themselves.”
“A finely practical attitude,” Sylvia said. “Do you want the house wrecked? Alistair, if you don’t stop messing about in that sugar basin I’m going to come over there and slap you, Christmas or no Christmas.”
Colin moved and took her by the arm. A corner of the vegetable rack caught him painfully on the shin.
“This is what I stay for,” he said. “They’re your children, you wanted them. Can’t you manage better than this? Do you realise this is what I stay for?”
“Stay?” Sylvia gaped. “And where are you planning to go? What are you talking about? Who else in the name of God would want you?” Her mouth quivered like Karen’s, in disbelief, and suddenly tears plopped out of her pale blue eyes and ran down onto her housecoat, Christmas or no Christmas, the first in years.
At mid-morning, Colin slipped away. He went up to the bedroom, and from his briefcase drew out Isabel’s present. He had missed the opportunity to hand over her mittens. They would have to be a late gift; when would he be able to deliver them? Term started on January 12th, and then, perhaps, there would be excuses: Parent’s Evenings, visits to Frank O’Dwyer, extracurricular drama. Even sports, as the night grew lighter; but how to sustain it, through another winter?
It was a flat parcel, in red paper; a record. He pulled the paper off. “Marches of Sousa.” In the field, maudlin after physical pleasure, he had spoken of suicide and his plans for evading it. For the season, it was a bitter joke.
Because it cannot be sustained, he thought. Last time they met, the strain was telling on her. These days she forgot things, lost her files, she jumped when she was spoken to. He saw her corroded spirit in her eyes, watched her twist her fingers together, frail, timid, flawed. She was not the woman she had been in September.
He thought of Sylvia weeping in the kitchen, her face cruelly blotched. His marriage had not disappointed him; his grief was that it had turned out exactly as he had expected. The past can’t be changed, but you should be able to change the present. My present isn’t under my control, he thought, it doesn’t seem mine to dispose of.
He slipped the record back into his briefcase; then, on second thought, retrieved it. He carried it downstairs and intruded it into the pile on the radiogram. Sylvia would never know.
Until well into the morning Evelyn did not remember it was Christmas Day. She knew it was near, of course, because of the festive irruption of Florence, and because the signs she had seen in the shops a few days ago when she went to buy food. She had not made plans to mark the festival. They were not religious.
Some time ago, two cards had fallen through the letterbox. At least, they were lying on the hall floor, as if they could have come through the letterbox. One was Florence Sidney’s, she knew by the writing. She sent one every year, as one of her impertinences. Gingerly, she held up the other one and peered at the address. It was to Muriel. From the father? Possibly. Who else did Muriel know? Evelyn did not succumb to curiosity. She carried the two envelopes into the lean-to and thrust them both into a pile of damp newspapers.
Far back in her memory was a picture of another Christmas Day, at her family’s house in Shropshire. She stood at the window of the morning room, the long french window, an overgrown girl of thirteen. She was wearing the party dress that had been bought for her when she was ten. It was too short now, and her great bony knees and wrists seemed like the exposed parts of some terrifying machine. Outside the glass the wind whirled the sleet into eddies. Goose pimples prickled her bare arms, and she shuddered at the thought of the festivities. They were to be meagre this year. Father had died of influenza. Water had got on his lungs, they said. She listened at doors. Blaise had been careless; the policies were not in order. Matters were outstanding, they said. Matters matters matters. A woman from Craven Arms had come up to the front door; bold as brass she had said outright that she had two children by Blaise and had been promised all sorts. She demanded compensation. In other ways, too, Blaise had been careless.
Mother was to be brought downstairs for Christmas dinner. Mother was an invalid and never left her room, but she would do so on this occasion because it was understood that this was the last winter in their own house. They were to be sold up, said voices in the air.
Evelyn rubbed her arms, clamping them across her thin chest. The garden had gone to seed; snow drifting in the hollows and a single blackbird scavenged in the weeds, pecking without hope at the iron-hard ground.
Remembering that Christmas, hands now slack in her lap, Evelyn felt no inclination to busy herself for Muriel’s sake. An accustomed weight lay around her heart. In February the house was sold. She left with one box-trunk for her Aunt Norah, in Liverpool. She cried as the taxi took her down the drive, not because her childhood had been happy, but because crying passed the time.
Aunt Norah had a tall black house, a city house with many staircases. Half a mile away skinny children played in the streets. On certain days a smell drifted up from the docks, of rubber and salt and decaying fruit. At Aunt Norah’s she cried every night. She stood by her bedroom window looking down at the pavement far below, tempted by the wicked railings of the street frontage. When she opened the window, a preparatory step, the night howled about her ears. She closed it again quickly, hearing her quick breathing in the dark, and watching the faint crack of light that crept under her door from the passage. She felt as if she were suffocating. But she was not more unhappy than she had been before.
Her mother, smelling of urine, was now confined to a nursing home. Evelyn visited her four times a year. Latterly, she screamed if she was touched. When she finally died, Evelyn was seventeen.
Aunt Norah now gave her notice that she must make her own way. She had performed her duty to her sister and had, indeed, met the hospital bills for the past six months. There was no more money from any source, and every mouthful of bread Evelyn ate had been put there by the charity of her Aunt and her Uncle Reggie. Every mouthful of bread.
Three weeks after this ultimatum came Clifford Axon. He was a senior shipping clerk who worked for Uncle Reggie. He had decided recently that his life would be better regulated if he had a wife to oversee his domestic arrangements and provide him with a few small comforts. Explaining this, he had proposed to as many as four young ladies, and they had all turned him down on the spot. His misfortune was the subject of general merriment in Uncle Reggie’s Chambers. Uncle Reggie bet Clifford five pounds that he knew a girl who would be willing to marry him at once, on first meeting.
“Is she ugly?” Axon asked.
“Ugly? You’d not say so. Plain, perhaps, but what would you?”
He did not say, faintly peculiar, but poured himself a glass of whisky, a little pale fire on a foggy afternoon, a toast to the Gaiety Girl.
