by Weldon, Fay
So, every second year, sitting round the Christmas table, would be:
Louise
Rupert
Adam
Simon
Polly
Zoë
Mr Brann senior
Mrs Brann senior
Mr Parsons senior
Mrs Parsons senior
Nye Evans (Rupert’s partner)
Wendy Evans (Rupert’s partner’s wife, with sclerosis)
A child (from the Give-a-Child-a-Christmas-Scheme centre)
And a few friends or visitors from abroad, or business contacts of Rupert’s who had nowhere else to go and who wanted to experience a proper Christmas.
Around twenty, usually. Never mind. If there was much to be done, there was much to be celebrated!
One dreadful day, when Louise and Rupert had been married for thirteen years, Luke’s wife Veronica woke up to find Luke beside her, dead in bed, and after that she and Vernon and Lucinda came to Christmas dinner too. They never smiled, either, though the years passed and everyone did their best. Veronica would sniff into the stuffing, and Lucinda would mope into the pudding, and Vernon would sulk if he didn’t get one of the silver sixpences, and never give it back if he did get one, in exchange for an ordinary 50p piece, as her own children were expected to; for silver sixpences, with the years, became in shorter and shorter supply, and modern coins tarnished when in contact with the hot, modern, paraffin-washed and dried fruit of the Christmas pudding.
‘The children were like that before Luke died,’ said Rupert in exasperation, one Boxing Day, when the noise of quarrelling and wails rose from the children’s rooms, as the cousins disturbed the delicate equilibrium of post-Christmas relationships. ‘Veronica too. In fact, I daresay that’s why Luke died. He couldn’t stand it a moment longer.’
Everyone tried to like Veronica. They managed to love her, and be protective to her, but like, as everyone knew, was a different matter. With some people, hearts simply sank when they entered a room. And the children seemed to have taken after her. And of course it was only fair to take Veronica, Vernon and Lucinda along on summer holidays too.
Never mind. The family spirit, sheer Christmas energy, swept all before it. Roughs and smooths were ironed out. Mrs Parsons still raised her eyebrows as Mrs Brann raised her glass; Louise learned not to intervene, not to worry; not to try to distract her mother’s attention as her husband (wilfully?) poured his mother yet another glass of brandy.
She learned not to mind her father watching to make sure Rupert wasn’t maltreating her, and his father watching to make sure she wasn’t exploiting him. She learned how to manage the delicate transitions, as both sets of parents little by little relinquished the parental role – asked advice, instead of giving it, unasked.
Louise’s only sister, Madeleine, had left for Australia years back; she’d opted out. She had a career, not a family. Every few years she’d be there, at the Christmas table, blonde and bold and free, with someone different always in tow, an airline pilot or a screen writer. ‘Hard,’ Rupert said, softly, gratefully, his arms round soft, sensible, loving Louise. ‘She’s brittle and hard.’
Madeleine never touched Christmas pudding; pushed the roast potatoes to the side of the plate. In Australia Christmases were salad with cold turkey. Hard to remember this wasn’t universal, cosmic: merely some kind of regional obsession!
There were a couple of bad, bad Christmases, well, you only know you’re happy if you have something extreme to set it against. One, when Rupert was in love with someone else Louise had never met, and never wanted to meet, but was very like her, she’d heard. Rupert exhibited all the symptoms of a husband illicitly in love:
1) taking extra care dressing in the morning.
2) buying new clothes.
3) looking at himself a lot in the mirror.
4) disturbed sleep patterns.
5) intensive fault-finding alternating with maudlin over-appreciation.
6) Radio 2 on the car radio and Vivaldi on the cassette player.
7) detailed and unnecessary accounts of where he’d been and who he’d seen.
8) making love twice as long and twice as often as usual.
