‘And Happy Christmas to you too, Gloria,’ said Tara sweetly.
The present-giving revealed that Gloria had outdone herself in the gift stakes this year, with Tiffany cuff links and an exquisite dress shirt for Finn and a sandwich toaster for Tara.
It had been downhill all the way from then, to the extent that Finn had made sure that the television in the den, the room which backed onto the dining room, was blaring loudly so that the sound of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang made up for the lack of conversation at the dinner table.
Making small talk while having one ear cocked for all her favourite tunes from the film, Tara wished she was in the den watching the TV instead.
After dinner, Gloria and Desmond piled on extra sweaters and coats to go for a walk in the December gloom. Finn, snug in the den with Tara and a fresh bottle of red wine, waved them off, saying he was too full of that fabulous dinner to walk anywhere.
‘Promise me that we can leave the country next Christmas,’ groaned Tara, positioning herself on the couch so that her feet were on Finn’s lap. He idly massaged her feet, giving in to a quick tickle now and then.
‘The Caribbean?’ he suggested.
‘We can camp out on the side of a mountain without a tent as long as we’re on our own,’ Tara said, then regretted being so blunt. ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she added, ‘it’s just that your mum and I…’ she tailed off.
‘Chill out, love,’ said Finn, reaching for his wine glass. ‘Christmas is the ultimate endurance test. I don’t know why the reality TV people haven’t made a game show where they stick a family in one house over Christmas and see how long they last before there’s bloodshed over who gets to pull the last cracker.’ He tickled her toes, then moved his fingers up to caress her calf. ‘I hate Christmas.’
But he shouldn’t hate Christmas, Tara reflected. The holiday wasn’t an endurance test at Kinvarra. She loved spending it with her family. How sad for Finn that he didn’t enjoy it with his family.
The only light relief came when Finn and Desmond dragged out the box of Trivial Pursuit and inveigled Tara to play with them.
‘What about your mother?’ Tara murmured to Finn.
‘She doesn’t like board games,’ he replied.
‘Count me in,’ Tara said loudly and settled down to see how many pieces of pie she could win.
By the time Desmond won, it was time for some of Gloria’s sandwiches with coffee and Tara, who thought she’d never be able to face food again, gamely managed two crustless triangles to be polite.
‘Do you not like spiced ham sandwiches, then?’ demanded Gloria.
Feeling like a foie gras goose, Tara took another sandwich and willed for the day to be over soon. At least tomorrow was the occasion of the drinks party, which meant Gloria would have a whole host of other people to be bitchy to and might forget about Tara.
‘I’ll tape the rest of The Untouchables,’ Desmond suggested as Finn and Tara headed for bed.
In their bedroom, Finn flopped onto the bed and began to crawl under the duvet fully dressed. ‘I’m wrecked,’ he groaned.
‘Finn, you’ve got to take your clothes off,’ complained Tara, trying to slip off his shoes.
‘I’m too tired,’ he said, not helping the undressing process by lying like a giant slug in the bed.
‘Cold sponge,’ warned Tara.
‘Not the sponge,’ said Finn, beginning to giggle.
He was still giggling when he sat up and let Tara pull off his shirt.
‘I love you, Tara Miller, d’ya know that?’ he said, kissing her drunkenly.
‘I love you too,’ she replied, ‘although I don’t know why.’
He leaned against her, nuzzling into her shoulder, making murmuring noises.
‘Finn, please stand up so we can take your trousers off,’ she said.
But Finn was asleep. Sighing, Tara finished undressing her husband and covered him with the duvet. Honestly, he was like an overgrown teenager sometimes. Only a big kid would drink too much at his parents’ house and have to be put to bed.
Stella’s fellow solicitor and colleague, Vicki, was insistent that she suffered from SAD. ‘Seasonal Affected Disorder,’ she repeated for Stella’s benefit. ‘It means I suffer from depression caused by not enough light. And look,’ Vicki gestured out of the office kitchen window where a square of foggy January sky could be seen through the grubby glass, ‘look at that weather.’
‘It’s called winter,’ Stella said, taking the milk from the fridge. Full fat, she realised, putting it back and reaching for the skimmed. Why had she eaten all those chocolates over Christmas? Her camel trousers, normally slightly loose, were biting into her belly reproachfully.
‘I hate January,’ Vicki moaned, pouring hot water onto her low-calorie chocolate drink. A statuesque redhead who was five foot nine in her fishnets, Vicki was always on a diet until about noon, when the thought of nothing but crispbread and low fat yoghurts made her abandon hopes to slither into a size fourteen.
‘Join the club,’ Stella said with a sigh.
Vicki looked at her friend in surprise. Stella was normally so cheerful. Nothing got her down: not torrential rain when they were rushing back from lunch with no umbrella, not clients from hell who demanded double attention and were late paying their fees, not even Mr McKenna, one of the senior partners and a creep who could put even Vicki off her food for a week with one lascivious leer down her blouse at her 38DDs.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’ she asked.
Stella shook her head. ‘It’s just January blues,’ she murmured, moving aside to let someone else into the kitchen. A mere cubicle tucked away beside the post room on the ground floor, it was barely big enough for two, never mind three people. Of course, the partners never ventured into it: they had tea and coffee delivered by their assistants whenever they felt like it. Stella, who was the most senior of the conveyancing solicitors, Vicki and another lawyer named Jerry Olson all shared an assistant and, theoretically, could have ordered tea and coffee with abandon. But Lori was run off her feet as it was answering their phones, without making them coffee as well. Or at least, that was Lori’s excuse.
They took the lift up to the fourth floor which was where the property department was situated. Property or conveyancing wasn’t seen as the sexy part of law: the hot favourite at the moment was the family law department and Lawson, Wilde & McKenna handled many of the highest-profile divorces around. The family law offices were huge. ‘Lots of space for exes to scream and hurl things at each other without actually injuring an innocent bystander,’ explained Henry Lawson whenever anybody remarked on the vast conference rooms on the second floor.
Conveyancing, which ‘earns LW & M a fortune’ as Vicki said furiously, was relegated to the less prestigious fourth floor, in the grand-looking but unmodernised part of the building where draughty windows, elderly heating and prewar plumbing reigned.
The fourth-floor conference room was the nicest part of their floor and was decorated in some style with a vast pink-veined marble fireplace, a mahogany table almost big enough to play tennis on, and exotic Indonesian silk wallpaper that had survived decades of cigar smoke. The staff called it the Gin Palace because the maroon-coloured walls made it look like the sort of room where colonial types would have sipped gin slings and moaned about the natives.
‘Two calls holding for