Comfort and Joy (11 page)

‘Kate. I’m forty-one years old. Bit late to retrain.’

‘You’re looking rather well on it, I must say,’ Kate says. ‘I was worried you’d be all sort of broken and hideous. Or that
you’d have gotten fat again. It’s so much harder to shift at your age. Have you had Botox?’

‘No.’

‘A man?’ Kate is staring at me beadily; if she had antennae, they’d be quivering.

‘Don’t ask Clara if she’s had a man,’ says Flo, taking off her woolly hat and tousling her hair. ‘We’re still queuing in the
hall and it’s not appropriate
at all
. Though, Clara, have you?’

‘A man!’ This is Evie, practically shouting and hopping up and down. ‘Is there a man? Oh, I knew it. Well, I
hoped
it. I prayed it.’

‘Hello, Kate,’ says Sam, coming down the stairs with a glass in his hand and looking rather stern. His eyes are very blue.
‘Evie, Flo. Happy Christmas. What have you done with your children?’

‘Oh pooey,’ says Evie. ‘Me and my shit timing. Sorry, Sam. Hello! Happy Christmas.’

‘They’re in the car,’ says Flo. ‘Hi, Sam. Merry Christmas.’

‘And to you. Lovely to see you all,’ says Sam. ‘Are they going to stay there?’

‘What?’ says Flo, shedding her flat boots and slipping into massive four-inch heels: I never understand how Flo can actually
walk, let alone run around after two little twins. ‘
Que?
Oh, no. Ed’s bringing them inside in a minute. They fell asleep and we didn’t want to wake them because they really need
a nap.’

‘Go upstairs,’ I say. ‘Take your presents. You’re making a traffic jam. Sam, would you sort out drinks for everyone? And –
hang on – there are some canapés somewhere, you can take them up too.’

‘Probably in the fridge, where this truffle belongs,’ says Kate, like a woman obsessed. ‘Give me your arm, Sam. Lead on. Is
your mother here? I long for her.’

‘I’ll bring them up,’ says Flo. ‘The snacks. Go ahead. I just want to talk to my sisters quickly.’ We huddle into the kitchen.

‘Sorry about saying “Is there a man?” ’ says Evie, looking contrite. ‘Me and my giant beak.’

‘It’s okay,’ I say.

‘But is there?’ says Flo. ‘Clara, we must know. We can’t sit here all day not knowing.’

‘In agony,’ says Evie. ‘In ABSOLUTE AGGO, Clara.’

‘Tell us,’ says Flo. ‘We beg it.’

I should perhaps point out that both of my sisters hold down responsible jobs, and that none of us talks like this except
when we are with each other, and particularly when we are with each other and our mother. We just slip back into the jokes
and cadences of childhood, the shorthand. It’s comfortable, but I don’t think that’s the only reason we do it. It’s also comforting.
My sisters are as obsessed with Christmas as I am, and there’s a reason for that: our childhood Christmases, our Christmi,
when everything was fine, and before everything went wrong and Kate and Julian, the girls’ father, split up in seismic fashion.
The golden Christmases that we all try to recreate each year, along with the feeling that we are loved, safe, happy and that
nothing bad will ever happen to us again. At this late stage, it would be fair to say that hope springs eternal in the Huttish
breast.

‘There isn’t a man,’ I say, grinning. ‘No man. Manless.’ I make a sad, upside-down face, but the grin won’t entirely go away.

‘I can tell from your face that thou lieth, Clara,’ says Evie.

‘I’m not lying, Eve.’

‘You are totally lying,’ says Flo. ‘Your pants are on fire.’

‘They are burning your bottom as you speak,’ says Evie. ‘Singeing your poor buttocks. “We burn,” they cry.’

‘Why are you so nosy?’

‘Because we love you,’ says Flo.

‘I love you too. But I’m a grown-up – you don’t need all the deets. And anyway, it’s been going on a while and it’s complicated.
I met him a year ago. We spoke on the phone, and
emailed. Very modern. He was working abroad at the time. But now he’s back in London and we’ve been … seeing a bit of each
other.’

‘Clara!’ says Flo. ‘Oh my God. Please tell me the man isn’t married.’

‘Oh no, noooo,’ says Evie, clutching herself around the waist. ‘We always said that was the one thing we’d never, ever do.’

‘Clara,’ says Flo, her dark eyes on mine. ‘Stop laughing. It’s not at all funny.
You
told us. When we were little.
You
said, a person does what they have to do, but they never nick people’s spouses, because it is sordid.’

‘And you said,’ says Evie, ‘that it was a monstrous betrayal of one’s own gender, also really bad karma.’

‘It is,’ I say. ‘You reap what you sow. Christ, I sound like Pat.’

