Comfort and Joy (24 page)

‘What’s tonight?’ I ask.

‘Christmas! Well, it’s tomorrow, obviously. But they follow the French model of doing most of the eating on Christmas Eve.
Sniff the air, if you don’t believe me.’

‘Fatima is cooking us an absolute
feast
,’ says Kate.

‘Oh, but God – tonight?’

‘Yes,’ says Kate. ‘Don’t worry about it – there are hours to go.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Okay. It’s not what I’d have done but …’

‘That’s the point,’ says Kate. ‘Of not being at home.’

‘Yes, I suppose so. I’ll just go and get my decorations.’

‘I brought one or two things too,’ says Kate. ‘Could you get them while you’re up there? Maybe get them first, actually. They’re
in the older trunk, the battered brown one.’

‘Yup. Where are the children?’

‘Cassie and Maisy are helping Fatima,’ says Kate, who seems to be holding everyone’s social diary in her head. ‘Or maybe hindering,
who knows. But she offered and they seemed awfully keen. The boys stayed out with Sam. They’ve gone to the main square, the
Djeema-el-Fna. They took Pat with them – I don’t know that it was an entirely wise decision. Shamans and snake-charmers, you
know. Tooth-pullers and dancing boys in drag. She’ll either love it or be sobbing for home.’

‘She’ll like being with Sam and the boys,’ I say. ‘Little break from us.’

‘She’s in a funny mood, isn’t she?’ says Evie. ‘Like she half wants to have fun and half wants to hate everything, and she
can’t make up her mind which it’s going to be.’

‘It’s difficult for her. She is very much out of water. She cheered up a bit after you’d gone,’ says Kate. ‘Ate quite an exotic
biscuit. And I have the most wonderful present for her, which’ll perk her up even more.’

‘You’re very organized, Kate, keeping tabs on everything.’

‘I have my uses,’ says Kate. ‘Now – Max has gone down to La Mammounia to meet his old friend Richard for a coffee. He won’t
be long. And I’ve told everyone else to be here and changed for six o’clock.’

‘Better get on with the decorating, then.’

I go upstairs to Kate’s bedroom and make a beeline for the oldest and most battered trunk. I’m about to go downstairs again
and ask her for the key, but then I notice that it’s already unlocked. It takes me a moment to realize what’s inside the trunk,
and when I do I let out an actual gasp. There, nestled between layers and layers of white tissue paper, are our old Christmas
decorations – the ones from home, from childhood, from Notting Hill all those decades ago. Boxes and boxes of them: red baubles
–
our
red baubles, from the Christmi: I’d know them anywhere. I didn’t think they still existed: I’d
assumed they got lost or thrown away when Kate and Julian split up and sold the house.

I sit down by the trunk, holding a box of baubles on my lap like a loony, staring at them tenderly as if they were a basket
of kittens. Kate has never, in two decades, mentioned that these decorations were still in her possession. She stopped hosting
Christmas after the break-up with Julian, which is why I started doing it at my house in the first place: I couldn’t bear
to see the flame go out, so I became its keeper. I can’t believe she had the baubles all the time.

I want to cry.

I want to cry even more when I start unloading the boxes – the boxes I know by heart; I can even tell you that the one I’m
holding now got trodden on by me in 1984 – that’s what the crumbling, yellowed Sellotape on the corner is about – which was
the year Julian’s mother gave his biological children £10 book tokens and a £5 one to me, and Kate, electric with anger, took
me aside and pushed a twenty-pound note (vast and unimaginable riches) into my hand. Here’s the angel I made at primary school,
with its pipe-cleaner halo; here are Flo and Evie’s cack-handed deer decorations from nursery; here’s the only tinsel we were
allowed (‘vulgar’), six feet of it, red, reinforced with wire and bent into a heart. Kate’s even brought our fairy lights
along.

I go into the hall and lean over the courtyard. My mother is talking to Moustafa in extremely rapid French; I can’t make out
what they’re saying.

‘Kate!’ I shout down. ‘I don’t know what to say. That’s like giving us the most amazing present.’

‘I thought it was time,’ says Kate, smiling up at me. I beam back at her, one of those mad smiles when you’re aware of showing
all your teeth.

‘Evie, Flo. Come up and see. I need a hand.’

