Comfort and Joy (13 page)

‘Mm.’

‘Anyway, eventually I just came out and said it. It was driving me mad. I would feel myself getting to the point of, you know,
and I would have to get the pillows and put them on my head.’

‘Didn’t he think it was strange?’

‘No. He just thought I was so wildly into it that I had to clutch pillows and put them over my head so they covered both my
ears.’

‘Right.’

‘Anyway. I told him I didn’t like “good girl”.’

‘Good girl,’ I say, in a deep voice. ‘Well done, babe. Come for Daddy.’

‘Not funny. Gross. Anyway. Then he started on the other stuff. And in many ways, it’s worse. Not as bad as “Daddy”, but …’

‘I need another drink,’ I say, refilling both our glasses from the champagne bottle on the coffee table.

‘Thanks. The first thing was “Take Jake’s cock.” ’

The laughter is so rapid, so violent, that I actually choke on my champagne, like in a sitcom.

‘I know,’ Tamsin says, patting me on the back. ‘I know. And there’s that awful internal rhyme. Also, who else’s cock would
I be “taking”, you know? Plus of course the third-person thing. That’s not good.’

‘No. That’s never good. Tam, can I ask you something? How do you keep a straight face? How do you not lose, you know, momentum?’

‘The thing is, he’s very good in bed. Plenty of practice and all that. But he will keep up this running commentary, and it’s
all seventies porno-speak. It does my head in.’

‘Could you not just tell him that silence turns you on?’

‘I don’t think he can help himself. It’s obviously just what he does. It’s part of his technique. I have no complaints about
the actual technique. He is skilled. It’s just the words.’

‘I don’t want you to tell me any more of the words.’

‘Please let me.’

‘No. It’s making me want to wee. Also, I think it’s too much information. I have a very vivid imagination, Tam. You’re forcing
me to picture intimate moments between a man and a woman I know. Special moments. Secret moments. It’s not right.’

‘Well, you asked. You’re the one who mentioned Mr Penis.’

‘Stop now.’

‘He invented it as a substitute for “Jake’s cock” and “my hard tool”.’

‘Tamsin!’

‘What? He said I could hardly complain because it was just … factual. It’s a penis, and penises are masculine, and therefore
it’s Mr Penis.’

‘I get a Mr Man cartoon, except with a disturbing head.’

‘Me too. At least with Miss Gina you don’t get an immediate visual. Because of pronouncing it Geena. If it was ’gina, like
in vagina, it would be awful. But I can live with Miss Gina, as it happens.’

‘Do you ever think, Tamsin,’ I ask, moving out of the way of Pat, who is carrying refills and cheese biscuits to the residents
of the sofa opposite, ‘that it’s all too much work? I know bad bed vocab isn’t the end of the world, but I mean … all the
compromises. All the things that make us laugh or cringe and that we have to put up with because otherwise we wouldn’t be
in a relationship? Don’t you think it’s tiring? And sort of unfair? And – well, hard work?’

‘Yes. But I lived with the alternative for five years and I didn’t like it.’

‘But don’t you think there must be a middle way? Like, a sort of Blairite Third Way? Where you can have a boyfriend or a husband
or whatever, but the whole thing isn’t quite so tiring and ridiculous and constant? Separate houses, maybe. Except not, because
nobody could afford it. I don’t know. But there must be some kind of solution.’

‘Marriage!’ says Tamsin, clinking her glass against mine. ‘That’s the basket I’ve got my eggs in.’

‘Yeah, well, good luck with that one,’ I say, clinking back. ‘I’d offer expert advice, except, you know.’

‘I know,’ says Tamsin sympathetically. ‘It’s different though, with me and Jake.’

Unwilling to point out to the blushing bride-to-be that at least neither of my husbands had sex-vocab problems (she also once
told me that Jake’s face, at the point of orgasm, ‘reminds me of someone having a stroke’), I go back to the other side of
the room.

‘You are my granny,’ Maisy is saying to Kate, ‘and you are my granny –’ this is to Pat ‘– but you –’ to Robert’s mother ‘–
are not my granny. You are the granny of my brothers but not of me.’

‘That’s right, Maisy,’ says Eleanor, Robert’s mother. ‘But I am almost your granny, because I love you so much. Come and sit
with me.’ This Maisy happily does, clutching her favourite present, a second-hand portable games console, bought for her by
both her brothers. I go off to find them.

‘Come and talk to your loving mummy,’ I say, embracing Charlie, who says ‘Gerroff’ but doesn’t make any effort to move away.

‘We love our presents, Mum,’ says Jack. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘Thank your father and Sam too, please,’ I say. ‘They’re joint presents, most of them.’

