Millie, aged six, was on her way to school; she sat strapped into her booster seat in the back of her father’s car. Improbably, beyond the car windows, it was snowing – a sleety, mushy kind of snow; the windscreen wipers laboured to push the wet masses aside. Winters in the city were so mild these days, and to the adults snowy winter weather seemed a nostalgic memory.
To Millie, however, the snow wasn’t at all improbable, but welcome as part of the necessary preparations for Christmas, like cutting out paper snowflakes with scissors to stick on the classroom windows, or decorating the tree at home with her mother.
The sound of the windscreen wipers was lulling and nearly sent her back inside her private sleep-world: which was dangerous because she must be vigilant, ready for school. She had to concentrate, apart from anything else, on not feeling sick. There was a sour smell of dusty fabric inside the car, which Millie dreaded; her mother had told her to imagine a long straight road with green trees overhanging it on either side.
She pushed her left hand, almost unthinkingly, down into the tight blind space beside the car seat, because often this space would cool her and reassure her, like the trees. This time, however, Millie touched something unexpected, lodged down there in the darkness, and at first she recoiled in a rush of conscious awareness, pulling her hand away. She had a horror of things biting her. But the something had been cool and hard and inert, not furry or squirmy, so after a moment she pushed her hand down again and closed her fingers on it.
They were nearly at the place, now, where her father would stop the car to drop her off; he didn’t usually get out, but would sit in the driver’s seat to watch her go through the gate into the playground. Millie didn’t hate school, and could only dimly remember any time before it became her unalterable fate; she was an old hand by now, with a little gang of her own friends, and had adapted to the hard truth of collisions with the reality of others, from which even your loving parents couldn’t protect you.
The thing down the side of the seat was a smooth globule, about the size of a marble but not so perfectly round, with fiddly workings, sharp like a pin, to one side. Furtively, as if it were shaming or forbidden, she fetched the something out, hidden in her hand, and slid it into the pocket of her pink parka without looking at it. ‘Bye, Daddy,’ she said, and got out of the car.
He wound down his window and reached out to pull up Millie’s hood with its fur trim, because it was still snowing: a couple of snowflakes melted on her dark tobacco-brown hair, tangled and greasy-looking, which he was supposed to have brushed this morning and fastened into bunches. Millie had a funny, wide, flat, knowing face with a snub nose and grey eyes set rather shallowly and far apart: not pretty, but dear to him. ‘Bye, little mushroom. Got your lunchbox? Take care. Look both ways now, very carefully. Have a nice day.’
Millie’s father, Fergus, parked the car a couple of streets away from the school and, cursing the slippery mush on the pavement, climbed into the back seat, searching for something. He squeezed awkwardly down in the footwell to peer at the desert terrain under the front seats, rummaging warily among crisp packets and mouldy apple cores, cereal bar wrappers. Fergus’s mistress had texted him to say she thought she’d lost an earring in his car, one of her big fake pearl ones. Not that mistress was a word either of them would ever have used: mistresses, like snowy winters, belonged to another era. Fergus slid his hand down into the suspect tight spaces beside the seats, where, as he expected, he only found chewing gum, no doubt deposited there by Millie’s older brothers.
It shamed him terribly to think he’d made love to Jo in the back of his car like some groping adolescent: the same car he ferried his kids around in. But both of them were married, so they couldn’t go to each other’s homes. They’d met at a conference, where beds were easy; and then they’d contrived to go together to another one. In between conferences, neither of them could afford a hotel; they certainly couldn’t afford for a hotel to appear on the bank statements of their joint accounts. And their lust at the time of the back seat of the car had seemed desperate, exotic, transcendent. Fergus winced now: on this snowy school day it only seemed predictable, ordinary, sordid.
He sat for long minutes in the driving seat without starting the engine, staring forwards into the whirling, clotting snow that seemed to insult him, thudding in lumps against the windscreen. Then he thought that one of his wife’s friends might spot him sitting there, and report back to Wanda that he’d looked funny or ask what was the matter with him.
It was the first time that he’d ever been unfaithful, in all their years together. He couldn’t easily explain, not even to himself – let alone to Wanda, were she ever to find out – how it had happened. He wasn’t really the kind of man who had affairs.
