the family were wearing their traditional jumpers: Pete’s with a pudding that lit up on the front; Marcia’s had a Santa on it, and Ruby was in a red sweater with a snowman grinning from her chest. She offered me a canapé of gravadlax and dill on rye from a tray, and I spent the next half-hour catching up with everyone who was there – Pete’s parents, down from Scotland; Marcia’s mum from Manchester who was busy preparing vegetables; Pete’s uncle Tom in charge of drinks; Marcia’s sister Yaz laying the table with Freya. Ben was sprawled on a sofa in the sitting room watching TV with his cousins; Pete’s younger brother Ted and his wife and twin girls waved from across the room where they were playing a game which involved one person wearing inflatable antlers’ horns while the others tossed rings onto them. Neighbours Jess and Ian Ward were settled with their glasses in the conservatory off the kitchen. No single men this time, I noted with relief. One year, they’d invited Nigel, a neighbour and bachelor, in the hope that we’d hit it off. We didn’t, though he got the idea that we did. There was a reason that he was single, and that was that he was the most boring man I’d ever met with a particular passion for lawnmowers, something I knew all about by the end of the afternoon.
‘And where’s your jumper?’ asked Marcia. They’d bought me a blue one with a penguin on it last year, which I had dutifully worn at the time then taken to a charity shop in January.
‘Ah … shrank in the wash, so sorry,’ I said. I was dressed in my usual black, a small nod to Christmas being the tiny silver holly-shaped earrings I’d had made and also sold in my shop.
‘You were never a good liar,’ said Pete. ‘Here, have these.’ He handed me a headband of antlers’ horns instead. Nobody got away with looking cool at their house on Christmas Day. I’d spent many Christmases there over the years and, though I’d offered to host at mine, there was no point really: we’d never all fit in. It was tradition now. Marcia and Pete’s every 25 December, apart from one winter when I was living with my last long-term partner, Richard Benson. He’d come along to their house for Christmas Day for the first two years we’d been together, but wasn’t happy either time. He was threatened by the ease and familiarity I felt when I was with my two oldest friends, especially Pete, who he felt he had to compete with. After weeks of complaint, on the third year, I’d given in and agreed to have Christmas at home, just the two of us.
It had been OK but hadn’t felt right. I missed the pandemonium that had become part of my life. After we’d split up five years ago, I’d made a new condition to my relationships, and that was ‘love me, love my friends.’ Trouble was, there hadn’t been anyone since to try the condition out on. I wondered where Richard was spending his Christmas this year. In fact, I’d been thinking a lot about all my past partners since India, reviewing who they were, who I was at the time, and asking myself if there was one who had got away. I hadn’t been thinking of them because I believed that I’d known any of them in a past life, but what Saranya Ji had said had got me thinking about the choices I’d made to get where I was today, and if there was anything I could learn from the past in order to go forward.
*
Richard Benson. I’d met him over ten years ago when he’d come into the shop in Hampstead, on one of the rare days when I was behind the counter and not up in my office on the floor above.
I’d heard the door open and looked up to see a tall, well-dressed man in his fifties coming in.
‘I’m looking for a gift for my niece,’ he’d said in a public school voice as he perused the counters and cabinets displaying jewellery. ‘It’s her twenty-first and I don’t want to go the usual Tiffany route, I’d like to give her something more personal.’
Hmm, a thoughtful man, I noted. ‘Any ideas so far?’ I asked.
‘Her name is Rose, maybe a chain with an “R” on it?’ he suggested as he pointed at a display of alphabet letter charms in gold and silver.
‘Oh no, they’re popular with the teenagers but maybe not for a twenty-first. Rose you say? How about something like this?’
I drew a quick sketch showing a bracelet with slim linked leaves with one charm on it, that being a single rosebud. ‘Far more subtle and unusual than an R,’ I told him. ‘Be lovely in silver. What do you think?’
He smiled. ‘Delightful. How clever of you just to draw it like that. It’s just the thing. Could you do it in time? The birthday’s in a few weeks.’
‘I’m sure we could,’ I said. I had a few contacts in the area who could make up a design for me.
He had returned to the shop to pick up the bracelet, then again a month later to tell me that the gift had been a great success and to ask if I’d like to go for dinner. I said yes.
Richard and I dated for a year before he moved in with me and I was impressed by his taste and initial generosity. With his army background, immaculate clothes and thin frame, he wasn’t my usual type, but I was ready for someone different. Richard was quite posh and I liked that about him – his impeccable manners, the way he spoke, the way he dressed in suits and shirts from Jermyn Street in Piccadilly, and wore handmade shoes. He always smelt wonderful, too, of Czech and Speake No.88 cologne. The typical English gentleman. He showed me another side of life. We ate in acclaimed restaurants in Mayfair, he got tickets to Glyndebourne, best seats at the theatre, taught me a lot about fine wines; we had weekends in France with his sister and a fabulous safari holiday to the Masai Mara in Kenya. It was a lifestyle I could get used to, I thought, and I did at first. I wasn’t used to being looked after so well and told friends that it was nice to have a father figure. Another plus had been that he didn’t come with any baggage or children. Richard’s first wife had died in her early twenties, a fact he’d grieved over and moved on from. ‘Life is for the living,’ he used to say. He didn’t drink to excess, didn’t take drugs, wasn’t moody and said what he meant. It was exhilarating after some of the men I’d known or thought I could change or stayed with because they appeared to need me. I wasn’t after a grand love affair. At that time, I wanted stability: a man I liked, loved even, but not too much because that way, there was less chance of getting hurt. He’d rented out his flat in Kensington and moved in with me in what was supposed to be a temporary measure. We even talked about marriage, though neither of us wanted to rush into it. We discussed buying a place in the country. We planned a future.
The first years were good but an adjustment. Richard had his way of doing things, I had mine. Slowly, over the years, it became more his way of doing things, and I felt I’d begun to lose myself in wanting to live up to his high standards, rigid routines and expectations. Even sex was like a military operation: you put this bit here, then that there, twiddle a bit, oo, ah, then done and into the shower. Hardly passionate, and it soon faded to less and less frequent. I did wonder sometimes if Richard’s first wife had died from boredom.
The final straw was when he became controlling over money and too possessive of my time. I wanted a relationship but never to be joined at the hip. Richard resented me being away too long if I was abroad on shopping trips, and even suggested that I give up my work and let him support both of us. When I refused to do that, his already thin lips became pinched as he insisted that I use my money to pay off as much of my mortgage as I could every month. He would pay for everything else. I agreed to it because I could see that he was the kind of man who needed to see himself as the breadwinner, but that was the beginning of all the trouble. Richard earned plenty of money as a barrister but, as the months went by, I realized he was rather tight. He’d question if I really needed an item if I’d splashed out on a pair of shoes or expensive make-up. I felt I had to defend any extra purchases, so I took to hiding things in the back of the wardrobe then, when I wore something new, would say I’d had it for years. Lying like that never felt right. He made a budget for our household expenditure and went through it with a fine-tooth comb at the end of the month. He told me to fire Stuart because he could do my accounts for me instead. I refused and, when I confided in Stuart about the suggestion, he asked if I was truly happy with Richard. It was probably then that I began to really question if I was. Richard sulked if I wanted to go away with a friend and argued that I should be using the extra money to pay off the mortgage. He even tried to control what