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them might not be too long deferred.
    The taxi drew up outside the Charlotte Street Hotel, where the party was, and Ismay and Andrew walked in hand-in-hand.
    Christmas was a grim affair in Chudleigh Hill. It made little difference if Edmund managed to fix things so that he worked on Christmas Day. In that case the celebrations would be postponed until Boxing Day. In the unlikely event of his succeeding in working Christmas Day, Boxing Day and the following day, the Great Feast was put back to Christmas Eve. There was no escape. And should he manage to bring forward or defer the huge culinary excesses, the present giving and the ecstatic watching of the Queen’s Speech (recorded on video) his mother’s bad-tempered reproaches, prolonged for hours, made his efforts to rearrange his days off hardly worthwhile. It was in vain that he told her he cared very little whether he celebrated Christmas or not. She simply said, ‘You don’t mean that. I can see how you love it – like a small boy again.’
    This year he was taking 25 December off. He had given in. Over the preceding months he had stuck out so much for nights away with Heather, weekends with Heather, once a weekend in Paris with Heather, that giving in now seemed less wimpish than it otherwise would have. Besides, he was making plans. ‘Plotting’, his mother would have called it. Having had little to spend his earnings on over the barren years, having inherited money when his father died, he had enough in the bank to put down a good deposit on a flat in a ‘nice part’ of London, almost to buy a flat outright in a less nice part. Heather never talked about the future, never said things like ‘We could do that in a couple of years’ time’ or ‘One day we might go there’.
    But when he told her how much he liked being with her, what a lot she was beginning to mean to him and even how he couldn’t imagine life without her, she smiled at him, gave him a kiss and said, ‘Me too, Edmund.’ So he was becoming sure that when he suggested the flat as a home for him and her together she would agree to that too. The difficulty was his mother.
    He had lived with her too long. He had stayed here, with her, too long. To have made a break ten years before when he was twenty-three and she was fifty-two, that would have been the time. When a son remains under his mother’s roof for half the span of a lifetime, she thinks – she is almost entitled to think – he means to stay for ever. Irene was fit and strong, and physically young for her age. She made herself old and feeble artificially. He knew that, but saying so outright wasn’t easy. Wasn’t kind; wasn’t filial. And meanwhile, here was Christmas looming, in the shape of endless visits to supermarkets, notably Marks and Spencer and Waitrose, but Safeway and Asda too. In the absence of a car, huge bags had to be carried (of course, all of themby him) into bus queues and on to buses or, occasionally, into taxis. When they got home he had to unload because she was exhausted, quantities of food he mainly disliked, ingredients to be made into other things he disliked and as far as he could see, she didn’t much like. But this was Christmas fare and the guests would like it. Woe betide them if they didn’t, he thought.
    He could see – had done for years, and his mother surely could see – that the people she invited didn’t want to come, would go to considerable lengths to avoid coming but couldn’t always achieve this. The ones who couldn’t came under duress. They were her sister, his aunt Joyce, Joyce’s husband, Duncan Crosbie, an old relative called Avice Conroy and Marion. Of those four, only Marion really wanted to come. Probably had nowhere else to go, Edmund thought unkindly. After all, her other rich lame ducks wouldn’t be celebrating the festive season. Old Mrs Reinhardt would be having a spot of