Chapter Three
For Hannah, Christmas Day passed in a rainy haze of food, presents, stress and sewing. Her five-year-old daughter, Jemima, was up at four and then six and by seven she was dragging her stocking behind her and clambering onto Hannah’s bed, jabbing her forehead to wake her up.
Hannah, her sister, Robyn, her brother, her brother’s boyfriend and her parents had all gone to bed at one in the morning – each having been working on a job concerning either the dress or Christmas Day.
If Hannah had the time and breathing space to have taken a step back from the proceedings she would have realised how lovely it was – all of them dotted about her parents’ kitchen either sewing or chopping or reading the cooking instructions for the turkey. Her dad walking round making sure everyone’s glasses were topped up, her mum, Clarice, reminiscing about bygone Christmases while her sister challenged the memories and her brother, Dylan, asked Hannah annoying questions:
‘So you think it was Harry Fontaine or you know it was Harry Fontaine? I mean, did he just look like him or was it him?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hannah said, pins in her mouth, kneeling in front of the dressmaker’s dummy hemming the silk skirt of Annie’s wedding dress.
‘Well why didn’t you ask him?’ Her brother made a face.
‘Because he wasn’t very friendly – just watching my panic, all smug.’
Her brother paused his flicking through the recipe book. Always the one to look busy but not actually do anything. ‘We ate at his restaurant once when we were in New York – The Bonfire – do you remember?’ he said, glancing over to where his partner Tony was helping Hannah’s sister ice the Christmas cake. Tony nodded without looking up.
Her brother went on, ‘He came out the kitchen and asked a table to leave because they were all on their mobile phones. Can you imagine? Just clapped his hands and pointed to the door. They were so embarrassed. You could see the whole restaurant sliding their phones from their tables and into their pockets.’
‘He looked a bit of a pain,’ Hannah said.
Tony glanced up from the cake that was being edged with tiny gingerbread houses like a wraparound street scene and said, ‘Very good-looking though.’
Hannah shook her head. ‘I didn’t notice.’
She saw her mum look up sharply from her beadwork, smile and then look back down again.
‘What?’ Hannah asked.
‘I met your father at a wedding,’ she said, standing up to grab another strip of beaded net from the table that needed finishing.
‘That’s nice,’ Hannah said, one brow raised as she carried on pinning the hem.
‘I’m just saying!’ Her mum laughed and went back to her chair to start on the new piece of fabric.
Now, as Hannah lay in bed and Jemima prodded her and she felt her back click into place as she turned over, the aching from the hours of sewing taking its toll, she thought, not for the first time, of couples who shared this role fifty-fifty. And she considered what a luxury that must be. To have someone else in the bed who would let her sleep for maybe another half an hour and take Jemima to look at the Christmas tree, or go with her to make Hannah a cup of tea. Wow, a cup of tea in bed. That would be a treat. She had a sudden image of the good-looking guy, Harry, in the cafe holding the sleeping, vomiting baby in his arms but dismissed it just as quickly – he was not the type to make someone a cup of tea in the morning.
‘Wake up, Mummy. Wake up!’
There was always Jemima. How old did someone have to be before they could be put to use to make tea?
‘I’m here, I’m here! I’m awake. OK.’
She was so tired she felt sick, but as Jemima snuggled up next to her Hannah leant down and smelled her hair. All soft and warm and sleepy like when she was a baby. Her warm little pyjama-clad body pressed up close to Hannah, the grin splitting her face in two as she pulled chocolates and light-up pens and crayons out of her stocking made Hannah remember the last five Christmases that had gone by. And think how different each one had been. The early years when Jemima just shook the Christmas tree and all the decorations fell off, while Hannah was still in the shocked new parent daze, to now when she stood and stared wide-eyed at the Christmas lights in the street, cried at Santa in John Lewis, petted reindeer at the farm, and sang loud and out of tune as an octopus in the bizarre nursery nativity, making Hannah shed a little tear and Dylan stand up and clap while other parents ssh’d him. They were a little unit now. The epicentre. The two of them tightly bound with her relatives added on like pompoms.
‘Wakey wakey!’ Her brother barged in holding a tray with four cups of tea and a packet of chocolate digestives.
Tony followed behind, looking a bit sheepish in his satin smoking-jacket dressing gown. ‘Hello, Hannah,’ he said, clearly embarrassed to be in her bedroom.
‘Move over, squirt, make room for us all.’ Dylan shovelled Jemima over, making her giggle, and plonked himself down on the bed. Tony took the armchair in the corner, crossing his legs out in front of him and resting them on the corner of the bed. Robyn came in a couple of minutes later, her hair all askew, her glasses on wonky, complaining about how early it was. ‘Any why don’t we have stockings any more? It seems really unfair,’ she said, curling up at the end of the bed.
‘Because we’re forty,’ Dylan said, incredulous.
‘Yeah but I like a stocking and it’s Christmas. There shouldn’t be an age limit on a stocking.’
Jemima looked up from where she was unwrapping the foil off a chocolate Santa and said a little warily, as if she didn’t quite mean it, ‘You can share my stocking, Aunty Robyn.’
Robyn tipped her head and smiled. ‘Thank you, Jem, that’s very kind. But that’s all yours and you should enjoy it. I will have a chocolate coin though.’
Hannah sat back against her big white cushion and took a sip of the piping hot tea her brother had made.
As she looked at the mug, almost surprised that her cup-of-tea wish had been so easily granted, she realised that the actual idea of someone else coming into this set-up was unthinkable. Who could they be that she would allow them to sit here as part of this precious Christmas morning?
The door bashed open again as her parents appeared. ‘What a lovely scene. All my family together.’ Clarice put her hand up to her chest and smiled. ‘This is the reason I had you all.’
‘Except for Hannah, because she was a mistake.’ Dylan laughed around his chocolate digestive.
‘She was not a mistake,’ Clarice said with a scowl. ‘She was the perfect surprise.’
Hannah rolled her eyes. Ten years younger than her twin siblings, there was no doubting she had been quite a massive mistake – surprise – whatever they wanted to call it. But actually it was her parents’ decision to keep her, even though she had so clearly been a mistake, that had been the main deciding factor in her decision to keep Jemima. That if they had decided to get rid of their mistake, then she wouldn’t have been born.
Hannah
