After his bath, he felt, briefly, more alert and cheerful. Breakfast soon put paid to both. Davy, full of stocking chocolate, wouldn’t eat, but cowered shivering on his chair in his despised pyjamas, refusing to put his dressing-gown on because Sam said it was a girl’s one since it didn’t have a cord girdle. Sam ate robustly and sniggered, as if amusing himself with an endless series of private lavatory jokes, and Alistair, peering through smeary spectacles and breathing heavily and theatrically, read the competition rules on the back of the nearest cereal packet as if they were the most absorbing literature in the world. Lizzie looked worn out, Barbara looked indignant and William abstracted. Harriet’s empty chair was eloquent of an impending storm – she had fired the first shot in a war of nerves that wouldn’t satisfy her until it was fully engaged.
I wish Lizzie and I were in Seville, Robert thought. Just the two of us, no children, no parents-in-law, no Christmas, no responsibility to make things fun for everybody else.
He tried to catch her eye. She was pouring coffee for William, her heavy hair swinging forward across her cheeks. She took a deep breath, as if gearing herself up for something and said, ‘Now we are all going to church. Ten-thirty and carols.’
Sam gave a yowl and slid under the table.
‘Don’t be silly,’ Barbara said. ‘I never go to church.’
‘Mum—’
Alistair looked at his grandmother in admiration. ‘Don’t you?’
‘You know perfectly well I don’t. It’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo.’
‘Mum,’ Lizzie said, ‘this is Christmas. You usually—’
‘I shall come with you,’ William said, interrupting. ‘And so will Davy. Davy and I need to do a bit of singing.’
‘I don’t,’ Alistair said.
Lizzie put her hands down flat on the table.
‘On Christmas morning, for the last umpteen years, we have all, as a family, gone to Langworth Parish Church and sung carols. We are doing it again today.’
‘Sorry,’ Barbara said.
Robert leaned forward. ‘I’ll come.’
‘I won’t!’ Sam shouted from under the table.
William got up and came round the table to where Davy sat. He lifted him into his arms.
‘Davy and I are going to dress for church.’
Davy looked deeply uncertain. If only Sam …
‘I suggest,’ Alistair said, ‘that those who want to go and do a bit of mumbo-jumbo, just do it, and send one up for me.’
‘Don’t show off,’ Robert said.
‘My dear father—’
‘The thing about carols,’ William said, bearing Davy from the room, ‘is that you know all the words anyway so it doesn’t matter if you can’t read them all.’
They went upstairs. Harriet’s door was open, but the bathroom one was shut and rock music thudded away behind it. William put Davy into his bed and pulled up the bedclothes round him, to get him warm. He used to do this to the twins, long ago, on Sunday mornings, when he was left in charge of them while Barbara, who had then been as strongly pro-church as she was now anti it, went to early communion. William had always preferred evensong; it had always coincided better with the quiet reflective tempo of his own appreciation of the ancient Christian virtues of tolerance and compassion combined with an antipathy to anything strident or proselytizing. There was, inevitably, a stridency about large family life, where all the separate personalities fought for the same space, not because that was the only space there was, but because they all determinedly perceived it to be so. Was that what Frances had run away from? Was her life, inevitably much more private than Lizzie’s because of its circumstances, making it difficult, almost unbearable, for her to join in? Or was it that she – most understandably, William thought – was pointing out, by absenting herself, that it was both unimaginative and patronizing to assume she would be grateful and relieved to be swallowed up automatically in the circus of family Christmas at the Grange? Her letter, left for them in the spare bedroom, had said so little, merely that she was sorry if she’d upset anyone but she was taking a promising chance for the business. It was a foolish letter really, evasive, even untruthful. But perhaps she not only couldn’t tell the truth, but also didn’t want to?
‘Half the world,’ Juliet had once said to him, ‘lives envying the other half, and the other half can’t think why the first half doesn’t pull itself together and live the way the other half does. Do I make myself clear?’
‘No,’ William said.
‘I suppose I mean, then, that half the world are the bossers, and the other half are the bossed.’
