It was the custom at Christmas for the McCosh family to do two things. One was for them to wait upon the servants, the day before Christmas Eve, and treat them to a proper Christmas dinner, complete with a goose, roasted parsnips, chestnut stuffing, Christmas pudding, and their own present under the tree, to be opened afterwards. Mr McCosh’s father had got the idea from an army friend, who had told him that in the Queen’s Bays it was the custom at Christmas for the officers to wait upon the men.
Since this custom had been imported from Mr McCosh’s family, rather than from that of his wife, she, needless to say, heartily disapproved of it, even though it originated in the manners of an elite cavalry regiment. Mr McCosh, however, always entered into the spirit of the occasion, and enjoyed it with great gusto even if the servants did not.
He had to concede that it had lately become a somewhat melancholy occasion. Because the male servants had never returned, there were only Cookie and Millicent left, apart from the Honourable Mary FitzGerald St George, who had been given leave to return to her father for Christmas. Whereas before the war the two women had not felt at all self-conscious being served by the family, it was distinctly embarrassing and awkward now that there were only two of them.
This year Mrs McCosh seemed highly confused, and so the sisters ushered her upstairs for a rest, and created chaos as they attempted to conjure a decent supper out of their inexperience. Fortunately Cookie always made two puddings on Stir-Up Sunday, but now she sat in the withdrawing room with Millicent, lightheaded from the unpleasantly dry sherry that Mr McCosh insisted on plying them with, in a lather of worry about what appalling mistakes the sisters might be making in the kitchen. Fairhead sat smoking in one armchair, having exempted himself from kitchen duty on the grounds of incapacity, masculinity and general incompetence. Gaskell, monocle in place, her short dark hair slicked back, smoked one Abdulla after another from her immensely attenuated cigarette holder. She was clad, as usual, in such a manner as to suggest that she was just about to go shooting. Her plan was to go to her own family the following day, and she was not helping in the kitchen on the grounds that it was already too crowded down there and she only knew how to cook under the stress of continuous bombardment. Daniel sat next to her, with both Esther and the cat on his knee, peeved at having been excluded from the kitchen, when it was quite clear to himself that the French half of him might have been quite useful. He found it agonising to have to sit still for any length of time anywhere, an agony that always seemed so much worse when it occurred in the McCosh withdrawing room, especially when Mrs McCosh was there. His own mother had gone to stay with her family in France for the Christmas period, and Daniel greatly wished that he could have been there with her. ‘Don’t worry,’ Mme Pitt had said, ‘une belle journée we will have a Christmas all ensemble en Normandie.’
Christabel came in, perspiring and flustered, and said, ‘Cookie, how long should we rest the goose?’
‘About half an hour, miss.’
‘Oh dear, I fear that supper will be frightfully late,’ said Christabel, hurrying out.
‘Would you like me to come and look, miss?’ called Cookie after her, in vain.
‘I wonder if it will snow,’ said Mr McCosh, like the good Scot that he was, who knows only to talk of the weather when no other topic is at hand.
At this point Millicent burst into tears, not merely because she had thought she might spend all her Christmases with Hutchinson, but because an unexpected catastrophe had descended on her family out of the blue, and she was unable to restrain her despair any further.
‘Millicent, what is it?’ asked Mr McCosh, who had been standing by the fireplace with his left arm on the mantelpiece and a substantial glass of neat whisky in his left hand.
‘What’s up, dear?’ asked Cookie, glad to have something to deal with.
Millicent sobbed into her hands. ‘We lost everything,’ she cried at last. ‘We got nothing left!’
‘Nothing left? What on earth do you mean, girl? Lost everything? Farrow’s? Do you mean Farrow’s?’
‘Yes, sir, it’s them lot. They’ve gone and taken everything, and we won’t never get it back. How are we going to manage? Every last penny, and now we’ve got nothing! All our savings! Gone!’
‘Oh good Lord,’ exclaimed Mr McCosh. ‘If I’d known you’d put all your savings into Farrow’s, I would have advised you against it. I know Farrow and Crotch, nice enough fellows, and very plausible, but their interest rates were quite mad. I wasn’t at all surprised when they crashed.’
