I wish I could say that on seeing Alex with some new woman I went home, realised what a dangerous, stupid game I’d been playing for the previous three months and became the old Harriet once again: loving wife to adored and adoring husband, mother of five, undedicated gym bunny and all round good egg. Probably just the opposite, really. Seeing Alex with someone else, holding her hand and smiling down at her face in just the same way as he had with me on so many occasions, had totally floored me.
Grace, her new found happiness perhaps making her oversensitive to my sudden despondency, had been desperate to know what had suddenly changed my mood as we walked to the car park. Was it something she’d said? Something she’d done? Did I think Amanda was after Nick again? Was I ill? All the way to Grace’s parents’ house, through the sleet covered roads, the wipers making a regular, melancholy sweep across the car’s windscreen, Grace gently probed until I almost broke down and told her about Alex.
I didn’t.
Instead I went home, shut myself into the bathroom, and rang his mobile. Ten times at least. And every time, it went to a mailbox inviting me to leave a message. I declined the invitation.
I’d taken off the lovely little suit and high heels ‒ now sporting white lines where the polished black leather had made contact with the salty slush on the roads ‒ rubbed off every scrap of make-up, tied up my hair in an unbecoming elastic band and gone down to the kitchen, where I’d attacked the boozy Christmas cake mix with such vehemence it had slopped over on to the floor and been thoughtfully licked up by a potentially inebriated dog.
*
And now it was Christmas morning. In the week since I’d seen Alex going into BarBaric with that other woman I’d rung and texted him on a daily basis. I just wanted to hear his voice. Wanted to hear him say he just had to see me, that day, that minute, now. He obviously didn’t.
‘Morning, darling. Merry Christmas.’ Nick reached out a warm hand, pulling me towards him.
‘Baby crying,’ I said, easing myself out of bed before Nick could actually make contact with any other, more intimate, bits of my body. ‘And a turkey to shove in the oven,’ I added, as we both noted a distinct lack of noise coming from the baby monitor on my side of the bed.
Nick held up his hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘Thrown over for a bloody turkey,’ he said, trying to make light of the fact that we hadn’t made love for weeks. Months. He rolled over on to his side, curling up under the duvet.
I went downstairs to the kitchen, which was warm from the heat of the Aga, walked through the utility room and into the garage, where I’d left the turkey in the boot of my car. It had been far too big to fit into one of our two fridges, which were, anyway, already overloaded with Christmas goodies. I sighed. I had very little appetite for any of it. I needed to get a move on. It was already almost seven o’clock. India had come into our room at five, stayed for an hour and then been persuaded back to her own bed. I was amazed she was still sleeping, and knew that any minute now the twins would wake and then all hell would let loose.
I’d prepared the turkey the night before, slapping half a pound of butter on to and into the poor beast’s most intimate places before wrapping it in a tent of foil. It just needed, according to Delia, to be brought to room temperature before banging it in the oven and basically hoping for the best.
I pulled my handbag from its resting place behind the sofa, reached for my mobile and automatically punched in the password I’d used ever since receiving that first text from Alex back at the beginning of October. I’m not sure if hearts can be said to soar but if they can, mine did.
Merry Christmas, lovely lady. Wish I could be there to give you this very special present.
Alex. He thought I was lovely. He’d bought a present for me.
All the misery of the last week evaporated in a second. The woman he was with must have been someone from work ‒ or his sister, Laura, maybe. I bet it was. He’d said she was dark haired like him. I nearly kissed the turkey, I was so happy.
‘OK, everybody,’ I shouted up the stairs, now energised and ready for a full-on day ahead. Amazing how one little sentence has the wherewithal to alter one’s whole mood. ‘Christmas is here. Father Christmas has been. Let’s rock and roll.’
Different families have different ways of doing the whole present thing. At home, as a little girl, we’d always had a pillowcase hanging at the bottom of our bed and Di and I, sharing a bedroom, would rip off paper with avaricious abandon before diving into the next present. When I was really little ‒ maybe three or four years old ‒ John, our elder brother, must have been there too. But, being more than seven years older than me, he hadn’t seemed to feature much in our Christmas morning dawn attack of the pillowcases by the time I was India’s age.
Nick’s middle class Christmas mornings had, apparently, showed rather more restraint. Presents, expensively and extravagantly wrapped and piled tantalisingly under the Christmas tree, were not allowed an airing until after Christmas lunch. These were then opened in turn by the recipients, while Nick’s father folded the carefully peeled off paper and Sylvia jotted down the giver’s name ready for the compulsory thank you note which, according to Nick, had to be completed by the end of Boxing Day.
