again. It
Sylvia took out a handkerchief smeared with gravy. She applied it to her heated face and smudges of mascara and tan foundation adhered to it as she patted her skin vigorously.
“I’m sorry. It’s not your fault.” She whimpered and sniffed. “Just…it’s only once a year…and I’ve been working hard to get the dinner and make everything nice, and I don’t feel myself—” With a neat and surprising movement she slipped under the table. Florence gave a cry of alarm, and half-rose from her place. “It’s all right, I’m only picking up these peas from under Karen’s chair before they get trodden in the carpet. Stay where you are.”
She sniffed loudly again, hidden under the cloth. Relieved at the return to normality, Colin handed Florence her book token. Sylvia had given him a blue shirt with a matching blue and white tie, pinned together under their cellophane wrapper. He thought this a very neat idea, because he always had trouble matching shirts to ties, and had to call on Sylvia to do it for him. She would be out of patience, because she was trying to get the children fed with their breakfasts, and she would snap at him, and fling his clothes across the room; but if he chose for himself she would mock at him at the breakfast table, and ridicule his efforts. His first thought was how much simpler life would be with this innovation; then immediately he saw something sinister in it. Was Sylvia preparing him for life alone? Did she know something, and had her words been more, that morning, than a vicious stab in the dark? He saw himself alone, crushed by alimony and abandoned by Isabel, spending his Christmas in a dirty bedsitting-room, with a bottle of milk on the table, and the cheapest kind of card, from each of his children, scrawled hastily and collapsed in the draught from the cracked window. A tin of fruit and a walk about the street; such a complete and vivid picture of his future desolation came to him that tears of self-pity welled up into his eyes. Sylvia did not notice. She was staring at Florence’s gift to her, twelve plain cream linen tablenapkins, requiring to be washed, starched, and ironed.
“Blimey,” Sylvia said. “Real serviettes, Florence. I always have paper ones, you know, when there’s company, otherwise I don’t bother with any.”
“Ah well,” Florence conceded pleasantly. “Of course you’re not newly-weds now. When you are putting your household together these gay little informalities are excused you, but as we get older, and established, it is not always becoming to be casual.”
“Why didn’t you put a message in them?” Sylvia asked. “Just to make the point? A little motto, like you get in the crackers?”
“We never had linen at home,” Colin said.
Florence caught his eye. She looked betrayed. “No?”
“No.”
“Your memory is at fault, Colin.”
“’Tisn’t.”
“I think it is.”
“We had paper.”
“Oh,” said Florence drily, “if you are right, I must have learned it out of books.”
Sylvia had been extravagant. She had bought Florence a cookery book, lavishly illustrated, called
“And this is your other one from me, Colin.”
It was a Five-Year Diary, with a lock and key.
This time he saw the implication immediately. She felt he had secrets. She knew he had. She was laughing at him, asking him to place them between covers of leatherette. It was hardly the world’s most secure object; she could have bought another identical, with the same key. He was damned if he would write anything in this book. He turned it over admiringly in his hands.
“How did you think of this?” he asked her. “Very useful. I never miss not having a diary till about April, and then I really need one, and there aren’t any in the shops.”
“I don’t think you’re meant to put your engagements in it,” Sylvia said. “It’s not that kind. You’re supposed to put down what you do, so that you have something to look back on.”
“That’s right,” Florence said. “You will be able to look back at the date and see at a glance that this day four years ago, you were at the dentist. For example.”
“I hope more will happen than the dentist,” Colin said. “I hope there will be more than that to record. You know,” he said, with a strained chuckle, “there’s a saying that only virgins and generals keep diaries.”
This epigram left the company listless. Renewed howls erupted from upstairs. Virgins and generals, he thought; and I need the sentiments of the former and the strategic sense of the latter. Or perhaps it is the other way round.
At ten o’clock, Colin drove Florence home. There was too little drink in the house for him to be the worse for it, and he was under the necessity of saving some of it to get him through the rest of the holiday.
As Florence got out of the car, her presents balanced in her arms, she said, “I wonder what sort of day the Axons have had. I do feel guilty about them, in a way.”
Colin wished she would shut the car door. He was getting frozen.
“Goodnight, Colin. Thank Sylvia for me.”
“Don’t mention it, Florence. Goodnight. Merry Christmas.”
She slammed the door and started towards the gate. Colin watched her until she was safely inside her front door, and turned the car for home. He thought of Isabel, not of the Axons. He stopped at a telephone box. There was a delay before she answered and her voice sounded chilly, remote, and strained.
“Oh yes. Merry Christmas,” she said. “Yes. Goodnight.”
