Comfort and Joy

by India Knight

  ‘It’s tonight!’ says Flo. She is stringing silver baubles on metres of silver ribbon. ‘Some of them got shattered in my suitcase, so annoying. But I thought we’d have these crisscrossing the landings. And then maybe hang some from the glass lanterns, too.’

  ‘What’s tonight?’ I ask.

  ‘Christmas! Well, it’s tomorrow, obviously. But they follow the French model of doing most of the eating on Christmas Eve. Sniff the air, if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘Fatima is cooking us an absolute feast,’ says Kate.

  ‘Oh, but God – tonight?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Kate. ‘Don’t worry about it – there are hours to go.’

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘Okay. It’s not what I’d have done but …’

  ‘That’s the point,’ says Kate. ‘Of not being at home.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. I’ll just go and get my decorations.’

  ‘I brought one or two things too,’ says Kate. ‘Could you get them while you’re up there? Maybe get them first, actually. They’re in the older trunk, the battered brown one.’

  ‘Yup. Where are the children?’

  ‘Cassie and Maisy are helping Fatima,’ says Kate, who seems to be holding everyone’s social diary in her head. ‘Or maybe hindering, who knows. But she offered and they seemed awfully keen. The boys stayed out with Sam. They’ve gone to the main square, the Djeema-el-Fna. They took Pat with them – I don’t know that it was an entirely wise decision. Shamans and snake-charmers, you know. Tooth-pullers and dancing boys in drag. She’ll either love it or be sobbing for home.’

  ‘She’ll like being with Sam and the boys,’ I say. ‘Little break from us.’

  ‘She’s in a funny mood, isn’t she?’ says Evie. ‘Like she half wants to have fun and half wants to hate everything, and she can’t make up her mind which it’s going to be.’

  ‘It’s difficult for her. She is very much out of water. She cheered up a bit after you’d gone,’ says Kate. ‘Ate quite an exotic biscuit. And I have the most wonderful present for her, which’ll perk her up even more.’

  ‘You’re very organized, Kate, keeping tabs on everything.’

  ‘I have my uses,’ says Kate. ‘Now – Max has gone down to La Mammounia to meet his old friend Richard for a coffee. He won’t be long. And I’ve told everyone else to be here and changed for six o’clock.’

  ‘Better get on with the decorating, then.’

  I go upstairs to Kate’s bedroom and make a beeline for the oldest and most battered trunk. I’m about to go downstairs again and ask her for the key, but then I notice that it’s already unlocked. It takes me a moment to realize what’s inside the trunk, and when I do I let out an actual gasp. There, nestled between layers and layers of white tissue paper, are our old Christmas decorations – the ones from home, from childhood, from Notting Hill all those decades ago. Boxes and boxes of them: red baubles – our red baubles, from the Christmi: I’d know them anywhere. I didn’t think they still existed: I’d assumed they got lost or thrown away when Kate and Julian split up and sold the house.

  I sit down by the trunk, holding a box of baubles on my lap like a loony, staring at them tenderly as if they were a basket of kittens. Kate has never, in two decades, mentioned that these decorations were still in her possession. She stopped hosting Christmas after the break-up with Julian, which is why I started doing it at my house in the first place: I couldn’t bear to see the flame go out, so I became its keeper. I can’t believe she had the baubles all the time.

  I want to cry.

  I want to cry even more when I start unloading the boxes – the boxes I know by heart; I can even tell you that the one I’m holding now got trodden on by me in 1984 – that’s what the crumbling, yellowed Sellotape on the corner is about – which was the year Julian’s mother gave his biological children £10 book tokens and a £5 one to me, and Kate, electric with anger, took me aside and pushed a twenty-pound note (vast and unimaginable riches) into my hand. Here’s the angel I made at primary school, with its pipe-cleaner halo; here are Flo and Evie’s cack-handed deer decorations from nursery; here’s the only tinsel we were allowed (‘vulgar’), six feet of it, red, reinforced with wire and bent into a heart. Kate’s even brought our fairy lights along.

  I go into the hall and lean over the courtyard. My mother is talking to Moustafa in extremely rapid French; I can’t make out what they’re saying.

  ‘Kate!’ I shout down. ‘I don’t know what to say. That’s like giving us the most amazing present.’

  ‘I thought it was time,’ says Kate, smiling up at me. I beam back at her, one of those mad smiles when you’re aware of showing all your teeth.

