“No. Not at all. Nor is gawping at obvious women in coffee shops.
Incidentally.”
His face was so open. She didn’t know what to say.
“Can I buy you a coffee? Go back to the scene of the crime? Penance?”
“There’s no need.” She couldn’t decide whether she was intrigued or exasperated. But either way, she was still late. She looked at her watch.
“Tempted?”
“No. Not tempted. Just wondering exactly how late I’m going to be.”
“Late for what? What do you do?”
“I’m temping.” Why was she even answering?
“They won’t fire a temp. Not this close to Christmas. Not because they’re all heart. Just because there isn’t time to get anyone else.”
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He wasn’t like anyone else she’d met lately. And it was pretty obvious that he was being a pain in the arse because he liked her—liked the look of her, or liked the way she’d sized him up the day before, or something.
And that was flattering, damn it. And after all, she’d accepted stranger invitations, in weirder places. Sometimes you wished you hadn’t. And sometimes amazing things happened. And the filing was seriously, seriously dull. . . .
He sensed her waver.
“Come on. A coffee . . .”
“I don’t like Starbucks.”
“God—me, neither. Evil. Scary. Like plastic bags. And disposable nappies.” He shuddered theatrically. “And that stuff you spray out of an aerosol to get the smell out of your curtains and stuff. Yewk!” He thrust his hands into his pockets. “Bloody good coffee, though.”
Jennifer
Jennifer loved her husband’s mother. It was her father-in-law she couldn’t stand. Kathleen was warm and funny and had always made her feel welcome. Brian was cool and sharp and left her, each time she saw him, with the impression that he was disappointed by her. Actually, as the years had passed and the feeling went from being uncomfortable to up-setting to habitual, she began to realize that Brian was disappointed by life, and not just by her.
This year he was disappointed by having to have his family Christmas celebration the week before Christmas. Which was her fault. She wanted to be with Hannah, and Mark, and the others. That felt like the right thing to do, and it would sure as hell be more fun, her poor dead mother notwithstanding. So her in-laws had brought the whole Christmas thing forward a week. No one had asked them to do that. Kathleen said she loved to see everyone together. Or, at least, that domestic disturbance was what Jennifer supposed might be the problem, as she stood in the door frame between the kitchen—Kathleen’s feminine,
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inclusive domain—and the living room, where Brian held court, sat old-man wide-legged in his armchair, watching his grandchildren play on the rug.
Stephen’s sisters, Anna and Joanne, were there. Their husbands were not, being, respectively, an ex and estranged. And Brian was as sure as hell disappointed by that. Anna’s husband had left his pregnant wife for his pregnant girlfriend three years before, and Joanne’s had walked out on her and their two children almost exactly two years later.
Although Jennifer supposed that, in reality, this family simply reflected national statistics, it seemed a singular failure to her. Two out of three of your children in a failed marriage. Mustn’t that have had something to do with the parents, even if it was nominally the fault of the deserting husbands? What had it been like here, when Stephen, Anna, and Joanne were young?
Stephen was the middle child. Joanne was older by thirteen months; Anna, younger by two years. Kathleen loved to talk about the time when she had three children under five—two of them in terry nappies. It was clearly when she had been happiest. Stephen remembered a tired mother, an absent father, but nothing, he said when Jennifer asked him, that made him any different from any of his mates. When she had questioned him more closely, he’d shrugged, and answered, “They’re still married, aren’t they?”
If that was Stephen’s measure of success, it was no wonder that she couldn’t get him to talk to her, to really, really talk to her. After all, the two of them were still married, weren’t they? What more could she want?
Kathleen, Anna, and Joanne were a long way down a bottle of white wine in the kitchen, huddled around the table, although it was after two in the afternoon and lunch was more than ready to serve. A little like a coven of witches, albeit more of the giggling than the cackling kind, cursing man in general, and some men very specifically. Stephen was watching television with his father, bending over occasionally to ruffle 62 e l i z a b e t h
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the hair or tweak the nose of one of his three fatherless nieces and his nephew, Jake, currently hunched over a Nintendo DS.
