Hens Dancing

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘No room at the inn,’ he says lightly. ‘But yours is the best offer I’ve had for Christmas, thank you, Giles, and all of you. I would love to, but I can’t. I’m going to see my parents in Newmarket, so I’ll open your present there. But thank you for asking me.’

  I slump onto the sofa, relieved but a little deflated.

  December 24th

  Rose, Tristan and Theo burst into the house at a moment of high squalor. The Beauty has emptied a packet of icing sugar onto the kitchen floor and is making patterns with it, unnoticed because Rags has just given birth to a black puppy and is in the midst of squeezing a second one into the world.

  ‘I thought she just had worms, Mummy, but she was pregnant. I think they’re Digger’s. How sweet. Black Russells. Can we keep them?’

  Giles and Felix are ablaze with excitement, following me around, taking it in turns with the puppy, which they have wrapped in one of The Beauty’s T-shirts. The second puppy is scarcely given a moment with its mother before it is tucked into one of those blasted socks which are still all over the house and not in any sock drawers. The telephone rings incessantly, the answerphone is bleeping and shouting in my study and a medley of Christmas carols plays in the sitting room, put on at breakfast time and now repeating for about the seventieth time.

  ‘Let’s call them Holly and Ivy,’ suggests Felix, as ‘The Running of the Deer’ warbles through the house.

  ‘Let’s call them The Ghost of Christmas Past and hope they’re just a bad dream,’ I mutter under my breath. I’ll kill David. I’ll kill Digger, the foul, sodding brute. Am now running on empty as far as goodwill goes.

  ‘Hello, darlings,’ says Rose, swooping all of us into her fragrant, silken embrace. Tears smart in my eyes. I have never been so pleased to see anyone in my life. Giles has ducked out of the collective hug to answer the telephone. He leaves it dangling and charges over to me, grinning.

  ‘Mum, Mum, it’s Dad. They’ve had the twins and they’re going to call them Holly and Ivy. It’s just like the puppies. It’s totally cool.’

  Tristan gauges the situation as soon as he walks in, dumps the heap of expensively wrapped presents and interesting carrier bags he is carrying and reaches into one for a bottle. The cork cracks against the ceiling and rebounds into The Beauty’s icing sugar, creating a powder fountain. Doubled up with manic, hysterical laughter I manage to reach the telephone to congratulate Charles.

  ‘Well done. How lovely to have two little girls. Send Helena our love.’

  Only when I get off the telephone do I realise that I truly am happy for Charles and Helena. I harbour not an ounce of bitter lemon about it, and while I can see that for them, their news is good, it is not half as engrossing as ours.

  ‘Mum, Mum, look. She’s just had another one. It’s white and it’s got legs about the size of a shrew. Let’s call it Lowly.’

  It is a positive relief to find there is no wood left in the stack by the fire. Peaceful ten minutes in the barn kicking logs is just what I need to restore equilibrium.

  December 25th

  ‘Gently lead those with young.’ My mother cannot stop singing this reference to pregnant sheep from the Messiah. She is enchanted by the puppies, and likes Lowly best because he is not a Black Russell, and even at this early stage shows signs of having the chiselled profile and loglike physique of Egor.

  ‘It is extraordinary that they can do that,’ she muses.

  ‘Do what, Granny?’ asks Giles, lurking by the puppy basket taking photographs.

  ‘Oh, you know, mating and stuff,’ she replies vaguely. Giles is not easily put off.

  ‘You mean have two different fathers for one litter of puppies?’

  ‘Yes, darling.’ She smiles fondly at him through lopsided specs, relieved that he already understands.

  ‘People can do it too,’ continues Giles, with relentless logic. ‘Or do Daddy’s new babies count as another litter?’

  My mother effects deafness and hurries towards the drinks tray. We drink toasts to all the young, including Holly and Ivy-Eff, as Tristan has christened the Cambridge twins. The toasts involve three bottles of champagne among Rose, Tristan, Desmond, my mother, The Gnome and me. We need the buffer of alcohol to be able to cope with the noisiest array of Christmas presents ever. The Beauty and Theo have a trumpet and a drum. Dreadful. They are laying waste to the architect-designed toy kitchen, and have posted a lot of black plastic spaghetti into the video recorder. It turns out that Tristan is in fact the architect who designed the kitchen.

