Notwithstanding Read Free

them coming, so that she does not have to go out and listen to them, or give them money, or make mince pies and hot punch as everyone else does. The carol singers have always sung to her closed door and doused lights, and have then departed.
    But things have changed. Mrs Griffiths lost her husband in the spring, and is slowly realising that at last the time has come when she has to make an effort to get on with people. She did not love her husband, he was boring and inconsequential, and she had not even loved him when they married. After he died, she felt merely a sense of relief, conjoined with the bitterness of a freedom that has come too late. Sometimes she wonders whether she has ever loved anyone at all, and certainly she has never loved anyone as they do on the television late at night, with all those heaving backsides. But, even though her husband was a cipher, nowadays Mrs Griffiths feels a certain emptiness, a certain need to reach out, a certain need to be reborn. Tonight she will make mince pies and punch, she will leave the lights on, she will come out and listen, and she will tell the children that their music is wonderful. She will ignore the fact that they know only one verse of ‘Silent Night’, their guitars are out of tune and their recorders too shrill, and she will wish them a happy Christmas even though they are beautiful and still have a chance in life.
    Mrs Griffiths covers herself and her kitchen in dusting sugar, she deals with the frustration of pastry that sticks to the table and the rolling pin, she conquers the meanness that nearly prevents her from pouring a whole bottle of red wine into the punch, and then she waits, sitting on the wooden chair in the kitchen, warmed by the rich smells of baking pastry and hot wine, and lemon, and rum. ‘After they’ve been,’ she thinks, ‘I will write all my cards, and then I’ll draw a hot bath and read.’ Since her husband died, Mrs Griffiths has taken to reading true-life romances that one can order six at a time from a special club. She has read so many that she thinks she could probably write one herself.
    It grows very dark, and three hours pass. Mrs Griffiths goes often to her door, and opens it, to see if she can hear the carol singers coming. The night is very cold; there is a frosty wind, but she does not think that it is going to rain. They will be here before long.
    Mrs Griffiths sits in her wooden chair and thinks about what she should say to the children; does ‘Merry Christmas’ sound better than ‘Happy Christmas’? Does ‘Thank you so much for coming’ sound too formal? The young are not very formal these days. During the time when everyone was going on about the Beatles, the youngsters kept saying ‘groovy’, but that was probably not very ‘with it’ any more. She is not even sure if ‘with it’ is ‘with it’ these days. She experiments with ‘Groovy Christmas’, but decides against it.
    Mrs Griffiths hears ‘Silent Night’ in the distance. The children are singing to the gypsies in their scrapyard, causing the Alsatians to howl. Now they are singing to the Davidsons, and now they are singing to the baroque musicologist, and now they are singing to smelly Jack Oak. Mrs Griffiths listens very hard for the squeak of her garden gate and the experimental chords of the guitarists. She knows that, in between the houses, the children bray out songs from pop groups with silly names and working-class accents.
    The children arrive at the garden gate, and the tall, lanky one says, ‘What about this one?’
    ‘Not worth it,’ says the other guitarist, who is proud of the fact that he is going to get a shaving kit for Christmas. He strokes his invisible moustache with a nail-bitten forefinger.
    ‘She’s an old skinflint,’ says the blonde girl who will be beautiful when she loses her puppy fat.
    ‘Her husband died,’ says the dark, sensitive girl with the brown eyes.
    ‘It won’t do any harm, will it?’ asks the