Comfort and Joy

by India Knight

  To me, the idea of hanging in there having a miserable time is a monstrous one, but then I can’t take my own word for it, boringly, given that I have some difficulties with this whole kind of thing anyway. Towards the end of my relationship with Sam, I started waking up in the night spluttering, unable to breathe, desperately gasping for air, as though I were being choked. Sam and I both decided that I had – weirdly and out of the blue – suddenly developed asthma. I went to the doctor – it was becoming a nightly occurrence, and debilitating – who ran tests and said, ‘No asthma here.’ I never believed I had asthma in the first place. Call me Clara Freud and have a stroke of my beard, but I knew exactly what it was: I was metaphorically suffocating, and my refusal to confront it in my waking life made me literally suffocate in my sleep. (To add insult to injury, I used to have to gulp down huge, dramatic breaths of air in between chokes when it happened, so that I didn’t actually pass out. When the choking was more or less over, I would then burp – buuuuuurp – like the burpiest freak in the history of burping. Sexy, eh? Pure fucking sizzling, that. Marriage-mendingly hot. And because I was embarrassed by the burpage – I’ve never gone a bundle on the companionable sharing of parp-honk bodily functions – I’d start laughing before I’d got my breath back fully, which of course would made me choke again. One night Sam turned over and said, ‘I think the mystique’s died, babe.’ That made me laugh too, and then want to punch him. I mean, he was the one causing me to choke in the first place.)

  I started sleeping like a baby the night Sam left – a sad baby at first, waking up and crying a lot, though cleverly managing to remain fully continent. I was sleeping blissfully through the night within a couple of months. I’ve never had a repeat of the choking weirdness since. That’s got to mean something, surely? On the other hand, look at us. The fathers of my children are my two greatest friends, the people I can talk to in shorthand, the people whom I can guarantee I won’t bore if my conversation turns to the domestic, to my children’s school reports, to the question of pocket money, to the dodgy boiler (maybe not so much with Robert, re. the dodgy boiler. If I try to share the pain of white goods malfunction with him, he literally yawns in my face with his mouth wide open. It was ever thus). Maybe we should all live together in a kind of commune.

  We are not troubled by oppressive, throbbing, promise-heavy waves of sexual tension, I’ll grant you. But then, who is, as the years go by? Most couples have a sex life, a good sex life even, but I don’t know anyone so overcome with lust that they drag their husband or wife of several decades into the undergrowth for an impromptu quickie any more. Does this matter? The undergrowth plays havoc with your hair and there might be dog poos lurking, or the weirder bugs. And you don’t need undergrowth for ecstatic rumpo, obviously (Flo, I noticed earlier, has taken to calling sex ‘riding the Ninky Nonk’, after In the Night Garden. Small children will do that to you).

  I don’t know the answers to any of this. There are few more depressing things than not being desired any more, I would say, but perhaps that’s not the universal view. I mean, the old people who make me cry in supermarkets have presumably not pottered out to buy snacks to fortify themselves before their next epic, bed-breaking shagathon. Have they? Maybe they have. I don’t know. It’s awful to get to middle age and know so little.

  The thing I’d really like to know is whether everybody thinks this, or whether it’s just me. Also, I’d like to know if I’ve got some terrible rogue gene that disables me from contemplating long-term domesticity with anything other than horror and panic (maybe it’s genetic. Maybe I got it from Felix, like my ear. Or from Kate. Or from both my bolting parents, yay). Or perhaps everyone has the rogue gene and they just butch it out, crash through the horror, leap over the panic and end their days buying ham together, all happy and content. It’s complicated by the fact that in my case the horror and panic co-exist with a subsumed longing for things not to change, a deep love of routine and an overdeveloped domestic streak. Part of me wants to cook supper for the same person for ever, and part of me wants to whack myself in the face with a frying pan at the very idea. It’s unhelpfully schizoid.

