I was drab and skinny next to her, dressed in jumble-sale rejects.
‘You look wonderful,’ I told her.
‘Thanks, lovely,’ she said, and she looked at Harry. ‘That was your line, you know?’
He kissed her on the mouth, and stepped back.
‘You do look wonderful. You always do. Spectacularly beautiful. I should be used to it by now, ten years on, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop thanking my lucky stars that a woman like you deigns to spend her life with a man like me.’
I smiled and looked down at the pastry cases I was filling.
He left the room, taking his drink with him. Sarah followed. Soon afterwards, ‘Rocking Around the Christmas Tree’ was pounding through the house at top volume. Then he reappeared, Sarah behind him. Agitation crackled off him like electricity. He flung the fridge open.
‘We haven’t got enough bloody champagne,’ he said. ‘Seriously. I thought we did but I’ve just had another look down the guest list. Those people would drink a brewery dry. I’m going to nip down to Tesco for another box. Won’t be a minute.’
Sarah followed him out of the room. I heard her say: ‘But you can’t take the car . . .’ There were raised voices for a moment, though they were muffled. A minute after that, the front door slammed and she came back, rolling her eyes.
‘There’s no telling some people,’ she said. ‘Let’s hope he knows what he’s doing. Lily, thanks for this. Sorting out this stupid party. I can’t tell you . . .’ Her voice tailed off. ‘Anyway,’ she said, with more energy, ‘what are you doing for Christmas? Staying here?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m staying with the family I live with. They have four children. Going to be busy.’
‘Not visiting your own family?’
‘I don’t really have my own family any more.’ I took a sip of champagne. It tasted nothing like I had expected. In my mind, from everything I had read, champagne was a nectar. This was chemical and held no attraction at all, as far as I could see. I put it down. ‘So you’re off to Barcelona?’
I could see that she wanted to ask about my family.
‘Yes,’ she said instead. ‘In the morning. We were going to visit my sister, but that’s difficult at the moment, and then we were going to go to Harry’s mother, but in the end we thought, sod it, and booked a break in Barcelona. You know, a little hotel in town, a five-day package. Harry’s furious with me for choosing a tiny hotel buried in the little alleyways, because it just looked adorable. Apparently, my crime is to have booked a three- rather than a five-star place. I imagine he’ll live. After that, we’ll probably go up to London for New Year.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said. I could not begin to imagine living like that.
‘Ever been to Barcelona, Lily?’ she asked, and she took another apron from the hook and started taking huge white plates out of a cupboard.
I laughed at that. ‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’ve never been anywhere. You wouldn’t believe the places I haven’t been to.’
‘You should go sometime,’ she said, as if it would be easy and breezy and straightforward. ‘There’s really nowhere like it. For having a good time.’ For a moment, it sounded as if she were being sarcastic. I began putting creamy mushroom mixture into the tiny pastry cases with a teaspoon, while Sarah arranged the other canapés on plates.
Harry came back at half-past seven. I knew it was exactly seven-thirty because we had been watching the clock, waiting for guests. He breezed into the room, bringing a lot of cold air with him, empty-handed.
‘Didn’t you get any?’ I asked him.
He looked down at his hands. ‘What? No, apparently not. All the other buggers had got there first. No champagne to be had, for love nor money.’ He left the room quickly.
By a quarter to eight, there were only the three of us there, standing together in the sitting room, the music blasting, ready and waiting for people who did not appear to be coming.
‘It’s not too late to cancel,’ Harry said. ‘Sarah, just text everyone. Tell them we’ve got swine flu. We’ll drink all the booze and eat Lily’s food ourselves. It’s too good for our friends anyway.’
‘Sure, OK, darling,’ she said, but did nothing. The tension in the room was palpable, and I was not sure it was all due to the missing guests.
The Christmas tree took up the whole of the front window: it was decorated in white and silver and was incredibly tasteful. I thought of the one back at our house, which was a plastic tree covered in brightly coloured tinsel, home-made decorations, and things the children had brought back from school every year. I actually preferred ours, though I could see that this one was much nicer.
There were sprigs of holly on top of all the pictures, and various decorations and streamers, all of them silver, around the place. The double doors that separated the two reception rooms were wide open.
