Fred’s parents years ago was in place on the bookshelves. Carol music filtered from the discreetly placed speakers. It was a pleasant scene, almost as if staged to make an impression. I have to admit that Fred does Christmas very well. But almost at once there was a little friction between us: she asked me if I would help her drape the coloured lights around the tree, and I said I was too tired and couldn’t it wait till tomorrow, so with an impatient sigh she did it herself while I got myself and Dad a drink, and the lights didn’t come on, and Fred got irritable, and in the end I had to lay the flex out on the floor and check that all the fragile little bulbs were screwed tightly into their sockets before I found the culprit which was breaking the circuit. I hope this is not a foretaste of contretemps to come. The trouble is that as soon as there is the slightest disagreement between Fred and me, our respective parents instinctively line up behind their offspring, and so the friction factor is squared. Dad urged me to finish my drink before attending to the lights and Fred’s mother mentioned that her late husband always used to regard the Christmas tree lights as his special responsibility. Mr Fairfax died five years ago.
Mrs Cecilia Magdalene Fairfax, to give her name in full, is a tall vigorous seventy-seven-year-old widow with an enormous bust which gives me some idea of how Fred might look at the same age if she hadn’t had her breast-reduction operation (she never told her mother about this, pretending that she had ‘dieted’). Cecilia has absolutely nothing in common with Dad and sometimes looks at him with a kind of horrified distaste, like a lady of the manor who finds that the under-gardener has unaccountably been invited into her drawing room by a member of the family and cannot therefore be ejected. He for his part regards her as a ‘stiff old bird’ whom it is his duty to cheer up with quips and anecdotes. He calls her ‘Celia’. When she corrected him once, he said ‘Cecilia’ was one syllable too many for an old man with false teeth. ‘So I call you “Celia” for short. You don’t mind, do you?’ She replied frostily, ‘If you must. But of course they are two quite different names. Cecilia was a virgin martyr of the Early Church. Celia was an ordinary Roman name, a pagan name.’ I think she would really prefer if he called her ‘Mrs Fairfax’. She invariably addresses him as ‘Mr Bates’, in spite of repeated invitations to call him ‘Harry’.
24th December. The house is filling up. Giles, Fred’s second child, and his wife Nicola arrived this afternoon, with their infant son, Basil, aged nine months, having driven up this afternoon from Hertfordshire in their black BMW 4x4, a huge high vehicle recently acquired in exchange for a Porsche to provide maximum protection for their precious offspring. It has almost opaque tinted windows to foil potential kidnappers, and a sticker on the rear window, ‘Baby On Board’, appealing to the consciences of drivers who might be intent on ramming them from behind. Of Fred’s three children Giles is the most prosperous. Andrew paid for him to attend Downside, and after university he followed his father’s footsteps into the City and a job in a merchant bank. Today he wears the expression of a man who has just been given a very satisfactory Christmas bonus and can barely restrain himself from telling you how much it was. Nicola is a commercial lawyer, but has decided to take four years out of her career to have two babies - the figures are specified precisely, like a balance sheet. One feels sure the babies will balance too, a boy and a girl. She is good-looking in a featureless sort of way, nicely dressed, pleasantly spoken and rather dull.
Fred’s youngest son, Ben, and his girlfriend Maxine arrived in the middle of the evening, later than expected, delayed not so much by the fog as by a festive lunchtime party at the premises of the TV production company he works for, ‘after which we had to chill out for a few hours in case we got nicked on the motorway’. I have always found Ben the most likeable of Fred’s children: a cheerful, relaxed, extrovert young man who declined his father’s offer to send him to Downside like his