Miss You (9 page)

The band started a new carol.

‘Little donkey, little donkey, on the dusty road . . .’

In my panic, I hadn’t seen Hope standing right next to the conductor. She was adamantly refusing to hold the hand of the worried-looking woman with the collection box.

‘Stop that huggy stuff!’ Hope shouted, as I squeezed her ever so tightly in my arms. ‘Stop it, I said.’

She fell asleep on the train home, a picture of innocence, her hand clasped around the giraffe’s neck, his soft face next to hers. When I thought about it calmly, it was
astonishing that she had found her way through the store and back to the band. Didn’t that just prove that she was as intelligent as any other child, if not more so? That would be something
to tell Mrs Corcoran.

Or not. Because that would involve admitting that I’d lost her.

A middle-aged woman sitting opposite us with her Christmas shopping nodded and smiled.

‘Bless her!’

‘You should have seen her earlier,’ I said. ‘Screaming blue murder!’

‘You don’t ever want to criticize your own,’ she admonished me. ‘There’ll be plenty of people in life who’ll do that for you.’

Normally, I’d have explained that I wasn’t Hope’s mother, but those cataclysmic seconds, minutes – I don’t even know how long it was – without her, had made
me realize that Hope was so much more important than anything else. It was suddenly clear as an epiphany that I had a choice: I could either go on thinking life was unfair and getting all bitter
and resentful, or just get on with looking after her. It was actually a relief. And it was true what Brendan said the last time I’d had a bit of a moan on the phone. Not studying English
Literature didn’t stop me reading books, did it?

I thought of something Mum often used to say.
If you do something with a happy heart, it will bring you joy.

Or as Doll put it, because she was the only person I ever told about the incident:

‘You lost Hope, but then you found it again.’

As the days grew shorter, I began to feel as if London was my home. Autumn sharpened the experience of living in the city. We came out of our afternoon lectures into darkness,
with street lights sparkling in the rain and the air steaming with appetizing wafts of spicy food. Shivering throngs at dripping bus stops were cheerfully united in suffering. In summer, it felt
more like being a tourist; if you were there as winter approached, it was because you had to be.

On Bonfire Night Lucy, Toby and I joined the crowds of people trudging up Primrose Hill and gazed over the vast, illuminated map of London spread out below us. As we oohed and aahed at the
firework display, it was obvious that Toby and I both fancied Lucy. There was an unspoken competition between us, which she pretended not to see.

On the first day of the holidays, most of the students loaded up with dirty washing and headed out of town. Lucy was eager to see her family, Toby to be reunited with his
school friends; Nash was flying off to see her father. Everyone else was looking forward to the thing I was dreading: Christmas at home.

I kept finding reasons not to leave, spending mornings studying in the library for the January exams, and afternoons in the National Gallery, working my way from the Renaissance to
fin-de-siècle Paris. When I discovered that the National Theatre had a batch of cheap tickets available on the day for the evening performance, I headed south instead of north on my morning
run, crossing the steely grey Thames as the first commuters began to spill across the bridge, and standing in the box-office queue, with the cold river air slicing through to my bones.

The day before Christmas Eve, it occurred to me that I hadn’t yet bought any presents, which provided an excuse to delay my departure for another few hours. In the past, my mother had
always bought our presents for us: from me, after-dinner mints for her and liqueur chocolates for my father. From Ross, a collection of guest soaps and a set of golf balls. The theory was that we
paid her back out of our pocket money, but we never did. We were responsible for wrapping, although paper, scissors and Sellotape were thoughtfully placed on our beds beside the gifts, and on
Christmas morning she would feign surprise as the parcels were opened. This year, I was determined that my mother would be genuinely delighted when she opened her gift from me, even though I
didn’t have the slightest idea what to buy her.

I made my way to Selfridges, where we used to be taken to see Father Christmas as children. Afterwards, my father, Ross and I would tuck into generous salt-beef sandwiches with lashings of
mustard and gherkin at the Brass Rail, while my mother sought advice about face creams and tested lipstick colours on the back of her hand in the perfumery department. Then we’d drive down
Regent Street, Ross and me in the back seat, craning our heads to see the lights.

