Sixteen

Anna was on the Luas. It swerved down from the new glass bridge that spanned the inscrutable waters of the Grand Canal into Peter’s Place – very, very slowly. As it swung into Harcourt Street it was crawling along in a weary way, like Thomas the Tank Engine going up a hill. I know I can I know I can I know I can, Anna found herself saying inanely; she had read the sentence aloud to Rory a hundred times, and her mother had read it to her a hundred times when she was a child. I know I can.

So the Luas wasn’t perfect, after all. These days the newspapers were full of reports about problems with the tracks; they had been laid in the wrong way and were now starting to crack. It was dismaying to read these things, although in practice the cracks did not seem to make any difference to anything.

Anna was on her way to town, to meet her editor, Elizabeth, and explain that she was delayed and that her book would not be ready for another six months, and to get her reaction to the extract she had sent her – so-called extract, because she had sent Elizabeth every word she had written. She was not looking forward to the encounter much. On top of that, this morning Ludmilla had been more than usually cheeky. When Anna had said she was going out early, Ludmilla had tossed her head and said nothing. She suspected, Anna knew. She suspects and she’s treating me accordingly.

There is definitely a way to let your cleaner know that cheekiness is not acceptable. But what is it? To some women such a skill would be second nature. But Anna was not a bossy person and – like most women – had not been brought up in a household with staff; she found it difficult enough to ask Ludmilla to wash the floor or clear out the fridge, much less how to let her know that it was not her place to make moral judgements on her employer’s behaviour. Not that Ludmilla had made any overt comments. Her indignation was expressed in silences, in the set of her shoulders, and in a madly irritating superior way of walking, a gait every step of which said, ‘I know just what you’re up to’. It is hard to find a suitable reprimand for that sort of thing. Anna, knowing this strategy was yet another mistake, responded in kind. She sulked back. She and Ludmilla hardly spoke to one another these days. The house was full of heavy silence, punctuated with the occasional shrug or grunt – these from Ludmilla, who was an expert grunter.

Anna left the house earlier than usual. On this occasion her business was legitimate, but how was Ludmilla to know that? She did not say goodbye when Anna took her leave, just muttered something inaudible, probably in Lithuanian, from her place by the dishwasher, where she was removing the clean delft with much more rattling and banging than was necessary. Interesting, Anna thought, as she opened the door of the jeep and climbed up, that as soon as speech was withheld in a household, other kinds of sound immediately rushed in to fill the vacuum: slams, rattles, crashes. Sighs, grunts, screams. Not that Ludmilla would ever scream. Or break anything. Her repertoire of annoying noises was limited to grunts, rattling cutlery, and controlled slow slams, the artillery of the restrained angry person.

McCarthy’s, the publishers, had an office on the sixth floor of a large glass and concrete building. This was the Irish branch of a big international publishing house, which had opened a few years back to deal with the Irish authors who were now very important to them, it was said – although it was not very clear what they meant by that. Maybe they had discovered that more people in Ireland read books than in England?

She had an appointment for midday, and the clock stood at twelve noon exactly as she arrived at the McCarthy building. In a covered walkway leading from an underground car park to the main entrance, a beggar wrapped in a blue sleeping bag sat reading the Metro, one of the free tabloids. He looked up as Anna passed, staring at her through his round spectacles. He recognised her but she did not even see him, so concentrated or anxious was she. As she swept past, oblivious of his existence, he laughed quietly and returned to his newspaper.

Anna climbed the stairs to the office. The door was on the latch but when she went inside there was nobody in the reception room. A side table was stacked with a high pile of Jiffy bags, about fifty of them: the day’s rejected manuscripts. Elizabeth had told her they received a hundred unsolicited manuscripts every week, of which ninety-nine point five per cent were returned to the writers. This information was intended to make Anna feel lucky and important, and it did, but it also bewildered her in an unpleasant way. She tried to imagine the accumulated disappointment of ninety-nine and a half writers, to comprehend the time they had spent writing their two to three hundred novels – two to three hundred years, cumulatively, all for nothing except the cold, abandoned feeling rejection must engender, no matter how justified. What a lot of pain and time wasting! Would those writers have been better off going for a swim, or watching movies, or doing whatever it is people who don’t write do in those long hours when the others are at their pcs? Perhaps not. At least they had their manuscripts at the end of their efforts. Products. Made by their own hands, minds, hearts, lives. Home-made books. Did they derive some satisfaction from that, a satisfaction that was greater than the pleasure of having had a good time enjoying someone else’s creation? Could creative work be an end in itself, even if the product never reached an audience? She didn’t know. Every writer she had ever known wanted to be published. Every writer she had ever known dreamed of fame and fortune, the way people long ago dreamed of marble halls and fairy-tale marriages. Every writer wanted to be the new Emily Dickinson, or Anton Chekhov, or James Joyce. (Not to mention J.K. Rowling.) Quite a few believed they were. No writer wanted to hear their own manuscript dropping onto the hall floor in a Jiffy bag – a precious gift generously sent to the world and sent back by return of post.

