Comfort and Joy

by India Knight

  ‘Also,’ says Kate, ‘there’s a shop in the new town, a saddler’s originally, that is described in one of my guidebooks as “the Hermès of Africa”.’

  ‘I don’t need bait,’ I say. Then I think about it for a bit and say, ‘But bait doesn’t hurt.’

  ‘They’re only open for a couple of hours today,’ says Kate, ‘so we’d better step to it. And then we can be back for about eleven and do presents then.’

  We walk through the streets, already crowded, of the medina, and are touched and delighted to note that our European aspect causes a dozen complete strangers to smile and wish us a happy Christmas.

  ‘Fundamental difference,’ says Kate, ‘between the eastern and the western mindset. How many times have you walked around London and wished people you didn’t know happy Eid or happy Ramadan or happy Hannukah?’

  ‘Never,’ I say, ‘but it would be much trickier. You can’t randomly assume all brown people are Muslims, and the Hannukah thing is even worse – look for anyone vaguely Jewish-looking and be ready with your cheery greeting?’

  ‘I suppose,’ says Kate. ‘I still think there’s a generosity of spirit here that we would do well to emulate. You can tell by the food.’

  ‘You can tell everything about people by the food,’ I agree. ‘Though let’s try not to have some for a couple of hours.’

  Twenty minutes later – stared at but unhassled, which is very different from how it was the last time I was here with Sam; sixty-year-old Kate claims this is because ‘I am old, and they revere the old’ – we are outside the old city walls. We walk a little more and find a horse-drawn carriage rank, and within minutes we are trip-trapping into the new town, with its Frenchified buildings and wide avenues. The Hermès of Africa hasn’t quite opened yet, so we sit in a café opposite.

  ‘I am resisting the urge to order those divine almond pastries,’ says Kate, ‘and I suggest you do the same.’

  ‘Just coffee,’ I say. ‘I feel practically pregnant.’

  ‘I hope you’re not,’ says Kate. ‘I was almost a grandmother at your age.’

  ‘No, Kate, of course I’m not pregnant! It was a figure of speech.’

  ‘Good. The fashion for middle-aged women having babies is not an attractive one for anyone concerned, if you ask me. How’s your friend Hope, speaking of which?’

  ‘Probably contemplating pregnancy as we speak, knowing her,’ I say. ‘She’s got a boyfriend, much younger – I don’t remember if you ever saw him on Facebook, this time last year?’

  ‘I don’t remember either. I remember her cruising, though. Isn’t it funny – well, not hilarious as such – but when I was in my late thirties, all I wanted to do was be someone like Hope, doing interesting work and having my own company and being in business. Julian was against it, and I was for anything Julian was for, and so that was that.’

  ‘I know. Rather atypically doormat-ish of you, Kate, I always thought.’

  ‘The Third World War in the background, darling. Raging away for years.’

  ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Well, no. Nobody does. The only people who ever have any idea of what goes on inside a marriage are the two people in it, as surely you know by now, Clara. Everything else is just gossip and conjecture. When Julian and I divorced, I kept bumping into people for years afterwards – good friends – who’d say, “Oh my goodness, I had no idea, you seemed so blissfully happy.” The fact is, unless you go spewing your guts all over the place, nobody has a clue. And I don’t like spewing.’

  ‘But that was what started the rot? That he didn’t want you to have a job?’

  ‘Among other things. But yes, it was the catalyst. When Flo and Evie were older, you know. And I sat there looking pretty and twiddling my thumbs and organizing nice dinners for years on end. His point was that I didn’t need to work, what with us having money. Rather missing the point. And of course ghastly waste of my excellent brain. That was what drove one loopy. The utter waste of brain.’

  We sit and sip our coffees. Across the road, somebody from the Hermès of Africa is pulling up the shop’s metal shutters.

  ‘Go on, then,’ I say. ‘I know you want to tell me about the Felix stuff.’

  ‘I don’t know why you’ve made such a fuss about it, Clara.’

  ‘Well. You know. It still kind of messes slightly with my head.’

