Free The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin

Bermuda just in time for the dividing-up of Ivor’s estate: she pondered, too, on the feather-brained little phone-calls to solicitors and lawyers that had been going on … and suddenly her eyes filled with tears. Ivor, why aren’t you laughing? Can’t you hear my wicked, uncharitable thoughts, off wherever you are?
    Naturally, Cynthia thought that the tears in Imogen’s eyes were tears of remorse, and at once she was all kindness and sympathy:
    “Oh, Imogen, darling, I didn’t mean … Of course I don’t hold it against you, my poor dear. Not now, not any longer. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, the bitterness is all gone now, it’s all been wiped away by this terrible, terrible tragedy. We are sisters in sorrow now, Imogen. Sisters, as Ivor would have wished….”
    Ivor would have hated sisters, if he’d had any. He’d have hated the demands they were entitled to make, and the things they could remember about you when you were ten. Shrinking within Cynthia’s scented Orlon embrace, Imogen wondered how soon she could decently detach herself, and move out of range. The awful thing was that Cynthia was being kind, in a way. Just as Edith was kind, and Dot, and Herbert. In their separate ways, and with due regard to their own interests, they were all being kind.
    But what can friends do for you when what you really need is enemies? People on whom to try out your precarious, convalescent aggression: people you can fight with, score off, not bother about. Sorry, didn’t mean to hit you, just wanted to find out if I still could….
    *
    Roast turkey. They’d promised there wouldn’t be, but there was. Robin brought Piggy down to join the family meal, her plait tied with a shoe-lace, but she’d taken one look and gone off to cookherself some Macrobiotic rice. Which of course made everyone feel more guilty than ever.
    “For the children …” they said, helping themselves to sprouts, bread-sauce, gravy. “Christmas is for the children….” A heavy burden, you’d have thought, for two such small boys, one of whom didn’t like stuffing.
    After dinner there were more presents—“for the children”, of course: two fragile, ecstatic little props on which the whole vast, dark day was balanced, more precariously than they could ever know.
    No tree. The anxious, behind-doors debate on this issue had been mercifully resolved only yesterday by the discovery that the trees were all sold out. And so now the boys’ presents lay in a heap on the carpet, waiting for some sort of uneasy ritual to be improvised. And to complicate matters even further, a legend seemed to be right now in the making that Ivor had been in the habit of dressing up as Father Christmas and handing out presents to his grandsons with beaming bonhomie and idiotic chatter about reindeer and chimneys and the rest. Imogen was aware of an anxious, whispered conference going on in the corner of the room as to whether Herbert should, or should not, take over this rôle—or non-rôle, rather, for none of it, to Imogen’s recollection, had ever happened. Mercifully, the debate ended in a decision that he shouldn’t; and with whoops of happy greed, the boys fell on their parcels without ceremony, tearing into the coloured wrappings and lovingly-penned messages like termites into timber. This year, of course, there was no present from Grandpa, but never mind, there were plenty of others.
    *
    Ivor as Father Christmas! Oh well. In a way, he’d have rather enjoyed the rôle—would certainly have undertaken it if someone from the B.B.C. had asked him to, and had come along with a camera-team to record it—“Professor Barnicott, author of this and this and this, relaxing with his grandsons”—that sort of thing: but it so happened that no one had.
    Well, and so why not let him have the legend, then?—thislegend that Dot and all of them were so busy concocting? The jovial, benign grandpa, each year bringing the magic of Christmas to his little