Page 51 of The Christmas Invitation
Henry asked me if I’d enjoyed decorating the tree and I assured him, with complete honesty, that I had adored it.
He and Teddy seemed to have entered into a Christmas conspiracy to wring the last drop of relish from every festive aspect, from the Advent calendar that hung in the kitchen, with all the doors popped open to today’s date, to release the chocolate Nativity figures within (though eating them seemed sort of sacrilegious), to the day they would put up fresh holly and ivy, and fake mistletoe.
‘Butgoodfake,’ said Clara. ‘The real berries are so poisonous, we’re all afraid they’ll fall down and that silly dog will eat them.’
‘One year she ate a whole bowl of peanuts roasted in their shells, but luckily she threw them all up again in the garden hall,’ Tottie said.
‘Doubly lucky, because it’s got a tiled floor so you can clean it easily,’ pointed out Clara.
‘Yer meanIcould clean it easily,’ said Den. He still had his blue and white striped pinny on, though he’d joined us for dinner. The rolled-up sleeves of his denim chambray shirt showed more tattoos on his wiry arms: one the dangling tail of what I thought must be a mermaid, because otherwise it would have to be a fish, and why would anyone have a fish tattooed on their arm?
‘You know I’d have cleaned it up if you hadn’t found it first,’ protested Tottie.
‘Any of us would; we’re not squeamish,’ agreed Clara. ‘You soon get over that kind of thing when you’ve worked on digs in remote parts of the Far East, with no mod cons except hot and cold running fleas, don’t you, Henry?’
‘Very true, though at least here at dinner nobody offers you a plate with a delicious sheep’s eyeball on it.’
‘’Ere’s looking at you, kid,’ drawled Den in a passable Bogart voice, and we all laughed, including Teddy, who can’t have had any idea whose voice it was.
I helped clear the plates and carry in the dessert, starting to feel as if I’d lived there for months, rather than a matter of a few days.
‘How is the autobiography coming along, my dear?’ asked Henry, after chasing the last delicious bit of apple strudel round his plate and then laying down the spoon with a satisfied sigh. ‘Did you catch up a little while we were out walking this morning?’
‘Oh, yes, I managed to skim through the boring years at boarding school and the holidays in Devon, and I’ve just got to the bit where I’ve been accepted by Lady Margaret Hall a year early.’
‘Only to findI’dbeen accepted by my college almosttwoyears early, so we were starting there together,’ said Henry.
‘Well, we always were both smarter than most of our peers,’ said Clara without false modesty. ‘That’s probably what drew us together when we were growing up in Starstone.’
‘Clara and I just literally bumped into each other in our first week at Oxford and it was as though we’d never been apart,’ Henry said reminiscently.
They beamed lovingly at each other and I envied their long and happy marriage, which wasn’t something that seemed on the cards for me.
‘You may have to jog my memory for the Oxford years, Henry. Most of it’s a bit of a blur: classes and picnics, lectures, talks, tennis, cycling round the countryside … swimming in the river …’
‘Wasn’t Oxford still trying to segregate women from the men back then?’ I asked.
‘There were still a few archaic rules and regulations, but it was 1959 when I went up and they’d never quite managed to put women back in what they thought was their place after the war. We just quietly did what we wanted to do, without making a song and dance about it.’
I could certainly imagine Clara doing whatever she wanted to do!
She explained to me that she and Henry had been so bright as small children that her father, a great scholar, had given them extra lessons in Latin, Greek, Ancient History and Egyptology, while her mother, a gifted linguist, had taught them French, Italian and German.
‘Of course, we didn’t realize then that we were quite bright. We just thought the other children we knew – especially my brother, George – were a bit dim,’ said Henry.
‘Georgewasdim,’ said Clara. ‘Big, bluff, self-centred, handsome and entirely stupid.’
‘Notentirely, Clara!’ Henry said mildly, then turned to me and explained: ‘George followed family tradition and went to Sandhurst for army officer training. He sold out not long after he married.’
‘He liked the idea of being an officer in uniform, but he really fancied himself as some kind of playboy,’ said Clara critically. ‘Whenever he could get leave he usually went up to London, but during our first term at Oxford he came to visit Henry.’
Something about that particular memory made her shake her head and sigh. ‘It would have been better if he hadn’t.’
Henry said, ‘He was always trouble, because women fell for him like ninepins and he never treated them well.’
‘Only the idiotic ones,’ said Clara crisply. ‘Hmm, it’s amazing what you push to the back of your memory over the years, isn’t it? The next part of my memoirs will certainly have to be edited out if I ever decide to publish it.’
She and Henry exchanged glances that I couldn’t quite fathom, a shared moment from the past, I assumed.