  ‘Evie, Flo. Come up and see. I need a hand.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ says Evie, peering into the trunk. ‘They’re the ones from home.’

  ‘No!’ says Flo. ‘Let me see. God, so they are. Look, Eev, our deer.’

  ‘And look, my Christmas robin,’ I say, holding it up.

  ‘And our baubles. There must be hundreds of them. And our thread. From that old lady who had a haberdashery on Portobello and used to give us sweets, remember?’ Each bauble has a piece of thread going through the metal loop bit.

  ‘I used to do them with pink thread, when I was obsessed with My Little Pony,’ says Flo. ‘Look, here they are. Oh, God.’

  ‘Christmas Hamster!’ shouts Evie. ‘It’s Christmas Hamster!’ She pulls out a misshapen knitted lump with tiny ears. ‘Oh, the sweet thing, he’s lost an eye. I’ll make him another one right this minute. I missed you, Christmas Hamster,’ she says to it. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘I had no idea these were still around,’ says Flo.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘It makes me want to cry.’

  ‘Me too. Did you know?’ asks Flo.

  ‘No, I thought they’d got lost years ago, along …’

  ‘Along with everything else,’ says Evie. ‘So did I. I thought they’d be lying smashed in a skip somewhere. But Christmas Hamster has risen again, and we rejoiceth.’

  ‘He rises at Easter. He is born tonight,’ says Flo.

  ‘Man, I need an infusion, I got bad Jesus confusion,’ sings Evie. ‘I just made that up. I feel weird. It’s the baubs.’

  ‘There’s an unChristmassy danger of us all sitting here sobbing into Kate’s trunk,’ says Flo. ‘Come on. Grab some boxes and let’s take them downstairs.’

  ‘But why now?’ says Evie. ‘She hasn’t done Christmas since she and Daddy broke up. Not a bauble, not a candle, nothing. These must have been sitting in that trunk for over twenty years.’

  ‘She said it was time,’ I say.

  My sisters and I stare at each other, and then, without speaking, pick up an armload of boxes each and make our way downstairs.

  And now there’s a Christmas tree in the middle of the courtyard. A huge, twenty-odd-foot Christmas tree, sitting upright in a beaten copper pot. It wasn’t there ten minutes ago, and now it is. I feel like rubbing my eyes.

  ‘Marvellous,’ says Kate to the couple of sweating men who must have dragged it in. ‘Thanks so much. How much do I owe you? Is that all? It doesn’t sound nearly enough. Here you go, much more like it. Au revoir, au revoir. Joyeux Nol!’

  ‘Kate?’ I say. It comes out quite strangulated. ‘You got us a tree?’

  ‘Holmesian powers of deduction,’ says Kate. ‘Let no one say my daughter is unobservant. Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s beautiful. But … But how?’

  ‘I had it shipped,’ says Kate. ‘Well, flown in, actually.’

  ‘But it’s enormous.’

  ‘It’s twenty-five foot,’ says Kate. ‘Like they all were. Handsome, isn’t it? I’m rather pleased with it. You never know, with trees, until you see them. But this one is a lovely shape, though the branches need to drop a little. I was worried it would look too sort of poignant, you know, tragically out of place, but actually it looks rather at home.’

  ‘But how did it get here?’

&nbs
p; ‘Clara! You are drearily obsessed with logistics. I put my considerable wealth to good use.’

  ‘How long have you been planning all this, Kate?’ asks Flo.

  ‘A fortnight or so,’ says Kate. ‘Now – we need the crepe paper from the trunk to wrap around the base, even though that copper pot’s quite pretty. Moustafa’s getting more ladders. I can’t bear heights these days as you know, so you’re going to have to do the upper bits of the tree, girls. He’ll help you. I’ll be the stylist and the stage director – both jobs I’d have excelled at, incidentally. How clever I was to only ever use red baubles – old but timeless, so classic and chic.’

  It’s amazing how fast you can work when you put your mind to it. Within two hours, the courtyard (no slouch in the aesthetics stakes in the first place) is transformed into – well, I don’t want to over-egg it, but honestly, into the most magical thing I have ever seen: it’s half glittering grotto, half Thousand and One Nights. It is dusk now, and the tree, surreal and beautiful, rises upwards, reaching for the sky, blazing with fairy lights and heavy with baubles. Kate is right: it looks oddly at home. Everything else is candle-lit; the flickering light bounces off the glinting brass tables and onto the glazed tiles; the glass lanterns shimmer high above us; the little green pool sparkles in the half-light, and beautiful old rugs have been laid on the stone floor.

