‘You still going on about that?’ said Buffy. ‘Your poor old dad.’ He turned to Celeste. ‘It’s a relief, really. My darling girl. I knew I loved you, but this is better.’
‘Why?’ asked Celeste.
‘Because it need never end. In fact, it’s just starting. One can divorce a wife, but one can never divorce a child.’
‘No,’ said Jacquetta, ‘but you can hardly ever see them.’
‘Whose fault was that?’ he bellowed, twisting round. ‘Every Saturday you kept saying they had to go to the dentist, they had to buy clothes for school, every Saturday you were suddenly this diligent mother –’
‘Children!’ Popsi, put up her hand. ‘Water under the bridge, dears.’
Tobias said: ‘It’s all Mum’s fault. We wanted to come and see you.’
‘And our stick insects,’ said Bruno.
Buffy gazed up at him. ‘You remember them?’
Popsi said: ‘Quentin always spoke fondly of you.’
Quentin nodded. ‘When I was at St Martins I painted an entire “Saint Sebastian Pierced with Arrows” while you were reading Rogue Herries on the radio. I said to my friend, that’s my father. Your voice was very comforting when I was doing the bloody bits – you know, the punctured flesh. I’ll show you the painting one day. It’s in my flat.’
‘I banged on the window once, but you didn’t hear me,’ said Buffy.
‘At the flat?’
Buffy shook his head. ‘At Harrods.’
Popsi put her arm around her son, spilling glitter onto his shoulder. The lurex top slipped lower. ‘Now we’ve broken the ice we can all be friends. Come and have a meal with Quentin. He’s a tip-top cook.’ She turned to Celeste. ‘Your half-brother! My head’s reeling.’
Everyone was quiet, trying to work it out. Madeira on top of sherry didn’t help. Was India an actual relative? No, but she was about the same age. Nyange was, though. She was a half-sister. She sat in the window seat. She had stuck a sprig of holly in her braids, twining it amongst the shells and coloured threads. She looked as startling and exotic as a votive goddess.
‘Tobias and Bruno,’ said Buffy, ‘they’re your half-brothers.’
‘Maxine isn’t,’ said Popsi. ‘I had her with Terry. Didn’t I?’
Celeste had sorted it all out some time before, when she had first discovered the truth. This lot were experts, but it was still taking them a moment or two. It was like watching a group of crossword-puzzle champions tackling a really difficult one, one of those big-prize ones with cryptic clues.
Suddenly she felt overcome with affection for them all. How her moods see-sawed today! Buffy was right. In a sense, of course, she had lied to them too, or at least concealed the truth, and one always feels responsible towards people one has put at a disadvantage.
Penny, the sharpest of the three, was looking at her. ‘All those questions about Buffy, after you’d accidentally-on-purpose bumped into me, you wily girl . . .’
‘Oh, ho, the penny’s dropped,’ said Buffy.
‘. . . I sort of wondered why you were so interested.’
‘So did I,’ said Buffy. ‘Poor foolish me, I thought you were jealous.’
It wasn’t totally dissimilar to jealousy, was it? The same hot, overpowering hunger for every detail, a similar pain?
Penny was gazing at her, her head tilted. ‘You were working out if I could be your mother.’
‘And me!’ said Popsi. ‘Wish I was, you’re a real poppet. And I thought you were only interested in telephones.’
‘The man never came,’ said Celeste.
‘Oh well – win some, lose some.’
Jacquetta was cleaning her spectacles with the hem of her shawl. She put them back on, and gazed at Celeste. ‘I finished the painting yesterday. I called it The Lost Child. I must have had some sort of premonition. Subconsciously, of course. You have his eyebrows, that’s what I noticed.’
‘I noticed them too,’ said Penny. ‘Buffy’s thick black eyebrows. I remember thinking you ought to pluck them.’
Buffy weakly raised his glass. Celeste refilled it. He looked at Lorna, who sat beside the fire in her darned jumper, woolly skirt and bright red tights. She wore striped socks too, but today they matched. He said: ‘This is our child. It’s only just sinking in. All last night, after you’d tenderly tucked me in here, under my simple blanket, all last night I lay awake, gazing at the embers of what might-have-been. And yet marvelling that here she is. I didn’t sleep a wink.’
