What people notice, then eventually stop noticing about my aunt, is that whenever she is addressing a topic of importance, she speaks with her chin lifted and her eyes closed. At her crux, they spring open and bulge enormously as if she has been shocked awake. Ending, she sucks air into flared nostrils and holds it for a period that becomes worrying, before slowly expelling it. In the instance of Margaret Thatcher, my aunt always opened her eyes at the point of saying our lady prime minister had chosen ‘the less good side’。 It infuriated my mother, who wondered aloud on the way to church why it might be that, instead of walking straight there, Winsome was leading us around three sides of the square.
As soon as we got back, my mother carried mince pies out to the policemen standing in front of Margaret Thatcher’s house and returned with an empty plate. Winsome makes her own mincemeat, in April, and just smiled and smiled as my mother told her that the policemen had not been allowed to accept them, which was why she slid the whole lot into a rubbish bin on the way back over.
*
Before lunch I got changed into a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and black bicycle shorts and came into the dining room with bare feet – I remember because when we were finding our places Winsome told me that I had time to go upstairs and change back since Lycra clothing wasn’t really de rigueur at the Christmas table and perhaps I’d like to pop shoes on while I was up there. My mother said, ‘Yes Martha, what if Mrs Thatcher is trotting across from the less good side of the square as we speak? Then where will we be?’ She took a glass of wine from Rowland.
Watching her empty it, he said, ‘By God, Celia, it’s not bloody medicine. At least look like you’re enjoying it.’
She was enjoying it. Ingrid and I were not. At home, at parties, our mother’s drinking had always been a source of amusement to us. It was becoming less so now that we were older, and she was older, and her drinking was no longer dependent on there being interesting people in the house or any people at all. And it had never been amusing at Belgravia, where my uncle and aunt drank in a way that did not produce a change in mood, and Ingrid and I learned that bottles could be recorked and put away and glasses left on the table unfinished. That day, which ended with Winsome on her hands and knees on the floor next to our mother’s chair, dabbing wine out of the carpet, it embarrassed us. Our mother embarrassed us.
Once we were all seated and Winsome started the platters going, requisite left around the table, Rowland, at the adults’ end, asked Patrick, at the children’s end, if he was of ethnic extraction.
Oliver said, ‘Dad, you can’t ask someone that.’
Rowland said, ‘Evidently you can, since I just did,’ and looked pointedly back at Patrick who obediently replied, saying his father was born in America but he is actually Scottish, and his mother was – his voice wavered at that point – his mother was British Indian.
In that case, my uncle said, it was peculiar that Patrick spoke with a smarter accent than his own sons if neither of his parents were English. Nicholas said oh my God under his breath and was asked to leave the room but didn’t. In his critical years, my mother told us once, both Winsome and Rowland lacked follow-through when it came to their eldest son, a position that surprised Ingrid and me because she did not discipline us at all.
With forced brightness, Winsome asked Patrick his parents’ names. He said his father was called Christopher Friel and, almost inaudibly, that his mother’s name was Nina. Rowland began peeling bits of skin off the slices of turkey my aunt had arranged on his plate, feeding them one by one to the whippet sitting at his feet, which he had acquired weeks earlier and named Wagner. Unfortunately, people only got the joke if he explained it, the German pronunciation vs. the spelling. Often he had to write it down and show them. Appearing at breakfast that morning, my mother said she would have preferred to listen to the entire Ring Cycle performed by a learner violinist than the dog’s whining all night in the crate.
To Rowland’s next question of what his father did, Patrick said he worked for a European bank but he couldn’t remember which one, sorry. My uncle took a large swallow of whatever was in his glass, then said, ‘Tell us then, what befell your mother?’
The platters had finished going around but nobody had started eating because of the conversation being had from opposite ends of the table. Working hard not to cry, Patrick explained that she had drowned in a hotel pool when he was seven. Rowland said bad luck and shook out his napkin, indicating that the interview was over. Immediately, Oliver and Nicholas picked up their cutlery and began eating like a starter’s pistol had just gone off, with their heads bowed, left arm circled around their plate as if defending it from theft while they shovelled food in with the fork in their right hand. Patrick ate the same way.