The next day, at three o’clock, Andrew and I take our places in the huge and ridiculously crowded church of St Mark’s in Hensham for Jono’s school Christmas concert. It is the lower school only today; the upper school will be doing the same thing again tomorrow, but even so the church is absolutely packed. We are greeted on the way in by the PTA elite, handing out programmes and ushering us down the aisles in search of somewhere to sit or stand.
‘Good grief,’ says Andrew, as if he’s forgotten what it was like last year. ‘Did you know it would be this busy?’
‘That’s why I said we should get here early,’ I say a little sharply. ‘To get a seat.’ I force a smile onto my face. I do not want people to see us arguing.
We end up having to stand at the back of the far-left aisle, with our view pretty much obscured by a pillar. I can’t even see Jono, though he is up there somewhere, crammed onto the stage, one of however many boys in identikit blazers and ties.
I am tired from standing even before the headmaster has finished his speech, but it would not do to slouch, so I do my best to stand tall and look interested and proud, even though I can barely see a thing past that pillar. I hear how well the boys are doing, and how privileged they are to be at Hensham Boys’, but that such privilege carries with it its own duties, to which they all must aspire. It’s quite a good speech, pitched perfectly at the wallets of the fathers. This year’s charity, apparently, is the new music block, although – from what I remember – the existing music block, next to the dining hall, is not exactly old. It certainly looked pretty impressive to me when I saw it on the open day, with all its sound equipment and every instrument you could think of, ready and waiting to be played. At my school you carted your own recorder or flute or guitar, or whatever, in on a Wednesday and played it in one of the maths’ classrooms at lunchtime, if you felt so inclined. But still, we must always strive to do more, as the headmaster says, and around me I see heads nodding in agreement. I look at Andrew, and even he is nodding and looking beyond that pillar in a wistful, misty-eyed way. He went to a grammar school in the Midlands somewhere, before they were abolished. A boys’ grammar school. Maybe this all takes him back, down a rose-coloured memory lane. It certainly takes Jono forward, away from us.
But who am I to complain? This is what I bought into. This is what I wanted for my precious, only son.
The boys start to sing, accompanied by the junior orchestra, and many of the parents join in. We have the words in our programmes. Rousing numbers, all of them: ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ and the like, and, of course, good old ‘Jerusalem’, though I’ve never heard that one at a Christmas concert before. A small blonde boy gives an angelic rendition of ‘Away in a Manger’ and I swear there isn’t a dry eye in the church. I look around, I see all these people, these lucky, chosen people puffed up with pride for their lucky, chosen sons, and even though I am in theory one of them – after all, I am here, and my son, too, is here – I feel like an alien, I feel like an impostor, a fake. So many blonde heads, so many expensive wool and silk jackets and beautiful scarves, so many men with the permanently tanned necks of those who ski and sun, and ski again; the glint of jewellery, the flash of a BlackBerry discreetly tended. I look around, I stand among these people. I am here, I am here, and yet I am not.
I look at Andrew again. He is tilted slightly backwards on his heels, totally enthralled. He is oblivious to me, and to the turmoil inside my head. He worked at home this morning, so that he would be ready for this. He shut himself in the study and I moved about the house with my demons raging inside me. If he loved me, he would see how tense I am. If there was any connection at all, surely, he would feel it. But he shuts himself away. He cuts himself off. I am best avoided, or handled at a distance, as though with gloves.
I look down suddenly. And I see with a jolt of embarrassment that slaps its cringing arms across my shoulders that Andrew is wearing the wrong shoes. He is wearing the soft-soled comfy slip-ons that he bought for weekends. They stick out from the bottom of his trousers like a pair of old man’s easy-fit. It took me an age to decide what to wear; I even washed my hair again, and redid my make-up, and now I am standing here, crippling my feet in a pair of suede high heels, but there is Andrew, dressed for comfort and quite blatantly so. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t even realize. Shame grabs me by the shoulders and hangs me strapped like a puppet. I nudge him and he looks at me.