She’d sat that out, grimly, and it had all faded away, and just as well, because otherwise she’d have burned the house down and made the children commit mass suicide, and then done it herself, because the family was all of them, and if the all was broken, then they were all as good as dead and the sooner it happened the better. She hadn’t said this at the time: she’d put no pressure on him. If Rupert didn’t know it, what was the point of saying it? But it seemed he did. Rupert had come back, delivered himself again into her safe-keeping. She did not dismay him with reproaches.
And now, of course, later, the children all but grown and gone, the sense of family, as all, had diminished. She was amazed, in retrospect, at the savagery, the extremeness, of her reaction to danger. She’d meant it. She’d have done it. The children had been part of her, then. Not so much now.
And then there’d been the Christmas she’d been in love, distracted, unable to concentrate: alternately singing and weeping about the house, the children following after her, pattering and puzzled. She’d have sacrificed them at the drop of her lover’s hat, run off with him, anywhere, anyhow, just for the feel of his body against hers, to have his mind caught up in her mind, and hers in his – but he hadn’t dropped the hat, in the end. He’d been playing games, teasing his wife.
‘You’ve been using me,’ she wept.
‘Using you?’ He was puzzled. ‘I thought you were using me! Being revenged on your Rupert. Weren’t you? Did you think it was real? Illicit love is never real. That’s why it’s so powerful.’
She was humiliated in the New Year, unhappy until Easter, guilty until Summer, and better and herself by the following Christmas. Did Rupert know? Perhaps not. It had been a busy year, down at Rupert’s Own. Would he have killed himself, if she had gone? Probably not! But the thing was, neither had gone.
And there had been years when one or other of the children had been difficult, had pushed and heaved against the restraining pressure of the warm Christmas blanket. They had various ways of demonstrating their discontent. They would:
a) stay in bed all day
b) stay out all Christmas Eve
c) get drunk or high
d) vomit at the Christmas table
e) quarrel over Christmas TV programmes
f) forget each other’s presents
g) weep all day
h) announce over mince pies: i) loss of virginity, ii) homosexuality, iii) abandonment of education, iv) drug addiction
i) Christmas-out – that is in other people’s houses
j) ask grossly unsuitable friends home
k) be rude to parents in public
But they seldom all did it at once. They acknowledged a kind of family balance, in which any person at any one time could behave very badly or more than one rather badly, so long as everyone else carried on as usual; that is, with a basic politesse, and sense of continued order. And those who erred had still been contained, loved and understood – which of course drove them wilder still, for a time, until reason reasserted itself.
‘Poor things,’ Louise would say to Rupert, and Rupert to Louise, with that strange mixture of complicity, love and resentment with which good parents regard their growing children, ‘all this understanding must be maddening. We must seem like cotton-wool to them. Butt their heads, as they may, all we do is give. They’d be happier, in the short term, with a brick wall to batter at.’ ‘But not in the long term,’ the other would say, and both would nod.
There had been a Christmas or so when she’d been unaccountably irritable and snappy, and had regarded the long rows of expectant faces on either side of the refectory table with less than love. But she had tried, and managed, not to show it. And she had wept and wept one year on discovering that when she handed Rupert his ritual share of the £x (Christmas) in cas
h, for him to buy her present from him, he had merely put it in the petty cash and sent his secretary out to buy something to its value.
‘You have no idea,’ he said, ‘no idea how busy I am, how worrying everything is. The whole export market is closing down… Exchange rates are so firmly and permanently against us!’
‘Then let’s spend less,’ she begged. ‘We could halve Christmas, we really could, somehow!’
But she could see how difficult it would be, in a world in which everything grew and grew, to offer suddenly less. The children, who had once expected one present each, now felt aggravated if they received less than three or four. It wasn’t that they were greedy, just that the young these days equated giving with love. Give less, and they took it that you loved less, and so construed your explanations and excuses. Not their fault, either, yours, for having got caught up in the world, for being what you were. How could you say to your ageing parents – ‘sorry, cook your own!’ – or to Nye Evans, who now had to cut up his wife’s dinner on the plate, ‘sorry, time’s up!’ or to poor widowed Veronica, ‘Christ! Isn’t it time to stand on your own two feet?’ when her ankles were so obviously and so permanently weak?
