He looked at her kindly as she sat on his right. ‘Bread that is made with yeast definitely does contain alcohol before it’s cooked. If you mix yeast with water and sugar you get alcohol and carbon-dioxide, which is the gas which makes the dough rise. The air in a bakery smells of wine... simple chemistry, my dear girl, no magic in it. Bread is the staff of life and alcohol is good for you.’
There had been jokes and lifted glasses, and I could have listened to Calder for hours.
The Christmas party at Gordon Michael’s home was in a way an echo, because Judith’s apothecary friend Pen Warner was in attendance most of the time. I got to know her quite well and to like her very much, which Judith may or may not have intended. In any case, it was again the fairy-tale day at Ascot which had led on to friendly relations.
‘Do you remember Burnt Marshmallow?’ Pen said. ‘I bought a painting with my winnings.’
‘I spent mine on riotous living.’
‘Oh yes?’ She looked me up and down and shook her head. ‘You haven’t the air.’
‘What do I have the air of?’ I asked curiously, and she answered in amusement, ‘Of intelligent laziness and boring virtue.’
‘All wrong,’ I said.
‘Ho hum.’
She seemed to me to be slightly less physically solid than at Ascot, but it might have been only the change of clothes; there were still the sad eyes and the ingrained worthiness and the unexpected cast of humour. She had apparently spent twelve hours that day — it was Christmas Eve — doling out remedies to people whose illnesses showed no sense of timing, and proposed to go back at six in the morning. Meanwhile she appeared at the Michaels’ house in a long festive caftan with mood to match, and during the evening the four of us ate quails with our fingers, and roasted chestnuts, and played a board game with childish gusto.
Judith wore rose pink and pearls and looked about twenty-five. Gordon in advance had instructed me ‘Bring whatever you like as long as it’s informal’ and himself was resplendent in a plum velvet jacket and bow tie My own newly bought cream wool shirt which in the shop had looked fairly theatrical seemed in the event to be right, so that on all levels the evening proved harmonious and fun, much more rounded and easy than I’d expected.
Judith’s housekeeping throughout my stay proved a poem of invisibility. Food appeared from freezer and cupboard, remnants returned to dishwasher and dustbin. Jobs were distributed when essential but sitting and talking had priority: and nothing so smooth, I reflected, ever got done without hard work beforehand.
‘Pen will be back soon after one tomorrow,’ Judith said at midnight on that first evening. ‘We’ll have a drink then and open some presents, and have our Christmas feast at half past three. There will be breakfast in the morning, and Gordon and I will go to church.’ She left an invitation lingering in the air, but I marginally shook my head. ‘You can look after yourself, then, while we’re gone.’
She kissed me goodnight, with affection and on the cheek. Gordon gave me a smile and a wave, and I went to bed across the hall from them and spent an hour before sleep deliberately not thinking at all about Judith in or out of her nightgown — or not much.
Breakfast was taken in dressing gowns. Judith’s was red, quilted and unrevealing.
They changed and went to church. Pray for me, I said, and set out for a walk on the common.
There were brightly-wrapped gifts waiting around the base of the silver-starred Christmas tree in the Michaels’ drawing room, and a surreptitious inspection had revealed one from Pen addressed to me. I walked across the windy grass, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, wondering what to do about one for her, and as quite often happens came by chance to a solution.
A small boy was out there with his father, flying a kite, and I stopped to watch.
‘That’s fun,’ I said.
The boy took no notice but the father said, ‘There’s no satisfying the little bleeder. I give him this and he says he wants roller skates.’
The kite was a brilliant phosphorescent Chinese dragon with butterfly wings and a big frilly tail, soaring and circling like a joyful tethered spirit in the Christmas sky.
‘Will you sell it to me?’ I asked. ‘Buy the roller skates instead?’ I explained the problem, the need for an instant present.
Parent and child consulted and the deal was done. I wound up the string carefully and bore the trophy home, wondering what on earth the sober pharmacist would think of such a thing: but when she unwrapped it from gold paper (cadged from Judith for the purpose) she pronounced herself enchanted, and back we all went onto the common to watch her fly it.
The whole day was happy. I hadn’t had so good a Christmas since I was a child. I told them so, and kissed Judith uninhibitedly under some mistletoe, which Gordon didn’t seem to mind.
‘You were born sunny,’ Judith said, briefly stroking my cheek, and Gordon, nodding, said, ‘A man without sorrows, unacquainted with grief.’
‘Grief and sorrow come with time,’ Pen said, but not as if she meant it imminently. ‘They come to us all.’
On the morning after Christmas Day I drove Judith across London to Hampstead to put flowers on her mother’s grave.
‘I know you’ll think me silly, but I always go. She died on Boxing Day when I was twelve. It’s the only way I have of remembering her... of feeling I had a mother at all. I usually go by myself. Gordon thinks I’m sentimental and doesn’t like coming.’
‘Nothing wrong with sentiment,’ I said.
Hampstead was where I lived in the upstairs half of a friend’s house. I wasn’t sure whether or not Judith knew it, and said nothing until she’d delivered the pink chrysanthemums to the square marble tablet let in flush with the grass and communed for a while with the memories floating there.
It was as we walked slowly back toward the iron gates that I neutrally said, ‘My flat’s only half a mile from here. This part of London is home ground.’
‘Is it?’
‘Mm.’
After a few steps she said, ‘I knew you lived somewhere here. If you remember, you wouldn’t let us drive you all the way home from Ascot. You said Hampstead was too far.’
‘So it was.’
‘Not for Sir Galahad that starry night.’
We reached the gates and paused for her to look back. I was infinitely conscious of her nearness and of my own stifled desire; and she looked abruptly into my eyes and said, ‘Gordon knows you live here, also.’
‘And does he know how I feel?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. He hasn’t said.’
I wanted very much to go that last half mile: that short distance on wheels, that far journey in commitment. My body tingled... rippled... from hunger, and I found myself physically clenching my back teeth.
‘What are you thinking?’ she said.
‘For God’s sake... you know damn well what I’m thinking... and we’re going back to Clapham right this minute.’
She sighed. ‘Yes, I suppose we must.’
‘What do you mean... you suppose?’
‘Well, I...’ she paused. ‘I mean, yes we must. I’m sorry... it was just that... for a moment... I was tempted.’
‘As at Ascot?’ I said.
She nodded. ‘As at Ascot.’
‘Only here and now,’ I said, ‘we have the place and the time and the opportunity to do something about it.’
‘Yes.’
‘And what we’re going to do... is... nothing.’ It came out as half a question, half a statement: wholly an impossibility.
‘Why do we care?’ she said explosively. ‘Why don’t we just get into your bed and have a happy time? Why is the whole thing so tangled up with bloody concepts like honour?’