Letters to Iris

by Elizabeth Noble

  It would be fair, at this point, to describe her relationship with Bernard as a love/hate one. She felt sure the feeling would be mutual, if Bernard didn’t currently have an onion in the cavity where his heart had once been. She’d certainly had more physical contact with Bernard than with anyone or anything else in the last twenty-four hours.

  Seven hours to prepare (well, a lifetime for Bernard, to be honest), twenty minutes to eat. If she was lucky.

  She wasn’t even hungry now. Of course, she had just shoved a chipolata wrapped in yet more streaky bacon into her mouth in the kitchen. But that was only because it didn’t fit on the edge of the platter and it was tidier to eat it. Richard would have placed it on a saucer, wrapped it in cling film and put it in the fridge to take up valuable real estate. And that would have made her want to kill Richard, which was not festive. Better all round to eat it.

  It was fair to say that Gigi was hot and bothered. More, even, than Bernard. She too was trussed up for the day. It was Christmas, and that was what you did. That was what they had always done, particularly her darling, compliant boys. Her daughter, Megan – sometimes, it seemed to Gigi, more like a different species than simply a different gender – had rebelled, aged around fourteen or fifteen, and started to come down on Christmas morning in fleecy pyjamas with what Gigi called Hedge Backwards hair, but that hadn’t been one of the many, many battles Gigi had actually picked with her, and eventually, by the time she was seventeen or eighteen, she’d gone back to actual clothes. The hair was a work in progress, and it was still one of the battles Gigi didn’t pick. She drew comfort from the fact that every other girl Megan’s age looked similarly dishevelled, albeit, mystifyingly, after long minutes of attention in their bedroom mirrors. Perhaps it was the music they listened to while they primped that made it stand up on its ends that way. Gigi was dressed up. She had a new dress, as she had done every Christmas forever. Fashion editors in magazines, and people who came on This Morning to tell you what to do, always said big girls should wear things that hugged their curves, which in turn would make said curves appear smaller. Gigi was reasonably certain this wasn’t true, because when you wore one of those dresses that hugged your curves and walked past a mirror or shop window and wondered who the pig in Lycra was, dying of shame did seem a palatable option. What was wrong with skimming, draping, disguising? And yet, she was wearing one. It had a tight inner lining like a sausage casing that promised you’d look a size smaller once you’d shoehorned yourself into it. It screamed so on its big, bright label, so that everyone in the queue behind you in the shop knew how dissatisfied you were with your size. You thought it meant you’d look a size smaller than you had been before. What it actually meant was that you’d look a size smaller than Demis Roussos. And Gigi was wearing tights, which she hated. Mostly for their tendency to roll down at inopportune moments. Although this dress was so damn tight, rolling of any kind seemed unlikely.

  Enough, Gigi, she told herself. Get a bloody grip and get on with it. You know perfectly well you’re not going to throw Bernard at the wall. You’re going to put him down in front of Richard, who will carve him slowly and painstakingly, while everything else you’ve put on the table hot goes cold, thus earning himself half the credit for the meal, which you will not begrudge him. And you’re going to eat Christmas lunch with your growing, beloved family. The tights will roll, the zipper will strain, too much wine will be drunk. It’s as traditional as taking all the strawberry creams out of the Quality Street as soon as you get the metal tin (never the plastic) home from Sainsbury’s.

  And here they were, around her table. Her people. Her life. Richard, her husband of thirty-seven years. Much more than half her life. Her handsome firstborn, Christopher. Next to his wife, Emily. Her younger son, Oliver. And his very new – to them at least – girlfriend, Caitlin. And the bonus baby of the family, born ten years after Olly, wild-haired Megan.

