A perfect summer day may make me feel suicidal. The wider the gap between my inner weather and the communal one, the worse it feels. Mostly, I try not to blame my childhood or, specifically, my parents, simply because to blame would necessarily mean to remember.
To think about them. About it. The fighting and shouting which would force me into a different, quiet world of loneliness and desolation: if you don't grow close to people, their shouting cannot reach you.
My peculiar way of dealing with atmospheric agents stems from the memory of me as a little girl sitting by the window, hungrily watching the nice things in life pass by: what good is it, a perfect sun shining on perfect fields and perfectly happy children playing together, if I could never be allowed to join them and enjoy it? Exclusion starves little people.
The darker the room inside me, the angrier I get with the potential joy waiting for me outside. I prefer to breathe at one with nature, and am annoyed if the physical landscape does not reflect my spiritual one.
Nevertheless, the circularity of a splendid summer day never stops to amaze me, regardless of my anger: the slow start with sharp colours neatly showing through the cool air, dissolving into a crescendo of hazy sighs as the sun stabs at its highest; the perfectly symmetrical recovery of those same colours dipping their hues into a dying sunset, so that the eternal circle can be reproduced: life, death, life again.
As an outsider, I resent the inexorability of this summer day, its certainty as it gallops through its cycle. Was it not Goethe who, in 'Doctor Faust', buys from the devil the luxury to say: "Stop, moment, you are perfect!"?
Mr Vroom's absence is unusual. I go through our email exchange, looking for clues that might explain the recent silence. I notice that our correspondence, starting over a year ago with neighbourly politeness, has gained pace and boldness, not to mention frequence. We have added the friendly, hygienic cross at the end, a negligible cyber-kiss; gently teased each other; occasionally skimmed the surface of our respective voids.
This apparent indifference stirs memories of Mr Bastard, which pops up in my mind like an evil-looking, ferociously coloured plastic clown; despite having a completely different relationship with the two men, my old wounds throb, awaken by the recollection of a similar remoteness.
To know that people you may care for live their lives without you, and sometimes despite you, heightens my feeling of exclusion, rather like watching this beautiful sunny day inevitably unfolding in the sky, whether I am part of it or not.
Being the lover of a married man automatically makes you 'at loose ends' for Christmas and indeed any other publicly recognised special celebration. If you feel extra sad, you can use your freedom to wait by the phone for the moment, between setting fire to the Christmas pudding and graveyard-ing in front of the TV, buried under several metres of wrapping paper, when he will be able to disappear to 'walk the dogs' (he had the best walked dogs in the entire county) and give me the much-awaited brief call from the wilderness of the hills nearby.
That stilted, stolen conversation had all the charm of a half-chewed bone, which is - effectively - what a lover is thrown on family occasions. Again, I felt like I was looking into another person's life from the outside, forever forbidden from joining in.
Maybe people just recognise a pattern, even an unpleasant one, and reproduce it in their lives because it is familiar and easier to cope with, than a steady flow of happiness which requires some maintenance.
Today, then, as I mourn the conspicuous absence of mail from Mr Vroom, with whom I have not exchanged bodily fluids or indeed even a glass of water, it strikes me that I may be one of those people who use unhappiness to highly masochistic effect.
Then again, I must have eventually grown tired of Mr Bastard's frequent disappearances, coinciding with the obligatory two-week holiday in the summer or occasional weekends away with Mrs Bastard, as I joined a dating agency, and met the future Mr Husband.
Collar
Emma, the child, sitting by the window fashions an eerie reflection on Léon's own experience. He had pictured himself by another window, outside this time, and in a dark evening. The window of a toyshop in some unfamiliar street, framed as a Dickensian Christmas card scene… inside the toys, the warmth... the party.
But there perhaps the similarities end, for Léon was now clear on the differences between himself, the child, and himself the adult onlooker.
Indeed he was unsure if something similar had ever actually happened - in a more recent decade of course. Was it down there in that collection of hard, buried memories that only recently had started to leak out?
If not, what was the source of that mocking, overbearing drive to ensure that his own children never 'did without' when there was actually no danger of that happening?
There was something in Emma's sense of exclusion that still would have reached him had it come from the other end of the universe. Irony and paradox lifted him by the shoulders into the witness box.
Though no longer inside the Christmas card, when he was away from those whose nearness and affection he yearned for, their attendance at the party to which he was not invited goaded and bruised. That's not what Christmas is about!
Léon