Plain Matilda Rowlinson brought him a mince pie. As he talked to her, his wife filled his glass with more negus. They smiled happily at each other, not needing to speak. The wine, flavoured with cinnamon and nutmeg, ran across his palate, mingling with the rich taste of the mincemeat.
‘Do you think God approves of mince pies, Matilda?’ Squire asked in sudden mischief. ‘Or does he think they’re ungodly?’
She laughed. ‘I think he leaves it to each of us to decide for ourselves.’
A good answer on the spur of the moment, he thought. All the best gods should leave it to the customer to decide.
It was a question of perspective. Periods of time seemed better or worse according to what followed. When you were young and had seen nothing follow, then time was special. So with God; he was special until you had seen certain things happen, Belsen, authorized murder in Yugoslavia, or your father’s face eaten by dogs.
He strolled over to his sister and slid his arm through hers.
‘How’s things?’
‘Oh, extremely cheerful, all things considered. And you? I was just thinking that with a few of these neguses under my belt I could perhaps face looking at mother. Would you come up with me?’
‘If you like.’
‘Do you remember, people used to say “Bearing up”, if you asked them how they were.’
Deirdre filled her glass and they went upstairs. Her boys, Douglas and Tom, were playing with a Slinky on the stairs. ‘I’ll be down soon,’ Deirdre told them, ‘I’m just going to inspect your grandmother.’
Her defensive facetiousness fell away from her once they were in the small room on the attic floor. Squire stood by the window, gazing out at the iron landscape, listening to his sister’s choked sobs.
He forced himself to speak. ‘She went so suddenly when she went. A week and she was gone. Ten days ago, she was joking, and quizzing me about “Frankenstein”… Teresa had been having bad dreams. She dreamed that a black figure was trying to get into the house. I told her that we would get a better burglar alarm, but now I wonder … Well, it’s easy to believe in portents at such a time – death makes everything irrational.’
Deirdre said, with a forced distinctness, ‘I blame myself that I never came over to see the old girl when I phoned and you said she was unwell. You know what it is, just before Christmas one’s always busy. It was end of term and we had to go over and see Grace in her school play, and Douglas had a cold and Tom had carol-singing and a party … Still, I should have bloody well come over. I can see that now. Poor old thing. I don’t fancy being a corpse, do you?’
Making the effort, he went over to her and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘There’s always guilt at these times. Filthy death, filthy guilt. Let it wash round you, don’t let it stay. We could all do better by everyone; it must be a cosmic law or something.’
‘Old Rowlinson could explain it, I don’t doubt.’
He could no longer bring himself to look down at his mother’s body. ‘I’ll put the lid on, if you’ve had enough.’
‘Oh, I don’t think I could bear to see you do that. Let me get out of here first.’ But she made no move to leave. She adjusted her hair. ‘Why haven’t you got flowers in here? Why hasn’t Teresa put some flowers in the room?’
‘A grey Christmas. Do you remember when we were kids and it snowed heavily just before Christmas, and we got stuck on the bridge at Wisbech? And father just laughed. He was enjoying it.’
‘They’ve both gone now. Mother was such a repository of family history – I can feel it already, there’s going to be a huge vacuum all down the left-hand side, here …’ She sketched a large position vaguely in the air.
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do. Bow to the Grim Reaper, damn him … Irrational … I keep having an irrational feeling that it’s the cold emanating from her that chills the landscape, that she’s become a dreadful natural force, that … it’s as if the corpse erupted out of the dead landscape, the way she keeps bursting into my thoughts …’
‘What’s Adrian said about it?’
‘You know Adrian; he never says much about anything.’
‘It beats me why you wanted to have the body lying here over Christmas. Bit morbid, isn’t it?’
He shrugged. ‘It was her home, after all.’
Deirdre went over to the door with a somewhat slack-shouldered walk he had noted in her lately. She put her hand on the doorknob, then hesitated.
‘Are you afraid of being alone in this house, Tom?’
‘How do you mean? Ghosts?’
She nodded. ‘Ghosts and things like that. Father, for instance.’
‘That sort of thing doesn’t worry me.’
She laughed with a partly derisive note. ‘Of course, you’re so tough. You’ve killed chaps in Yugoslavia – I try to forget that rather nasty side to your character. All the same … What about Teresa? Isn’t she scared? How’s she going to be when you’re trooping round the world doing your TV series?’
‘Oh, that won’t take many weeks.’
‘It’ll alter your lives.’
‘Not at all. And I don’t think she’s afraid of ghosts. She’s never said.’
‘I’d have thought you’d have asked. It’s an obvious enough question, stuck in a place like this. Really, I don’t think I’ve ever liked Pippet Hall, not even when I was a small child … I wouldn’t care to live here. Won’t Teresa be lonely?’
‘She keeps very busy. Her decorative insects are really developing into something tremendously attractive, don’t you think? Aren’t they original?’
Opening the door, casting a last suspicious glance at the coffin, Deirdre said, ‘You, aren’t you lonely here on your own?’
Hesitantly. ‘I am afraid of my own loneliness. But that goes wherever I go. If anything, it’s less here, where I belong.’
‘I can’t stand it when Marsh is away from Blakeney. I’m worse now I’m getting older. He’s already put in for, and been accepted for, some bloody dig on some bloody Greek island next summer. I may go with him. Though you can’t see me living in a tent exactly, can you?’
‘You aren’t quite the pioneering type.’
‘Me perched on some bloody outcrop of Hellenic rock, while Marsh grubs up bits of broken urn?’ She laughed at the ridiculous picture she had conjured.
Squire closed and locked the door behind them.
‘What did you do that for?’ his sister asked. ‘Afraid she’ll get loose?’
They descended together to the lower regions, from which seasonal aromas of roast turkey, sausages, bacon, stuffing, and other fleshly delights arose.
The meal took its accustomed course. First, champagne all round and a loyal toast to the sovereign; that tradition must have gone back as far as Matthew Squire himself.
The toast held special meaning, for the Queen was spending Christmas at Sandringham; it was easy to imagine her with her family, sitting down to table only twenty miles away.
After the toast, Scottish smoked salmon, followed by the main course with all its ramifications – the glistening brown barrel of bird attended by a fleet of small china boats containing gravy, bread sauce, cranberry sauce, and blackcurrant jelly. Then came pudding,