Every Christmas decoration that Coralie has ever owned is in that box, some wrapped in tissue paper. The paper is getting a bit too creased and torn now to be properly protective, tissue isn’t meant to be folded and re-folded but only used the once – soft layers freshly wrapping clothes in elegant boutiques – she must make a note to buy some more. Every year at this time she takes each little object out, inspects it, sets aside the ones that are destined for display, puts the rejects back, stows the box away for the time being underneath the spare-room bed. The chosen favourites are laid out on the dining table, like the pieces of a board game, ready to be hung or placed into position over the next few days. And then, on the sixth of January each year, Coralie will take each decoration down, gather them together, dust them with a damp cloth, wrap them up in paper if it’s needful, lay them all back in their box. Every time she does this she has the sense that she is daring fate. To repeat a single action annually is to chance it being the last time; when she puts her trove away she can’t help thinking she might never unpack it again. That’s a daft thought, she admits, you could say the same about anything you regularly did: watching the news, brushing your hair, having a cup of tea, going to bed. The last time you close your eyes, the very last time you draw a breath. And of course you wouldn’t know, you couldn’t say: oh my last ever forkful of mashed potato; that’s the last time I’ll put food out for the cat. But one day, and that day somehow seeming sooner, it will be the case. Already she finds herself saying: ‘That’s the last time I’ll ever need to buy a winter coat, this one will see me out.’ To tell the truth, in some ways that’s not a totally unwelcome thought; life can be rather tiring; it would be quite nice to be outlasted by the majority of your teeth. On the other hand, to think of Stephen having to unpack the Christmas box all on his own next time. It’s like stocking up a freezer, one of the many reasons she hasn’t been all that keen to have one – after a death do the bereaved just throw the food away? The homemade food, that is. There’s nothing very personal about a bag of peas. But, a cheese and onion tart? A cottage pie? Wasteful just to put them in the bin and yet peculiar to eat them up when the cook is dead and buried. Coralie pictures the widower grimly chewing his way through his late wife’s beef and onion casserole. Well, the extent of the grimness would depend, perhaps, on the dear departed’s status as a cook. If she’d been a dab hand in the kitchen the widower might wipe away a tear or two while he commemorated the lightness of her pastry but … Either way, she wouldn’t like to think of Stephen having to decide between eating or wasting something that his mum had left behind in a Tupperware container. Or sorting through the Christmas things, all by himself. Though would he? Or would he leave the box untouched to gather more dust in a loft unvisited, untenanted but for her ancient dummy? Whichever, either way, it did give her a little shiver of relief, when the time came round each year, the dark December afternoon, and she opened that box and found its contents safe. What’s the word? Oh, yes, that’s what it was: reprieve.
A bit of sheeting covers the contents, an old cot sheet as a matter of fact. The box is nowhere near full, although one item, housed in a square box of its own, takes up a fair amount of room. Coralie will leave that one till last. On top of it are a plastic bag of tinsel and the Christmas lights, disentangled on the feast of the Epiphany and carefully re-wound round their original cardboard packaging, which has a separate compartment for spare bulbs. There are globes of coloured glass so fragile each must be double-wrapped. A robin made with real feathers. A lace and plastic angel. A golden star. Crib figures also wrapped, painted plaster, a gift from Stephen’s godparents the Christmas he was born. His first Christmas, how long ago that was. It had been his particular delight when he was a little boy to lay the baby Jesus in his manger last thing on Christmas Eve. Silent night, holy night; they would set the scene on the sideboard in the dining room earlier in the day, expectant mother, father, ox and ass, the sheep in a patient line outside, the waiting shepherds, an attendant angel and the plaster baby, swaddled completely, secreted in a drawer beneath the serviettes. The deep and dreamless sleep. And then, when the stocking was hung and the boy in his nightclothes, the baby would be tenderly brought out. Naturally, the three kings and the orient camel would spend all of Christmas in the drawer, emerging only at the final moment. The ox’s hind leg was broken, in consequence of Stephen disobeying the injunction not to touch.
Most precious are the things that Stephen made. The snowman out of paper plates and doilies, the lumps of approximately modelled clay: remembrances of infant school, of early childhood. When does it stop, all that excited creation of things for mother? There ought to be a warning with the final gluey collage: this is the last that you will ever receive. Oh yes, older children do make things and bring them home, but those are different – more elaborate, connected with their schoolwork, less spontaneous, associated with necessity not pleasure. Coralie has some of these things still – a flower pot of coiled clay, a wobbly stool – but they do not bring the same sweet and tearful memories with them. Stephen as a small boy, round-faced, trusting, the neat straight line of his blond fringe; when had he become a hollow thing regarding the world from behind his glasses, as likely as a man of straw to be blown off course by a strong wind? Well, even as a child he had been gifted with imagination. Coralie had often thought he ought to be a writer. And at the grammar school you had to choose by the time you were fourteen: Latin or woodwork, art or history, and for Stephen that really hadn’t been a choice, as he was always clever. Scholarly. So a complete end to any bits and pieces then. No more bags for clothes pegs, matchbox constructions, smudgy watercolours.
