London and the South-East

by David Szalay

  ‘Very well, thanks, Mike. Very well. Champagne?’

  ‘I think I need a refill, darling,’ Angela says.

  Mike stands aside. ‘Ladies first.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Have you got an ashtray somewhere, Paul?’ Joan asks, holding an unlit cigarette, her forehead furrowing apologetically. ‘Sure, I’ll just get you one.’ He sets the bottle down, happy to be able to leave the room again. As he leaves, he hears his father and Mike tentatively start talking about the traffic.

  They do not sit down to lunch until two thirty, and everyone is quite tipsy when the order finally comes to move to the table, which is lost under silver-sprayed pine cones, candles, and a twinkling mass of polished cutlery and glass. Smoked salmon and cold toast, posh-looking white wine and some sort of dill sauce are slowly ferried out. Heather sits down last, at the head of the table, flushed with heat and alcohol, and dabs her brow with one of the new linen napkins. Mike, who is sitting next to her, pours her some wine. ‘Thanks,’ she says, and takes a quick sip. ‘Mm!’ She seems pleasantly surprised. ‘Merry Christmas, everyone.’

  There is something slightly insane about the way that Angela is still talking about the Bucks Advertiser. ‘Since they joined forces,’ she’s saying, ‘there’s been less and less about Amersham every week. I can’t believe nothing’s happening. It’s that the paper only has satellite offices now. They’ve closed the old offices, and that’s because they’re only interested in advertising revenue, rather than local news …’ Paul helps Heather take out the small starter plates and washes the wine glasses. It is obvious that his mother and Mike hate each other. When he returns to the table, she is wearing her half-moons and holding a piece scissored out of a newspaper – a letter to the Bucks Advertiser. ‘I have a friend who is a journalist on the south coast,’ she is saying, ‘who once had someone complain to her about their event not being covered. When she asked them who they had contacted at the paper, the person complaining admitted they hadn’t told anyone …’

  ‘Paul, where’s the toilet, mate?’ Mike says loudly, standing up.

  ‘My friend jokes people think she has a crystal ball on her desk,’ Angela presses on, markedly increasing the volume of her voice. ‘Considering the amount of stuff which appears in the papers, I’m sure the Advertiser’s quartet of reporters put a lot of work in and find out what they can and then tell us the readers.’ She is almost shouting now. ‘But why assume, just because you know something, that they have been told, or would know. Yes, they’re supposed to inform the masses, but someone has to tell them first. Or maybe someone knows a repairman who can fix their crystal ball?’ She laughs delightedly.

  Joan, too, politely laughs.

  ‘Haven’t we heard enough about the Advertiser, Mum?’ Paul says.

  She ignores this, but the atmosphere is momentarily icy.

  Joan says, ‘I sometimes read the Hounslow Chronicle.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you start!’ Mike says, standing in the doorway. Then he laughs, to pretend that he was joking.

  ‘Do you need any help, darling?’ Angela asks Paul, putting a hand on his arm. ‘No, I think it’s all right actually,’ he says.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’ll ask Heather.’

  ‘Let me know if you need help carving the bird!’ Mike shouts after him as he leaves.

  Heather is in the kitchen. She looks upset. She says, ‘I think it needs another ten minutes. At least. It’s still a bit pink inside.’

  ‘That’s okay. Why don’t you go in there? I’ll keep an eye on it.’

  ‘I don’t want to go in there,’ she whispers, laughing.

  ‘Where are the kids?’

  ‘Upstairs.’

  Paul opens the door and steps out. It is wonderfully still outside. An empty Christmas silence hangs over all the dead gardens. Though no yuleophile, Paul normally has no problem with Christmas. He is usually able to take it for what it is – which is, for him, primarily a sort of obligation to drink more than usual. This year, though, he has felt oppressed by it – by the unending hysterical imprecation to purchase things; by the tired, insincere imagery of snow and reindeer and holly (none of which he ever sees in real life); by the empty jauntiness of the advertising jingles, and the Christmas singles, and most of all by the sense, screaming out of the TV, in newspapers and magazines, on illuminated billboards in the street, that if you are not happy with all this stuff – look how happy the people in the pictures are! – there must be something wrong with you. Yes, the festival of shopping oppresses him this year.

