‘That’s not fair,’, Tyler said. ‘She didn’t even bother much about looking.’

‘She looked more than we did,’ Ted said.

Predictably, Christine chose Patsy’s tree, and Tyler suffered, being both outnumbered and too small to fight for his rights.

‘Why couldn’t Ben and Mike be here?’ he demanded. ‘They’d know a good tree when they saw one.’

‘They get to pick their own tree,’ Patsy said.

‘Okay Tyler,’ Ted said. ‘You can choose where we’ll have lunch.’

Both the girls groaned, and David sympathized with them. Ted and his son shared a taste for junk food, and Ted had figured out a way to avoid being outvoted. There was nothing at McDonald’s David was happy about putting into his stomach. He assumed his granddaughters’ protest was more social than dietetic; they were too old to be seen there in the company of older relatives. But it was all in the cause of keeping the family’s demands on Mary to a minimum. Patsy succumbed to a belching contest with Tyler on the way home, which David could have joined with some relief, but he was sitting next to Christine, whose offended dignity was more important than relief from his indigestion.

David was glad to leave them to the chore of the tree. His duty as light stringer had been handed over to Ted along with all the other rituals as head of the house. Beyond that, it had been Patricia’s pleasure, once the girls were grown, to spend a couple of hours at the decorating, and the elegant result always looked something out of a magazine, to awe rather than to delight children. All of the homemade ornaments of the past had been thrown out. The only traditions that remained were the small, round-framed pictures of the children and grandchildren, which David had given her. This year the tree would be the children’s own, and they’d be left to get on with it.

‘Is that all right?’ Mary had asked.

‘Exactly right,’ David had assured her.

He went down to his own part of the house and collected the presents he had wrapped for Diana and Constance. He hadn’t heard the sound of the compact disc player since the day he had bought three of them, and he was suddenly worried that there might not be so startling a difference when it was hooked up to Diana’s good but certainly dated equipment. It seemed even more improbable when he realized that the player was small enough to slip into his coat pocket, and the half dozen discs he had bought made hardly a bigger package. Yet in a way, the smallness of the packages pleased him, one for each to open, no great display of Christmas to burst upon their quiet fireside.