Nick and I had compromised with our Christmas mornings: the children had sacks ‒ white, beautifully embroidered and decorated laundry bags donated by Grace to each of our children on the occasion of their first Christmas ‒ but these were left by the sitting room fireplace, rather than in their bedrooms. They still ripped off the paper with greedy abandon, but we did keep back quite a few presents until after lunch when the adults would join in with their Christmas present giving ‒ and Nick and Sylvia were ready, like a couple of overzealous secretaries, to jot down who’d given what and to whom.
Grace, Sebastian and Jonty, together with Grace’s parents, were the first to arrive.
‘I wanted to get here early,’ Grace said, almost shyly, ‘so that I could give you these.’ She handed me two more of the embroidered and named bags that she had so cleverly crafted for my other three as each of them had celebrated their first Christmas.
I hugged her. ‘Grace, these are beautiful. You are so talented. I really didn’t think you’d have the time or the energy to think about the twins.’
‘Well, I really wanted to make one for Jonty ‒ I went a bit over the top with his ‒ and then, of course, I couldn’t leave Thea and Fin out.’
The plain white laundry bags, made of a heavy, calico cotton, were embroidered with the twins’ names in Christmas greens and reds and with a plethora of elves, reindeer and Santas. They were a total work of art: something that the children would keep all their lives and probably pass down to their own children ‒ family heirlooms in the making.
‘You should go into business,’ I marvelled. ‘Set up The Designer Christmas Sack Company. You could take orders, each one individually bespoke for each child.’
‘I’ve been telling her that,’ Katherine Greenwood, Grace’s mother, said proudly. ‘She could send one to Prince George and then she’d really get some interest in them.’
Grace tutted, but was obviously enormously satisfied herself with how they’d worked out. She hesitated before pulling out a beautifully beribboned present from her carrier bag. ‘And this is for you, Hat. I couldn’t have got through the last six months without you.’
Inside the package was an exquisite gold locket. ‘You can look at it later,’ she said, a bit embarrassed now that Nick and the others were looking over to where we stood in the kitchen.
‘Gosh, no. I want to wear it now; it’s so beautiful.’ I pulled the little catch and it sprang smoothly open on its tiny hinge. Inside, Grace had had engraved:
For Harriet. My best friend, and the sister I never had
Shame flooded through me. I hadn’t done half as much as I should have done to help her, so bound up with seeing Alex as I had been. I’d even used going to visit Grace in the MBU in Manchester the past couple of weeks as an excuse to then meet up later with him at his flat.
Mistaking my mortification for embarrassment she said lightly, ‘I told you to open it later. Come on, lead me to the sprouts, Macduff. We’ve only got three hours before we eat and they’re not even on yet.’
Sylvia and Judge Colin had arrived from the south the day before, laden with presents and champagne into which, by late morning, Colin was already well entrenched. I’d been dying to show Grace the Christmas card Sylvia had had printed and sent ‒ even to us. Instead of the usual glittery nativity scene or cross-eyed, cartoon reindeer, the front of the card sported a photograph of herself, regally seated on a gold damask chair, with Colin standing to attention at her side, his hand holding her outstretched one to her shoulder. Inside, in a bold printed script, were the words:
Sir Colin and Lady Sylvia Fitzgerald wish you a most Joyous Christmas and Happy New Year.
Kit and I had howled with laughter when we’d opened it, but Nick and India both thought it most tasteful, India insisting on taking it to school for Look and Show. Liberty, in a permanently foul mood during the build up to the big day, had declined even to comment.
While Sylvia, Grace and I ploughed through the mound of vegetables, divesting them of their outer layers and chopping for Britain, Colin leaned against the Aga, becoming increasingly sentimental in direct proportion to the amount of alcohol he was putting away.
‘You’re lucky, you girlies, having all your families around you on Christmas Day. While of course I have my lovely lady wife here with me, my own son is with his in-laws and my little girl is still in Italy. I did hope that once she’d decided she was leaving that Italian fellow ‒ never did like him much: carried a handbag around with him all the time like a girl ‒ she’d come back to England and live near us. Well, with us, to begin with…’
Sylvia swiped at a carrot but said nothing.
‘And then find something for her and Sophia very near us in Surrey. But it appears she’s intent on staying in Italy. Even turned down the invitation to come here for Christmas. Don’t understand it at all.’