This was not a very welcoming office. There were no bells to press to attract attention. There was not even a chair to sit down on, unless you went behind the desk and sat in the orange swivel chair used by the receptionist. So Anna stood, tapping her foot against the wooden floor and getting increasingly anxious. A quarter of an hour passed, very slowly. Then Linda, the receptionist, bounced busily into the room, sat down with a sprightly motion, as if she had springs in her bottom as well as her feet, and said, in the cheery tones she would have used greeting anyone, from the Revenue Commissioner’s bailiff to their bestselling chick-lit writer, ‘Oh Anna! How are you? What a lovely coat!’

Anna was wearing a pink coat she had bought the day before in Brown Thomas to impress Vincy.

‘Thanks,’ said Anna. Linda, she suddenly remembered, irritated her at the best of times. Anna refrained from adding some warm and friendly comment. She had learned some tricks from Ludmilla. She said nothing.

This had the gratifying effect of embarrassing Linda, if only slightly. She had retained some dregs of human vulnerability, in spite of her job as guard dog for the publisher, which entailed dealing with annoyed authors several times a day. Most of them never came near the place, contenting themselves with sighs on the phone, but among every heap of rejects one or two would have the sort of owner who would come storming up in the lift, letting Linda know exactly how they felt. She had an alarm button under her desk, which she had been forced to use only once in her life when the writer of a post-modernist work of fiction about Irish politicians had pulled a sawn-off shotgun out of his backpack. He had calmed down when he heard the sirens and scuttled off before the gardaí arrived on the scene, forgetting his terrible manuscript in the process. (Linda had not known what to do with it: if she sent it back, it might elicit another angry response; on the other hand, she was afraid to shred it, lest that too have dire consequences. So she kept it. She still had it. It had been sitting in the reject pile on the table for two and a half years. The paper was yellowing at the edges.)

‘Well, em, what can I do for you?’ she asked.

‘I had an appointment with Elizabeth for twelve o’clock,’ said Anna stonily.

‘Oh!’ Linda looked surprised. ‘She hasn’t mentioned it to me.’ She fiddled with her computer. ‘She’s at a meeting,’ she said flatly, after a moment’s pause.

Anna felt her stomach sink. ‘Well, tell her I’m here, please,’ she said.

‘The meeting is in London,’ said Linda. She looked Anna in the eye. ‘Some mix up. I’m very sorry … you didn’t come in specially, did you?’

As if I were in the habit of dropping in for a cup of tea, thought Anna. Again she was silent.

‘Look, I’ll phone her and tell her.’ Linda took pity on her.

Anna waited while she dialled. Impatience was now beginning to etch itself on Linda’s face. The office was very neat, and still not impersonal. It was a nice place to be, if you were being looked after, but if you were not, its orderly, pleasant atmosphere emphasised your sense of abandonment. It was like being very ill on a lovely summer’s day in the country.

Linda got an answering machine, as Anna had known she would. She left a message asking Elizabeth to ring Anna as soon as she could.

‘That’s all I can do, I’m afraid,’ said Linda, looking apologetic but impatient. ‘She won’t be back until tomorrow, she’s staying over for a launch, so she’ll ring you in the meantime.’

‘Can’t be helped,’ said Anna. ‘Goodbye.’

In two weeks it would be Christmas. Her novel should have been finished by the 31st of December, but it was so far from completion that at this rate it would be next Christmas before she’d have anything to show. And it looked as if Elizabeth had not been impressed by the chapters she had seen. No wonder, thought Anna. They were wooden. They were so wooden that they were dead, deader than wood. In a way, she thought, wooden characters, talking stiffly in a wooden fashion and moving stiffly like sticks, could be interesting, in a post-modernist, stylised way. But not, probably, in a book aimed at a juvenile mass market. Not in a book that, like a million other books being written all over the world at this very moment, was aiming to be the next Harry Potter. To succeed in becoming the pre-eminently successful children’s author of worldwide repute, she would have to come up with a better strategy than writing a wooden book about wooden characters, with a predictable but at the same time totally unbelievable plot.