  ‘I do wish you’d be more robust. What if you were an Afghan peasant, struggling daily against the Taliban and the lure of opium?’

  ‘I, er. I’m not, Kate, is the thing.’

  ‘Or a Moroccan womanfolk who had to slaughter her own fowl?’

  ‘But Kate. I’m from Notting Hill.’

  ‘No excuse. One should always be prepared and vigilant and capable. There is zero point in sticking one’s head in the sand about anything at all. I, for instance, would resist the poppy and slaughter the fowl.’

  ‘You sound like Robert. Anyway, I’m here. I volunteered the question. Go on, shoot.’

  ‘There’s actually very little to report,’ Kate says, ‘which is partly why your ducking away is so annoying. So,’ she continues, rootling through her bag and pulling out a thin folder, ‘here we are. Probate.’

  ‘Why was this sent to you, by the way?’

  ‘What? Oh, because they didn’t have your address.’

  ‘Right. Great. Well, come on. What’s it say?’

  ‘I can’t find the bit about the money. Ah yes, here we are. There’s a tiny bit of money – about ten thousand dollars.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, pleased. ‘That’s nice. And unexpected.’

  ‘God knows what he did with the rest, he used to be terribly well-off. Still, not our concern.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Now,’ says Kate. ‘The thing is. There isn’t much money, but what you have is a fraction of it. Do you follow?’

  ‘Not at all. What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, darling, that there’s a wife.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say. ‘Hardly surprising. I wouldn’t have wanted him to die alone, in his Mexican eyrie.’

  ‘And children. Rather a lot of them. You, obviously, and then two more with wife number one, two others with wife number two, and one with the current wife, whom he in fact wasn’t married to. Common-law. Six in total, I believe.’

  ‘Children?’ I say. For some bizarre reason, the idea of Felix having other children has simply never entered my head. ‘Wow. God. Weird.’

  ‘Your half-siblings,’ says Kate. ‘Five of them. And they are – hang on, let me find the dates of birth – they are, yes, here we go: they are thirty-eight, thirty-six, thirty-two, twenty-nine and fifteen. Do you want the names?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not yet, no. This is so strange, Kate. I’m five people I’ve never met’s older sister.’

  ‘I know. Came as a surprise to me too; he never mentioned them. Rather have the feeling he was fairly breezy in his approach to fatherhood, old Felix. But here we have it: three boys, two girls. Or three men, two women, I suppose. They all have his surname. Well, aside from you.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘One other thing: there’s a letter. Here,’ she says, pushing an envelope across the table at me. ‘You don’t have to open it now. It’s from him. He sent one to each of his children, apparently.’

  ‘From beyond the grave. This is really, really strange, Kate. I don’t know what to say. Shall we go and look at the shop? I’d like to think it through while looking at small leather goods, if you don’t mind. I think I’d find it soothing.’

  I stick the envelope in my handbag, noting first that Felix – my father – has rather adolescent handwriting.

  ‘I quite understand,’ says Kate, waving for the bill.

  I am entirely able to focus on the Hermès of Africa. You’d think my mind might wander, but you’d be wrong. The work on the bags and cases we admire is outstanding: immaculate stitching, exquisite finishes and the softest, butteriest leather you could imagine. We’re in the shop for abo
ut an hour, examining everything with forensic attention. Kate points out, rightly, that these are the perfect holiday souvenirs: you’d still love them back in London and would carry them happily without feeling they didn’t look quite right outside their native country (‘Unlike the lightweight hooded cloak I got here once, years ago, and which I wore to Glyndebourne for warmth until I realized I looked exactly like Satan’). I buy a satchel-style bag with a long strap and Kate buys two wallets, and then we carriage it all back to our house in the medina, where preparations for lunch are afoot and where it’s time for us all to open our presents. I haven’t lifted a finger all morning. I have five new brothers and sisters and God knows how many new nieces and nephews. This is the oddest Christmas I’ve ever had.

