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  ‘Ah, Jimmy Gooch,’ said Mum wistfully. Tom coughed and looked outraged. ‘Nice boy. I know he was a bit mean to you at school, Tom, but it was his parents. Horrible people. The father was a drunk. He used to beat Jimmy up.’

  ‘No, he didn’t!’ Tom exploded. ‘That is a complete myth! It was the other way round! Jimmy Gooch used to beat his father up! He’s an evil thug! He made a policeman cry!’

  ‘I know you didn’t like him, but he wasn’t a bad boy. I was rather fond of him,’ said Mum. ‘He had terrible stress headaches, even when he was little. Poor mite.’

  Tom put his elbows on the table, made a pyramid with his fingers and cleared his throat. ‘Oh, honestly, Aunt Suzy, you’re so naïve.’ He then told my mother that all of the prescriptions she’d written for Jimmy Gooch at primary school had been sold in the playground for hard cash by the same Jimmy Gooch: he had claimed, to a circle of goggle-eyed ten-year-olds, that they were ‘hard drugs what made your bits feel funny’.

  My normally cheery mother, who had made a pet of Jimmy Gooch, was devastated. She sat in silence for the rest of the evening, which alarmed all of us, even Tom, then went to bed early, muttering that she needed to get up early and check her records.

  I should never have left Tom and Gibbo alone together. After supper, I went to Jess’s room. We sat on her bed, on the patchwork quilt she’s had since she was tiny, and I took off my nail varnish. We were studying the ingredients of the remover – it smelt of almonds, but in a toxic way that wasn’t pleasant – and chatting about what Jess would do next year after her course when we heard shouting.

  We didn’t pause. Like crack commandos, we leaped off the bed and jogged down the corridor. Screams were coming from the other end of the house.

  A door slammed. ‘I never want to see you again! I hate you!’

  ‘What’s he done now?’ I said, a wave of unease washing over me.

  During their men-and-motors chat, Tom had asked Gibbo when he was going to propose to Chin. In touching and forthright language he had conveyed to Gibbo Chin’s advancing years, her desire for children, her satisfying financial position and the sincere wish of her loving family to see her comfortably established. He left Gibbo with the distinct impression that he, Gibbo, was in danger of being regarded by our family as a cruel seducer, toying with Chin’s emotions and playing her for a fool. He conjured up a vivid image of Dad and Mike as men who would break a man’s neck like a cocktail stick for so much as glancing at their sister.

  Gibbo, who was sincerely in love with Chin – and the only person I’d ever met who didn’t take any notice of her when she was in a mood – was horrified. While he didn’t particularly want to get hitched, he did want to be with Chin, and saw the wisdom, nay, the urgency of his position. (All of this I found out the next day at the pub, when the recriminations were flowing freely. At the time, of course, I was as confused as Ricky Martin.)

  ‘What’s happened?’ I gasped, as Jess and I arrived at the scene of the crime. Gibbo was standing outside the bathroom, looking hopeless. There was a toothbrush and a slipper on the floor and an old print of Marriage à la Mode listing on the wall, clinging to a frayed wire. Chin was inside the bathroom, whence sobbing could be heard, along with muffled phrases like ‘How could you?’ and ‘Go away, you piece of shit!’

  ‘Oh, my God, what have I done?’ Gibbo muttered, alternately wringing his hands and slapping his cheeks.

  ‘Yes, Gibbo, what have you done?’ echoed Jess.

  At that moment Tom appeared, unruffled and wearing a nightshirt. He looked like Wee Willie Winkie. Jess and I clung to each other and guffawed.

  Tom glared at us. ‘What’s happened here?’ he asked.

  ‘I did what you said,’ Gibbo said weakly. ‘I told her I thought we should tie the knot, that she wasn’t getting any younger, and I was about to get stuck into the speech about how much I loved her when she threw the toothbrush at me, then the slipper, then the yelling started and now she’s locked herself in the bathroom.’

  Jess slapped her forehead. ‘You said what?’ she whispered.

  ‘HE SAID I WAS GETTING ON AND I SHOULDN’T WASTE ANY MORE TIME,’ came Chin’s agonized voice from the bathroom. ‘THEN HE SAID, “HOW ABOUT IT, EH?”’ More indistinct noises.

  The door to Mike’s room opened and its incumbent poked out his head. ‘I say, what’s happening?’ he called in a passable impression of Terry-Thomas. ‘Everybody all right? Are you having a party?’

