Chapter 20: Twenty-Two People
There is a particular silence a large room makes, and it is not silence, it is twenty-two people deciding at once not to have heard something.
It lasted about two seconds. Then it filled in.
Somebody laughed. I could not tell you who and I have never wanted to know.
It was the short laugh people use to make a thing be a joke.
Somebody else said, Well, and somebody said, More potatoes over here then, and the evening put its hand out to catch itself.
The salver weighed about two and a half kilos.
I was holding it at waist height with both hands and I had stopped walking.
Here is what I knew in that two seconds, and I knew all of it, in order, the way you know things in a contest.
I knew the room.
Twenty-two seated, four standing, two doors, a table join covered by an arrangement, and forty candles.
I knew that Damon was six metres behind me with his back to the fire and a glass in his left hand.
I knew that if I put the salver down, the sound of the base on the cloth would be the loudest thing in the room.
And I knew what Margot would say, because I had heard the shape of it eleven times, and I could have said it with her.
She said, “Damon.”
That is all.
One word, mild, the way you correct a child at somebody else's house.
And then, into the middle of the room, at exactly the same volume she used for curtain fabric:
“Well. It's Christmas. Nadia won't mind.”
Frances Price was sitting on the near corner of the second table, which is where I was going.
She is about sixty, used to teach, and had asked me before dinner whether I had ever done any sport, because she had a granddaughter who was keen.
She came about four inches out of her chair.
I saw it.
Her hands came onto the arms and her weight came forward and she began to stand.
And then she stopped, and sat back down, and looked at the tablecloth.
I have never blamed her for that and I want it in writing.
She was a guest at Christmas dinner in another woman's house and she got four inches out of her chair, which is four inches more than eight other people managed in three years.
But I have thought about those four inches every week since.
Because that is where it lives. Not in Margot, and not in Damon.
In the four inches.
I knelt.
I went down on the bare boards where the rug stops, six steps from my chair, right knee then left, controlled all the way, no drop.
I put the salver on the floor beside me, and served the roast potatoes up to the four people at the near end of the second table.
Two spoons each.
The last one, a man from the practice, said, Thank you, very quietly, and put his hand over his glass, which was not the same thing but was something.
The potatoes were extremely good.
Mrs Bell did them in goose fat with a bay leaf in the tin, and I had turned them myself at four o'clock with my hands still black from the silver.
Then I put the serving spoons back on the salver and I stayed where I was.
Nobody had told me to stay.
Nobody had told me to go down in the first place.
That is the part I have had to explain in rooms full of people who wanted a simpler story.
Nobody in that house said the words that night. It had been eleven times.
By the eleventh time you do not need an instruction, you need a cue, and the cue was: Nadia won't mind.
The evening reassembled around me in about forty seconds, and I want to describe how thoroughly, because it is the most frightening thing in this book.
Conversation came back at the far end first, then the middle.
The rector asked for water.
Aimee came past with the gravy and had to step round.
Aunt Celia said something about the goose.
Vaughan, at Margot's end, told a story about a man in Harrogate, and it was a long story, and it got a good laugh at the end.
Twenty-two people had a Christmas dinner.
I know they did, because I could hear all of it from where I was.
The boiler was on long cycles because of the cold and the doors going.
A hundred and ten seconds, then four minutes twenty, the same as it had been for three years.
The floor was the same floor it had been on the twelfth of October.
I put my hands flat on my thighs.
Fingers together, palms down, thumbs along the seam of the dress.
And I waited to be told I could get up.