  ‘I could have got you that for free,’ he says, and is kicked hard on the shins by Rose. She glares murderously at him.

  ‘That is such an annoying thing to say.’

  Worse than Theo and The Beauty’s noise is that of the CD player Gawain has sent the boys, along with ten garage and house CDs. Hopes that they will not master the instructions are soon dashed. We cower for a while, then banish them to a bedroom.

  ‘They’ll come down when they’re cold, and it won’t be for hours,’ says my mother gleefully, pulling her chair closer to the fire and tipping a good measure of red wine into her glass. The Gnome is very overcome, and having chosen a small chair close to my mother with a good view of the Christmas tree, he sits in silence, smiling, but with a fat emotional tear strolling occasionally down his increasingly pink cheek. He usually spends Christmas Day alone with a nut roast in his caravan, but this year my mother insisted that he come here with her.

  ‘I just couldn’t bear the thought of his little face, woebegone at the window,’ she explains.

  The Gnome contributes a dish of lentils and some fifty-five per cent proof vodka which he makes into jellies with a packet of Rowntree’s raspberry. We sample it before lunch, and it improves the cracker jokes no end. Felix’s is the best, put to my mother who sits next to him.

  ‘Granny, listen. How do hens dance?’ Granny is puzzled.

  ‘I don’t know, you tell me, Felix.’

  Felix shoots her a brimming look. ‘Chick to chick,’ he said triumphantly.

  December 28th

  Giles appears in my room at an ungodly hour, hair dishevelled, face lit with excitement.

  ‘Mum, quick, look out of the window.’

  It has snowed heavily in the night, and the garden is a chaste sheet of gleaming white, undulating slightly where lawn meets drive, but otherwise pure. ‘I’ve woken Felix. Will you come and help us build a snowman?’

  Giles is evidently in a hurry; he is eating bread and peanut butter and is already wrapped in three jerseys, a scarf and a pair of woolly gloves. His face is scarlet from two minutes in my warm bedroom.

  ‘Out you go,’ I propel him towards the door. ‘I’ll be there in a minute.’

  The Beauty is convinced that the white floor show has been laid on especially for her, and dances on the doorstep, a genial gnomic figure in her bobble hat and glittering green wellies. She refuses to come out further, making blowing noises and shaking her head when coaxed. Instead she drags her deckchair onto the doorstep and climbs into it, hugely pleased with the spectacle of her mother and brothers rolling a vast white snowball in a shrinking spiral around the lawn. When the snowball is taller than Giles, we wedge it in the middle of the garden.

  ‘It’s got to be on a kind of rugby-ball tee,’ explains Giles, who is operations manager. ‘Now for the head.’ Another ball, another spiralling pattern on the broken-up snow.

  ‘In art, at school, we have to make heads one-fifth the size of the body,’ announces Felix. He inspects the ball doubtfully. ‘Or maybe one-third for snowmen.’

  Putting the head on the body requires Herculean strength, and is finally achieved by the brilliant placing of a plank onto the snowman’s shoulders. I applaud the engineer.

  ‘Well done, Giles, I would never have thought of that.’

  Am dispatched into the house for an outfit. In the kitchen, The Beauty has been giving Rags some tips on mothering. Or maybe she is baby-snatching. The puppy Lowly has been remove
d from the basket with the other puppies, and is in The Beauty’s pram, next to her dolly. Both are wrapped in napkins. Manage to prevent her from picking Ivy up by the tail, and swap Lowly for a toy rhino, hoping she will not notice the difference. We must make a gate to protect Rags and her children from The Beauty’s nannying.

  December 31st

  Giles and Felix have gone to spend New Year with Charles and Helena and all-night television. They are very pleased not to be coming with me to my mother’s party, chiefly because her television is very small and they might be made to join in with embarrassing dancing and singing. The Beauty has not been asked to Cambridge, but she will enjoy a bit of Granny’s party until her bedtime. Accordingly, she arrives in Dalmatian pyjamas and dressing gown. My mother is similarly clad, but not with Dalmatians.

  ‘I’m just going to change,’ she says. ‘Come and talk to Minna and Desmond.’