Lilian had said it was good. But she was probably lying. Indeed, since sending her chapters to Lilian, Anna had hardly heard a word from her. At the J.K. Rowling thing the other night Lilian had seemed to be avoiding her, although in that huge press of bodies it was hard to tell. At any rate, they had not even exchanged a greeting, whereas usually they got together and gossiped long and hard at these events, of which that had been one of the most glittering all year. Of course Anna had been with Vincy. Lilian probably had her suspicions about them. Perhaps she disapproved?

Anna was now walking aimlessly around the streets near O’Connell Street, walking off her annoyance with Elizabeth.

The streets were decorated and the choirs of carol singers were belting out the songs and rattling the boxes. The shop windows were crammed with shiny clothes and tinsel. All this delighted her usually, but today she felt mixed up. She could take no interest in the preparations for the festival, just as she could take no interest in writing her book. Her plan had been to do some of the Christmas shopping after her meeting, but now she did not have the heart for it.

The writing was on the wall. It was her own fault. She had a good publisher, something a lot of her friends would die for, and she had failed to come up with the goods.

Against her better judgement, she telephoned Vincy, who had made it clear that he didn’t like being phoned during the day.

His mobile is not accessible at the moment or it may be turned off, the voice told her.

Just when you most needed someone, the customer was out of range or inaccessible. He was in a meeting, no doubt. Like most people she knew, he spent a lot of his time in a meeting, inaccessible, out of range, protected by his turned-off mobile or a guard dog of a secretary.

She had a cup of coffee in a department store café and when she phoned again after the coffee, he was still out of range or had his mobile turned off.

It was then that she decided, why she could hardly say, to go and look at his apartment. She had never been there. It was mainly out of bounds, because he shared it with a friend, another journalist, Joe McFale. Anna had never met Joe and had not come across his work. All she knew about him was that he seldom left the apartment, for which Anna had been grateful – it meant she was under no pressure to go there and sleep with Vincy. Now, however, what had once been a blessing was gradually evolving into a nuisance, at best. When Anna thought of Joe McFale, she usually added the phrase ‘pain in the ass’ to his name. She would be very pleased if he got a place on his own, or if he emigrated to some far-off land. Or died.

The affair had been going on for almost two months. Ludmilla knew about it. That greenhorn Leo suspected it – he’d caught them in the pub. Who else had spotted them, unbeknownst to Anna? Half of Dublin, probably.

The affair that was not an affair. The affair that lacked the single, essential ingredient of any proper affair: sex. Platonic, some people called such relationships. A nice word for a wishy-washy, half-hearted, excuse of a thing. A euphemism for sexual hypocrisy. Or something worse.

What was the point in being so abstemious? She was risking her reputation and that of her husband and child, but not experiencing the unbelievable pleasure a love affair was supposed to bring. Because of some stupid scruple, some innate cautiousness, that would not permit her to let herself go completely?

She was cheating on Alex anyway, although she didn’t want to admit it. He would be devastated if he knew what was going on – that she was meeting Vincy Erikson almost every day, that she was in love with Vincy, not with him, Alex, her husband. Would Alex be any less disturbed if she explained, yes, yes, but we haven’t had sex, so it doesn’t count? No. Not in the least. Alex would not be consoled in the slightest by that; he was not a fool.

He would be much happier, probably, if she had sex discreetly with Vincy, and stopped meeting him in pubs and cafés, where anyone could see them and suspect the worst. He would care about appearances. Not because he was a hypocrite, or shallow. He was neither of those. Because he was human.

Alex did not deserve to be betrayed by his wife. But half betraying him was not making it better – it was just alleviating her own feelings of guilt.

She rang Vincy’s doorbell.

Somewhat to her shock, he opened the door almost immediately.

‘This is a bit of a surprise,’ he said, when he had admitted her to the gloomy hall. He half-smiled and she knew he was annoyed.

‘I was upset. I phoned and you were out of range.’

‘Well, it’s nice to see you anyway.’ He did not hug her as he ushered her up two flights of uncarpeted stairs and into his rooms. He was wearing an old green cardigan, and carpet slippers. He looked older than usual.