  I read the letter as soon as we get home, of course I do. I take it up to my bedroom while everyone’s downstairs gearing up for the marathon that is present-opening. I put it on the bed and stare at it for a bit. I’ve already noted the adolescent handwriting on the envelope. It’s odd because Kate is rather fussy about calligraphy: she disliked a friend I had throughout my teenage years purely because of the rounded, loopy way she formed her Ws – ‘Like bottoms,’ Kate had sniffed, ‘or breasts: awful beyond belief’ – and dotted her Is with a happy face. Perhaps the writing reminded her unpleasantly of Felix’s and of teenage single motherhood. Who knows? Anyway, here we are, and here is my late father’s missive, the only letter he has ever written to me. I open the envelope carefully, wondering in passing at the oddness of his saliva having been on the licky bit. If this were a crime programme on television, we could run a DNA test. Except we don’t need one.

  Oaxaca, Mexico

  9 March 2011

  Dear Clara,

  I have been no father to you. It seems trite to apologize and I shan’t attempt to.

  I have been a hopeless father to all of my children, with the exception of Aurelio, the youngest, whose mother and I have lived together for these past sixteen years.

  I am sending variants of this letter to all of you – to you, Clara, and to your half-siblings. Their names are Jorge, Elias, Katherine, Isabel and Aurelio. Katherine and Isabel live in San Francisco, California. Jorge, Elias and Aurelio are here in Mexico. If any of you are curious about each other, my lawyers will be able to assist with addresses.

  Your mother is a great woman and spoke very highly of your stepfather.

  With all good wishes,

  Felix Maddox

  I sit on the edge of the bed and try to take this all in. I don’t quite know what I was expecting, but this perhaps wasn’t it. Couldn’t he have lied a bit? Said, ‘Sorry I was so crap, it must have felt horrid’? Said, ‘Sorry I had absolutely zero interest in you at any stage of your existence – that sucks, and I apologize’? Said, ‘I’m sorry I never met my grandchildren’? He doesn’t sound very nice. It’s not what you’d call warm, that letter.

  And I’m née Maddox. That’s weird. I quite like it. Maybe I’ll reverse the deed poll Kate filled out on my behalf nearly forty years ago. Clara Maddox: rather smarter than Clara Dunphy, formerly Clara Hutt.

  Well, there we go. That’s that. Line drawn under chapter. Except, I think as I wash my face – I’m not crying, just hot and a bit dusty from my walk with Kate – that maybe I should look them up, old Jorge and Elias and the rest of them. Send them a letter or something. An email. They’re my family, after all – they’re no more or no less Of The Blood than my beloved sisters Evie and Flo and a great deal more Of The Blood than, say, Julian or Pat. Oh, I don’t know.

  ‘Are you okay, love?’ Pat asks as I arrive back downstairs and sit myself down among the banquettes and floor cushions.

  ‘I’m fine, Pat,’ I say. ‘Kate and I were just going through some stuff from my dad’s probate – my real dad, the one I never knew. All done now.’

  ‘Ooh, that’s a horrible thing, that probate,’ says Pat.

  ‘It was more strange than horrible,’ I say. ‘But anyway, it’s done now.’

  ‘So humiliating,’ muses Pat.

  ‘Well – yes, I suppose so,’ I say, rather startled by her insight and empathy. ‘Sort of. I mean, you really can’t be humiliated by something so absolutely outside your control, but it does feel a little …’

  ‘Aye, that’s the thing,’ says Pat. ‘You’re that powerless.’

  ‘Thanks for your concern,’ I say, giving her hand a squeeze. ‘It’s all done now. Let’s enjoy Christmas.’

  ‘It’s an awful spot, the arse,’ says Pat. ‘Of all the places to be getting something like that.’

  ‘The arse? How do you …? Oh, I see. Prostate.’

  ‘My friend’s husband had it,’ says Pat, shaking her head. ‘Sad business, that was. Terrible trouble with his waterworks. The build-up, you know. The pressure.’

  I close my eyes, because I think that if I keep them open and focused on Pat’s sweet, round, concerned face, I might just explode with laughter. I take a couple of deep breaths.

  ‘Come on, Pat,’ I say. ‘Let’s get these presents open.’

