Gifts Read online

  For Caleb, the greatest gift

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  For Peter

  For Chloe

  For Irene

  For Alina

  For Daniela

  For Eddy

  For Jake

  For Lizzy

  For Della

  For Robert

  For Fran

  For Maddy

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Laura Barnett

  Copyright

  My concern is the gift we long for, the gift that,

  when it comes, speaks commandingly to the soul

  and irresistibly moves us.

  Lewis Hyde, The Gift

  What can I give Him, poor as I am?

  Christina Rossetti, ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’

  For Peter

  She wanted to buy a gift for Peter, but could think only of mundanities. A tie, a wallet, cufflinks. A watch, but those cost a bomb if you wanted anything half-decent; otherwise, it might as well have come off a market stall. Which was a thought, ­actually – Maddy could trawl the market later.

  The stallholders were already setting up outside, parking their vans, clanging their metal awning poles on the cobblestones. It had used to get on her nerves, all this noise three mornings a week, all this banging and shouting and the mess they left behind: the polystyrene crates with their residual fish-stink, the cabbage leaves and kale fronds and bruised apples, lying in mushy drifts around the square. Now, Maddy found it all strangely comforting: a sign, as good as any, that life had returned more or less to normal, that the world still turned.

  Eight o’clock in the morning, on a Wednesday in December, in a small town close to the furthest limit of England. Chalk cliffs and downland, pebble beaches, and the testy grey reaches of the Channel. They’d gone down there in the summer, she and Peter, walked a length of the cliff path, stood staring out at the smudged layers of sun, sky, sea. ‘Edge lands,’ he’d said. ‘They make people anxious, paranoid. Or maybe that’s just me.’

  She’d shrugged, smiling. ‘I always feel calm out here.’

  He’d looked at her. She’d felt him looking, though she hadn’t turned to meet his gaze. ‘You know what?’ he’d said. ‘I do too, right now.’ And then they’d walked on.

  Walking shoes, perhaps. A good pair, with cushioned soles: there had been other walks, other moments. The crisp, saline tang of the air, the wide, open sky. Peter beside her, his long, loping stride. The sadness that clung to him, slowing his pace: leading him, at times, to break off in the middle of a sentence, to drop his thread. ‘Sorry, where was I?’ he would say, and Maddy, beside him, would pick up the fallen skein of the conversation and hand it back. ‘Here, I think. You were telling me about …’

  But no, it was no good, was it? She didn’t even know his size.

  ‘What are you doing then, love?’ Fran said. ‘Made up your mind?’

  Maddy took the cup Fran was offering. It was from the coffee shop across the square, the new one, the one that charged £2.50 for a flat white. She’d been planning to pop over there herself later, with a couple of the newer hardback novels: the owner, Harvey, had told her he was stumped for presents for his wife. Maddy enjoyed this: finding books to suit customers, assessing tastes. Shame she wasn’t better at it when it came to her own friends, her own … Well. Whatever Peter was.

  ‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said, gulping the coffee. ‘Made up my mind about what?’

  Fran had had her hair done: it was shorter, blonder, falling in neat, obedient layers across her oversized grey lambswool scarf. Her coat was black, padded, expensive. There were tiny diamonds in her ears: from Adam, Maddy presumed. He was good with gifts.

  ‘Christmas,’ Fran said. ‘We’ve got to get our turkey order in. Today’s the last day for the butcher’s. You know what Adam’s like …’

  Maddy nodded: she did. He was so unapologetically himself. She liked that; envied it a little, maybe. ‘Sorry to be rubbish. I’d love to come, it’s just that I …’

  ‘Would rather sit upstairs in your PJs watching telly?’ Fran was smiling now: she had a great smile, a real high-wattage beam. ‘Who wouldn’t, Maddy, who wouldn’t? I really don’t mind – neither of us does – I just thought, after last year …’

  Last year. Yes. All those empty weeks and months, the scored-out calendar, the shuttered shop. The call Maddy had been forced to make to Fran to say that she could no longer justify her wage, that she’d had to organise a stay of execution with the bank. She’d been lovely about it, Fran – she’d made it easy. Maddy, in her awkwardness, had been harder than she’d meant to be, almost cruel: she’d pointed out that it wasn’t as if Fran had really needed the money. Cursed herself afterwards for her tactlessness, though it was true: the job had really just been an excuse for Fran to leave the house for a couple of days a week and sit chatting, arranging stacks of the prettiest hardbacks and patterned notebooks and posting her handiwork online. ‘Shelfies’, Fran called them. She still managed the social media stuff – Maddy was useless with all that – and wouldn’t take a penny. She was a good friend: the best of women, really. Maddy wasn’t always convinced that Adam knew quite how lucky he was.

