Christmas 1961
Nothing happens. Nothing worth talking about – so why mention it?
The first thing that doesn't happen: Patsy doesn't go to South Africa.
Perhaps it's the case that she's tied here, Delia worries. Sister Julienne thinks that Patsy will want to be here, primed and ready to assume responsibility if Delia should have a relapse (it won't happen; Delia's been fine for ages). Patsy insists she doesn't want to go, never put her name forward for it, even though Nurse Crane suggested that her formidable talents would come in very handy. She would much rather say here. But not out of any sort of duty or sense of obligation that Delia should worry about. She's not a good sailor. Not good is an understatement.
But wouldn't she like – Delia supposes – to go for a walk beneath the big broad skies of the southern hemisphere. To be ambling out of the clinic just as the twilight sets in, to find – what – a herd of wildebeest, grazing on the savannah in front of her? (Delia would be the first to admit that her knowledge of the particular flora and fauna of that corner of the world is rather lacking. Patsy could have gone, and reported back.) For that scene, you could put up with the discomfort of a little maritime nausea.
It's not that Delia thinks it will be a lovely jaunt. Sister Julienne has made it sound hard, and it will be hard, it will be graft. But there's a hardness – of a different kind - here in London too. It's not a holiday to remain.
Patsy insists she has no interest in setting out for a land she's never seen.
She's rather explore that undiscovered country, and move about the contours that make up Delia's body. To envisage how she can persuade that landscape to give up its secrets. Only that metaphor strikes rather awkwardly. There's something violent and aggressive about it. Like the land or the body is a territory to be claimed, waiting for you to impress your imprint on, the stamp of ownership. Something to be taken, rather than invited into. Something dominating rather than…reciprocal.
So Patsy rethinks the analogy. More like getting to know the map of Poplar then. A landscape that becomes more familiar with each day, one she knows, one she can inhabit without fear or self-consciousness. A landscape opens up before her because she knows how to speak to it. It is not a place she can demand things of, only a place she can work with.
Delia blushes. And then objects. Much as she likes the place, and has made her peace with the frustrations and surprising delights of Poplar, Patsy is truly terrible at flattery.
Patsy rethinks. And then decides to drop the analogy completely. Comparing bodies to other things, or disputing the extent to which something else takes on the quality of flesh – isn't that the kind of thing that Luther got in trouble for? The humanness of a little communion wafer has been a tussle between the churches for several centuries. Best to leave it alone. The comparison, that is, not the body. Delia agrees, entirely.
They make a list of things that will probably happen while nothing is happening here.
One. Phyllis and Fred will argue over the repair of a car that belongs to the clinic. No, a truck. No, a motorbike. They embody two very different approaches to vehicle maintenance.
Two. Trixie will pretend to be horrified at their living conditions, the heat and the perspiration and the fact her make-up won't fix. She'll do that because she thinks people are expecting her to say something about keeping beautiful in foreign climes. She'll take less than a day to forget to pretend be annoyed about this, to roll up her sleeves. She won't have packed sleeves, of course.
Three. Tom will probably – this is more of a guess – pick the least opportune moment to propose to Barbara. At the moment of a sudden crisis, just as something vital breaks down or something else equally vital runs out. Delia can see that coming, it's on the cards. Patsy is more unsure.
It is comfortingly predictable. The two of them will have to work to pretend to be surprised when they all return and unfold the stories that Delia and Patsy have already predicted. All these things will happen – out there. Nothing happens here at all. Patsy and Delia will have nothing to report at a homecoming bursting with stories.
It's Sister Monica Joan whom they assume will be huffy about not being taken along. And slightly wounded too, perhaps. It's the right decision, no doubt about it. But what underlines age and infirmity more than the unspoken non-invitation?
Sister Monica Joan has no cares about it whatsoever. Who knows what travelling she did in another life, before this?