‘Oh my God,’ says Evie, peering into the trunk. ‘They’re the ones from home.’

‘No!’ says Flo. ‘Let me see. God, so they are. Look, Eev, our deer.’

‘And look, my Christmas robin,’ I say, holding it up.

‘And our baubles. There must be hundreds of them. And our thread. From that old lady who had a haberdashery on Portobello
and used to give us sweets, remember?’ Each bauble has a piece of thread going through the metal loop bit.

‘I used to do them with pink thread, when I was obsessed with My Little Pony,’ says Flo. ‘Look, here they are. Oh, God.’

‘Christmas Hamster!’ shouts Evie. ‘It’s Christmas Hamster!’ She pulls out a misshapen knitted lump with tiny ears. ‘Oh, the
sweet thing, he’s lost an eye. I’ll make him another one right this minute. I missed you, Christmas Hamster,’ she says to
it. ‘I thought you were
dead
.’

‘I had no idea these were still around,’ says Flo.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘It makes me want to cry.’

‘Me too. Did you know?’ asks Flo.

‘No, I thought they’d got lost years ago, along …’

‘Along with everything else,’ says Evie. ‘So did I. I thought they’d be lying smashed in a skip somewhere. But Christmas Hamster
has risen again, and we rejoiceth.’

‘He rises at Easter. He is born tonight,’ says Flo.

‘Man, I need an infusion, I got bad Jesus confusion,’ sings Evie. ‘I just made that up. I feel weird. It’s the baubs.’

‘There’s an unChristmassy danger of us all sitting here sobbing into Kate’s trunk,’ says Flo. ‘Come on. Grab some boxes and
let’s take them downstairs.’

‘But why now?’ says Evie. ‘She hasn’t done Christmas since she and Daddy broke up. Not a bauble, not a candle, nothing. These
must have been sitting in that trunk for over twenty years.’

‘She said it was time,’ I say.

My sisters and I stare at each other, and then, without speaking, pick up an armload of boxes each and make our way downstairs.

And now there’s a Christmas tree in the middle of the courtyard. A huge, twenty-odd-foot Christmas tree, sitting upright in
a beaten copper pot. It wasn’t there ten minutes ago, and now it is. I feel like rubbing my eyes.

‘Marvellous,’ says Kate to the couple of sweating men who must have dragged it in. ‘Thanks so much. How much do I owe you?
Is that all? It doesn’t sound nearly enough. Here you go, much more like it.
Au revoir, au revoir. Joyeux No
l!
’

‘Kate?’ I say. It comes out quite strangulated. ‘You got us
a tree
?’

‘Holmesian powers of deduction,’ says Kate. ‘Let no one say my daughter is unobservant. Do you like it?’

‘It’s beautiful. But … But how?’

‘I had it shipped,’ says Kate. ‘Well, flown in, actually.’

‘But it’s enormous.’

‘It’s twenty-five foot,’ says Kate. ‘Like they all were. Handsome, isn’t it? I’m rather pleased with it. You never know, with
trees, until you see them. But this one is a lovely shape, though the branches need to drop a little. I was worried it would
look too sort of poignant, you know, tragically out of place, but actually it looks rather at home.’

‘But how did it get here?’

‘Clara! You are drearily obsessed with logistics. I put my considerable wealth to good use.’

‘How long have you been planning all this, Kate?’ asks Flo.

‘A fortnight or so,’ says Kate. ‘Now – we need the crepe paper from the trunk to wrap around the base, even though that copper
pot’s quite pretty. Moustafa’s getting more ladders. I can’t bear heights these days as you know, so you’re going to
have to do the upper bits of the tree, girls. He’ll help you. I’ll be the stylist and the stage director – both jobs I’d have
excelled at, incidentally. How clever I was to only ever use red baubles – old but timeless, so classic and chic.’

It’s amazing how fast you can work when you put your mind to it. Within two hours, the courtyard (no slouch in the aesthetics
stakes in the first place) is transformed into – well, I don’t want to over-egg it, but honestly, into the most magical thing
I have ever seen: it’s half glittering grotto, half
Thousand and One Nights
. It is dusk now, and the tree, surreal and beautiful, rises upwards, reaching for the sky, blazing with fairy lights and
heavy with baubles. Kate is right: it looks oddly at home. Everything else is candle-lit; the flickering light bounces off
the glinting brass tables and onto the glazed tiles; the glass lanterns shimmer high above us; the little green pool sparkles
in the half-light, and beautiful old rugs have been laid on the stone floor.

