Across the field into Abelhammer’s chilly transatlantic silence floats my motherin-law’s voice, clear as a cathedral belclass="underline" “Really, these Americans, absolutely no sense of tradition.”
7:35 P.M. Back at the house am swabbing dung off Emily’s Mini Boden trousers. Lilac needle cord. (Paula seems to have packed for a week in Florida, not Yorkshire. Should have done the suitcase myself.) Cheryl comes into the utility room and pulls a face. Her kids were wearing brown drip-dry polyester. “I find it terribly practical.”
2:35 A.M. A figure is stooping over our bed. Sit up, reach blindly for light switch. It’s my father-in-law.
“Katharine, there’s a Mr. Hokusai on the telephone, calling from Tokyo. Seems very anxious to talk to you. Could you kindly take it in the study?”
Donald’s voice is frighteningly calm, as if withholding all the things he could possibly say. As I stumble past him in my nightie, he raises a silvery eyebrow. Catch sight of myself in the hall mirror. Realize am not wearing nightie. Am wearing Agent Provocateur bra.
5 Boxing Day
WELL, WE MADE IT through the season of goodwill, all right. Except for Boxing Day lunch. I forget the derivation of Boxing Day, but the feeling of wanting to invite your loved ones outside one at a time and punch them in the face, does that come into it somewhere?
Anyway, it was all my fault, Richard said, and he wasn’t wrong exactly, but I plead gross provocation. Whenever we’re at my in-laws’ house, I feel as though the children have turned into hand grenades. Any second the pin may work loose and they’ll explode all over the eau-de-nil chaise longue or take out an entire cabinet of Royal Worcester egg coddlers. Rich and I scurry after them, lunging at falling ornaments, fielders in the dying light of a doomed cricket match.
I am longing to drown my sorrows with Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic on the TV, instead of shadowing Ben around the sitting room as he hauls himself up onto spindly occasional tables, chewing on lamp wires or snatching fistfuls of slivered almonds. Weigh up danger of denying baby slivered almonds, thereby risking embarrassing tantrum (“Can’t she even control her own child?”) or allowing him to go ahead and choke, thereby endangering his life and Barbara and Donald’s prairie-lush Wilton carpet.
In the afternoon, while Ben is having his nap, I lie on the bed with my laptop and compose an e-mail to another world.
To: Debra Richardson
From: Kate Reddy, Wrothly, Yorkshire
Dearest debs, how was it 4 U?
All the elements of the traditional English Xmas here: sausage rolls, carols, subtle recriminations. Motherin-law busy preparing emergency food parcel for son neglected by callous City bitch (me).
You know that I always say I want to be with my children. Well, I really want to be with my children. Some nights, if I get home too late for Emily’s bedtime, I go to the laundry basket and I Smell Their Clothes, I miss them so much. Never told anyone that before. And then when I’m with them, like I am now, their need is just so needy. It’s like having a whole love affair crammed into a long weekend — passion, kisses, bitter tears, I love you, don’t leave me, get me a drink, you like him more than me, take me to bed, you’ve got lovely hair, cuddle me, I hate you.
Drained & freaked out & need to go back to work soonest for a rest. What kind of mother is afraid of her own children?
Yrs Wrothly,
K8 xxxxxxx
I am about to hit SEND, but instead I press DELETE. There’s only so much you can confess, even to your dearest friend. Even to yourself.
3:57 A.M. Emily is sick. Excitement, I think: too much Tweenies chocolate plus large and unaccustomed helping of Mummy. Just got off the phone to Japanese rubber company and am slipping into bed next to a snoring Richard when there is a cry from the neighboring room, as though an animal were being hunted in a dream. I go in and find Em sitting up in bed, cupping her left ear. There is sick everywhere: over her nightie, her duvet — oh, God, Barbara’s duvet — her blankie, her sheep, her hippopotamus, even her hair. She looks up at me with beseeching horror; Emily hates any loss of dignity.
“I feel sick, Mummy, don’t let me be sick again,” she pleads.
I carry her across the landing to the bathroom and hold her over the toilet, arching her clear of the rim as my mother always did for me. I feel my palm cool on her forehead; feel her stomach stiffen suddenly and then relax as what’s left in there comes out. Then, when I have undressed us both, we take a silent bath together and I comb the cranberries from her hair.
After finding clean nightwear, changing the bed linen and tucking Em in, I scrape the Russian salad gunk as best I can from Barbara’s duvet cover and leave it to soak in the bath. Then I lie on the floor next to my child’s bed and estimate the losses if Abelhammer is so furious that the Salinger Foundation quits Edwin Morgan Forster. Two-hundred-million-dollar account. Heads will roll. And my head is not even highlighted. No time. Emily presented me with a drawing of myself yesterday.
“Oh, is Mummy wearing a lovely brown hat?” I exclaimed.
“No, silly, the top of your hair is brown and the bottom is yellow.”
Surprised to feel big little-girl tears start to roll down my cheeks and drip warmly into my ears.
8:51 A.M. Surface. Feel like a diver in lead boots. Emily is still asleep. Touch her forehead: much cooler. Downstairs, Barbara is tight-lipped and shooting charged glances at the kitchen clock.
“Katharine, I hope you don’t think I’m speaking out of turn, but you want to put a bit of makeup on before you come downstairs. Don’t want Richard thinking we’ve stopped making an effort, do we? They soon cotton on to that sort of thing, do men.”
I tell her I’m sorry, but I’ve been up half the night with Emily and haven’t really slept. I sense her eyes on me: that cool, appraising stare she gave when Rich first brought me home: the way you might look at a heifer in a show ring.
“Oh, I know you look very peaky at the best of times, love,” she owns cheerfully. “But a spot of rouge can work wonders. Personally, I can’t speak too highly of Helena Rubinstein’s Autumn Bonfire. Cup of tea?”
I didn’t mean to describe myself as the main breadwinner at Boxing Day lunch. It just came out that way. There was a general conversation around the table about New Year’s resolutions, and Donald — upright but wistful, like Bernard Hepton in Colditz—said perhaps Katharine could work a bit less in the coming twelve months. That would have been fine — gallant, sweet, caring even — if my sister-in-law hadn’t added with a snort, “So the kids can pick her out in an identity parade.”
Ooof. Clearly Cheryl had had one glass of red wine too many, and what was required of me was to rise above it. But after three days of enforced wifely humility, I didn’t feel able to rise above anything. And that was when I began a sentence with the words, “As the main breadwinner in our house—” A sentence I would never finish as it happens because, when I looked at the startled faces round the table, it seemed safer to let it die away like a bugle call.