  There is no one in the kitchen. Saucepans bubble quietly on the hob, and the hot oven hums. Everything is eerily quiet. It is as though everyone has left – only a CD of carols still playing in the empty lounge. (Paul recognises it as Carols from King’s, sung by the choir of King’s College, Cambridge – one of a number of Christmas CDs that Heather purchased the previous week.) Wondering where everyone is, he is shocked to see Heather’s parents and his own still there, listening to the prim prepubescent voices sing ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’. ‘Oh,’ Paul says, unable to hide his surprise. ‘All right?’ Something seems to have happened.

  ‘Where’s Heather?’ he says, after a moment.

  Joan answers. ‘Um, I think she’s upstairs.’

  ‘I think we’re going to eat soon,’ Paul says. ‘The turkey needed a few more minutes.’

  It takes a long time to serve the meal. Finally, they sit down. Just as they are about to start, Angela tings her glass and launches into a pious, long-winded toast – several minutes, including tributes to both Paul’s elder brother Chris, who lives in Rotterdam with his Dutch wife, and Geoff’s sister Jennifer, who lives in a nursing home near Cambridge – ending with the words, ‘So, to Heather.’ Everyone echoes this with drunken gusto, and they start to eat.

  Outside, the dusk is leaden.

  An hour later, and in the dark Heather is presenting the pudding, under its diaphanous blue ghost of flame. Her father made it himself. There is applause. Paul, now very drunk, wolf-whistles. Then the lights are switched on and it is served. While the plates are passed round, Angela – who quietly refused a portion herself, saying, ‘No, thank you, I can’t stand it’ – says, ‘Well, Geoff’s too modest to mention it, but he’s a published poet now.’

  ‘Published?’ Mike says. ‘Where?’

  She ignores him. It is as if her face and Mike were magnets of the same polarity – wherever he is, her nose turns the other way.

  ‘Where?’ he says, and Geoff himself mumbles, ‘Bucks Advertiser.’

  Mike laughs.

  ‘Yes,’ Angela says. ‘He had a poem published in the Advertiser.’

  ‘Did you?’ says Joan. ‘How impressive.’ She smiles at Geoff, whose eyes are gloomily following the boat of brandy sauce as it circles the table. He knows that his wife will speak for him, and she does. ‘He did,’ she says. ‘And I’d like to read it to you.’

  ‘Oh God, can I go now, Mum?’ Marie says, in a petulant whine.

  ‘Don’t be so rude,’ Angela says.

  Marie scowls at her. The children do not quite understand how they and Paul’s parents fit together – a perplexity that is entirely mutual.

  Though expressionless, Geoff’s heavy face, with its prominent dark eyebrows and five o’clock shadow, has turned brick red. An embarrassed wall. ‘Really,’ he says, ‘I don’t know if this is the right time …’

  ‘It is the right time.’

  ‘Mum,’ Paul says, ‘if he doesn’t want you to …’

  ‘He does want me to.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s the right time,’ Geoff says moodily. His arms are tightly folded.

  ‘Why not? It’s a lovely poem. I’m sure everyone would love to hear it.’ And Angela looks particularly to Joan, who, with her ‘Did you? How impressive’, had shown such a kind interest in Geoff’s work.

  ‘Well …’ Joan says. ‘Of course, but …’

/>   ‘If you’re going to read it, just read it. Get it over with,’ Geoff says, pouring himself a full glass of red wine. He is, in fact, quite proud of the poem. Angela was not wrong when she insisted that he did want her to read it out. ‘It’s called “Sanatorium”,’ she says proudly. And in a slightly – only slightly – strange, otherworldly voice, she starts to read.

  White, rectilinear,

  on a green alp.

  From the terrace –

  white mountains.

  Vegetable soup.

  Fresh loaf.

  Water from out of

  the white mountains.

  Glacial lake

  in a bowl of rock.

  Cowbells echo

  from the white mountains.

  High summer pasture –

  lying in the grass

  with closed eyes.

  ‘That’s really very nice,’ says Joan, following a well-mannered silence.

  ‘Thank you,’ Geoff mutters. He starts to eat his pudding. ‘This is very good,’ he says.