Well, if he didn’t, I certainly did. Some Christmas that would have been with Anna Fitzgerald seated at the table giving me filthy looks over the bread sauce. Sylvia and I had already discussed on the phone that Anna wouldn’t ‒ thank goodness ‒ be joining us and, as one, we looked up from our respective vegetables, complicit for once in our relief that the damned woman was safely still ensconced in Italy.
‘Merry Christmas, one and all.’ Rebecca and Sam the dog burst into the kitchen followed, at a more leisurely pace, by Lilian. Rebecca hugged me before turning to Grace. ‘Grace, you look wonderful. Are you OK now? Gosh, I can’t believe how much better you look than when I saw you in October. You’re even more gorgeous now, you bitch.’ Rebecca laughed. ‘I don’t believe we’ve met,’ she said, without drawing breath as she turned to Judge Colin and extended a hand.
‘It’s Christmas, m’dear. An old man is allowed more than a handshake on Christmas morning, especially from such a pretty girl.’ Colin drew Rebecca into a champagne fuelled bear hug, which at least temporarily shut her up.
Rebecca extracted herself from his clutches, removed his hand from her bottom and, slightly pink in the face, breathed, ‘Champagne all round, I reckon.’
The house began to fill up. Lilian, wonderful Lilian, was soon on the sitting room floor with Grace’s mum, keeping the twins entertained with bits of wrapping paper and empty boxes while India explained to them the intricacies of some new electronic toy she’d been given. Katherine Greenwood had offered to take Jonty as well, but Amanda appeared not to be letting go of him, even for a few minutes. Seb, David and Nick were, as usual, talking L’uomo, giving Robert Greenwood, Grace’s father, the low down on the company’s amazingly successful first year of business. From the kitchen window I saw Di’s little red eco-friendly Fiat pull up at the same time as Sandra Duck-Lady and Philip Kerr walked, hand in hand, up our drive. Shit. I’d sort of forgotten to tell Kit that his teacher had been invited. Well it wasn’t my fault ‒ I hadn’t invited him. Sandra had.
Sylvia left her parsnips and went to the front door to usher in, as if she owned the place, our remaining guests. I could hear Dad’s flattened Yorkshire vowels mixing with Sylvia’s plummy Surrey ones and then Mum saying, ‘Hello, Dorothy, love. ’Ow are you?’
‘Who’s Dorothy?’ Grace asked, surprised.
‘Mum’s cousin,’ I said.
‘Oh, I didn’t know you’d invited her as well. Do I need to do more sprouts?’
‘Unfortunately, she wouldn’t be able to eat them. She’s been dead two years.’
Grace and I looked at each other, tried not to laugh, but, with a glass of champagne already working its magic in our systems, failed miserably. ‘What on earth’s this?’ I asked, laughing even more as I lifted the lid on the white Minton tureen I’d just pulled down from the cupboard above our heads. Donated by Sylvia when she’d moved her stuff up with us three years ago, the tureen only saw the light of day each Christmas. Nestled in the corner of the dish was a mummified relic: a leftover and forgotten sprout from last Christmas Day. Grace and I howled.
‘Mum, what the hell’s he doing here? I can’t believe you’ve done this to me.’ Kit sloped in to the kitchen with such a hangdog expression, Grace and I laughed even more. ‘It’s all right for you two. He’s just spoken to me completely in French and I haven’t got a clue what he’s going on about. Well, if you two are getting pissed, so am I.’
‘Actually, Kit, my darling godson, I’m not,’ Grace laughed. ‘I’ve had half a glass to celebrate the occasion, and that’s my lot.’
‘Brilliant,’ he said. ‘All the more for me, then, to be able to face that nerd you’ve bloody well invited.’ And with that, he poured himself a huge glass and went to join Lilian and the children on the floor.
Lilian and I, with some help from a jet lagged Rebecca, had done the majority of the food preparation the day before. The table had been laid in the dining room the previous evening before I’d gone to bed ‒ any excuse to stay up that little bit longer until I hoped Nick would be asleep ‒ and was now groaning under a mass of polished silver and starched red and green napkins. We’d had to find extra chairs up in the attic to accommodate the twenty of us but, apart from India having to be squashed on to the end of one corner, we’d managed to get them all round the extended table.
Just as the remaining kitchen staff made to join the others in the now crowded sitting room, there was a knock on the front door. Oh, God, had I invited someone else in my post lust high and actually forgotten about them? On the doorstep stood a tall, well built young man of about eighteen whose face was partially hidden behind an enormous bunch of Christmas roses and gypsophila.
‘Er, is Libby in?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, I think so. To be honest, I’ve not really seen her much this morning ‒ she’s been keeping out of the way of the sprouts ‒ but I’m sure she is. Come in.’
