Comfort and Joy (5 page)

Treading gingerly over these – Pat immediately sets about tidying up, until I tell her to leave it – we arrange ourselves
in a little huddle near the tree, which is nine feet tall and shining like a beacon, bedecked with white fairy lights, the
red baubles I bought when I left home and lugged about with me from house to house over the years, and a manageably scant
number of child-made decorations (sweet but often hideous, let’s be frank). The tree is beautiful. It’s blazing magnificently
by the window, with an obscene pile of presents already underneath. The sight of these presents – they cascade all the way
around the room because no under-tree is roomy enough to contain them – would be enough to cause any sane person to denounce
capitalism and join Class War on the spot, but there are only so many because there are so many of us: sixteen on the day,
plus all the friends and relatives who’ve sent the children gifts.

We’re eight to supper, not counting the boys, who have now decided to eat on their laps in front of the telly, all the better
to add to the chaos of the room. There’s me and Sam and Pat, Tamsin and Jake, my friend Hope, who was going to
come with ’this amazing man I met’, except the amazing man seems to have been mislaid en route and now Hope’s running late,
and Sophie and Tim, who are that strange species: parent-friends from your child’s school. They’re very ostentatiously happily
married and have three small children aged five and under; we know each other vaguely from morning drop-off and a year’s worth
of quiz nights and school concerts. Their raison d’être seems to be to disprove my theory about marriage and children doing
things to relationships: they are almost provocatively happy together, and consequently not un-smug. I kind of have the feeling
Tamsin and Sophie aren’t exactly hitting it off, but I’m going on body language so I may be wrong.

‘All done, then?’ Tamsin says to me.

‘Pretty much. I had a last-minute burst this afternoon. I went to Oxford Street.’

‘That’s madness.’

‘I know. But I needed to.’

‘I’m surprised you’re looking so unstressed,’ Tamsin says. ‘Oxford Street on the 23rd would kill me. I’m going tomorrow. It’s
practically deserted on Christmas Eve.’

‘You have nerves of steel.’

‘Clara went for a drink, didn’t you, babe? To the
Connaught
,’ Sam says.

Everyone looks at me as though this were the most earth-shattering piece of news.

‘The Connaught?’ says Sophie. ‘But what about the children?’

‘I’d say it was more of a question of “The children? But what about the Connaught?” ’ says Tamsin dryly.

‘What about them?’ I say. ‘They were here. Pat looked after Maisy. Sam was around. I just had the one drink.’ More or less.

‘Goodness,’ says Tim. ‘A mother, drinking alone in a hotel.’ He says this much as one might say, ‘Goodness, a man, legs akimbo,
self-fellating.’

I force a smile and point out to Tim that it’s 2009, and that a shop-weary person – a woman, even one who has procreated –
might find themselves liking the idea of a little light refreshment, especially if that person is in the middle of organizing
Christmas for sixteen people.

‘Sure, sure,’ says Tim, whose manner is quite annoying. ‘Roger rog. Even so … would you go for a drink by yourself to a strange
hotel, Soph?’

‘It’s not a strange hotel,’ says loyal Tamsin. ‘It’s the Connaught. It’s the Queen Mother of hotels.’

‘Of course not, Timboleeno,’ laughs Sophie. ‘If I wanted a drink, I’d come home and have it with you. And the kids.’

‘I hate my kids,’ says Jake, which is startling enough to move the conversation on, though ‘Timboleeno’ worked for me. ‘Bloody
little buggers. I’d hole up in the Connaught and not come out for a week.’ He squeezes my arm. ‘Good on you, Clara. Hope you
got good and pissed.’

‘You can’t mean that,’ says Sophie, looking absolutely appalled. ‘About … about hating your kids.’

‘Fuckers, every one,’ Jake says, downing the rest of his red wine in one.

‘Jake’s children are grown up,’ Tamsin explains. ‘He doesn’t hate, like, toddlers. Or babies. Or Cassie.’ Cassie is her six-year-old
daughter, the product of a one-night stand with a man called David, who, I happen to know, had a micro-penis (called Little
Dave – true fact) and who, immediately after sex, did the most enormous poo in her loo. ‘If only his tool had been as large
as his stool,’ Tamsin had said, disgustedly, at the time.

‘I imagine they’re about our age,’ says Tim, ‘Jake’s kids, I mean.’ Tim is, it now strikes me, one of those men who doesn’t
self-edit, causing you to wonder whether he is on the socially crippled end of the autistic spectrum. I asked them to supper
because they’d asked us so many times and we kept saying no,
and on the last day of term I rashly felt I should make amends and have them round to ours. But why two days before Christmas?
Mistake.