Jennifer wanted lunch to be served and to be over. She didn’t want to be here. Her heels hurt, and her head ached, and she wished she were at home, in the flat, in a pair of sweats.
It hadn’t always been this way. The first time she had come here for Christmas, she’d been high as a kite, head over heels in love with Stephen, and wanting more than anything to hasten the process by which she could become a part of this new family. Desperate to make a good impression, she’d carefully packed and prepared, bought thoughtful gifts and wrapped them with care.
Joanne’s first child, Jake, was about six weeks old, and the whole Christmas revolved around him. He spent the day, somnolent on a bean-bag, center stage, dressed in an elf Babygro with matching hat, the star player in a protracted Kodak moment. Everyone, even Stephen’s dad, was doting and love-struck. Joanne had worn elastic clothing, breast pads, and an expression of beatific exhaustion all day, and it had felt contagious, so that by the end of the evening, they were all reclining on chairs and sofas, gazing happily at Jake, and each other, and the Bond movie.
That had been the first year. It had been pretty much downhill from there, until it had reached the point where Jennifer started dreading it around Halloween.
She must have sighed. Stephen’s mum stood up and came to her, a comforting arm snaking around her shoulders. “You all right, love?”
She pursed her lips together in a nonsmile and nodded.
“Thinking about your mum?”
They hadn’t known each other well. Engagement party, wedding, the odd Sunday lunch. They’d had the peculiar, forced intimacy of in-laws, a stilted relationship. They weren’t alike, and Jennifer doubted they would have been friends under different circumstances.
The truth was, she wasn’t thinking about Barbara now. Not really.
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She was thinking about the things in her life that she
did
have some control over, not the things she didn’t.
But it was easier to nod and accept the sympathetic cluck and the hug and then, from Joanne, the big glass of wine.
Given that she was condemned to eat two Christmas lunches, she was glad this one was first. Mark’s lunch would be delicious—this one was dry and flavorless. The turkey was overcooked to the point of sawdust, and the gravy was like dishwater, which made you glad there was barely enough in the gravy boat to moisten your bulletlike Brussels sprouts. No stuffing, no cranberry sauce, no chipolatas wrapped in bacon.
“For the sake of the children” there were crackers and hats and stupid jokes. The children had no interest in sitting at the table, anxious to escape back to their new toys and the afternoon film. Jennifer, studying the clock above her father-in-law’s head, knew how they felt. Anna and Joanne were talking in code about the CSA and their exes’ new girlfriends. She was getting a headache from trying to keep up with their encrypted references. Several times, Stephen’s mum tried to change the subject, but those new forays, which concerned Stephen’s job, and their plans to holiday in Tunisia at Easter, and the new Italian restaurant that had opened down the road, would inevitably peter out into semiawk-ward silences that led right back to the bitching.
Jennifer had the sense that she was the only one here who found the meal difficult. It felt as though the rest of them were inured to the medi-ocrity—of the food and the conversation and the happiness level. She guessed that maybe, apart from that first magical year, when she acknowledged that she was looking but not really seeing, Christmas here had always been like this.
When the children were finally excused to rampage in the next room, it grew even quieter. As though he’d been waiting for the perfect moment, Stephen’s dad leaned forward, elbows on the table at either side of his unfinished bowl of Christmas pudding, and looked first at her, and then at Stephen. She knew what was coming.
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“So, how many more years are you two going to make me wait for grandchildren?” The stupid remark hung in the air like cigarette smoke.
Jennifer felt tired. He may have been looking at Stephen, and referring to both of them, but he was talking to her. Trying to light her touch paper. It seemed a malicious sport to her.
She smiled as lightly as she could manage. Her voice carried a warning, but she doubted it would be heeded. “You
have
grandchildren, Brian—they’re those adorable noisy little people jumping on the sofa next door.”
“I mean
your
children—
Stephen’s
children. A man wants to see his son produce a family.” He sounded like some idiotic Victorian.
“Brian! Leave them be.”