This was progress. At last. The mystery boy, who apparently had the wherewithal to turn my daughter into Julie Andrews one minute and Godzilla the next. But then, who was I to talk? One little text from Alex had been enough to put me on a Christmas high.
I led the boy into the sitting room, where Libby was sitting, chatting with Amanda and Sebastian.
‘Libs? Someone to see you.’
Liberty must have been expecting him, although she’d said nothing to me. Mind you, she said very little to me these days about anything. She’d obviously pulled out all the stops and looked absolutely stunning. I hesitated for a second, hardly recognising the ravishing creature sitting at Amanda’s feet, glass of champagne in hand. I’d always thought Amanda the most exquisite creature on this planet, but my seventeen year old daughter was giving her a run for her money. She was wearing the skimpiest of skirts but, with flat shoes and black tights the look wasn’t a bit tarty, but coolly chic. I recognised the pink cashmere sweater ‒ it was one that Nick had given me last Christmas but, already big with the twins, I had been unable to wear it at the time. I have to say I’d almost forgotten about it. I now understood where it had gone. I was about to make a comment ‒ something about the purloined sweater ‒ but the look Liberty gave me as she got up from the floor, challenging me to say anything about her sweater, shut me up.
‘Hi, Harry. This is Harry, everyone,’ Libby said, flushing slightly.
‘Can I get you a drink, Harry?’ Nick asked, coming forward to shake his hand.
‘Just a soft drink, thanks. I’m driving.’
When Kit, who’d gone into the kitchen to surreptitiously refill his glass, came back into the sitting room, he flushed even more than Libby had done, his eyes wide at the sight of Harry in front of him. ‘Hi,’ he muttered and then, as Harry left the room with Nick and Libby, whispered. ‘Mum, what’s he doing here?’
‘Do you know him? Is he on your school bus?’
‘He’s our head boy,’ Kit said glumly. ‘Who’s coming next? Old Scotty, our headmaster?’
‘Quite possibly,’ I said, cheerfully. ‘So, Kit… head boy, is he?’
‘And captain of the first eleven. And about to go to Cambridge.’
This was even better. The perfect prospective son-in-law, by the look of it. Kit took a drink of his champagne and gazed disconsolately across the room towards Philip Kerr, who was himself knocking back champagne, and attempting to chat up Rebecca.
‘Ah… bonjour, mon cher Harry,’ Philip called, catching sight of Harry as he walked back into the sitting room. ‘Joyeux Noël. Je suis très heureux de vous voir ici. Soyez le bienvenu.’
‘Joyeux Noël, Monsieur, à vous aussi.’ Harry replied in a perfect French accent. ‘J’espère vraiment que vous passez de bonnes fêtes de fin d’année.’
Blimey. ‘Is he doing languages at Cambridge?’ I whispered to Kit.
‘No,’ he said gloomily, ‘physics, maths and further maths. Old Scotty talked about him in assembly a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Hello, love. I haven’t seen you for a long time.’ Mum had left the sofa she was sharing with Diana and made her way across to where Harry was standing chatting to Nick and Liberty.
‘Granny Keturah, this is Harry. I don’t think you know him,’ Liberty said, frowning.
‘Oh, I do, love, although I think he must have changed his name, for some reason. It’s our Dorothy’s boy, isn’t it? Eeh, last time I saw you were at our Ernest’s funeral. Bad do, that, wasn’t it? Did you work out what he’d left you in his will?’
‘Come on, Mum,’ I said, taking her by the arm and away from Harry and Libby ‒ that had a real ring to it, Harry and Libby ‒ ‘I need some help with the gravy. No one makes it as well as you.’
Mum’s dementia, which had been creeping up slowly, had been diagnosed as such only a year or so earlier. Medication did seem to be keeping her fairly stable and we’d finally persuaded Dad to allow carers in on a daily basis, not only to help with Mum but to give Dad some respite so he could go up to his beloved allotment. She was actually on good form this Christmas Day, despite thinking Libby’s boyfriend was Mum’s cousin’s son.
Looking over at them, I couldn’t understand why Libby had kept Harry to herself: he was obviously besotted with her. I wasn’t sure if she’d invited him for lunch as we’d suggested, but hadn’t liked to ask him outright in case she hadn’t. I went down to the dining room and managed somehow to squeeze in an extra place next to Libby just in case: I couldn’t really see his parents wanting him to go somewhere else for Christmas lunch.
