I had excellent intentions for Christmas morning. I would start with a couple of painkillers and a run, and then a bracing early-morning dip in the sea. Then home to call Dad, glaze the ham and make fruit salad. It was a virtuous little plan and, had I carried it out, would have given me a pleasant glow of self-satisfaction. But alas, it came to nothing.
Instead of getting up when I woke up, I lay in bed feeling guilty, which is a terrible waste of a sleep-in. And when at length I did prise myself out from under the covers, I drifted around in my pyjamas drinking coffee and leafing through a murder mystery a backpacker had left behind the week before. It was about a gorgeous, brilliant, crime-solving arts student with the libido of a cat on heat, which prompted her to ignore leads in order to have improbable sex with strangers in restaurant toilets, and it irritated me intensely. Just what, exactly, is so cool about letting the murderer slip out a back window while someone bends you over a wash basin?
‘Good for you, sweet pea,’ I said aloud, closing the book with a snap. Then, as I looked up at the clock, ‘Crap!’
I scored the fat on the ham too deeply in my haste, and had to pin it back on with cloves. Once it was in the oven I squared my shoulders, took a deep breath and rang my father.
‘Yes?’ he said, picking up the phone.
‘Hi, Dad. Merry Christmas.’
‘Lia.’
‘How are you going?’ I asked.
‘Could be worse.’
Talking to my father on the phone is a bit like playing tennis with someone who catches the ball and stuffs it into his pocket rather than hitting it back to your end of the court.
‘How’s Nana?’
‘Senile,’ he said flatly. ‘You get that with dementia.’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘We’ve been really busy at the café these last few weeks.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Are Gina and Nigel and the kids up for Christmas?’ I asked.
‘No, they’re with Nigel’s family this year.’
I pictured him eating tinned spaghetti for Christmas lunch with the National Programme on the radio for company, and, despite his treatment of his eldest son, felt a small twinge of pity. ‘Are you going out for lunch?’ I asked.
‘Merv and Gillian Copland have asked me up there,’ he said.
‘Oh, that’s nice.’
Dad snorted. ‘She’s not much of a cook.’
All in all, it was not an inspiring conversation, and I was further depressed after searching high and low for my favourite white singlet top and eventually finding it scrunched into a musty-smelling wad in the bottom of the washing machine. I was feeling a little frayed when I let myself into Mum’s kitchen just before twelve, fruit salad bowl balanced precariously on top of the ham.
The place was a hive of industry. Mike was arranging strawberries on top of a trifle and Anna was icing chocolate éclairs. Mum sat cross-legged on the window seat polishing the family silver (six teaspoons and a cream jug) and Rob, who prefers whenever possible to adopt a supervisory role, was leaning against the bench eating scraps of stuffing off the bottom of the roasting pan.
‘Yo, sis,’ he said, relieving me of the fruit salad.
I put the ham down beside him. ‘Hey, guys. Merry Christmas.’
‘Merry Christmas, love,’ said Mum. ‘Robin, leave that ham alone.’
Rob had lifted a corner of the tin foil covering the ham, and he smiled at her with great charm as he broke off a crispy bit of glazed fat. ‘Quality control,’ he said.
Mum gave him a Stern Look (her preferred method of discipline for about the last fifteen years, despite very mediocre results). ‘I’ve just had an idea,’ she said. ‘If Mike can possibly stay till Wednesday the shops will be open again, and you can both go to the suit hire place and be fitted. It’s much better to go in person than just give them your measurements.’
Mike looked bemused. ‘What?’ he said.
‘For the wedding,’ said Mum.
‘But I’ve got a suit.’
‘Yes, but you’ll want to be matching.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it’s – it’s customary, isn’t it?’
‘Um, yeah, I may not actually have asked him, yet,’ said Rob, taking another bit of ham.
‘Robin Leslie,’ Anna said, more in sorrow than in anger, ‘you are, without a doubt, the most useless individual I’ve ever met.’
‘Asked me what?’ Mike asked.