  In the downstairs loo Paul blows his nose. The tiny frosted window is open a little and the temperature is more or less the same as outside. It smells of air-freshener, chemical cleanliness, a plasticky approximation of pine. He looks at himself in the mirror. His eyes are still slightly pink. Why had it happened? The tears. He does not know. He just feels unstable, easily upset. Perhaps that is why the poem touched him so unexpectedly. His father had listened to it without expression on his brick-red face. Paul had not known, or suspected, that he wrote poetry. And he would not have suspected, either, the feelings which the poem timidly tried to express. It had made him sharply aware of how little he knew his father. As he stood up, murmuring, ‘I’m just going to the loo,’ he had heard him say, in answer to a question of Joan’s, ‘Well I think I’m quite influenced by Japanese haiku.’ I think I’m quite influenced by Japanese haiku! Who was this man? Paul did not know him, whoever he was. He knew his father as a tense, distant, empirically-minded headmaster. The laughterless driver of a black Rover (property of Imperial Chemical Industries) who liked snooker and political memoirs and watching the news. A seventies manager with a hairstyle like early Arthur Scargill and a collection of cardigans the colour of autumn leaves. A former pipe smoker, resentful at not having had a university education. This was the man Paul knew. Haiku had nothing to do with him.

  Nor lying in a high-summer pasture, listening to the lazy clatter of cowbells. Though the poem’s longing was pathetically naive, Paul sees – still sniffling in the nippy loo – that he too is in love with the idea of hiding himself somewhere. Somewhere impossibly pure. How he would love that. It shocked him, though, that his father would even imagine such things. Why had it shocked him? He does not know why he found it so upsetting either. He blows his nose a final time, and flushes the toilet.

  In the lounge, Mike’s CD is playing loudly.

  So here it IS, merry Christmas,

  Everybody’s having fun …

  ‘There you are,’ Heather says. ‘We’re opening the presents.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Paul sits at the table and lights a cigarette. In his dark, anxious, weepy, drunken mood, the thought of unwrapping presents depresses him. With something approaching disgust, he watches his father claw inexpertly at the paper wrapping of his present from Mike and Joan. It is a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. ‘Thank you so much,’ Geoff says, holding it and staring at it as if it were a newborn baby. Then he looks up, meeting the eyes of Mike and Joan in turn with an innocent, small-toothed smile. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘It’s our pleasure,’ Mike says, magnanimously. ‘Where’s Angela’s present, Joanie?’ Joan searches through the stuff. ‘Um. Here.’ She holds it out to her.

  Not enjoying herself, but with a chilly little smile, Angela unpicks the bright paper. Inside is a box of mint chocolates. ‘Thank you so much,’ she says, setting it aside. ‘You really shouldn’t have.’

  ‘It was our pleasure,’ Mike says. He is enjoying himself. ‘To give,’ he says, ‘is better than to receive.’

  Most of the presents have now been opened and the room is ankle-deep in crumpled husks of wrapping paper. The children have squealed with joy at the mini iPods they received from Mike and Joan, and said unsmiling thank-yous to Angela and Geoff for the old-fashioned paperbacks their impatient fingers found. Paul has tried on the crimson Pringle jumper his in-laws offered him. (It was too small – the scrawniness of his arms, the soft lumpiness of his torso cruelly exposed in the clinging lambswool.) Heather said, ‘This will be useful,’ when she saw that her present from Paul’s parents was a food blender, and went misty-eyed with delight when she unwrapped the tall, oxblood leather boots her mother had selected for her. From Paul, she received a huge bottle of Chanel No 5 – not imaginative, but she did not expect that from him. Her thank-you kiss was perfunctory. Paul himself seemed out of sorts, withdrawn, depressed. He sat at the table, not even feigning enthusiasm when presents were handed to him. When he opened the one from his parents, it was so inappropriate that he laughed sadly – a pair of hiking boots. Very expensive ones. He nodded, trying to understand, while his mother went on about Gore-tex and breathable fabrics and ankle support. And he felt a painful resurgence of his earlier sadness when he reflected that by presenting him with these boots his parents had betrayed a profound, and perhaps wilful, failure to understand who he was. At this moment of sorrow, Mike is trying to get his attention, bobbing in front of him as he sits with the boots – one of them still wrapped in tissue paper in its box – on his lap. He wants to take a picture using his new digital camera, and when Paul looks up the blue-white flash immediately hits his stunned retinas. He starts to smile, but it is too late.