She sat down beside him on a rickety sofa.

The room was big, with a high ceiling and its original ornate plasterwork intact. A marble fireplace of enormous dimensions. It was immensely shabby, its wallpaper about a hundred years old, browny beige, dripping off the walls in places. The wooden floors were ancient, uneven. The furnishings were junk-shop antiques, mismatched, broken.

‘It’s lovely.’ Anna gazed around her, awestruck. It was the sort of room hired out by film crews for arty documentaries, or advertisements for instant coffee or spaghetti sauce. ‘You never told me you lived in a place like this.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think about it as anything special. I take it for granted.’

‘It’s amazing,’ she said.

‘It isn’t mine,’ he looked at her, amused.

She was taken aback slightly.

‘Who owns it?’ she asked. ‘Joe?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Lucky Joe.’

‘Yes, lucky Joe.’

‘I bet he lets it to film crews and things all the time? I think I’ve seen it on an ad.’

‘It happens.’ Vincy was not cross but he was still uneasy, as if he didn’t know what to do next. This was not a situation he found himself in very often. ‘Do you want something to eat? Coffee?’

She nodded.

There was no further mention of Joe.

Vincy made the coffee and got out some bread and cheese, heated some soup. He regained his composure. A phone call was made, and that changed his mood. He seemed certain that Joe would not come back to the flat.

After lunch, they made love.

He did not ask her if she had changed her mind. He just led her into his bedroom, paused for a few seconds – a parenthesis in which she could say anything, as they both knew. She unbuttoned his cardigan. Could there be a more unsexy garment to unbutton in the world than a man’s cardigan? No. But even as she was thinking this she unbuttoned it, with a fine show of passion.

It was so simple.

All she had to do was come to his flat. Even though he had not planned any of this, once he had taken control of the situation, he knew exactly what was expected of him and carried it out.

It was not as momentous, as wonderful, as the kiss in the car park.

She loved him. But nobody had made love to her, ever, apart from Alex. Nobody apart from him – and a few doctors – had seen her naked body in ten years. She felt at home with Vincy’s wiry hair, with his smell – grass, smoke. The fact was, she felt at home with his cardigan. And the body inside that cardigan did not seem strange to her, felt as familiar as a body she had slept with a thousand times. But she was shy about her own, about revealing it, in this weird room, with its peeling plaster, its cavernous proportions.

They made love, and it was successful, but not what she had hoped for.

And he didn’t seem to notice.

‘I love you,’ she said, as they lay side by side. He smoked a cigarette. She loved that about him, that he smoked, although it made no sense. ‘I adore you.’

‘I’m flattered,’ he said, laughing. His eyes twinkled mischievously and mysteriously.

She kissed him, got up and started to pull on her clothes. He lay against the pillow, blue smoke climbing in wreaths above his head. He gazed at her, appreciatively, silent and, it seemed to her, thoughtful. ‘I love you,’ she said again. He did not reciprocate with any declaration of his own, just continued to smoke his cigarette, and stare. Anna’s mood was so buoyant that she ignored his silence, the distance he seemed to be placing between her and him, now that she had left his bed. The room, its walls the colour of putty and brown skin, was the perfect setting for sex. A candle or two, thick and dripping in ancient candlesticks, would have made it completely perfect – there were a few candles around, she noticed, but he didn’t think of lighting them. As it was, the low slanting sun of December falling through the window, long and narrow, and dusty, cast rays of reddish light into the shadowy room. It could have been … the past. Vermeer and Scarlett Johansson. Yeats and one of his lovers in Woburn Buildings, or some rented room in a Dublin hotel.

Anna felt changed. Too changed to take a taxi and go home, which was what she should have done. Instead she walked back towards the Luas stop at Stephen’s Green, braving the terra incognita of Mountjoy Square and Upper O’Connell Street. Vincy was unconcerned for her safety. Like most people who live in bad areas, he did not subscribe to the belief that this was more dangerous than anywhere else. He was concerned that she would be very late in getting home. But in her brave new mood she dismissed these concerns, called Luz Mar to make sure she collected Rory from school and said she would be home in time for dinner.

She was halfway down O’Connell Street, when Elizabeth, her editor, phoned.