‘To be best man,’ said Rob.
‘At your wedding?’
‘That’s the one. Assuming she’s still going to marry me, that is.’
‘But what about your friend Eddie?’
‘What about him?’
‘Rob, would you just ask him properly?’ I said, tiring of a flippancy that seemed excessive even by my twin’s standards.
Rob made a face at me, but said obediently, ‘Please, Mike, would you be best man at our wedding?’
Mike looked more appalled than gratified by this request. ‘Would I have to make a speech?’ he asked.
‘The speech’ll be a piece of piss,’ said Rob. ‘Just tell a couple of grubby jokes and say the bridesmaids look lovely.’
‘Anna, love,’ said Mum, screwing the lid back on the jar of silver polish and getting to her feet, ‘if you decide not to marry my idiot son I assure you I’ll understand.’
* * *
We had lunch in the sunny kitchen, with all the windows open and the air fragrant with Christmas lilies and good things to eat. Then we retired to the sitting room for present opening and tree appreciation before drifting outside to doze and eat cherries and Jersey caramels in the dappled sunlight of the top lawn.
It was a truly excellent afternoon. No stress, no rushing up and down the country to spend time with relatives you’d prefer not to have to see, good food, nice company, beautiful surroundings . . .
Sometime around three, Rob, who had been sleeping peacefully with his head in the shade of the apple tree and his feet in the sun, yawned and sat up. ‘Ready to go, love?’ he asked.
‘Mm-hmm,’ said Anna, removing one of Mum’s straw gardening hats from over her nose and stretching like a cat. ‘Thank you, Maggie, it’s been a gorgeous day.’
‘Beautiful, aren’t they?’ Mike said, watching them wander off hand in hand.
‘And deliriously happy,’ said Mum as she struggled out of her new Christmas hammock. ‘Although I wish Anna would eat more. Would you two like a cold drink?’
‘Sounds good,’ Mike said.
I put down Daddy-Long-Legs, with which I had spent a pleasant hour, and stood up. ‘No thanks, I think I’ll go down to the beach. Anyone want to come?’
They didn’t, and I went down the garden, let myself through the gate in the camellia hedge and turned up the estuary path towards the coast. People lay in deckchairs on the lawns of the houses I passed and the McKinnon extended family was playing rounders on the smooth hard sand at the mouth of the estuary.
I skirted the rounders game and walked along the edge of the sea, little waves foaming and hissing around my ankles. It was a lovely day, I didn’t have to be anywhere but here, and I was the proud new owner of a state-of-the-art running top, a sleek chrome iPod docking station and Jill Dupleix’s latest cookbook. Life was good.
The south end of the beach was crowded but, since ninety-five per cent of beachgoers never go further than fifty metres from the car park steps, I had a good two-kilometre stretch to myself. Selecting a promising bit of sea, I checked my underwear to make sure it wasn’t the see-through-when-wet kind, left my skirt and top in a little heap on the sand and ran out into the surf.
I swam straight out past the breakers, turned over onto my back and floated there with my eyes closed, thinking of nothing in particular. At length I paddled lazily back towards the beach and stood up in waist-deep water beside a half-submerged boulder, which stirred, flexed its wings and swam away.
I like stingrays, in theory, but in practice I like them much better from a distance, and I reached dry land in about a second and a half. Drawing a long, shaky breath, I wrung out my wet hair and dried myself with my skirt to get most of the salt off, then stood up straight and saw someone sitting just along the beach at the base of a sand dune. I recognised Jed beneath a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses, and my black cotton bra and knickers seemed suddenly a whole lot less tog-like and a whole lot more like undies. Why, I thought crossly, did the man have to appear out of the undergrowth every time I took my clothes off? (Although, if we were going to be all pedantic about it, it could be argued that if I refrained from taking my clothes off in public the problem wouldn’t arise.)
