. “So you see,” he said, “you must understand, I can’t leave her now.”
“I expect you’re glad,” she said.