  But then, look at the alternative. The man from the Connaught, say. I like the man from the Connaught, whom I’ve now been ‘seeing’ on and off for just over a year. The man from the Connaught and I have a very good time. I really liked the idea of the man from the Connaught existing in the background and then materializing every now and then, and then retreating. It was romantic and sexy and it kept one on one’s toes. But, woe. The man from the Connaught has vanished – I’ve no idea why or how – in the past fortnight. There is radio silence, and now I’m annoyed. Where is the man from the Connaught? I’m too old for people to vanish for no rhyme or reason. I mean, what if the man from the Connaught is dead? It’s possible, if not probable. I wouldn’t really like him to be dead. Maybe he’s had both arms amputated and hasn’t trained himself to text using his nose yet. I’d forgive him, but I can’t contact him to find out, because when you’re forty-two you don’t send plaintive little texts to people who have, for whatever reason, vanished into thin air. So that’s very trying too, the alternative to wedded bliss. It’s not as easy as it looks. I could always find another man from the Connaught (don’t believe anyone who tells you men from the Connaught are thin on the ground if you’re over thirty and not a size four. In my wilder moments, I sometimes think it’s a lie designed to keep women in their place, unhappy but grateful for the company). But what if the original rises again, like Jesus, and then I have two men from the Connaught to worry about? You see? It’s complicated. It’s more complicated than I really have the time or the emotional energy for.

  Option three is to turn my back on what Robert’s mother likes to call ‘bedroom unpleasantness’. I could be like Pat. I could chuckle comfortably and tell people that ‘my cuddling days are over’. When Maisy’s grown up, I could reinvent myself as a spinster and take a postgraduate course in anthropology, like somebody in a Barbara Pym novel, and invite curates to tea (why don’t I know any curates? It’s irritating, though not half as irritating as not knowing Madonna. It’s so crashingly obvious that my girlfriends and I should know Madonna, and hang out with her. She’d love it. What a waste). Oddly, this Pym-plan isn’t as wholly unattractive as it might be: there’s something very appealing about the idea of living in ‘rooms’ with a spinster friend and having cups of tea and never bleaching your moustache and preoccupying yourself with matters of the intellect rather than matters of the flesh or kitchen. The thing is, I think the charms of such a lifestyle would pall after a while. The issue is that the charms of all the lifestyles seem to pall after a while. It seems a pity. I am, after all, in my prime. Where is the lifestyle for me?

  Plus, obviously, the children. To be perfectly honest, I’m not overly troubled – though I know that every single newspaper or magazine article I read tells me I should be – over the question of ‘what’s best for the children’. I know perfectly well what’s best for the children: me, demonstrably. I moan about them all day, but they’re extremely nice children. Add the fact that they have permanent access to their loving fathers and to an equally loving, if lunatic, extended family made up of both relatives and friends, and I don’t think there’s a problem. The only way of introducing a problem at this stage would be to produce an impermanent stepfather, or – God – a series of ‘uncles’. (‘Why are you walking like that, Mum, and wincing when you sit down?’ ‘Hoo, son, it’s been quite a night.’) I think that’s probably a scenario that’s best avoided. They’ve met the man from the Connaught, fleetingly, because I don’t want them to think that I am in fact a nun: it’s not a healthy thing for children to view their mother as a sexless being with a cobwebbed ’gina. But I’m not overly keen on them meeting a quick-fire succession of his successors – if he has indeed perished or suffered the indignity of a double amputation. Which I do hope he hasn’t. I liked him more than I let on to Robert. I liked him enough to feel sad about h
is absence.

  Is it different for men? Robert shags anything that moves, though perhaps his new carpe diem attitude will change that. I thought he was doing pretty well at carping every diem that he came across, but who knows? I have no idea at all of whom Sam shags, partly because he’s discreet and partly because I don’t particularly want to know (why not? Is that weird?). I don’t want his penis to atrophy and drop off, obviously, but I don’t need to know the particulars of its nocturnal activities, either.

  ‘Are you okay, Clara?’ says Tamsin, who’s appeared in the chair next to mine. ‘You look like you’re daydreaming. Lovely, lovely dinner, wasn’t it? Just glorious. It’s so fantastic, being here.’

  ‘Happy as a clam,’ I say, which is true. When I was younger and the boys were small, I used to count my blessings, and I’ve never fallen out of the habit. My blessings are many. They are legion. That’s the thing to remember. You know: nobody died. Well, apart from my dad, and possibly the man from the Connaught. Aside from that, though: all alive, wahoo.