Moustafa and his helpers have dragged in an enormously long table and Fatima has set it for supper (it has been decided that
the courtyard looks so spectacular that we want to eat in it). The table is blazing too, with crockery, silverware and an
abundance of pearlescent, pastel-coloured glass. Fatima goes to her kitchen and comes back with Maisy and Cassie, both grinning
with delight and both equipped with large paper bags; these contain rose petals, which the girls scatter in lavish quantities
all down the dining table and all around our feet, bouncing with excitement as they do so. When Ed comes down with the twins,
Ava makes enormous eyes and says, ‘Is it real, Daddy?’, which I think is how we all feel. Even Robert stands there with his
mouth slightly open.

‘It’s stunning,’ he says. ‘Really beautiful.’

‘You don’t mind, do you, Clara?’ Kate asks. ‘I hope it doesn’t feel like I’ve hijacked Christmas. That wasn’t the intention.’

‘Mind? Of course not,’ I say. ‘It’s the most wonderful thing ever. And I can’t tell you how happy I am that you’ve … come
out of retirement on the Christmas front.’

‘Well, it’s just this once. We’ll be back at your house next year, though I’m thinking I might lift the ban on a tree in my
own house. They just made me so sad, for so long. But you’ve changed that, you know. Your Christmases are lovely, Clara.’

‘I learned from you,’ I say, leaning on her shoulder.

‘You learned well, my child,’ she says, leaning back on mine. And then: ‘Oh my God, I nearly forgot. Fatima! Fatima! THE TRUFFLE.’

I’ll say one thing for my family: we can eat. Man, can we eat. Even the small children are like human Hoovers. I’m always
perplexed by people who claim children hate vegetables, I think as I watch Flo’s twins chow down on some puréed aubergine
and flatbread. (‘A few little things,’ said Fatima, arriving with plateful after plateful of amazing appetizers. ‘Not the
real food.’) Maisy and Cassie are chomping on roasted red peppers with cumin (‘We cooked the seeds!’), looking like illustrations
from one of those bossy volumes about healthy eating. Mind you, child vegetable-hate is one of those supposed ‘facts’ that
only becomes real because of people’s mindless repeating of it. Pretty much the first solid things that babies ever eat are
mashed-up vegetables, and they don’t have any difficulty doing that, and I’ve always found it weird that it should be universally
believed that, somehow – by magic – they then start shunning the things they loved eating two years before. It’s just not
true. But then, so many of the things people say about children aren’t true either: see also ‘children are cruel’. Mine aren’t,
and neither are the children of anybody I know. I’m sure children can be
made
cruel, just as they can subtly be encouraged to hate vegetables by a parent making a hysterical fuss of a piece
of broccoli, but otherwise I see no evidence of epidemic veg-loathing. Maybe it’s a British thing, like doing the washing-up
in the sink and ‘rinsing’ the clean dishes in soapy water that’s grey with dirt. The question of children hating vegetables
wouldn’t occur to any Moroccan person, for example; you might as well hate bread, or water.

On cue, Pat says,‘They’re good at eating their vegetables, those wee ’uns. Mine wouldn’t touch them.’

‘That’s because we
had
no vegetables, Ma,’ says Sam. ‘Other than potatoes.’ Sam is one of those people who never met an avocado until he came to
London, and who is still secretly suspicious of the more exotic fruits.

‘Yes, we did,’ says Pat. ‘We had plenty of vegetables. And of course, everything we ate was organic, in those days. You never
ate any chemicals.’

‘Vegetables? Organic?’ splutters Sam. ‘Where? How do you mean?’

‘It just was,’ Pat says serenely. ‘Organic. Back in the day.’

‘Because pesticides hadn’t been invented in the 1970s?’ Sam says, laughing.

‘Leave it,’ I say to him.

‘I was brought up on chips and salad cream,’ he quietly says to me. ‘And tinned pies. And Angel Delight for treats. I didn’t
see anything green or leafy during my entire childhood. She’s joked about it before. What does she mean, “Everything was organic”?
Our cans of own-brand Spam?’