David was embarking on a bout of foreplay when he insisted we go to Phyllida’s for Christmas. I would have preferred his mind to be entirely focused on the stimulation of my pleasure centres, but her darling old husband had died, leaving her with six labradors who were only marginally younger and marginally less smelly than he had been, and David thought we ought to make the effort.
I couldn’t argue; one didn’t argue with David, even when he was naked but for an excitedly distended pair of underpants. He had a militarily precise way of putting one in one’s place. My place being somewhere between the blind mole-rat and the bonobo.
Of course he hadn’t considered that when he’d got me ‘up the duff’, as his father put it, and ‘done the right thing by the ghastly little trollop’. David had a remarkable appetite for unsuitable sex. Or at least sex with unsuitable partners. Oh, I wasn’t genetically suspect, but the truth was David had inseminated an utterly unsuitable mother for his line because I had compounded the sin of being lower middle class by being an actress. A television ‘star’ and ‘celeb’.
The words star and celebrity had become grubby with overuse by then, but for a while I was a favourite with the tabloid press, and, to a certain extent, the public. David always found it excruciatingly embarrassing when I was accosted by affectionate old ladies in the street wanting my autograph. At least, I thought it was embarrassment; perhaps it was envy.
Anyway, it was hoped his family’s genes would all but obliterate mine. Certainly they’d be gone by the next generation. Everyone was politely regretful, as though David had been somehow caught out. This was only made worse when, shortly after the birth of the son and heir, I landed a regular part in a daytime soap about police vets and promptly became a national icon for saving a kidnapped sniffer dog. The story ran for weeks and I was all over every newspaper, even mentioned at Prime Minister’s Questions. It was more than fifteen minutes of fame, and David detested it.
But a standing cock knows no conscience, as my friend KT always says. He also said he couldn’t believe anyone in this day and age could have been stupid enough to fall pregnant and go through with it. Fall pregnant – extraordinary expression. As if I’d tripped on a badly laid kerbstone and torn the hem of my virginity.
Poor David. My husband. Small, neat, dapper; dirty blond hair and a shy smile. That vulnerable half-smile that attracted maternal instincts like wildebeest to a waterhole. An absolutely old-fashioned gentleman. Sweet, charming, diffident. And a gold-plated bore with a borderline personality disorder. Well, all right, if I was such an astute judge of character, how did I come to be married to him in the first place and pretty soon have Welcome embroidered in large letters across my forehead? Quite simple, really: I was desperately, madly, blindly in love and my brain was disengaged. The wheel was spinning but the hamster had long since passed on.
I was absolutely defined by the men in my life until comparatively recently. I’m not saying that’s an entirely bad thing; it saves wear and tear on one’s intelligence and it never occurs to you to wear trousers rather than wax your legs.
But, as Shakespeare might have said: I run before my Volvo to Sainsbury’s.
Christmas. Phyllida lived, still does live, in a rambling, ersatz stately home in Gloucestershire. Not quite within hunt distance of royalty, but exclusive nonetheless. She was a Phethean by birth. I’ll quite understand if this impresses you with the same force as discovering she uses skimmed milk, but apparently in these circles of middle-class rurality, a great deal could be learned from a name.
The Phetheans had loose connections with the Bosanquets and were directly descended from William IV and Mrs Jordan. But then so is a crowd big enough to fill Wembley stadium.
David was frightfully impressed with her. She had married the 27th Baronet, Sir Tristram Fyvie, when he was 67 and she 33, and had become Phyllida, Lady Phethean Fyvie, lest her ancient name be lost, like her husband’s upper set the first time he introduced her.
I thought her a strikingly plain woman, far too long in the gum. Blue eye-shadow, no mascara, as is the way of women who wear Hermès scarves and pearls with wellies. I can only imagine her desire for his title was as great as the deterioration in his eyesight. Late onset diabetes, apparently. She never seemed particularly fond of him, and when he slipped into a twilight world peopled by ‘big women’ and ‘bloody Irish stiffs’, she gave him less attention than she gave to any one of the spoiled dogs already mentioned.
This pack of sleek black labs surged and ebbed around her, shared her bed and infested every chair and sofa in the house. I loathed visiting, as I always came away with enough shed hair to knit a yurt and smelling like a 1970s sheepskin coat. But David always said:
‘Poor dear Phylly.’ No, he didn’t say it, it drawled out of him, pulling the left corner of his lower lip out of alignment rather than disturb the stiffness of the upper. ‘She must be desperately lonely, darling.’
