Christmas had always been presumed a point of tension between Julia and Daniel but had been, in reality, quite the opposite. Before they’d married they had felt obligated to visit Julia’s mother every year on the grounds, put forward by Julia’s mother herself, that Daniel’s parents were Jews and it was not “their day.” “They can’t have everything,” she had said, dark and obscure. Julia had sat in shame and misery while her mother scorched a crown of turkey, refused Daniel’s help with anything but taking the bins out, and instead sat, slashing deep scores into the bottoms of tough sprouts and alternately ignoring or interrogating him on the subject of his religious beliefs. Unearthing his agnosticism, layered on top of the already unacceptable Judaism, had been the final insult. They had gone one final time when Gwen was tiny, teething, battling an unfortunate coincidence of pinkeye and impetigo, not a celestial Christmas cherub but a blotched and irritable tyrant. Julia’s mother had refused to hold the baby but instead had sat back, arms crossed defensively across her chest, and offered the bewildering adage that “a redhead aboard a ship brings bad luck,” implying that both Gwen and Daniel might have had the same ill effect upon National Rail, opined that it had been wicked to take the child on a crowded train spreading all those germs, and had then gone on to suggest that they had done so only because Daniel (and wasn’t it always the case with his sort?) was too tight-fisted to pay for the petrol. Julia had not repeated the mistake, preferring to visit alone, and at less charged points on the calendar. Christmas had offered too much tantalizing material, too many baubles of obvious conflict and star-points of attack.
Since Daniel had died, they had not visited. Julia had fought hard to forget that final conversation, to lock it away, sealed very tightly out of sight, in the dark, where it could no longer hurt her. Daniel would have dismissed it, would have laughed and told her to forgive, would have said that Hell didn’t exist anyway so how could a fanciful evocation matter; he knew Julia didn’t believe fairy stories, nor that he’d face lakes of fire or unquenchable flaming pits. But she could not forgive, and even to contemplate it burned like a betrayal. Gwen had never asked to go back, and the birthday cards she received, containing five pounds and the unvarying and unpunctuated message in blue Biro, MAY JESUS KEEP YOU FROM GRANDMOTHER, were never mentioned. Julia had embraced Daniel’s family traditions with relief.
• • •
GOSPEL OAK: a pleasingly ecclesiastical name at Christmastime. The Queen’s Crescent lights as scanty and ineffectual as a weak torch in daylight and lit not by a minor local celebrity but instead by whichever council-employed electrician has garlanded the lampposts in perfunctory and partially functioning strings of white bulbs. Stiff felt Santa hats and last year’s Dairy Milk advent calendars appear on market stalls, adding to the usual array of tissue multipacks and plastic children’s shoes and individual batteries on sale in a clear plastic washing-up bowl, the tartan-print vinyl shopping trolleys, nesting Tupperwares, and carousels of polyester headscarves. In December a regimental bank of small, potted poinsettias stand on proud display beside the usual buckets of wearily opening lilies. The market itself takes on a genial air and here, for the last ten years, Julia bought tinsel and wrapping paper and boxes of reliably cheap and unreliable fairy lights. She joined in with Christmas in the scrappy and defiant local style. And this year there was James, her family and his, around a single table. Thrilling. Terrifying.
He had set her free. Julia had never before considered retiring. Give up teaching for what? More hours of solitude? But James would retire in ten years, and was already full of ideas. He had a colleague supervising a training program for community midwives in Sierra Leone and he wanted to spend three months a year there, teaching. He’d always thought he’d move back to New England but now he talked of Sussex, “Lewes or some other absurdly beautiful British town,” and learning to cook on an Aga, and walking together, if not by the icy western Atlantic, then on the quieter shores of the English Channel.
