Fresh tears well from Binny’s eyes and swamp her cheeks, her chin, her hair. It is so big, this feeling, it is hard to believe she is alone with it. Are there moments when those people we remember are plunged simultaneously and without warning into the same ocean of memory? Is it possible that Oliver, for instance, is at this very moment recalling the curve of Binny’s thigh and picking up his guitar and singing from a high-up window while the Christmas lights blink over a housing estate? She cries and stops and wipes her eyes, and then she cries some more.
‘Would you like a tissue?’ The young woman magics one from her pocket.
Binny blows her nose with a honk. ‘This is not something I do. I can take anything. I mean, look at me. I’m a rock. I never cry.’
‘You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. Do you want a go?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You can if you like.’ The young woman offers the tiny silver cup and the yellow duster. ‘Try not to touch the surface. Then you won’t get finger marks and smudges. You want to do it properly.’
Binny wipes her hands carefully on her coat. She receives the small, cold christening cup like a gift in the cradle of her palm, her whole body tensed. It touches the cuts on her hands, but it is so light they do not hurt. If anything, it soothes them.
‘That’s it,’ says the young woman. She tucks the duster into Binny’s right hand and guides it, as if Binny is blind, to the pot of cream. ‘Gently now,’ she says.
Binny scoops up a tiny spot of polish. She dabs it over the cup. She takes the second cloth, the polishing one, and she rubs with tiny circular movements all over, up and down, left and right, just as the young woman showed her. She thinks of nothing except the silver cup, how it was covered in white and how, as she polishes, the silver returns. She balances it between her fingertips, holding only the base and the rim. She mustn’t smudge.
‘You have to accept it, don’t you?’ says the young woman. ‘He’s gone.’
Binny continues to wipe the duster in the smallest concentric circles. Briefly she closes her eyes and breathes in the lemon smell.
A memory comes back. It is so clear, she sees it. It is herself as a girl. It is Bronnley soap on a rope. Of course. Sherbet-yellow and shaped like a small, dimpled balloon. She is pulling it out of her stocking, tugging off the paper, and everything, everything smells of lemon, even the satsuma and walnut hidden at the bottom. The whole of Christmas will smell of it. ‘What do you have, darling?’ Her parents laugh as if they have never seen such a thing as soap on a rope. It is that simple. And every year it is the same. The soap, the smell.
When she opens her eyes, the young woman is watching. Binny holds the cup very still.
‘I am sorry you lost your baby,’ she says.
‘It’s nice to talk about him. People don’t want to see me upset so they don’t mention him.’
‘Did he have a name?’
‘I called him Gabriel.’ She points to the engraved writing. ‘Because of the time of year.’
‘You must hate Christmas.’
‘No. I like it.’
Binny pokes a corner of the first duster into the pot of cream, just as the young woman showed her, and rubs again. She takes the second duster and begins to polish.
‘My partner left me,’ she says at last.
Her words echo in the silence. The young woman nods. And because she does not reply, because she does not fight Binny’s words, because she does not soften or dilute them with a sentence of her own, they fall for the first time. They land. Binny feels their weight, her loss, but the world does not stop or shudder. Yes, she is still standing. She is still breathing.
And so Binny dares to think of those other people she has lost. No matter how much she rails, some of them are gone for ever. The young woman is right. Some things we can have only briefly. So why, then, do we behave as if everything we have connected with, everything we have blessed with our loving, should be ours for keeps? It is enough to have tiptoed to that space which is beyond the skin, beyond our nerve endings, and to have glimpsed that which beforehand we could not even imagine.
‘I don’t promise cleaning is the answer to everything.’ Saying this makes the young woman laugh. ‘You could try something else. Chop wood. Or make soup. Sometimes you just need to do something ordinary. Something you don’t need to think about, you just do. And there are times, too, when it’s nice to show someone what you’ve done. When it’s nice to hear them say, Yes, that’s very good. I like that.’
How has she become so wise, this unassuming young woman?
