Comfort and Joy by India Knight Page A

Maisy, already halfway back up the stairs.
    ‘Are you okay?’ says Robert, more solicitously than one might have expected.
    ‘I’m delirious,’ I say. ‘Everything’s fine.’
    ‘Good,’ he says, hanging up his coat. ‘I’ll just take these presents up and see my children. And I’ll make you a drink. My
     mum’s about half an hour away. Nice rack, by the way. As we say in the twenty-first century. Or
boobies
, if you must.’ And, with a snigger, he runs up after Maisy. He’s very annoying, my former husband, but he still makes me
     laugh. (I never, ever wonder – literally, not once – what things would be like if we’d stayed together. I don’t think he does
     either. We were rather well matched, in that respect.)
    Robert is followed by Kate, my mother, a vision in what appears to be – bold move, even by her standards – real fur. She is
     accompanied by my sisters, Evie and Flo, who are respectively thirty and thirty-two; Max, Kate’s fourth husband, is en route
     from Devon, where he has spent the morning with his own grown-up children and grandchildren, and won’t get here until teatime.
     I’m making it sound like my mother and sisters walk through the door in a normal, walking-through-the-door kind of way. What
     actually happens is, they sort of
explode
into the hall, thus:
    ‘Who’s got the truffle?’ This is Kate. ‘Hellodarlinghappy-Christmas. Flo! Did you get the truffle?’
    ‘I have it in a little pot of rice, packed all sweetly,’ says Flo.
    ‘Like a little special egg, in a nest,’ says Evie, who is wearing a silver lamé vintage dress of great beauty and dragging
     a vast stack of presents behind her on a red plastic sleigh.
    ‘Yuck, eggs,’ says Flo. ‘Hen periods. Sickness. Don’t say eggs, Eve.’
    ‘Eggs,’ says Evie, smiling an angelic smile.
    ‘God, how I loathed periods,’ says Kate, taking off her coat and handing it to me, her trusty major-domo. It
is
real fur. ‘The bliss of the menopause. You should write about it, Clara. I don’t know why people moan about it – there is
literally
nothing nicer.’
    ‘Everyone is saying periods,’ says Evie. ‘Periods, periods. Can they stop? It’s kind of grossing me out.’
    ‘Get in and shut the door, it’s freezing,’ I say, kissing them all. ‘Happy Christmas!’
    ‘Oh God – yes! HAPPY CHRISTMAS!’ yell Evie and Flo.
    ‘Happiest of Christmi,’ says Evie, catching my eye – an old family joke dating back from childhood, when Evie thought it was
     spelled ‘Christmus’.
    ‘The truffle needs to go in the fridge right now,’ says Kate. ‘Clara! Right this second. The truffle. The fridge. They must
     meet and become one.’
    ‘I read that the menopause gave you vaginal dryness,’ says Evie to Kate. ‘That wouldn’t be good.’
    ‘No,’ says Flo. ‘That would be very challenging.’
    ‘Except,’ says Evie, ‘there’s always lube.’
    ‘Vaginal dryness! Absolute nonsense,’ says Kate. ‘You should never believe anything you read. All journalists lie. They’re
     paid to lie, basically.’
    ‘Um,’ I say. I’ve been working on magazines since I was twenty-one. ‘Hello. I’m here.’
    ‘Shameful profession,’ says Kate. ‘Ghastly. But never mind. The foul deed is done. Though I still don’t understand what was
     wrong with medicine.’
    ‘Kate. I’m forty-one years old. Bit late to retrain.’
    ‘You’re looking rather well on it, I must say,’ Kate says. ‘I was worried you’d be all sort of broken and hideous. Or that
     you’d have gotten fat again. It’s so much harder to shift at your age. Have you had Botox?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘A man?’ Kate is staring at me beadily; if she had antennae, they’d be quivering.
    ‘Don’t ask Clara if she’s had a man,’ says Flo, taking off her woolly hat and tousling her hair. ‘We’re still queuing in the
     hall and it’s not appropriate
at all
. Though, Clara, have you?’
    ‘A man!’ This is Evie, practically shouting and