Comfort and Joy (10 page)

Without the text, I tell myself, I would be hinged, stuffing the turkey like I do every year, not finding it remotely bosomy
or gapey or porny. But the man from the Connaught’s text has undone me. We normally communicate by phone or by email; texts
are rare beasts, and I don’t think I fully understand the form in this context. Most of the night and all of this morning,
I have been poring over single characters as though they held some eternal secret. He’s put two kisses. Is that normal? Is
two kisses just what he does? Is it in fact the definition of normal-for-him – does he send everyone who doesn’t get ‘best
wishes’ or ‘yours’ two kisses, and am I being sent the same number of kisses as, like, his nan? I reach for the phone again
to check, smearing the keypad in sausagemeat.
Happy Christmas, Clara. Xx
. Two kisses, one big, one small.

Yes, I know. I know that text doesn’t look like much. But … actually. First, note the comma. I feel proud of his comma, and
of being his comma’s recipient. The man from the Connaught can punctuate, and that works very well for me, attractiveness-wise.
Second, he sent me the text just before one this morning. He was thinking of me, and maybe he was even thinking of me while
he was lying in bed. So. That is not entirely insignificant. Third, the kisses. Perhaps they denote an agony of longing. And
what’s with the first, big, kiss? Is that a kiss with tongues, or does the kiss automatically capitalize itself on his phone
because it comes after a full stop? So you see my
quandary: that text, that so-what, nothing-looking text, could actually mean, ‘I am lying in bed thinking about you, in an
agony of longing. These kisses mean I love you. I’m snogging with tongues. Actually, Clara, I want to marry you. Merry Christmas,
my darling.’

Well, not the last bit, obviously. But the rest – well, it’s possible, I think, smiling to myself at my own idiocy as I paint
Nigella’s maple-syrup-and-butter mix onto the bird’s H-cupped bosom. Not necessarily probable, granted. But at least he texted.
He texted! And even as I’m smiling at myself, there’s a twinge somewhere in my abdomen, a little dart of hope. I think the
penultimate sentence of the text probably doesn’t denote an imminent proposal – let’s get a grip here. And obviously I don’t
want him to marry me, because I’m married already. But still.

Daubs of butter, bacon on the breast, and – God, my back: I’m bent in two, like a crone – the bird goes into the oven. I turn
my attention to the potatoes. We had a massive peeling session yesterday evening – me, the children, various rellies and friends
who were hanging about – but I think the potatoes suffer from being peeled and left in water overnight, and frankly, if it
were down to me, we’d chuck the turkey and feast on roast potatoes and bread sauce. So here they are, all four kilos of them,
and here I am with my peeler in my hand and a cup of tea at my side, Radio 4 in the background, enjoying the last few moments
of solitude I’ll have all day.

I know exactly what’s going to happen in approximately ten minutes. It is what always happens, and what will continue to happen
until the End of Days (I push that thought right out of my head, because it makes me feel unpleasantly claustrophobic. I used
to have it a lot, usually in various domestic contexts: I’d look at Sam sleeping, and think, ‘Until the End of Days,’ and
sometimes I’d feel panicky and short of breath though
I know I should have felt comforted, secure, safe, bathed in the golden glow of eternal matrimony. But let’s not go there
again). Anyway, what will happen is that Pat will come downstairs and she won’t have put her teeth in yet. Yes, I know – they’re
her teeth and if she wants to walk around with a broken-looking, caved-in face, it’s her lookout. And maybe the teeth are
uncomfy; in fact I expect they are – how could they not be? Nevertheless, I will be temporarily irritated. I will also be
irritated by the fact that, despite my having bought her four different dressing gowns over the years, she will choose to
come downstairs in her sweet, old-lady, see-through nightdress. Why are sweet, old-lady nighties never sufficiently opaque?
Buttoned up to the neck, cuffed to the wrist, virginally white, starched-seeming, practically Amish – but you can always see
the bosoms. And the … I don’t know what to call my mother-in-law’s vagina. I don’t understand it: my own nighties – less Amish,
more flesh-exposing – are as densely woven as you like. I could stand in front of Klieg lights and nobody would see anything.
Pat’s nighties, not so. Good morning, Pat, and – hey! Long time no see! – good morning to you, Pat’s tits and arse. Greetings,
o loins.

And here she comes. ‘You should have told me you were up,’ she says, toothlessly. I can see her nipples. ‘I’d have come down
and helped.’ She turns her back to get to the kettle, and yup – there is Pat’s arse, glinting pearlescent through the fabric.
And then she turns round again and … oh God. There it is, clearly visible and – help me – drawing my eye to it like a magnet.