  There were two firsts this year amongst all the rituals and traditions, and the soundtrack of the King’s College choirboys and the Jackson Five. This was the first year there was no one with them from the older generation. Richard’s father, James, the last grandparent still living, wasn’t here. He was ninety, quite confused and entirely infirm. And he was twenty-five minutes up the road in the nursing home they’d put him in five years ago, when caring for him at home became too difficult. They’d decided it wasn’t worth moving him to the house for Christmas this year, certain James was too far gone now even to understand what was happening. At least, Richard had decided, and Gigi had acquiesced, although she’d felt slightly ashamed of the decision ever since. Richard had framed it as being ‘too much for her’, with ‘everything else going on’. It wasn’t. It was too much for him. They’d go tomorrow, Richard had decreed, when there was less going on, and spend the afternoon with him.

  And it was the first year when there was a Moses basket in the corner. It seemed symbolic, somehow. One out, one in. Megan’s old Moses basket, in fact, empty for years in a bin bag in the loft, and now, marvellously, full of Christopher’s new baby girl, Ava. A perfectly small and smooth and beautiful and miraculous baby, sleeping to order at the moment, arranged in something pink and cashmere that some friend who had never had to do a baby’s laundry had bought her, looking for all the world like an Anne Geddes photograph.

  Barring the odd fantasy of domestic Armageddon, and who could blame her for those, these were the good days. She felt a familiar flood of love for the people in this room. These were the days. The days when all was well. When she could tell herself all the days would be well, and believe herself.

  It was the presence of the fruit of her union with Richard which reminded her that union hadn’t always been as difficult as it was now. As predictable, and as unfulfilling, and as lonely. She and Richard were partners in this family firm, more, it sometimes seemed, than they were lovers or even friends. These occasions provided the proof that the business of being them had been successful, a profitable one. She clung to them, and tried to bank the joy they brought her.

  So, there in the doorway, Gigi did not throw the turkey. She held it aloft like Mufasa in The Lion King and called attention to herself and to it with a loud and typically theatrical ‘Ta da’.

  ‘Wow, Gigi!’ This was Emily, Christopher’s entirely adorable wife. She always knew the right thing to say. And, right now, ‘Wow, Gigi’ was definitely the right thing to say. Christopher himself was peering anxiously in the direction of Ava’s basket, making sure his mother’s ‘ta da’ hadn’t woken her, but she’d forgive his new-parent neurosis, as she’d forgive him almost anything.

  ‘Smells fantastic, Mum.’ Now Oliver spoke, her second son. So sensitive and kind she’d always somehow imagined he’d grow up gay – a notion undiscussed with Richard but one she was so beyond okay with by the time he was eighteen that she’d felt slightly affronted at the parade of very lucky girls he’d been bringing home ever since, in a flamboyant and blatant display of his heterosexuality.

  And then, never one to disappoint, completely self-absorbed Megan’s ‘Thank God for that. I’m absolutely starving. Can we eat now? Please?’

  Gigi almost simultaneously play-glared at Megan, beamed at Em and Olly, grimaced apologetically in Ava’s direction and avoided Richard’s eye, as he hadn’t spoken. He was standing in front of his place setting, sharpening the carving knife on the steel. Very slowly. She put Bernard down in front of him, trying not to wonder why he hadn’t done that earlier, or to mind that he hadn’t poured the wine yet either.

  ‘Here you go.’

  ‘Well done, G.’

  ‘Come on everyone. Tuck in while your dad carves.’ She bit her tongue on the rest of the sentence – ‘or everything else will be cold’, brandishing a serving spoon with a determined smile on her face.

  ‘Ava out for the count?’

  ‘Fingers crossed.’ This was Christopher, who was still wearing an expression of slight post-traumatic stress disorder, though his daughter was almost th
ree months old now. He liked order, Christopher. He’d been the neatest little boy Gigi had ever known. His Enid Blyton books had always been arranged alphabetically on his bookshelves, and he always knew if you’d put one of his model airplanes back in the wrong place after you’d dusted. Knew and minded, badly. Although he clearly adored Ava, he had struggled, she knew, to accept the disruption to his routine she had wrought with her tiny ineffectual fists and her loud cries. Thank God for Emily, who had taken to motherhood like the proverbial duck to water, facing down the chaos and the newness with an almost bovine tranquillity. She was so very, very good for her son. Oh, the relief of your child finding someone they not only loved and fancied, but someone who was good for them.