‘Older,’ says Sophie, smiling at Sam, whom she clearly fancies. ‘They must be older than us, surely.’ The missus is clearly
‘on the spectrum’ too. Result. I also have the feeling she is my least favourite of things, a mummy-wife, who mothers her
husband as well as her children. There are an awful lot of them about. I bet she lays out his clothes for him the night before.

‘So,’ says Tim. ‘So she – I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name …’

‘Tamsin,’ says Tamsin, not exuding festive spirit.

‘Right,’ says Tim, looking at Jake. ‘Tamsin. So Tamsin isn’t your daughter?’

Jake’s response to this is to hand Sam his empty glass, turn to Tamsin, put both his hands on her bottom, knead her buttocks
vigorously and rhythmically – it’s quite hypnotic – and then stick his tongue down her throat. Tamsin snogs him back enthusiastically.

‘Whoa,’ says Charlie from the sofa. ‘Get a room, grandpa.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ says Jack.

‘I don’t do this with my daughter,’ says Jake, still wet-lipped. ‘Do you?’

‘Well, would you look at that,’ Pat says, with fascinated, almost anthropological interest. ‘Now that’s a cuddle.’ She is
smiling approvingly, her earlier repulsion at the oul’ fella nowhere in evidence. ‘Oh, it’s nice to see a proper cuddle.’

Sophie and Tim stare at Jake and Tamsin in utter, appalled silence, though whether it was the snog or the suggestion of incest
that shut them up is unclear; I’m guessing both. Sam catches my eye and winks. I feel a well of hysteria rising in my stomach,
and whereas if I’d had less to drink I’d have somehow managed to control it, it now comes out in the form of an inelegant,
snorting guffaw. This is what’s so nice about
Sam – well, one of the things. If I’d been hosting this dinner on my own, I’d be mortified by now, desperate to smooth things
over before we all sat down. But Sam and I are allies. He’ll make it okay – he’s professionally charming – and he sees all
of it: the funniness of his mother, the hilarity of the geronto-lurch, the comic aspect of our poor neighbours’ distaste.

‘I’d better go and check on supper,’ I say, still giggling as the doorbell rings. ‘Ah, perfect timing – and let Hope in. Come
down in ten minutes, would you?’

‘Roger rog,’ Sam says, staring straight at me and absolutely po-faced. ‘Now, who wants another drink?’

Hope is crying at the dinner table, wearing a Father Christmas hat and being watched over by a protective Tim. It’s about
a man. It’s always about a man. Men, if you believe what Hope says, are uniquely badly behaved towards her. Within Hope’s
vicinity, men – all men – reach an outlandish level of bastardishness that has to be heard to be believed. Sometimes I make
her swear that such and such an outrage really has happened and that she played no part in provoking it, because I simply
can’t get my head around the level of dreadfulness. This one – the formerly ‘amazing man’ she mislaid on the way to supper
at our house – is no exception. And here she is, sobbing. She looks good crying. She weeps well. Just as well, in the circs.

I met Hope at yoga. I did yoga for three weeks when I was pregnant with Maisy, thinking that given how geriatric I was – thirty-four
– I’d better adjust my being-pregnant method, which with the boys had mostly consisted of lying on the sofa eating rose and
violet creams. Pregnancy yoga and I didn’t get on especially brilliantly, mostly – but not exclusively – because all those
pregnant women farting like billy-o as they contorted themselves used to disable me with laughter. This was frowned upon,
but it really was pretty funny, especially around here: the
women in question were yummy types, with perma-tans and very expensive highlights and banker husbands; the kind of women who
hate being pregnant because it makes them feel ‘fat’, i.e. not a size four. I loved that they farted uncontrollably – it used
to literally make my day: I’d get up in the morning and laugh in pleasurable anticipation. But a couple of them complained
about my constant howling with mirth, and I wasn’t really sure how the classes would help my labour in terms of, you know,
actual human anatomy, so I stopped going. Before that, though, I met Hope in the changing rooms. She wasn’t pregnant – she
was doing some class that would improve her tantric abilities, she said, because she liked having sex ‘for four or five hours’.
She was crying – obviously – over some man or other and we went for a coffee. It turned out we had a couple of friends in
common, and I liked her immediately: calamities aside, there’s something enormously engaging and big-hearted about her.

