The tree went up on the nineteenth. Not because I’d planned it for the nineteenth, but because I found the box at the back of the press in the hall while I was looking for the extension lead, and it seemed easier to put it up than to put it back.
It’s a small artificial one – two and a half feet, maybe three. We had a real tree in the B&B years, a five-footer at least, dressed to the point of embarrassment with lights and glass balls and a star that Donal insisted on even though it leaned every year and every year he straightened it and every year it leaned again. I didn’t replace it after we closed. A few strands of lights on a small fake tree is enough. Enough for one person in a cottage on the winter solstice, the shortest day, the dark pressing in from both sides of four o’clock.
Bríd came down from Tralee on the twentieth. She stayed the night, which she hadn’t done since October of the year before, and we sat up too late with the fire going and she told me about her sister’s kitchen renovation in a level of detail I couldn’t have anticipated.
The tinsel was in a box with a cracked bauble and some string. Not all of it made it out.
‘You haven’t changed anything,’ she said, looking around the kitchen.
‘Some of the teacups are cracked,’ I said.
‘They were cracked before.’
She’s right that I haven’t changed much. The same table, the same four chairs, the same blue-and-white tiles behind the range that I thought about replacing in 2018 and then didn’t. Bríd finds this either admirable or worrying, depending on the week. She didn’t say which it was this time. We ate lamb chops and roasted potatoes and there was a glass of red wine each and we didn’t talk about anything much, and she left after lunch the next day because she had to get back for her daughter’s visit. The house was quiet in a particular way after she left. Not bad quiet. Just specific.
I made the Christmas cake in early December, the same week I got back from Cork. It’s a small cake, a six-inch tin, soaked in whiskey twice since then. In the B&B years I made three of them, sometimes four. The Americans wanted photographs, some years. I have nothing against Americans wanting photographs of a Christmas cake, but I don’t miss the performance of it. This one cake in its tin, with a single layer of marzipan and a very rough application of royal icing – Bríd said it looked like a satellite photograph of an Arctic landscape, which I thought was fair – is entirely sufficient.
Donal rang at half ten on Christmas morning to tell me it was dry in Cork, as if I’d want to know that.
‘Fierce cold here,’ I said.
‘It’s not bad in Cork.’
‘It’s always not bad in Cork according to you.’
He laughed at that, which is the right response. Then he told me about his daughter’s plans – they were going to his son-in-law’s parents in the evening, a big crowd – and I could hear something in the background, the television or a child, and I thought about our Christmases growing up, how loud they were, how many cousins. You don’t notice the volume going down until it’s already gone.
‘Will you be all right on your own?’ he asked.
‘I’m grand.’
‘You’d tell me.’
‘I would,’ I said, and I meant it.
He asked had I finished the book I’d brought back from Schull in October, which I had, weeks ago. I told him I’d been on two more since then and he said he still hadn’t started the one his daughter gave him in the summer, which is typical Donal. We talked for the better part of forty minutes, which is long for us, and by the end we’d covered the Yaris noise under the dashboard that I’ve been ignoring since spring, whether the gate at the back is any better since Tom looked at it in November – it is, slightly – and what I was planning to eat. I told him the truth, which was a single chicken breast and some roasted carrots, and he said he’d ring again on St. Stephen’s Day.
After I got off the phone I stood at the kitchen window for a while with my tea. No wind. The apple tree bare against the sky. Tom’s fields silent, no sign of Bess. The light – that thin, low December light that doesn’t quite arrive before it starts thinking about leaving again.
There are things I kept from the B&B years. The tree, even if it’s smaller. The cake. A candle in each window on Christmas Eve – I did that again this year, three candles along the front sill, though I’m not sure who I’m signalling to at this point, three kilometres off the R560. The dinner: I always made it properly when we had guests, so I make it properly still, even for one. Proper plates. A cloth napkin. The good cups from the press, not the cracked blue one.
The things I let go are harder to list, because they went so gradually I barely noticed. The big tree. The Christmas cards, which I stopped sending about three years ago and nobody said anything, which I found equal parts relieving and slightly depressing. The guests, obviously. The performance of cheerfulness at breakfast when you’d slept badly and the radiator was acting up and someone’s husband wanted to ask you the best route to Killarney in a way that suggested he wouldn’t be satisfied with the first answer.
I ate my dinner in the kitchen rather than the sitting room. I’d thought about moving to the sitting room, the fire, the tree with its three strands of lights. In the end I stayed where I was. The radio on, low. The candles burning down in the window.
Later I rang Donal back because I’d forgotten to tell him something, and he’d already forgotten what it was he’d been going to tell me. So that was that.
St. Stephen’s Day tomorrow. Tom might pass by with Bess. I’ll put the kettle on for them if he does.