Peggy was itching to go and give her a hug. It was a visceral sensation, a welling-up, as if she could take three steps across the lino, enfold Sam and stroke away the size and age of her, cuddle her daughter back out of competence and adulthood. But Sam had two fistfuls of cutlery and was thoughtfully wiping each piece with the teatowel.
“I’ve messed up the timing a bit with the dinner. I think I’ve fucked the vegetables.”
“Never mind, pet. What’s important is, we’ve had this talk.”
“Perhaps I’m not so domesticated, after all.”
Her mother was fixated for a moment by the green and purple butterfly calendar. The paint was so thick it had cracked in places; little chunks had dropped onto the draining board, where Sam’s dishcloth had turned them into garish streaks.
“I think you’re doing fine. And Mark’s doing fine, too, considering. And don’t worry about keeping Sally in the dark from things. Children find out…”
“But I do worry about that.”
“Trust your own feelings. She’ll turn out how she turns out. You turned out all right, didn’t you, with me?”
Sam dropped knives and forks loudly onto the pile of plates. “I don’t fucking want her to turn out like me.”
Something beat feebly at Peggy’s inner ear. The aftershock of ringing cutlery, her own startled heartbeat. She swallowed, waiting for Sam to continue.
Sam looked her mother in the eye. “You, Mam, to be quite frank, never kept me in the dark enough.”
THEY SAT DOWN TO DINNER. MARK CARVED THE TURKEY STANDING UP IN the candlelight, making it clear that he was doing it under duress and, as it were, between inverted commas. The women applauded likewise as he passed neat slivers round. Iris dished out more wine.
“Oh, what’s this music?” she exclaimed, banging down her glass and slopping a little on the cloth. Mark looked from the purple stain to Sam.
Sam said, “It’s a compilation tape Mark did for me, a few Christmases ago.”
Iris was shifting about in her seat, waggling her hands in time to the music. “But this particular song—what is it?” Without waiting for a reply, she went on, “You know how some pieces of music, some songs, the first time you hear them and every time afterwards, they make your insides jump up inside you? And want to be out?”
“Oh, yes,” Mark said.
“It’s ‘Heroes’,” Sam muttered, tactlessly dabbing at the stain, “by David Bowie.” But a new song had begun—Marlene Dietrich intoning ‘Give me the Man’—and the rest of the main course was taken up by a long story from Iris about the decadent nightlife of Berlin. Sam gritted her teeth all the way through; Mark was politely interested—and genuinely so, at one or two points; and Peggy looked down at what she was eating, wordlessly. She glanced fiercely at her partner only once, when Iris let slip that she was talking about Berlin of the nineteen twenties, and had once appeared in the same cabaret as Dietrich herself.
“It was fabulous. You would have loved it.” She patted Mark’s hand and crammed her mouth with sprouts.
“Should that make you the same age as Marlene Dietrich?” asked Sam icily.
The ensuing pause fell unfortunately between tracks on the tape. “Darling,” sighed Iris, “you should never ask a lady her age.”
They lit cigarettes between courses. As if on cue, Iris produced a ridiculous holder which, they found, had a spring strong enough to catapult dead filters across the length of the table. They were beginning their fourth bottle of wine and moulding little balls out of melted candle wax when Mark went to deal with the pudding.
He reappeared in the doorway, sucking his fingers. “Have you doused this in petrol, Sam? It almost blew up in my face.”
“Just light it,” she snapped, getting up from her seat. “What’s wrong with you? Oh, I’ll do it.”
“Sit there,” Mark said, cross more suddenly than if he hadn’t been drunk.
“Oh, this song!” Iris cried, toddling over to the hi-fi to turn up the volume. Nimrod booked out of the speakers. Peggy felt, quite distinctly, the glass tremble at her lips.
Moments after Mark returned to the pudding (finding the sauce smouldering in the pan), Sally appeared in the dining room in her dressing gown, her hair fluffed up with static and clutching a stuffed koala bear to her chest.
“Darling!” Iris predictably burst out and went scuttling for her carrier bags. Sally looked a little alarmed.
Sam slammed down her glass and growled, “Would you once—just once—say something without the words ‘fabulous’ or ‘darling’ in it?”
Yet it was Peggy who looked as if she had been slapped. And what made it worse for Peggy was that Iris didn’t respond at all to Sam. She simply stopped in her tracks, clutching her bag and smiling foolishly.
Sam added, “And could you please stop talking about yourself all the time?”
“Have you…” Peggy began tentatively, turning to Sally, “Have you come to see if Santa’s been?”
Taking a deep breath, Iris smiled reassuringly and asked, “Sam darling, are you always this fabulously premenstrual?”
“Dad!” Sally cried, coming to life as Mark carried the lit pudding into the room. He held it level with his shoulders so that his face and forearms were polished with a spectral gleam.
“Ta-dah!” he announced. “And I think clever Mam’s gone and put coins and fortune cards in this, too!”
I’m going to choke on this, thought Peggy, as Sam plopped a large spoonful of pudding into her bowl. Dimly she recalled all the other moments in her life when she thought something was going to choke her, and almost all seemed preferable to this one.
“Aren’t you having any, pet?” Mark asked Sally.
“Leave her. She’s opening her prezzies.” Iris pushed her own bowl under Sam’s nose and they all turned to look at Sally, on the rug in front of the television set, in piles of shredded colourful paper. She unwrapped her gifts as if still dreaming. She had decided to herself that she was still dreaming; Christmas had come hours early this year. If it