That was just over five years ago, in which period of time Hope hasn’t had a single relationship that hasn’t ended in abject
disaster. There have been a couple of lying, cheating married men, but they’re really nursery level. Hope has a PhD in this
stuff. One was an illegal immigrant who wanted to marry her. Anybody else would have worked out the visa thing – he clearly
had no personal interest in her, and the photographs in his wallet clearly weren’t of his ‘nephews and nieces’ – but not Hope.
I tried to tell her several times, only to be informed that I didn’t understand the undemonstrative, downright sullen demeanour
of Nigerian people who are madly in love. When I said that Nigerian people seemed perfectly cheerful to me, in love or otherwise,
and that maybe something was just up with her Mr Right, she didn’t speak to me for a couple of weeks. They got married at
Chelsea Town Hall, had a small party – paid for by her – afterwards; he went to the loo halfway through the
speeches and never came back. Mobile dead, no response from his alleged workplace – the whole lot. Then there was the Polish
builder, who combined the renovation of her basement with – well, actually, with the renovation of her basement, if you know
what I mean. He went back to Poland to become a priest. I know – it must have been
crushing
: ‘After this relationship with you, I vow never to sleep with a woman again.’ But there’s more: Hope’s also a magnet for
men with addictions, emotional sadists, men with unusual sexual fetishes, and men who seem to hate women – or maybe just Hope
– to a pathological extent. Hope’s quite suggestible. But she has a good heart, and I find something endearing about the chaos
of her life: eventually she blows her nose, washes her face and – cheerfully – just keeps going, optimism intact.

Hope runs her own company and is in charge of 300 people. She’s very good at her job. It’s just the men thing. And the men
thing is becoming quite urgent, because she really wants to have children. She doesn’t, as has been suggested by several of
her friends, want to get pregnant and bang one out before she becomes peri-menopausal, and nor does she wish to be a single
mother. She wants the whole shebang. She’s aggressively on the hunt for the father of her child, who will also be her bridegroom,
which may have something to do with the string of failed relationships – but that’s another thing I’m not allowed to say on
pain of banishment. ‘They
can’t
smell the desperation, Clara. That’s a horrible thing to say.’

‘And then he just said …’ she gulps. ‘Pass me the wine, would you, Sam? He said …’ At this point tears spurt out of her cornflower-blue
eyes. Tim inches his chair slightly closer to hers and proffers kitchen roll. She smiles, blows her nose. ‘He said I was too
needy. Me! Needy! Me! I’m all about other people, Tim. Ask Clara.’

‘Um, yes. You are. In a way,’ I say.

‘I’m an independent woman. I’m a brilliant catch. I’m loaded, for a start. I don’t think that’s a bad thing to say. I mean,
it’s just true. You should see my house.’

‘Right,’ says Tim, nodding. ‘That’s not at all a bad thing to say.’

‘Money doesn’t buy happiness,’ says Pat, whose entire emotional vocabulary is based on a) soap opera and b) platitudinous
‘wise’ sayings she’s overheard here and there, or read in those magazines that are printed on loo paper. She can only respond
to stuff in the way she has seen demonstrated on
EastEnders
or
Corrie
, which can make her exceedingly melodramatic, and also sound like she’s occasionally possessed by spirits. She once told
Sam that he was ‘doing my head in, babe’, in a pitch-perfect, ventriloquial impersonation of the late Frank Butcher.

‘I know it doesn’t, Pat,’ Hope wails. ‘I’m living proof.’

‘And neither do fake breasts,’ Sophie murmurs to me. Hope does have a pretty spectacular rack, which cost £8,000 from the
Lister Hospital and came about at the request of yet another Mr Wrong, who, Hope claims, said she would be his ideal woman
if only she weren’t so flat-chested. Now – you’d pack your bags and say bye-bye, wouldn’t you? Maybe sew some prawns into
the curtain linings while you were at it. Not Hope. I think he hung around for about three weeks after the bandages came off.

Encouraged by Hope’s soap-operatic wail of misery, Pat tries out another one of her helpful mottoes:

‘What’s for you won’t go by you,’ she says, wisely.

‘But Pat, darling, what was for me is on his way back to Kensal Green in a black cab as we speak.’ Pat and Hope get on very
well. They bonded – this is absolutely true – when they discovered that one of Hope’s ancestors was directly responsible for
the terrible famine that decimated Pat’s home village. ‘Grand to have a wee bit of common ground,’ Pat had said, looking pleased.