Where she'd like to go, though, is the western coast of Scotland. The isle of Iona, but up and down too, into each island and inlet and hidden loch. She has been listening to a detective serial on the radio – she hasn't abandoned the radio in favour of the television, not at all. She makes a point of gathering her information about the world from multiple sources. One who relies on a single source for their truth is a fool. And then pauses, and then adds, that scripture is excepted from this point. But even biblical truth is supplemented by biblical archaeology. She's waiting for them, one day soon, to dig up the Holy Grail - so that all shakes out.
It's not the news though, strictly speaking, that she wants the radio for. It's drama, every weeknight at 7.45pm. A mysterious killer is on the loose, and the detective (from Glasgow originally), must track him across the Scottish islands. But the killer is always – at least so far – one step ahead, with a perfectly-devised legend and a charm that allows him to leave dead bodies strewn all along the coast.
This is just an old woman listening to a radio programme – and then recounting each episode to the rest of the house at breakfast. Even though, most of the time, the radio in Sister Monica Joan's room is loud enough for everyone to hear. She doesn't want to miss the quietest aural clue, muttered softly in the background for the benefit of the most attentive listeners.
Another thing that doesn't happen. This is just an old woman listening to a radio programme, so there is nothing really to report.
But this inspires Sister Monica Joan.
Before the lull of the New Year, she devises a game. Sister Mary Cynthia will play, and Delia and Patsy too, obviously. She invites Violet around too, and her nephew, who is visiting over the holiday. And Peter Noakes.
She gives each of them a laboriously written set of cards. Each of them describes a character, some quite outlandish, who have been discovered in a house where a gruesome murder has taken place. They must take on that character, inhabit his or her flesh. Written down on those cards are the things that each of their 'characters' must divulge over the course of the evening, with a note that when questioned on other points they are free to invent what they will, so long as they remain in keeping with the general attitude and orientation appropriate to the backstory. There is guidance on their character's Weltanschauung on a separate card, detailing their career and the seedy parts of their past. Each of them has a seedy part of their past – if only to make real the possibility that each of them might have committed the murder.
With each 'round', Sister Monica Joan, in the guise of grouchy and hard-bitten Glaswegian detective, brings out a newly-discovered clue. The phone used to batter in the head of the victim (poor Mrs Tiverton, elderly society widow); the secret love notes exchanged between Mrs Tiverton's glamorous daughter and the vile American playboy (Peter Noakes). At the end, each of them must guess who has committed the murder. Despite their initial reluctance, they all agree that it has been marvellously well done. Sister Monica Joan has carried off a triumph. She ought to market it.
There's nothing happening here.
It's Christmas eve, and Mrs Busby calls, from her sister's house – they had a telephone line put in this year. Because it is Christmas, her mam has allowed herself the luxury of twenty minutes on the phone. Delia can hear the sound of her aunt and her aunt's grown-up children in the background, just settling down for a mince pie and something warm as they troop back from church. Her aunt, hovering impatiently in the background, waiting for the household to settle so Christmas proper can begin.
"And", her mother pauses, and then runs through the following sentence very quickly, so the space between the words can scarcely be perceived "say Happy Christmas to Patsy too."
And that's it. Delia sits down, back on the sofa.
Patsy is half asleep, the effects not of a long day, but of assisting Sister Monica Joan with a bottle of sherry. It is traditional to drink it on Christmas eve, apparently. They both suspect that Sister Monica Joan has been inventing a lot of traditions this Christmas, but neither of them will say anything. There's no harm in it – neither of them is at work this evening, or tomorrow. Sister Mary Cynthia has offered to take on the rota for the following day, and Chummy will be at the Maternity Hospital, along with the locum doctor and another nurse whom they don't know, doesn't stay here, but seems perfectly likable. Patsy didn't really argue with Sister Mary Cynthia. There's not much on the books to anticipate, anyway. A distinct slowing down in the birth rate anyway, these past months (the pill? Delia wonders). Maybe too, soon-to-be mothers don't like to interrupt their festive calendars unless they're absolutely sure they're giving birth. There are definitely fewer false alarms at this time of year.