  ‘She’s completely milk drunk, Gigi. I knew what I was doing when I accepted that sherry this morning …’ Emily giggled. ‘She’ll be out cold well past the Queen’s speech, I’m guessing.’

  ‘Is that okay?’ Christopher hadn’t known about the sherry, and now he looked more worried than before. Emily rolled her eyes fondly.

  ‘Didn’t hurt you lot much. I certainly drank through all three pregnancies, and all three breast feeds.’ Gigi didn’t mention the two cigarettes she’d also smoked, one with each of the boys. It seemed unnecessary.

  Megan sniggered. ‘You did?’

  ‘Absolutely. And you turned out all right. Mostly. I wasn’t chucking back vodka Red Bulls – the odd glass of wine or sherry. A pint or two of Guinness …’

  ‘Have we got any Red Bull?’ Megan asked, as if hearing the drink’s name had planted a marvellous thought. She’d been down the pub last night with her schoolmates, all excited to be reunited after their first term at uni, and keen to escape the Christmas rituals of home. She hadn’t come back until well after closing time – Gigi had heard the door close carefully at around 1 a.m. She’d thought that once Megan had been away for a few months, she’d be able to sleep properly when her daughter was home and out, but the cruel trick of motherhood was apparently that she still couldn’t. 1 a.m. And it still showed on her at 1 p.m. The hair was at its most Caitlin Moran this afternoon, and Megan’s skin was pale and, Gigi, thought, just a little on the clammy side. She’d only emerged from her room about an hour before everyone had been called to the table.

  ‘No, we have not.’ Gigi was unsympathetic. She’d been tending to Bernard while Megan swanned off to the pub without so much as an ‘Anything I can do?’ and if her daughter was paying the price today, she felt only a tiny shiver of distinctly unmaternal Schadenfreude.

  ‘Olly? Would you pour the wine?’ She ignored Richard’s slightly reproachful glance. After so many years of marriage, they both caught the subtext and tone.

  Olly, who evidently didn’t, jumped up and grabbed the bottle from the sideboard. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Now, Caitlin. Dig in. Every man for himself here …’

  Caitlin was not the first girlfriend Oliver had ever brought home for Christmas. She was just the first one none of them had ever met before she appeared on Christmas Eve, unannounced and unheralded. A secret girlfriend, no less.

  Gigi knew it was unfair to be suspicious of very slim people, but she couldn’t help it, any more than some very slim people, she knew, could help deciding at first sight that she was lazy and undisciplined, which was equally unfair. But still, Caitlin was a very slim person. And she was forcing herself to say ‘slim’ and not ‘skinny’. Very slim, very pretty, very quiet. Either shy or aloof. Gigi hadn’t decided which yet.

  Oliver had been the final one to arrive last night. Megan had already been home a few days, since term ended. Christopher and Emily had arrived in the early afternoon, fresh from a couple of days at Emily’s parents, with a pantechnicon of baby stuff that had taken the best part of an hour to unload and install in Christopher’s old room. Olly, in true Olly style, had rung late afternoon to say he’d missed the train he’d planned to catch, and he’d be on the next one. Missing trains was practically a hobby of his – you never really reckoned on his catching the one he said he would. Richard had gone to collect him at the station at six-ish and texted at a quarter past to say he was on his way back and that Olly wasn’t alone, but travelling with a girl. Richard was tantalizingly light on details. Like father like son.

  From a practical point of view, Gigi – in full-on hostess mode – hoped it was a girlfriend type of girl. It was a bit late to worry about Olly’s moral compass, and, besides, there were just no more beds. Chris and Emily were in the guest room, since Ava and her clobber had annexed his old single. Megan was in hers, and that just left Olly’s four foot six double. Her mind whirled with the possibilities, if she had to find another room. Megan would have to move, and share with Ava, and she’d have to strip her bed. And she’d be seriously irritated and no one needed that. The mystery girl would need clean sheets … and towels … Better that it be a ‘girlfriend’ girlfriend.

