The Queen's Margarine (11 page)

‘Gosh, d'you want me to shove off? It sounds as if you could do with a bit of peace.'

‘Don't you dare go! Friends are different. I just hope you'll excuse the mess. I haven't had a moment to clear up.'

Hannah glanced around at the so-called mess – a source of envy, actually: kids' drawings pinned up on the wall; abandoned toys littered underfoot; children's gloves and woolly hats flung down on the dresser, and a pile of home-made Christmas stockings sharing the table with lengths of felt, pots of glitter and fuzzy stick-on letters. ‘Who made these?' she asked.

‘Oh, they're all Tara's handiwork. She's made one for each of the family, and an extra one for you.'

‘For me?'

‘Mm. With your name on. But I mustn't spoil the surprise. She'll give it to you herself, once I can drag her away from the tree.' Judith put the baby over her shoulder and gently rubbed his back. ‘So, Hannah,' she asked, looking her friend directly in the eye, ‘have you decided yet what you're going to do for Christmas?'

The pause seemed endless; finally broken by a loud burp from Alexander.

Judith laughed. ‘That's his way of saying “please come here”. We'd love to have you – I've told you enough times. And you can stay as long as you like – right on to New Year, if you want.'

‘It's sweet of you, but—' She broke off in mid-sentence, unable to explain her deep unease about carrying off the role of Auntie Hannah, when she wasn't a genuine aunt, in fact, and didn't really belong. Judith always had a crowd for Christmas, all bona-fide relatives, and most of them in couples. She knew she'd feel an interloper, with all that reminiscing about treasured family memories; all those family traditions she wouldn't understand; all those little in-jokes baffling to outsiders, and – hardest to endure – all that kissing under the mistletoe. Even the word ‘Mum' could bring a pang of grief, now she had no mother herself, nor child to say it to
her
. She cleared her throat; sat stroking one of the red-felt Christmas stockings. ‘Maybe next year, Judith, but this year I'm going abroad.'

It wasn't a lie. She
was
going; had made the decision just now. And she would opt for a destination where Christmas wasn't celebrated in any shape or form, and ensure it was a holiday for singles, so she would be spared the sight of happy, cosy families, at least in the hotel. In fact, once she had done her bit here – helped Patrick decorate the tree, read
Milly-Molly-Mandy
to the girls, said a quick hello to Ben – she would go straight home and make a packing-list, and be waiting outside the travel agent's the minute it opened in the morning.

She shifted from foot to foot as the woman in front of her – a tall, supercilious blonde, too thin for her own good – changed her mind for at least the seventh time.

‘No, hold on – I'm not sure I like the sound of that hotel. I do particularly want a sea view, and you told me they'd all gone at the
Vittoria
. In fact, I'm going off the whole idea of Sorrento. Would there be a sea view somewhere else – say, Amalfi or Capri?'

The poor chap behind the desk clearly possessed heroic fortitude. Having duly found a sea view in both Amalfi and Capri, the wretched woman suddenly took agin Italy in general (having
already turned down Portugal and Spain), and now switched her attention to Greece.

Hannah listened with increasing impatience as every suggestion made – Santorini, Ithaca, Athens, Skyros, Crete – was tetchily dismissed.

‘The problem is,' the clerk explained, ‘if you opt for a singles holiday, you're much more limited for choice, especially in the
age-band
thirty-five to forty-five. They're the most popular, you see, and get booked up months in advance.'

Oh my God, thought Hannah, ears twitching at the phrases ‘Singles … thirty-five to forty-five'. This spoilt, skinny bitch might be just the sort of person she'd find herself beside on a coach tour or excursion; even forced to bunk up with, if all the single rooms had gone. And there might be other people every bit as odious: unhappy spinsters bewailing their lack of partners or their benighted, lonely futures; self-righteous divorcees bitter about their ex's, comparing bloody battles over custody or maintenance, even damning the entire male sex.
She
had never been bitter about any of her men – still loved Geoff, the monk; respected Mark for his honesty, at least, and harboured cherished memories of Andrew, despite his lack of commitment. Did she really want to spend her time with a bunch of miseries, especially when she felt so low herself?