So Binny will make a start on the kitchen. She will get a tree for the children to hang with their homemade decorations. She will buy cards and write messages. It’s still a few days until Christmas; it’s not too late. She will find little gifts, rubbish really – soap on a roap, a satsuma, to wrap and stuff in those woollen slipper socks hanging on the mantelpiece. She will join the ritual of acknowledging what she has loved, either with an email or a sparkling snow scene. She will remind the people who are left that they mean something to her, even after all these years, even after all this separation. This is what her Christmas will be.
‘Gently, gently,’ smiles the young woman. ‘Look, you’ve missed that tiny bit beneath the handle.’
Time passes without seeming to do so. Binny stays beside the woman she doesn’t know and polishes her christening cup. There is much to do, much to prepare, much to mend, but it cannot be done in a day and sometimes it is better to do one small thing. She will stay a while longer.
The angel watches with her tinsel wings. Binny wipes and she wipes and she wipes.
The Marriage Manual
Alan and Alice. A textbook marriage. Other couples had come and gone. Divorce, remarriage, several early bereavements, stepchildren, singles’ parties, speed-dating (‘At our age?’ said Alice. ‘All I want is a camomile tea.’), but here they were, Alan and Alice, still as one after twenty-three years. The stories they shared had become small legends. ‘Do you remember the time …?’ Alan would say, and Alice would listen, wide-eyed, smiling, chipping in with a detail or two when he forgot. Their stories were like other people’s photograph albums or the family silver, kept in a glass cupboard and taken out for polishing every now and then. They reminded Alan and Alice who they were. And sometimes, yes, as she listened to a neighbour complain about a difficult teenager, or another confessing that she’d had it with her marriage, Alice thought of her home, her husband, her son, and she felt (though she would never admit it) a little smug, a little blessed.
Alan hung his coat in the coat cupboard and placed his shoes on the rack. Beyond the hall, soft green light pooled from the garden into the conservatory. The Christmas tree twinkled blue, then red, then a joyful combination of both. He reached for the day’s post.
No bills, not on Christmas Eve, just a neat pile of opened cards on the hall table. He picked one up, a photographic image of a romantic snow scene. It was the young woman in the red coat again; she seemed to be everywhere. Alan didn’t know what it was for, the advert – he couldn’t see the connection between the girl with her red coat and the woodland animals that seemed to be following her, and surely she’d be cold in all that snow, but it made him feel festive, especially with the weather so grey and ordinary. He liked the song too that went with the advert on the television. It was catchy.
Alan took a glance at the enormous writing inside the card.
Dear Alice & Alan, Happy Winter Celebration, It’s been years!!! Hope you’re still alive! Love, as always, Binny, Coco & Luke
‘If we don’t do it tonight, mister, we never will.’
‘Alice?’ Alan swung round to find his wife watching him from the conservatory door. She was wearing her mule house-slippers and her slimming slacks, with her cardigan hooked over her shoulders like a pink cape. Her cheeks were flushed and she had straightened her hair so that it hung on either side of her ears like a pressed brown napkin.
‘So are you up
for it?’ she said.
‘Are we doing something?’
Alice laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.’
Alan hoped that if he remained very still and didn’t incriminate himself in any way, she would say something that would give him a clue as to what she was talking about.
‘Every morning you promise we’ll do it and every night you fall asleep. I don’t think you’ve even looked down there.’ Alice whipped from her pocket a pair of latex gloves and a ball of polypropylene twine. ‘Will’s in his room. So come on, Alan. This is your big moment.’
It turned out Alice was referring to Will’s Christmas present, ordered in kit form on the internet and stored in a box in the cupboard beneath the stairs. Alan hadn’t looked; she was right. He had been putting the job off because it was so easy there would be no fun in it. Assembling a racing bike struck Alan as beneath him, even though it was for their son. Alan would have preferred to make something more challenging on Christmas Eve. An ornamental pond, for instance. He very much wanted to make one of those. But you could not give your twelve-year-old son an ornamental pond for Christmas.
