Use the Good China

It was a Wednesday when I noticed the tree. Up the hill from the car park near my office, left at the junction, then all the way along the road that separates the park from the terrace of Edwardian brick houses, their porched front doors and gracious bay windows mirroring one another in friendly pairs, like each house had its favoured neighbour, all the way down the row. After that, it’s another left turn, then another, and then a right. I wasn’t really thinking about it after I saw the tree though, with its fairy lights shining dimly in the afternoon sun, no twin in the adjacent bay. I was just going on automatic pilot, thinking about that tree, imagining why anyone puts a Christmas tree up in June. I suppose I did that drive on automatic pilot most days.

It was warm enough to eat dinner in the garden that night. It had been hot all week, proper June weather, and by the time we got home from work and shepherded the kids through those turbulent family squalls that can blow up fast by the end of the school year, taking the plates outside seemed like too much effort. But who knows, in England, when the last warm evening might be, so that night I took a damp cloth out and wiped down the outside table, put knives and forks and a jug of water under a fly net, cut a handful of sweet-peas and put them in a glass, and by the time the food was cooked, it was no effort at all.

“I saw one of the houses on Park Road has a Christmas tree up.” I said.

“Weird,” said Mick.

“I know. Maybe they had to bring Christmas forward.” I said.

“Maybe they forgot to take it down.” Lilah added. Eddie pushed a green bean in a semi-circle around a piece of potato and said nothing.

“Eat your beans Eddie.” Mick waved his own fork towards the bean, like maybe Eddie hadn’t noticed what it was he was toying with.

“I picked those this morning Eddie, they’re the ones you planted in Spring, remember?”

Eddie lifted his gaze from his plate and the bean lay still. He stared at me, then speared a potato and put it in his mouth.

“I thought it might be nice to go to the beach on Saturday? If the weather stays nice?” I hadn’t thought it at all. Not until I said it.

Lilah groaned, and Eddie glared at her. No one needed reminding about the last trip to the beach. It had been nearly a year though. Maybe we had all matured since then. Maybe it would be like it had been two years ago, when Eddie had still wanted to dig out a moat, and Lilah had still wanted to bring buckets of water that sunk away, leaving the sandy trench spongy floored and empty.

“Just a thought,” I offered, “if we want to. We could get some board games out, get some snacks, that kind of thing, if you prefer. Do something together.”

Eddie pushed back his chair and walked into the gloom of the house without looking back, and in the stark light of the sun, the frown lines on Mick’s face seemed cartoonishly sharp.

*

The tree was still lit on my way to work the next day, white pinpricks more visible while the front of the house was in shade. At work there were cakes and a banner, and someone – probably Jo, it was usually Jo – had Sellotaped “Happy Retirement” balloons in blue and pink and yellow to the top corners of Diane’s monitor and the back of her swivel chair.

“Oh, gosh, so much fuss!” Diane said, coming into the office a convenient ten minutes past nine.

“Got to have a bit of a party for your last day!” said Jo, “Crack out the balloons before you leave us!” Diane smiled and picked up the card propped on her desk. “We Will Miss You” it said, over a picture of two smiling donkeys.

“How many years has it been?” one of us asked her, and she told us she had worked in this office for eighteen years, and in the old building on Fairfax Street before that, before the company moved, which we all knew already, but you have to ask, all the same.

“You going to be keeping that husband busy, with all your plans?” one of us asked, and everyone chuckled except Diane, who managed a strained smile and offered sausage rolls in a Tupperware tub around again, and I wondered what had changed. Diane had been so against retiring just this Easter gone, telling everyone how vague and irritable her husband had been since he’d stopped work the previous autumn, and how she was planning to work until life made her stop, and that they might be taking her out in a casket if she got her way. I thought about my Dad, who'd gone so quickly downhill, so soon after retiring. How he'd been there planting winter cabbages as the leaves began to turn golden, and how those cabbages had rotted in the ground, untended in the January rains. How we never got to eat them.

“What are you looking forward to then?” one of us asked, like we were passing the script around.

“Oh,” said Diane, softening, “My daughter and her family are moving back from Australia in the autumn, you know, to be nearer. So they’ll be with us for Christmas. Good to be together at Christmas.”

*

I picked Lilah up on my way home, my Thursday detour past the dance school. I watched her change her shoes, long angular legs concertinaed so that she could slide her fingers in at the heels and push her toes into her school shoes.

“Good day?” I asked.

“Fine.”

“What did you do today?”

“Nothing.”

“Hey, do you want to stop for ice cream on the way home?” I asked her, but she didn’t answer.

When I lifted my foot from the accelerator, allowing the car to slow as the little café with the twenty one flavours came into view, she snarled “I am NOT stopping for ice cream.” I let the weight of my foot relax and the car sped on, leaving our ice-cream date behind.