Harry was pacing around.
‘What do you think, Lily?’ he barked, pretending to be jolly. ‘No one’s going to show up, are they? They’ve all had a better offer – do you reckon?’
‘I should think they’ll be here in a few minutes,’ I told him. ‘No one wants to be first, do they? At least this way they’re not drinking your champagne.’
‘Very true, very true. We could learn a lot from young Lily.’ He looked at my glass. I had managed to drink only a couple of sips. He looked at Sarah. Her glass was full, though I suspected it might have been her second. His own was empty.
‘Come on, girls,’ he said in a hearty voice. ‘Drink up, drink up! The night is young.’
The doorbell rang. I jumped up, smiled at Harry’s mock excitement, and went to answer it. A man and a woman were on the doorstep, both in expensive-looking coats, each holding a bottle of champagne. They were, I thought, in their forties. The man had the eager look of a little boy pretending to be older than he was, while the woman was very skinny and had hair like a helmet. I wanted to reach out and tap it, to see if it was as solid as it looked. They looked at me and then beyond me, as if I were not quite worthy of engagement.
‘Good evening,’ I said, remembering to smile. ‘Please come in. May I take your coats?’
The man laughed. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘We really are going up in the world.’
The house filled up quickly. These people were Belinda and Michael. Then heavily pregnant Constanza arrived with Seumas (I noticed Harry pointedly not greeting Seumas, and wondered why), followed by Chris and Christina. After that I stopped remembering the names and concentrated on keeping their glasses and their mouths full.
I did not speak to Sarah again for the rest of the evening. Afterwards, I wished I had. I wanted to wind back time and play it out again, to go back to the half-hour we spent in the kitchen together and to talk to her properly. I wanted to see if there was anything I could say to make her feel better about her life; because it was soon horribly clear that everything about her smiling, gracious persona that evening had been fake.
First of all, he wanted to go and stay with a mate, but it turned out there was not a single one of his mates he trusted. Rachel soon admitted that Mark and Sam were far from being the first and second beneficiaries of what she was now calling ‘housewife’s boredom control’. Every day that went by, it seemed, something new came to light. It turned out that there was no man in this town that Jack could have sworn, hand on heart, wasn’t having it away with his wife. Where were the gay blokes when you needed them?
He went back home instead. His mum had died years before, but his dad was still plodding along, living his life his own way. At Dad’s place, the day started on the dot of 5.45 a.m., with a cup of tea and a walk with the dog, and it ended at 8.45 p.m., with a mug of cocoa and a listen to the radio. It was not quite the freedom Jack had imagined: it was like being twelve again, in fact.
‘You need to get that wife of yours back,’ his dad told him one day, at midday, when they were having lunch.
‘Great idea,’ Jack said. He was trying to be sardonic. ‘After all, the world has nothing else to offer. Adultery and gossip will do me fine.’
His dad frowned over his sandwich. The electric light was shining off his bald head. Jack ran a hand through his own hair, which was, he had always thought, his best feature. It was thick and blondish, and even though he was coming up to thirty, it was not receding, not even a little bit. The other guys were losing their hair all over the place. Not that this seemed to count for much, in Rachel’s eyes.
‘Well,’ said his dad, ‘if you were being sarcastic, which I think you were, John, then I haven’t wanted to say this, but you do need to tie up the loose ends.’
Jack scowled. His dad was the only one who called him John.
‘What loose ends?’
‘Those kids.’ Dad had something that might have been a triumphant gleam in his eye, though it could have been the light. His house was overlit: there were four lights in this room and they were all on, so there were reflections on everything. None of the overhead lights had lampshades on. ‘I mean, are they actually yours?’
Jack closed his eyes. ‘Of course they’re bloody mine.’ There had been lampshades, when Mum was alive.
‘You done DNA tests?’
‘Yes.’
‘John?’
‘Yes!’
‘OK.’ His dad nodded. ‘That’s good then, because otherwise it would have been a tricky situation, wouldn’t it? Glad to hear it. Proves you weren’t trusting her though, doesn’t it? You don’t do a test if you don’t have an inkling!’
‘Dad. Shut up.’