  ‘It’s kind of you to invite me, Fran.’ Maddy traced the rim of the cup with her finger. ‘It’s just …’

  Just what? She was wondering what Peter was going to do for Christmas, now that Chloe was definitely going to her mum’s? She wanted to hold out just a little longer, to see if he might eventually ask her the same thing? She could say none of these things aloud: Fran wasn’t stupid, she’d guess exactly what was going on, and Maddy didn’t want to acknowledge it – not yet, not now.

  Fran waved a hand. Her own coffee was still in its cardboard tray. ‘No pressure, love. It’ll just be the usual. Jesse’s Alice might come for a bit. But there’s the party, anyway. You will come to that?’

  Maddy nodded. ‘Of course.’ Was Peter going? He knew Adam a little, had done some work for his property company: it wasn’t impossible for Adam to have invited him. Maddy ached to know, but didn’t dare to ask. ‘I’ll let you know about Christmas Day soon, Fran, I promise. And thanks.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Chat soon.’

  The silence seemed louder after Fran had gone. Wednesday mornings were quiet on the square – even now, a few weeks before Christmas – but things usually picked up around lunchtime, as the market mustered a steady dribble. Not that there was really such a thing as usual, any more. Not for Maddy, not for anyone.

  Books, though: everybody needed books. Even now. Especially now.

  A book for Peter, then? Too obvious; and anyway, Maddy didn’t know what he’d read, or hadn’t read. It was guesswork. But then it always was, giving a gift – at least, if it was a true gift, a surprise. A thing to say … what? Something. Something honest. Something true.

  He called at lunchtime, as she was finishing her sandwich. Al desko, Fran called it, though this wasn’t really a desk but a counter – handsome, solid oak, bequeathed, along with a pair of glazed display cabinets, a mouse problem and some seriously antiquated plumbing, by the previous owner, Mr James (Maddy never could think of him as Leonard), who had run a ladies’ clothing store here for half a century. He’d sold wedding hats, gloves, floral two-piece ensembles whose hemlines dipped to mid-calf. Maddy had come in quite often as a child, had sat on a satin-covered stool in the changing room out back, where Maddy now kept her stock, watching her mother, stripped to her underwear, fiddle with zips, buttons, sleeves. Straps and waistbands and the raw, marbled gleam of bare flesh. How’s this, darling? What do you think? It’s fine, Mum. Can we go now? I’m bored.

  ‘Good day?’ Peter said.

  ‘Not bad, thank
s. Yours?’

  ‘Can’t complain. Well, all right, I probably can. Spent all day wrangling the departmental budget. Come for dinner? Chloe’s going out.’

  That rise, that lift. Steadily, Maddy said, ‘What time?’

  ‘Shall we say eight? Give me a chance to tidy up.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that, Peter.’

  ‘I know I don’t, but I will.’

  The woman who’d been lingering in the children’s section – small, slim, her hair dark and cropped; a blue health worker’s tunic beneath her unbuttoned coat – was approaching the counter now, carrying a pair of board books. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Goodnight Moon.

  ‘I’ll have to go, Peter,’ Maddy said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘You will,’ he said, and then he was gone.

  Wine. Maddy scanned the books. She ought to take some wine tonight. A wine subscription as a gift? Too much?

