by India Knight
It is still dark outside. Julian glances at the steely sky and promises us all that it’ll snow later. Flo says she would like to make ‘an enormous snow bear’, and he assures her that he’ll help her after lunch. When we’ve eaten our cinnamon buns, we solemnly troop into the living room. The fireplace is decorated with yet more branches of spruce, the ceiling canopy is glinting merrily, and there are our stockings. Flo squeals with excitement, and so do I. I am a sweet girl, young for my age, bookish (I was an only child until I was nine, after all), quiet, family-minded, and if I know that squealing at stockings left by a pretend person isn’t cool, I don’t let it stop me.
The day progresses in the same vein: in my memory, it is bathed in a kind of golden light. All our Christmases – our Christmi, as Evie was to christen them only a few years later – were. Kate’s infinite generosity, her capacity for joy, love, celebration and the grand gesture all combined to make high days and holidays indelibly memorable, none more so than Christmas. And the feasts! My God, the feasts. Kate, not obviously a domestic creature in her later years, was a veritable Mrs Beeton in those days – a cool one, in Biba and kohl-rimmed eyes. Cakes, perfectly iced, with elaborate snowscapes made of royal icing. Spiced biscuits, permanently warm from the oven. Home-made stollen and panettone, before either had become commonplace. Goose, and turkey, and two kinds of gravy, and four different vegetables: she was amazing.
A little before lunch, I am chatting to some of our guests in the living room, pausing every now and then to lean back and examine my lovely stack of presents, including a longed-for Sony Walkman. Kate and Julian have headed off to the kitchen – we’re moments away from sitting down to eat. I notice that Evie is absolutely covered in rusk – she really loves rusks – her little face practically orange with it, and I pick her up and head towards the guest loo to wipe it off her. The guest loo is just past the kitchen. I am walking very quietly, padding like a cat, because I am wearing my new knee-high stripy socks with toes, a gift from Father Christmas, and no shoes. Evie is sucking her thumb and staring at me with big eyes. There’s even rusk in her eyebrows. As we pass the kitchen, I hear Julian saying,‘This report’s going to get lost. I’m putting it in the dresser, Kate.’
‘Thank you, darling. I meant to tidy it away.’
‘She’s done brilliantly at all the languages again, it says here. Isn’t it interesting? Nature versus nurture and all that. I always thought there wasn’t anything of her father in her at all.’
‘Apart from her ear,’ Kate says, which is when I realize they’re talking about me. The bit near the top of my left ear is pointy. Not like an elf or anything, but it’s there, and distinctive, if you look for it.
‘Yes, apart from that. Though you’re not bad at languages yourself, I suppose.’
‘I’m better than you,’ Kate says. I can hear the laughter in her voice, and the silence as she gives him a kiss. ‘Which isn’t saying much. Bonn-jewer mon-sewer,’ she says. ‘Boo-ay-nas deee-as, sen-nore.’
I carry Evie into the loo and wipe her face with damp loo roll, and a few minutes later we all come back downstairs for lunch. And it is at lunch, somewhere between the smoked salmon and the second helping of roast potatoes, that I realize that Julian isn’t my dad.
It all makes sense afterwards, of course. One of the things that has occasionally puzzled me over the years was my presence at Julian and Kate’s wedding, where I was the bridesmaid. I’d just turned six. I had a silver dress with puffed sleeves and lily-of-the-valley in my hair. Their wedding is perhaps the abiding memory of my early childhood. People get married – or not – after they’ve had children all the time nowadays, but in the mid seventies, even among Kate’s haut-bohemian circle of friends, you got married and then you had kids, the model was still broadly nuclear: marriage then kids, in that order. I remember my friends at primary school being amazed by the concept of being a bridesmaid at your own parents’ wedding. Nevertheless, I took it in my stride. And I’d asked Kate about it, some years later. She’d said, perfectly reasonably, ‘We had you, and then we got married. Julian was working abroad at the time, you see. When you were born. And then he came back, and then we tied the knot. Do you see?’ And I did.