In the cloakroom, when no one was looking – they were excitedly stamping snow from their boots – Millie took out the something she had been grasping in her parka pocket, to look at it. She’d expected it to be a bit of a toy car or gun belonging to her brothers, but to her astonishment it was a precious female thing, gleaming and lustrous and lovely: fastened on a twisted gold wire, a huge pearl and a smaller translucent cut green stone, which must be an emerald. She transferred it carefully to the pocket of her pinafore dress and whispered to her friends that she had something to show them. At wet break in the hall, when the four of them huddled together behind the piano, she held it out toward them on the palm of her hand. ‘Jewels,’ she announced importantly, and the others gasped.
‘It’s just an earring,’ Lila said.
As soon as she said it Millie saw that Lila was right, it was an earring: but that didn’t matter. ‘It’s a sacred earring,’ she solemnly explained.
‘What do you mean, sacred?’
‘It has powers. Look!’
Clutching the jewels tightly in her fist, she let her eyes roll up in her head and gave an odd kind of jump, throwing her head backward and kicking up her heels as hard as she could. ‘Feel it,’ she offered to them generously, when she came back to earth. ‘It can really make you fly.’
And she allowed the others to take it in turns, holding the earring tight in their hands and jumping and rolling their eyes back, reporting how they’d really felt themselves leaving the ground for a moment. They staggered around, claiming that they felt dizzy. ‘It’s really weird,’ they exclaimed.
‘It really makes you fly.’ Only Lila wouldn’t try it. She was jealous of Millie’s bossy authority.
‘What are you going to do with it?’ she asked.
‘I’m going to give it to my mother, for Christmas.’
Fergus taught at an FE college and was a passionate advocate for literacy across the sector; he was conscientious, political and committed to his students, who were mostly adult learners or teenagers on vocational courses. He was a good man, really; he’d always thought of himself as a good man who liked people, warm and not cynical, even an enthusiast. So where had it come from, then, the cold worm of doubt that had insinuated itself, over this past year, into his thoughts? The trouble hadn’t begun with sex, it had begun with doubt. He’d begun to doubt whether he really liked his wife. Yet he was supposed to have such a great family life: he really did have a great family life, he loved his kids.
One of the cold thoughts Fergus hated himself for was that, if Wanda ever did find out about his affair, she might magnanimously forgive him – after a lot of wholly justified wrangling and hurt and offended dignity – but then she would hold it over him for ever. He saw that she did this: forgave people but looked down on them for ever afterwards, from the heights of her wounded righteousness.
Wanda was luminous and beautiful and wholesome and worked for a charity; but wasn’t she also brittle and superior, moralising? In another age – the age of snowy winters and mistresses – she would have made an excellent vicar’s wife, fragrant and irreproachable, dispensing soup to the poor. Fergus couldn’t forgive himself for thinking all this. And how could all the things that he’d once loved in his wife – he’d thought she was like the heroine of a 19th-century novel – become the very things he disliked about her?
His problems didn’t end, though, with Wanda. There was Jo now as well, because in his cold thoughts he’d turned against her, too. He had been attracted to her, that first time at the conference, because she was spontaneous, fun, self-deprecating, sexy – and she really was all of those. The trouble may not have begun with sex but, of course, once sex was stirred into the mix everything got more torrid, hungry, greedy; even in the back of the car it had been pretty exciting. The trouble wasn’t the sex, it was all the rest of the time. He’d hardly known Jo when their affair began, and now he was finding out that as well as being spontaneous and sexy she was needy, a bit silly, whiny sometimes, drank too much. She sent cute emojis to his WhatsApp, of cats with hearts for eyes; she hadn’t vaccinated her children, she said, because of the autism thing. ‘What autism thing?’ he’d said. ‘Don’t you know that’s junk science?’ But the real problem wasn’t Jo or Wanda. The real problem was himself, or that dark place inside himself, from which the cold thoughts came. What kind of man was he: without love, without belief?