‘It’s still true, though. Hurry up and tell us so we can stop feeling sick,’ says Evie. ‘I want to go and say hello to Pat.
And I want to squidge Maisy. And the boys. And everyone. They will all be squidged. And I want to know you’re not shagging
a married man.’

‘Why’s it complicated?’ says Flo.

‘You don’t owe anything to Sam, and besides you two split up ages ago,’ says Evie. ‘
Quel est le problème?
’

‘We only split up eight months ago, Eev. Hardly ages. It’s not entirely non-weird. First Christmas and all that.’

‘You are obfuscating,’ says Flo. ‘Is the man married?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then,’ says Evie, with a theatrical sigh of relief. ‘
Je répète: quel est le problème?
’

‘There isn’t a problem,’ I say. ‘I just fear the jinx if I tell you too much.’

‘Why didn’t you say in the first place?’ says Flo. ‘The jinx, we can understand.’

‘God, yes,’ says Evie. ‘Totally mustn’t jinx. We’ll speak no more of it.’

‘Also, I haven’t told Sam yet,’ I say. ‘So. Hushed beaks. But mainly, it might not go anywhere, and thus I fear the jinx.’

‘Gotcha,’ says Flo. ‘But can I just ask – why isn’t he married? Is he, like, twenty-five?’

‘Ew, toyboy,’ says Evie. ‘Bit suburban, Clara.’

‘Bit “Hello, big boy, I am a lady of a certain age and I am wearing my lucky negligee.” Ack,’ says Flo.

‘No, no. He has been married, but he isn’t any more,’ I say.

‘Hm,’ says Evie. ‘You’ve been having sex, obviously. I do believe it is the thing to which our mama alludes. You glow with
sex, Clara. You are like a glowing beacon of the goodness of sex.’

‘Eve!’ says Flo, giggling. ‘You’re so mad.’ She turns to me. ‘Have you?’

‘Not answering any more. Respect the jinx,’ I say, and we all go laughing up the stairs.

‘Deep breath,’ says Flo, taking my arm as we enter the sitting room.

Our sitting room is big and square, and on an ordinary day you would find it airy and pleasantly spacious. Today, there’s
already nowhere left to sit, and the presents – the obscene tsunami of presents, which has been added to by every new guest
– has by now pretty much engulfed what remains of the floor space: people are standing about like little person-islands, an
ocean of packages at their feet.

Kate and Pat are sitting together on the sofa, champagne flutes in hand. Pat’s flute contains brandy mixed with lemonade:
she doesn’t drink wine of any kind, claiming it’s ‘too strong’ (she also claims that salad leaves are ‘too scratchy’, gesturing
to her throat and wincing as she says it; I note this isn’t a problem with jumbo bags of crisps). She and Kate are screaming
with laughter, God knows what at. You wouldn’t think they had an enormous amount in common, but it’s like this every year:
BFFs, or at least best friends for Christmas. They’re practically sitting on each other’s laps by the end of the day. I think
the love strikes because Kate makes no concessions of any kind when she’s talking to Pat. So if she’s just been cruising around
the Aegean on Max’s yacht (Kate prefers to say ‘boat’), she assumes Pat is familiar both with island-hopping and with yacht-life
generally. Pat likes this approach very much, and picks stuff up incredibly fast, including all the detail of Kate’s social
circles: ‘Ah yes, that’ll be the one that got divorced because in the end she couldn’t make herself sleep with him,’ she’ll
say. ‘Even though he was so rich.’

‘Exactly, Pat,’ Kate will say. And then they’ll both howl with laughter.

Robert and Sam are by the fireplace, engaged in earnest-seeming conversation; I briefly wonder, paranoiacally, whether they
are talking about me and my disastrous failings as a spouse: ‘And then she got fat.’ ‘She’d sorted that out by the time she
met me. With me it was more, she just got boring.’ ‘Well, yes, she got boring with me too, obviously.’ ‘She started complaining.’
‘Yep, yep, I hear you. She got the whining degree with me, but the doctorate with you.’ ‘I wish you’d warned me.’ ‘Well, you
seemed very into her.’ ‘I was, then.’

Jack is perched on the arm of another sofa, his laptop balanced on his knee – I expect he’s busy wishing every one of his
829 Facebook ‘friends’ a happy Christmas. Charlie is rifling through the presents like a locust, pointing out to a desperately
overexcited Maisy which ones are hers, while Maisy dances around, begging her brothers and anyone else who cares to listen
to let her open ‘just one teeny-tiny present’.

‘You have to wait till everyone’s here, Maise,’ Charlie says. ‘It might be tomorrow.’ He sees her face fall and adds kindly,
‘Not really. If you’re good it’ll only be about five more minutes.’