Edging out of the queue, on the pretext of needing more brochures, she picked up ‘SINGULAR' from the rack again, and reread the fulsome promises inside:
Seek adventures in paradise with a group of like-minded singles, who'll soon become firm friends … Although travelling on your own, never, with us, will you feel alone, or lonely, but move effortlessly beyond yourself into a new, exciting world … We strive to treat each individual guest as a member of our own family….

Unlikely. In fact, no more realistic than the improbably blue skies and impossibly blue sea preening in the photographs. Far from a family atmosphere, the reality would be moaners and complainers, like that blonde grouch at the desk, still bleating to the clerk about how she couldn't abide the ‘Welcome Parties', laid on as part of the trip. Whatever it was – Welcome Parties, meals or staff, rooms or even sea views – would all be judged sub-standard;
indeed the very
air
would fail to come up to scratch. Better by far to stay at home than be stuck with such companions. Her wisest course would be to treat Christmas like an ordinary day; a chance to catch up on the list of chores she had been postponing since October. No need for elaborate cooking – a sandwich would do her fine – and, once she'd finished her work, she'd spend the evening watching strictly non-festive television.

‘Thank you, Blondie,' she whispered,
sotto voce
, to the woman, as she rammed the brochure back into the rack. ‘You've just saved me a mint of money, not to mention four wasted days.'

She glanced around the neat and shining flat with a certain sense of achievement. Christmas Eve had proved as good a time as any to tackle the spring cleaning, and at least she'd cleared the decks for tomorrow's marathon, when she intended to update her software, sort out her database, send a shoal of emails, and generally bring order out of chaos.

Part of the plan was early bed tonight, if only to stop herself from dwelling on
last
year's Christmas Eve: her mother decorating the Christmas cake; her father, in a frilly pinny, making his mulled punch (with no hint of the pneumonia that was to kill him four months later). And she, the forty-year-old child, continually offering to help, but being instructed to ‘recover' after what they called her ‘stressful' job, and just let herself be pampered.

‘That's finished,' she hissed. ‘Over and done with. You've enjoyed all that indulgence for forty feather-bedded years. Now it's time to move on.'

The flat was mercifully quiet, so at least she wouldn't be disturbed by next-door's music pulsing through the walls, or the usual footsteps clack-clacking back and forth across the wooden floor above. Both those sets of neighbours were away, and the old codger in the flat below never made a sound, so she could catch up on her sleep, as well as with the jobs.

Having undressed and cleaned her teeth, she wished herself goodnight, and pulled the duvet right up to her chin. Outside was frost and snow – traditional Christmas weather. Except for her it
wasn't
Christmas, so, as she settled down and closed her eyes, she forbade her mind to wander along beguiling Christmas
byways, but kept it strictly counting sheep (and Muslim sheep, at that).

Five-thousand sheep later, she was still maddeningly awake, so she dragged herself out of bed again to make a milky drink. In the kitchen, she caught sight of the home-made Christmas stocking, which she had deliberately left lying on the table. But perhaps it was unfair to Tara not to hang it up, when the child had taken such pains with it; gluing contrasting strips of felt around the top, and attaching a coloured bead to each wonky, lurching letter of the HANNAH.

In the end, she took it back to bed with her, and sat sipping her drink, while gazing at it hanging from the footboard. The only trouble was, it brought such floods of memories: the pre-dawn excitement as she reached out in the dark, and found the empty stocking transformed with bulging booty. She was allowed to unpack it while waiting for her parents to wake up. (Proper presents came later, and were opened around the Christmas tree, after a breakfast of stewed figs and coddled eggs.) First, she'd tip out all the contents, so she could reach the tangerine nestling in the toe. She could smell the zingy citrus tang as she dug her thumbnail into the peel; felt a spurt of juice on her face; heard the crunching of a pip she'd somehow swallowed in her haste.