I am suddenly filled with a sort of carpe diem vigour. If you can’t carp the diem on Christmas Day, when can you? So after
I’ve kissed Pat good morning and wished her a merry Christmas and stuck two pieces of bread in the toaster for her (I’ve cleverly
remembered to buy her the plastic white bread she likes; she can’t eat wholemeal bread because she says the seedy
bits remind her of ‘wee moths’), I say, boldly, for the first time ever in the seven years I’ve known her, ‘Pat. You know
your nightie’s completely see-through?’

‘Is it now, darling?’ says Pat, looking down at herself. ‘Aye, so it is. Most of them are. D’you have any red jam? I don’t
like marmalade.’

‘Here,’ I say, fetching the jar. ‘But, Pat?’

‘Yes?’ says Pat.

‘Do you not feel … do you not think maybe a dressing gown?’

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

Tricky question. Admitting I mind suggests I am somehow affronted by Pat’s parts, which – though true up to a point – isn’t
something I want to emphasize. I mean, what a downer for her, on Christmas morning, to feel her genitalia are somehow spoiling
the vibe.

‘Me?’ I laugh, like this: ha ha ha. ‘Me? Of course not. We’re all the same, as I’m always telling Maisy.’

‘Oh good,’ says Pat, sitting down to breakfast, so that all I can see now are her practically bared breasts.

‘But, you know … other people,’ I say. ‘The boys, and Sam, and …’

‘Sam’s seen it all before,’ Pat says cheerfully of her sixty-something nudity. I have no idea of what goes on any more. Perhaps
they watch
Sex and the City
together starkers.

‘I, er, right. But the boys, and people are going to start turning up in a bit, and I just think, I just wonder …’

‘Ah, they’re just my wee diddies,’ Pat says. ‘I’ll go and get dressed in a minute. Now, what can I do to help?’

And that is the start of Christmas morning.

Everything happens at once, as it always seems to on Christmas morning. The children open their stockings after breakfast
– I
make them wait until then these days – and they all seem gratifyingly delighted with them; Jack and Charlie don’t eye up Maisy’s
with any discernible dissatisfaction. And then there’s a mini-lull, where it feels almost like an ordinary day, if we had
ordinary days and lived in an idealized world. The house is calm, the children are in their rooms playing with their new things,
everything is clean and shiny and there’s a delicious smell. It is, frankly, blissfully domestic. Pat has put in her teeth
and put on some underwear, as well as some clothes. There’s champagne chilling on the balcony, what with the fridge still
being crammed to capacity (I don’t know why I buy stuff as though we were going to be under siege for days: the shops re-open
tomorrow). King’s College carols are streaming through the house via my computer; we even have a fire going in the sitting
room. It’s all extremely charming: a perfect scene, really. And I am delighted as I look at it. All that haring around, all
that effort, and I think the result is worth it. Here we are: it’s Christmas Day and the surface, at least, is gloriously
lovely.

My former husband, Robert, is the first to arrive. He’s been living in New York for the past three years, and Paris before
that, which means the quality of his presents is really excellent. And I’m pleased to see him, too, obviously. Robert has
gone, pretty much seamlessly, from being my husband to being my very good friend; we speak two or three times a week and hang
out with the children when he’s in London for work, which is every four weeks. It helped that I had already met Sam just before
we separated: it cut the time I spent wailing and weeping. It also helped that I wasn’t entirely inclined to weep and wail
for long, once the shock of being dumped had passed. That’s the main thing, really, about dumpage – the humiliation. Is that
an awful thing to say? It’s what I felt, at any rate. Twenty per cent sad; eighty per cent crushed with humiliation. Just
really embarrassed, as though I’d farted exceptionally loudly, fusillade-style, at a very quiet wedding (an apt analogy, that
– in all the time we were married, I was never aware of Robert having any bodily functions of the evacuative sort. He pooed
in secret.
For eight years
).

Which isn’t to say that being dumped doesn’t suck, even when nothing very dramatic happens and you just peter out for no very
good reason. You’re like a stiletto when everyone’s wearing wedges, all alone and unloved, gathering dust at the back of the
wardrobe, not yet knowing – because you’re too busy feeling miserable, and, er, also because you’re a shoe and your brains
aren’t that huge – that your time will come again. I don’t mean that my time with Robert will come again – Jesus, what a thought
– but rather that you don’t realize, when you’re a shoe, that everything is cyclical. At some point you – shunned shoe, shoe
of shame, shoe with the wrong heel and the unfashionably pointy toe, shoe with shoe-babies – will be in demand. You will be
the shoe du jour. Sure, as Pat says, as eggs is eggs. But it’s pointless telling a shoe that at the time of its despair.