‘Yeah, thanks Mum,’ says Charlie. ‘Cool-ass gifts.’

‘You’re very welcome. Happy Christmas. I wanted to say thank you for getting Maisy that DSi. She absolutely loves it. And
I know they’re not cheap. You must have saved up for ages. It was very, very nice of you to get it for her.’

‘Yeah, well. We traded in some old games, so it wasn’t that bad. She’s quite cute, when she’s not being a totally massive
pain in the ass.’

‘Do you think maybe you could stop saying “ass” every two seconds?’

‘No. Soz.’

‘Also, she won’t bug us so much because she’ll become totally addicted to playing it,’ says Charlie. ‘So it’s win-win, we
reckoned.’

‘And she’s had kind of a crap-ass time, you know, with her dad leaving,’ adds Jack. ‘We felt a bit sorry.’

I honestly spend quite a lot of my time wanting to put these boys in the bin, but I am suddenly so overcome with love for
them that I just stand there staring, feeling quite choked.

‘You’re very nice boys,’ I eventually manage to get out. ‘I’m proud of you.’

‘Whevs,’ says Jack, looking embarrassed. ‘Can you get off my hair please, Mum?’

‘We told her it would be okay,’ says Charlie. ‘We were okay when it happened to us.’

‘I don’t even remember it,’ says Jack.

‘It’s not that big a deal,’ says Charlie.

I don’t know. That’s always been my line: it’s not that big a deal. It
has
to be my line, really, otherwise everyday life would be intolerable. And I think it’s broadly true: sadness aside, it doesn’t
matter if relationships go wrong. What matters is how you deal with the aftermath in relation to children. This – the dealing,
the absolute need for some sort of continuity – I am able to do. Sam sees as much of Maisy as he ever did: possibly,
if you totted up the hours, he actually sees slightly more of her. The boys and Robert’s relationship is more detached, out
of geographical necessity, but they are fundamentally close: they certainly don’t do that thing of being in any way confused
about who their parents are, or who occupies parental roles. My worry now, though, is how they feel about losing their stepfather
– the man who effectively helped bring them up. I don’t want to put a downer on Christmas, but now seems as good a time as
any to ask them.‘Are you still okay with it? With Sam no longer living here, I mean. I know we’ve talked about it before,
but now it’s a long time later, and I just wonder …’

‘Oh God, mum chats,’ says Charlie. ‘On Christmas. That’s so lame-ass.’

‘We’re fine,’ says Jack.

‘No, we’re traumatized,’ says Charlie.

‘Charlie walks up to strange men in the street and says, “Will you be my daddy?” ’ says Jack, laughing at his own joke.

‘Jack wets the bed about it,’ says Charlie, reluctantly laughing himself. ‘He says “Sam, Saaaaam” in his sleep. “Come back,
Sammmeeee.” ’

‘We’re fine,’ Jack says again.

‘We did it in PSHE,’ says Charlie. ‘In a module called the Blended Family.’

‘Can you stop staring at us weirdly now, Mum?’ says Jack. ‘We were going to go and set up the new game on the Xbox before
lunch. Mum?’

Christmas 1981. I am twelve years old. I live in Notting Hill with my mum and dad, whose names are Kate and Julian. Notting
Hill isn’t Notting Hill yet: it may sound hilarious from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, but it’s considered
rough and not quite
comme il faut
: a borderline slum, partly because of its large immigrant community. I have two little sisters, Flo, who is three, and Evie,
who is just over a year old. It is Christmas Day.

Our house has a spectacular central staircase that spirals four storeys up, and our Christmas tree sits at the bottom of it
in a pot wrapped in red crepe paper: it must be twenty-five feet high. Its delivery every year, on 17 December, is a momentous,
thrilling occasion, as is the ceremonial decorating of it. Julian does the lights first – it takes him ages, because he is
quite the perfectionist – and then my mum and I come along with our decorations. The result is heart-rendingly beautiful,
even to a child with no sense of aesthetics. Our tree is majestic, Victorian, with its blaze of white lights and its hundreds
of red baubles, and every year, once it’s all ready, we turn off the main lights and sit looking at it for twenty minutes
or so, beaming at each other. Elsewhere, there are big branches of spruce threaded through the banisters, going up all four floors. The whole house smells
resinous, piney. All the presents are on the steps of the staircase, starting at the bottom and also spiralling out of sight.
Kate is a genius at wrapping, and the sight of the presents – thick, glossy paper, velvet ribbon, a riot of colours – is viscerally
pleasing, gasp-makingly lovely. In the living room there are thousands of fairy lights tenting from the ceiling, like a sparkling
canopy. Kate put every strand of them up herself two weeks ago. I got back from school one day to find Evie bolstered by a
cushion on the sofa while Kate was on a ladder, getting tangled up in wires, a dozen multi-socket adaptors piled next to the
sleeping baby. She wanted it to be beautiful for when Julian came home; my job was to watch Evie, occasionally detangle my
mother, and be in charge of what wire went where. When Julian did get home, he exclaimed in pure
delight, congratulating Kate on her cleverness and ingenuity. (This was back in the day where fairy lights only lived on Christmas
trees and got one outing a year.) Later that night we had supper together – me, Kate and Julian – eggs on toast, on trays
balanced on our laps, in the twinkling fairy light. I felt like I was inside a fairy tale: I wouldn’t have been especially
astonished if a unicorn had galloped past, shooting rainbows from its hooves.