Alice began dragging the box across the hall towards the conservatory. It was far bigger than Alan had expected and clearly also heavier. Her face was on fire with the effort. ‘Is it me or is it boiling in here?’ she asked, ramming the box into the doorway. ‘Allow me,’ said Alan. As he slid and shuffled the box into the centre of the conservatory, it gave a tinkly sound like a wind-chime, as if there were tiny pieces inside.
‘Maybe something’s broken,’ Alice said.
‘Oh I don’t think so.’ But even as Alan replied, his heart gave a leap. If something was broken it would need fixing. He parked the box firmly in the centre of the conservatory.
‘This is exciting,’ said Alice. ‘We’ve never done anything like this together, have we, Alan?’ And maybe she was imagining the story that would follow – the night we built a bike – because she was beginning to smile.
They studied the box that stood between them. Strange. Alan would have expected a picture, or at the very least a label, and this had neither. It was just a very big and plain brown box, exactly the same as any other, swaddled in strips of brown tape. He used his retractable penknife to carve a small slit in one of the flaps. He lifted it carefully and peered inside.
Every year it seemed harder to find the right Christmas present for Will. When he was small there had been toy animals – a farm set one year, a zoo set another. There had been little plastic knights on horses, followed by soldiers. There had been tractors and aeroplanes, followed by kits to make aeroplanes. But on Christmas morning, Alan would gaze at the pile of presents beneath the tree, decorated by Alice with ribbon in loops and silver bows – she had done a course in gift-wrapping – and instead of feeling excited, he would feel squashed, almost suffocated. Deep down, he knew that no matter what they gave Will, it would be the same, because it was the same every year. Will would open all those professionally gift-wrapped toys one by one, patiently, solemnly peeling off each strip of Sellotape, and he would turn the new toy over and over in his hands, murmur a polite thank-you, and then what would they find him playing with? The ribbon.
‘Well?’ said Alice, leaning over Alan’s shoulder. ‘What can you see in the box?’
A soup of small metallic pieces, that was what. Alan had assumed it would just be a case of assembling two alloy wheels. Clearly this was a job for the hand tools. And even though the hall clock was already chiming eight, he felt a tingle of excitement.
‘Stand back, Alice,’ he said.
Alan shunted the box to its side and tipped its contents over the floor. ‘Mind!’ she warned, but it was already too late. Hundreds of pieces came crashing and spilling and tumbling forth like water from a spring. Nuts and bolts and washers and screws, caps and catches and metal plates, as well as piping, tubing, brackets and clamps, all gushing and skittering across the conservatory floor towards the three-piece suite and the Christmas tree.
‘Blimey,’ said Alan.
‘Goodness,’ said Alice. She dropped to her knees. The open box was almost twice her size. ‘Is it normally like this? Where are the wheels?’
‘I don’t know, Alice. I can’t even see a chain.’
‘Are we expected to make all those things ourselves?’
Alan scratched his head. ‘I guess,’ he said. ‘I guess.’
‘The instructions must be in the box.’ Alice crawled towards it. Alan went to fetch his toolset from the kitchen.
Alan was what Alice affectionately called a DIY nut. He had begun with the basics when they first moved in – putting up a picture hook, a set of shelves, followed by small repair jobs, and over the years he had taught himself bigger things. How to replace internal doors, insulate the roof, build radiator covers and plumb in a simple basin. Theirs was the first house along the avenue to have security lamps (installed by Alan), as well as green-backlit shrubbery with ten different mood settings (also Alan’s work). He had fitted the downstairs bathroom with one of those showtime mirrors – though there had been a minor incident with the wiring and Alice still preferred the one upstairs – and once he had surprised her with a brand-new kitchen. Last summer, instead of going on holiday, Alan had built the Edwardian-style conservatory. It had been the best summer Alan could remember. Every day, instead of dressing in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt, he had put on his hi-vis jacket and a hard hat. The conservatory was his number-one achievement. There were moments during its construction when he had wanted to give up, when the job had seemed too big and he knew he was out of his depth, but Alan had worked it out, every detail. (True, he had had to make some adjustments of his own, because these kits were never perfect.) Sometimes he liked to inspect the white plastic-coated frame, the polycarbonate roof panels, the smooth silicone joins, not because there was anything wrong, but just because he loved to be reminded that he had fitted them all by himself.