What did she want? She hardly knew, and she’d never dared consider. Growing up she’d wanted a mother who wasn’t always angry; whose love did not feel conditional upon being unobtrusive, or upon the meek and tireless execution of chores. James’s asking allowed her to wonder, and to fantasize. She would adore the opera at Verona, or to go to JazzFest in New Orleans, and wanted to walk with James along the northern Appalachian Trail he’d described to her so vividly. They would wake up together in Maine, and New Hampshire, and Vermont. A new phase ahead, when their hours were freed only for one another. Whispered to James as they fell asleep, these wishes did not sound foolish. Instead, now, they sounded like plans. She no longer need dread the loneliness and silence of her daughter leaving home but instead could look forward to the new world that Gwen’s growing up would enable. If they left London and moved to Lewes, she could buy a better piano. Gwen would visit—with a degree, a boyfriend, with stories, with laundry—and then return to her own life. James and Julia would have one another.
But in the meantime, all must coexist in closer quarters. And no doubt Gwen was dreading every moment of Christmas lunch today, Julia thought, swallowing the hard bead of guilt that had lodged in her throat. She would find time alone with her on Boxing Day. Maybe they could go for a long tramp on the Heath together as they had last year, and the year before. They no longer had Mole, but she hoped Gwen knew they still had each other.
• • •
UPSTAIRS, JAMES WAS FOLDING the laundry and examining his own sense of faint unease, probing it like a sore tooth. He had felt almost instantly at home in this house, he reflected, and had only realized it with hindsight, now that his sense of belonging was unexpectedly undermined. Each meeting with them had been characterized by generous goodwill and decorum, but Daniel’s parents had not visited the house since he had moved in, and he was surprised by the degree of his own discomfort. He knew he was not a usurper. Nonetheless, he intended to remain upstairs until Iris and Philip had arrived to avoid the insensitive accident of welcoming them into a hallway that they knew better than he.
Since the divorce he and Pamela had managed to spend the holidays together in relatively amicable coalition. (Usually they gathered in Boston and once, less successfully, in Barbados—in the course of that week they had reunited intermittently for angry late-night sex, the pleasure of which had been entirely undermined by the magnificent violence of their daytime arguments. Afterward they’d agreed to celebrate chastely, and in Boston again.) He had readily agreed to host the Aldens for Christmas lunch, but this would be the first year that Nathan and Saskia would not have their parents together, and he knew, though they would not admit it, that they minded. Both had spoken to their mother several times already, and he’d overheard Nathan, in particular, sounding wistful and slightly guilty. Pamela had flown over with Saskia the day before and was having lunch with her own sister and extended clan in Sussex; the kids would join her on Boxing Day. They were shuttling, in the time-honored tradition of broken homes. It turned out they were not the rule’s exception.
Nathan appeared, looking conspiratorial. Then he rearranged himself, cool and collected again and drawled, “They’re here. Jeez, how boring. But at least now we can eat.” He tossed the hair from his eyes and grinned, winsome, devilish, spearing James’s heart with love, and then was gone again, footsteps thundering heavily down the stairs. James followed and joined them all in the hallway. Julia looked up and gave a quick nervous smile. He willed her to understand: they’re yours, and I shall learn to cherish them as you do, or try. I will love them: another tender, necessary lie.
“Really, you’re going to have to help us,” Iris was saying, “I’ve booked tickets for the whole series and I’m just not sure that I can face them every week.” She was shrugging off a black fur coat, silky, heavy, and Philip stood behind her attentively to receive it. Iris raised a leather-gloved hand to James in greeting. “I was just telling Julia I’ve booked a thousand and one tickets for a series at the Wigmore. You two are going to have to take a few off our hands; my ears were bigger than my stomach. Take the Borodin Quartet Shostakovich in February.”
Philip had hung Iris’s coat over the end of the banister and was slowly unwinding his own scarf. “I sometimes find Shostakovich rather exhausting,” he mused. He took off his glasses slowly and began to polish them on the corner of his cardigan, smiling blindly toward James.
“Which is precisely why I am offloading him. I’m saving us Brahms and Liszt.”
“Thank you,” said Philip, humbly. Glasses replaced, he extended an unsteady hand to James. “Chag sameach. Thank you for having us.”
“Right, exactly. Christmas sameach. Come in, come in.” This invitation was just what he had intended not to say, and with nerves he had somehow said it twice. Come in, make yourselves at home. Too late. He stood back, allowing them past him and into the living room. Philip patted his arm.