Anna had forgotten all about the morning’s events. That is how happy she was: the world of books and editors and publishing did not matter. By comparison with what she had experienced, the writing of a book, the fortunes of a book, were trivial in the extreme. Books would come and go, but the joy in her heart would go on forever. So she believed, just then, in the cold crisp evening on O’Connell Street, with the giant pine tree from Norway glittering behind her and the decorated shop windows lighting her way.

Elizabeth was very apologetic. She asked Anna how she was, in her warm, caring tones, the tone that was the house style, and said she would ring and arrange for another meeting, in about a week’s time. She hadn’t had a chance to read everything as yet.

Everything about the conversation – which had lasted about two minutes – added to Anna’s euphoria. It was quite clear to her now that Elizabeth liked whatever she had read, was on her side, and would publish Sally and the Ship of Dreams, as soon as it existed, and would spend heaps of money marketing it. All this she was able to deduce from the warmth of the ‘How are you?’

Alex was already in, worried about where she was, when she arrived home laden with bags – Anna had slipped down Henry Street and shopped frantically for half an hour before coming home.

‘Sorry!’ she said, wondering why she had to apologise (after all, he did not know she had spent most of the afternoon committing adultery). ‘I had to get a taxi, I had so much stuff, and of course the traffic was awful. Friday.’

‘It’s not Friday,’ said Alex, in his most irritating neutral tone. ‘It’s Wednesday.’

‘So it is,’ said Anna lightly.

Rory came in to the kitchen.

‘You’re so late,’ he said. He whined, ‘Why are you always so late?’

‘I’m not always so late,’ said Anna cheerfully. ‘I was doing the Christmas shopping for the big day. I have to do that, don’t I?’

He ignored her and went to sit with his father, showing him a copybook. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to something he had written or drawn. ‘Read it.’

Alex read it, silently, probably to make sure Anna did not share the experience.

‘Good stuff, Rory.’ He patted him on the head, something Rory quite liked having him do. ‘It’s a …’ he paused, to find the right word. ‘It’s a very original story.’

‘Can I see it?’ Anna asked, genuinely curious. She put on a mock wheedling voice.

Rory closed the copy book and pressed it to his chest. ‘No,’ he said, and moved to the door.

‘Please, Rory. I’d really love to read your story.’

Rory turned and looked at her. ‘You can’t. You’re naughty,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m not naughty.’

Rory had nothing to say to this. He looked knowingly at her and then went off clumping up the stairs.

Had Ludmilla been priming him?

Alex was looking at her.

‘What was that about?’ he asked.

Anna felt very anxious but she did not show it. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘So what was the story like?’

‘Great. Very symbolic, I thought, but what would I know?’

She opened the Aga oven, to see if he had put in something for dinner. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t, ever, even if he were to starve.

There were pizzas in the freezer, so she selected two, Tesco’s Finest, tore them out of their elaborate packages and placed them directly on the grid of the top oven, the hottest one. Then she decided to make a decent salad, to compensate for the perfunctory main course.

She would have liked to have heard more about Rory’s story, but was, stupidly, afraid to ask. Alex, unprompted, did not enlighten her any further.

‘When will dinner be ready?’ he asked.

Sometimes this question, put to her at a time like this, when she had just walked in the door, irritated her profoundly and provoked an angry rejoinder. Although she had been married to Alex for many years, she could still not understand why he could not cook, even to the extent of putting a pizza in the oven, or why he accepted it as normal that she should make all the decisions and execute or arrange for the execution of every single household task. Of course, she did not really know what other men were like, but she assumed they were mainly more active than Alex in the domestic sphere. Some of her friends had husbands who were good cooks. ‘Fred does all the cooking!’ some of them said. Anna had sometimes wondered if the wives of these Freds were making it up, but Vincy could cook. He had given her lunch today; without batting an eyelid, he had heated soup, home-made soup, which had been made by himself, he had said when asked. A hearty peasant soup, full of vegetables and chunks of chorizo and lentils. He had served it in big coloured bowls with brown bread and cheese, all of which he had, there, in his larder, ready for himself or anyone who called. Or the flatmate, maybe, the mysterious Joe. Who bought candles.

Maybe, if Alex could have made a soup like that, she would have loved him. But he couldn’t. Not even that. It was one of a very long catalogue of things Alex could not do.