At home she retreated upstairs. “Movie tonight?” I shouted at her heels.

Mick was in the kitchen already, putting away shopping.

“How’s Eddie?” I asked.

“Fine, I think.” Over his shoulder I watched him stacking the box of new eggs on top of the old ones.

“You should rotate the stock,” I told him.

“What?”

“Rotate the stock. Put the new stuff at the back so we use up the old stuff first.”

He sighed and swapped the egg boxes.

“How are you?” I asked.

Mick turned and picked a bag of carrots up from the counter. “Fine. Why?”

“You know, just, wondering how you are. You okay?”

“They didn’t have fish fingers,” his voice was muffled from inside a carrier bag on the floor.

“No one eats fish fingers anymore.” I told him.

*

On Friday morning, the curtains were closed, on Park Road. The weather had stayed hot, and the humid closeness of the office put me on edge.

“I’m going to get some air.” I almost whispered it, but Livia was on her feet already.

“I’ll come with,” she said, “I need to grab some lunch.”

She stepped towards the door, her fresh young face open and relaxed, and for a moment I wondered if I might cry.

“Sorry,” I said, “I’m not going towards town,” and I fled from the look of shock on her face, out into the street, and up the steep hill, away from the bustle of lunchtime shoppers.

I started out strong, as if vigour could outpace the tears pricking at my eyes, but was too hot to walk far or fast, and I was slow and sweating by the time I drew alongside the church. The density of the shade of its north wall attested to the permanence of the thick walled building.

In the shadow, an empty bench faced out across the graveyard to the streets below, its cool gloom calling to me, an offering of sanctuary. I sat down, concentrating on slowing my breathing as I looked out, past Edith Moncrieff, loving sister, daughter and wife, past Charles Little, Died 1870, Eldest Beloved Son of Charles and Lileth, Also Lileth Little, Died 1902, Also Charles Little Snr, Died 1912. Past Mathilda Beresford, Forever Loved, and Jonathon “Grampy” Fletcher, Loving Father to Henry, William and Elizabeth, Grandfather to Sarah, Katherine, Jack, Lucy and Jon (JJ), and Loyal Husband to Mary, May He Rest In Peace. I looked out over stone and grass to the bustling pavements where office workers brushed past one another in rolled up sleeves and summer dresses, and I blew my nose and wiped my eyes and told myself how silly I was being, and yet still the tears welled and my heart felt unshuttered and exposed.

When my lunch break was up, I walked back to work. “I’m sorry,” I said to Priya, though it was meant for Livia really, “I’m not feeling myself at all. Would it make things too difficult if I were to go home this afternoon?”

*

On Park Road, the lights from the Christmas tree caught my attention as I passed, though I hadn’t been looking for them, it was not for me to pry.

*

When I got home, I felt quite a bit better, well enough to make a trifle for dinner, or maybe for Saturday lunch. I remembered how much Lilah had resisted trying trifle, until Eddie had coaxed her into eating one mouthful with that king of sibling competitiveness rooted in trust, and how her delight had made us all laugh, and how we liked to tell that story like a ritual prayer wherever trifle was served, whether a summer dinner with my mum or Boxing Day lunch with Mick’s mum and dad. Perhaps, I thought, even though it was forecast to be hot, I might do a roast for lunch on Sunday. Sit down together for a change.

When Lilah got home, she was surly and flat, and I wondered whether something had happened at school. “Nothing,” she growled, when I asked, but I could tell it was something. She closeted herself in the bathroom, until Eddie banged on the bathroom door and told her to hurry up, and by the time the shouting stopped, the trifle didn’t seem like the right thing at all.

“Can I go to Matty’s tonight,” Eddie asked me, once he was showered.

“Remember the beach tomorrow morning” I said, and his face grew dark and sullen.

“Why do I have to go to the stupid beach?”

“I thought… I thought we could do something fun together.” My tone was light, I hoped, but the tenderness of my heart felt like it must surely be audible in my voice.

“Can’t you have fun without me?” he said, and left me, again, with the picture of his back, moving away.

I drove him to Matty’s myself. Mick said he could do it, that I looked tired, but I wanted to. On Park Road, the tree lights were still on, and in the park across from the houses, parents were pushing small children on the swings while under the big oak, older children, maybe Eddie’s age or thereabouts, were gathered in clustered groups.

“What time do you want picking up?” I asked.

“Dunno,” said Eddie, resenting even the offer of a lift.

“Approximately.” I said.

“Dunno. Midnight?” And I agreed, because otherwise...

I picked him up myself too. Mick was snoring on the sofa and Lilah had eaten in her room, citing a video call with her friends. In the dark, the Christmas tree was like a beacon, firelight in a fraught world. In the rearview mirror, I watched Eddie turn his head, keeping it in view as we passed. He said nothing to me, the whole way back.

