David Szalay - London and the South-East

‘Where’s Heather?’ he says, after a moment.

Joan answers. ‘Um, I think she’s upstairs.’

‘I think we’re going to eat soon,’ Paul says. ‘The turkey needed a few more minutes.’

It takes a long time to serve the meal. Finally, they sit down. Just as they are about to start, Angela tings her glass and launches into a pious, long-winded toast — several minutes, including tributes to both Paul’s elder brother Chris, who lives in Rotterdam with his Dutch wife, and Geoff’s sister Jennifer, who lives in a nursing home near Cambridge — ending with the words, ‘So, to Heather.’ Everyone echoes this with drunken gusto, and they start to eat.

Outside, the dusk is leaden.

An hour later, and in the dark Heather is presenting the pudding, under its diaphanous blue ghost of flame. Her father made it himself. There is applause. Paul, now very drunk, wolf-whistles. Then the lights are switched on and it is served. While the plates are passed round, Angela — who quietly refused a portion herself, saying, ‘No, thank you, I can’t stand it’ — says, ‘Well, Geoff’s too modest to mention it, but he’s a published poet now.’

‘Published?’ Mike says. ‘Where?’

She ignores him. It is as if her face and Mike were magnets of the same polarity — wherever he is, her nose turns the other way.

‘ Where? ’ he says, and Geoff himself mumbles, ‘ Bucks Advertiser .’

Mike laughs.

‘Yes,’ Angela says. ‘He had a poem published in the Advertiser .’

‘Did you?’ says Joan. ‘How impressive.’ She smiles at Geoff, whose eyes are gloomily following the boat of brandy sauce as it circles the table. He knows that his wife will speak for him, and she does. ‘He did,’ she says. ‘And I’d like to read it to you.’

‘Oh God, can I go now, Mum?’ Marie says, in a petulant whine.

‘Don’t be so rude,’ Angela says.

Marie scowls at her. The children do not quite understand how they and Paul’s parents fit together — a perplexity that is entirely mutual.

Though expressionless, Geoff’s heavy face, with its prominent dark eyebrows and five o’clock shadow, has turned brick red. An embarrassed wall. ‘Really,’ he says, ‘I don’t know if this is the right time …’

‘It is the right time.’

‘Mum,’ Paul says, ‘if he doesn’t want you to …’

‘He does want me to.’

‘Do you?’

‘I don’t think it’s the right time,’ Geoff says moodily. His arms are tightly folded.

‘Why not? It’s a lovely poem. I’m sure everyone would love to hear it.’ And Angela looks particularly to Joan, who, with her ‘Did you? How impressive’, had shown such a kind interest in Geoff’s work.

‘Well …’ Joan says. ‘Of course, but …’

‘If you’re going to read it, just read it. Get it over with,’ Geoff says, pouring himself a full glass of red wine. He is, in fact, quite proud of the poem. Angela was not wrong when she insisted that he did want her to read it out. ‘It’s called “Sanatorium”,’ she says proudly. And in a slightly — only slightly — strange, otherworldly voice, she starts to read.

White, rectilinear,

on a green alp.

From the terrace —

white mountains.

Vegetable soup.

Fresh loaf.

Water from out of

the white mountains.

Glacial lake

in a bowl of rock.

Cowbells echo

from the white mountains.

High summer pasture —

lying in the grass

with closed eyes.

‘That’s really very nice,’ says Joan, following a well-mannered silence.

‘Thank you,’ Geoff mutters. He starts to eat his pudding. ‘This is very good,’ he says.

