‘It’ll be fine,’ I told her. The smile she flashed me wasn’t very convincing.
‘C’mon. They liked that accountant bloke you dated earlier this year. And to be honest, Treen, you’ve been single so long I think you could probably bring home anyone who wasn’t Attila the Hun right now and they’d be delighted.’
‘Well, that theory is about to be tested.’
We pulled up before I could say any more and I checked my eyes, which were still pea-sized from the amount of crying I’d done, and climbed out of the car. My mother burst out of the front door and ran down the path, like a sprinter off the starting blocks. She threw her arms around me, holding me so tightly I could feel her heart thumping.
‘Look at you!’ she exclaimed, holding me at arms’ length before pulling me in again. She pushed a lock of hair from my face and turned to my father, who stood on the step, his arms crossed, beaming. ‘How wonderful you look! Bernard! See how grand she looks! Oh, we’ve missed you so much! Have you lost weight? You look like you’ve lost weight. You look tired. You need to eat something. Come indoors. I’ll bet they didn’t give you breakfast on that plane. I’ve heard it’s all powdered egg anyhow.’
She hugged Thom, and before my father could step forward, she grabbed my bags and marched back up the path, beckoning us all to follow.
‘Hello, sweetheart,’ said Dad, softly, and I stepped into his arms. As they closed around me, I finally allowed myself to exhale.
Granddad hadn’t made it as far as the step. He had had another small stroke, Mum whispered, and now had trouble standing up or walking, so spent most of his daylight hours in the upright chair in the living room. (‘We didn’t want to worry you.’) He was dressed smartly in a shirt and pullover in honour of the occasion and smiled lopsidedly when I walked in. He held up a shaking hand and I hugged him, noting with some distant part of me how much smaller he seemed.
But, then, everything seemed smaller. My parents’ house, with its twenty-year-old wallpaper, its artwork chosen less for aesthetic reasons than because it had been given by someone nice or covered certain dents in the wall, its sagging three-piece suite, its tiny dining area, where the chairs hit the wall if you pushed them back too far, and a ceiling light that started only a few inches above my father’s head. I found myself comparing it distantly to the grand apartment with its acres of polished floors, its huge, ornate ceilings, the clamorous sweep of Manhattan outside our door. I had thought I might feel comforted at being home.
Instead I felt untethered, as if suddenly it occurred to me that, at the moment, I belonged in neither place.
We ate a light supper of roast beef, potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and trifle, just a little something Mum had ‘knocked together’ before tomorrow’s main event. Dad was keeping the turkey in the shed as it wouldn’t fit in the fridge and went out to check every half an hour that it hadn’t fallen into the clutches of Houdini, next door’s cat. Mum gave us a rundown on the various tragedies that had befallen our neighbours: ‘Well, of course, that was before Andrew’s shingles. He showed me his stomach – put me quite off my Weetabix – and I’ve told Dymphna she needs to put those feet up before the baby’s born. Honestly, her varicose veins are like a B-road map of the Chilterns. Did I tell you Mrs Kemp’s father died? He’s the one did four years for armed robbery before they discovered it had been that bloke from the post office who had the same hair plugs.’ Mum rattled on.
It was only when she was clearing the plates that Dad leant over to me and said, ‘Would you believe she’s nervous?’
‘Nervous of what?’
‘You. All your achievements. She was half afraid you wouldn’t want to come back here. That you’d spend Christmas with your fella and head straight back to New York.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. She thought you might have outgrown us. I told her she was being daft. Don’t take that the wrong way, love. She’s bloody proud of you. She prints out all your pictures and puts them in a scrapbook and bores the neighbours rigid showing them off. To be honest, she bores me rigid, and I’m related to you.’ He grinned and squeezed my shoulder.
I felt briefly ashamed at how much time I’d intended spending at Sam’s. I’d planned to leave Mum to handle all the Christmas stuff, my family and Granddad, like I always did.
I left Treena and Thom with Dad and took the rest of the plates through to the kitchen where Mum and I washed up in companionable silence for a while. She turned to me. ‘You do look tired, love. Have you the jetlag?’
‘A bit.’
‘You sit down with the others. I’ll take care of this.’
I forced my shoulders back. ‘No, Mum. I haven’t seen you for months. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on? How’s your night school? And what’s the doctor saying about Granddad?’
The evening stretched and the television burbled in the corner of the room and the temperature rose until we were all semi-comatose and cradling our bellies, like someone heavily pregnant, in the way one did after one of my mother’s light suppers. The thought that we would do this again tomorrow made my stomach turn gently in protest. Granddad dozed in the chair and we left him there while we went to midnight mass. I stood in the church surrounded by people whom I had known since I was small, nudging and smiling at me, and I sang the carols I remembered and mouthed the ones I didn’t and tried not to think about what Sam was doing at that exact moment, as I did approximately 118 times a day. Occasionally Treena would catch my eye from along the pew and give me a small, encouraging smile and I gave one back, as if to say, I’m fine, all good, even though I wasn’t and nothing was. It was a relief to peel off to the box room when we got back. Perhaps it was because I was in my childhood home, or I was exhausted from three days of high emotion, but I slept soundly for the first time since I had arrived in England.
I was dimly aware of Treena being woken at five a.m. and some excited thudding, then Dad yelling at Thom that it was still the middle of the ruddy night and if he didn’t go back to bed he would tell Father Ruddy Christmas to come and take all the ruddy presents back again. The next time I woke, Mum was putting a mug of tea on my bedside table and telling me that if I could get dressed we were about to start opening the presents. It was a quarter past eleven.
I picked up the little clock, squinted, and shook it.
‘You needed it,’ she said, stroked my head, then went off to see to the sprouts.
I descended twenty minutes later in the comedy reindeer jumper with the illuminated nose I had bought in Macy’s because I knew Thom would enjoy it. Everyone else was already down, dressed and breakfasted. I kissed them all and wished them a happy Christmas, turned my reindeer nose on and off, then distributed my own gifts, all the while trying not to think of the man who should have been the recipient of a cashmere sweater and a really soft checked flannel shirt, which were languishing at the bottom of my case.
I wouldn’t think about him today, I told myself firmly. Time with my family was precious and I wouldn’t ruin it by feeling sad.
My gifts went down a treat, apparently given an extra layer of desirability by having come from New York, even if I was fairly sure you could have got pretty much the same things from Argos. ‘All the way from New York!’ Mum would say in awe, after every item was unwrapped, until Treena rolled her eyes and Thom started mimicking her. Of course, the gift that went down best was the cheapest: a plastic snow globe I had bought at a tourist stall in Times Square. I was pretty sure it would be leaking quietly into Thom’s chest of drawers before the week was out.