At home, Mick had gone up to bed. “Are you going straight up?” I asked Eddie. “Do you need anything?” I was standing in the kitchen, he in the doorway, taller than me now, his face a changing landscape of adolescence, a foreigner gradually becoming known.

“Night,” he said. Then he stepped forward, so unexpectedly I nearly stepped back, and hugged me.

“Night,” I said. “Love you.” And then I was standing alone under the glaring spotlights again, my body still remembering the brief press of him against the indents his infancy had made in my flesh.

*

“The beach will be there next weekend,” Mick said. We were in the kitchen, just the two of us. I had gathered a deflated beach ball, two bottles of sunscreen and a Frisbee into a small pile on the kitchen surface, but I hadn’t put them into a bag.

“But the weather,” I said, “we can’t count on good weather next weekend, can we?”

“No.” Mick was slow and gentle, as if he were soothing a child. “But this won’t be the last hot Saturday this year, will it.”

“Who knows?” I could hear how I had started to sound like the child that needed soothing, but I couldn’t change it. “Who knows what might happen? We should do things when we can!”

By the time the children did come down, moving like sluggish poltergeists through the kitchen, opening cupboard doors, spreading crockery and cereal and milk about the surfaces, I had vacuumed the carpets and mown the grass and quelled the panic that had risen in me at the loss of the beach trip. “You haven’t lost anything,” Mick had said, “it was never going to happen,” and I had known he was right.

“Can you drive me to Sofia’s?” Lilah mumbled it into her cereal.

Eddie’s ears pricked up, though he didn’t lift his eyes from his phone screen. “Are you going to Sofia’s?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Hang on.” I sandwiched myself into the conversation. “I haven’t said I will take you anywhere yet.” Lilah glared at me, spoon raised before her face, and Eddie looked up at me. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take you to Sofia’s, but I want you home for dinner tonight.”

“Can you drop me in town then?” Eddie was already rising from the table.

*

In the end, all four of us got in the car.

“There’s that tree, look.” I pointed towards to where it stood in the bay window, proudly glowing into the June afternoon.

“Looks wrong” Eddie said.

“Yeah,” Lilah agreed, “why would anyone put a Christmas tree up and decorate it and everything at the exact furthest you can get from Christmas.”

“Maybe they just couldn’t wait for December” Eddie said, and though he had probably meant it flippantly, the car grew silent, and we were at the turning before Mick spoke.

“Maybe they’re having an Australian Christmas. You know, in the summer.”

Lilah sat forward, leaning into the centre of the car. “I reckon they’re having a magazine shoot,” she said, and Eddie punched her lightly on the shoulder.

“What was that for?” she shrilled.

“Dunno,” Eddie said. “You probably deserved it though.” But he was smiling as he said it, and when Lilah shot her own fist out in retaliation it hit home lightly, splaying into an octopus of writhing fingers, so that Eddie shrieked in surprise at being tickled.

*

Later, I served the trifle. Dinner had been piecemeal but at the announcement of dessert, Lilah and Eddie drifted in from their bedrooms and Mick came in from the garden. I had thought to wait for Sunday lunch, but Eddie was going to the cinema, and Mick wanted to cycle to the headland.

“Do you remember,” Eddie began, “when Lilah wouldn’t even let a spoonful of trifle near her?”

Mick put his hand on Lilah’s arm and laughed. “And the FACES you pulled.” He contorted his face into an improbably hideousness, and Lilah opened her mouth in protest, but she was smiling. Eddie loaded his spoon to airplane it towards Lilah, who pushed the spoon aside, spilling a yellow and red blob of trifle onto Mick’s t-shirt, pausing the incipient hubbub for a moment before laughter mushroomed across the table, and I, laughing too, wondered why laughing felt so close to crying.

*

On Monday, the tree was gone. From the street, the house looked the same as it had the week before, and by the evening, I wasn’t even certain which window I had looked in at to glimpse that season out of time.

Eddie left for university three years after that, and Lilah two years later. They’re grown now. Lilah has two children of her own, and Eddie has one on the way. They still come home, of course. Birthdays. Christmas. I tell them they don’t have to, they mustn’t worry about us, live their own lives, you know? Lilah tells me not to be ridiculous, of course she wants to come, and I am grateful for it. Eddie just tells me you never know what’s round the corner, and gives me a squeeze, which should be annoying, really, but it’s not.

Our lives keep moving on. They do, don’t they, right up until the end, speeding up and slowing down, but always moving on. But it stuck with me, spotting that tree on an ordinary Wednesday night. I don’t know why. I just think about it from time to time, that Christmas tree, baubles glinting, fairy lights barely making a dent against the midsummer sun, and the angel on top, half way between Heaven and Earth, arms spread wide in welcome, knowing what is to come.