  I don’t know whether being in Morocco has focused the mind, or whether it’s pure coincidence, but I am the delighted recipient of the best presents I’ve been given in years: presents that actually remind me of the absolute, pure pleasure of receiving. It’s almost as though everyone has been mindful of my Christmas fixation and has sweetly gone out of their way to make things extra-nice for me. Kate, along with the dinner service she tells me she bought me at the shop we went to yesterday and is having shipped back to London (‘so that we have enough plates next year’), has made me an album of photographs. I have hundreds – thousands, probably – of photographs of my own children, but only a handful from my own childhood: they were another casualty of separations and house-moves and rented flats and my general carelessness. Whenever I wondered aloud to Kate whether she had any she could give me, she’d go all vague and mutter about attics, and eventually I stopped asking. Now she hands me a sumptuously bound cornflower-blue leather album. The photograph on the first page is tattered and faded; it is of Kate and a man wearing jeans and a duffel coat, laughing in what looks like an Oxford quad.

  ‘Is that him?’ I say, squinting at the picture.

  ‘Yes,’ says Kate. ‘Terrible photo, but the only one I had. It’s literally taken me six months to find it.’

  ‘He looks nice,’ I say.

  ‘He was quite nice,’ says Kate. ‘In his day. Carry on.’

  There’s a photograph of me as a toddler, wearing a turquoise velour playsuit and with a daisy chain on my head, perched on Kate’s hip and smiling at Julian, and then all the familiar ones of home, a deluge of them: birthday parties and Christmases and school holidays, and us in the garden, and us in France, and us in restaurants and in bed and on the sofa. There are Evie and Flo, tiny babies at first and then little children and then grown-up girls. There’s me in a succession of appalling teenage haircuts, including – the horror – a mullet dyed ginger. There are friends and relatives and lunches and suppers and teas, and, on the last page, a formal portrait of my sisters and me standing on either side of Kate that someone took as the basis for a painting, if I remember rightly. I have no recollection of the painting at all, but the photograph is beautiful.

  I go to kiss my mother. ‘It’s the best thing you’ve ever given me. The best present, I mean. Ever. Better than my Sony Walkman. I love it.’

  ‘Pleasure,’ says Kate. ‘You seemed to be going a little bit doolally on the families front. I thought you might find it grounding.’

  ‘That’s gorgeous. Lovely photies. But now my turn,’ says Pat. ‘Open mine.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘but you all open some too. I don’t want to be the only grown-up who’s opening presents.’

  Pat’s present to me, wrapped in paper featuring bare-buttocked, mooning Santas, is a white porcelain mug lavishly embellished with gold paint around the rim and handle.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘It’s lovely.’

&
nbsp; ‘Turn it round,’ Pat says. ‘There’s writing on it.’

  I turn the mug round. World’s Best Daughter-in-Law, it says, in curlicued writing.

  ‘Oh, Pat. I don’t know what to say. That’s so nice. It’s so nice of you. So incredibly nice that I …’ It’s useless: my eyes have filled with tears.

  ‘Have a tissue,’ says Pat, pulling one out of the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘You don’t have to thank me. It’s a pleasure, love. And I mean it,’ she adds, grinning at me. ‘So I do.’

  I hug her very vigorously and get up for a bit to distribute the usual piles of presents to everybody else and also, to be honest, to take a few surreptitious deep breaths. When I sit down again, my own presents keep coming. There’s a handwritten invitation from Robert, on thick cream-coloured card, asking me to be his companion on a press trip to Zanzibar, which he knows I’ve wanted to go to since I was twenty.

  ‘This is fantastic,’ I tell him. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘No one I’d rather go with.’ He smiles. ‘You have to swear to keep your hands off me, though. No funny business, Clara.’

  ‘Challenging. I can’t promise I’ll manage to control myself …’ I say.

  ‘Who could?’ says Robert.

  ‘… but I’ll try my hardest.’

  ‘Here,’ says Evie, shoving a parcel into my hand. ‘I got you other stuff, but this is my best present to you.’

  ‘It’s Christmas Hamster!’ I say, as soon as I’ve torn off the first inch of paper. ‘Christmas Hamster! He was your favourite thing in the whole world!’