From the kitchen came a loud clattering, and then Gwen skidded in, hair loose and flying. She threw joyous arms around her grandmother, who recoiled. “Darling, you reek of fish, get off me immediately!”
Gwen pushed a curl from her eyes with the back of her wrist, and then sniffed her hands. “Yuck. Sorry, I’ve been making smoked salmon rosettes. I should have rubbed lemon on them.”
Saskia followed from the kitchen, and smiled vaguely around. “Hey,” she said in general greeting, and then added, “Does that really work? Mine stink, too; I’ve been unwrapping. Gwen’s cooking awesome stuff, come see.”
“Gwen doesn’t cook, she presents,” Nathan amended.
“That’s true. But I tell you something, my presentation is seriously Off. The. Charts. Granny, I’ve made a cream cheese snowman, he’s in the fridge, he’s got poppy seed hair and everything. There’s not really cooking to do with Christmas bagels.” She pirouetted on socked feet, landing rather heavily on her heels.
In the last weeks James had detected a thaw between Nathan and Gwen—not an alliance, for that would be too much to ask, but a truce, perhaps. Late at night, he and Julia whispered about it with cautious optimism. Since Valentina’s now firmly established absence, family life had steadily improved, and it no longer seemed unreasonable to picture them all coexisting in relative harmony until the next years would send one, then both of the children to college.
They moved together into the kitchen, where Julia peeled plastic wrap from various dishes and James, glad to have something to occupy him, offered drinks, clinked ice into glasses, and then retrieved Gwen’s snowman construction from the fridge. It was indeed very impressive, with eyes cut from scraps of black olive, rosemary twig arms, and a tiny carrot nose. It was likely she’d spent more time on this edifice than she’d spend on a week’s homework, but her academic future (or lack of it) was not James’s business. An appreciative murmur went around the table. Julia moved a basket of bagels to one side and took a seat between Iris and Gwen.
“Not wanting to pit matriarch against matriarch,” Nathan began, offering Iris the platter of Gwen’s elaborately rolled salmon flowers, “but why bagels exactly? Pamela always makes goose on Christmas Day.”
“It’s an Alden family tradition.” Julia pushed back her chair to retrieve the sliced lemons from the counter. She was feeling charitable, more relaxed than expected in this odd, mixed company. She took Gwen’s hand and squeezed it, and Gwen squeezed back, and smiled.
“It was Iris,” Philip told him, pointing apologetically at a poppy seed bagel in the basket that Julia held out. She took it and sliced it for him. “It was entirely Iris’s innovation. I was often at the hospital on Christmas Day—”
“That is a total misrepresentation,” Iris interrupted. “You were always at work on Christmas Day because you always offered to work Christmas Day.”
Philip shrugged. “It’s not our holiday, it seemed fair . . .”
“It seemed charitable to take them all bagels.” Iris shrugged. “They were such a sorry bunch, nothing scheduled on the wards and these rather pathetic strands of tinsel over the nurses’ station. And hospital food is just so revolting, and they did the most repulsive seasonally inspired muck. Horrid pale greasy sprouts, and slices of mystery meat with stuffing. It was an act of charity that turned into a tradition.”
“They still do the mystery meat,” James told her. “I’ve grown quite fond of it.” To Philip he said, “I forgot to tell you, you know we had the quad mother?”
“Did you manage to keep them in?”
“We had to section her yesterday. She was—”
“Dad.” Saskia spoke very softly, but her voice was firm. “No gross birth stories today, please. It’s Christmas.”
“Christmas is all about birth stories,” said Nathan through a mouthful of lunch. “In a barn or whatever, with nothing but herbs as pain relief. What do frankincense and myrrh actually do? It’s right up Mom’s street, it’s like, the ultimate home birth.” He snorted, pleased with himself. Gwen giggled.
After a few moments hunched over his phone Nathan announced, “Myrrh opens up the heart chakra.”
“So says the wisdom of the Internet.”
“No, so says Mom, I texted her. ‘Good for making one accepting and nonjudgmental.’”
“I’d need a hell of a lot of myrrh not to judge that utter horseshit,” James told him, and then looked to Iris, regretting the obscenity, but Iris was nodding in firm agreement.