‘Hello, Clara,’ says Robert. ‘You look gorgeous. Merry Christmas.’

‘My mummy always looks gorgeous,’ says Maisy, who has appeared at my side, wearing a pair of felt antlers on her head and
a dress with an appliquéd Christmas pudding on the front. ‘It’s because she has beautiful boobies. Daddy has
hairy
boobies, because he is a man. You’re not my daddy, Uncle Robert. Come and see my presents now please.’

Robert sweeps her up and gives her a kiss. ‘Boobies?’ he says, raising an eyebrow at me. Robert’s innate fastidiousness, which
is legendary – he edits fashion magazines, and this has only made him worse – extends to language. ‘Why not “knockers”, while
you’re at it? Or “jugs”, like the trusty print companion of my teenage years?’

‘I didn’t teach her “boobies”,’ I say. ‘Obviously. She learned it at school. It could be a lot worse.’

‘Come on, Uncle Robert,’ says Maisy, already halfway back up the stairs.

‘Are you okay?’ says Robert, more solicitously than one might have expected.

‘I’m delirious,’ I say. ‘Everything’s fine.’

‘Good,’ he says, hanging up his coat. ‘I’ll just take these presents up and see my children. And I’ll make you a drink. My
mum’s about half an hour away. Nice rack, by the way. As we say in the twenty-first century. Or
boobies
, if you must.’ And, with a snigger, he runs up after Maisy. He’s very annoying, my former husband, but he still makes me
laugh. (I never, ever wonder – literally, not once – what things would be like if we’d stayed together. I don’t think he does
either. We were rather well matched, in that respect.)

Robert is followed by Kate, my mother, a vision in what appears to be – bold move, even by her standards – real fur. She is
accompanied by my sisters, Evie and Flo, who are respectively thirty and thirty-two; Max, Kate’s fourth husband, is en route
from Devon, where he has spent the morning with his own grown-up children and grandchildren, and won’t get here until teatime.
I’m making it sound like my mother and sisters walk through the door in a normal, walking-through-the-door kind of way. What
actually happens is, they sort of
explode
into the hall, thus:

‘Who’s got the truffle?’ This is Kate. ‘Hellodarlinghappy-Christmas. Flo! Did you get the truffle?’

‘I have it in a little pot of rice, packed all sweetly,’ says Flo.

‘Like a little special egg, in a nest,’ says Evie, who is wearing a silver lamé vintage dress of great beauty and dragging
a vast stack of presents behind her on a red plastic sleigh.

‘Yuck, eggs,’ says Flo. ‘Hen periods. Sickness. Don’t say eggs, Eve.’

‘Eggs,’ says Evie, smiling an angelic smile.

‘God, how I loathed periods,’ says Kate, taking off her coat and handing it to me, her trusty major-domo. It
is
real fur. ‘The bliss of the menopause. You should write about it, Clara. I don’t know why people moan about it – there is
literally
nothing nicer.’

‘Everyone is saying periods,’ says Evie. ‘Periods, periods. Can they stop? It’s kind of grossing me out.’

‘Get in and shut the door, it’s freezing,’ I say, kissing them all. ‘Happy Christmas!’

‘Oh God – yes! HAPPY CHRISTMAS!’ yell Evie and Flo.

‘Happiest of Christmi,’ says Evie, catching my eye – an old family joke dating back from childhood, when Evie thought it was
spelled ‘Christmus’.

‘The truffle needs to go in the fridge right now,’ says Kate. ‘Clara! Right this second. The truffle. The fridge. They must
meet and become one.’

‘I read that the menopause gave you vaginal dryness,’ says Evie to Kate. ‘That wouldn’t be good.’

‘No,’ says Flo. ‘That would be very challenging.’

‘Except,’ says Evie, ‘there’s always lube.’

‘Vaginal dryness! Absolute nonsense,’ says Kate. ‘You should never believe anything you read. All journalists lie. They’re
paid to lie, basically.’

‘Um,’ I say. I’ve been working on magazines since I was twenty-one. ‘Hello. I’m here.’

‘Shameful profession,’ says Kate. ‘Ghastly. But never mind. The foul deed is done. Though I still don’t understand what was
wrong with medicine.’