CHRISTMAS IN THE House of Mourning: Edith, with many meaning looks, sympathy firing on all cylinders, brought in a pot of white hyacinths, but only because there were no such things as black ones. Imogen thanked her nervously, and waited to see from which direction the next assault would be launched. “A Quiet Christmas” everyone had earnestly agreed—and you could see them, as they spoke, working out just how much it would save, and what they could do with the money. No presents, it wouldn’t seem right, Yippee! And now, after all that, here they were, one after the other, twitching packages guiltily from behind their backs and shoving them at her as if they were dirty postcards. Soap. Bath salts. Writing-paper. All the things that a widow might reasonably be expected still to have some use for. And because they’d promised not to give her anything, and were breaking the promise, she had to be extra grateful and thank them twice, once for the present and once for the betrayal.
But one of the betrayals—Cynthia’s—was a magnificent one: a brilliantly expensive Kaftan, covered in gold embroidery, and glitteringly unsuitable for anything except the kind of parties that Imogen would never be going to again. It would have been all right for the kind of parties she sometimes used to go to with Ivor; and he would have liked her to wear a thing like this. Would have liked it, that is, all the while she remained at his side, manifestly his possession; but on the other hand, he hated her to remain at his side at parties: it cramped his style with the beautiful wives of important husbands. And so actually it would all have been rather complicated. Her grief for Ivor was always running into tangles like this: no sooner did she get thinking, Oh, how Ivor would have loved this, than she had a sudden vision of how it would actually have been.
And somehow the truth made her feel like crying even more. Funny.
Still, you don’t cry on Christmas morning. Not with everyone looking at you and wondering if you are going to, and what they are supposed to do about it if you do.
“Oh, thank you, Cynthia, how lovely!” she enthused, shaking out the glittering folds and holding it up for inspection. “Look, Dot! Look, all of you! Isn’t it gorgeous?”
“Beautiful,” said Dot, disapproving. It wasn’t that she was shocked, exactly, or disliked the garment in itself: it was just that she could see at a glance that no good would come of it. Some women have this gift.
Herbert’s eyes were almost popping out of his head.
“It’s the tops!” he cried. “You’ll be quite the cat’s whiskers!”—two expressions which—as he must surely have known—his wife couldn’t endure. To have a husband who is impossible, that’s one thing, and you can complain about it to your friends without loss of status: but to have a husband who is vulgar …
“Herbert!” was all she said, and he subsided at once, while Imogen, still murmuring her embarrassed gratitude, re-folded the glittering thing and laid it back in its tissue-paper under Cynthia’s self-satisfied scrutiny. You could see that Cynthia had won: but without, as yet, having any idea what the battle was about.
It was about Ivor, of course—what else? Even dead, she couldn’t leave him alone.
During the five days since Cynthia’s arrival at Heathrow, nearly four hours late and having mislaid her vaccination certificate, Imogen had almost forgotten about her visitor having once been Ivor’s wife. She seemed more like an Act of God, scattering scarves, luggage, presents, hairspray all over the house and wanting to sleep with her head to the north, and with three hot-water-bottles. She couldn’t eat parsnips, or anything fried, and every mealtime started with her crying out “Where are my pills?” Three lots of them there were—white ones for her nerves, yellow ones for her blood-pressure, and pink ones for—what was it?—migraine, or something. They’d been prescribed by her doctor in Bermuda, a dear, lovely man. Promise me, he’d said to Cynthia, promise me you’ll take them regularly while you’re in England; and she’d promised. If only—Imogen mused darkly—if only the dear, lovely doctor could have made her promise also to put them back in the same place at the end of each meal. But alas, he hadn’t. Handbags, pockets, drawers had to be ransacked day after day, while the food cooled on the table, and everyone felt they must stop eating so as to look as if they were helping, and Cynthia clambered back and forth past their chairs, joggling the table, and saying she didn’t want to be a nuisance.
*
And now here she was waiting for Imogen to say something. Stick her neck out—put her foot in it—something. That gleaming, over-generous present had been a lead-in.
Imogen waited.
Forgiveness. That’s what it was. Cynthia forgave her; wanted bygones to be bygones. Christmas, surely, was the time for burying the hatchet?
Indeed yes. But what hatchet? Which bygones? Imogen didn’t want to be behindhand in Christmas charity, but she couldn’t make out what it was all about. It wasn’t as if Ivor had left Cynthia for Imogen; he’d left her for peace and quiet, and freedom, and punctual well-cooked meals. Imogen couldn’t see how forgiveness came into it, in either direction, especially after all this time.
But this, for some reason, simply made Cynthia burst into tears, and declare that Imogen didn’t understand, had never understood: which of course was true. But where do you go from there?