  Moustafa and his helpers have dragged in an enormously long table and Fatima has set it for supper (it has been decided that the courtyard looks so spectacular that we want to eat in it). The table is blazing too, with crockery, silverware and an abundance of pearlescent, pastel-coloured glass. Fatima goes to her kitchen and comes back with Maisy and Cassie, both grinning with delight and both equipped with large paper bags; these contain rose petals, which the girls scatter in lavish quantities all down the dining table and all around our feet, bouncing with excitement as they do so. When Ed comes down with the twins, Ava makes enormous eyes and says, ‘Is it real, Daddy?’, which I think is how we all feel. Even Robert stands there with his mouth slightly open.

  ‘It’s stunning,’ he says. ‘Really beautiful.’

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, Clara?’ Kate asks. ‘I hope it doesn’t feel like I’ve hijacked Christmas. That wasn’t the intention.’

  ‘Mind? Of course not,’ I say. ‘It’s the most wonderful thing ever. And I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’ve … come out of retirement on the Christmas front.’

  ‘Well, it’s just this once. We’ll be back at your house next year, though I’m thinking I might lift the ban on a tree in my own house. They just made me so sad, for so long. But you’ve changed that, you know. Your Christmases are lovely, Clara.’

  ‘I learned from you,’ I say, leaning on her shoulder.

  ‘You learned well, my child,’ she says, leaning back on mine. And then: ‘Oh my God, I nearly forgot. Fatima! Fatima! THE TRUFFLE.’

  I’ll say one thing for my family: we can eat. Man, can we eat. Even the small children are like human Hoovers. I’m always perplexed by people who claim children hate vegetables, I think as I watch Flo’s twins chow down on some puréed aubergine and flatbread. (‘A few little things,’ said Fatima, arriving with plateful after plateful of amazing appetizers. ‘Not the real food.’) Maisy and Cassie are chomping on roasted red peppers with cumin (‘We cooked the seeds!’), looking like illustrations from one of those bossy volumes about healthy eating. Mind you, child vegetable-hate is one of those supposed ‘facts’ that only becomes real because of people’s mindless repeating of it. Pretty much the first solid things that babies ever eat are mashed-up vegetables, and they don’t have any difficulty doing that, and I’ve always found it weird that it should be universally believed that, somehow – by magic – they then start shunning the things they loved eating two years before. It’s just not true. But then, so many of the things people say about children aren’t true either: see also ‘children are cruel’. Mine aren’t, and neither are the children of anybody I know. I’m sure children can be made cruel, just as they can subtly be encouraged to hate vegetables by a parent making a hysterical fuss of a piece of broccoli, but otherwise I see no evidence of epidemic veg-loathing. Maybe it’s a British thing, like doing the washing-up in the sink and ‘rinsing’ the clean dishes in soapy water that’s grey with dirt. The question of children hating vegetables wouldn’t occur to any Moroccan person, for example; you might as well hate bread, or water.

  On cue, Pat says,‘They’re good at eating their vegetables, those wee ’uns. Mine wouldn’t touch them.’

  ‘That’s because we had no vegetables, Ma,’ says Sam. ‘Other than potatoes.’ Sam is one of those people who never met an avocado until he came to London, and who is still secretly suspicious of the more exotic fruits.

  ‘Yes, we did,’ says Pat. ‘We had plenty of vegetables. And of course, everything we ate was organic, in those days. You never ate any chemicals.’

  ‘Vegetables? Organic?’ splutters Sam. ‘Where? How do you mean?’

  ‘It just was,’ Pat says serenely. ‘Organic. Back in the day.’

  ‘Because pesticides hadn’t been invented in the 1970s?’ Sam says, laughing.

  ‘Leave it,’ I say to him.

  ‘I was brought up on chips and salad cream,’ he quietly says to me. ‘And tinned pies. And Angel Delight for treats. I didn’t see anything green or leafy during my entire childhood. She’s joked about it before. What does she mean, “Everything was organic”? Our cans of own-brand Spam?’