  ‘For my boys,’ the dark-haired woman said. Her accent was fluid, musical. Her smile was tentative; she had the money counted out in change in her palm. ‘They are older, but they are learning English. So we start with the easy books.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Maddy said. ‘They’ll love these.’ Maddy sorted the coins – not a penny short – and slipped the books into a paper bag. In her mind, all the while, she was eyeing cases of wine, and Peter’s face when the box arrived at his door. That slow, shy smile, the one that tugged creases in the skin around his eyes. The call he might make to her afterwards: high, chiming cadences, sadness dispelled. Thank you, Maddy, thank you! It’s just perfect. And it would be, wouldn’t it? Perhaps it would.

  They had been at school together, she and Peter – or more precisely, at adjacent schools. The boys and girls had been kept separate, even then, in the late 1970s – an era that did not, to Maddy, feel so very long ago, but whose customs seemed so quaint, so remote (no mobile phones; no internet; the girls’ skirts measured with rulers if they crept too high above the knee) that it might as well have been the 1870s.

  The school was co-educational now: the two grammars had conjoined, sprawling out across Lenbourne’s western fringes. One of the old campuses – the boys’ – had been knocked down to make way for a science and technology centre, a featureless rectangle of glass and steel. But the girls’ building still stood: Maddy drove past it often, on her way to and from the out-of-town supermarket, feeling … What? That strange compression of time, in which she was both a fifty-six-year-old woman, driving her doddery Fiesta to Sainsbury’s, and a thirteen-year-old girl in blazer and knee socks, waving to Peter at the gate.

  They’d walked to school together each morning, and back again in the afternoon: Peter lived on the next street, their mothers had met at a church coffee morning. Church was another institution they had endured in parallel: long hours on hard pews, the tedium of the youth club, with the toe-curling young curate playing them the soundtrack to Jesus Christ Superstar on LP.

  Peter, then: lanky, as he still was; shy, too, his unbrushed hair falling across his eyes, those twice-daily trudges across town often silent but for the rush and thrum of passing cars, the soft smack of school shoes on pavement. It was a long walk, half an hour each way, skirting the playing fields, taking them through the cobbled marketplace and ancillary lanes.

  Occasionally, if it was very wet, or thick with snow, Peter’s mother Irene drove them to school: Maddy’s couldn’t, she left for work at six, and her father was dead. Peter’s father wasn’t, but he might as well have been: he never came to church, and there was no trace of him in the car – a white Ford Cortina, kept spotless by Irene, who didn’t work and chain-smoked slender, pastel-coloured cigarettes she bought in bulk in Calais twice a year. ‘Maddy love,’ she said when she drew up outside Maddy’s house, the engine purring as Maddy locked the door with her own keys, the set she kept under her school jumper on a chain around her neck. ‘Hop in.’ So Maddy did, and sat on the white-leather back seat at arm’s length from Peter. ‘Hello,’ they each said, looking away out of their respective windows at the trim terraced houses, the polished door knockers, the box hedges. Sometimes, witnessing their silence, Irene laughed, caught Maddy’s eye in the rear-view mirror and said, ‘You are a funny pair. Cat got your tongues?’

  No, Maddy hadn’t thought much of Peter then. She hadn’t thought about him much at all, really, until they were fifteen and Sally Jarvis, the girl with the biggest breasts and blondest, fullest perm (her mother ran A Cut Above, the new salon on East Street), had come up to Maddy one lunchtime to ask whether she was going out with Peter Newton.

  It had actually taken Maddy a second or two to realise who Sally meant. ‘Peter? No.’

  ‘Why d’you walk together, then?’

  Maddy had put down her fork. ‘Our mums are friends.’

  Sally had stared at Maddy, hard-eyed. She’d been queen of the class back then – queen of the school, really – though you wouldn’t know it now: she managed the post office in town, and didn’t seem at all happy about it; just sat there behind the glass screen glowering and fiddling with her phone. Maddy had smiled at her a few times in the early months after moving back to Lenbourne, considered starting a conversation; but Sally had stared back just as blankly, offering no indication that she recognised her at all.

  That day, in the lunch room, the teenage Sally had said, ‘Someone I know fancies him. Find out if he’s got a girlfriend, will you?’

  Peter had seemed different to Maddy, somehow, after that: more substantial, his features more clearly defined. She’d told him about Sally and he’d laughed. ‘Tell her I only like girls with at least half a brain.’