In fact both Lorna and Celeste, upstairs in the bedrooms, hadn’t been able to sleep a wink themselves. They had been kept awake by the stentorious snores downstairs in the living room. But they didn’t like to break the mood.
Lorna looked at her daughter, who sat on the floor next to Buffy’s prone body. She herself didn’t feel like a mother; not yet. There hadn’t been time. It was something she would have to learn from a standing start, like a Berlitz crash course in some foreign language. But maybe neither of them wanted this, by now; maybe it was no longer appropriate. They had missed the mothering years, and were starting out as grown-ups together. Already Celeste felt familiar to her – lovable, even – but they had a long way to go. Oh, it was too complicated to think about, with all these people here, and Penny was talking.
Penny was saying, to Celeste: ‘What I don’t understand, sweetie, is why didn’t you just ask Buffy? Why didn’t you just ask him how many children he had?’
‘Because of the letter,’ said Celeste.
‘What did the letter say?’
Celeste paused. Everyone was looking at her – even Jacquetta, who sat huddled on the floor, swathed in a shawl, nursing her tea. I’m an actor’s daughter, Celeste realized. For twenty-three years I thought my father repaired washing machines. For twenty-three years – oh, I must turn every event around in my hands, lift it painfully and examine it all over again. I’ve hardly started; it will take for ever.
She turned to her mother. ‘Can you pass me my shoulder bag?’ Lorna passed it to her. Celeste opened it, unzipped her wallet and took out the letter. She kept it there, between her phone card and her bus pass. She unfolded the paper; the letter was disintegrating at the creases, from re-reading. She cleared her throat, and read to her audience.
‘My dearest Celeste,’ she read, ‘This is a difficult letter to write but it must be done. Now that we are both gone I have to tell you something that concerns you. it is a secret that Donald and me have kept from you for all these years past, and you might not agree with that but we did what we thought was best. We have loved you like a daughter, but that is not the whole truth. You were chosen. We chose you because we thought you were the one for us, and God had decided in His wisdom not to give us a child of our own. Except that he did. He gave us you. All these years you have bought us nothing but happiness, and I want to thank you for that. I don’t know anything much about your real parents but maybe one day you will be wanting to find out more about yourself. So here is what I know. Your mother gave you this fish, which I leave for you enclosed. I think you are the daughter of a man called Russell Buffery but I am not sure about this. Maybe he would know, were you to find him. Maybe he was married to your mother, but I would think not. Probably he does not know about your existence and in my opinion it is best to let sleeping dogs lie. God bless you, and thank you for being such a joy to us all these years. There is £800 cash for the arrangements in that plastic tub thing with a lid on it, the thing Annie gave us and we never used, that you dry lettuces in. Should you have problems with the plumbing the mains stopcock is in the front garden to the right of the gate, I don’t think you ever knew. All my love my darling, Connie.’
There was a silence, broken by a sob from Popsi. ‘Oh, that’s so beautiful!’ she cried. She sat there like a large fairy, her glitter scattered over the people she had touched – Buffy, Celeste. ‘Oh, if only I’d done that. Had my boy adopted. He might be here right now, with us.’
Even Penny was sniffing. She wiped her nose and said, b
riskly: ‘You could have found them out much more easily, you know. You could have gone to Somerset House and asked to see the records. Children’s Act, 1975. Adopted children have a right to trace their real parents.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ said Celeste. ‘Anyway, I wanted to see what he was like.’
‘So you came to London . . .’
Celeste nodded. ‘I tracked him down – I just found him in the phone book – and got a job nearby. And by that time it was too late. Each time I found one of you, I found there was another one of you before that.’
‘And then another one on the side,’ said Penny.
‘And by that time it was too late to tell the truth,’ said Celeste. ‘It had sort of got too complicated.’
‘Exactly,’ said Buffy. ‘One never lies. One just grows up.’
‘In her case, pretty fast,’ said Penny. ‘She’d hardly got her skis on and whoosh! She was off down the Black Run.’
There was a general stirring. It was six o’clock and the three exes were preparing to rejoin their other lives. Back at their homes food was waiting to be cooked, presents to be unwrapped. Their Christmases, stilled by Celeste’s urgent phone-call, were waiting to be re-activated. Buffy tried to get to his feet, bellowed with pain, and flopped back on the floor.
