‘I couldn’t agree more, George,’ said Trevor, wishing he knew how to show in full his inability to agree more.
‘Absolutely diabolical,’ said Tracy.
‘Diabolical is the exact word. In 1921—’
At this point, Shorty, who had been seeing to drinks, bustled up and, swaying hardly at all, said,
‘Couple of carols, Adela? I think the kids might like ’em.’
‘Not more than two, Shorty, and not more than, say, four verses. Then we really ought to have the presents, because we don’t want to—’
‘I’m right up there with you, Adela.’ He was not best pleased at the implication that having carols on Christmas morning was a tiresome and eccentric indulgence of his own. ‘If the carols go on too long, that holds up handing out the presents, and holding up handing out the presents means holding up lunch-on, and holding up lunch-on’s bad.’
‘But surely it’s Christmas dinner, isn’t it?’ asked George. ‘I mean, the main meal’s usually—’
‘So it is, George, so it is. Once more hath Shorty erred.’
After calling for silence in the manner first of someone imitating a sergeant-major quite well, and then of someone imitating an Oberstürmbannführer almost as well, Shorty introduced the idea of carols in a pan-American accent. He sat down at his piano, played (not too badly) a few bars of Alexander’s Ragtime Band, apologized, and went into While Shepherds Watched. By the end of the first verse, most people were singing, or at least la-la-ing to the tune.
Trevor took in the home-made paper-chains that, falsifying George’s prediction that there would be no you stretch them from one corner to the other, met at the partly-intact electrolier at the middle of the room, the holly arranged along the mantelshelf and round the stained oval mirror above it, the Christmas tree (dug up, no doubt, in the woods by Shorty) hung with artificial frost and coloured tin spheres, the pile of variegated parcels and packets at its foot: Adela’s planning and her and Shorty’s work. A lot of work, done for much less effect. Of eleven people in the room, perhaps two, Adela and George, would positively enjoy the display, two more, Finn and Vanessa, would notice it in full for about half a minute, and another, Marigold, could have been counted on to complain if there had been none. And that was that. Did Adela know of the disparity between her intentions and their results? It made no difference either way: the thought was what counted, and she had simply done what had had to be done. That did not mean that doing as much was negligible or ridiculous or hypocritical.
Tracy saw the same incongruities as Trevor, but they brought to her mind a selection of fairly uncomplicated ironies about good cheer and the festive season, and she felt nothing much more than a mild, inert repulsion.
Keith was not interested in any of that. He threw himself into the singing with as much gusto as he could, short of obvious parody, also with the hope of seeming in retrospect to have enjoyed the day in some part, and was grateful too for another unexpected few minutes’ worth of leaning on his spade.
Rachel was fully contented: the children were behaving well, and someone other than herself was doing all the cooking for the whole day.
While Shepherds Watched came to an end with a florid run on the piano not much disfigured by wrong notes. Shorty was having a fine time – bar getting pissed (and he was doing that too) he liked nothing better than a good old sing-song, and here was the chance of one, a rarity in this household. Now he started on O Come, All Ye Faithful.
‘… Joyful and triumphant,’ he sang, and continued at a safe volume, ‘The Queen was in the parlour, dopping bread and honey. The maid was in the garden …’ He caught sight of Marigold on her knees between her great-grandchildren, an arm round the restive shoulders of each. The bitch was singing away fit to bust; not only that, but in a way that made out that she had seen to it herself that everybody was having a rare old treat. ‘Then along came a bloody great shitehawk,’ sang Shorty, slowing down the tempo, ‘and chomped … off … her nose.’
After that they had the presents. Those from the guests to the hosts were chiefly a disguised dole: tins or pots of more or less luxurious food, bottles of hard liquor, wide-spectrum gift tokens. Hosts showered guests with diversely unwearable articles of clothing: to Keith from Adela, a striped necktie useful for garrotting underbred rivals in his trade; to Tracy from George, a liberation-front lesbian’s plastic apron. Under a largely unspoken kind of non-aggression pact, the guests gave one another things like small boxes of chocolates or very large boxes of matches with (say) aerial panoramas of Manhattan on their outsides and containing actual matches each long enough, once struck, to kindle the cigarettes of (say) the entire crew of a fair-sized merchant vessel, given the assembly of that crew in some relatively confined space. Intramural gifts included a bathroom sponge, a set of saucepans, a cushion in a lop-sided cover, a photograph-frame wrought by some vanished hand and with no photograph in it, an embroidered knitting-bag. Keith watched carefully what Bernard gave, half expecting a chestnut-coloured wig destined for Adela, or a lavishly-illustrated book on karate for George, but was disappointed, though he savoured Bernard’s impersonation of a man going all out to hide his despondency as he took the wrappings off present after useless, insultingly cheap, no doubt intended to be facetious, present.
Twenty-Nine
‘Do you think, er,’ said Keith, ‘… do you think they spend all their time thinking about it or merely nearly all their time?’
‘Quite possibly not as much time as all that,’ answered Trevor, urinating as he spoke, for the two stood now in the upstairs lavatory. ‘If you live with something, you may end up with it not meaning as much to you as if it only turned up now and then. You know, like background noise.’