In the downstairs loo Paul blows his nose. The tiny frosted window is open a little and the temperature is more or less the same as outside. It smells of air-freshener, chemical cleanliness, a plasticky approximation of pine. He looks at himself in the mirror. His eyes are still slightly pink. Why had it happened? The tears. He does not know. He just feels unstable, easily upset. Perhaps that is why the poem touched him so unexpectedly. His father had listened to it without expression on his brick-red face. Paul had not known, or suspected, that he wrote poetry. And he would not have suspected, either, the feelings which the poem timidly tried to express. It had made him sharply aware of how little he knew his father. As he stood up, murmuring, ‘I’m just going to the loo,’ he had heard him say, in answer to a question of Joan’s, ‘Well I think I’m quite influenced by Japanese haiku.’ I think I’m quite influenced by Japanese haiku! Who was this man? Paul did not know him, whoever he was. He knew his father as a tense, distant, empirically-minded headmaster. The laughterless driver of a black Rover (property of Imperial Chemical Industries) who liked snooker and political memoirs and watching the news. A seventies manager with a hairstyle like early Arthur Scargill and a collection of cardigans the colour of autumn leaves. A former pipe smoker, resentful at not having had a university education. This was the man Paul knew. Haiku had nothing to do with him.

Nor lying in a high-summer pasture, listening to the lazy clatter of cowbells. Though the poem’s longing was pathetically naive, Paul sees — still sniffling in the nippy loo — that he too is in love with the idea of hiding himself somewhere. Somewhere impossibly pure. How he would love that. It shocked him, though, that his father would even imagine such things. Why had it shocked him? He does not know why he found it so upsetting either. He blows his nose a final time, and flushes the toilet.

In the lounge, Mike’s CD is playing loudly.

So here it IS, merry Christmas,

Everybody’s having fun …

‘ There you are,’ Heather says. ‘We’re opening the presents.’

‘Okay.’

Paul sits at the table and lights a cigarette. In his dark, anxious, weepy, drunken mood, the thought of unwrapping presents depresses him. With something approaching disgust, he watches his father claw inexpertly at the paper wrapping of his present from Mike and Joan. It is a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label. ‘Thank you so much,’ Geoff says, holding it and staring at it as if it were a newborn baby. Then he looks up, meeting the eyes of Mike and Joan in turn with an innocent, small-toothed smile. ‘Thank you.’

‘It’s our pleasure,’ Mike says, magnanimously. ‘Where’s Angela’s present, Joanie?’ Joan searches through the stuff. ‘Um. Here.’ She holds it out to her.

Not enjoying herself, but with a chilly little smile, Angela unpicks the bright paper. Inside is a box of mint chocolates. ‘Thank you so much,’ she says, setting it aside. ‘You really shouldn’t have.’

‘It was our pleasure,’ Mike says. He is enjoying himself. ‘To give,’ he says, ‘is better than to receive.’

Most of the presents have now been opened and the room is ankle-deep in crumpled husks of wrapping paper. The children have squealed with joy at the mini iPods they received from Mike and Joan, and said unsmiling thank-yous to Angela and Geoff for the old-fashioned paperbacks their impatient fingers found. Paul has tried on the crimson Pringle jumper his in-laws offered him. (It was too small — the scrawniness of his arms, the soft lumpiness of his torso cruelly exposed in the clinging lambswool.) Heather said, ‘This will be useful,’ when she saw that her present from Paul’s parents was a food blender, and went misty-eyed with delight when she unwrapped the tall, oxblood leather boots her mother had selected for her. From Paul, she received a huge bottle of Chanel N o5 — not imaginative, but she did not expect that from him. Her thank-you kiss was perfunctory. Paul himself seemed out of sorts, withdrawn, depressed. He sat at the table, not even feigning enthusiasm when presents were handed to him. When he opened the one from his parents, it was so inappropriate that he laughed sadly — a pair of hiking boots. Very expensive ones. He nodded, trying to understand, while his mother went on about Gore-tex and breathable fabrics and ankle support. And he felt a painful resurgence of his earlier sadness when he reflected that by presenting him with these boots his parents had betrayed a profound, and perhaps wilful, failure to understand who he was. At this moment of sorrow, Mike is trying to get his attention, bobbing in front of him as he sits with the boots — one of them still wrapped in tissue paper in its box — on his lap. He wants to take a picture using his new digital camera, and when Paul looks up the blue-white flash immediately hits his stunned retinas. He starts to smile, but it is too late.