  Gigi sort of despised this preoccupation with domestic detail. Other people made stuff like this seem effortless and easy. Bohemians. Did they all sleep in other people’s sheets, though, and dry themselves on towels that had been in other people’s armpits? And not mind? She hadn’t always been obsessed with her washing machine. She wished she wasn’t now but she didn’t know how not to be. So her brain whirled and whirled with domestic detail and she couldn’t stop it. She’d gone to the linen cupboard for a clean bath sheet and hand towel, and put them on Ollie’s bed. She was bound to be a ‘girlfriend’ girlfriend, wasn’t she? But, then again, how could he? Just spring it on her …

  Truthfully, though, she knew exactly how. Olly didn’t think like the rest of them. He was the polar opposite of his brother. Disorganized, laid back to the point of horizontality, nonconformist to a fault. A free spirit. This was exactly like him. It was Caitlin who’d been nothing like she’d expected.

  Olly’s girlfriends up until now were usually, if not exclusively, much like him. Light-hearted, giggly, game. The bungee-jumping type. This girl, this new girl, didn’t seem to be any of those things. She looked serious. And she was quiet.

  Richard had gone to The Swan for a pint with his sons this morning, as was their habit. He’d poured drinks for the girls before he left, and they’d congregated in the warm kitchen, apart from Megan, who could not, of course, be roused. Ava held court in her bouncy chair, gurgling and flailing happily so long as someone cooed over her every couple of minutes, while Emily made bread sauce and chattered easily. Caitlin had been really hard to draw in, giving short answers to their questions, and eventually excusing herself, ostensibly to make telephone calls to her own family. Emily had raised an eyebrow and smirked. ‘Not Olly’s usual!’ Gigi had raised a finger – ssh – to her lips. But she’d been thinking the same.

  Under the bright spotlight of Gigi’s spoon-wielding attention now, Caitlin helped herself to a few vegetables, no potatoes, roast or mashed, and a ladle of gravy Thumbelina couldn’t have had a strip wash in.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got enough, love? There’s plenty …’ Gigi couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Leave her be, Mum.’ Oliver’s tone was gentle, and he smiled at her, but Gigi caught the soft and subtle realignment of loyalties in his words.

  Eventually, Richard finished carving and, with the platter passed around and crackers pulled (this felt odd and slightly awkward, ever since the youngest child stopped being enchanted by the pungent bang, or interested enough in the ‘gift’ within to clamber on the carpet to find it), the family ate.

  Richard seemed suddenly to remember the required public vote of thanks owed to his wife, and clinked his glass formally with his knife, though there was scarcely enough noise to merit it.

  ‘To the ever competent Gigi. Thanks, darling. For the delicious lunch.’

  For some reason Gigi’s imagination conjured up the highly charged table scene in Moonstruck, where Olympia Dukakis toasts her husband in dramatic Italian. ‘Ti amo.’ ‘Ever competent’ was hardly ‘Ti amo’, even if it came with a ‘darling’. Hey ho.


  Gigi saw Caitlin and Olly exchange a glance she couldn’t immediately interpret, and then, as he held his glass aloft and took a deep breath, she knew at once.

  ‘Before we all get stuck in again, I had one more little thing …’

  And Gigi found, to her surprise, that she wanted to shout NO. Almost as much as she had wanted to throw the turkey. She didn’t even know why. It came from somewhere deep within her. From the uterus, she thought.

  And it wasn’t your run of the mill ‘no one’s good enough for my boy’ stuff. She couldn’t get Christopher married to Emily quickly enough. She’d adored the girl since the first time she’d met her, in the second summer of their university years. She’d loved her ready laugh, and her earthy frankness, and her transformative effect on Gigi’s frankly uptight son. She’d practically cheered when she’d changed Christopher’s sheets after their first stay, when Emily had been meant to be sleeping down the hall in the guest bed, and found a balled-up pair of pink lacy knickers.