‘Happy Christmas to you all, my dears,’ he said, waving them goodbye. ‘My loves, my better halves, my lost delights . . .’
‘All right, all right,’ said Penny.
One by one they filed into the little hall, and started putting on their coats. Lorna opened the door. Snow blew in and swirled around. She flinched back.
Outside, in the darkness, the garden was deep in snow. A foot, at least. It had fallen while they were busy talking; it must have been falling for hours. There were mounds where the bushes had been; in the distance, larger humps where the cars were parked. It was eerily beautiful, and utterly, utterly silent. No murmur, even, from the main road beyond the hill.
There was no way they could get out. They couldn’t possibly drive their cars up the track in these conditions.
They were snowed in.
Thirty-one
THEY WENT BACK into the living room and took off their coats.
‘What are we going to do?’ asked Lorna.
‘This is what Catholics must feel,’ said Penny, looking down at Buffy. ‘When they want to get divorced. Permanently snowed in. For life.’
‘There’s hardly anything to eat,’ said Lorna. ‘There’s hardly anything in the larder.’
‘We could always cook Buffy,’ said Penny. ‘There’s enough of him.’
‘Shut up!’ he yelled.
‘Char-grill him over the fire,’ she said, ‘and save one little piece for the doggy bag.’
‘Shut up!’ He struggled to move. ‘This isn’t some avant-garde feminist film.’
Penny laughed. ‘Lord of the Flies, divorce style.’
Jacquetta said: ‘Can’t we phone for help? Leon’ll be worried.’
‘Oh, no he won’t’ said India, ‘he’ll be too busy. Don’t you remember? Christmas is so traumatic all his patients phone him up.’
‘That’s true,’ said Jacquetta.
India went on: ‘Sometimes they’re in such a state he has to open up his consulting rooms for a special session.’
Celeste nudged her. ‘Ssh!’ she whispered.
Lorna lifted the phone but the line was dead. ‘Oh, Lord. The wires must be down.’
The kitchen was crammed with women. They opened cupboards and pulled out drawers.
‘There’s some fish fingers in the fridge,’ said Lorna.
‘Have you got a wok?’ somebody asked.
‘There’s some sausages somewhere,’ said Lorna. ‘I got them from work, but I think they’re date-expired.’
Popsi sighed. ‘I know the feeling.’
‘There may be some hamburger stuff,’ said Lorna.
‘I’m a vegetarian,’ said Jacquetta.
‘You would be,’ said Penny. ‘Why are difficult people always vegetarian?’
Popsi had put on an apron. ‘Come on girls, its loaves and fishes time.’ She looked in the fridge. ‘A bit of cheddar cheese, one strawberry yoghurt, Lordy, these sausages are old.’ She turned to Penny. ‘Penny for Them?’
‘Want to add some zip to that tinned cannelloni? Try mixing it with a little boot polish!’
‘Want to stretch that tagliatelle a little bit further? Try adding kitty litter, for a real family treat!’
‘And the left-overs make a super potting-compost!’
Jacquetta peered in the larder. ‘Here’s some chick peas, but they take three and a half hours.’
Lorna stood there helplessly. ‘I’m afraid I’m not very domesticated.’
‘Lucky you,’ said Penny, ‘you haven’t had to be.’
Popsi was rummaging amongst some vegetables. She pulled out a small, wizened carrot. ‘Remind you of anyone, girls?’
They burst out giggling, even Jacquetta. Nobody had ever heard her laugh before; they all turned and stared.
At that moment Quentin came in, rolling up his sleeves. ‘Leave it to me, dears,’ he said.
Outside, the windows shone in the dark. In the garden Bruno and Tobias were having a snowball fight. They had lost their teenage languor, they were children again. Whooping and shrieking, they clawed up the snow, handfuls of it, and flung it at each other.
India opened the cottage door. Light spilled out onto the snow. ‘Come in!’ she called. ‘Mum says you’ll freeze!’
But they didn’t hear. Suddenly she waded out. ‘Nyange!’ she called. ‘Come out! It’s wonderful!’
Buffy and Celeste were alone in the living room. She sat, propped up against his stomach. Outside in the garden they could hear whoops and yells. From the kitchen came bursts of laughter.
‘Sounds like Dorm Night in there,’ said Buffy.
‘They seem to be getting on pretty well,’ said Celeste.