The old-fashioned revolving door at the centre of the store triggered a memory of Ross pushing as fast as he could to whirl unsuspecting shoppers off-balance. One section of the ground floor was
a sturdy, masculine kind of place where I found a range of gifts for men and bought a matching tartan-covered hip-flask and scorecard holder in a faux-wooden box. On the more feminine side of the
store, I chose a Yardley boxed set of talc and bath oil tied with lavender ribbon and stood in the line for the till.

In front of me, there was a tall woman with a fidgety little girl in one hand and a couple of boxes in the other. Her gift sets looked much more sophisticated than mine and I became a little
anxious about the Yardley. She was talking to the child so patiently that I was about to pluck up the courage to ask her opinion, but then it was her turn at the till, and, as she delved into her
shoulder bag, the little girl shot off through the legs of the shoppers.

I was suddenly at the front of the queue.

‘Can I help you?’

I picked up the black, blue and silver box the woman had abandoned and weighed it against mine.

‘Girlfriend or mother?’ demanded the shop assistant.

I could feel the colour spreading across my face and burning the tips of my ears.

‘Mother,’ I murmured.

A small, knowing smile completed my humiliation.

‘Probably safer with the Yardley, then,’ she said, taking it from my hand.

For a moment, I was tempted to buy the other box out of sheer defiance. Perhaps my mother was younger and trendier than she assumed? Perhaps I would give it to Lucy? We’d made tentative
plans to meet up between Christmas and New Year. But I had no idea what perfume, if any, she used.

My father picked me up at the station, leaning across the passenger seat to open my door.

‘They’re saying it might snow.’ He was something of an amateur weather forecaster and there was a mahogany barometer in our hall, but the statement was freighted with deeper
layers of meaning.

‘Let’s hope not,’ I said.

We both sat in silence, staring straight ahead as if to face down any stray snowflakes for the duration of the short drive home.

There was the usual wreath of holly and tartan ribbon on the door and a real Christmas tree in the hall, but the Blue Peter advent crown that Ross and I had made the winter we both had measles
had been retired. My mother emerged from the kitchen in her festive apron. Her hands were covered in flour, so we air-kissed, and then she looked me up and down as if she was expecting me to have
changed.

At supper, in our rarely used dining room, my father was eager to catch me out with questions about the working of organs and glands. I remembered him behaving in a similar way towards Ross
early on in his training. Perhaps Nash was right about him being a failed doctor? Ross had been more combative than me, unafraid to challenge him. My reticence simply made my father more
persistent. And yet, when my mother said, ‘For goodness’ sake, leave him alone, Gordon!’ I almost wished he would keep going, because the silence in the room was so acute, it was
like an inaudible scream of pain.

The dining table was polished to a high shine, the glasses and cutlery twinkled. With all her attention to cleanliness and propriety, my mother had made the place as sterile as my father’s
surgery.

‘More wine?’ asked my mother.

I had barely touched my glass, but hers had been filled and emptied three times. The neck of the bottle tinkled slightly against its rim. My father stared at it. She put the bottle carefully
down and picked up her glass. Then, the doorbell rang.

‘Who on earth?’ said my father.

‘Probably carol singers!’ My mother seemed almost feverish at the distraction. When she opened the front door, the sound that filtered through to the dining room from the hall was
not a song, but an exaggerated squeal of delight.

‘What a lovely surprise!’ Her voice became louder as she walked down the hall towards the dining room. ‘Guess who, Gordon? Angus?’

Ross’s girlfriend Charlotte followed her into the room. She was wearing a long lilac coat with a shawl collar that on anyone less elegant or slim might have looked like a dressing gown,
but made her look like a film star. She was holding a cube wrapped in incongruously cheap and cheerful wrapping paper.

‘Please don’t get up!’ she said. ‘I don’t want to disturb your supper.’

‘You’re not!’ I blurted, ridiculously grateful to her for changing the dynamic.

‘Let me get you a drink!’ My father clicked into the jovial-host mode I’d forgotten he was capable of.

The dining room felt nice, normal again.

‘Something soft.’ Charlotte put down the parcel and slid off soft black leather gloves. ‘I’m in my car.’