  The bathroom door flew open and there stood Chin, wiping her nose with her finger in a distinctly ominous fashion. ‘You low-down piece of crap,’ she said softly, her face inches from Gibbo’s. ‘How dare you say I’m past it? How dare you ask me to marry you while I’m spitting out my toothpaste? I – I’m going to have you shot. No, I’m going to do it myself unless you get the hell away from me. You can sleep with Tom tonight and then go. I never want to see you again. You two,’ she turned to us menacingly, ‘go to bed and mind your own bloody business. And you – you…’ We all stepped back when it was clear she was aiming for Tom. She grabbed him by the scruff of the nightshirt so that it rode up almost to his bottom. ‘You!’ She curled her lip and bared her teeth. ‘You’re starting to get on my nerves! I don’t give a fuck if you’re gay. You can be a one-armed bisexual Zoroastrian cannibal for all I care. Just stay the fuck out of my business. You think about what you’ve done today. You’ve ruined Christmas. You’ve ruined it!’ Her voice broke. ‘This is the worst Christmas since the awful one and that’s all because of you!’ And with that she turned on her heel, walked into her room and slammed the door.

  ‘Well, well.’ Mike’s tone was unexpectedly cheerful in the circumstances. ‘There’s a sleeping-bag in my room, Gibbo. You’d better grab it and bunk down with Tom for the night.’

  ‘Don’t get any ideas,’ said Tom, pursing his lips, and trying unsuccessfully to make a joke of it. I glared at him. ‘Oh, well, we can discuss all this in the morning. I do think Chin’s overreacted somewh—’

  ‘Tom,’ said Gibbo, in a voice that seemed to come from beyond the grave, ‘don’t try to get out of this. You’ve got to cop responsibility for what you’ve done here today. You’ve made your aunt cry. And she’s going to have me killed.’

  ‘Jeez,’ Tom said. ‘I gave you a piece of helpful advice and you went off and told a woman in her late thirties that her eggs were drying up and time was running out and, frankly, she was lucky you were being seen in public with her, let alone shagging her. I’m surprised she didn’t kill you there and then. Phew,’ he said, shivering at the memory of Chin’s basilisk stare. ‘I’m going to have nightmares tonight. Night, you two. Night, Mike.’

  ‘Night,’ said Mike, handing Gibbo the sleeping-bag and closing the door. ‘You’d better discuss this further tomorrow.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Tom. He leaned against his doorframe. ‘Lizzy, Jess – hey. How about we go to the Neptune for lunch? I’m meeting Miles there for a drink. We’ll take Gibbo with us. Miles is a wise chap. He’ll know what to do. Wow. I’m exhausted. Some people are so ungrateful.’

  On Friday morning I’ll be in Queensway, shopping and having lunch with Georgy, I thought. I’ll be out of this madhouse. I’ll be in London, behaving like a sane person, not holding a bottle of almond-oil nail-varnish remover in a corridor at one in the morning watching my cousin in a nightshirt, my sister and my aunt’s spurned lover trying unsuccessfully to undo the zip on a sleeping-bag.

  TEN

  We moved into Keeper House when I was seven. My grandmother had fallen and broken her hip, and she and Grandfather had decided to move to a little cottage a hundred yards away. Dad had been offered a better job in an auction house nearby so our move to the country made sense.

  I remember our first proper Christmas there mainly as a series of domestic accidents and arguments. My parents had a blazing row about where we should put our furniture, what to leave and what to keep. Dad felt everything should be left as it was, and only the furniture
my grandparents had taken should be replaced. Mum felt Keeper House should be our home, not a kind of mausoleum to Dad’s relatives. Then Grandmother had another fall after she’d drunk one glass of sloe gin too many on Christmas Eve. Tom had measles and had to stay at home with Kate. Chin had just left school and hated her parents for moving out of her home, hated Dad for moving in, and Mum for moving things around. And Mike had suddenly left his job with a tiny, rather bizarre charity (the objective of which escapes me now – something to do with real ale for carthorses, or being nice to second-hand bookshops) and gone back to London, where he’d spent his dissolute early twenties, to take up a flash new job in a City law firm.

  So, in later years my family referred to that Christmas as ‘the awful one’. As we were walking along Wareham high street the next day, I wondered if this might be the one to eclipse it in the collective memory.