‘They shouldn’t. It’s unseemly.’
‘They do have something in common.’
‘I know.’ He paused, listening to a burst of raucous laughter. ‘That’s what worries me.’ He tried to sit up, to listen better, and fell back. ‘Pass me my cigarettes, sweetie.’
‘You shouldn’t smoke.’
‘Do you mind? Do you really care?’
She stroked his beard. ‘Of course I do, silly.’ It was painful, to watch him making this huge readjustment towards her. She had known for months that it lay ahead of him, like a major operation he was unaware that he had to face. She had meant to prepare him for it more gradually – more ceremoniously too, with a gentle talk culminating in a Christmas dinner à trois, back at her flat – but the unexpected events in the wood had thrown the whole thing into disarray. ‘Look, I’m awfully sorry.’
‘I adore you. You know that.’
‘I adore you, too,’ she said. ‘So is that all right?’
He nodded. He took her hand and kissed the fingers, one by one. He laid her palm against his cheek. In the kitchen the bursts of laughter and the clatter of pans seemed far away. Here there was no sound except the shifting of a log as it settled in the embers of the fire.
‘You’re got glitter in your beard,’ she said.
‘You’ve got some on your jumper.’
‘You know I’ll never be able to call you Dad. It makes me feel too funny.’
‘That’s fine by me. Hasn’t done me much good up to now.’
She pulled away. ‘Listen!’ She glared at him. ‘You’re not a failure! I’ve seen your boys with Jacquetta, they’re just as horrible with her. They’re adolescents! I’ve been in all your lives. I’ve heard how they all speak about you, your ex-wives, India, everybody, I’m probably the only one who has. I’ve been like a fly on the wall. Don’t you understand? They wouldn’t be so rude about you if they weren’t fond of you. It’s a compliment, in a funny way.’ She paused for breath. She had been meaning to say this all day. ‘You’ve not
been a failure, Buffy! You’ve just had more of a past to be a failure in! And look – they’re all here, aren’t they? All your exes. They all rushed down, on Christmas Day too! Listen to them. And your children too.’
They paused. A snowball thudded against the window. Outside, yells echoed over the countryside – all the Christmases he had never had, they were happening here, now. They echoed across the dark, locked countryside.
‘You’ve brought them all together, bless you,’ he said. ‘You’re the only one who could do it.’
‘That’s not true! I just helped it happen. Don’t you see, you silly? I think the reason you can’t act anymore is that you’re too busy acting out this, this, scenario.’
‘What scenario?’
‘Of poor old Buffy. Poor old battered Buffy, all abandoned and divorced. Penny’s right. You’ve got sort of locked into it and it’s not really true! You’re not that old. You haven’t even got anything wrong with you, not really. It’s, like, you’ve written a part for yourself and those are the only lines you know.’
Just then Jacquetta came into the room. She wore his trilby hat, at a rakish angle, and she had tucked a Historic Sights of Kent tea towel into her waistband. She was still giggling. ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she said, ‘but do you two want baked beans with yours?’
Afterwards they all said, to whoever would listen, that it was certainly the most bizarre Christmas dinner they had ever had, and they should know – they had had some bizarre ones in the past. They ate a concoction of stir-fried tinned ravioli, cabbage, onions, sausages and baked beans with, as Lorna said in her supervisor’s voice your choice of tomato ketchup or piccalilli. This was washed down with half a bottle of tawny port, a litre bottle of Cinzano somebody had discovered in the back of the larder and three cans of date-expired Budweiser Lorna had bought for some men who came a long time ago to fit her new boiler.
They ate on Buffy. One of his hundred uses, as an ex-husband, was to provide a convenient dining-table. He wasn’t allowed to laugh or move, however, or the plates slipped off. Celeste fed him. They sat around on the floor, eating off their laps and off Buffy. They all had Happy Eater napkins, there were plenty of those. Popsi had put a sprig of mistletoe in her hair. Lorna had found, hidden away, a Dizzy Gillespie record. She put it on. Nearly a quarter of a century earlier she had danced to this with Buffy, little knowing that their embraces would lead, after such a long hiatus, such a long, waking sleep, to the presence of this flushed young woman tenderly lifting his grizzled head and shovelling food in. A daughter, popped up from nowhere! As they all became drunker this fact struck them as both wonderfully strange and utterly inevitable.