Comfort and Joy by India Knight

feels almost like an ordinary day, if we had
     ordinary days and lived in an idealized world. The house is calm, the children are in their rooms playing with their new things,
     everything is clean and shiny and there’s a delicious smell. It is, frankly, blissfully domestic. Pat has put in her teeth
     and put on some underwear, as well as some clothes. There’s champagne chilling on the balcony, what with the fridge still
     being crammed to capacity (I don’t know why I buy stuff as though we were going to be under siege for days: the shops re-open
     tomorrow). King’s College carols are streaming through the house via my computer; we even have a fire going in the sitting
     room. It’s all extremely charming: a perfect scene, really. And I am delighted as I look at it. All that haring around, all
     that effort, and I think the result is worth it. Here we are: it’s Christmas Day and the surface, at least, is gloriously
     lovely.
    My former husband, Robert, is the first to arrive. He’s been living in New York for the past three years, and Paris before
     that, which means the quality of his presents is really excellent. And I’m pleased to see him, too, obviously. Robert has
     gone, pretty much seamlessly, from being my husband to being my very good friend; we speak two or three times a week and hang
     out with the children when he’s in London for work, which is every four weeks. It helped that I had already met Sam just before
     we separated: it cut the time I spent wailing and weeping. It also helped that I wasn’t entirely inclined to weep and wail
     for long, once the shock of being dumped had passed. That’s the main thing, really, about dumpage – the humiliation. Is that
     an awful thing to say? It’s what I felt, at any rate. Twenty per cent sad; eighty per cent crushed with humiliation. Just
really embarrassed, as though I’d farted exceptionally loudly, fusillade-style, at a very quiet wedding (an apt analogy, that
     – in all the time we were married, I was never aware of Robert having any bodily functions of the evacuative sort. He pooed
     in secret.
For eight years
).
    Which isn’t to say that being dumped doesn’t suck, even when nothing very dramatic happens and you just peter out for no very
     good reason. You’re like a stiletto when everyone’s wearing wedges, all alone and unloved, gathering dust at the back of the
     wardrobe, not yet knowing – because you’re too busy feeling miserable, and, er, also because you’re a shoe and your brains
     aren’t that huge – that your time will come again. I don’t mean that my time with Robert will come again – Jesus, what a thought
     – but rather that you don’t realize, when you’re a shoe, that everything is cyclical. At some point you – shunned shoe, shoe
     of shame, shoe with the wrong heel and the unfashionably pointy toe, shoe with shoe-babies – will be in demand. You will be
     the shoe du jour. Sure, as Pat says, as eggs is eggs. But it’s pointless telling a shoe that at the time of its despair.
    ‘Hello, Clara,’ says Robert. ‘You look gorgeous. Merry Christmas.’
    ‘My mummy always looks gorgeous,’ says Maisy, who has appeared at my side, wearing a pair of felt antlers on her head and
     a dress with an appliquéd Christmas pudding on the front. ‘It’s because she has beautiful boobies. Daddy has
hairy
boobies, because he is a man. You’re not my daddy, Uncle Robert. Come and see my presents now please.’
    Robert sweeps her up and gives her a kiss. ‘Boobies?’ he says, raising an eyebrow at me. Robert’s innate fastidiousness, which
     is legendary – he edits fashion magazines, and this has only made him worse – extends to language. ‘Why not “knockers”, while
     you’re at it? Or “jugs”, like the trusty print companion of my teenage years?’
    ‘I didn’t teach her “boobies”,’ I say. ‘Obviously. She learned it at school. It could be a lot worse.’
    ‘Come on, Uncle Robert,’ says