One Good Turn

dec-orated it with chocolate buttercream, scored and marked to look like wood, and then sprinkled it with icing- sugar snow. Finally, she cut ivy from the garden, frosted it with egg white and sugar, and then twined it round the log before perching a red plastic robin on top. She thought it looked lovely, like something from a fairy tale, and if she had been still bothering with Weight Watch-ers, it would have used up all her points for a whole year.

When it came time to eat it, Ewan would say (because they were like actors with an immutable script), “None of that stuff for me, I’ll just have Christmas pudding,” and Emily would say, “God, Mother, that kind of thing is toxic to the system,” and now that she had Xanthia she would add threateningly, “And don’t give any to Xanthia either,” because, of course, one-year-old Xanthia had been weaned on millet as far as Gloria could tell, and then, inevitably, Graham would say, “I don’t know why you make that shite, no one eats it,” and Gloria would say, “I eat it,” and she would cut herself a big slice. And eat it. And every day after that she took it out of the fridge and cut another big slice until only the piece with the robin was left, and she would put that one out for the squirrels and the birds, but minus the robin, of course, in case the squirrels accidentally ate it. Or another robin attacked it, thinking it was a miniaturized, paralyzed trespasser into its terri-tory.

Their parts were fixed-Graham was the villain, Ewan took the role of worthy leading man, Nick was his long- suffering sidekick, and Emily was forever the adolescent ingenue, the moody daugh-ter whose life had been blighted by everyone else (apparently). Gloria herself was offstage, playing the woman in the kitchen. They wheeled Graham’s mother, Beryl, out for Christmas Day, and she sat on the sofa, dribbling. An extra with a nonspeaking part.

“You have such a classic passive-aggressive personality,” Emily had hissed at Gloria while she was basting the Christmas turkey. Gloria wasn’t sure she knew what a passive-aggressive personality was, classic or otherwise, but clearly it wasn’t something that was to Emily’s liking.

“You’re always so nice to everyone,” Emily said.

“Is that a bad thing?” Gloria asked.

Emily carried on as if Gloria hadn’t spoken, slamming down the tureen of roast potatoes onto the countertop. “But underneath you’re so angry. And do you know something I’ve come to under-stand recently?” Emily had been having some kind of counseling, every Wednesday afternoon in Basingstoke, from a man named Bryce who was “reprogramming” her brain “into more positive patterns.”

“No, what have you come to realize?” Gloria asked, wondering if hitting her daughter about the head with the basting spoon would reprogram her brain a lot faster and more cheaply than someone named Bryce.

“I’ve realized that I have spent my entire life not being me.”

“Who have you been, then?” Gloria knew that she should try to be more sympathetic, but she just couldn’t somehow.

“Oh, very clever, Mother. I haven’t put my energy into being me, because my whole life has been defined by my terror of becoming you.” Gloria didn’t think of herself as a nice person at all, quite the opposite in fact, but she supposed these things were rel-ative-compared to Emily, most people were in line for canoniza-tion.

The only item on the Christmas menu that Emily had prepared was a starter of fig and Parma ham. All Emily had done was buy the figs and ham from Harvey Nichols’ food department and put the ruddy things on a plate, but nonetheless her starter was given a rousing introduction-“Now this is going to be something really lovely for a change”-before being applauded to the rafters (by her-self) afterward. “Wasn’t that gorgeous? Isn’t it nice to have something different?” The starter had also come with a warning as Emily placed the plates on the table, this warning was directed specifi-cally at Nick, said with a manic kind of cheerfulness, “Now, dar-ling, don’t you dare critique this.” Emily had done an MA in literature at Goldsmiths, and it had made her into the kind of person who used “critique” as a verb. And applied it to food. She was “not getting on very well with Nick,” she confided to Gloria in the kitchen, she had even been thinking of a “trial separation.”

Horror clutched at Gloria’s chest at the idea that Emily might move back home.