Aged twelve, I don’t remember ever living anywhere else, though Kate says, somewhat vaguely, that we did, and that we only
moved here when I was five years old. But I have no recollection of any other home. Every inch of this house is as familiar
to me as my own face: I know which floorboards squeak and which don’t when you tread on them; I know that I like laying my
cheek on the wall outside the third-floor bathroom, because it is an especially cool-feeling bit of wall on a warm day; I
know there’s a patch of damp behind the left-hand curtain (a William Morris print of green leaves on buff background) in the
living room; I know that my favourite room is the kitchen, with its preponderance of pine, because it’s so warm in there,
and so cosy, and it always smells delicious. I know the best places to hide – it’s a huge, rambling early Victorian house,
full of odd nooks and crannies and doors that lead to cupboards big enough to make little lairs in. I know everything, and
I love it all. I have friends at school who are starting to feel that their home is really their parents’ home, and very little
to do with them. I know that that’s true of my house too, technically, but I don’t feel that way. I love our house like I’d
love a person. It is a part of me, and me of it.

I especially love it at this time of year, because Kate makes such a fuss of Christmas. The day starts early, because Flo
is an early riser. Just after 6 a.m., Flo pads into my bed and we huddle for a while; I use her excitement about the day as
an excuse
to give full rein to my own. As soon as I hear Evie babbling to herself in her cot – the girls’ room is next to mine – I pick
her up, deftly change her nappy and carry her, warm and giggling, into Kate and Julian’s enormous bed. We all clamber in.
I am twelve years old but I feel no shyness or awkwardness about us all being hunkered in together (that will come, two years
on, when I will also – finally – stop playing with dolls, and when I will choose to perch on the edge of the bed instead of
getting in. I will sit and flick bits off my black nail polish, and then I will escape to my bedroom for a cigarette, and
Kate and Julian will exchange a long look).

Kate excuses herself for a moment and comes back with a huge wooden tray, laden with cinnamon-scented buns and a stout teapot
and mugs, as well as with Evie’s bottle. ‘Breakfast in bed!’ she announces gaily. ‘Merry Christmas, my darlings.’ She kisses
all of us. She looks so happy, and radiantly beautiful. She is barely thirty years old. She feeds Evie tiny pieces of bun
after she’s finished giving her the bottle, and laughs at the greediness with which the baby opens her little mouth for more,
like a bird.

It is still dark outside. Julian glances at the steely sky and promises us all that it’ll snow later. Flo says she would like
to make ‘an enormous snow bear’, and he assures her that he’ll help her after lunch. When we’ve eaten our cinnamon buns, we
solemnly troop into the living room. The fireplace is decorated with yet more branches of spruce, the ceiling canopy is glinting
merrily, and there are our stockings. Flo squeals with excitement, and so do I. I am a sweet girl, young for my age, bookish
(I was an only child until I was nine, after all), quiet, family-minded, and if I know that squealing at stockings left by
a pretend person isn’t cool, I don’t let it stop me.

The day progresses in the same vein: in my memory, it is bathed in a kind of golden light. All our Christmases – our
Christmi, as Evie was to christen them only a few years later – were. Kate’s infinite generosity, her capacity for joy, love,
celebration and the grand gesture all combined to make high days and holidays indelibly memorable, none more so than Christmas.
And the feasts! My God, the feasts. Kate, not obviously a domestic creature in her later years, was a veritable Mrs Beeton
in those days – a cool one, in Biba and kohl-rimmed eyes. Cakes, perfectly iced, with elaborate snowscapes made of royal icing.
Spiced biscuits, permanently warm from the oven. Home-made stollen and panettone, before either had become commonplace. Goose,
and turkey, and two kinds of gravy, and four different vegetables: she was amazing.