lets out a ‘Hmmm’, her way of saying I’m not convinced, then finally leaves her scarf alone and turns to look at me. ‘Julianne, dearest, how have you been? You look … haggard.’
If anyone else had said this I’d be offended, but from my mother it’s only to be expected. ‘It’s only been two weeks since I last saw you. I can’t have changed that much.’
She shakes her head and looks at me as if staring at someone who’s just been told they’re terminal. ‘It just saddens me to see you run yourself so ragged. You’re probably doing too much again. Where’s that housekeeper of yours? What does she actually do? I swear she has a holiday every other day.’
‘It’s Cassie’s day off. Her first this week. And she isn’t always on holiday.’ I hear the closing of a door upstairs and jump slightly. Stephen must have gone back to his own room. My slight movement doesn’t escape my mother’s ever-observant eye.
‘Goodness, you’re twitchy. Maybe you should sit down.’
‘No, Mom, I need to go and finish the food.’
‘I can do that,’ James says, probably considering it the lesser of the two evils when compared with making small talk. He disappears off to the kitchen, leaving my mother smiling and shaking her head a little.
‘James is such a dear,’ she says.
I stare back blankly at her. My husband always gets the compliments, the praise, the terms of endearment. It’s probably because of all the money he’s given her over the years. Helping her buy a new property when we were married. The steady money she’s become used to, going out of our joint account and into hers every month. He’s her saviour, in many respects.
‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to when the man of the house has to tend to the cooking.’ She drops her gaze as she says this and continues to shake her head, as if slightly sad.
On some days I fight back. I pick her up on her sexism, her little digs, her many prejudices, her dated worldview. But today I haven’t got the energy. I just look at her, standing there in her crisp tailored blazer, as if she’s about to attend a boardroom meeting. She’s never set foot in a boardroom in her life, but dresses every day like she’s ready to negotiate a corporate merger or try to poach a big new client from a rival legal firm. ‘Dress for success’ is what she always used to teach me as a child. I can see her now, eyeing up my plain, dark-green, John Lewis own-brand cardigan, her lips curving down slightly at the sides. She doesn’t approve.
‘Come on into the lounge, Mom.’
I walk in ahead of her and immediately go to the drinks table. ‘Do you want anything?’
‘If you’re referring to a drink, Julianne, I will have a small sherry.’
I sigh as I pour the liquid into a glass and turn round to hand it to her. She’s appraising the Christmas tree, stepping back, slowly and deliberately, as one would in an art gallery when trying to take in a painting as a whole. She nods. ‘Very nice,’ she says. ‘Very … homely.’
‘Well, this is a home, so I guess something went right,’ I say.
‘I suppose.’
I don’t know what she means by that, but I’m not about to interrogate it right now. I sit down on one of the sofas before she does. After the tree, she continues her tour around the lounge, slowly turning, taking it all in, as if she hadn’t already seen everything hundreds of times before. She stops at the TV.
‘I did always tell you, Julianne, an excessively large television can seem a little … how shall I put it …?’
I can feel myself getting more tense by the second. ‘I don’t know, Mom, probably in your usual kind and generous way.’
She glances over at me, an eyebrow raised. ‘No need to get snippy, Julianne. Maybe you should have a drink yourself. Take the edge off.’
I continue to stare back at her and she turns away from the television. ‘I just fear a large television suggests that it has too much of an important place in your life.’
‘Or that we don’t all want to be squinting at some old twenty-two-incher as if this was still the 1990s. We’ve had that for over a year, Mom, and it’s not that much bigger than your new set. You’ve never had a problem with it before. You spent most of last Christmas glued to old musicals on it. In fact, I even think I remember you remarking how good that Blu-Ray boxset of yours looked on it compared to your previous old antique.’
She makes a tutting sound and shakes her head some more. ‘It was only an observation, Julianne. You don’t have to take everything as a personal attack.’ She moves over to the single sofa seat opposite me and sits down on the edge, straight-backed and looking less than comfortable. ‘Where is my favourite grandson?’
‘Your only grandson is upstairs finishing something. He’ll be down for dinner soon.’
‘Finishing something? Not schoolwork, four days before Christmas?’
‘It’s a big year for him, Mom. A levels, you know.’
‘No, I don’t know,’ she says, picking a nonexistent bit of fluff from her sleeve. ‘I don’t know how these schools work over here, and I never get much sense from you or James when I ask. I find the whole thing a bit incomprehensible compared to the American system.’
‘Mom, even that’s probably changed since you were there.’
‘Well, how would I know? Twenty-five years on, this whole place still feels like a mystery to me. I can barely understand the young people now. Some uncouth young man served me in Waitrose the other day and slurred his words so much I had to ask him five times to repeat himself.’
‘Maybe you’re going deaf.’
‘I certainly am not. Then he had the cheek to ask if I was over here for a holiday. I said to him I’d lived in this hellhole longer than he’d been alive.’
‘Richmond isn’t a hellhole, Mom.’
‘Well, it’s all right for you, living here, in the centre of things. Not banished to the suburbs with the waifs and strays.’
This is too much for me. I can’t be doing this right now. I’m struggling to remain calm, the mounting level of unease causing a dull nausea to ebb and flow around my body. I stand up and try my best not to shout. ‘Waifs and strays? Do you know what kind of a life you have compared to some people out there?’
As soon as I’ve said this, my mind darts to those documents. Those young women – the desperate state of their lives intricately detailed. I shiver involuntarily, but my mother doesn’t notice. She bats away my comment. ‘Oh, you don’t need to have a go at me, Julianne. Not this early in the evening. I’m aware I’m not one of those refugees you see crawling across Europe. I make do with what I have and I don’t complain.’
In another mood I might have found the sheer awfulness of what she’s just said funny, but today it riles me all the more. ‘Jesus Christ, can you hear yourself, Mom?’
She looks at me again, an expression of puzzlement and mild alarm stretching across her preserved skin. ‘Julianne,
