The jokey presents were a part of my disguise. I was afraid my true feelings would show up in the gifts I chose for him if I didn’t keep it light. This year I’d felt stumped. I didn’t know Grace well enough to buy her a joke-themed present. I didn’t even know what her sense of humour was like. Presumably, she had one, because Mark did. In the end I’d bought them Kitchen King and Kitchen Queen aprons, which was hardly inspired. Judging by their polite reactions, I was reasonably sure they agreed with that assessment.
God, I missed Rosie. I didn’t open her gift to me, deciding to keep it until she got back. I missed her even more when she called midmorning and Sylvia put her on speakerphone. She was all ciao this and ciao that, and we could hear Giorgio in the background saying something to make her giggle. Suddenly I felt like the only person on the entire planet who was single at Christmas.
I wasn’t the only one who was upset by Rosie’s call. After Sylvia hung up, her stiff upper lip went all wobbly. “I’m happy for her, of course,” she said. “But she’s thirty-five years old. She ought to be here with us with a pack of bouncy grandchildren.”
Richard and I both remembered our conversation in my flat when he’d come to fit the shelving unit, and we exchanged glances. See? my expression said, and he smiled.
“Do grandchildren come in packs?” Mark asked.
“I’m not sure there is a collective noun for grandchildren,” said Grace.
“There is,” said Richard, who knew most things. “It’s a commotion.”
It ought to be a lack, I thought miserably, brooding over my own childless state. A lack of grandchildren.
“Come on, love,” Richard said to his wife. “Cheer up. It’s Christmas.”
Sylvia nodded and blew her nose. “You’re right. Sorry.” She smiled at Mark and Grace. “I’m counting on you two to provide me with a commotion of grandchildren. All right?”
“Give us time, Mum,” said Mark. “We’ve only been married two minutes.”
Mark and Grace had given me a five-year diary for my gift. Five years of empty pages—I had no clue what I could fill it with.
“I hope you like your present?” Mark said to me later. “Grace chose it. I wasn’t sure at first, but then I thought you could use it to note down some of the more amusing things that happen at work. How’s Sooty, by the way?”
I smiled. “The diary was a lovely thought. And Sooty’s fine, thank you.”
“Still got all four legs?”
“At the last count, yes.”
Grace joined us, winding her arm around Mark’s waist, as per usual.
“Just catching up on whether Sooty the hamster ate his broken leg off or not,” Mark explained.
Grace pulled a face. “Oh yes,” she said. “The self-cannibalisation story that threatened to sabotage our wedding. I’m so glad you brought that up again, darling.”
She was speaking to Mark, so why did it feel as if her comment were addressed to me?
“We saw a lot of handbag dogs in Paris,” Mark told me. “They were like joeys in their pouches. Only their mamas bought their pouches at Dolce & Gabbana.”
“That’s Italian, sweetheart.”
Mark shrugged. “Okay, whatever the French equivalent is, then. Did you know there are so many pictures in the Louvre that if you spent thirty seconds in front of each of them, you’d be there for a total of thirty-five days?”
“How many pictures did you see?” asked Sylvia.
Mark laughed. “Absolutely none.”
Sylvia sighed. “It sounds so romantic. Was it romantic, Grace?”
“Of course. It’s the City of Love, isn’t it? It was perfect.”
“And what was it like at the top of the Eiffel Tower?” Sylvia asked. “I’ve always wanted to go up there.”
“We didn’t get there either,” said Mark.
“You didn’t go up the Eiffel Tower?” his mother said, aghast. “I thought that was one of the main things people went to Paris for!”
Grace shrugged, a shrug that said she’d been far too busy making blissful love with her new husband to go sightseeing.
“I was proposed to once, in Paris,” I said, desperate to move the conversation on. “On the Eiffel Tower, actually.”
Mark stared. “You weren’t. Why don’t I know about this? Mum, Dad, did you know about Beth being proposed to on the Eiffel Tower?”
“I didn’t, love,” said Sylvia. “But I certainly want to.”
Rosie knew about it—I hadn’t minded her hearing my tale of total humiliation. I wasn’t quite sure why I’d decided this was a good time to share it with everyone else, but since they were all agog—well, except Grace, who appeared to have developed a sudden fascination for her sparkly red Christmas manicure—I launched into my tale. About how my boyfriend at the time—Danny—and I had decided to climb the 674 steps to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower to avoid the queues for the lifts. How I’d begun to get dizzier and dizzier as the steps wove round and round the structure. How Danny had been so determined to propose in exactly the way he’d planned that he’d underestimated the extent of my vertigo. Just as he had got down on one knee to pop the question, I’d had an overwhelming need to lie down in the middle of all the people. Everything had been spinning round so alarmingly—it was either that or throw up.
“So what did you say when he proposed?” Mark wanted to know.
“That first time? ‘Not now, Danny, I think I’m going to be sick,’ or something like that.”
Mark shuddered. “Not very romantic. Poor guy.”
I shook my head, back there on the windswept structure with everyone looking at us. “It got worse.”
“How?”
“Well, after I’d recovered a bit, he asked me again, and I had to say no. And because it was only the first day of a four-day holiday, we had to trudge around for days on end with him sulking and barely speaking to me. It was awful.”
“But why did you have to say no, dear?” Sylvia asked.
“Because I didn’t love him.”
Richard nodded. “A sound enough reason, I’d say.”
Mark was shaking his head. “I can’t believe I don’t know about this.”
Grace looked up from her fingernail examination. “Well, we can never completely know a person, can we?” she said. “You don’t know everything there is to know about Beth, just as you don’t know everything there is to know about me.”
That hooked him back and had him gazing down into her eyes. “Oh?” he said, stroking a line down her neck with his forefinger. “And what, exactly, is it I don’t know about you?”
Grace grinned wickedly. “That’s for you to find out, isn’t it?”
There was a moment of animal intensity. Then Richard cleared his throat, and Sylvia shuffled off towards the kitchen talking about carrots.
I sprang to my feet and followed her, saying, “Need any help with the brussels sprouts, Sylvia?”
6
Sylvia’s cooking was a triumph. Sylvia’s cooking was always a triumph. Crispy roast potatoes. Succulent turkey. Perfectly cooked vegetables. A delicious dessert. Yet the actual meal—the event of the meal—was a bit off. Or maybe it was just me who thought the conversation and laughter felt forced, as if everyone were putting on a great big act of bonhomie. It felt like the end of an era—as if Christmas would never be the same again. And after we’d finished eating and Grace and I were in the kitchen clearing up, I received incontrovertible proof of just that.