‘Your daddy is over there,’ says Maisy. ‘He is talking to my daddy.’

‘I know,’ Charlie says.

‘Your daddy is Robert,’ Maisy continues. ‘And my daddy is Sam.’

‘Yep,’ says Charlie. ‘Got it in one, clever-ass. What are you?’

‘A clever-ass,’ Maisy says.

People are still arriving: here comes Ed, Flo’s husband, shepherding in their two-year-old twins, who waddle in giggling and
make straight for the snacks. Flo kindly let Evie choose the twins’ middle names, so they are called Grace Moomin (after
the Moomins) and Ava Timothy (after Timmy, the dog in
The Famous Five
). Unlike Flo, Ed didn’t appear over-impressed with these choices at the time. ‘But what can you do,’ as Evie said, ‘if someone
simply refuses to see the goodness? I wonder if I should have been more modern, maybe gone with something like Gruffalo or
Iggle. Ah well, next time.’

‘My aunties!’ Maisy screams, hurling herself at my sisters, who shower her with kisses, one to each side of her. ‘Like a sandwich,’
Maisy says happily, ‘and you’re the bread and I’m the ham. No, the cheese. No, the cucumber. No, the
egg.
’

‘I wish your mummy had let me choose
your
middle name, Maise,’ says Evie. ‘It would totally be Egg.’

And here come Tamsin and Jake (still together, and getting married next year) and Maisy’s great crush, Tamsin’s daughter Cassie,
who at seven is a whole and significant year older and therefore an object of purest admiration. They are followed by Hope,
travelling solo except for the laptop from which she has become inseparable: having worked her way through most of the dating
sites with predictably unhappy – and occasionally downright grotesque – results, Hope has recently become obsessed with Facebook,
which has opened up entire new worlds of disastrous flirting possibilities for her. (‘It’s different on Facebook,’ she claims.
‘You meet friends of friends, so you know they’re going to be okay.’ It doesn’t seem to bother her that the online definition
of ‘friend’ is ‘someone you’ve never actually met in the flesh’.) She goes to perch next to Jack, recognizing a fellow social
networker. Perhaps they’ll sit there side by side, and send each other special Facebook Christmas gifts.

Everyone is eventually gathered – Robert’s mother and stepfather have arrived, as have Sam’s old friends Laura and Chris,
who he’s asked this year for moral support. They’re currently standing in the middle of the room looking slightly overwhelmed
and in need of support themselves, as well they
might: there are an awful lot of us and it would be easy enough to feel swamped at the best of times. Which this isn’t. It
is a weird time, though today the weirdness is on the back burner, because it’s Christmas. Sam moved out eight months ago,
though he’s living locally and is around most days, to see Maisy. She seems to be coping remarkably well with the new arrangements:
the only evidence of any disquiet is her constant stating and restating of people’s relationships to each other. Poor thing:
in the context of our family, it’s as though she’d asked for a six-piece, chunky wooden puzzle and been given a white Rubik’s
Cube.

‘You can open a present now, Maisy,’ I tell her. We walk – well, I walk, she hops – to the tree holding hands, trying not
to step on people or gifts. While Maisy tears into wrapping paper festooned with jaunty reindeer, I start distributing presents
to everybody else, so that they each have a little pile to open. Sam tops up glasses; Cassie passes around plates of canapés;
Ed is in charge of bin liners to stick the debris in, because if you’re not careful the sea of presents transforms into a
sea of wrapping paper that things get lost under. The noise is unbelievable: you’d think we were having a party for a hundred,
though at a party for a hundred there would be fewer children’s squeals and less beeping from their battery-powered new toys.

When everyone seems happily ensconced, kissing each other thank you, holding things up delightedly and pronouncing that they
love their gift – ‘I LOVE MY GIFT!’ if you’re one of my sisters; ‘You’re that good to me,’ if you’re Pat (tearful); ‘Charming.
Anyway, as I was saying …’ if you’re Kate – I go down to the kitchen to check on the roast potatoes, which disloyally, given
how devotedly I love them, challenge me every Christmas, presumably because the giganto porn-turkey is absorbing all the heat;
I need to swap them from the bottom to the top of the oven. Sam’s down there too, unexpectedly (in
the kitchen, I mean, not nestling among the spuds), feeling around the medicine drawer.

‘I’m looking for headache pills,’ he says. ‘Do we … do you have any? Would they be in here?’

‘They should be. It’s a bit of a mess in there. You have a sore head?’

‘Little bit,’ he says. It strikes me – for the first time, oddly – that he looks a lot like Captain Von Trapp from
The Sound of Music
. Except younger, obviously. And real.