They had to reconcile themselves to it all, and pray it would not just end in bankruptcy. Christmas had become Louise’s version of the ‘vicious tax spiral’ of which Rupert had complained – when you had to pay last year’s tax out of this year’s earnings, which were taxed higher than last, and that was that. Do it well this year, and you had to do it better the next. Partly Louise’s own nature, partly the world’s pressure – as in so much else in life, reflected in the way they lived.
1981 was a bad year. The business was in trouble. Not just the export market, but the home market was contracting. There were redundancies, as the business streamlined itself. Rupert was preoccupied, moody, ready to blame anyone for anything, gave up demonstrating his love to her either in bed or anywhere else, fell asleep the minute his head touched the pillow or couldn’t sleep at all and thought it was an indignity to use sex as a soporific (which she construed as him saying to her, if I’m not having a good time, I’ll be damned if you will either) and Zoë had to re-sit her A-levels, and Polly got pregnant and at first wouldn’t have a termination and then suddenly had one much too late, and was ill, and accused Louise of spoiling her life by giving birth to Zoë, so then Zoë was hysterical, and failed more A-levels, and Simon left home too early, and Adam, who had finished college, wouldn’t leave home at all, and Veronica had a nervous breakdown and Vernon and Lucinda had to be made room for, so Zoë walked out and went to live with the Branns senior, whereupon Mr Brann had a mild coronary – or so Mrs Brann claimed – and Zoë said what was the point of education anyway, since everything only ended in unemployment and death, and came home. There wasn’t any time even to make lists of the troubles, so fast did they occur, that Spring.
By the summer holidays everyone had pulled themselves together, of course, and backpacks were filled and friends organised – and off they all went, for once, leaving Louise and Rupert with the wonderful notion that they would have a holiday on their own, for the first time in twenty-one years: except of course then Veronica slipped a disc and so Vernon and Lucinda came along too, to the rented Italian villa. Vernon had a verruca and couldn’t or wouldn’t walk and Lucinda had sunstroke, of the serve-you-right kind. It didn’t really make much difference, Louise thought. To be alone with Rupert suddenly seemed not quite such a good idea. Perhaps he was going mad?
He had the following symptoms:
a) he was careless.
b) he was slovenly in his habits, slopping food and drink and wiping greasy hands on his clothes.
c) he complained of sleeplessness and nightmares.
d) he was rude to guests.
e) he drank too much.
f) he was obsessional – seeing plots where none were.
g) he was for the most part morose, but occasionally noisy and high-spirited.
h) he regarded his wife as his enemy.
i) he went off sex.
A friend, in whom Louise confided her fears – tentatively, for she did not wish to appear disloyal – said ‘Mad? That’s not madness, that’s the male menopause. He’ll grow out of it.’ Another said, ‘Mad? That’s not madness, that’s business worries. Is he impotent too?’ to which Louise could only reply, gloomily, ‘How would I know?’ ‘I expect he is,’ said the friend. ‘Most men of his age are. It’s the women’s movement that’s done it. All those assertive women going about!’
‘I’m not an assertive woman,’ protested Louise. ‘I’m a traditional woman.’
‘Yes, but you’re a busy woman,’ said the friend. ‘God, how busy!’
She wasn’t above accepting an invitation to Christmas dinner, all the same. The Branns’ Christmas was famous.
In the first week of that September, when Louise brought out her file, Rupert said, ‘You can’t be thinking about Christmas already, Louise,’ and Louise did not reply, so he said, ‘Well, I suppose you have to have something to think about.’
In the first week of October Rupert said, ‘Let’s just keep Christmas simple this year, shall we?’ And she did not reply, so he said, ‘But I suppose you’re just not a simple person any more, are you.’
In the second week of October he gave her the Christmas cheque. It was made out for £1800 which represented a twelve per cent increase over the previous year. He peered at it rather curiously, as if it were nothing to do with him, and at her as if she were an oddity.