  ‘She wants your childhood to have been lovely,’ I say, ‘and so she’s reinventing bits of it. It doesn’t matter if she contradicts herself. They all do it. We’ll do it too, I expect, when the children are grown up. And she wants to fit in with us – the rest of us I mean. She’s feeling quite defensive. Don’t call her out on it.’

  Pat is now chatting enthusiastically to Flo about the eating habits of babies she has known, and about the marvellous biodiversity of her own children’s diets.

  ‘I guess. But I don’t like it,’ says Sam. ‘It makes me feel argumentative.’

  ‘Nobody likes the rewriting of history,’ I say. ‘But it’s just what people do. Kate’s always telling us that our childhoods were “idyllic”, which is true up to a point but kind of bypasses the bit where she and Julian split up and everybody went mad and Evie and Flo were completely traumatized for years.’

  ‘Fucking families,’ says Sam with feeling.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘You have to force yourself to remember that you have your recollection, and she has her recollection, and it’s okay if they aren’t the same. Here, have some of these little crispy things. They’re called briouats. They’re delicious.’

  ‘There’s an incredible amount of food on this table and dinner hasn’t even really kicked off properly,’ Sam observes, biting into the pastry.

  ‘It’s Christmas Eve. Don’t do your weird foody freak-out. The “we are all bourgeois pigs” thing. Now’s not the time.’

  ‘No, it’s nice,’ says Sam. ‘God, these are good. I don’t mind it tonight, for some reason.’

  ‘Did you have a nice walk this afternoon?’

  ‘It was fantastic. The boys were mesmerized by everything. My ma loved it. She wanted to have a tooth taken out by some filthy street dentist. It took ten minutes to convince her that it wasn’t a good idea.’

  ‘Really? Doesn’t sound like her.’

  ‘Yes. She was staring and staring at him – you know those blokes in the main square, they basically have a pair of pliers and a couple of cloths?’

  ‘But didn’t she think the set-up was too dirty?’

  ‘She didn’t, oddly. Or, she may have done, but then she asked me how much it would cost and when I said “about 20p” she became very keen. She only has two real teeth left and apparently one of them is sore. I thought it would be a sad way for it to go.’

  ‘She loves a bargain, your mother.’

  ‘Anyway, after that she wanted to buy some tortoises,
so then I had to be the bad guy again and try to convince her not to. And then we went into the souks – I took her to the jewellery one, and at that point she really cheered up.’

  ‘I’d have thought most of the stuff was too big and heavy for her, no? Too Eastern?’

  ‘Yeah, a lot of it was.’ He laughs. ‘Though I like the idea of her going to her OAP nights completely bedecked in Marrakesh’s finest.’

  ‘Well, so, what – did you get her anything?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘Spit it out, Sam. What?’

  ‘There was a gold curly necklace she took a real shine to.’

  ‘Curly, how?’

  ‘It was writing.’

  I can suddenly see exactly what happened.

  ‘In Arabic?’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ says Sam. ‘She wouldn’t be deterred. Mum. Mum! Show Clara the necklace I got you.’

  ‘It’s that nice,’ says Pat. ‘I’m that absolutely delighted with it. I love it, son.’

  ‘Let’s have a look, then,’ I say, getting up and walking around to where Pat is sitting.

  I’ve seen the necklaces before.

  ‘Lovely,’ I say, which it is. ‘Beautiful.’

  ‘Aye,’ says Pat. ‘What’s it say again, Sam?’

  ‘Allah,’ says Sam.

  ‘The merciful, the compassionate,’ murmurs Moustafa, who has just deposited more flatbreads on the table. He looks at Pat, and then at Sam, and then at me, shakes his head very faintly and walks back to the kitchen.

  ‘Thankee, Mooza,’ Pat says to his departing form. ‘Thankee kind. That’s right,’ she adds happily. ‘Allah. They didn’t have one that said Pat. Or Patricia.’

  ‘It means “God”, Ma,’ says Sam. ‘Remember? The guy in the shop explained it.’

  ‘Aye, God,’ Pat repeats. ‘That’s lovely, isn’t it? Everybody likes God. And the wee baby Jesus.’

  ‘We are all His children,’ says Evie.

  ‘Charming,’ says Kate. ‘Very nice, Pat. Quite right. Why shouldn’t you wear a Muslim necklace? All monotheistic religions are basically the same.’

  ‘Aye,’ says Pat, who comes from Northern Ireland and lives in Eire. ‘I love my necklace. But I wish Sam had let me buy a couple of wee tortoises.’