Chapter 23
‘Here you go, Tim, there’s all your gubbins.’ Roo set the components of the Christingle down in front of him, once he had taken a seat.
‘Thank you, Roo,’ he said, his tone much softened, and she knew he wasn’t just saying thank you for an orange and some cocktail sticks.
‘So firstly, wrap your red ribbon around the middle of the fruit, securing it with glue or pin or even a knot,’ instructed Brian. ‘I’ve done a little preparatory work already and skewered my Dolly Mixtures with the cocktail sticks…’
Hark! Hark, the angels sing. Today the Christ is born…
‘That’s your carol playing in the background, isn’t it, Roo?’ said John, sticking cherries and chopped-up dates onto his cocktail sticks.
It was indeed, a folk group singing acapella, four harmonising voices.
Let the bells ring out ’cross every land, all hail this blessed morn.
‘I love folk music,’ said Elizabeth. She’d once bought two tickets for a Steeleye Span concert for herself and Gregory and he’d sat through it as if he was enduring a long boring court case.
She’d thought at the time that had they gone a few months earlier, he would have made a convincing effort to have enjoyed it.
Now she knew that a few months later and he wouldn’t have gone at all.
He didn’t listen to music, he listened to pompous literary fiction, dry military history and politics audiobooks.
The things they didn’t have in common far outnumbered the things they did and having even this short time away from him was like drifting up into space and seeing their world as it was: full of dried-up seas and arid brown where there should have been rich, green foliage.
‘Let heaven and earth rejoice and sing, welcome, welcome, little king,’ Roo trilled, prompting Jane to tell her – just as John had done earlier – that she had a lovely voice.
‘Give over, Jane.’
‘You should take the compliment and not bat it back,’ Jane admonished her, though she knew that most women didn’t know what to do with a compliment.
Accepting them was uncomfortable, a contradiction to an entrenched negative self-perception.
It had taken Clifford quite a few years to succeed in having her value herself, as he valued her.
Frank walked in. He needed company, his thoughts were racing around in his head like motorcyclists on a wall of death. He forced out his best smile.
‘Don’t let me interrupt, I’m here in an observational capacity.’
‘There’s a spare orange if you want one. We can help you catch up,’ said Roo.
‘Oh, go on then, if I must.’
Roo quickly tied on a section of ribbon and rolled it across the table. ‘Cocktail sticks and cherries at your side there.’
Frank looked to his right for direction from Jane.
‘Are we ready for sticking our four corners of the world into the orange?’ asked Brian.
‘I mostly use sweets I don’t like so I’m not tempted to eat them.
Mind you, there aren’t really any sweets I don’t like.
’ He chortled. ‘Though I confess I am not that fond of the raspberry in a Fry’s Five Centres bar. I always have to give that to Cath.’
‘What’s that?’ said Roo, through a mouthful of maraschino cherries and their juice.
‘History, that’s what that is,’ said Frank.
When they were first courting, he used to buy Grace a Fry’s Five Centres bar when they went to the pictures.
If he’d looked to his side, he would have seen Grace steal a glance at him, remembering the same.
He’d refuse her offer to share it, so she had to pretend she was full when she gave him the last section.
‘I do think old Brian may be living somewhat in the past, though who can blame him,’ said Jane with a wistful sigh.
She had a picture in her head of him in his attic, talking into his microphone, not getting out enough to realise the world was moving at a ridiculous pace.
She wished it would stand still more sometimes.
‘Maybe Brian is in a delightful bubble of memorabilia, a world where Quality Street came in proper tins with shiny wrappers. It was like opening a box of jewels once upon a time.’
‘And the smell of Christmas used to rush out at you when you took the lid off,’ said Frank with a nostalgic sigh.
There was a tin of those for him under the Christmas tree every year, along with a pair of slippers and a Beano annual.
His mum was still buying him his ‘holy trinity’, even after he was married.
‘Progress, eh?’ said Vincent, wondering how he had managed to cock up sticking four sticks into a bleedin’ satsuma. He’d made it look like a wheel that had lost half its spokes. He would never have got a job on Blue Peter. He held it up to look at it from all angles.
‘What the hell is that?’ said Tim. ‘You a flat-earther, Vince?’ And he guffawed and Roo thought that the Tim who had walked in after their talk seemed lighter, jollier. She’d done that and she allowed herself a moment of smugness for it.
‘What’s “a flat-earther”? asked John.
