Ordinary Miracles by Grace Wynne-Jones

Author:Grace Wynne-Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781905170647
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 1996-01-01T13:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Christmas is over. I know this because they’ve stopped playing ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day’ in the supermarket where I’m demonstrating a new brand of ice cream. That song is one of the reasons I’m very glad it’s not Christmas every day. There’s an unyielding, almost hysterical ring to it.

I dreaded Christmas this year. I approached it as though it was a military operation. Tinfoil, washing up liquid, paper napkins and lightbulbs had been stockpiled in a large cupboard for weeks beforehand – along with the more obscure forms of food such as brandy butter and cranberry sauce that the season seems to require.

The whole business of Christmas dinner was particularly problematic. But Avril helped us out there. Bruce was working right up to Christmas Eve so I suggested it might be more practical for him to join Katie and myself at Charlie’s place on Christmas Day. Amazingly Bruce agreed to this, but then Charlie was away visiting his sister in County Meath. Bruce doesn’t like Charlie. In the interests of PR I told him about the woman I’d seen in Charlie’s bed.

‘They slept together and everything,’ I said, trying not to betray the slightest jealousy. ‘She seemed very nice.’

Before Christmas dinner Bruce phoned his parents and I found myself wishing my mother-in-law ‘Happy Christmas’ on the phone – though at the time this well-worn phrase seemed like a contradiction in terms.

‘I’m so pleased you’re all back together again,’ my mother-in-law said, as though stating this might somehow bring the fact about. I feared that she might go on and on about Bruce and myself like she usually does, but Harvey’s Bristol Cream seemed to have lightened her zeal. If she had gone on and on I had a plan. I was going to hang up while I myself was in mid-sentence. People don’t usually suspect anything if you do this. That’s what the woman I was sharing an office with while working for Mr McClaren said anyway.

I know it’s fashionable to hate one’s mother-in-law, but I don’t hate mine. I approach her with considerable caution, but that’s not quite the same thing. One of her more endearingly eccentric features is her firm belief that Bruce should become a horticulturalist and stop ‘mucking about’ in the more inscrutable soil of television. She herself is an avid gardener and tried to groom Bruce into being one as well. He had his own little vegetable patch as a boy. The luxuriance of his kale, she once told me, ‘had to be seen to be believed’. She still can’t understand why he put crazy paving all over our front garden.

In the unlikely event of Bruce ever winning an Oscar, I’m sure it would never match the glory of that kale in his mother’s eyes. He pretends to laugh this fact off, but I know it causes him some despondence. I think that’s why he was so sensitive when I didn’t share his enthusiasm for Avril: A Woman’s Story.

For the

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