Christmas had always been presumed a point of tension between Julia and Daniel but had been, in reality, quite the opposite. Before they’d married they had felt obligated to visit Julia’s mother every year on the grounds, put forward by Julia’s mother herself, that Daniel’s parents were Jews and it was not “their day.” “They can’t have everything,” she had said, dark and obscure. Julia had sat in shame and misery while her mother scorched a crown of turkey, refused Daniel’s help with anything but taking the bins out, and instead sat, slashing deep scores into the bottoms of tough sprouts and alternately ignoring or interrogating him on the subject of his religious beliefs. Unearthing his agnosticism, layered on top of the already unacceptable Judaism, had been the final insult. They had gone one final time when Gwen was tiny, teething, battling an unfortunate coincidence of pinkeye and impetigo, not a celestial Christmas cherub but a blotched and irritable tyrant. Julia’s mother had refused to hold the baby but instead had sat back, arms crossed defensively across her chest, and offered the bewildering adage that “a redhead aboard a ship brings bad luck,” implying that both Gwen and Daniel might have had the same ill effect upon National Rail, opined that it had been wicked to take the child on a crowded train spreading all those germs, and had then gone on to suggest that they had done so only because Daniel (and wasn’t it always the case with his sort?) was too tight-fisted to pay for the petrol. Julia had not repeated the mistake, preferring to visit alone, and at less charged points on the calendar. Christmas had offered too much tantalizing material, too many baubles of obvious conflict and star-points of attack.
Since Daniel had died, they had not visited. Julia had fought hard to forget that final conversation, to lock it away, sealed very tightly out of sight, in the dark, where it could no longer hurt her. Daniel would have dismissed it, would have laughed and told her to forgive, would have said that Hell didn’t exist anyway so how could a fanciful evocation matter; he knew Julia didn’t believe fairy stories, nor that he’d face lakes of fire or unquenchable flaming pits. But she could not forgive, and even to contemplate it burned like a betrayal. Gwen had never asked to go back, and the birthday cards she received, containing five pounds and the unvarying and unpunctuated message in blue Biro, MAY JESUS KEEP YOU FROM GRANDMOTHER, were never mentioned. Julia had embraced Daniel’s family traditions with relief.
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GOSPEL OAK: a pleasingly ecclesiastical name at Christmastime. The Queen’s Crescent lights as scanty and ineffectual as a weak torch in daylight and lit not by a minor local celebrity but instead by whichever council-employed electrician has garlanded the lampposts in perfunctory and partially functioning strings of white bulbs. Stiff felt Santa hats and last year’s Dairy Milk advent calendars appear on market stalls, adding to the usual array of tissue multipacks and plastic children’s shoes and individual batteries on sale in a clear plastic washing-up bowl, the tartan-print vinyl shopping trolleys, nesting Tupperwares, and carousels of polyester headscarves. In December a regimental bank of small, potted poinsettias stand on proud display beside the usual buckets of wearily opening lilies. The market itself takes on a genial air and here, for the last ten years, Julia bought tinsel and wrapping paper and boxes of reliably cheap and unreliable fairy lights. She joined in with Christmas in the scrappy and defiant local style. And this year there was James, her family and his, around a single table. Thrilling. Terrifying.
He had set her free. Julia had never before considered retiring. Give up teaching for what? More hours of solitude? But James would retire in ten years, and was already full of ideas. He had a colleague supervising a training program for community midwives in Sierra Leone and he wanted to spend three months a year there, teaching. He’d always thought he’d move back to New England but now he talked of Sussex, “Lewes or some other absurdly beautiful British town,” and learning to cook on an Aga, and walking together, if not by the icy western Atlantic, then on the quieter shores of the English Channel.
What did she want? She hardly knew, and she’d never dared consider. Growing up she’d wanted a mother who wasn’t always angry; whose love did not feel conditional upon being unobtrusive, or upon the meek and tireless execution of chores. James’s asking allowed her to wonder, and to fantasize. She would adore the opera at Verona, or to go to JazzFest in New Orleans, and wanted to walk with James along the northern Appalachian Trail he’d described to her so vividly. They would wake up together in Maine, and New Hampshire, and Vermont. A new phase ahead, when their hours were freed only for one another. Whispered to James as they fell asleep, these wishes did not sound foolish. Instead, now, they sounded like plans. She no longer need dread the loneliness and silence of her daughter leaving home but instead could look forward to the new world that Gwen’s growing up would enable. If they left London and moved to Lewes, she could buy a better piano. Gwen would visit—with a degree, a boyfriend, with stories, with laundry—and then return to her own life. James and Julia would have one another.
But in the meantime, all must coexist in closer quarters. And no doubt Gwen was dreading every moment of Christmas lunch today, Julia thought, swallowing the hard bead of guilt that had lodged in her throat. She would find time alone with her on Boxing Day. Maybe they could go for a long tramp on the Heath together as they had last year, and the year before. They no longer had Mole, but she hoped Gwen knew they still had each other.
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