I said no. ‘I don’t think so. Sorry.’
My mother sighed again. ‘Well I can’t make you. But please think about whether you need to make yourself more miserable than you already are. Spending Christmas alone, Martha, I’m not sure. It will be very bleak. And if I can say so, I would just like to see you myself.’
As soon as we hung up, I went for a walk. The thought of the towpath, doing it again, exhausted me and I went another way towards town.
*
Broad Street was crowded. I felt dazed by the concentration of people with plastic bags, coming in and out of shops, buying shoes and mobile phones and things from Accessorize. Babies cried in their prams, hungry and overheated. Children lagged behind their parents or strained ahead on safety reins.
Mothers were shopping with teenage daughters who walked with their heads down, texting. A girl stormed out of River Island, letting the door spring back on her mother who was trying to keep up.
The girl didn’t ask to be born, her mother could just fuck off. She got out her phone and the mother, who was beside her then, said that was it, Bethany. She’d had a gutful. They walked off in opposite directions. I was in the mother’s way and she stopped in front of me, close enough that I could see her earrings were tiny candy canes. For a second we were face to face, looking directly into each other’s eyes, but I do not think she saw me. I went to step aside but she wheeled around and began chasing after her daughter, holding her purse above her head and waving it like a white flag.
I walked on slowly, staring at the faces of people coming towards me, jostling past on both sides, wondering if any of them had burned their own houses down and if they had, how long it was before they could come out and walk around and want things from Accessorize.
I went into a Costa and bought a muffin. I was not hungry and, back outside, I tried to give it to a homeless man sitting under a cashpoint. He asked me what flavour it was and when I told him he said that he didn’t like raisins.
I kept walking to the covered market. Standing outside a sweet shop, I called my mother. There was a child sitting at a high table in the window with his grandmother. He was eating ice cream. Even though he was holding it with mittened hands, and still wearing his parka and woolly hat, his lips were violet.
She picked up and asked me if everything was okay.
‘If I come tomorrow, will you not drink?’
There was no pause. She said, ‘Martha. You asked me to stop. The day you called me from the train.’
‘I know.’
‘Well I stopped,’ my mother said. ‘I haven’t had anything to drink since then. After you hung up, I tipped it all down the sink. In the language of group –’ she said the word as though it had a capital ‘– it has been two hundred and eighteen days since my last drink.’
We had never – Ingrid, my father, Winsome, Hamish or Patrick – none of us had ever asked her to stop. Out of loyalty, or sensing the futility, we had never even discussed doing so among ourselves.
I had not noticed I was smiling at the boy with the violet lips. He stuck his tongue out at me.
My mother said, ‘Are you laughing?’
I said no. ‘I mean, yes. But not about you. Something I’ve just seen.’ I said it’s good. ‘That’s good.’
*
It was mid-afternoon, already beginning to get dark, when I arrived at Belgravia. I had woken up not intending to go and spent the morning on the sofa watching television with the lights off, trying to convince myself that I did not feel guilty about disappointing my mother, that the sick feeling and tightness in my forehead was the first symptom of a migraine, and that I had not sunk so far into despair that by the time Mary Berry’s Absolute Christmas Favourites came on at noon I wondered if I would stop breathing.
Winsome opened the door and looked ecstatic to see me, her unshowered niece who was wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants under her coat and holding a hostess present she had purchased at motorway services. She fussed excessively over my coat and expressed too much gratitude for the present, then ushered me into the formal living room.
I had not come with the expectation of feeling better. I had come because I did not think I could feel worse but when I entered the room I felt an instant and perverse nostalgia for those hours of cloistered misery at the Executive Home. Seeing Rowland and my mother and father sitting in the overwhelmingly empty-looking room, each opening a very small present, I felt indescribably worse. I had done this. I was the reason Ingrid and my cousins had chosen to be elsewhere. The room hummed with their absence. There was a separate undercurrent of sadness that was so palpable, a stranger coming in would have inferred a recent bereavement. It was Patrick’s not being there. I had accomplished that too. And like my aunt, my parents and my uncle were absolutely thrilled to see me.