The discovery that Julian wasn’t my dad also cleared up another puzzling thing, that of the enormous – nine years – age gap between me and Flo, my closest sibling. I must have also mentioned this to Kate, or maybe she pre-empted me, but I remember her saying that I was ‘so wonderful’ that there was simply ‘no rush’, which was a brilliant, and brilliantly jealousy-busting, thing to say to a child. I took everything I was told for granted: why wouldn’t I?
Nevertheless, it was pretty shocking, at the time. I’d say devastating, but that wouldn’t be quite right: the devastation came later. I told Julian and Kate that I’d overheard them later on Christmas Day, when everybody had gone home and Kate was lying on the sofa in Julian’s arms. They were incredibly in love, Kate and Julian: you noticed it all the time, even when you didn’t yet know what grown-up love meant, or what it looked like. They set the bar quite high, I see in retrospect.
I didn’t know how to phrase it, and – more curiously – I didn’t know how to feel. I was sad, obviously, and shocked, and angry with them for lying to me, though not as angry then as I would become over the next decade. I wanted them to reassure me, I suppose, to flick a switch and undo the conversation I’d heard.
‘Was my father, whosoever he may be, good at languages, then?’ is how I started. I remember the ridiculous ‘whosoever’ because I’d read it in a book that week, and I felt pleased to be able to slip it into a sentence. It felt dramatic, appropriately filmic.
Kate paled, but didn’t dissemble for a moment. I suppose it must have been a relief for her, after twelve years, at some level.
‘He was studying them when I met him,’ she said, reaching out for my hand. ‘Postgraduate. He was very good at them, yes.’
‘Where?’
‘At university. Oh, Clara. Come here. Sit down. I’m going to make you a hot drink and then we’ll sit properly and I’ll tell you all about it.’
‘Clara,’ Julian said when Kate was out of the room. ‘This must be weird, I know. I can imagine. But you know all this stuff – who is or isn’t your father, genetics, nature?’
I nodded.
‘None of it matters. Kate thinks it and I think it. What matters is love.’
‘I thought you were my dad,’ I said.
‘In every measurable respect,’ Julian said, ‘I am. I took you to your first day at nursery. And to your first day at school. Do you remember? Your little red uniform. I taught you to swim. I told you off when you were naughty and I cuddled you when you were good. I read you bedtime stories. Your favourite was The Little Mermaid. Have you forgotten?’
I shook my head.
‘I don’t make those sorts of distinctions,’ Julian said, sighing and taking in my expression. ‘I know that’s a very complicated and unhelpful thing for a child to hear, especially a child who feels a sense of, of betrayal, which I suppose you must. But remember, Clara. One day you’ll understand. And yes, maybe it was wrong to lie to you …’
‘Maybe?’ I said. ‘Maybe?’ If I could have snuck another ‘whosoever’ in there, I would have.
‘… but we had our reasons, and they came from a good place. You were tiny, Clara, when I first met you. You were younger than Flo is now.’
‘I remember you,’ I said. ‘At least I think I do. Maybe that’s made up too.’
‘Kate and I were together for a couple of years before we bought this house,’ he says. ‘You and I first met when you were two and a bit. I loved you then, and I love you even more now.’
Kate came back into the room and handed me a mug of hot chocolate. She was wearing a cashmere kaftan, very soft and brown, nicer than it sounds, and long amber earrings.
‘I’m going to tell you everything,’ she said. ‘And you can ask me anything you like. I’m sorry you found out by overh
earing: that must have been horrid for you. But nothing else in the story is horrid, darling. It’s a story about love.’
And she told me. There wasn’t much to tell. Kate was a student. She had a relationship with another student, called Felix. She became pregnant. She decided, on the spur of the moment, that she would keep the baby. She was pretty, clever, comfortably off due to her background: ‘It would have been an awful indulgence not to see you as a blessing.’ Her parents were furious, ‘though less so once they met you’. Her father was not as cross as her mother, and he bought her a little flat. Kept afloat by a generous allowance, she and I lived in the flat ‘as happy as two clams, darling. You were adorable.’ Felix was long gone, by this point.
‘Were you in love with him?’ I remember asking, hoping at least for some romance.
‘No, Clara. I was briefly infatuated with him, because I was young and giddy and he was very handsome. And,’ she smiles, ‘good at languages.’
‘Did he love me?’