‘Oh, you poor thing, you should have kept it all under the bed, like sensible folks,’ said Cookie.
‘Now we know where you keep yours,’ observed Fairhead. ‘You’ll have to put it somewhere else.’
‘How much have you lost?’ asked Mr McCosh.
‘About two hundred pounds, sir. It was everything that me and Mother saved up for years and years, sir.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Mr McCosh. ‘I suppose you know that the government has refused to bail them out? There’s no compensation?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ve seen the people outside the branches. The weeping and wailing. It’s most distressing. I don’t know if you know Mr Hughes at the toy shop in Eltham? He told me he couldn’t pay for his Christmas stock, so I lent him the money at 2 per cent for three months. The least I could do. Damned bankers! They’re the scum of the earth. I can’t tell you how much trouble they’ve caused me and how many opportunities I’ve lost because of damn bankers. They only lend to you when they know perfectly well that you don’t need it. Damned bankers. Curse the lot of them.’
Millicent sobbed into her handkerchief, and Mr McCosh said again, ‘I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Thank you, sir,’ sniffled Millicent.
‘Thank God I took my money out of Farrow’s to buy a motorcycle,’ said Daniel. ‘At least I have something to show for it.’
‘I withdraw my remark about the madness of buying it,’ said Fairhead.
‘Ah, but do you apologise?’
‘My dear fellow, that would be to go too far. You will undoubtedly come to grief on it one of these days. Should hospitals ever require spare parts, it will be to motorcyclists that they will turn.’
‘In future you should put any spare money into Martin’s Bank,’ said Mr McCosh to no one in particular. ‘They are very solid, very solid. There’s a branch in Eltham. Let us propose toasts, as usual. Millicent, to whom would you like to propose a toast?’
‘Um, my poor old mother, I think, sir.’
‘Well, here’s to Millicent’s poor old mother!’ exclaimed Mr McCosh, raising his glass. ‘God bless her!’
Gaskell said, ‘I propose a toast to Oxford University!’
‘My dear lassie, why?’
‘Because on the 14th of October they gave out degrees to women for the very first time.’
‘Ah, the monstrous regiment of women gains apace! Here’s to Oxford University!’
‘And a curse on Cambridge for not,’ added Gaskell.
‘A curse on Cambridge!’ toasted Mr McCosh. ‘What about you, Cookie?’
‘I’m toastin’ Charles Elmé Francatelli, sir.’
‘Who?’
‘Charles Elmé Francatelli, sir.’
‘Gracious me, Cookie. Who’s he? Sounds like a wop.’
‘Wrote my favourite cookbook, sir. A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Classes. That’s what it’s called. It’s a godsend, sir.’
‘For the working classes, Cookie? When do you get a chance to use that?’
‘All the time, sir. Wouldn’t have got through the war without it. You know that giblet pie you like, sir, and that toad-in-the-hole and them Norfolk dumplings and that rabbit pudding? Them’s all from that book, sir.’
‘Good God, are they? You’ve been cooking for us from a book for the working classes? Well, I’m damned. Socialism comes to Court Road! Gracious me.’
‘Don’t tell the mistress, will you, sir? But he was a cook to Queen Victoria, sir, and I do use the posh book he wrote too.’
‘I certainly won’t. She would have a thousand fits. And kittens. But she would certainly be swayed by his having been a royal cook.’
‘I do use Countess Morphy’s book ’n’ all, sir.’
‘Cookie, you’re a dark horse,’ said Fairhead.
‘Oh well, here’s to what’s-his-name the gastronomical wop that got us through the war!’ Mr McCosh drank, and the company followed suit.
‘I propose a toast to Dame Nellie Melba,’ said Fairhead, ‘the most wondrous warbler of them all.’
‘And I to the monstrous regiment of women,’ said Mr McCosh, ‘and in particular to Cookie and Millicent, without whom we would all grind to an ignominious halt.’
‘Dame Nellie Melba and the monstrous regiment of women and Cookie and Millicent!’
At that moment Mrs McCosh entered, having woken from a nightmare and been drawn down by the pleasant aroma of cooked food. ‘Ah,’ she said as all the menfolk stood, ‘drinking the usual toasts, I see. I hope you have not forgotten Their Majesties.’