“I know you despise me,” Cynthia sobbed, “you always have! You think I’m just stupid and impractical and silly … maybe I am, but all the same, Ivor loved me, he’d have wanted me to have my rights … he loved me just the way I am! He’d had enough of clever women, his first wife was a right blue-stocking, and years and years older than him … if you’d ever met her, you wouldn’t wonder that he ended up falling for a silly, feather-brained, harum-scarum little thing like me….”
No? Imogen reflected on this whole harum-scarum little trip all the way from Bermuda just in time for the dividing-up of Ivor’s estate: she pondered, too, on the feather-brained little phone-calls to solicitors and lawyers that had been going on … and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. Ivor, why aren’t you laughing? Can’t you hear my wicked, uncharitable thoughts, off wherever you are?
Naturally, Cynthia thought that the tears in Imogen’s eyes were tears of remorse, and at once she was all kindness and sympathy:
“Oh, Imogen, darling, I didn’t mean … Of course I don’t hold it against you, my poor dear. Not now, not any longer. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, the bitterness is all gone now, it’s all been wiped away by this terrible, terrible tragedy. We are sisters in sorrow now, Imogen. Sisters, as Ivor would have wished….”
Ivor would have hated sisters, if he’d had any. He’d have hated the demands they were entitled to make, and the things they could remember about you when you were ten. Shrinking within Cynthia’s scented Orlon embrace, Imogen wondered how soon she could decently detach herself, and move out of range. The awful thing was that Cynthia was being kind, in a way. Just as Edith was kind, and Dot, and Herbert. In their separate ways, and with due regard to their own interests, they were all being kind.
But what can friends do for you when what you really need is enemies? People on whom to try out your precarious, convalescent aggression: people you can fight with, score off, not bother about. Sorry, didn’t mean to hit you, just wanted to find out if I still could….
*
Roast turkey. They’d promised there wouldn’t be, but there was. Robin brought Piggy down to join the family meal, her plait tied with a shoe-lace, but she’d taken one look and gone off to cook herself some Macrobiotic rice. Which of course made everyone feel more guilty than ever.
“For the children …” they said, helping themselves to sprouts, bread-sauce, gravy. “Christmas is for the children….” A heavy burden, you’d have thought, for two such small boys, one of whom didn’t like stuffing.
After dinner there were more presents—“for the children”, of course: two fragile, ecstatic little props on which the whole vast, dark day was balanced, more precariously than they could ever know.
No tree. The anxious, behind-doors debate on this issue had been mercifully resolved only yesterday by the discovery that the trees were all sold out. And so now the boys’ presents lay in a heap on the carpet, waiting for some sort of uneasy ritual to be improvised. And to complicate matters even further, a legend seemed to be right now in the making that Ivor had been in the habit of dressing up as Father Christmas and handing out presents to his grandsons with beaming bonhomie and idiotic chatter about reindeer and chimneys and the rest. Imogen was aware of an anxious, whispered conference going on in the corner of the room as to whether Herbert should, or should not, take over this rôle—or non-rôle, rather, for none of it, to Imogen’s recollection, had ever happened. Mercifully, the debate ended in a decision that he shouldn’t; and with whoops of happy greed, the boys fell on their parcels without ceremony, tearing into the coloured wrappings and lovingly-penned messages like termites into timber. This year, of course, there was no present from Grandpa, but never mind, there were plenty of others.
*
Ivor as Father Christmas! Oh well. In a way, he’d have rather enjoyed the rôle—would certainly have undertaken it if someone from the B.B.C. had asked him to, and had come along with a camera-team to record it—“Professor Barnicott, author of this and this and this, relaxing with his grandsons”—that sort of thing: but it so happened that no one had.
Well, and so why not let him have the legend, then?—this legend that Dot and all of them were so busy concocting? The jovial, benign grandpa, each year bringing the magic of Christmas to his little grandsons? He’d have loved it—of course he would: and all for free, now that he was dead. No boredom. No bother. No risk of the kids wrecking the whole image by crying and squabbling. It was a soft option, being dead. Good old Ivor!
*
Father Christmas, though. And after barely three months. What else would they have done to him, between them, by the time another year had passed—and all the years to follow?
Ivor, Ivor, she cried silently, what are they doing to you? Come back, just for one moment, and let me look at you, remind myself what you were really like …!
But already he was slipping away into the past, smaller and smaller, further and further away, scarlet hood, white beard and all.
*
“Granny! I say, Granny!”
Imogen roused herself, with an effort. There at her side was Timmie, gazing up into her face wide-eyed, and slightly aggrieved. “Granny, I thought Grandpa was supposed to be dead? Well, he isn’t. He’s still here. In his study, all dressed up as Father Christmas! Why isn’t he dead, Granny, like he’s meant to be?”