Sorrow and Bliss(7)
As soon as we got back, my mother carried mince pies out to the policemen standing in front of Margaret Thatcher’s house and returned with an empty plate. Winsome makes her own mincemeat, in April, and just smiled and smiled as my mother told her that the policemen had not been allowed to accept them, which was why she slid the whole lot into a rubbish bin on the way back over.
*
Before lunch I got changed into a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and black bicycle shorts and came into the dining room with bare feet – I remember because when we were finding our places Winsome told me that I had time to go upstairs and change back since Lycra clothing wasn’t really de rigueur at the Christmas table and perhaps I’d like to pop shoes on while I was up there. My mother said, ‘Yes Martha, what if Mrs Thatcher is trotting across from the less good side of the square as we speak? Then where will we be?’ She took a glass of wine from Rowland.
Watching her empty it, he said, ‘By God, Celia, it’s not bloody medicine. At least look like you’re enjoying it.’
She was enjoying it. Ingrid and I were not. At home, at parties, our mother’s drinking had always been a source of amusement to us. It was becoming less so now that we were older, and she was older, and her drinking was no longer dependent on there being interesting people in the house or any people at all. And it had never been amusing at Belgravia, where my uncle and aunt drank in a way that did not produce a change in mood, and Ingrid and I learned that bottles could be recorked and put away and glasses left on the table unfinished. That day, which ended with Winsome on her hands and knees on the floor next to our mother’s chair, dabbing wine out of the carpet, it embarrassed us. Our mother embarrassed us.
Once we were all seated and Winsome started the platters going, requisite left around the table, Rowland, at the adults’ end, asked Patrick, at the children’s end, if he was of ethnic extraction.
Oliver said, ‘Dad, you can’t ask someone that.’
Rowland said, ‘Evidently you can, since I just did,’ and looked pointedly back at Patrick who obediently replied, saying his father was born in America but he is actually Scottish, and his mother was – his voice wavered at that point – his mother was British Indian.
In that case, my uncle said, it was peculiar that Patrick spoke with a smarter accent than his own sons if neither of his parents were English. Nicholas said oh my God under his breath and was asked to leave the room but didn’t. In his critical years, my mother told us once, both Winsome and Rowland lacked follow-through when it came to their eldest son, a position that surprised Ingrid and me because she did not discipline us at all.
With forced brightness, Winsome asked Patrick his parents’ names. He said his father was called Christopher Friel and, almost inaudibly, that his mother’s name was Nina. Rowland began peeling bits of skin off the slices of turkey my aunt had arranged on his plate, feeding them one by one to the whippet sitting at his feet, which he had acquired weeks earlier and named Wagner. Unfortunately, people only got the joke if he explained it, the German pronunciation vs. the spelling. Often he had to write it down and show them. Appearing at breakfast that morning, my mother said she would have preferred to listen to the entire Ring Cycle performed by a learner violinist than the dog’s whining all night in the crate.
To Rowland’s next question of what his father did, Patrick said he worked for a European bank but he couldn’t remember which one, sorry. My uncle took a large swallow of whatever was in his glass, then said, ‘Tell us then, what befell your mother?’
The platters had finished going around but nobody had started eating because of the conversation being had from opposite ends of the table. Working hard not to cry, Patrick explained that she had drowned in a hotel pool when he was seven. Rowland said bad luck and shook out his napkin, indicating that the interview was over. Immediately, Oliver and Nicholas picked up their cutlery and began eating like a starter’s pistol had just gone off, with their heads bowed, left arm circled around their plate as if defending it from theft while they shovelled food in with the fork in their right hand. Patrick ate the same way.
He was sent to boarding school a week after his mother’s funeral. That is what kind of father manages to forget to book his own son a flight home.
A few minutes later, during a lull in the adults’ conversation, Patrick stopped shovelling, raised his head and said, ‘My mother was a doctor.’ No one had asked him, then or earlier. He said it as if he’d forgotten, and just remembered.
I think, to prevent Rowland from reopening the topic or selecting a worse one, my father began to explain the Theseus Paradox to the whole table. It was, he said, a first century philosophical conundrum: if a wooden ship has every single plank replaced during the voyage across the ocean, is it technically the same vessel when it gets to the other side? Or put another way, he went on, because none of us understood what he was talking about, ‘Is Rowland’s current bar of soap the same one he purchased in 1980, or a different one entirely?’ My mother said, ‘The Imperial Leather Paradox,’ reaching across him for an open bottle.
*
At the end of lunch, Winsome invited us all to transition to the formal living room for ‘a little bit of opening’. And, for Ingrid and me, a little bit of finding out that the money we lived on did not come from our parents.
Both of us, then, were at a school that was private and selective and single sex. I got a scholarship because, an older girl told me on my first day, I came number two in the exam and the number one girl had died in the holidays.