Next came the chocolate coins, each encased in gold foil; the foil embossed with magical things like prancing lions and dragons, and the Three Kings, in fancy crowns. Chocolate tasted weird combined with tangerine; the one bland and smooth and velvety, the other sharp and fresh. But both tastes were soon deliciously swamped by the chalky crunch of sweet cigarettes, which came in a proper grown-up packet, with
WOODBINES
stamped across it. Having wolfed a couple (teeth aching from the sweetness), she would smoke a few more, at leisure; inhaling like her Dad did, tapping imaginary ash into the non-existent ashtray, and blowing pretend smoke-rings at the ceiling. And, once she'd extinguished the butts, it was time to unwrap the tiny gifts, feeling them first through the paper, trying to guess their contents from the shape. Sometimes, it was bath salts, the gritty sort, in psychedelic colours like puce-pink or peacock-blue, which never quite dissolved in the bath, so she'd find herself sitting on a little pile of gravel. Or there
might be a new hair slide she could wear for Christmas lunch: a red plastic flower or turquoise butterfly. And always a glass animal; triple-wrapped in tissue, so its frail legs wouldn't break. And, usually, a diary – one year a Barbie Diary, the next a Hungry Caterpillar, or maybe Raold Dahl, or Tolkien, or the Nature-Lovers' Companion. And, her favourite of all, when she was eleven-and-a-half, a leather-covered beauty in a padded
pink-plush
box, with its own tiny lock and key.

But whatever diary it might be, she always did the self-same thing: flicked swiftly through the pages, almost to the end, until she reached Christmas Day the
following
year, and wrote
HAPPY CHRISTMAS HANNAH
!, in big capitals across the page. She wasn't sure exactly why – perhaps to remind herself that, once this current Christmas was over (indeed fading to a blur), another one was waiting to explode in all its glory, with pantomimes and carols, new toys and games and books, huge crackling, golden turkeys, squidgy-sweet mince pies.

It was only as she drained her milk she realized that she'd been awash in forbidden Christmas thoughts – in fact, so lost in childhood memories, she had forgotten bleak reality. With a sigh, she switched off the lamp, so she could no longer see the stocking, and, having settled down to sleep again, forced herself to resume her task of sheep-counting.

However, by the time another hour had passed, her antipathy to sheep had increased to such proportions, she would have happily asphyxiated every ewe and ram in the known world and beyond. Wearily, she got up once more, to find a magazine. Reading an undemanding piece about fashion or celebrities might help her to relax.

In the lounge, she stopped to look at her parents' photograph, taken just a year ago. How spry they still looked, despite their total age of 176 years! They had never become doddery, or vacant and confused, but remained vigorous and sharp until a few months before their deaths. Pressing her lips to each face in turn, she gave each a tender kiss; relieved that none of her friends were there to see. She was already considered peculiar for having loved them so immoderately, when it was more fashionable these days to accuse parents of abuse, or at least of negligence. She gazed at her
mother's mild blue eyes; the gnarled, veiny hands folded on her lap; the hair arranged in soft, white, Mr-Whippy waves, and freshly permed for the occasion of the photograph. Next, she studied her father: his shy, unassuming expression, as if overwhelmed by the honour of a professional photographer actually coming to their home, with a camera on a tripod, and special lights and filters.
She
was the one who'd organized the session, as a present to herself; wanted her parents immortalized on a scale beyond the casual photos taken on her mobile.

She tucked the gilt frame under her arm, then, having fetched some magazines, stood it on the dressing-table, where she could see it from her bed. Her parents could keep guard while she read her
Cosmopolitan
. Soon, she was deep in an article on fashion, although increasingly annoyed by the stress on ‘must-have' items – ‘must-have' knee-high boots, ‘must-have' beaded evening-bag. She glanced at the Christmas stocking: flat and empty still. It was way past midnight, yet Santa hadn't come. And he
wouldn't
come; had completely failed to grasp her own personal list of ‘
must-haves
': a decent man, and marriage, a brood of lovely children, commitment, lifelong love.

Flinging the magazine on the floor, she stumbled out to the bathroom to find the sleeping pills. Her GP had prescribed them after the two bereavements. But she hadn't wanted her grief dulled; felt it only fitting that she should lie inconsolably awake after such a loss. She took a couple now, though. They would make her pretty dopey in the morning, but she no longer even cared. She had nothing to get up for – no one to get up for – and the jobs she'd planned would simply have to wait.