Darling – that was suspicious; I was usually Lumpy, or Kipper Feet or Old Pudding.
‘I think it would be a fine thing to take Christmas down to her this year. First one alone. Be difficult for her.’
I could never work out why he spoke like a 1940s Guards captain. He was at least a foot too short to join the Guards, years too young to have done national service, and the closest he’d been to a parade ground was waiting for a bus outside the territorial army barracks when the Land Rover was being serviced.
David was a forensic anthropologist. Only in his forties, but the dryness of the bones he worked with had desiccated his soul. He was ancient and I had become old to accommodate him. So successful was I that, had things not changed, I would soon have been mistaken for his mother. Or, more probably, nanny.
Anyway, Christmas.
I was of course and as usual left to buy, plan and prepare the entire event. David Carved The Turkey – and all my efforts paled before the sheer beauty of his feints and passes with a newly steeled carving knife.
•
We drove down to Gloucestershire on Christmas Eve in my ancient Metro. Originally known as the Flying Bidet, it was now so old it was the Venerable Bidet. David had wondered if we should take the four-wheel-drive or his classic Mercedes tank, but he wanted to drink and wouldn’t trust me with the Merc since I’d driven it twenty miles in top gear with the handbrake on. Easy mistake to make. And I wouldn’t drive the Discovery without an HGV licence. So Bidet it was: my faithful friend who’d never liked the cold and, in car years, was about 85.
The turkey wobbled about on the back seat like a nodding dog with my home-made Christmas pudding and my painstakingly iced Christmas cake – just a drop of Quink blue ink out of my school Osmiroid to make the white icing whiter; thinking of my father with tears in my eyes as I recreated the flowers and trails he’d taught me when I had to stand on the upturned washing-up bowl to see onto the table. Sprouts, chipolatas (a dozen for us, two dozen for the dogs – all organic), potatoes, breadcrumbs, brandy, champagne, wine and dinner-party crackers, guaranteed to yield gifts over which we’d squabble after the port… And us crammed in the front seats with our knees wedged under the dashboard.
We arrived at dusk. David disappeared into the house with Phyllida, airily saying how much he needed a drink and he’d unload the car later.
I did it. Alone. No help and in the dark.
In those days, last Christmas and a lifetime ago, martyrdom born of guilt was my preferred mode of dress. Comfortable. Like a bra that’s lost its wires in the wash.
While they started on the gin and tonics in front of the log fire surrounded by tail-waving labradors, I put everything in the pantry, and that which didn’t belong in the pantry in the larder, and the rest in the fridge. I laid out my stall, happy in my unassailable domestic superiority, accompanied by an ancient brown and white spaniel – so old its rear end stayed still while its front walked round it. Its watery eyes, tired after a lifetime of looking up for food and love, gazed unfocused into a bone-filled past at ankle level. The poor old thing was far too frail to compete with the rough young dogs next door.
I put a bit of bacon in front of him. His nose, more by a process of elimination than smell, guided his mouth to it. His tongue hoovered it over his gums and slotted it into a space where teeth had once been. He sucked at it contentedly, chin resting on outstretched paws.
When I was satisfied the kitchen was familiar to me and that I could face Christmas morning with confidence, I joined David, Phyllida and the pack in the living room. It was beautifully decorated – Dickensian, with its large tree dripping with sentimental fancies. In fact, there was nothing in the Victoria and Albert Museum shop that was not hung, propped or nailed up in this room. I felt like Cook going above stairs for the festive sherry. I was even more acutely aware of my position as I reached out to take my drink from Phyllida. Her long pale fingers only just touched my raw red ones, but I saw them like a close-up, on widescreen. Why wouldn’t my nails grow like that? Where her hands tapered elegantly away, mine came to an abrupt end, like coal shovels. Hands like navvies’ feet. Capable, the nuns had said.
She sat down. Either side of her, dozing black dogs. David, brightly flushed by the nearness of the fire and the strength of the gin, I supposed, sat in a high-backed club chair, all leather and brass buttons. Every other raised surface was covered in dog.
I sank to the threadbare rug which was masquerading as an antique kelim, forced my legs to cross as they had in the infant school hall for assembly, and murmured that I always sat on the floor. David and Phyllida continued their conversation, neither inviting me in nor purposely excluding me.
