My favourites though were the little houses that Mother set out along the windowsill. The Christmas village. One house with red shutters, one with green, one with blue and all with white painted snow and perfect lines of icicles just under the little roofs. There was a bakery too, with painted cakes in the window and an ice-skating pond where little ceramic children wearing tiny ceramic skates were glued to a track. At the flick of a switch the houses would light up with real electric lights and the tiny children would loop and loop and loop around the same track for ever, as long as anyone wanted them to.

What I mean to say was, inside December, inside my house, inside the party, there was a switch. A switch that could be turned on, and it was magical and wonderful and real. As real as plugs and electricity and engineering. At the party, Daddy would be home all day and my mother would wear a new dress and they would even dance, just a moment but laughing. If the right song came on late in the afternoon. I remember his hand on her back, guiding her around the living room in circles, like the ice-skating children. I remember all the smiling. The punch. Parties can be like that, can’t they? A place where anything is possible.

Mother didn’t keep the punch bowl after Daddy left. It’s possible that she broke it. It’s possible that she picked it up and smashed it on the driveway at night. On the night after the last party. After all the guests had left, after he was leaving. I just have to go, he said. I have to go I have to go I have to go. I can’t do this anymore. It’s possible that she followed him, in her dress, in her dress that she had danced in, in the dress that was possibly still warm in the place on her back where he had put his hand when they were dancing, down the steps from the front door carrying the huge red bowl sloshing with the last of the punch, sloshing up onto her dress in dark red waves. A wine-dark sea so small you could miss it, if you weren’t watching it with your nose pressed up to the window. So small and furious. It would have been quite possible to miss the way the punch sloshed up onto the dress and stained the dress’s red a redder red and made it so that you could see the soft indent of her belly button through the silk. It’s possible that she raised the punch bowl up over her head and threw it at his car as he pulled out of the driveway and it’s possible that it all smashed on the drive. The sea, the punch bowl from Hermès. And if it really had been a sea, inside the bowl, all the men on all the boats would have been instantly killed. Can you see it? The wreckage of all those little boats?