Delightful though the babyish artefacts might be, they could not now be brought out for display. Stephen wouldn’t like it. Even though no one but he and his mother might see them, nevertheless, two decades on, he would think them out of place on the mantelpiece or the tree. Reluctantly Coralie laid them back in the banana box, and having set out everything else she planned to use this year, she lifted up the separate container.
This is the jewel of Coralie’s collection, always stowed in its original packaging, with a strip of foam around it for extra buffering against accidental damage. A model carousel, hand-crafted out of wood and delicately painted; tiny prancing horses skewered on barley-sugar poles, beneath a sky-blue canopy and a scattering of silver stars. It works: if correctly wound, a little knob sets the horses circling and plays Brahms’ Lullaby in tinkling notes. The horses are as new and fresh as they were the day that Spencer bought the carousel – in all the time that’s passed since then they have not been put through their paces very often. Twice a year, on average, once on their liberation from their box, once on their return, the silent stars go by. The mechanism’s fragile, the ornament too precious to run the risk of repeated winding. Strictly speaking, the carousel is probably not a Christmas ornament; it could perfectly well be left on show the whole year round. There are no angels or shepherds or babies on it, no snowmen, nor even donkeys. But it was given to Coralie at Christmas and in her mind it’s a Christmas treat. Besides it wouldn’t have lasted half so well if she had allowed it to stay out. As it is, each year she tests the workings nervously, her heart in her mouth in case they’ve given up the ghost. There’s no reason why they should, being well protected from the damp by their multiple layers of packing, but then these things are mysterious; who can say what might mysteriously befall a thing that slumbers dreamlessly so long in the silent dark?
This year – reprieve, again. The knob has always been fiddly, it must be set just so, but Coralie is practiced and this time without a false start or a stutter, the horses begin to glide, the tune to peal out thinly and Coralie to cry. She knew she would. She always does. It’s that tune and the memory of it, the memory of choosing the carousel with Spencer on the eve of their first married Christmas, the resonance of it through all those years. ‘Little darling, goodnight …’ It had been so cold that evening at the Christmas market: stille Nacht, gu
te Nacht, she had never known winter like it, those arctic winds that sliced right through you like a knife, the tips of your fingers even if you did have gloves turning numb and blue. She had felt it terribly, especially after Malta. But, her arm through Spencer’s, the warmth of him beside her, and knowing it’d be snug enough at home in their married quarters and in bed that night and a whole day with nothing to do tomorrow. Must have been made before the war, Spencer had said of the carousel, poor bloody Huns had better things to do now than make little painted horses out of wood. Like staying alive and finding food; what wood there was was used for fuel. No, you won’t get craftsmanship like that again, he said. That’s why he had bought it, slightly to her surprise, him not being a sentimental man, nor given to buying presents and their not really having money to burn at that stage, newly wed. Nor did they later, come to that, or ever. The Christmas markets, what were they called, Weinachtsomething? – a poor shadow of the ones they used to have before the war, a vestige, everybody told them, but even so, in the bleak midwinter, a flicker of warmth, and there’d been hot red wine with spices, and chips and sausages and her breath frosting on the air, and Spencer in his greatcoat, laughing. And on one of the stalls with their meagre displays, the carousel. They hadn’t any other Christmas things, the pair of them, well you don’t, when you’ve been married a matter of months and a war is only just over. We’ll get one new thing each year she’d said to him, and with each one we’ll be reminded of where we were that Christmas. She hadn’t said, but she had thought, that by their second married Christmas there could be a third person and they’d no longer be a couple but a family. That’s what Coralie yearned for. Armfuls of babies and handsome Spencer and happily ever afterwards, amen.
But it doesn’t work like that, now does it? Month after month, and the hot blood coming, that feel of it like nothing else, the sudden flow between your legs, sticky, hot, impossible to take for any other source of wetness. Month after month and year after year and Coralie, already past her prime then, older than her husband, crying in the toilet every time she got the curse. Worst were the times when it held off long enough for her to feel hopeful. A few days or weeks sometimes, a few times even longer. As each day went by her hopes would rise and with each day the plunge into black misery when the dreaded flow came would be proportionately deeper. Who knows, there may have been a baby there, or the first new bud of one, those times when she didn’t bleed as she expected, poor little thing, one small hope of life flushed down the drain like a slug off a lettuce. Who would ever know the children who could have been? And are they there still, the thin, transparent wraiths of them, mourning the lives they never led?
Well, there did come a time, a long time later, after Berlin, after Gütersloh, after Catterick and Dhekelia, when no blood flowed, and Coralie supposed her change had come, although she was not a great deal over forty. As she had pretty much given up hope by then and, anyway, seldom spread her legs for the man who had been ardent once but lately had lost interest so it seemed – well, that happens too, after several years of marriage, especially if they bring with them a freight of disappointment and unspoken blame – it had not been an unreasonable assumption. Oh but the wonder of it, as the weeks wore on and the symptoms grew apparent. And the greater wonder of the babies.