‘Like who was that bugger in mythology that the grapes were always swinging up out of reach and the stream sank whenever he bent down and tried to drink out of it? Pretty noisy sort of noise at their time of life. Tantalus. He’d have noticed being hungry and thirsty a bit as the days went by. More like foreground noise. Aircraft noise when you’re living twenty yards from Heathrow only moving closer.’
‘Are you pissed?’
‘Yes.’ Keith replaced Trevor at the w.c. ‘Do you know that SF story where the space pilots or something do six hours on and six months off because it’s so shagging? Cordwainer Smith, that’s right. I thought he was overdoing it rather until I turned up here today. You know my father was sixty last month? Coming along nicely. I suppose with luck we might get a couple of weeks between the last of them going and us being in their situation. And if you’re not pissed you must be out of your mind. This is the last time I do this.’
‘So you always say round about now. You’ll be here next time.’
‘Because of thinking what a bloody good chap I am when it’s all over. Sudden burst of self-admiration.’
‘And non-sudden trickles of thinking you’re a shit for not coming.’
‘Oh, they’ve got us there. Because we know how much better off we are.’
‘We’d better go down. Isn’t it marvellous, having a wife?’
‘Yeah,’ said Keith. ‘And being able to finish a sentence.’
‘We’ll be just the same when we get to their age.’
‘Oh no we won’t. Horrible, yes. Boring, sure. But not like them. Chummy little crowd, aren’t they? And I take it back about us being boring. Boring on that scale, anyhow.’
‘I’d like to have a tape of what they were saying about their grandparents and so on thirty years ago. Come on.’
‘Would you? Off sharp at ten, Trev. A mere eight-plus hours. Unless one of them checks out before then. Two or three of them check out.’
Thirty
Christmas dinner was something of a success; it passed off, at any rate, without bloodshed. Marigold, with the young in close attendance, actually enjoyed herself, not least because Finn and Vanessa paid so much attention to her. (On the journey down,
their father had several times ordered them to behave in this way, adding far from casually that, according to rumours he had not yet been able to check, very naughty and disobedient children were sometimes made into Bow-Wow.) George was happy too, and explained to any adult not in mid-phrase that many traditional features of Christmas were of pagan origin, that there was no reason to suppose that there were not intelligent beings on worlds other than our own, and similar matters. Bernard said little; he was trying to reconcile his dislike of Trevor for having a lot of hair on his face with his dislike of Keith for having none, and found the task difficult until it dawned on him that of course Trevor was flaunting the fact that he was young while Keith was trying to pretend he was no different from anyone else. Adela was too concerned that everything should go well to derive much active pleasure from the occasion, but now and again she was warmed by the memory of what Marigold had said about the running of the household. Shorty, what with the normal covert drinking and abnormal overt drinking he had done, was drunk, and, after breaking one glass and upsetting another full of wine, fell sound asleep at table.
Thirty-One
By pre-arrangement, the Fishwicks and MacKelvies insisted in unison that the kitchen should be left as it was until coffee, liqueurs, cigars and other treats had been consumed in the sitting-room, at which stage the four of them would do all the washing- and clearing-up – it looked kind and, as Keith had put it to Trevor, was preferable to going fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali, which in turn, so he suggested, would have been preferable to an extra half-hour with the oldsters.
The quadripartite insistence proved effective. Full of food and fudge, virtually force-fed by their parents to the point of stupefaction, Finn and Vanessa were encouraged without trouble to have a prolonged nap in their great-grandmother’s room. Bernard was sincerely sorry to see them go. With all his heart, he had hoped that one or both of them would commit some salient piece of misbehaviour: pissing on this, shitting on that, being sick over the other. Their temporary departure did not, of course, rule out such joyful possibilities, but it did postpone them, substantially reduce the period within which they might be made actual.
When the five full-time occupants of Tuppenny-hapenny Cottage were settled together in the sitting-room (an extraordinary state of affairs), George drew luxuriously on his second cigar of the day and said,
‘Well, I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve had the finest Christmas present I could possibly have wished for.’
Shorty roused himself, no mean feat after the MacKelvie-provided shot of green Chartreuse and the Fishwick-provided shot of Bénédictine he had thrown down on top of everything else. ‘What’s that, George?’
‘Let me put it this way. I’ve been given a bottle of after-shave lotion, a pullover, two pairs of socks, a potted plant to stick on my bedside table, a pair of slippers and various other very kind gifts I could name. What does that suggest to you?’
‘Well, you seem to have done pretty well, George.’
‘Indeed I have, and I’m most grateful to all concerned, but that’s not what I’m driving at. Surely one of you must see.’
‘You’ve had a lot of nice presents,’ said Adela.
‘Oh yes, but … Hasn’t anybody noticed anything?’
‘Let’s have it, George,’ said Shorty.