‘You’re wearing the wrong shoes!’ I hiss in a whisper.
And he just looks at me, incredulously.
‘Your shoes!’ I whisper. ‘Why didn’t you put your smart shoes on?’
Andrew glances down at his feet and then back at me. Irritation cobwebs his forehead and he mouths at me to shush. And then he turns away from me and back to the stage, angling himself so that his shoulders are distinctly there between us. My heart is thumping. I am doubly embarrassed; first by Andrew’s shoes, and now by this show of hostility. I imagine everyone is watching us, and noticing. This is not how I wanted us to be. What I wanted was for us to be united and serene, as benevolently happy as all these other perfect parents around us. I wanted us to fit in.
I suffer through the rest of the concert. I am ashamed of myself for being ashamed. I know I am wrong even to care about something as trivial as shoes, and the truth is that I wish I was more like Andrew and that I
didn’t
care. But I can’t help thinking that the other women – women like Amy and Stephanie – will be looking at us and later, talking about us and rolling their eyes.
Did you see her husband?
they might say.
Did you see his shoes? And did you see the way he told her to be quiet?
They, of course, will have perfectly turned-out husbands, as polished as themselves. Men who wear custom-made clothes during the week and Paul Smith at the weekend. Men who wear their shoes as if they own the world, and not as if they were just heading off to the garden centre.
They will know, as I know, that I will never be one of them.
When the concert is over, and we have all applauded the boys, the headmaster and – bizarrely – ourselves, the boys are released to locate their parents in the audience. Ten minutes of jovial chaos ensues as boys force their way through the baying and beckoning crowds, accompanied by more bursts of spontaneous applause and shouts of,
Well done, William/ Harry/George. Brilliant performance! Your parents are just over there. Tell them we’ll meet you outside in five/in the restaurant/back at yours.
Like one vast family, they collect and come together. And within this moving sea Andrew and I stand and wait, as Jonathan peels his way towards us. He greets us woodenly. As I was ashamed of Andrew, he is ashamed of us both.
‘Well done, Jono,’ Andrew says and makes to give Jono a quick, matey hug, but Jono recoils as though burnt.
‘Get
off
,’ he hisses, and he looks shiftily around lest any of his friends should have witnessed his dad’s monumental gaffe.
The colour rises from the collar of Andrew’s shirt, up his neck, up the sides of his face. He hesitates, he tries to laugh. I know how hurt he is. I know it, because I feel it too, a swift, sharp blow to the heart.
‘Can we just
go
?’ Jono whines, and his face is pulled in like a prune, dark with embarrassment. Around us the masses are still basking in the communal hug of congratulation, but we three, we slink out from that church unnoticed, each of us an island, each of us alone. I walk behind Andrew; I see the stiff set of his shoulders, and the back of his neck so vulnerable somehow, and flushed still. I see him, my husband, and I feel for him. Tears prickle in my eyes. I long to touch him. I long to put my arm through his and rest my head on his shoulder; I wish that we could lean together, laugh together. I am a bitch for minding about his shoes. He is a good man. He is a good, kind, caring man, but the truth is – the awful, terrifying and heartbreaking truth of it is – that he is lost to me, as I am to him. We lost each other, a long time ago.
Christmas arrives and with it Lois, Andrew’s mother. She lives near Leicester, in the small, neat bungalow in which Andrew grew up. On Christmas Eve Andrew drives all the way there and back to collect her, and on the day after Boxing Day he will do the same again to return her, because she will not, thankfully, leave the cat for longer than that.
It is of course a good thing that Andrew will make this journey for his mother, and I hope that one day, if necessary, Jono would do the same for me. Andrew is setting his son a good example. But in those three hours or so alone together in the car Andrew becomes entirely hers again. Andrew is her only son, as Jono is ours. When Andrew was ten his father died, and then there were just the two of them in that claustrophobic, lace-trimmed bungalow, and now of course his mother is alone, apart from her cat, and whatever scraps of our lives we throw her way. On the rare occasions when I am with her I see the horrible potential that life has for repeating itself. I see the way she looks at Andrew, as though through a mirror in which longing and pain are equally reflected. And I see the way that he becomes around her: reduced and pulled back; the ghost of the umbilical cord still caught around his neck.