  We’d left early to have a drink before Miles joined us. Mum had disappeared straight after breakfast to check her surgery records and find out what and how much Jimmy Gooch had taken her for. Dad had left for the solicitor’s, very serious and smart in his suit. Kate had returned to her cottage after supper the previous night; Rosalie and Mike were going for a drive; and Chin was AWOL, but I knew she was there because she kept slamming doors.

  After a brisk walk across the fields, Tom, Jess and I found ourselves in the Neptune, nursing hangovers with a sense of gloom and anticlimax. The Christmas decorations hung limply, the tinsel curling and dusty. Put us away, they moaned. We want to go back in the box in the cellar next to the crème-de-menthe that no one drinks. Christmas was two days ago: move on and get over it.

  The Neptune was where I’d got so drunk on my eighteenth birthday. Bill, the landlord, had bought me a double rum and Coke as a present, and I’d found myself still there three hours and lots more drinks later, with my head down the loo reacquainting myself with the original double rum and Coke. Ah, memories.

  We slotted ourselves into the alcove by the fire, the best spot in the green, cosy interior. It has a view of the main street through leaded windows, and the snug gloom means you can look out but not be seen by those looking in. There are two high-backed wooden settles, worn smooth by the bottoms of local habitués over the last three centuries. They’re joined at the end by an old oak-panelled wall, with a door in the middle, painted on the outside with the crest of the Radcliffes, the family who built Keeper House. It was for their personal use and favour, so that they weren’t bothered by the lumpen proletariat. David and I had spent many a happy hour there, covertly doing things we couldn’t have got away with in the open.

  Gibbo appeared with a tray of drinks. ‘Gin and tonic?’ he asked.

  We surveyed him gloomily. ‘Me,’ I said.

  ‘Guinness?’

  ‘Me, thanks,’ said Jess.

  ‘Pint of girly Carling?’

  ‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ said Tom.

  Gibbo sat down and took a gulp of his Guinness. He smacked his lips and put down the glass. ‘Well, Thomas, what the bloody hell am I going to do now?’ he said.

  ‘I honestly wouldn’t have told Suzy all that about Jimmy Gooch if I’d known she’d get so upset,’ Tom said passionately. ‘I just thought she’d want to know the truth.’

  ‘Oh, be quiet, you fool,’ said Jess, rather crossly for her.

  ‘No, you be quiet,’ said Tom. ‘You don’t know what it was like, knowing I was going to tell you all on Christmas Day. I kept thinking, while we were all oohing about Rosalie and Mike, What are they going to say when they hear about me?’

  ‘You’re not wrong there,’ said Gibbo. ‘But (a) it wasn’t exactly a bolt from the bleeding blue, and (b)…’ he cleared his throat and glared at his new room mate ‘…it doesn’t give you the right to play God. Seems to me…’ He ground to a halt. ‘I’m going to the toilet.’

  ‘Poor Gibbo,’ said Jess, after he’d gone. ‘Chin’s still furious with him. I talked to her this morning.’

  ‘What did she say?’ I asked.

  Jess took a gulp of her pint. ‘Not much. She used her eyes, mostly. And hand gestures.’

  As if by magic, the door opened. ‘Oh, my God,’ I whispered. The three of us shuffled further away from the door of our safe haven and prayed Gibbo wouldn’t emerge from the loo just then.

  It was Chin. And she couldn’t have been looking shiftier. Her lovely black bob was all but covered by a black beret and her coat collar was raised. Her brown eyes looked enormous in her pale face, which was partially covered by a large scarf. She looked like Inspector Clouseau’s daughter. She paused, eyes darting about, then crept stealthily to the bar.

  ‘Afternoon, Ginevra, how are you, then?’ Bill bellowed. He’s not overly keen on social chit-chat, but has always been fond of Chin, in his lugubrious way.

  We stayed as quiet as church mice, praying he wouldn’t mention our presence.

  ‘Fine, thanks,’ said Chin briskly. ‘Gin and tonic, please. How about you? Good Christmas?’ I could see her taking off her scarf and putting it on the bar.

  Bill slapped a measure of gin on to the bar with a little bottle of tonic. ‘Ice?’ he boomed. ‘Not so bad,’ he continued, as Chin reached for her purse. ‘Lemon?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said impatiently. ‘How much?’

  ‘Straw?’ Bill said, Eeyore-like.

  ‘No!’ Chin snapped. ‘Why on earth would I want a straw with my gin and tonic? Just tell me how much.’

  ‘On me, Ginevra. Season’s greetings and all that,’ said Bill, with the air of one announcing long delays on the motorway.