‘We drink the loyal toast after our own Christmas dinner, my dear, as you know.’
‘In that case let’s drink to King Constantine of the Hellenes.’
‘But why, my dear?’
‘He’s just been restored. One has to stand up for the principal of royalty, my dear, otherwise the whole world falls apart, as we know.’
‘I’d quite like to be restored,’ said Daniel, resisting the temptation to ask her whether her support of the principle of royalty extended to the Kaiser and the Emperor of Austria. ‘I’m exhausted after that drive from Partridge Green. I don’t think I have ever been so wet or so cold, not even at fifteen thousand feet. It would have taken minutes in a Snipe.’
Mrs McCosh glared at him, and then, as if having read Daniel’s thoughts, Gaskell said, in her languid, rather decadent drawl, ‘Well, here’s to the Dutch handing over the Kaiser, so we can string him up.’
‘I feel sorry for the Kaiser,’ said Fairhead.
‘What?’ cried Daniel. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Oh, very probably. What I mean is that he seems to have wanted an empire in Europe, when the rest of us have already got one elsewhere. There wasn’t anywhere else to get one, really. And now everybody is going to hate and despise him forever, including his own relatives. He must be hiding in Holland, blushing with shame and embarrassment. He must be in Hell, actually, when you consider how omnipotent he was before. He’s been well and truly cast out of Paradise, I’d say.’
‘The man was a complete and utter fool,’ said Gaskell shortly. ‘Did he really think he could invade neutral countries and go to war with our Allies, and get away with it?’
‘Of course you’re quite right,’ said Fairhead, ‘but one can still feel sorry for a fool. Every paradise has a serpent hiding in it, doesn’t it? And he turned out to be his own serpent. A very great fool indeed, I’d say.’
‘I find your compassion quite inexplicable and inexcusable,’ said Mrs McCosh. ‘One simply doesn’t declare war on one’s relatives, especially in the royal family.’
‘Edward IV murdered his own brother,’ said Ottilie, ‘and I understand that the sultans murdered their brothers as a matter of course. It was fully expected of them.’
‘I hardly think one can call a sultan royalty,’ declared Mrs McCosh. ‘Why, they’re not even Christian!’
Rosie said, ‘Did he really want an empire? I thought he was just worried about being a sandwich between France and Russia, so he decided to knock out one and then go on and knock out the other.’
‘Ah, the Schlieffen Plan,’ said Fairhead. ‘Yes, you’re right about that.’
‘He was still an absolute fool,’ insisted Gaskell, her green eyes sparking with contempt.
‘May I change the subject?’ asked Daniel, his eyes aglow with mischief. ‘I have a surprise for you. An entertainment. I want everybody here at teatime. Without fail, including Cookie and Millicent, if that’s convenient.’
‘It’s hardly convenient,’ said Mrs McCosh, who had been making a vocation of irritating Daniel for some time now.
‘Of course it is,’ remonstrated her husband. ‘Where else would we be at teatime?’
‘How exciting,’ said Gaskell drily. ‘What a shame I shall not be here to see it.’
‘Christabel will send you a report,’ said Daniel. ‘In fact I will ask her to take photographs.’
At that very moment Christabel came in, even hotter and more flustered than before. ‘Talking about me?’ she said. ‘I hope it was nothing uncomplimentary. Dinner is served. Or, to be more precise, charred.’
‘Cookie, you will take my arm as always,’ said Mr McCosh.
‘And Millicent will take mine,’ said Daniel. He leapt to his feet and offered it to her.
Millicent blushed and placed her arm softly in his. She felt something like a spark pass between them at the contact, and she knew that he had felt it too. She suddenly wished that she had better clothes to wear, even though she was most grateful for Miss Rosie’s cast-offs. After dinner Ottilie would play the piano and she would probably have to take a waltz with Mr Daniel while Cookie took one with Mr McCosh.
Mrs McCosh remembered that it had not, after all, been so unpleasant to take a waltz with the footman, back when they still had one. A scintilla of Christmas spirit sparkled in her eyes, and then quickly faded. It was difficult to enjoy anything these days. She had got halfway through writing a Christmas card to Myrtle, before remembering.