The other tradition that Sister Monica Joan has instituted is that she will not decorate the tree, in memory of Sister Evangelina, and the struggles they used to have over that particular item of yuletide decoration. So it stands there, sparse, in a brightly-lit room. Sister Monica Joan smiles beatifically at it. A reminder of something, the depth of that friendship, that endured as long as anything human can do.
She's also – and Delia supposes it's not really a tradition, not worth reporting on – taken to having her breakfast in a different seat around the table every morning. As if to experiment with where the view is best.
Delia sits down, as close to Patsy as possible. And drapes Patsy's right arm back over her shoulders. It's not heavy, but it's warm. Sister Monica Joan is out for the count, and, besides – she thinks she knows the sister well enough to say this now – this is not the sort of thing that she in her glinting, beady-eyed way, would comment on. She comments on many things, but those are the things that irk her. Her own words. "Affection has never irked me", she said, once, as Sister Winifred offered a solicitous remark about a woman – a school-teacher, respected, prim, unmarried, and nearing thirty, stepping out with a strikingly handsome young man, who wasn't twenty for another month.
Delia drapes Patsy's right arm back over her shoulder, where it was resting before she took the phone call. As she does so, she can hear Patsy's breath catch in her chest. Not with fear about who might be watching. This is something Patsy does every time Delia comes to touch her – a small stutter of surprise and gratitude that Delia should want to. Only Delia can hear it, and she doesn't say anything to Patsy about hearing it. Let Patsy think she continues to exude her usual put-together steeliness. She'll pass on the Christmas wishes from mam tomorrow.
There are two people sitting on a sofa in a warm room. Nothing is happening here – or, for that matter – in a thousand households around Poplar, this Christmas Eve.
Also, too, and just briefly: unremarkable gifts not worth noting. A tree, in a colourful plant pot. Only a small one, and proportionately smaller for Patsy than it is for Delia. Delia suspects it may not even be a pear tree, although the man who sold it to her swore blind it was. Horticulture – she needs Sister Julienne as a guide. The pot she found separately, and re-planted. Delia has also found a little knitted bird, for sale at a Christmas craft market in the Community Hall, to perch in it. She doesn't know what a partridge looks like, and, fortunately, nor does Patsy. Nor does the woman who knitted this lumpy-looking, evil-eyed bird know much about winged creatures in general.
Delia is at pains to emphasise, when she hands it over, just how unremarkable it is. "Only this, mind you. Don't expect two turtledoves tomorrow. My salary won't stretch to expectations like that."
"So there's no hope of three hens in striped jumpers and a beret?"
"Trixie does have a beret, which she has now declared to be out of fashion. That wouldn't be impossible."
Patsy smiles.
"Well, I might offer a compromise then. I'll get you the two calling birds next year, and you can owe me the French hens the year after that. It might take you that long to negotiate with Trixie for the beret. Go on – it will save me the trouble of thinking what to buy for you. You really are very difficult, you know."
Delia, who would probably admit to herself that she sometimes can be difficult, quickly does the mental arithmetic involved here. That's eleven more gifts.
That would take them far away, into almost the middle of the 1970s. An almost unimaginable distance in time, brought to life in a pageant of birds, rings and drummers. And more birds after that. Ah, Delia realises – Patsy is no fool; if they alternate the years, it'll be her, not Patsy who's on the hook for the five gold rings. Still, she assents anyway.
That's eleven more years. But some things endure for that long. Longer, even. The untinseled, unbaubled tree in the corner of the sitting room is a testimony to that.
A/N: Really, BBC, really? You deny me my festive lesbian subplot? Oh, I know, I've fiddled with the timeline.
And this is how the Murder Mystery Dinner Party was invented, can't believe it wasn't in the Christmas Special.