One of the dogs farted.
Silent, deadly and level with my face. By the time it drifted as high as Phyllida’s nose it was dilute enough to be laughed at, but on the floor I was as afraid to inhale as if it had been phosgene gas.
‘Oh, Winston. You naughty dog. Really. Stinky creature!’
I dipped my toe into the conversational stream: ‘That’s a nice name for a dog. What are the others called?’
Phyllida was pleased with the question – unlike when I asked where the turkey dish was (she didn’t have one) or how many saucepans there might be without nameless encrustations in the bottoms.
‘Well, Nora…’
Nobody called me Nora.
‘…The little one behind you is Peter, next to him is Geoffrey, here are Rose and Ruth, and those two are Fred and Winston.’
I flopped a velvety dog ear, exposing its pink insides: ‘After Churchill?’
‘Good Lord, no. Silcott. They’re all murderers.’ God, how stupid was I? Of course… ‘Dahmer, the Wests, Lee…and Sutcliffe.’
Phyllida looked at me as if I were a C-stream woodwork reject when I laughed a little too loudly and said my friend KT had two dogs called Eta and Ira, and that he wanted to get a third and call it Rouge. Phyllida politely asked why, though I could see she had no interest in the answer.
‘Because,’ I said, with a slightly desperate vocal flourish, ‘the first two are named after terrorist groups, and he wants to be able to go on the heath and shout, C’mere Rouge… Khmer Rouge…’
Not long after that I said goodnight.
They were overly solicitous and polite as I closed the door on the Christmas-card scene and plodded up the stairs, knowing I had made a fool of myself. David had given me that gentle, patronising look he usually reserved for occasions when I’d had two glasses of wine.
My face was glowing red in the hall mirror. The old spaniel staggered out to join me, hoping perhaps for another piece of bacon, or maybe it just wanted me to chew the bit it had. Did I see sympathy in its moth-eaten old face?
I should have liked to go to midnight mass, but there was no Catholic church in the village – the locals still had fond memories of Henry VIII and most had just the one eyebrow.
As I climbed higher up the stairs the air grew colder. And colder. I had only stayed in the house in summer before and had not then noticed the complete absence of radiators, gas heaters, or even one-bar electric fires, above ground level – where the old spaniel stayed, having absent-mindedly wet the hall rug.
The frost had formed pretty patterns on the bedroom window.Inside. My breath clouded the air and died, defeated by the bitter cold. I switched on the electric blanket, which would, I calculated from its position and meagre width, eventually singe one buttock each of a double occupancy. I couldn’t bear the idea of taking my clothes off, but thought it might be marginally less painful if I did so and got straight into a hot bath.
I crept into ‘our’ bathroom, which was about a furlong from the bedroom. The window was open. After ramming it closed, or as close to closed as would still let a stiff breeze through, I stood shuddering and staring down at the bath, like some bedraggled cat waiting for rescue from a perpendicular roof. The bath was the size of Windermere and constructed from off-cuts of the Forth Road Bridge. My mind went back to third-form maths: ‘If a man spends two days filling a bath at the rate of four litres a second but there is a hole in the side of the bath and the diameter of the hole in the side of the bath, etc. etc.’ My answer was always, ‘Why doesn’t he buy a new bath?’ But it was clear to me in that bleak midwinter you’d need an Icelandic geyser to combat the chill of the enamelled iron.
I’ll have a shower instead, I thought.
I turned the handle: immediately a gush of steaming water rushed out of the single brass tap. I pushed the lever across and the Niagara hurled itself up the coils of sprung copper. And then it encountered the shower head. A dribble of water forced its way past a century of limescale and formed a puddle beneath. The only way I was going to get warm would be to run round under the holes trying to get wet.
I gave up and went to bed.
There are few things less welcoming than damp sheets steaming in the heat of an electric blanket. The sweat on your bottom is only condensation; the droplets forming between once-pert breasts, fabric conditioner.
Mercifully, I was asleep when David came up. He never liked to risk my being awake in case I required intimacy. Or worse still, servicing. However, if he required that same intimacy, he was a fine and considerate lover, showing the same good manners that dictated he should open a door and allow the lady to go first. He asked permission to visit my bed. The light was always switched off. He never slept with me. And I never questioned him. I had learned, though, that if I made the first move, indeed any move, he was repelled.