  Follow her through the hall, and in the glare of the naked bulb there, notice something odd about her head.

  ‘What have you done to your hair? Why is it purple?’

  My mother dips her head and accelerates out of the hall and into the dining room.

  ‘Because I dyed it. Actually, it’s gone a bit wrong. It’s more blue than I intended. I thought I’d read the instructions, but I missed out the gungy stuff, so I added it at the end.’

  Minna and Desmond are snogging in the dining room. My mother squawks briskly and they separate, greet me, and continue with their job of laying the table. My mother hovers, moving candlesticks, fiddling with strands of ivy and trying to find a light for her cigarette. She can’t face going to get dressed because she will have to dry her hair and it will be the colour of blueberries or worse.

  ‘You know, I think it’ll be a really wonderful colour when it’s dry, and it’ll look great with your blue velvet dress,’ I say, thrusting her towards the stairs. ‘Go on, or everyone will be here.’

  ‘She’s asked twenty people and there are only two chickens and some of The Gnome’s lentils,’ Desmond hisses, as soon as she leaves the room. ‘They’ll all get paralytic long before midnight.’

  ‘I’ve brought some vol-au-vents,’ soothes Minna. Desmond grimaces. ‘Well you won’t catch me eating them. I’m going to use up that ham and turkey we’ve still got right now and have a sandwich to keep me going.’

  Minna rolls her eyes.

  ‘He’s always ravenous,’ she says complacently. I wish I made someone feel ravenous all the time.

  Desmond and I always become nostalgic in my mother’s house. In fact Desmond seems unable ever to leave, and lives there in an impromptu fashion, insisting he is on his way back to London. Crammed with ephemera from our childhoods, including every clay or wood figure either of us ever made and brought home, and every macaroni-and-doily calendar, the house slopes and sags like the Moomintroll’s residence. None of the doors shuts properly, and none of them has a key. My mother likes it like this, and although she keeps a bread knife beneath her mattress, she maintains it is for insurance purposes, and not because she is afraid.

  Her friends, all aware of her doorkeeping policy, let themselves in, and we find a throng in the kitchen. The blue hair has worked a treat, and is now a heaped confection adorned with old silk roses, so tall that my mother has to curtsey at each doorway, as if in the court of Marie Antoinette. The only person taller than her hair is David, and his glamour in the shirt I gave him is astonishing. Had not expected it to have such a film star effect, and am quite overcome when he takes his jacket off and the shirt is on show.

  ‘He’s nice,’ Minna whispers, as she passes drinks round. ‘He’s got such lovely broad shoulders. I like that in a man.’

  ‘So much better in a man than in a glass of rum punch, for example,’ agrees Desmond, who likes Minna to look at him alone. He is sporting a black eye this evening from a confrontation at the pub last night over whether Minna could be bought a drink by a man enamoured of her ankle chain. David leans against the mantelpiece with a rapacious woman called Verika.

  ‘Tell me some things about wood and its uses,’ I hear her ask him. God, the depths to which some people will sink. Especially Verika. She has been a friend of my mother’s for ever; she was a famous model, or so she says, and always wears false eyelashes and a feather boa to hide the fact that her neck has turned to scrawn. Her skin is the colour and texture of a pickled walnut. She is very drunk and is trying to pick David up, making eyes at him and licking her rubber lips. Yuck. Nonplussed by the way she keeps bobbing her head and flicking her fringe about, he asks if she has a headache. She throws back her head, revealing perfect pearly teeth, and laughs loud and long. David keeps talking, but begins to shift nervously from foot to foot. Desmond and Minna, who have been sipping the rum punch as they circulate it, tumble over Egor and land on top of me on the sofa, giggling.

  ‘Come on, Venetia. Find someone to dance with. Get David away from Verruca the Vampire and come with us. We’ve cleared the room next door and cranked up Mum’s gramophone. Listen.’