‘Your own car? How exciting!’ said my mother.

‘It’s just a little Peugeot.’

My father opened a bottle of tonic water. Ice cubes cracked in the glass as the fizz frothed over them and a faint, bitter aroma drifted across the table. ‘Peugeot, eh?’

With a shrug of Charlotte’s shoulders, her coat hung itself over the back of her chair, revealing a slippery satin lining. Underneath she was wearing a plain black polo neck and black
jeans. Her long hair was so black and shiny, it almost looked blue; her complexion was flawless. In the photo of her and Ross on the living-room mantelpiece, dressed up as the Addams family for a
Halloween ball, there was something almost vampiric about her beauty, but now, with her lips pale from the cold, she was like a model shot by David Bailey in the sixties: stunning, and somehow a
tiny bit vulnerable.

‘So you’re a houseman now?’ said my father. ‘Or am I meant to say “houseperson”?’

The pale lips formed a thin smile.

‘Any areas you’re keen to specialize in? General practice?’

‘Cardiac surgery,’ she replied, evenly.

For some reason, I let out a little snort of laughter.

I’d been in awe of Charlotte from the first time Ross brought her home the summer at the end of his second year. My dad had just built the hot tub on the decking. Charlotte had worn a tiny
white bikini. I’d never seen a woman wearing so little before. She’d been tantalizingly aloof. I couldn’t even tell if she’d noticed me behind her film-star sunglasses.

‘How are you enjoying Medicine, Angus?’ she asked.

‘Fine. Hard work, obviously,’ I mumbled, thirteen years old again.

‘Not as hard as being a heart surgeon,’ my mother said. ‘Goodness! I should think that’s the most difficult—’

‘It’s a competitive area,’ Charlotte acknowledged.

‘I wonder . . .’ my mother began.

Her eyes had the watery, unfocused look that meant she was thinking about what path Ross would have chosen.

‘Anyway,’ said Charlotte, taking a sip of her tonic water. ‘That’s for the future.’

‘Good to have ambitions, nevertheless,’ said my father. It didn’t sound as though he rated her chances. ‘So, you’re going home for Christmas?’

Her mother’s house was just a few miles from ours, though Charlotte and Ross had met at uni.

‘I’ve fucked women on five continents,’ he’d told me once, as he shaved before a date. ‘When the finest fuck lives five minutes down the road.’

‘Just today and tomorrow. I’m working Christmas Day,’ Charlotte replied.

‘Welcome to real life!’ said my father.

I could think of only one Christmas when he had been called upon to prescribe antibiotics for an abscess.

‘And New Year?’ my mother asked quietly.

‘Yes, New Year too.’

‘Probably just as well,’ said my father.

‘Yes,’ said Charlotte.

The silence seemed endless.

‘How lovely of you to come to see us, though! Gordon, isn’t it lovely?’

Charlotte pushed the parcel towards my mother.

‘Just a little something,’ she said.

‘You shouldn’t have! But how lovely!’ said my mother. ‘I must go and get yours.’

From the length of time she was out of the room, I wondered if my mother really had purchased a gift for Charlotte, or whether she was wrapping something up that she had bought on the off-chance
that, even with all her meticulous Christmas lists, she had overlooked someone.

‘Where are you living?’ I asked Charlotte, to break the silence.

‘Battersea. Do you know it?’

‘No.’

‘It’s quite convenient.’

‘I’ve been to the National Theatre.’

To produce this howling non-sequitur, my thought processes had jumped from Battersea to the only place I knew south of the river.

Charlotte regarded me disdainfully.

‘Lucky you,’ she said, with a thin edge of irony.

‘You can get cheap tickets on the day,’ I said, for the benefit of my father, who was looking perplexed. ‘I run,’ I added.

‘I run too,’ said Charlotte.

‘Perhaps you’ll run into each other!’ my father tried to join in, but his attempt at a joke simply closed the conversation down.

My mother returned with a soft parcel and handed it to Charlotte.

‘Shall I open it now?’ Charlotte asked.

She tore the paper to reveal a red knitted glove and scarf set from Marks & Spencer.

‘Mmm,’ she said, draping the scarf around her neck. ‘This will keep me nice and warm!’