Christmas

Christmas is a turning point in Mary Lamb / Amy Hide and Jamie’s shared life: as other people leave, the pair withdraw from the world and reorganize their days around drinking, eating, sleeping, and one another. The season’s usual social timetable gives way to a private cycle that makes time feel suspended, even as money and poverty remain pressing realities.

Time as a Social Exchange

The episode’s unusual schedule sits within a broader account of time as something people trade. The narrator describes tramps as people who have no money because they refuse to sell what others sell: their time. They keep their time, yet remain preoccupied with money, exposing the cost of opting out of the exchange that structures ordinary life. Against this account, Christmas will offer Mary and Jamie a temporary, enclosed way of spending time together, though not an escape from its material conditions.

Mary’s experience of money complicates that contrast. In the shops, other people resent money, while she privately sees it as useful and takes pleasure in saving it even as she spends it. Under Mrs Botham’s informal guidance, she becomes adept at finding bargains. Later, Mary understands more sharply what poverty has meant: she had thought life itself was poor, but recognizes that money and access to comfort exist beyond her circumstances. Seeing well-kept people, she does not simply want their money; she wants their time. Christmas brings this tension into Jamie’s flat, where money is available but cannot make the season feel welcome to him.

Withdrawal for Christmas

As Christmas approaches, people around the pair make plans elsewhere. Jo leaves for Switzerland to ski with her partner; two men take Augusta to a country house; and Lily and Carlos leave to stay with Bartholomé in the North Sea. Mary and Jamie see them off in a taxi. Once they return to the flat, Mary is glad to have Jamie to herself, although the supposedly enlarged privacy has the opposite spatial effect: the flat seems smaller, not larger. Without really considering the act, she cuts the telephone cord, making their separation from other people deliberate and practical.

Jamie acknowledges that Mary will have to cope with everything and gives her money, telling her to take plenty. He notes how fortunate they are to have it, then says he does not care what food she gets. His response to Christmas is not simple dislike: he feels that the season itself is hostile to him, and expects to drink heavily because everyone drinks a lot then. When Mary asks how long it will last, he answers, but the passage does not establish what duration he means. The exchange places money, food, and drinking within their isolated holiday without resolving Jamie’s dread of it.

The Day-Night Cycle

Mary and Jamie try to abolish diurnal time: the distinction by which day and night keep life separate and sequential. Around noon, after several hours of drinking, they prepare to eat. Jamie eats less than he once did; afterward, Mary leads him to the bedroom, where she has been crying, and prepares him for the daily routine she has established between them. They then sleep deeply, often for six or seven hours, passing what feels like a full night’s rest through the afternoon.

They rise in the evening and begin a long night, remaining awake until dawn and ready to start again. Their pattern does not remove time so much as rearrange it: midday becomes the beginning of a meal, the afternoon becomes night’s sleep, and the hours after dark become their working span. The repeated cycle gives the days a private order while cutting them off from the ordinary calendar around them.

Intimacy and Its Cost

During the first few nights, Mary waits until Jamie is confused by drink and drugs before talking at length about what she sees as his failures and concealed identity. Later, they talk less; the narration presents their closeness as no longer requiring those conversations. This silence develops alongside the routine, not as evidence that their problems have been settled but as part of the intimate enclosure they have built.

Christmas therefore combines abundance and deprivation. Jamie can hand Mary money, yet the pair choose a life structured by drinking, sleep, and isolation rather than by the season’s public rhythms. Their shared schedule offers a way to occupy time together, but its repetition also narrows their world: dawn finds them still awake, and the next day begins by returning to the same cycle.