‘He … He wasn’t terribly good with babies. Or terribly into them. You have to remember, Clara – I was six years older than you are now, and he was only three or four years older than me. We were babies, really. All of us. You, me, him. Well, you were the actual baby. But, you know. Not much in it.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He went back to California, where he’d come from. And then he moved to Mexico. He behaved impeccably. He sent money every month, but we didn’t need it, so I asked him to stop. And he used to send Christmas cards and birthday presents, except we … we pretended they were from us. From me and Julian.’
‘God, Mum,’ I said. ‘When were you going to tell me?’
‘I didn’t see the point,’ Kate said, looking defeated. ‘Julian really loves you. He’s always loved you. I found you the best possible father I could. I found you a father who loved you. I thought … Clara, darling, I thought it was an improvement.’
‘I suppose,’ I graciously conceded. ‘I have to go to bed now, to think about it. The thing that’s really bothering me is that Flo and Evie aren’t really my sisters.’
‘Never say that!’ Julian shouted. I remember it like it was yesterday: he actually bellowed, and Julian never really raised his voice. ‘They are absolutely your sisters. You are absolutely loved and we are absolutely a family. And we always will be.’
I lay in bed that night wondering whether he was right, or whether he was lying to me again. Both, was the answer to that one. Christmas 1981: memorable in all respects.
* * *
All of this popping into my head, and Maisy’s current fixation with everybody’s genetic lineage, reminds me that I haven’t heard from Felix for some time. We spoke on the phone a couple of weeks after the Christmas bomb detonated, round about January 1982 (‘Julian’s a good man,’ Felix had told me. ‘He loves you. Don’t forget that, Clara’) and a handful of times since: I called him up to tell him I’d had children, for example. But we haven’t spoken for years now, partly because he moved to some even remoter bit of the Mexican desert. I’d get the annual Christmas card but really, there is no relationship. We have never met. I’m not naive enough to think we’d fall into each other’s arms, and besides Felix has never expressed any interest in it. And, to be fair, neither have I, not seriously.
Now, aged forty-one, I wonder whether this is quite as it should be. I thought about it long and hard when Kate and Julian got divorced, which happened when I was twenty-one, half a lifetime ago. That was a bad time. Not only was there the seismic shock of it – none of us had seen it coming: I suppose by then we were all too wrapped up in ourselves – but, after the event, the realization that my nearly real father had, just like that, gone from being almost the real thing to … to nothing much. A man my mother used to be married to. ‘My former stepfather’ is how I took to referring to him: it was like self-harming every time the words came out of my mouth. I can’t express the sense of bereavement I felt without sounding like a mad person, so I shan’t try, but it was awful, particularly when Julian remarried and inherited a fresh batch of stepchildren. Lovely, each and every one. Nothing to complain about there. But …
Anyway, I briefly considered trying to establish some kind of relationship with Felix, my biological father, at around that time. I toyed with the idea, even as I knew it was doomed. Julian was right: he taught me to swim – and the rest: everything else that ‘taught me to swim’ is shorthand for. I told myself that I should be happy for that, and not go desperately searching for something, or somebody, that could never be as good as the reality of my childhood – which was that I was raised by two people who loved me. So, no Felix.
But today, for some reason, I wonder what happened to him, and make a note to ask Kate later today. Maisy doesn’t have a grandfather, as such – Sam’s father died years ago and, after all these years, it would be absurd for her to call Julian ‘grandpa’. We should maybe all go and see him, I think. Felix. Mexico: family trip. Just to say hello. Not to fall into each other’s arms. But just so the children get a sense of where they’ve come from. Maybe.
Meanwhile, it’s time for lunch.
*
Sam normally does a placement for where we sit at Christmas lunch, but he hasn’t this year, what with not living here any more and possibly finding me repulsive to the point of mouth-sick, and I’m so busy giving the bastard potatoes a final blast while trying to make un-revolting gravy – I find gravy-making particularly challenging, for some reason – that I just wave my hand vaguely at the tables and tell everybody to sit where they like. This is possibly a mistake.