Waving with what was meant to look like cheerful unconcern, I started to get dressed. It didn’t go well. I was damp and sandy, my skirt clung lovingly to my thighs and my top rolled itself up at the back. Wrestling it grimly back down I turned and called, ‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ said Jed, breaking inch-long sections off a dried grass straw.
‘How long have you been there?’
‘Longer than you.’ He finished his straw and plucked another with a vicious little jerk, and I realised belatedly that something was wrong.
‘Didn’t you go to Thames after all?’ I asked.
‘Yep.’
I could see perfectly clearly that he wished I’d bugger off so he could be unhappy in peace, but it was Christmas Day, epicentre of the season of peace and goodwill, and it seemed better to be seen as a rampant busybody than not to at least try to help. ‘Jed, are you okay?’
‘No.’
I went towards him across the hot sand. ‘What’s up?’
He dealt with his second straw in silence, and then said tightly, not looking up, ‘I was supposed to spend the day with my son.’
I felt quite breathless with shock. He was a parent. A grown-up. I’d always had a vague but deep-seated conviction that people with children are wiser and more adult than those without – although, considering that the only prerequisite for having children is unprotected sex, this theory was not entirely watertight. ‘Why didn’t you?’ I asked at last.
‘No-one home. The house was locked, my ex won’t answer her cell phone, I can’t get hold of her parents . . .’
‘Did – did she know you were coming?’
‘Yep.’
I sat down, because standing over someone while you ask them questions is too much like an inquisition. ‘How old’s your son?’
‘Nearly four.’
There was a short silence.
‘Can she do that?’ I asked. ‘I mean, I know she can, but does she have the right to vanish when she knows you’re coming? Has she got sole custody?’
‘No. For the first couple of months after we separated I had Craig half the time, but then she decided she needed some time to get her head around things without having to see me. So I came up here.’ He began to dismember another hapless grass stem.
‘What are you going to do?’
‘God knows,’ he said tiredly. ‘Go home and get a lawyer, I suppose. I don’t want to put Craig through this crap, but I’m not going to just disappear out of his life because she feels she needs to punish me.’
It must, I thought, be truly hideous when love and kids and a shared life descend to that. I know it’s hardly unusual – it happened to my own parents, for a start – but I’m sure that doesn’t make it hurt any less.
‘Surely she’s not really going to try to keep you away from your son,’ I said. ‘She probably had a – a minor brain explosion this morning and ran away because it was all too hard. She’s probably feeling really bad about it.’
‘They went on Thursday,’ he said. ‘The next-door neighbour told me.’
‘Oh.’
He sighed. ‘For all you know she might be completely justified in running away from me.’
‘Nah,’ I said, wrapping my arms around my bent knees. ‘You’re nice.’
‘How do you know?’ he asked, turning his head to look at me.
‘Well, Monty thinks you’re wonderful, for a start.’
‘Monty thinks everyone is wonderful.’
‘And,’ I continued, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘it seems to me that only a nice person would leave town to make things easier for his ex.’
He reached out for another grass straw, and my cell phone buzzed in my skirt pocket. I pulled it out and looked at it; it was a text message from Isaac, and it read, U hav ruined my life hope it makes u hapy.
‘Here,’ I said, passing the phone across. Sometimes someone else’s troubles make you feel just a little bit better about your own. ‘That’s from my ex.’
Jed looked at the screen. ‘Does it make you happy?’
‘Not particularly,’ I said, putting the phone back in my pocket.
We sat there for a while without talking, and then I said, ‘Will you come and have tea at Mum’s tonight? It’ll be very low-key, just leftovers.’
‘That’s very kind . . .’ he started.
‘I know it’s the last thing on earth you feel like doing, but at least it’d take your mind off things. It’ll just be me and Mum and my big brother Mike – it’s the yellow house with the funny roofline across the road from you.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ he said. ‘Your mum brought me a cake when I moved in.’
‘If you say yes, I’ll go away and stop harassing you.’
He smiled, then. ‘Yes.’
‘About six,’ I said, getting up and brushing off sand.
I was five metres away when he said, ‘Hey, Lia? Thanks.’