  Gibbo appeared from the gents. ‘Sit!’ we hissed. Tom grabbed his shoulder and pulled him down.

  Transaction over, Chin took her drink and disappeared to the other side of the curved bar, where I could just about make out the top of her head and one of her hands. Bill looked over in our direction, but we shook our heads and put our fingers to our lips.

  ‘What’s she doing here?’ said Gibbo. ‘I’m going to go and talk to her.’

  ‘No,’ said Tom, all previous thoughts of goodwill momentarily shelved. ‘She’s obviously not here to meet us. Don’t interrupt her.’

  ‘But I want to apologize to her! I want to let her know I didn’t mean it and I don’t want to marry her!’

  ‘Not sure that’s going to do the trick, Gibbo,’ Jess said. ‘Leave it for a moment or two, OK?’

  ‘She has to talk to him some time, though,’ I pointed out, ‘and let him back into their room. He’s wearing Tom’s pants.’

  The door banged open again. It was Miles Eliot, and as his gaze ranged round the bar I shot my head out of the Radcliffe and hissed, ‘Miles! We’re over here!’

  ‘Hello, you lot,’ he said, pulling his scarf out of his coat. ‘Hello, Lizzy.’ I was nearest to him, and he squeezed my shoulder.

  ‘Get in.’ I pushed him on to the settle next to Tom, and kissed him hello.

  Miles managed to stay friends with Tom and me, all the while the thing with David was crumbling around us, and for that I thanked him. Heck, he was the one who told me about what David had done. But it couldn’t be denied that it was a little awkward now that he was David’s brother, and the one who’d had the courage to tell me the truth. I hadn’t really seen him (apart from Christmas Day), since a dreadful night, about four months ago, just after the breakup. We’d gone out to supper and I’d just been so sad, it had been a pretty dire evening. It culminated in me bursting into tears all over my nice steak, because David liked steak. I know, pathetic. It’s not exactly a controversial thing to like – who doesn’t like steak, for cripes’ sake? Miles had to take me home in a cab and I snotted on his shoulder. I hoped he’d forgiven me. We’d emailed and texted, but never got round to fixing up another date. The one good thing about it was that it meant that what had happened before, between me and him, had been pretty much forgotten.

  I like Miles. He’s laidback and urbane, a bit bitchy, easy to get on with, and obsessed with QPR (why?). In direc
t contrast to his brother, to whom he is close but not in temperament, David being unlaidback, unurbane, crap at gossip and an Aston Villa supporter (again, why?).

  ‘Er, what the hell are you all doing?’ said Miles. ‘Why aren’t you with Chin? She’s over there.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Tom snapped. ‘We know that. We don’t want her to see us. We’ve got a problem and we need your help. What I rang you about on Christmas Day is all fine now. We—’

  ‘I don’t need a drink, by the way,’ Miles said, taking off his jacket.

  ‘Good,’ said Tom.

  ‘Have this, mate, there’s two here,’ said Gibbo, sliding over a spare Guinness we’d bought earlier.

  ‘Thanks, er – mate,’ said Miles. ‘We haven’t met. I’m Miles Eliot.’

  ‘Hi. Norman Gibson. Good to meet you,’ said Gibbo, and shook his hand.

  ‘Anyway—’ Tom stopped. He stared at Gibbo. ‘Norman? Norman Gibson? What’s that?’

  ‘Take a wild stab in the dark,’ said Gibbo, closely examining one of the frayed cuffs on his shirt.

  ‘Gibbo! Is that your name!’ Jess cried.

  Miles produced a folded-up copy of The Times and buried himself in it.

  ‘You’re called Norman!’ I said. ‘That’s really weird – like calling your parents by their first names or looking at yourself in the mirror for too long—’

  ‘Oh God, I know what you mean!’ said Tom, turning to me in excitement.

  ‘Norman Gibson,’ Jess mused. ‘No, I’m sorry. It just doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘Shut up, you blokes,’ said Gibbo, whose ears were turning pink. ‘I don’t go a bundle on it either, but occasionally it slips out. Wait till you hear my middle name. Awful.’

  ‘Tell us!’

  ‘No way,’ said Gibbo. ‘Listen, if I ever marry Chin, they’ll say it in church, so there’s an incentive for you.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Tom. ‘Like in Neighbours, when Charlene married Scott and that was when we found out her middle name was Edna. Poor Kylie.’