He said, ‘I don’t like it.’
I asked him why he did it then.
‘So I don’t sink.’ He looked at me nervously, as if I might laugh at him. ‘My mum wouldn’t be able to find me.’
I told him I knew what that felt like, not wanting to sink. He held up the piece of flannel and asked me if I needed it; he would give it to me.
‘I know you would but it’s okay. Thank you. It’s your lovely thing.’
With the flannel still in his hand, he reached up gently, tugged the end of my hair until my face was very close to his and whispered, ‘I actually have two the same.’ If I changed my mind, I could tell him. He rolled onto his side and went to sleep with the fingers of his other hand curled around my thumb.
5
I HAD A headache for two weeks, and possibly a dry mouth. I still had the headache on Christmas Eve and told my mother that I didn’t feel well enough to stay the night at Belgravia and I did not want to go the next day either.
The four of us were in the kitchen. We were already late, which was why my father was spreading pages of the Times Literary Supplement on the floor so he could polish his shoes, not the ones he was going to wear – all of his shoes – and my mother had just decided to have a bath, which was loudly filling next door. She was wearing a worn silk kimono that kept undoing itself. Each time, Ingrid, who was standing at the table wrapping presents quickly and badly, stopped and put her hands over her eyes, silently screaming like she had just been blinded in a factory explosion. I wasn’t doing anything except sitting on a stepladder in the corner watching them all.
My mother went into the bathroom and came back with a laundry basket. I watched as she began packing the presents into it and vaguely heard her say that if we only went to Belgravia when we felt like it, she would have been there a total of once. I was distracted by the laundry basket because it was the one my father used when he moved to the Hotel Olympia.
I glanced at him, wiping brown polish off a black shoe with kitchen roll. He had started to leave the house so rarely it was strange to see him making any kind of preparation to go out. Even when my mother told him to, or Ingrid begged him to drive her somewhere, he wouldn’t. His reasons for refusing – that he was expecting a call from an editor, that he’d forgotten where he’d put his licence, a thousand variations on recorded mail – my mother found so specious, it was obvious he was trying to get out of helping her with us.
She said Martha. I blinked back at her. ‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘I can just stay home by myself.’
‘Oh we’d all love to stay home by ourselves.’ She said she’d been denied that pleasure for months, with the briefest look at my father, and I wondered how it hadn’t occurred to me until just then that since the night on the balcony, he had been making sure I was never, ever alone.
He looked extremely tired. My mother uncorked a bottle of wine and took it into the bathroom with her, flipping on the radio as she passed it.
*
Hours later, we got into the car and drove to Belgravia, the laundry basket full of presents on Ingrid’s lap and my head on her shoulder. Winsome was the only one who had waited up for us. She was too furious to acknowledge my mother and only managed a crisp nod to my father. She kissed me and Ingrid, then told me that she’d made up a little bed on the sofa in the snug, which was what my cousins were required to call the TV room on the basement level, near the kitchen. She said, ‘Your father rang up this morning and said you’ve been poorly and wouldn’t want to bunk in with the others,’ and now she’d seen me, I did look quite drawn.
I didn’t come out in the morning. Nobody tried to make me. Ingrid brought me breakfast even though she knew I wouldn’t eat it. She said I had to drink the tea.
I had been awake for hours, not feeling the sense of dread that seemed to precede consciousness or the consuming sadness that had accompanied it for so many months. In the dark, lying still, waiting for it, I had wondered if it was waking up in a different room.
After Ingrid went out I sat up and listened to the sound of voices from the kitchen and radio carols and my cousins thundering up the stairs and back down, Rowland’s vibrato whistling as he passed the door and instead of terror, I felt reassured by the noise, even the sharp, isolated sounds of doors being closed too hard overhead and Wagner’s demented barking. I wondered if I was better. I drank the tea.
Towards nine, the noise concentrated itself in the foyer, the shouting peaked and then the house fell into almost perfect silence. The only other person who hadn’t gone to church, I knew when I heard the radio switch over from carols to a man’s voice doing some sort of dramatic reading, was my father.