  ‘So am I,’ Tam sighs. ‘Who’d have thought, ten years ago?’

  ‘You know,’ I say, ‘I thought for ages that you were with Jake because you thought anything was better than being alone.’

  ‘I know you did,’ says Tam. ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘I apologize for thinking it,’ I say, squeezing her hand. ‘I always think I’m so right and so insightful, and just now – before you came over – I was musing on the fact that actually I know nothing at all.’

  ‘You do,’ says Tam. ‘You know tons.’

  ‘Well, there’s a massive gap in my knowledge, let’s say. I’m like somebody who seems to function but doesn’t actually know how to count, or their world capitals, or the names of animals.’

  ‘But you have experience,’ says Tam.

  ‘Yes,’ I laugh. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’

  ‘No, I mean it,’ says Tamsin. ‘Remember the pain theory?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say. ‘I’d forgotten about it. We used to be obsessed with the pain theory. When was it – when you had Cassie?’

  ‘When that awful Boden woman I met at my NCT classes was giving me advice,’ says Tamsin. ‘That’s when we came up with it. The pain theory is absolutely true. It still holds.’

  The pain theory is: you know those people who seem to have charmed lives? Idyllic childhoods, parents totally compos and healthy and still together fifty years later, lovely time at school, not an iota of heartbreak before meeting their delightful husband/wife, gorgeous children, zero illness anywhere, no financial worries, professionally successful, wonderful houses, no doubt or panic or dark thoughts in the middle of the night. Most of us have been broken at some point, and we’re walking around with a few bits superglued back in place, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Not them: the most terrible or saddest things to happen to them are mildly tiresome, like painful wisdom teeth or having a flight cancelled. I’m pleased for them, and long may their joyous existence continue. But there’s one caveat: they’re not allowed to express any serious opinions. They can have them, obviously, but they’re not allowed to say them out loud. They’re allowed to say that roses are their favourite flower, or that they prefer bicycling to walking or Devon to Dorset, but that’s it. I don’t want to hear their opinions on single mothers, or on assisted suicide, or on the rights and wrongs of placing an aged parent in a residential home. I don’t care what they think about an NHS they never use. I particularly don’t wish to be lectured by them on things – the complexity of relationships, the pain of separation, the best way of ensuring children stay sane and happy when things go wrong – that they literally know nothing, zero, zilch, about. On these topics, such people are not allowed to talk: it would be like me lecturing people about nuclear physics, i.e. utterly absurd. That is the pain theory. And using the pain theory’s criteria, both Tamsin and I have required superglue, which means we know stuff. So has everyone around this table, actually: like tends to stick with like, artfully patched broken pot with artfully patched broken pot. I wonder if that’s why we were so instinctively hostile to poor Sophie and Tim two Christmases ago – whether it’s because they were so full of opinions and so seemingly unburdened. They’re happy now, by the way. Sophie is pregnant again. They’ve observed – rightly – that that’s what people like them do: keep on banging them out and try to make everything about their life like a double-spread from the pages of a parenting magazine. It’s not my definition of happiness, but it seems to work for them, and so I’ve never pointed out to Sophie, who has become quite a good friend, that I secretly think she’s just given in.

  There’s no Christmas pudding in Morocco – well, there’s no Christmas at all, if we’re going to be exact. We’ve all imported puddings, but they’re for tomorrow. Tonight, Fatima has made us a traditional French bûche de Noël, a chocolate sponge filled and iced with chocolate buttercream and rolled into the shape of a wooden log. She has decorated this with red berries and green holly leaves made of marzipan, and scattered icing sugar over the top to look like snow. The icing has been scored with a fork, so the chocolate looks like wood. A tiny plastic squirrel is perched jauntily on the cake’s edge, and I smile at her dedication: God knows where you find small plastic animals among the souks of Marrakesh. The bûche looks enchanting, both familiar and exotic, and even Pat volunteers that she wouldn’t mind a little taste. Then she stands up and clears her throat.

  ‘Cheers,’ she says, raising her glass, which tonight contains cherry brandy and a dash of advocaat (I often wonder whether I could persuade Pat to co-author a book of cocktails with me). ‘To everybody that’s here. To all of us at Christmas. I’ll never forget you.’