William sat down on the edge of his bed and looked down at Davy, drowsy now in the reassurance of an adult bed. Was he one of the bossed, like William was? And was Frances? Was Frances the bossed and Lizzie the bosser? And if so, had Frances at last recognized this and started to get the hell out of it all, just in time?
Davy opened his eyes. He regarded his grandfather.
‘Are you sure this is Christmas?’ he said.
In the end, Lizzie, Robert, William, Sam and Davy went to church, and a number of the rest of the congregation, who knew the Gallery family well, did a bit of counting and wondered where Barbara, Harriet and Alistair were. Lizzie didn’t like to admit, when questioned, that Barbara had started a revolutionary movement against church at breakfast, so she simply mumbled untruthfully that they all knew how Christmas morning was and that they somehow simply hadn’t got their acts together. Strangely, church cheered them all up a little, Robert because it ate up an hour of this endless day, Lizzie because it got her out of the house, William because he enjoyed the familiar ritual, Sam because he liked being in a crowd of any kind and Davy because he was wearing cast-off clothes of Sam’s which could not, therefore, by simple definition, be called either girly or sexy.
When they returned, humming snatches of carols and feeling a mild anticipatory enthusiasm for the food and drink ahead, they found Barbara in the kitchen ostentatiously instructing Alistair in the art of basting a turkey – ‘I cannot imagine how you suppose he will make a fit husband for anyone if you indulge his rampant chauvinism so pathetically’ – and Harriet, dressed in leggings, gold lurex ankle boots, one of Robert’s jerseys and far too much make-up, yawning over drawing elaborate place-cards for the lunch table.
‘Where did those boots come from?’
‘They’re Sarah’s.’
‘They are truly tarty—’
Harriet eyed her father. ‘And how would you know?’
‘Can I,’ Davy said, writhing out of his half-unzipped anorak and dropping it on the kitchen floor, ‘open my presents now?’
‘Not till I’ve found something to write on, to make a list—’
‘And now,’ Barbara said loudly, ‘we shall turn the potatoes.’
Alistair slumped against the Aga.
‘I really am exhausted. Prostrated, you know. And I have to say that women do these things so much better—’
‘Pack that in,’ his grandmother said crisply.
Sam, still anoraked, appeared in the kitchen door armed with a silver plastic raygun.
‘Look!’ he yelled. ‘Look! Look what I’ve got!’
He pressed the trigger and a deafening explosion of chattering sound hit them all like smacks in the face.
‘Stop that!’
‘Where did he get it? I said, Sam, I said to wait till I’d found a piece of paper—’
‘Can I have it? Can I have a go, can I, can I, can I—’
‘It makes me furious, simply furious to see boys fed these ridiculous stereotypes—’
‘Turn it off, Sam!’
But he was wild with excitement. Clutching the gun, which glittered with intermittent lights like little deranged eyes, he spun round the kitchen, blazing away at everyone, hysterical with power and pleasure. As he reeled past the door to the outside, to the back drive and the garden, it opened, almost knocking him flat and sending the gun flying out of his hands. Before hi
s screams began, there was a tiny silence, and during it, Frances appeared, wearing her mackintosh with a sprig of holly in the lapel.
‘Hello,’ Frances said, almost uncertainly. ‘Happy Christmas.’
6
JULIET JONES RELISHED the particular solitariness of Christmas day. Because the rest of the world was so deeply preoccupied with Christmas, the day, for her, hung suspended, without time or place, a day that hardly existed, and which therefore did not have to be treated with all the wearying domestic obligations that other days required. It was a day to be relished, or squandered, on a whim, a day to be celebrated or totally ignored, to be spent in bed or tramping the hills, guzzling or fasting. The only rule about Christmas that Juliet had evolved over the years was that she would never spend it with anybody else.
