This isn’t a complaint, but nothing seemed to be happening, for me, in the order in which I wanted it to. Take the incident over the plum pudding. There were no plans for all three of us to sit down, like a regular Christian family, to a regular Christian dinner. Our Jewishness – Sharon’s and mine – might not have got in the way of our buying each other Christmas presents or polishing off boxes of chocolate liqueurs, but it did rule out, on the grounds of cultural nationalism and self-respect, such things as the singing of carols or the hanging of mistletoe, just as surely as it ruled out going to midnight mass. A plum pudding, on the other hand, was something else again; a plum pudding, according to my reckoning was sufficiently free of associations with virgins and wise men and infant saviours to be eaten by my wife and myself at any time with impunity. As for Fitzpiers, he had spent the morning dashing from one SF widow to another, crying over their babies and helping them to baste and stuff and sample turkey; he’d already had a terrific Christmas, the best he could remember – plum pudding with brandy butter would round it off perfectly.

It had been steaming on the stove for hours. I’d popped downstairs I don’t know how many times to check the water. At three-thirty it was ready and at three-thirty-seven we were sitting up in bed eating it. But I was not enjoying mine as much as I usually did, or as much as I believed I had a right to. I was put off and put out. In the seven minutes I’d been away in the kitchen, untying the cellophane and being careful not to splash any water and measuring out three equal portions (equal to the last crumb!), Sharon and Fitzpiers had sneaked one in – I could tell it from the queer look on their faces and the three little beads of fresh perspiration between Sharon’s breasts – without me. An hour ago I would have given up my share of pudding gladly for the sweet pang that such an act of silent complicity would have caused me; the little secret something that Sharon and Fitzpiers now had together was the very element that had all along been missing from my excitement. But it belonged to then, not now. Its place was in the dream, not the reality. Sharon, of course, was the one I blamed. Yet again she was guilty of a breach of that etiquette whose principles were the only things that stood between civilized life and barbarism.

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