  ‘We’re not dead, Ma,’ says Sam. ‘Nobody’s going anywhere.’

  ‘I always want to spend Christmas with you,’ Pat continues. ‘If that’s okay, like. I know we’re not the same, but …’

  ‘I’m going to cry,’ says Evie.

  My own throat has gone a little bit tight. I love annoying, plate-sniffing, food-denying Pat. I always want to spend Christmas with her, too. I want these people – my family and the remnants of my attempts at marriage – to stay with me always.

  ‘We have such a nice time together. You’re all that unusual. So thank you. For having me here and for … for everything.’ She sits down again and looks around her in a slightly dazed way. ‘I’ve never made a speech before,’ she says as we all clap and cheer.

  ‘I’m glad you did. But there’s no need to thank anybody, Pat,’ says Kate.

  ‘You’re part of the family,’ I say. ‘And you always will be. Thank you, Pat. That was lovely.’

  ‘Aye,’ says Pat. ‘I know I’m not good with words, but I wanted to say a wee something. I was thinking about it for ages in the bath.’

  ‘That was nice, Mum,’ says Sam, giving her a hug.

  ‘We’re sorry that there are no pig latrines,’ says Evie. ‘We love you, Pat.’

  6

  25 December 2011, 7 a.m.

  Christmas morning starts early in Marrakesh: we are woken at what feels like the crack of dawn by the muezzin’s call to prayer. We all went to bed late last night, aside from the small children, who despite the excitement had conked out by 8 p.m., felled by their early start. For the rest of us, there were postprandial cocktails, much conversation, a boisterous couple of rounds of the Name Game, a little bit of singing (by Pat, tipsy and in fine voice), a late-night dip in the pool (by Jake and Tamsin) and then a collective dash to get the presents under the tree and organize the positioning of the children’s stockings. All glorious, but what was especially amazing to me was the lack of tidying up required. At home I barely have enough crockery or kitchen utensils, so that once you’re allocated a glass as you arrive you have to hold on to it for dear life throughout the day. We have to quickly wash some of the plates between our turkey and pudding because I don’t have enough dessert plates to go round; and all of this takes place in my hot, overcrowded kitchen,
with everybody shoehorned into place. Here, we were stopped from even attempting to clear up by Fatima and, we were pleased to note, three other women who’d appeared from nowhere. I felt a bit guilty, but I was so tired by that point that I mostly felt nearly tearful with gratitude.

  What’s surprising to me about this whole Christmas-not-at-home malarkey is how comfortable it feels, considering it was conceived in a moment of madness. Maisy and the boys came into my room this morning to open their stockings, and if they did so in the pale Moroccan sunlight rather than in the London gloom – well, so what, really? It’s odd, me thinking this, because Christmas at home is so part of my being – the one family tradition that still exists to be passed on – that I feel I’m somehow being unfaithful to myself just by being here. It’s like Pat suddenly discovering that she not only likes all ‘foreign’ food but that her utter favourite is manioc, or sheep’s eyes. Previously I’d believed that geographical location – my house, specifically – was what was holding the whole thing together: children, family, husbands, me. Today, I’m not so sure. The idea that we are holding ourselves together flits through my brain, only to be dismissed: we need foundations, and Christmas at home is the best foundation of all. Still, this isn’t bad.

  ‘Do you miss being at home at all?’ I ask the children. The boys look at me as though I were mad, but they and Maisy eventually agree, after some discussion, that they wouldn’t want to be away every year, ‘because then we’d be used to it, and if we’re going to be used to it we might as well be at home’.

  After breakfast of tea and fruit – hard to see how any of us can countenance any more food after last night’s extravaganza, but we’re now all bracing ourselves for lunch in a few hours’ time, imported giganto-turkey and all – Kate asks if I’d like to go for a stroll with her. And I would, partly to take a measure of exercise (there’s an awful lot of pastry in Moroccan food) and partly because I know she wants to talk to me about Felix’s probate, and I’ve been putting the conversation off for weeks. Christmas Day wouldn’t be my number-one choice, but Robert’s words last night about procrastination are fresh in my mind.