He went over to the house and put them to bed that night, staring into their little faces as he tucked them in. They weren’t as upset about his departure as he’d expected, but that was probably because everyone’s parents split up these days. They must have been half-expecting it.
LeEtta was small and blonde, like her mum, with rosy little cheeks. She was 100 per cent Rachel, 0 per cent Jack. Impossible to call. Aidan was small and dark, not much like either of them – and this was suspect. Jack was on safer ground with Sarah-Jane, because she was him to a T. She was Daddy’s little girl all right.
As he looked at them, first LeEtta and then Aidan, he forced himself to imagine that they might have no biological connection to him whatsoever. Taking a deep breath, he took his mind to a place in which he had to look on them as strangers; someone else’s kids. To his amazement, it turned out that it did not matter even a smidge. Nothing could possibly change the fact that he was their dad. This is what adoptive parents must feel, he mused. How odd that the biological thing counts for nothing at all. He smiled broadly in the half-dark. In this case, he did not care and he never wanted to know.
For a second he thought of the Monsters of Auckland, behind bars for ever. Frank and Jane Smith were their names. The people who had left their baby son in a cot in the corner and ignored him until he died. He wanted to storm the prison they were in and string them up himself, even though he hated the idea of the death penalty and had never been a violent man. As he often did, he put the thought of them from his head. It was too sick to contemplate.
The two girls shared a room. ‘Night night, Sarah-J,’ he whispered, because LeEtta was already asleep, breathing in a deep, satisfied way that he adored, no matter what.
‘Night, Daddy,’ Sarah-Jane whispered back. ‘Dad, are you staying tonight?’
‘I’m at Gramp’s for the moment. You know that, sweetie. But I’ll always be around. Never far from you.’ Even as he said it, he wondered if that was strictly true. He was beginning to get a few ideas.
‘Love you, Daddy,’ she murmured, and he pushed the thick hair back from her forehead and kissed her.
‘Love you always,’ he told her, and his heart constricted and he had no idea what he should do for the best.
When he went back in to gaze at Aidan again, the boy had woken up, but he was pretending to be asleep. Jack went along with it, kissed his hair, pulled the sheet up over his little pyjamaed body, closed the door quietly as he went out.
Rachel was at the dining table with a glass of wine and a bottle of beer in front of her. Her lips were pressed together so tightly that they were bloodless, and looked nothing like lips at all.
‘What is it?’ he asked. ‘Don’t look so bloody stressed, Rach. I’m giving you an easy time of it, and you know it.’
‘Yeah. I do know.’
‘So?’
‘Jack,’ she said, in her high-pitched, slightly nasal voice, ‘you know something? I’m not loving this. Everyone in this whole town knowing that I’m the wicked woman doing the dirty on her poor little childhood sweetheart. I know you haven’t been any better than me. Your turn to ‘fess up. What have you been up to?’
He was surprised. She pushed the beer over to him. He took it and swigged from it deeply.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. You’ve certainly not had your needs met by me. You’ve had no interest at all. What have you been up to? And who’ve you been up to it with?’
He laughed aloud. ‘Nothing. I’ve been up to
nothing,
darl, with no one. Believe me, you’d know it if I had. I can’t keep a secret the way you can.’
She looked him in the eyes, with her piercing blue ones, then shook her head. ‘Christ, you’re weird,’ she said. ‘I do believe you’re telling the truth.’
‘Yep,’ he agreed. ‘Been looking at some travel magazines.’
She laughed at that. They both did.
‘Oh, yeah,’ she said. ‘That’d be right. Cheat on me with the
National Geographic.
That’s my Jack all right.’
After enough beer to loosen his tongue, he decided that he ought to let Rachel know that he didn’t care about the ins and outs of the latter two conceptions. He tried to explain it to her, but she jumped straight on the defensive, and did not understand at all.
‘Jack,’ she said tightly. ‘Why don’t we just let it be?’
‘Yeah, I know,’ he explained, raising his voice. ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying! That is precisely it. I’m saying, whatever happened, I don’t care. It doesn’t make a difference to me. And above all, I
do not want to know.’
‘You don’t care about the children?’
‘No, I
do
care! I care about them enough not to care whether or not . . . Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘This was what I was hoping not to have to spell out.’