I bought Sarah a Kur’s Egg. Not a Fabergé. Not an Easter. Not the sort a chicken manages without assistance. I have not told her why.
What I told her was that I’d seen it, and thought of her, and that there was no reason. This is the sort of thing one says while handing over a parcel one has wrapped oneself, badly, in the paper left over from Christmas. No reason. It is the most reliable lie in the English language and we both let it stand, because the alternative was for me to say the true thing, and the true thing was a paragraph, and one does not deliver a paragraph across a kitchen table at four o’clock on a Sunday.
So I will deliver it here instead, where she cannot see my face.
I bought Sarah an egg because some weeks ago, at a lunch that went the way the good ones do, she said the thing women say at four that is not the thing they arrived to say at one. The arrived-thing was about her eldest’s UCAS form. The four-o’clock thing was that she and David hadn’t, in a while, and that she’d stopped minding, and that the stopping-minding was the part that had frightened her enough to say it out loud to me, over the cheese nobody ate.
I did not say anything wise. I am not, the column notwithstanding, a wise woman. I said something about David being tired, which was kind and useless, and we moved on to whether the dog needed its teeth done.
But I thought about it on the bus. I thought: she does not need advice, she has had advice, advice is what the magazines are for. She does not need to be told her body is beautiful; she is forty-six and has buried a parent and run a department and does not require my opinion on her body. What she needs is for someone to put a specific object on her table without making it a conversation. To say here and not here, because. To remove, from the whole transaction, the requirement that she explain herself, or perform gratitude, or have a feeling about it in front of another person.
That is what I could not say while handing it over, because saying it would have been the precise thing I was trying to spare her. You cannot announce that you are being delicate. The delicacy evaporates on contact with the announcement. So you say no reason, and you wrap it badly, and you let her think you are scattier than you are.
The huxi people give you sixty days to send it back for the actual money — not a voucher, the money — which is the detail that let me buy it for someone else in the first place. If it does nothing for her, she is out nothing. I find I can give a gift far more easily when it is, structurally, returnable. There is no version of this where Sarah is stuck with my misjudgement on her bedside table. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, most of why I could do it at all.
It cost £130. I have said it was a trinket. It was not a trinket. Margaret, who misses nothing, watched me wrap it and said only, “That’s nice paper for no reason,” and started a fresh stack.
Sarah texted on Tuesday. The text was one word. I knew the word before I opened it. I texted back “I know” and that was the whole correspondence, and it was, I think, enough.
— Charlie bought one for herself, too, some time ago, and has mentioned this before, and will not be mentioning it again.
— Charlie