  ‘What about that?’ Mike says, indicating the huge blue box, while erasing his image of Paul in pain. ‘Whose is that? What lucky ess aitch one tee gets to open that?’

  ‘It’s Paul’s,’ Heather says quietly. She has just lit a cigarette and is smoking – uneasily in front of her parents. She seems nervous and holds her lower lip with her teeth.

  ‘Go on, Paul.’ Mike puts the viewfinder to his eye.

  Paul stubs out his cigarette, and slowly standing, says, ‘I know what it is.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Heather says.

  ‘I saw it in the shed.’

  ‘But you never go in the shed!’

  ‘I was looking for a saw.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To cut the tree down to size. It was too big, remember? I had to borrow a saw from Martin.’

  Everyone watches – except the children, who are upstairs, downloading tracks for their iPods – as Paul approaches the blue present. He sighs, and touches its shiny surface, looking at it as a sculptor who has lost his enthusiasm for his art might look at a new block of marble – yet another bloody block of marble – bored and demoralised. ‘How the fuck am I going to open this?’ he mutters. He is aware of the extreme loutishness of his demeanour – his determined, obtuse failure to evince even the slightest excitement, the least hint of enjoyment – and he finds it offensive himself, distasteful, selfish, ugly. Yet he is somehow unable to stop himself, which only intensifies his distress. As he faces the horizontal blue monolith, he feels the silent disapproval of the room behind him. His mother and Mike, despite their instant loathing for each other, have largely sat on their writhing animosity and smiled, so as not spoil things for everyone else – and yet here he is, joylessly unimpressed by his huge blue gift, and making not the slightest effort to hide it. Quite the opposite – sourly, he seems to be exulting in his unpleasantness. Finding a taped seam with his finger, he starts to tear, pulling the paper off in strips, slowly revealing the box. ‘It’s a TV,’ he says, in the tone of someone finding a ticket under their wiper. The camera unleashes its sheer flash and, wearily, he finishes pulling off the paper. ‘Is it one of the flat-screen ones?’ Mike asks, and Joan says, ‘How on earth did you get it here from the shed? It must weigh a ton.�
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  ‘One of the neighbours helped me.’

  ‘You’ll enjoy watching this, Heather,’ Paul says.

  ‘So will you.’

  ‘Oh, yes. So will I.’ His voice is openly sarcastic and sneering, and he knows as soon as he has spoken that it was too much. ‘Hea-ther …’ he hears Mike say, and turns, just in time to see her leave. ‘Oh, God,’ he mutters, and shouts half-heartedly after her – ‘Heather …’ Somewhere upstairs a door slams.

  As he trudges, sighing, up the narrow stairs, his performance already seems strange and inexplicable to him. Shameful. Why had he been so determined to spoil things? And he has spoiled them. They are spoiled. Despite his shame, however, he is still angry. In this state, he knocks on the bedroom door and opens it. It is dark, and he fumbles drunkenly for the light switch. When he finds it, the scene is desolate – the windows black, the morning’s mess of unwanted apparel on the floor. Heather is lying on the unmade bed, her skirted haunches turned to where he stands in the doorway, her small feet drawn up under them. ‘Heather …’ he says. She does not move. ‘I’m sorry.’ Still she does not move. ‘Look … You’d better come back downstairs. I’m sorry.’

  He is halfway down the stairs when he stops and, with a whispered ‘For fuck’s sake’, turns and stomps back up. To his surprise she is not where she was. She is standing up, looking at herself in the mirror. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘You’re coming down?’

  ‘Piss off, Paul.’

  ‘What do you mean, piss off?’

  ‘You don’t deserve anything,’ she says gnomically, still not looking at him.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ She ignores this question. ‘The TV? Are you talking about the TV?’ He finds he is shouting, and makes an effort to lower his voice. ‘It’s true you’ll watch it more than me. That’s fucking obvious …’