When he returned to the conservatory, it was silent. ‘Alice?’ he called, but there was no sign of her, only the box and all those tiny pieces; perhaps she’d decided to leave the kit to him. Alan rolled up his sleeves and picked up a screwdriver and found himself humming the catchy Christmas song that went with that advert …
‘Nice singing, Alan.’
He froze. ‘Alice?’ She was not in the room. No one was.
‘I can’t seem to find the instructions,’ said the box, quite high-pitched.
Alice reversed, mule-heels first, from its opening. She crunched with her hands and knees over several nuts and bolts and fished out a small item that looked like a stub axle. Alan rushed towards her.
‘Let me do this,’ he said, more enthusiastically than he intended, taking up a central sitting position on the floor. ‘Why don’t you find me things?’
‘I thought I was going to help this time? I thought we were building this together?’
‘But you’re so good at finding things. You can start with the spanner.’
Alice opened the toolbox. She passed him his spanner.
‘Just as well I know what I’m doing. By the time I was Will’s age, I could dismantle and rebuild my bicycle at the drop of a hat. I’ll have the wrench now.’
‘Wrench. Voilà.’
‘That’s another ring spanner.’
‘Is it?’
‘It is.’
‘They all look the same, Alan.’
He laughed indulgently. He knew his tools like old friends. Alan outlined the differences between an open-ended spanner, a ring spanner and an adjustable one, including their different functions and sizes, and Alice nipped her hand to her mouth to dispose of a small yawn. Whilst he matched three bolts with three nuts, Alice crawled back inside the box to have another look for the instructions.
It was a disappointment that Alan couldn’t get Will interested in DIY. It was what fathers and sons did. They built things, and once they’d finished, they drove to specialist shops and looked at new tools with which
to build the same things all over again, only slightly better. Alan had tried with Will. ‘Shall we make a set of shelves, son? How about I show you how to use the electric drill?’ But Will stared back at him with his unsettling deep-brown eyes and his long hair tucked behind his ears and those tiny shoulders like a bunch of twigs. There was something so impenetrable about him. ‘For God’s sake,’ Alan would snap. ‘Why can’t you get a haircut?’
‘Aha!’ cried Alice from inside the box. ‘I’ve found the instructions. They were tucked inside the flap.’
Alan had expected a leaflet, but what she had found was a black manual. It looked more like a hymn book than a set of instructions for a kit.
‘I’d better take a look,’ he said. Alice was already flicking through the pages, her face bunched into a frown.
‘It doesn’t seem to be in English, Alan. It doesn’t even have pictures.’ She pushed the book towards him.
She was right. What language was this? It was page upon page of curlicues and swirls. It looked more like musical notes than letters, wearing pointed hats and shoes.
‘So how are we supposed to make a bicycle if we have no idea what to do?’ she asked. She was almost on the verge of tears. ‘Why did you leave this so late, Alan?’
There was nothing for it but to be practical. Use his common sense. He rooted through the nuts and bolts, efficiently pairing them together.
Alice knelt at his side, her hands twitching in her lap. ‘Are you sure I can’t do anything?’
‘I think I should just get us started. Ratchet, please.’
‘You said we would do this together. What is a ratchet?’
‘This is a ratchet, Alice. Do I have to do everything?’
‘No, Alan. You could let me help. Like we agreed …’
‘Once I’ve got the skeleton of the thing, that’s when you can do all the detailed work. I mean, you’re marvellous at the detail, Alice. Look at the soft furnishings. Detail is where you come into your own.’