In addition, in the general chaos of trying to hump lunch out of the oven and onto the tables (two huge trestles, hired from the community centre for the occasion – and the kitchen’s not big, so there’s much squeezing myself past people and bumping into things with my bottom), I have (the horror) forgotten all about the truffle. Kate and my sisters are vegetarians, and though I did once attempt to fob them off with chestnut soup and nut loaf, Kate pointed out that nut loaf was for hippies and soup was ‘for the homeless’. ‘Even lobster bisque?’ I’d said, startled. ‘Lobster bisque would be for the homeless of Chelsea,’ she replied, ‘or for rich invalids. We are neither. We have teeth. And homes. Feed us accordingly, Clara.’
So, the truffle, or more accurately, The Truffle. White truffles, as you probably know, cost more than gold, pound for pound. The Truffle, therefore, costs the same as the whole of Christmas lunch for twenty people put together, Bronze turkey, organic veg and pudding from Fortnum’s included. We started sourcing The Truffle in October. It’s about an inch and a half long. It’s also completely slipped my mind.
‘The Truffle!’ Kate cries, as I finally sit down. My hair is damp and clinging unattractively to the side of my head, and I can feel my flushed face and burning cheeks, as though I’d given myself a quick blast in the oven along with the parsnips.
‘We forgot all about it!’ says Flo. ‘Oh crap.’
‘Oh God,’ I say.
‘I’ll do it, Clara, if you move out of the way,’ says Kate.
But I can’t move out of the way – I am absolutely wedged in due to the number of people and the two tables and the narrowness of the room.
‘It’s okay,’ I say, getting up again. ‘I’m closest.’
At least I haven’t forgotten to buy the linguine – not spaghetti: spaghetti is not allowed near The Truffle, being unforgivably tubular – or the Parmesan or the double cream onto which The Truffle will be shaved. But there aren’t any clean pans left, so I start washing up the one I parboiled the potatoes in earlier. The Truffle is getting on my nerves.
‘We need a toothbrush,’ says Kate.
‘What?’
‘To clean The Truffle!’ she says. ‘I’m not eating a dirty truffle that a strange pig has snuffled all over with its snout.’
‘In a bosky glade,’ says Evie. ‘In autumn. Quite a poetic pig, as pigs go. I don’t think it matters terribly. Can’t
we just give it a wipe?’
‘Toothbrush!’ says Kate, much as a surgeon might say, ‘Scalpel!’
‘Oh God,’ I say again, not on purpose – it just comes out. And then, ‘Ow, fuck,’ because I’ve just burned the top of my forearm trying to extricate the tray of extra stuffing from the top shelf of the oven.
‘It’s okay,’ says Flo. ‘I’ve got it. I’ll go and get one from upstairs.’
‘Florence!’ Kate says. ‘For God’s sake. We need a clean toothbrush, a new toothbrush. We don’t need the toothbrush that’s been in Clara’s mouth.’
‘It’s my mouth, not my arse,’ I say. I am feeling hotter and hotter, plus I’m starving, plus I feel a bit dizzy from all the champagne, plus my burn is starting to throb. Everyone else is tucking into their lunch with gusto. I can feel my hair frizzing and sweat beginning to trickle down the back of my neck. Also, there’s turkey fat on my really nice new lace dress – this is the first time I’ve worn it – and I don’t think it’ll come out.
‘Good grief,’ says Kate, shaking her head with sadness and pity. ‘You are so unbelievably coarse, Clara.’
‘I’ve burned my arm. I don’t have a brand-new toothbrush,’ I say. ‘And the shops are shut, otherwise obviously I’d crawl there on my hands and knees through the snow. So. Why don’t we use Maisy’s? You can’t object to Maisy’s mouth, surely?’
‘My new princess toothbrush?’ says Maisy. ‘What are you going to do with it?’
‘Scrub the dirt off The Truffle,’ says Kate. ‘I’m no happier about it than you are, Maisy.’
‘Pigs find truffles. Will it have pig on it?’ says Maisy. ‘Afterwards.’
‘Yeah,’ says Jack. ‘It’ll be covered in pig’s bogeys.’
‘But I don’t want –’
‘That’s enough,’ I say, more loudly than I mean to.
‘I’m getting the toothbrush right now,’ says Flo. ‘From upstairs. Excuse me, everybody.’