‘I know what they’re all called. I can put a name to them. I can name pretty well everything.’ George pointed at various objects in the room. ‘Clock, piano, ashtray, sofa, glove, table, rocking-chair, bookcase, statuette, bowl, picture, another picture, and I could go on, but I don’t need to. You must remember how for a long time I couldn’t think what things were called because of my stroke, and the doctor said it might or might not get better of its own accord? Well, it’s got better. It could have happened – I can’t say when. Not overnight, I imagine. But I’d got into the habit of using periphrases for the names of things, phrases that more or less meant the same, so as not to have to keep hesitating and talking tripe. As a result I stopped worrying about not being able to think of the names; I don’t know whether that’s got anything to do with it. Anyhow, it dawned on me just today. You’ve no idea how marvellous it feels. I don’t mind being half paralysed now, except that it’s a nuisance to other people. The gift of language is a very precious thing. After all, it’s what differentiates us from the animal kingdom. It’s the most human—’
‘Which means that in future,’ said Bernard with a smile, ‘you’ll be able to bore us all even more efficiently than in the past.’
‘If you’ll pardon the intrusion, Bernard, I don’t think that’s very funny,’ said Shorty.
His tone was mild; Bernard’s was not when he answered, a notable departure from his usual practice of confining acrimony to the content of what he said. ‘Since when have we been expected to regard you as an authority on what is and what is not funny?’
‘Since never, Bernard,’ said Shorty, laying the mildness on as thick as any man could. ‘I probably know nothing at all about that. But perhaps I do know a bit about what is and what is not a nice thing to say. Good taste’s what it used to be called.’
‘So now you’re an authority on good taste.’ Bernard was trying hard to lower his voice and force the smile back on to his face. ‘I’m bound to say I find that an equally remarkable concept. What other treasures of authoritativeness have you in your store? What clothes to wear? How to stay sober?’
‘Here, I say, you fellows,’ began George.
‘Please, both of you,’ said Adela with as much urgency as she could convey, ‘don’t let’s be like that. It is Christmas, after all.’
‘So it is, upon my word.’ By now, Bernard was in relative control of himself. ‘I knew there must be some explanation.’
Adela glanced at Marigold to see how she was responding to this interchange, and what she saw, to her surprise, was that Marigold was not responding at all, had evidently not so much as taken it in. She had not (now Adela came to think of it) said a word or made any sort of move since the young people had left the room.
At a second attempt, Shorty rose to his feet. ‘I think, if you’ll excuse me, Adela and Marigold and George, I’ll betake myself to my chaste couch, there to enjoy a spell of blanket-bashing of indefinite duration.’
‘Oh, don’t go, old boy,’ said George. ‘Stay and have another spot of port or brandy.’
‘Thank you, George, but I fear lest that might prove unwise. In the language of the Hun, au revoir.’
As soon as Shorty was out of the room, Bernard said to George with an air of concern, ‘I hope I didn’t offend you by what I said a few moments ago. I was only—’
‘Bernard, you couldn’t offend me today if you tried. And of course I knew you were joking. A chap would have to have a pretty poor sense of humour not to see that.’
‘I think possibly I was a bit hard on Shorty just now. I’d better drop him a word of apology later.’
‘A sense of humour is important in all sorts of ways,’ said George, and went on to outline some of them to Bernard.
‘What’s wrong, dear?’ asked Adela quietly.
Marigold looked up and hugged her elbows to her sides. ‘Nothing. I’ve just come to a decision.’
‘Oh, Marigold …’ Adela clasped her short-fingered hands together. Why was it that other people’s decisions always turned out badly for her?
‘I’ve changed my mind. I’m not leaving here. I’ll never leave.’
‘Oh, darling, I am so glad,’ said Adela, successfully struggling not to embrace the other woman. ‘So very glad. But … has something awful happened that’s made you change your mind? You seem all …’
‘Nothing’s happened.’
This was true in a restricted sense. Half an hour earlier, Trevor had recalled to her the Christmas of five years previously, when her husband had been alive and in full vigour, had indeed entertained the company with anecdotes abo
ut comic disasters that had befallen him during his career as a glass merchant. Or rather, the boy had failed to recall any single fact or detail to her: she had forgotten the entire occasion and it stayed forgotten. Searching introspection had since told her something of how much else she had forgotten. Marigold had loved her husband for forty-eight years; so, at any rate, she would have said, and would have meant it. Now she could not remember their first meeting, their engagement, their wedding, their first house, what clothes he used to wear, what sort of voice he had had, what he had looked like – she had photographs by the score, and she had slipped into her room to turn them through, but to see what he had looked like was not the same as remembering. It was as if he and their life together had been taken away from her. At least Adela had known him, Bernard and Shorty had met him often, several times, more than once. While she stayed with them and could talk to them about him, he would not be altogether obliterated, not unless or until her mind became unfit to grasp the fact of his former existence. It no longer mattered that the others would witness at close quarters the advance of her senility.
Tracy, Trevor and Keith came in before anything else was said. (Rachel was in Marigold’s room, officially to keep the children quiet, though they needed no such attention, being sound asleep, and she was herself sound asleep, her favourite state since Finn’s birth.) Tracy immediately sensed that something or other was going on between the two older women, decided with as little delay that it was none of her business, moved across to the two older men, and was surprised to see a welcoming expression on Bernard’s face; she could not have known how close he had come to going for George with the poker.