That evening in her bedroom, Millie was wrapping up presents secretively, tongue stuck out in concentration. She struggled to cut the paper with blunt scissors and then got tangled in twisted Sellotape or lost its end. A notice written in red felt pen and blu-tacked to her door said, Dont com inn. Fergus knocked on the door and asked if he could come in anyway. ‘You have to wait,’ she said, and he heard a bustling noise, something hastily hidden away. The first thing he saw when she let him in was Jo’s earring, nestled in an explosion of tissue paper.
‘What’s this?’ he asked.
‘It’s a jewel. It’s very beautiful and has special powers. It’s for Mummy.’
‘Where did you get it?’
‘I found it.’
‘Found it where?’
‘Just found it,’ Millie said evasively. ‘She’s going to be excited.’
Millie had presents for all the family: even her brothers got chocolate bars. ‘But I’m not telling what I’ve got for you!’ She was breathless with her surprise, pushing something back further under the bed, sitting on guard in front of it with her arms folded, eyes shining.
Fergus was visited by a vision of his lost innocence: memories of the Christmas decorations in his grandparents’ house, so charged with mystery in his childhood: a crib with baby Jesus in a manger with real straw, a picture of a robin on a post box capped with snow made of crimped folded paper, and one of people coming out of a church whose celluloid stained glass windows shone, beneath a sky full of stars, one star brighter than all the rest. Yet he’d never been to church at Christmas in his life. And outside in the real world this morning’s snow had been an aberration, it had mostly melted away already, there hadn’t even been enough to build a snowman, although the boys had tried when they got home from school.
Later that evening he took the dog out for a walk in the dark, and texted Jo to ask if he could call; she phoned him back right away, her voice low and wary, slurring slightly. ‘I’m so sorry, Jo,’ Fergus said. ‘It’s all my fault, but it has to be over.’
A pause at Jo’s end, cautious. Not wholly taken aback, he thought. ‘So that’s nice,’ she said. ‘Is that my Christmas present?’
The dog sat perplexed and patient on the wet pavement – she was a good girl, a black lab – looking up at him, identifying the guilt and shame in his voice. He wished that the dog didn’t have to hear this.
‘Millie found your earring in the car,’ he said, ‘and I just thought, this isn’t good for either of us. I mean, it was good…’
‘I thought we both thought it was good.’
‘Well, we did, but now we…’
‘So I’d like my earring back again, thank you very much,’ she said, having a stab at sounding brave and indignant, although he heard her hurt and humiliation, her tearfulness.
‘She’s wrapping it up to give it to Wanda for Christmas.’
Another pause. ‘Oh.’
The dog grew bored and restless,
standing up to go, tugging at the leash. Fergus asked Jo to get rid of the other earring, the one that she still had. ‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘In case it ever crops up.’
‘I might,’ she said defiantly. ‘Or I might not.’
But Jo wasn’t a bad person. She hung on to the solitary earring for a while, then in the new year put it in a jiffy bag and sent it to reassure him, addressed to him safely at the college where he taught. And he threw it away, not in the waste bin in his room.
Millie’s present to her father on Christmas Day was a rusty old penknife she’d bought at the fair at school – Fergus hung on to it as if it were lifesaving. Then Millie stood anxiously over her mother, while she unwrapped hers. ‘You won’t believe your luck!’ she said.
Wanda held out the earring on her palm.
‘Oh, Millie,’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s beautiful!’
‘Why’s there only one?’ scoffed Millie’s brother Jacob. ‘Mum can’t wear just one.’
His mother frowned significantly at him. ‘Oh, I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘It’s the kind of earring that isn’t really meant for wearing, it’s more for looking at.’
‘Like treasure in a museum,’ Millie said, improvising quickly. It hadn’t occurred to her until now that there should be two. ‘It’s probably Roman I expect. And it has special powers.’
Wanda squeezed the earring tight and closed her eyes. ‘I think I’m feeling something,’ she said. She was definitely reminding Fergus of the heroine in a George Eliot novel. Smiling, she held the earring out to him, warm from her hand. ‘Hold on to it and make a wish,’ she said.
Of course what he wished for, despising himself, was to get away with it.
The Party by Tessa Hadley is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). To order a copy for £11.04 until 5 January, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. free UK delivery on orders over £25
