Going Home. Harriet Evans

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       SEVEN

      By the time you’ve finished Christmas lunch, it’s incredibly late, and even though you’re stuffed you have to have tea with Christmas cake and Bavarian stollen, made by my mother, and by about nine p.m. you’re starving – the huge amount you have ingested over the last four hours has stretched your stomach, which is now empty and needs to be filled again. So you have the traditional Christmas ham, accompanied by the equally traditional Vegetable Roger, which is what Tom called it once when he was little, and which is Brusselsproutscarrotsroastpotatoescabbagestuffingand-breadsauce but not necessarily in that order, all whizzed up in the food-processor, then served with melted cheese on top. I console myself with the thought that this was what kept Mrs Miniver going through times of stress.

      Because it was a time of stress. I’ve been underwhelmed in my time (George Alcott, 1995, step forward), but never quite so much as by Tom’s outing himself for the benefit of his family. The drama of the moment wasn’t matched by the significance of the announcement. Ever since Tom showed me the picture of Morten Harket that he kept hidden in a secret compartment of his Velcro-fastening, blue and red eighties wallet, I’ve always suspected that he was as gay as a brightly painted fence.

      Immediately after lunch, Kate ordered him to bed for a nap. He protested loudly (what a great way to start your new life, being sent to bed by your mother), but he was so drunk it was for the best.

      We sat downstairs, opened our presents, then had tea. Tom’s presents sat in a forlorn heap in the corner of the sitting room as we leaped up to thank each other, exclaimed with horror, amusement or pleasure at our gifts (all three, in Jess’s case, when she unwrapped a parcel from her flatmate without knowing it was a vibrator. I thought Dad was going to pass out).

      I can’t say with my hand on my heart that my immediate family were overjoyed by their presents from me but, then, Jess gave me a ‘Forever Friends’ key-ring and Get Your Motor Runnin: 25 Drivin’ Classix for the Road on cassette, and I know the only place you can get those tapes is at a service station.

      Mum and Kate both loved Tom’s presents: bottles of wine, gift-wrapped in a couple of rather creased Oddbins bags.

      ‘Ah, he knows just what to get his old aunt,’ chuckled my mother, affectionately.

      ‘Now, that’s what I call a present,’ said Kate, indulgently. ‘Bless him.’

      ‘Yes,’ Chin said sharply. ‘The masterstroke of asking for two separate plastic bags must have taken him ages.’ She had given her sisters-in-law individually crafted, velvet-beaded bags and was quite rightly annoyed at the reception lavished on Tom’s wine. As was I, but with less justification.

      Later, as Mum and I were clearing up after the ham and Vegetable Roger I decided to wake Tom, so that he could enjoy a bit more of his Christmas Day, rather than coming to at three a.m. with a raging thirst. ‘I’m going to go and get Tom in a minute,’ I said to Mum, as we stood by the sink, washing the Things that are Too Big to Go in the Dishwasher.

      Mum was in a philosophical mood. ‘Ah, Tom,’ she said, staring out of the window into the dark, windy garden. ‘Lizzy, did you really never ask him?’

      ‘No,’ I said firmly.

      ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, placing an earthenware pot on the draining-board. ‘Didn’t it ever come up?’

      I felt a bit impatient, as if I was being accused of being a bad cousin/friend. ‘No, it didn’t.’

      ‘But why not?’ said Mum, lowering another dish into the soapy water.

      ‘Because you don’t ask big questions over a glass of wine or on the way into the cinema,’ I explained. ‘How do you say, “Hi, Tom, the tickets for Party in the Park have arrived and, by the way, do you prefer the manlove?” It was up to him to tell me if he wanted to. I’d do anything for him, he knows that.’

      ‘I know, darling,’ said Mum. ‘I do understand. I’m just glad he felt he could tell us now. It was all so different in My Day.’

      ‘Right,’ I said, hiding a smile in a tea-towel and not particularly wanting to hear about the famous ‘My Day’, although I’d very much like a specific calendar date for it at some point. In My Day blokes were called chaps, rad fem med students like my mother wore Pucci tunics, had big hair with black bows on top, applied their eyeliner wearing oven gloves while sitting on a bumpy bus, and marched during the day against the Midland Bank or Cape fruits while in the evening they grooved and bed-hopped at someone’s shabby stucco South Ken flat. In My Day you knew one chap who was ‘a queer’, usually a photographer or a film director, and you told people about it in a subtle way that implied you were a free-thinking liberal.

      ‘Well, it’s been quite a Christmas so far, hasn’t it?’ said Mum, wiping her hands. She advanced towards me. ‘And I’ve hardly talked to you since you got back, darling. How are you?’

      ‘I’m fine,’ I said, alarmed by the sudden maternal probing.

      ‘Was it very awful seeing David today?’ she said in a casual way, filling the kettle.

      From the other side of the house I could hear Mike and Gibbo doing something to Chin that was making her scream. I put my elbows on the counter. ‘No, it was fine, thanks.’

      ‘Do you miss him?’ my mother persisted.

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