  ‘I can’t tell her that.’

  He looked at her. They were on London Road now, almost home; it was winter, the afternoon already thickening into evening, a scarf drawn tightly around his chin. He’d had his hair cut shorter: his face, now more visible, seemed older, its contrasts starker, etched with shadow in the fading light. ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘tell her there’s someone I like.’

  ‘Is there?’

  He smiled. ‘Maybe. Yes. But I don’t know whether she likes me back.’

  Maddy said nothing, didn’t know what to say. Her mouth was dry, her heart drummed. At his corner – they reached his street before hers – Peter turned and walked off without saying goodbye and she stood stricken for a moment, watching his back. It seemed to her that an opportunity had been presented and she had missed it. There was something she should have said or done and she had failed. She had stood there on the corner, feeling the weight of that failure, until she’d had no choice but to pick up her school bag and walk on home.

  He’d made chicken with chorizo, in a rich tomato sauce: he’d done most of the cooking for Laura and Chloe, he said. They were eating in the kitchen, a narrow galley lined with wood-effect units, lit by a single shadeless bulb. The table was a folding one from Ikea, squeezed between the dishwasher and the window, which looked out over the alley behind the car park, with its graffiti and its stunted weeds. The house was rented; it had been the best he’d been able to find at the time.

  ‘Just a stopgap,’ Peter had said, the first time Maddy had come round – though it had been six months now, and he and Chloe were still here.

  They drank the wine Maddy had brought – a Merlot, from the Co-op on Market Square: Peter’s favourite, she knew by now. When they’d finished eating they moved through to the living room – ‘more space,’ Peter said, and it was true, though the room wasn’t, in all honesty, much less depressing. A sagging leather sofa (it had, like all the furniture, come with the house); an electric coal-effect fire. But there was the Christmas tree, a real one, glowing cosily in the corner. Someone – Chloe, perhaps – had made an effort with the decorations, stuffed fir off-cuts into a tall glass vase, made an artful display of pine cones and artificial berries. Her mother’s daughter: the house in London had been beautiful, meticulously arranged, like something from a magazine. ‘Something not quite real about it,’ Owen had sa
id, the last – the only – time they’d visited. ‘It’s like they’re trying too hard.’ Maddy had dismissed it at the time – they’d been at that stage in their marriage when it had become too easy to dismiss too much – but it seemed now that Owen had been right, as he’d been about so many things. Their ultimate unsuitability, for one thing: the fact that Maddy and Owen had each, for too many years, tried too hard to fit to the shape of the other.

  Peter put on an album, a band Maddy hadn’t heard of – something folky, soothing. (Music, as a gift? But no – again, how would she know what he already had, or didn’t have?). At least this wasn’t Christmassy; she’d had a festive playlist on in the shop all afternoon. Trade had picked up, she’d been busy, time had flown. Maddy had a soft spot for it all, really: for the lights and the glitter and the old, recycled songs. The turkey and the roast potatoes and the cracker jokes, the glorious absurdity of mongrel tradition; even, yes, if she were to spend the day alone again in her flat above the shop with a ready-made single-portion turkey crown and a bottle of gin. Last year, she’d drawn the curtains in mid-afternoon, painted her toenails gold, watched Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life, celebrated not having to pretend, as she’d done to Owen, that she found the old festive movies unbearably schmaltzy. It hadn’t been so bad, really; but still, Maddy wasn’t sure she could bear doing it all over again.

  ‘Laura called today,’ Peter said now. ‘She wanted me to know that she hadn’t put Chloe up to Christmas, that it was her decision.’

  ‘Well.’ Maddy gripped the stem of her wine glass. They were on the uncomfortable sofa, side by side; the choice was either to perch right on the edge of the cushions, knees angled primly away from him, or sink back, lolling against the broken springs. Maddy had opted for the former. ‘That’s good to know, I suppose.’

  But Peter didn’t seem to be listening; he had withdrawn again, shrunk back inside himself. ‘I don’t suppose it’ll be much fun for her, for any of them. Chloe’s still furious. But I guess I can see why even spending Christmas with her mother appeals more than staying in this dump with me.’