“Which is more than can be said for us,” her father muttered without lifting his gaze from the newspaper he still bought daily from the local shop. He did the crossword every morning after breakfast while her mother caught up on her knitting. It always struck Jenny as a very companiable arrangement.
“Ignore him,” her mother said. “His bones were aching when he woke up this morning and he has been a grouch ever since. This tree is a pretty shape. Thank you.” Her mother tweaked a few branches and then leaned in to breathe in the scent. “Now I feel Christmassy. It’s the smell. Come and put your nose in these branches, Brian. It will cheer you up.”
“No thanks. They’ve probably been sprayed with something and I’ll have an allergic reaction. Either that or a spider will crawl up my nose.”
Her mother made a tutting sound. “They have not been sprayed with anything! Our Jenny got the tree straight from the forest.”
“As I said—spiders.” He tapped his pencil on the table. “Eight letters—the clue is mood.”
“How appropriate.”
He ignored that. “Begins with anF. The fourth letter is anl.”
“Feelings?”
“That’s it!” Her father looked up, delighted. “I love your mother. Have I told you today that I love your mother? Phyllis, you’re wonderful. If we weren’t already married, I’d ask you to marry me.”
Her mother’s cheeks were pink. “I might say no.”
“Too late for that. You’re stuck with me now.”
Jenny grinned. The two of them made her laugh. “Why don’t you do the crossword on your tablet, Dad?”
“Because I prefer doing it the old-fashioned way. I don’t want to forget how to write. Do you know that the young generation barely write anything anymore? It’s all computers. Everything is computers. The tablet has its place, but it’s not at the breakfast table.” He went back to his paper and her mother shook her head and shared a long-suffering look with her daughter.
“Thank you again for the tree. It makes me think of forests and snow and smiling children. Remember when we used to take Jamie and the twins to get the tree? Martin was always working so we used to do it with you. It was my favourite Christmas activity. And then we’d decorate it.”
Jenny felt a pang of nostalgia. She remembered all of it. Occasionally she yearned for the days when the children were very young, but then she reminded herself that memory was selective. Her brain had stored all those precious memories of happy moments and conveniently ignored all the less sunny moments, like the relentlessness and exhaustion that was part of parenting three children (including twins! How on earth had they managed that?) and the way that all three of them had inevitably managed to go down with coughs or ear infections on Christmas Eve.
“I dug out our decorations earlier. There was so much dust in the back of that cupboard I’ve been sneezing ever since.” Her father put down his pencil. “Talking of Martin, how is he? I thought he might come with you today.”
“He’s having a quiet day. Doing a few jobs around the house before everyone is home for Christmas.” Jenny kept her voice bright and cheerful. “One of the showers only produces cold water and the lock on the back door keeps sticking. And Rosie doesn’t have a lock on her bedroom door at all so I’m hoping that’s on his list. You know how it is.”
Did she sound convincing? She hoped so because she didn’t want to tell them the truth, which was that she’d begged Martin to come with her just to make him leave the house but he’d stayed slumped on the sofa in his pyjamas, staring out of the window as snow slowly coated everything in the garden.I’m too tired, Jen. Maybe tomorrow.
It had been like this for two months, since the day his retirement began, and she was reaching a point of despair. This was not her husband. This wasn’t who he was. Martin was an enthusiast who had boundless energy. He was first up in the morning and last to bed at night. He was efficient, kind and not at all given to introspection, which made the current state of affairs all the more alarming.
She’d hoped that the approach of Christmas might shake him out of his state of gloom because he loved the season as much as she did, but so far that hadn’t happened.
And she didn’t understand it.
After years of working as a family doctor with all the stresses and demands that entailed (particularly now, when the job had become increasingly thankless) he was overdue a break. He’d been exhausted with it all and talking about retiring for ages, so it wasn’t as if he shouldn’t have been prepared for what was coming. The staff, many of whom had worked with him for years, had thrown a party and made an enormous fuss of him (even the practice manager, widely considered to be the scariest person on the planet and possibly related to a dragon, had been seen with tears in her eyes), and he’d returned home with armfuls of chocolates, bottles of wine and more cards than they had space to display them. But the morning after, instead of waking up and sayingthis is the first day of the rest of my life, he’d woken up and saidthis feels like the end of my life.
And that was the point when she’d realised that it wasn’t only his life that had changed, it was also hers. She’d been thinking about retirement as something that was going to happento him, but now she realised it was something that had happened to them.
They’d been married for forty years, and they’d been happy years (if you ignored the rough patch when the twins were born and didn’t seem to sleep at all). They’d had a routine. Martin rose before six, took the dog for a walk, then came back and brought Jenny tea in bed. He was in the surgery by seven thirty every day, which meant she had the house to herself. She’d trained as a nurse originally and had worked for years in the local hospital before taking early retirement. She’d had no problem adjusting. She had her book group, her yoga class, her choir practice, and she frequently met up with friends. They walked, they visited art galleries, they went to the movies in the afternoon when everyone else was at work. She’d filled her days with things she enjoyed doing and was happier than she’d ever been.
Because it had been an easy transition for her, it hadn’t occurred to her that it might not be the same for Martin.
Every morning she woke up and hoped that today was the day he would embrace his new life. She wanted him to spring out of bed and suggest they go for a walk on the beach, or out for lunch at the local pub, but so far that hadn’t happened. He’d even stopped walking Percy, their English setter, so for the first time in her life Jenny had to drag herself from the bed before dawn and take the dog for his morning walk.
Nothing was the way she’d imagined it would be.
She’d pictured them enjoying a peaceful cup of coffee together in the sunroom, admiring the light on the ocean and agreeing that they’d picked the perfect place to live and raise their children. She’d imagined him tackling all those small jobs around the house that needed doing, but so far that hadn’t happened.
When she’d suggested he might fix the bathroom door so that one of the children didn’t get stuck and find themselvesspending Christmas in there, he’d nodded and said he’d do it, but then he’d retired to the sofa to stare out of the window and listen to a podcast. Still wearing his pyjamas.
The predictable and comfortable rhythm of their life had been shaken up, and now they needed to find a new way to be together every day.