Kathleen was trying to come to their rescue, but he was belligerent after a morning of drinking. His words were slightly slurred, and he didn’t even look at his wife when she spoke.
“I’m only having fun with them, Kathleen. Besides, haven’t I a right to know? They’ve been married for years.”
Jennifer looked at Stephen for help, or rescue, or even just for a shared moment of exasperation, but Stephen looked down at his place and swept away a few imaginary crumbs from the cloth. He wasn’t going to say anything, and she didn’t think she had ever felt more alone.
Kathleen’s smile pleaded with her, and Joanne and Anna looked embarrassed and sympathetic, and perhaps the tiniest bit curious, but no one was going to tell him to shut up.
She pushed her chair back—its legs squeaking unpleasantly against the floor—and stood up, forcing her voice to be calm and quiet, as she said, “You know what, Brian? You don’t have a right. You don’t have any bloody right at all.”
Then she turned and walked through into the kitchen. She grabbed her coat and handbag and opened the back door.
Kathleen loved her long, narrow garden and kept a bench on the patio right outside the door, on which she would sit and watch the birds at
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her birdbath. Jennifer sat down heavily, pulled her coat around her against the cold. Her breath came in clouds. She fumbled in her bag for a cigarette and lit it, taking a deep first drag. He could bloody well bugger off, the stupid, insensitive, nosy sod. She was too angry to cry.
Kathleen followed her out, her coat around her shoulders but her slippers still on. She sat down beside her.
“Can I have one of those?”
“You don’t smoke.”
“Nor do you!”
“Bloody well need one now.” She’d bought the packet a few days ago.
It was the first one she’d bought for months—since Mum, really—and this was the first one she’d lit. It wasn’t really like her, and even as she drew deeply on the cigarette, she wondered what she was doing. Stephen would be cross. Maybe that was why she’d bought them.
“Well . . . me, too.”
Jennifer half smiled at her and passed the packet. Kathleen lit a cigarette with the shallow breath of the halfhearted smoker.
“You think you need a fag to get through a day with him, try a lifetime.”
It was the first time she had ever said anything remotely like that, and the statement hung in the air with their smoke and their cold breath, like smog.
For a moment, Jennifer stared at her in shock. Then Kathleen shrugged, nodded, took another pretend drag, and burst out laughing.
They didn’t talk much on the way home in the car. She was driving. Stephen had drunk several glasses of wine and port with his lunch, and his head was nodding before they’d gone five miles. She told him it was okay for him to sleep, and he’d reclined the passenger seat, balling up his sweater to make a pillow, and fallen asleep. She’d listened to the radio for a while, but then switched over to a CD. She wanted Norah Jones or Paul Simon. This was Stephen’s car, though, and bore 66 e l i z a b e t h
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testament to his peculiar weakness for heavy metal; Megadeth and Me-tallica were not really what she was in the mood for. The roads were quiet this late in the afternoon the Sunday before Christmas, and the drive was an easy enough one—she’d been doing it for years.
She’d hugged her mother-in-law warmly at the door, but she’d refused to be conciliatory with her father-in-law. He could stew on it all week as far as she was concerned. She wasn’t in the least sorry she’d stormed out in the middle of their Christmas dinner. Maybe it would make him think twice the next time. The rest of the afternoon had had a sense of forced gaiety—they had all turned their attention to the children, while he had slumped in his armchair, dozing to
Chitty Chitty Bang
Bang.
She’d played endless games of Uno and Pictionary. Once, looking up, she’d seen Stephen looking at her strangely, but when his eyes met hers, he looked away.
Kathleen had never said one word about finding Brian difficult to live with before, not in the whole time she’d known her. It made her think.
Who else had a marriage full of secrets, and things unsaid, and things ignored until you could bear it no longer? Not just her.
Her mind went back to Mum’s journal. She’d read it and reread it, and even when she didn’t read it, she kept it by her bed, where she could see it, and it made Mum feel close by. Stephen had asked to look at it, but she had said no, that it was personal, and only meant for her and her sisters. He had shrugged and looked pained, as though her saying no was one more instance of her pushing him away as he tried to get closer.