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bracelet
    and earrings
    a doll’s house
    and some perfume
    and a bigger fairy dress
    Love, Anjelica
    I wrote this letter one Christmas Eve under great duress in front of a big turf fire in the Little House sitting room. I remember breaking down several times: the difficulty of getting my letters straight, desiring all those presents, and the exhaustion of having to spell it all out on paper. It was the year before Tony blew the whistle on Santa Claus.
    On Christmas morning, we awoke at the crack of dawn after a fitful sleep following every attempt to stay awake and catch Santa in the act. We dove to the end of our four-poster beds to check out the stockings we’d hung the night before, complaining about the lumpy fillers, the walnuts and foil-wrapped tangerines, burrowing deep for what often proved to be the best presents of the year: a charm bracelet with a miniature enameled Jonah praying inside the mouth of a golden whale, a tiny Etruscan ring with the black cameo of an angel. Each individually wrapped by Mum.
    On Boxing Day (St. Stephen’s Day), the Wren Boys, or Mummers, would come to St. Clerans wearing crude masks, lace curtains, and their mother’s lipstick. Their song went:
    The wren, the wren,
    The king of all birds,
    St. Stephen’s Day
    Was caught in the furze.
    Although he was small,
    His courage was great,
    Cheer up, old woman,
    And give us a treat!
    At this point, they’d give you a glimpse of the tortured little bird they were carrying in a cardboard box. Mum always boughtthe birds from them, and we’d try to feed them worms, but they were usually too traumatized to live, and we’d have a sad little burial in the garden before the first day of the year.
    I remember a pine tree lit up with colored bulbs in the garden room, hearing Tony’s and my new budgies chirping in their cage, and folding my arms, leaning over to slide down the banister on my armpits, then realizing that I’d tilted too far, falling over the rail, and dropping onto my head, maybe ten feet, to the floor below. As I came to, Dad was holding me on his lap. “Get her some sherry, honey,” he said to Mum. It tasted delicious as I sipped it, lying in my father’s arms, feeling dizzy. I loved the Little House. It was intimate.
    Mum would give me jobs for a few shillings an hour, like digging in the lawn with a potato peeler for dandelions to make salad, or polishing the silverware. Every day I was expected to make my bed with the hospital corners favored by Nurse. I had to shine my own shoes and, as soon as I could be trusted not to burn myself, to iron my shirts. Mum said you had to be able to do these things in case you grew up to be poor and couldn’t have servants.
    As a child, she herself had to make many beds and change the water in many vases and do the washing up. I understood, and although it was tedious, it made basic sense. What I didn’t understand was that the same did not seem to apply to the boys, or, more specifically, to Tony, whose only appearance at the kitchen sink was to gut trout or dismember small birds.
    •  •  •
    My first perfume was Blue Grass. I loved the bottle, with the flying turquoise horse with flowers in its mane. Then Mum gave me Diorissimo, which smelled like lily of the valley. Mum wore Chanel No. 5, and later, Guerlain’s Shalimar, which wasexotic and spicy, like burnt vanilla. But each year, when Nan Sunderland would make her appearance from America, the all-encompassing odor of Mary Chess Carnation permeated the ether and lingered for weeks in the Little House after she had gone. Nan was Walter’s widow; we called her “Gran,” though she wasn’t much older than Dad. She was a tall redhead with heavily freckled skin, who wore beaded hairnets and trousers cut high at the waist and wide at the hips, tapering above white ankle socks and penny loafers. She also wore a sizable Bengal ruby on her wedding finger, which I later inherited.
    At that time, having converted to Christian