A time of joy, a time of grief, for the little one who came into the world already tired and wizened and left it with a small sigh ten days later, having seen enough. Lullaby and good night, Henrietta, Stephen’s sister, Stephen’s twin: another waif to join her unborn children. Well, but, Stephen Spencer Donaldson. An August child, a harvest child, as gold and full of promise as a grain of corn. Old enough by his first Christmas to open wide his eyes and reach his hand out for the dancing horses on the carousel.
Hard it had been, very hard, not knowing whether to weep or sing, to celebrate or grieve. But, in the end, you know, there’s no real choice: the babe that lives needs all the strength that you can muster if he is to thrive. Coralie remembers her worries of the first weeks, all the weighing and the measuring – will he grow plumper, longer, stronger or will he wither like his sister or, like the changeling child of nightmare, wane and fade away? The terror of all mothers – to wake and find your baby lying stiff and silent in his crib. A memory that still has power to send shudders through her decades later: lifting Stephen up one morning, he by now fifteen months old, and his eyes looking into hers completely blankly. Not a glimmer of recognition, a smile or a response. As if the child she’d laid to sleep had vanished in the dead of night, substituted by a stranger. Or as if an evil thing had slunk into his bedroom in the dark and sucked his soul from him.
But, fear and anguish notwithstanding, notwithstanding malign fate, the babe not only lived but flourished. In a manner of speaking, if flourish is a word that could apply to a child who was as narrow as a willow leaf, as thin as the stalk of a dandelion – he could suck his belly into such a hollow you would swear his spine showed through – and who causes to this day outpourings of anxiety in the matter of his diet. It was his mother’s responsibility from his first minutes on the earth to feed and succour Stephen and, as far as she can tell, there is no other woman yet to take that burden from her shoulders.
Spoonfuls of mush ladled into a gummy mouth: Farex, creamed rice, creamed oats, creamed potato. Bottles of sweetened milk. Condensed milk on a rusk. Mashed bananas with brown sugar, extract of malt, sponge fingers and strawberry jam. Thank goodness Stephen comes home at weekends so that she can keep an eye on what he eats; she has a hunch that what he feeds himself is not what she would see as wholesome food, and besides, speaking for herself, meals for one are not the same. Although Stephen had been gone for years now, Coralie has never summoned up much interest in cooking for herself. An egg on toast will do for her, or a can of soup.
Anyway, so her son survived but he came too late to stop his father straying. Off he went, into the night, like a tomcat on the prowl, Spencer Albert Donaldson. No, let’s be fair; there are always two sides to a story. Maybe he’d had his fill of her, of the scrawny, tearful woman she’d become. The barren wife, already middle-aged while he was young. In bed he’d always been more keen than her, keen as mustard to begin with, she’d be quite bow-legged, but to be honest she could never see the point of it, or get the hang of it, perhaps. And as soon as they started to connect the deed with her need for a baby, that’s when the rot set in. Funnily enough, it hadn’t put her off as much as it had him. She’d even been the one to start things off, or at least to make it clear that she was willing, which she certainly would not have done before. But she had to admit there was something unromantic about urging a man to pump away while you lay stock-still beneath him, desperately trying to keep the seed in, encourage it upwards, having washed yourself with lemon juice, drunk nettle tea, hung mistletoe above your bed and monitored the moon.
He stuck around for a year or two. No, let’s be truthful: he must have been there, in body at least, until Stephen was four or thereabouts; she can remember his fourth birthday, Spencer bought a bicycle, blue, with stabilisers. But he didn’t stay long enough to teach his son to ride it. Coralie did that by herself, running along beside the child, one hand on the handlebars, trying to stop him swerving wildly or coasting down the hill. She had had to buy a spanner when Stephen eventually mastered the art and the stabilisers could come off. Long before that birthday Spencer had left the Army and was an engineer on Civvy Street; better money, he had thought, a more settled life, less wandering about from pillar to post. That’s why they moved to Didcot, to be close to the Atomic, where Spencer got a job.
Spencer had gone by the time Stephen went to infant school, of that Coralie is sure. She can remember his first day; she was certainly on her own, the lump in her throat when she left him there, trying not to let him see her tears. How he had doted on that teacher! He kept in touch for a while, Spencer that is; he sent money every now and again, and birthday cards, but both dried up eventually. Someone told her he had emigr
ated to Australia. Whatever the case, she has not heard from him for a long, long time but she bears him in mind, especially on their wedding anniversary, Stephen’s birthday and the anniversary of Henrietta’s death. And maybe other times as well. He’d been much more upset by the little girl’s death than she would have thought. It was as if the loss of his daughter overshadowed the childhood of his son, the baby’s twin.
The Long Room Page 8