With Lilian, Rebecca and Grace helping to drain the vegetables, baste the turkey and slice the ham ‒ and with Mum firmly ensconced at the stove stirring the gravy, we had lunch ready for its consumption at around its allotted time. Harry, it seemed, wasn’t staying for lunch, but at least we’d now met the mystery boy. I needed to tell Liberty I could see that he was mad about her. Maybe that would stop her being so irritable one minute and high as a kite the next. High as a kite all the time would do just fine.
‘We had a turkey in bed once,’ Mum was saying to an astonished Amanda once we were all seated and about to tuck in. Mum had no idea, thank goodness, that the woman to whom she was talking was the very same girl who had broken my brother’s heart all those years ago and, if we were to believe John, with whom she still toyed when the fancy took her. More importantly, that Amanda was Frank Goodners’s daughter: the very same Frank Goodners with whom Mum had fallen in love and had a baby to when she was just seventeen. Our half-sister, Joy, who Mum gave up for adoption at birth ‒ and of whom we had had no knowledge until her daughter, Camilla, over from Australia for the year, had revealed all last year. Dementia, horrendous as it is, does have the advantage of erasing bad memories as well as good.
‘Mum, you didn’t ever have a turkey in bed with you.’ I smiled at her and adjusted her napkin on her knee.
‘Aye, lass, we did,’ Dad chuckled. His hearing might be bad, but he’d heard what Mum had said. ‘Your mum’s right.’
‘What, a great big gobbly turkey? In bed? How did it get there, Grandad?’ India stopped chewing, eyes wide.
‘Well, we allus used to get our turkey from Jim up on th’allotment. He used to raise quite a few from chicks ready for Christmas. Anyroad, we’d said we’d have one, as we allus did but ‒ at the last minute, before he could finish ’em off, as it were ‒ they all got out. One great big one ‒ he’d called it Terence the Terrible Turkey because it was so fierce: used to have to take a broom to it ‒ decided to mutiny and led the others out on to the road. Most of ’em got run over ‒ very silly creatures, are turkeys ‒ or escaped, and probably t’fox had ’em. Anyway, Terence himself flew up on the school roof and stayed there for days.’
‘Gosh, I remember that,’ Di said. ‘I was in the infants and we used to go out into the playground to see if it was still there every day.’
‘So, there we were: no turkey.’ Dad tutted, enjoying being the centre of attention for once. ‘I trailed round all the turkey farms around looking for one, but there wasn’t one to be had.’
‘Why didn’t you just go down to M&S and buy one?’ I asked.
‘In them days, M&S was for your pants, not turkeys. Well, not the one in Midhope, anyroad. And then, on Christmas Eve, I was up at the Legion having a pint or two and some bloke came in with a couple of frozen ones. Frozen solid, they were. So I bought one, took it home, and thought best place to defrost it was in our bed with the electric blanket wrapped round it.’
Amanda’s and Sylvia’s faces were a picture.
‘Blimey, Dad,’ Di laughed, horrified. ‘You could have both been electrocuted. We could have all been orphaned on Christmas Day. Death by turkey. I can see why I became vegetarian.’
‘Being vegetarian is a big missed steak,’ Philip Kerr giggled, shovelling a huge forkful of ham and turkey into his mouth.
Kit looked at me before raising his eyes to the ceiling.
‘Now then,’ Judge Colin stood up and cleared his throat. ‘Before I raise a toast to our hosts, who wants stuffing?’
Kit raised his eyes to the ceiling once more as Philip giggled loudly again, and the stuffing was passed down the table.
Colin reached behind him, producing what looked to be a very old and very expensive bottle of red. ‘Been keeping this for a special occasion,’ he said. ‘And I can’t think of any more special occasion than my first Christmas with my new lovely lady wife.’
Sylvia simpered, reaching out a hand across the table to Colin. I wouldn’t have put it past her to have rehearsed that hand movement beforehand.
Kit raised his eyes ceilingwards once more.
I caught Grace and Rebecca’s eyes and we all tried not to laugh.
‘It’s a Merlot 1983,’ the judge said proudly.
‘Ugh,’ India said, curling her nose. ‘Won’t it have gone off?’
‘Wine improves with age, India,’ Colin said, patting her on the head.
‘I improve with wine,’ Rebecca said, throwing back her almost full glass before holding it out to Colin.
‘Like a good woman,’ Colin was waxing lyrical now, ‘a good wine really does improve with age.’ He held up his glass to Sylvia.
‘Getting older really is quite fabulous,’ Sylvia tinkled, holding up her own glass to meet Colin’s.
‘Unless you’re a banana,’ Rebecca sniggered, before knocking back Colin’s treasured wine in one.