sure, is his mother Kate, who lives near my parents. When we were both three his father, Tony, had a heart-attack and died. He was only twenty-eight, the next in age to my dad. Tom can hardly remember him now, although he can picture lying beside him in the long grass of the meadow opposite Keeper House one summer and being tickled so much he was sick. I always think that’s a rather unfortunate last memory to have of your dad, but Tom always says no, because it’s complete; he can remember what he was wearing, how he felt, what his dad looked like, and how hot it was. Tom doesn’t talk much about Tony, in fact none of us does. But our house is full of reminders of him, from a little cricket trophy he won when he was twelve to his huge collection of opera programmes, and I think Tom likes looking at them secretly when he goes there. And being in the house where his father grew up.
As we headed deeper into the countryside, the roads became thinner and darker, the trees arching over us. The car wove its way through the old familiar places, the scenes of our childhood that I always forgot about until I came back. We were getting closer and closer to home.
Past the meadow we used to own when my aunt Kate still rode and kept a pony there, and where as children we used to play Funerals for Pets, a rather ghoulish game involving the re-enactment of the various ceremonies we’d held for recently deceased dogs, cats, hamsters, gerbils and guineapigs. Along by the river that had an island at its centre, then skirting the edge of a small wood, where Tom once got lost, gave up on civilian life and determined to be a child of the forest until our other aunt, Chin, found him there. The road sloped gently down the side of the valley and now I could just make out Wareham village, a mile away – it was the same view as the one from my bedroom. Now we were driving past the house where sweet Mrs Favell lived: she had made a pet of me when I was small and rewarded me with old copies of the Radio Times, a glamorous luxury to Jess and me because it was banned in our house as a waste of money. Last time I was home I found an old copy and was disappointed to see that its most exciting feature was on the new series of Ever Decreasing Circles.
We passed the track that led down to the ivy-covered tunnel of the long-neglected railway, along which the steam trains had ferried my father and his brothers to school, and my grandparents to town. It had been closed down long before I was born, and replaced with belching, unreliable buses, crowded and sticky, especially in summer, and thoroughly unsatisfactory.
‘Nearly there,’ said Tom, as he swung off the main road, the sound of wet leaves mulching beneath the car. ‘Can’t believe it. I thought I’d die of alcohol poisoning before I made it to Christmas Eve.’
I knew what he meant. I find the lead-up to Christmas so exhausting that it’s sometimes a struggle to preserve some energy for the holiday. Some of the stores on Oxford Street put their Christmas lights up two weeks before Hallowe’en. It’s ridiculous. I remembered the slanting glass toothpick-holder and shuddered, resolving that next year I really would do my shopping before Bonfire Night.
‘So, who’s going to be there when we arrive?’ Jess asked.
‘Mum will, because we’re staying at yours,’ Tom said. Kate lived in a cottage down the road from my parents.
‘And Mike’s definitely not coming?’ I asked.
‘Mum spoke to him a week ago. He’s obviously knackered, and he has to be back in the office on, like, the twenty-seventh to finish some deal.’
‘What if he’s just lying, doing an Uncle Mike joke?’ Jess said hopefully.
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Tom said. ‘He’s not coming, and that’s that.’
Mike was Dad’s eldest brother and everyone’s favourite. He’s the funniest man I’ve ever met. He did a lot of the work necessary to earn that title when I was about five years old and fairly easy to impress, but he somehow knows exactly what will please you most, or cheer you up when you need it. Who else would forget his godson Tom’s tenth birthday, then arrange, a week later, for a pair of remote-controlled toy cars, complete with flashing lights, proper gears and red enamelled bonnets to be delivered from Hamleys by a man in full livery? Who, for my thirteenth birthday, took charge of the party when Mum was ill with flu and escorted me, with ten of my friends, to the cinema, where we saw a ‘15’ film (A Fish Called Wanda) then went to Pizza Express where he let us all have a glass of wine and tipped the waiter to go and buy me a proper birthday cake from the patisserie next door? Mike.
Actually, more often than not he’s useless. He never turns up, he has no idea how old you are or what you’re doing, he’s late, he’s disorganized, and when he’s there he often has no idea what’s going on, but I suppose that’s part of what makes him so fab – you never know what he’s going to do next.
Mike is a high-powered lawyer, like Tom, and lives in New York where he works even harder than Tom does and has an infrequent succession of girlfriends. ‘The law is my mistress, Suzy,’ he’d say, in answer to Mum’s hopeful enquiries about his love life.
‘I don’t care who your mistress is, you stupid man,’ Mum would reply crossly. ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’
Tom negotiated the crossroads through the village. A Christmas tree covered with twinkling lights shone through a cottage window, and in another I could see the glow of a television. The rain had stopped, and the temperature had dropped sharply.
‘Mum told me yesterday that Chin’s bringing her new man,’ Jess said.
‘I didn’t know she was seeing someone.’ Tom was obviously nettled by this information.
‘Wait! It’s not that Australian guy…Gibbo? She’s bringing him?’
‘Apparently,’ said Jess. ‘It must be more serious than we thought.’
‘Must be, if she’s willing to expose him to Christmas at home,’ I said.
Chin was Dad’s youngest sibling by a mile, and more like a cousin to us than an aunt. She was a designer: some of her scarves had been sold in Liberty and she also made necklaces and little bags. She lived in London too, but I hadn’t seen her for a while, although she had a flat not too far from me, in Portobello Road. Even now she seemed the epitome of chic Bohemian glamour, without even trying; the kind of woman who could walk into a junk shop and say, ‘Wow, what a delightful eighteen-century French armoire for fifty p! I’ll take it please,’ while if I’d been in there three seconds earlier I’d only have spotted a rusty old baked bean tin for four hundred pounds.
She’d been seeing Gibbo for a few months now and all I knew about him was that he had long hair and wore flip-flops in November. Jess had bumped into them in Soho one evening, and Chin – who normally goes out with worldly Frenchmen or devastatingly handsome record executives who break her heart, rather than dishevelled young Australians who punch her jovially in the arm and say ‘Let’s get going, mate!’ – couldn’t get away fast enough.
‘That’s it, then,’ Jess said. ‘That’s everyone.’
‘You’ve forgotten your parents,’ said Tom. ‘Perhaps they don’t count, though. I mean, it’s their house. They’re always there.’
It was my parents’ house, but it felt like home to all of us. The home of the Walter family. It had been for over