‘Is that enough?’ he asked.
‘It just about keeps pace with inflation,’ Louise said. Then she said, ‘Take it back. I don’t want anything. There won’t be a Christmas this year.’
‘There has to be Christmas,’ he said, with a kind of heavy meaningless irony. ‘Happy families and all that.’
‘I could sell something,’ she offered, ‘if things are as bad as you say.’
‘Sell what?’ he enquired, and for a moment she thought he was going to hit her.
She made the Christmas lists as usual, very late, and without pleasure.
At the beginning of November he said, ‘If you weren’t such an obsessive hausfrau you could have had a career and kept us both.’
He said it in front of her parents, and she thought perhaps she hated him. She knew it was only temporary, but did not know how to endure until it was all over and Rupert was returned to his normal self. She marvelled at the fragility of the male psyche, which dented so under the impact of material misfortune.
The housekeeping money was transferred from his bank account to hers, each month, as usual: index-linked to keep pace with inflation and with a built-in five per cent annual increase on top of that, which they had decided on and kept to, some fifteen years back. The household was accustomed to a small but steady rise in its standard of living. The price of meat went up, but the size of the steak upon the plate remained much the same, and its quality, if anything, was better.
At the end of November, staring at the piece of fillet steak upon his plate, and watching Polly picking at hers, and Zoë pushing hers away and declaring vegetarianism, and Adam devouring his in three mouthfuls – as do many eldest children, he ate as if terrified someone would snatch the food from his fork – Rupert said:
‘We do live well, don’t we! And all around us are the unemployed and the redundant!’
To which Adam observed, ‘The highest good is to consume, and the second highest good is to employ, which makes you a very good man indeed, Pa,’ and Simon remarked, ‘Eat now, pay later, that’s the only answer to this.’ (He was to the far left, politically, the better to annoy his father.) And Rupert got up and left the table, and thereafter appeared at family meals only sporadically. When Louise asked what was the matter, he replied ‘nothing’.
But Rupert, she knew, was beginning to take the children seriously, as if their phases were them. She saw a real dislike of him dawning in their eyes, or what was worse, a sort of
understanding and forgiveness.
‘Mum,’ said Simon, returning blithely from college, ‘don’t take him so seriously. He’s going through a hard time.’
Not take Rupert seriously? How could she not? Were they not, each of them, in the other’s keeping? Now the children seemed to be suggesting she separate herself out from him. How could she? What did they understand, this new, strange, flaring, kindly, idle generation she and Rupert had created?
On December 3rd, on their wedding anniversary, Rupert said, ‘You make such a meal of Christmas. You really shouldn’t. It’s embarrassing to everyone. A file! Who else keeps a Christmas file? Christmas should come from the heart, spontaneously! What do you put in the file?’ She told him, and she went on telling him all night, shaking him awake if he fell asleep; even knowing as she did that he had to be fresh for the next day: that he had a meeting of creditors. She told him about the cards, to begin with.
‘Pages 2–8,’ she said. ‘Cards.’
‘What about Page 1?’ he demanded. ‘You’ve forgotten page 1. Or do you draw Father Christmas on Page 1?’
‘Page 1! Page 1 is the overall spending pattern of the Christmas. This year x = £1800. Thank God it’s neatly divisible by six. I need to know how much to spend on cards. Cards is of sundries. Sundries is of x. That is if x = £1800 and and . Nice and neat, for once! 150 cards or so for £100? You could just about do it. Just.’
She continued:
1) She made five initial headings, as an aide-mémoir. Family. Friends. Acquaintances. Business. Duty.
2) She entered recipients under appropriate headings.
3) She checked for extra names from previous files of cards sent and received, and entered those.
4) She struck off those who had received cards but not returned them for two years running, exempting the senior citizens and the mentally deranged.
5) She upgraded and downgraded. Acquaintances could become friends: aunts become duty rather than affection.