She did not consider herself by nature misanthropic. If asked – and people did, constantly, ask her, being convinced, as people are, that there is something freakish and unnatural about choosing to be alone – she would say that she had made a virtue out of necessity and had come to like her own company since that was the most of anyone’s company she got. She knew herself to be also slightly perverse, always, even from childhood, wanting things she couldn’t have, largely because she couldn’t have them. Surely that accounted, certainly at the beginning, for William? After all, William Shore was the last kind of man that a woman like Juliet Jones would choose. At least, twenty-seven years ago, he was. Now, he was so familiar he was an extension of herself, an extension which, to her mild relief, took itself away after every meeting, to be administered to by Barbara. Long ago, Juliet had wanted William’s baby. To be strictly honest, she had wanted a baby and William, such a tender-hearted father to his twins, seemed to be the perfect choice to assist her. She never told him this; she just took no precautions, and hoped. The hope came to nothing, and William stayed.
Juliet had always been regarded as very bohemian by her own generation. Tall and strong-featured with long, vigorous hair, she had, as a young woman, provided a remarkable contrast to her gloved and waisted contemporaries in the early-fifties. She had been to art school, and then to Paris, and to Florence, where she led, it was assumed by her old schoolfriends in Bath, a life only to be hinted at for physical extravagance. Then she returned to England, said she wasn’t going to be a painter, but a potter, and set up home and workshop in an isolated cottage up a track two miles out of Langworth.
The cottage was no beauty. It was Victorian, sturdily built, but of uncompromising brick in an area of golden stone. All around it, the uplands rolled and swept away, so that Lizzie, toiling up the track on her bicycle as a teenager, felt she was somehow ascending on to the roof of the world. Juliet’s cottage was a treasure trove to Lizzie, an Aladdin’s cave of colour and texture and muddle after her own house which was painted either green or cream with not quite enough furniture or pictures. The bones of Juliet’s rooms, the walls and windows and tables and chairs, had vanished under a riot of fabrics: rugs and shawls and cushions, lengths of Paisley cottons and gleaming brocades, pieces of crushed velvet and embroidered linen lay layered on everything like exotic leaves. And out of this rich confusion came Juliet herself and her pots; Juliet so self-possessed and decided, her pots, creamy, smoky and cloudy from the wood-ash glazes that were her speciality, as cool as classical columns. Lizzie had been head over heels in love with it all, with Juliet, with her skill with her cottage and her clothes and her pungent cooking full of cumin and nettles and the olive oil which Barbara would only buy suspiciously from a chemist, in little bottles, like a medicine. Lizzie longed for Frances to come with her to Juliet’s. She told her all about it, she described and raved and promised Frances paradise. But Frances wouldn’t come.
‘Is she exploring sex?’ Juliet had once asked Lizzie.
Lizzie thought of the head boy at William’s school.
‘I think she’s trying to—’
Juliet had never got to know Frances as she had known Lizzie. Lizzie made it so easy; she was longing to be known, as William was. Even Barbara, between whom and Juliet there should by rights have existed a great awkwardness, was in some ways easier to grasp than Frances. Barbara and Juliet had had one mighty quarrel, in which Juliet said she was not leaving the area, and if Barbara wanted to move William away she’d better get on and do it, and then, except for minor eruptions, no further ones. A kind of strange friendship even grew up, founded on Barbara’s tacit acknowledgement for which Juliet was both grateful and respectful, that Juliet wasn’t in fact taking anything that Barbara desperately wanted herself. Even Barbara didn’t seem quite sure why she still wanted, as it were, the outer husk of William, his body in her life, but she did. Juliet recognized this, just as she recognized that she didn’t want William always and all the time, and also that Frances, Lizzie’s double to all appearances, was as elusive as Lizzie was accessible.
From her vantage point outside the family, Juliet could see them clearly. She could see that William, although he couldn’t bring himself to like much in Barbara’s temperament, loved her for being the mother of his children and for taking decisions for him. She could see that Barbara was torn, all the time, between the strength of her natural desires for self-fulfilment and the grim and abiding corset of her upbringing in a generation of middle-class women who, by and large, did no work after wedlock but social work. She could see that Lizzie, probably unconsciously, wished to show her mother that a woman could indeed run the whole gamut of womanly possibilities, wife, mother, worker, and be a living proof of the practicality of feminism, not just a noisy inconsistent theorist. But Frances … Juliet could not see so clearly when it came to Frances. There was something both bright and shadowy about Frances, open and yet half-hidden, something playful, a little erratic, vulnerable, something that didn’t want to be known. There was a time when Juliet had thought Frances disapproved of her relationship with William, but Lizzie had assured her that wasn’t it.