“For better or for worse,” Gloria said, and Emily replied, “What-like you and Dad, staying together when neither of you can stand the sight of each other?” Children were not necessarily a Good Thing.

If they had known that it might be their corrupt, adulterous, fraudster of a paterfamilias’s last Christmas, would they have done things differently? Gloria might have roasted a goose instead of a turkey, he liked goose, but that was probably as far as she would have been prepared to go.

Gloria sat on the peach-damask sofa in the peach-themed living room and drank tea and ate a sandwich she had bought in town. The sandwich contained mozzarella, avocado, and rocket. None of the ingredients existed in the museum that was Gloria’s past. Gloria could remember a time when all you could buy was lettuce. Soft, limp lettuces that tasted of nothing. English lettuces. She could remember a time before mozzarella and avocado, before aubergines and courgettes. She could remember seeing her first yogurt in the corner shop in the northern town that had been her home and still was, even though she hadn’t been there for more than twenty years.

She could remember a time when there was no take-out food, no Thai restaurants, when Vesta packets were the nearest you came to anything exotic. A time when food was herrings and mince and luncheon meat. She had mentioned to Emily once that she could remember a time before aubergines, and her daughter had snapped, “Don’t be ridiculous,” at her. She finished her lunch with a slice of Genoese sponge (the secret was in the addition of a spoonful of hot milk). She had already hung her Victorian kittens-in-a-basket painting in place of the gloomy stag at bay, although its ghostly impression was still visible, thanks to a faint outline of grime. It was only last year that the room had been redecorated, after the new security system was installed, but it never ceased to surprise Gloria how quickly dirt gathered. The kittens looked completely at home on the wall.

She was so far lost in the contemplation of innocent kittenhood that she wasn’t aware of the lumbering shape that appeared at the French windows until it raised a meaty paw and knocked on the glass. Gloria nearly fell off the sofa.

“For God’s sake,” she said crossly, heaving herself off the peach damask and opening the window. “You nearly gave me a heart attack, Terry.”

“Sorry.”

Terence Smith. Graham’s golem, formed from the slime at the bottom of a pond of lowlifes somewhere in the Midlands. Sometimes Murdo borrowed him to work on the doors or do bodyguard duties (Murdo’s security firm looked after fragile celebrities when they made appearances in the capital), but most of the time he was simply Graham’s pet thug, driving him around if he was too drunk to find the steering wheel-Graham refused to crush his ego into Gloria’s red Golf-or hanging about in the background with the same air of doltish fidelity as his dog. Gloria fed cake to both man and dog and kept them away from cats and small children. There was no sign of the dog today. “Where’s your dog today, Terry? Where’s Spike?”

He made an odd choking noise and shook his head, but when he spoke it was to ask after the whereabouts of Graham, his puppet master.

“He’s in Thurso,” she said. It was funny, but the more she said that, the more it seemed true, in a metaphysical sense at any rate, as if Thurso were a kind of purgatory to which people were ban-ished. Gloria had been to Thurso once and found that to be pretty much the case.

“Thurso?” he repeated doubtfully.

“Yes,” Gloria said. “It’s up north.” She doubted that Scottish geography was high on Terry’s list of specialist subjects. She frowned at him. His face, always ugly, had acquired a new and disturbing florescence. “Terry-what happened to your nose?” He put his hand over his face, as if he’d grown suddenly bashful.

The phone rang again, and they both listened in silence to Emily’s bleating. “Mother-Mother- Mother.”

“That’s your daughter,” Terry said eventually, as if Gloria had failed to recognize Emily.

Gloria sighed and said, “Tell me about it,” and, against her better judgment, went and picked up the receiver.

“I’ve been ringing forever,” Emily said, “but all I get is the answering machine.”

“I’ve been out a lot,”Gloria said. “You should have left a message.”

“I didn’t want to leave a message,” Emily said crossly. Gloria watched as Terry lumbered down the path. He reminded her a little of King Kong, but less friendly.

“Mother?”