I hold it together, I really do, until we get to that line in “O Little Town of Bethlehem” when I have to press both gloves to my eyes:
“Above thy deep and dreamless sleep the silent stars go by.”
4 Christmas Day
SATURDAY, 5:37 A.M. WROTHLY, YORKSHIRE. It’s still dark outside. The four of us are in bed together in a sprawling tentacular cuddle. Emily, half mad with Santa lust, is tearing off wrapping paper. Ben is playing peepo with the debris. I give Richard a packet of wind-dried reindeer, two pairs of Swedish socks (oatmeal), a five-day wine-tasting course in Burgundy, and How to Be a Domestic Goddess (joke). Barbara and Donald give me a wipable Liberty print apron and How to Be a Domestic Goddess (not joke).
Richard gives me: (1) Agent Provocateur underwear — red bra with raised black satin spots and demitasse cup over which nipples jut like helmeted medieval warriors peeking above parapet; also, a suspender/ knicker device apparently trimmed with trawlerman’s netting, and (2) Membership of National Trust.
Both fall into category of what I think of as PC presents: Please Change. Emily gives me a fantastic travel clock. Instead of an alarm, it has a message recorded by her: “Wake up, Mummy; wake up, sleepyhead!”
We give Emily a hamster (female, but to be called Jesus), a Barbie bike, a Brambly Hedge doll’s house, a remote-control robot dog and a lot of other stuff made out of plastic that she doesn’t need. Emily is thrilled with the Peacekeeper Barbie I snatched up in Stockholm Duty Free until she opens Paula’s present: Baby Wee-Wee, which I have expressly forbidden.
Risking hysteria, we try to get most of the kids’ gifts unwrapped upstairs so that my parents-in-law will not be appalled by reckless metropolitan surfeit (“Throwing your money about”) and the outrageous spoiling of the younger generation (“In my day, you counted yourself lucky to get a doll with a china head and an orange”).
Some things are harder to keep quiet. It’s difficult to pretend to grandparents, for instance, that your child is just an occasional video watcher when, during breakfast, she gives a word-perfect rendition of every song from The Little Mermaid, adding brightly that the DVD version has an extra tune. At the table, I sense another source of conflict when I remind Emily to stop playing with the salt.
“Emily, Grandpa asked you to put that down.”
“No, I didn’t,” says Donald mildly. “I told her to put it down. That’s the difference between my generation and yours, Kate: we told, you ask.”
A few minutes later, standing by the Aga stirring scrambled egg, I am suddenly aware of Barbara hovering by my side. She finds it hard to conceal her disbelief at the contents of the saucepan. “Goodness, do the children like their eggs dry?”
“Yes, this is the way I always do them.”
“Oh.”
Barbara is obsessed with the food intake of my family, whether it’s the children’s lack of vegetables or my own strange unwillingness to plow through three three-course meals a day. “You need to build your strength up, Katharine.” And no Shattock family gathering would be complete without my motherin-law pressing me into the African violet nook next to the pantry and hissing, “Richard looks thin, Katharine. Isn’t Richard looking thin?”
When Barbara says thin it immediately becomes a fat word: hefty, breathless, accusing. I shut my eyes and try to summon reserves of patience and understanding I don’t have. The woman standing before me equipped my husband with the DNA that gave him the lifelong figure of a Biro refill, and thirty-six years later she blames me. Is this fair? I rise above such slights on my wifeliness, what there is of it.
“But Richard is thin,” I protest. “Rich was skinny when we met. That’s one of the things I loved about him.”
“He was always slim,” concedes Barbara, “but now there’s nothing left of him. Cheryl said as soon as she saw him get out of the car, ‘Doesn’t Richard look run down, Barbara?’”
Cheryl is my sister-in-law. Before she married Peter, Richard’s accountant brother, Cheryl was something in the Halifax building society. Since she had the first of her three boys in 1989, Cheryl has become a member of what my friend Debra calls the Muffia — the powerful stay-at-home cabal of organized mums. Both Cheryl and Barbara treat men as though they were livestock who need careful husbandry. No Christmas in the Shattock family would be complete without Cheryl asking me if my Joseph cashmere roll-neck is from JCPenney, or if it’s really all right that Rich should be upstairs bathing the children by himself.
Peter is a lot less help with the family than Richard, but over the years I have come to see that Cheryl enjoys and even encourages her husband’s uselessness. Peter plays the valuable role in Cheryl’s life of the Cross I Have to Bear. Every martyr needs a Peter who, given time, can be trained up to not recognize his own underpants.
Things I take for granted at home in London are viewed up here as egalitarianism gone mad. “Somme,” says Richard in grim triumph, walking through the kitchen holding aloft a bulging nappy sack whose apricot scent is fighting a losing battle to subdue the stink within. (Rich has evolved a classification system for Ben’s nappies — a minor incident is a Tant Pis, an average load is a Croque Manure, while an all-out seven-wipes job is a Somme. Once, but only once, there was a Krakatoa. Fair enough, but not in a Greek airport.)
“Of course, in our day the fathers didn’t pitch in at all,” says Barbara, flinching. “You wouldn’t get Donald going near a nappy. Drive a mile to avoid one.”
“Richard’s fantastic,” I say carefully. “I couldn’t manage without him.”
Barbara takes a red onion and quarters it fiercely. “You’ve got to look after them a bit, men. Delicate flowers,” she muses, pressing the blade down till the onion cries softly to itself. “Can you give that gravy a stir for me, Katharine?” Cheryl comes in and starts defrosting cheese straws and vol-au-vent cases for tomorrow’s drinks party.
I feel so alone when Barbara and Cheryl are twittering together in the kitchen, even though I’m standing right there. I reckon this must be how it was for centuries: women doing the doing and exchanging conspiratorial glances and indulgent sighs about the men. But I never joined the Muffia; I don’t know the code, the passwords, the special handshakes. I expect a man — my man — to do women’s work, because if he doesn’t I can’t do a man’s work. And up here in Yorkshire, the pride I feel in managing, the fact that I can and do make our lives stay on track, if only just, curdles into unease. Suddenly I realize that a family needs a lot of care, a lubricant to keep it running smoothly, whereas my little family is just about bumping along and the brakes are starting to squeal.
Richard walks back into the kitchen, minus nappy, puts his arms round my waist, hoists me up onto the rail of the Aga, rests his head in the crook of my neck and starts to twiddle my hair. Just like Ben does.
“Happy, sweetheart?”
It sounds like a question, but really it’s an answer. Rich is happy here, I can tell, with the womanly bustle and the fug of baking and me not on the phone every five minutes. “He’s a real homebody is our Richard,” says Barbara proudly.