‘Frances never disapproves of anything much, you know, and she thinks if Dad didn’t have you, Mum’d leave him.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes,’ said Lizzie, who had, the night before, expounded this theory to Frances and not been disagreed with. ‘Yes, really.’
When William had told Juliet that Frances had suddenly decided to go away for Christmas, Juliet had felt a small elation. It was always thrilling to see someone turn protagonist, particularly someone whose life had always appeared a little hazy and evasive. Good for Frances, Juliet had said to William on the telephone, listening to the pubby chink of glasses and rumble of talk behind him, not before time, I was waiting for this, I love seeing people start steering their own lives.
‘I don’t think I ever have,’ William said sadly.
‘More than you think,’ Juliet said, almost sharply. ‘You’re sometimes a shameful old poser.’
Nobody seemed at all sure why Frances had gone, and nobody seemed to wish to believe the reason she had given. Lizzie had been deeply hurt. She had come up to Juliet’s cottage late on the Sunday evening and sat by Juliet’s fire.
‘It isn’t that I resent her doing her own thing, it really isn’t, but it’s the not telling, it’s the bouncing of the news on me when the whole plan is already made, as if, somehow, I’d have tried to stop her, as if – oh Juliet, it’s as if she didn’t trust me.’
People went on so about trust, Juliet thought. They spoke of it as if it were a sacred vessel and, once you’d even cracked it, with only a hairline crack, the whole thing was then useless afterwards, thus invalidating relationships.
‘Nobody’s to be ultimately trusted,’ she said briskly to Lizzie, ‘not me, not you, not Frances, not anyone. It isn’t in human nature to be utterly trustworthy, we just can’t do it.’
Lizzie had gone home shocked as well as uncomforted, leaving Juliet unable to sleep. As she got older, she had found she had to woo sleep, beckon it seductively with no disturbing shocks of late-night news or quarrels. That night, something about Lizzie,
about her real misery and sense of rejection, had set all kinds of wheels of memory in motion that Juliet had hoped would never turn again, reminding her of past pains and rebuffs and unwanted solitariness, from which the road to her present reasonable contentment had been so long and hard and stony.
Having slept poorly, she spent Christmas Eve with a headache. She had asked, as she always did, the other waifs and strays from the nearest village – a retired nurse, a senior county librarian, a silent man who made weather vanes, a widower doctor, a journalist on the local paper – up to the cottage for mince pies and mulled wine and saw, as she always saw, the gallantry on their faces as another lonely Christmas challenged them to make the best of it. When they had gone, an uneven procession of red tail-lights jerking down her track like a line of bouncing scarlet stars, she quelled the fire, put the glasses and plates on the slate slab beside her kitchen sink, and went upstairs to fall into the kind of absolute sleep usually only granted to babies and adolescents.
She woke at three. A disagreeable night was in progress outside her window, a whining wind and the lashing slap of either heavy rain or sleet. She got up and went downstairs to make some tea. She felt, when she got down there, alert enough to wash up, rake out the fire and plump the cushions. Then she carried the tea upstairs, remade her bed and prepared to start the night again, remembering to say, ‘Happy Christmas,’ to herself, with a satisfaction that was, she told herself, almost smug.
She woke the second time to shouts. She thought at first that it was just the wind, whose many insistent voices she knew extremely well from her upland years, but then she realized that the wind, however ingenious, did not know her name. She climbed out of bed, pulled on the patchwork robe she had made years ago out of scraps of velvet and brocade, and went to the window. It faced the valley, the track and the best view. Juliet pulled back the curtains, opened the window and leaned out. There below her in the dim grey light, stood Frances Shore, with a suitcase.
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