But that is not all.
Like Andrew, and like Jono too, she is tall and thin and dark, and so I, by physical default, am the outsider. I am outnumbered by the strong, commendable Morgan genes. I feel that she regards my lack of height, my tendency to freckle and my rather thick, wavy hair as combined proof of my failings.
At Jono’s christening Lois got hold of Jonathan and rocked him in her vice-like arms. ‘He looks just like his father. Just like him,’ she said proudly, to anyone who was listening. And then, as if it was meant to be amusing, ‘And I think we’re all rather relieved about that!’
I have never forgiven her.
On Christmas morning the three of us watch as Jono opens his presents. Lois is properly dressed already, but the rest of us are not and I am very aware of my messy hair and my pale, soft skin under my bathrobe. Jono performs for us; he reverts to childishness, ripping paper off presents and letting it pile up discarded around him. Each unwrapped present he holds in both hands for the necessary amount of time before moving on to the next; I can almost see him counting out the seconds in his head. ‘Thanks,’ he says as he works his way through. ‘Thanks, that’s cool.’
And then my parents arrive later in the morning, and we do it all again. Now there are five people, all with their eyes on Jono. He is like a monkey in the spotlight. I see the stress of the circus, pink upon his cheeks.
There is a present for me, from Andrew. He has bought me earrings, small gold moon-shaped drops. I make a big show of putting them on. I look in the mirror. I tuck my hair behind my ear; I preen. I behave like a woman who is loved. My parents tell me how lucky I am. Lois tells me how lucky I am. Andrew basks in their approval like a boy who has done well at school. I have bought him a jumper, and a kit for cleaning his golf clubs. I do not hear anyone telling him how lucky he is, but these things of course are not so special.
My sister was unable to come. She decided to spend Christmas in Devon, instead, with friends. I try not to think of her going for long walks on a windswept beach, or lazing by the roar of an open fire. I try not to think of Amy, either, and her house filled with the exhilarating noise and laughter of sixteen people. I spend much of the day in the kitchen. Andrew has our guests to entertain, and a Meccano rocket-launcher to build with Jono. And I find that there is only so long that I can bear to be in the living room with them all, yet another pair of eyes upon Jono. I cook lunch, I serve lunch, I eat, I clear away. It goes as smoothly as ever it could. My son sits or moves among us – the pet, the idol, the raison d’être. One day he will escape all this; he will leave as soon as he is able. The inevitability of that is a large, immovable rock in the pathway of everything that I do.
Later, when it is over, and my parents have gone home and Jono is curled up in front of a film in his pyjamas, Lois decides it is time for her to go to bed.
‘Thank you for a very nice day,’ she says to Andrew.
And Andrew says, ‘You’re very welcome,’ followed by the measure of all nice days: ‘I think Jono enjoyed himself.’
She turns to me then, and I think that she is going to thank me, too, for after all, I did all the work. But instead she pulls a very wistful face and says, ‘You want to make the most of Jonathan while you can, Rachel. Before you know it, some woman will come along and steal him away from you, and you won’t like that, I can tell you.’
‘Did you hear her?’ I ask Andrew, when she’s gone upstairs.
‘She didn’t mean anything by it,’ he says. We are in the kitchen, putting away the last of the plates.
‘She didn’t even thank me. She just thanked you.’
‘Don’t be like that now,’ Andrew says in his patient but warning voice, as if I am the one who is wrong, as if he is being patient with
me.
His tone goads me.
‘When Jonathan gets married, I’ll have the sense to make a friend of his wife,’ I snap. ‘I’ll be her best friend.’ I swallow hard. ‘She’ll be the daughter I never had.’
I see the weariness cross his face; I swear, he almost rolls his eyes. ‘But what if you don’t like her?’ he says so calmly, so apparently reasonably. He says it as if I don’t know that it’s meant to hurt.