or after lunch, and in the end a compromise was reached whereby each person should open one present immediately (to assuage the impatience of little Lena in particular) and the rest would be opened after lunch, when Fred and others engaged in the preparation of the meal would be more at leisure. Then it was time for drinks - champagne and Buck’s fizz, Giles having brought a case of Bollinger as a house-gift (an index of the size of his Christmas bonus) - which put everybody in a good mood, as the first drink of the day usually does.
Richard arrived at this juncture, somehow managing to get into the house without ringing the bell, and sidling into the drawing room so unobtrusively that I didn’t notice him until Fred pointed him out to me. He was standing just inside the door, examining a painting on the wall like a guest at a party who didn’t know anybody. I beckoned him over to the sideboard where I was dispensing the drinks. ‘Richard! Happy Christmas!’ I said, pouring him a glass of champagne. ‘Same to you, Dad,’ he said. He held the glass critically up to the light, sniffed the exploding bubbles, sipped and nodded approvingly. ‘Nice temperature,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you a couple of bottles of Savigny-les-Beaune, premier cru,’ he went on. ‘They’re in the hall. I shouldn’t open them at lunch - they won’t be appreciated. ’ He was dressed exactly as I used to dress forty years ago, in a tweed sports jacket and grey flannels, a discreetly checked shirt and a plain dark tie. He was the only man in the room wearing a tie - even I was wearing an open-necked sports shirt, and a rather dashing suede waistcoat that Fred gave me last Christmas, in honour of the occasion. I noticed his hair was getting thin - something he must inherit from Maisie’s father, who was already quite bald at our wedding. ‘So how are you?’ I said. ‘Fine, fine.’ ‘How is low-temperature physics?’ He smiled. ‘Interesting,’ he said. He tried to explain it to me once.The object apparently is to get the temperature of substances down to a point as near as possible to absolute zero, which makes particles behave in odd and interesting ways. I remember him saying: ‘You have to identify the energy within a given substance and then devise a way of removing it.’ It seemed to me a strange and obsessive sort of quest, a kind of reverse alchemy. We chatted for a while about his drive up. Little Lena tugged my sleeve. ‘Grandma says will you check the table,’ she said. I went into the dining room where Fred and I had constructed an irregularly shaped surface around which thirteen adults and two children could be seated by joining our extended dining table to a card table, and covering them with overlapping cloths. I checked the glasses and the cutlery, and opened some bottles of wine to breathe.
There were rather too many women endeavouring to help Fred in the kitchen, with conflicting views about how the ingredients of the meal should be cooked and served, and several of them were slightly tipsy from the champagne, so that some dishes were overdone and some underdone and I was instructed to start carving the turkey before all the vegetables were ready, and Fred had forgotten, or I forgot (there was disagreement about whose responsibility this had been) to warm the dinner plates in the device we have for this purpose. By the time people were seated there was some danger that the main course would be tepid rather than hot, so I suggested that they should start eating as soon as they were served, but Cecilia asked plaintively if we weren’t going to say grace first, so we had to stop serving ourselves and adopt suitable expressions and postures, while Cecilia closed her eyes and joined her hands and intoned a grace - all except Dad, who had not noticed her intervention and carried on cutting up his dinner. This happens every year: we forget that Cecilia likes to say grace before Christmas lunch, and she deliberately doesn’t remind us until the last minute so that she can make everybody feel chastened or edified or otherwise put in their place.
‘I think it’s a great shame that grace before meals seems to be dying out even among practising Catholics,’ Cecilia declared, as she unfolded her napkin and prepared to eat her dinner.‘My