The tree without

Since last Christmas, John and Edie have been watching their tree, which they keep outside, with the mixture of helplessness and pride familiar to mothers of sons. They first decided to have a tree that was to enjoy a full life, roots and all, in its pot, five years before.

‘I thought it might have happened, and it has,’ said John, from behind the tree, more accurately from within it, which he was attempting to fit through their front door. ‘It won’t come without a fight, this year. It’s even prickly on its smooth bits. Did we like it once?’

Edie saw where this might end, with a lot of spiteful lopping and some vinous remorse. ‘Leave it outside,’ she said. And, to make certain, ‘I remember you saw an outside tree once, do you remember? You liked it.’

John had seen such a tree, when first he had lived in a city. It was in an unloved street, gritty and neglected, decorated in the early morning with rattling cans and half-eaten, never edible, but absorbent meals. Once he had been walking home, at Christmas, and there was a thirsty but assertive Christmas tree, defiantly gay, almost in his path, not tall but sure of itself, its snappy branches decked with little painted wooden horses and baskets containing apples the size of berries, the whole impression hardy, generous and not frivolously lavish, as are the trees in the windows of department stores, but expressive, or so it had seemed to John, of something held on to in a difficult time. This hard, small tree almost certainly had no roots, was dead already, but it was the tree he thought of when people said ‘Christmas tree’, even now.

‘We could bring it inside,’ said John, pleased to realise that he wouldn’t have to, but reluctant to be read so easily by his wife.