‘People who believe the earth is flat and not round,’ replied Vincent, ‘but we all know for sure that’s bollocks because the people who went up to the moon saw it was round and took pictures.’
‘Allegedly.’ Roo held up a finger to stop that theory in its tracks.
John chuckled and shook his head. ‘They want to get their trains to run properly in all weathers before they even start thinking about putting men on the moon.’
‘Absolutely,’ Roo said to that, recognising a fellow cynic in John.
Vincent looked over at Tim’s impeccable effort.
‘I’ve got serious Christingle envy, Tim,’ he said. Even his red ribbon line was like a perfect equator.
‘Why an orange, I wonder, and not an apple or a pomegranate?’ Grace said, checking all her sticks were equidistant.
‘Juice,’ answered Roo.
‘Eh?’ Vincent pulled a ‘you’re bonkers’ face.
‘I think it’s because it’s full of juice.’
The look on Vincent’s face said that he wasn’t convinced so Roo explained further.
‘Because it’s like God’s given it to us so we can squeeze as much sweetness as we need out of it. You can’t squeeze an apple, can you – or a pomegranate. The seeds would fly all over the place.’
‘Right,’ said Vincent, with a conceding tilt of his head. ‘That might make sense if I force it to.’
Roo knew he was teasing her and so she told him to shut up.
‘Now for the exciting part,’ said Brian. ‘I always put a little bit of tin foil around the bottom of my candle before I stick it in. I’m not sure if I remembered to tell you to get that, but, if not, I’m sure you’ve got some in for tomorrow’s roast.’
‘Yes, don’t worry, Bri, you did say,’ Roo replied to him. They all proceeded to wrap the bottom of the candle stubs before sticking them in the top of the clementines. Frank had just about caught up, with the help of Jane and her best cherry-spearing skills.
‘So now, we light the candles and praise baby Jesus, the light of the world, bringing hope to those in darkness.’
‘Hallelujah, brother,’ said Vincent, making them all laugh by raising his hands in the air as if he were at a big religious convention in a field.
They lit their candles from a match and Tim turned the main light off.
And from the radio came the soft rolling harp notes of ‘Balulalow’.
Jane knew the song, knew what the Scots lyrics were about: a homage to the Virgin Mary singing her lullaby to her baby as she rocked him in her arms, and in the flickering candlelit dark the piercing voice of the soprano found a place in Jane’s heart that had hitherto escaped being broken and broke it.
She remembered holding her first son, unable to stop marvelling at his perfect face as he slept, his tiny fingernails, his thick brown lashes.
She didn’t think that any baby who came next could stir such emotion in her, but it did twice more – each time that wonderment, that riptide of emotion that carried her willingly away.
Never mair from thee depart. If she had been debating whether it was the right thing to do to talk to Grace when the opportunity presented itself, then she had just found her answer.
Benjamin Britten’s ethereal harmony, the pin-sharp voice of the soprano, the soft dark of the train carriage and the eight of them together with their candles lit, caught in a strange crystallising moment; they all felt it, as if they were held in time, in the cup of its hands, fleeting, uniting, pure but none of them said it for fear of appearing daft.
Vincent looked across the table at Elizabeth: she appeared even more beautiful by candlelight; her eyes were shining as if they were made of diamonds.
That Gregory is a lucky fucker, he thought.
He hoped the man realised that. A picture rose in his head of he and Elizabeth close on his big sofa at home in front of the TV, watching an old festive film, his favourite one about the angel who comes down to earth in the form of Cary Grant and falls in love with the bishop’s wife, coffee table in front of them with two big glasses of mulled wine on it scenting the air, Snowball snoring contentedly in between them.
Pipe dream, of course. Elizabeth Dudley was the caviar-on-blinis type, not Doritos dipped in a sour cream dip.
And if anyone rubbed all the rough edges off him, there would be nothing left but a pile of sawdust.
The last bars of ‘Balulalow’, the final cadence that left its enchantment in the air.
Elizabeth lifted up her eyes to find Vincent’s, his gaze intense and sparkly as if there was laughter captured in the irises.
She smiled, a little embarrassed. And Roo, seeing that moment of connection, slapped her hands together and said, ‘Well, I was going to tart up the tree now because it needs doing before tomorrow, but I might go for a lie down instead. Any volunteers – Elizabeth? Vincent?’
Jane followed Tim and John who were heading off to the cabins in the ‘Uglich’ carriage.