Chapter 18: Look Like a Family
Twenty-two is not a dinner. Twenty-two is an operation.
The table takes fourteen with both leaves in, so there was a second table at the window end, borrowed from the village hall and dressed to match, and the join was covered with an arrangement.
Margot ran that fortnight the way a good sergeant runs a stores.
Lists on the kitchen wall.
Everything crossed off in the same green biro.
I was on the lists. Not by name.
My tasks were written in the imperative: Collect Aunt C.
Silver. Napkins pressed, not folded.
I have thought since that if you want to know a house, read its lists.
Mine were the only tasks on that wall with no name against them.
The guests were: family, eleven. Neighbours, six.
Two partners from Julian's practice and their wives.
The rector.
And a man called Vaughan who did something with the homes and whose title nobody used twice.
I did the arithmetic on the fifteenth, sitting on the stairs with the seating plan, because Margot wanted it typed.
Twenty-two people.
Nine of whom had been in that dining room on the twelfth of October.
Nine people who had eaten a lemon tart four metres from a woman kneeling on a floor and had said nothing, and who were coming back for goose.
That is the fact I would give to anybody who asks how such a thing keeps going for three years.
It does not need a conspiracy.
It needs nine people with a nice evening behind them and no particular reason to bring it up.
The instruction came on the twenty-second, in the drawing room, with the tree half done.
Margot was doing the tree the way she did everything, by category, all the red ones first.
She said, “I want us to look like a family this year.”
I said, Of course.
She said, “Vaughan's coming. And the Prices. It matters, this year.”
Then she handed me a box of glass birds to put on the lower branches because I was the one who could reach without the steps.
I have turned that sentence over more than any other from that winter, because at the time I heard only the first half.
Look like a family.
Not be. Look.
And she said it to me, specifically, holding a red bauble, in a completely ordinary voice.
It matters, this year. Because Vaughan was coming.
I did not know who Vaughan was.
I knew he wore a good coat and had been at the house twice in the autumn and that Damon called him by his surname with the definite article missing.
I found out much later, along with everybody else, and it is not this chapter's business.
What matters is that on the twenty-second of December I was told, plainly, that a performance was required, and that I was in it, and that the audience included a man from the business.
And I said, Of course, and I hung eleven glass birds on the lower branches.
Then I did the silver list, and the candles, and I drove into town for the extra chairs and could not fit the last two in the car and went back.
I collected Aunt Celia from a station forty minutes away on the twenty-third and she talked about the marquee in Suffolk again, and I found that I was glad to hear about it, which tells you what December had been like.
On Christmas Eve I ironed twenty-four napkins. Pressed, not folded.
Margot folded them herself on the morning, into the shape she liked, which took her an hour and eight minutes.
The house looked extraordinary.
I will not pretend otherwise, and I had done a good deal of it myself, and I was not sorry about that either.
Holly on the barometer. Forty candles.
A fire in the hall that Ken's son laid at seven and which drew perfectly.
I have been asked whether I was frightened, in that fortnight, and the answer is no, and it is worth explaining why.
Because a big dinner is safer than a small one.
That was three years of hard-won knowledge and it was completely correct until it was not.
With five people at a table, anything can be said.
With twenty-two, there is a shape to the evening and the shape protects you.
Nobody kneels in front of a rector.
I believed that.
I want it written down that I believed it, on Christmas Eve, ironing napkins, with a pulse of sixty-one and six weeks off the door frame.
At half past ten that night, Damon came into the kitchen while I was putting the iron away.
He looked at the napkins, and at me, and he said, “Big one tomorrow.”
Then he took an apple out of the bowl and went out through the boot room, and I stood there and listened to him cross the shingle.