The gathering - By Anne Enright Page 0,75

not what children are for,’ I say, quite fiercely. And he gives me a look of sudden interest, before twisting the girls by the shoulders, to push them across to their Gran.

‘Give your Granny a kiss, there, go on.’

The girls stand in front of my mother. There is a chance that Emily will actually wipe her mouth in front of her–she does not like wet kisses, she says, only dry ones ‘like her Daddy’s’. In the event, there are no fluids involved. My mother lifts her hand and places it on Rebecca’s head, then she turns, quite formally, and does the same to Emily, who receives the gesture with large eyes.

I watch this configuration as from a great distance. It is as though I am not related to any of them. But there is a roaring in my blood, too.

‘So what are they for?’ says Tom.

‘They’re not for anything,’ I say. ‘They just are.’

And I mean it too.

Rebecca comes back to me. Her face is full of unshed tears and I take her outside for a minute. The other room is occupied by the coffin so we have nowhere to go except the stairs, where we sit while my gentle, drifting daughter weeps in my lap for something she does not understand. Then she sharpens up a little.

‘I want to go home,’ she says, still face down.

‘In a little bit.’

‘It’s not fair. I want to go home.’

‘Why is it not fair?’ I say. ‘What’s not fair about it?’

She is insulted, in her youth, by the proximity of death. It is spoiling her ideas about being in a girl band, maybe–or so I think, with a sudden impulse to bring her in to the coffin and push her on to her knees and oblige her to consider the Four Last Things.

Jesus. Where did that come from? I have to calm down.

‘This is not about you, all right? People die, Rebecca.’

‘I want to go home!’

‘And I want you to be a little bit grown up here. All right?’

And so it goes.

‘I didn’t even like him,’ she says, in a final, terrible whimper, and this makes me laugh so much she stops crying to look up at me.

‘Neither did I, sweetheart. Neither did I.’

Emily has come out to look for me, followed by Tom. So we stand up and dust ourselves down and turn around, one more time. I have my children about me and my husband at my side, and I walk back into yet another family gathering; every single one of them involving ham sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and butter, and supermarket coleslaw, and cheese-and-onion crisps for the side of your plate. There are cocktail sausages and squares of quiche, and fruit salad for Mossie, who complains about trans-fats. There are Ritz crackers with salmon pâté and a single prawn on top, others with a sprig of parsley over a smear of cream cheese. There is houmous for Kitty or Jem, whichever one of them is vegetarian this week, in a trio of dips with guacamole and taramasalata. There is my smoked salmon, and Bea’s lasagne, and fantastic packet jelly wobbling in little glass bowls, made by my mother with quiet deliberation and left to set the night before.

There is no wine.

No, I tell a lie. This time, for the first time–perhaps in honour of Liam’s prodigious drinking–there are two bottles on the table; one red, one white. Everyone knows they are there, and no one, but no one, is going to drink them. Mossie tries to pour a glass for Mrs Cluny, who nearly beats him away with her handbag. ‘No no, I couldn’t,’ she says. ‘No, absolutely not.’

It is great to be nearly forty, I think, and lashing into the fizzy orange.

Jem goes in to rescue some chairs from the room next door, and Bea passes around the plates, and we get the show on the road. For a while I try to keep the kids in check, and then I don’t bother. I lean against the wall and watch my family eat.

When we were young, Mossie used to insist on silent chewing. He didn’t mind sitting with us, he said, and we could talk as much as we liked, but he would not abide the noise of the food being mashed up in our mouths, and any slurps, even the slightest squelch, would get you a thump across the side of the head. He kept his eyes on the table for the duration, but he moved