And the equally long catalogue of things he could do, such as make a lot of money, make a snap decision on an issue of immense importance and stick to it, win respect and influence people while being the quietest man in Ireland – he had a reputation for being clever, brilliant and honest, which his lack of sparkle seemed to enhance. His boringness was interpreted as intelligence, and often given a nice name: gravitas. Another word for dull as ditchwater, thought Anna, but there were plenty of lively, witty men in the boardrooms. Alex was well off and successful, and therefore it was universally acknowledged that under his quiet exterior there lurked a most superior intellect.

She chopped scallions and sliced tomatoes on a wooden board. He didn’t suspect a thing. Even that was annoying, as if he did not have the imagination to be suspicious. Or as if he didn’t care what she did, as long as she was around to prepare his dinner, to look after the house, and to accompany him to the events he had to go to.

Or because he loved her.

That was, in the end, the main problem with Alex.

They ate the pizzas at the big kitchen table. She had lit candles, as usual, and opened a bottle of wine, as she did most nights. Shadows flickered on the walls and floor of the big, warm space, so fluid in its design, with a glass wall on one side and open-sided on the other, that you could not call it a room. The glow that had been inside her since making love with Vincy was faint, but still there, like, she felt fancifully, a candle flame flickering deep inside.

Rory seemed to have forgotten about his earlier sulkiness. He liked pizza, and as a very special treat, to celebrate his mother’s sexual liberation, he was allowed a Coke. He chatted about what he wanted for Christmas, and about his friends in school. Cuan was getting a new bicycle. Michael was getting a piano. Rory thought a piano was an odd sort of present for anyone to get. How could Santa bring it?

‘He won’t bring it down the chimney,’ Anna said.

‘I know that,’ said Rory. ‘I know he doesn’t bring anything down the chimney. He doesn’t exist.’

‘Oh!’ said Anna, shocked.

‘I wish you’d stop pretending he does.’

Alex shrugged his shoulders and glanced questioningly at Anna, but she ignored the look.

‘Well …’ said Anna. She hadn’t given any thought to this moment, the moment when Rory challenged the belief in Santa. And she certainly hadn’t expected the moment to arrive this evening, the same day that she had, in a way, rediscovered her belief in Santa, or at least in superhuman gift-bringers. The way she was feeling was not normal, or human: like Santa, she was up there among the stars, dashing across the sparkling skies.

Rory’s challenge brought her back to earth.

What was she supposed to do now?

It wasn’t like telling him about babies, or aids, or even death – for all of those difficult challenges in her life as a parent, she had prepared by going to lectures and reading books. But Santa – she couldn’t remember what the books had said about him, if anything. Actually, she had supposed Rory had given up on Santa ages ago and had been pretending to believe in him, just as she did, for years, when she was a child.

Her mother had never confirmed for her that Santa did not exist.

Old-fashioned ways.

But you didn’t get away with that sort of evasion these days.

‘You’re right,’ she said, looking him in the eye.

Alex looked alarmed.

‘There really is no Santa?’ He wanted even more.

Anna gave it.

‘No. There isn’t. Not literally. I suppose he represents something – people’s love for one another, and for children.’

‘Well …’ Rory looked mildly disgusted.

She began to wonder if she had handled the situation optimally.

‘We still give presents even when we stop believing in him.’ She offered materialism as an alternative to superstition. It worked for most people.

But not for Rory. Not now.

He started to cry. ‘I can’t believe there is no Santa,’ he whined.

Anna was taken aback. Alex continued to eat his pizza and paid no further attention to what was going on.

‘Well, I said there was, in a way,’ she said lamely. Had she said this? When?

‘No you didn’t. You said there really is no Santa.’ He sobbed. ‘There isn’t a real person who drives a sleigh and comes from the North Pole with presents for us all.’

Pianos, computers, bicycles. Dolls’ houses. How could anyone be naive enough to believe it, even a three-year-old child? But Rory had, apparently, until right now. In spite of moments of scepticism, in spite of teasing by more enlightened children, he had clung to the belief that the red-clothed gift-bringer came from the North Pole transporting millions of bicycles and computers and pianos in a sleigh and carried out a global delivery in one twelve-hour period every year on the 24th of December.

He usually got ninety-nine per cent of his spellings right, got one hundred per cent in his maths exams, and watched the Discovery Channel on a regular basis.

But he believed this.

What strange creatures human beings are, she thought, wondering how this applied to herself.

‘No, there isn’t a Santa,’ was what she said sadly. Because there is no going back, no matter how much everyone wanted to.