  Above swelling, rolling conversation, music swirls across the room. And David is pulling me to my feet, bowing and saying, ‘Shall we dance?’ Twirling, spinning, rock ’n’ roll. As usual, Desmond is hurling his partner about the room. Luckily Minna only weighs about as much as a bunch of flowers, or he’d have a hernia. Am pleased I wore my floating tulip-red skirt and not the chic black trousers I had planned for a sophisticated and grown-up look. That idea was scuppered by The Beauty before we left home; ever the fashion leader, she clearly thought they were wrong for a party and dropped them into the bath, choosing a moment when I was concentrating on my make-up.

  January 1st

  It is dawn. Haven’t gone to bed. Am delighted to be so advanced. Desmond, Minna, The Gnome, my mother and David are all still up too. Am feeling expansive and adoring. Adore them all. We toast the silver light of next year with sloe vodka. Then we toast Rags’s puppies. David cannot stop laughing as my mother tells the story of all the Christmas Eve miracles. I smoke my twentieth cigarette of the night. Delicious. I haven’t done anything this daring since before I had children.

  January 2nd

  Still hung-over. Thank God the boys aren’t back until tomorrow. Light the fire, put on bedsocks and watch Marilyn Monroe films all afternoon with The Beauty and Minna. We eat a whole tin of Quality Street. David has taken Desmond to a football match. How wholesome men are.

  January 4th

  Dull grey sky and iron cold set in two days ago, and with no wind, or any form of weather at all. Can see no end to it. All the children are ill, chalk-faced with exhaustion and coughing like seasoned smokers. I can hardly do my jeans up, and can only wear one skirt with an elasticated waist because every other item of clothing is too tight. Also have a spot on my chin. It is the only totem of youth on a face otherwise careworn, dissipated and wrinkled. Too cold to try a face pack, so must put up with scaly, sallow skin and pensioner looks until the sun shines. Must rouse myself from torpor and try to persuade the children to write their thank-you letters. Wonder if I can still fake their handwriting? It would be so much easier to do it for them and skip the inevitable battle.

  January 7th

  Fatness peaks this morning, as I try to make myself respectable for first day of term and initial appearance in the school car park. Carefully ironed navy pinstripe trousers slide on with no trouble, although I do have to hold my breath to do them up. The effect is pleasing and businesslike until stooping over The Beauty to wedge her into her shoes. Ping. The button flies across the room, and my midriff, caught unawares, sags like a hammock. Can’t find any safety pins, or a belt, so tie Rag’s lead around the waist and untuck my shirt so it doesn’t show. Why am I bothering? Who will care what I look like?

  ‘Mum, Holly’s pooed by the Aga and I trod in it.’

  Felix limps into the hall, waving a shoe to which a chipolata of puppy shit is attached. Have to turn my face to the wall and force myself to take deep breaths to avert temper overflo
w.

  School car park teems with clean cars and mothers who have had time to put make-up on and who have evidently been to health farms and also the Caribbean during the holidays. Trisha, mother of Peregrine, rushes over to me.

  ‘Hello, Venetia, such a shame not to see you at Bronwyn’s coffee morning. I was sure you’d be there, being so local. Did you forget?’

  She blinks a hedge of emerald mascara at me and smiles.

  ‘I wasn’t asked,’ I reply, hoping to sound disdainful and yet polite. She carries on blithely.

  ‘It was such a hoot. She’s having another one next week, and someone is coming to show us all some jewellery. Why don’t you come, Venetia, it would do you good to get out a bit. I’ll see if I can persuade Bronwyn to invite you, shall I? I’m sure one more wouldn’t make much difference.’

  God, how I loathe her. To my horror, I hear myself saying, ‘Yes, that would be such fun, please do.’

  January 8th

  To Norwich, to purchase fun items in the sales and to find Felix some birthday presents. Wish I had been more organised with family planning and had given birth to him some other time, rather than just after Christmas when everyone is broke and it is difficult to muster energy for making more jellies. The sales are horrible, thronged people with sharp-edged bags barge into us and make The Beauty cry. Am about to brave the toy shop before lunch, in order to purchase Felix yet more bits of plastic to clog up the vacuum cleaner, when The Beauty squeals, ‘Oooh, look!’ and points, smiling across the crowd. The object of her attentions is tall and wears a plaid jacket and sheepskin-lined hat. Standing in front of the jewellery shop window is David. Amazing that The Beauty identified him, as his face is almost invisible between collar and hat, and there are far too many people milling about on the pavement.