The Hypothetical Children

The hypothetical children have been at it again. This time they’ve managed to ruin Christmas. I was all for having a nice sedate one. I felt it was the thing to do. Mother had passed away in the autumn. This would be our first year without her. I knew the neighbours would be watching and judging if we made too much fuss. We’d keep Christmas simple this year. A smallish tree. A few tasteful decorations. Modest presents, carefully wrapped. I thought that Emily would understand. She’d know you don’t make a fuss over Christmas when there’s been a death in the family.

Emily did not understand. Emily wanted all the trimmings. An enormous shop-bought Christmas tree; synthetic so we could get the good out of it for the next few years. Brightly coloured sparkling lights. Decorations cascading down the hall. When I tried to tell her that it wasn’t on. That everyone in the village would think it shameful; celebrating, when my mother was hardly even cold. “Life’s for the living,” said Emily and brushed my concerns aside. “There’s no point thinking about your mother. We should be looking to the future. We’ll want a decent tree and lots of lovely decorations when the children begin to arrive.”

Emily had been figuring these hypothetical children into our plans since the morning after our wedding day. I couldn’t buy a sports car because we’d require a backseat when the babies came. And I couldn’t turn the front lawn into a rockery because the children would need somewhere spacious to kick football. I couldn’t have a study because we’d need the spare room for a nursery. We couldn’t even book next year’s holiday in a timely fashion because there was a very real chance that by the time the summer rolled round, there would be children to consider and they wouldn’t take kindly to continental heat.

I was not entirely opposed to the idea of children. I knew from being a child myself, that when the bloody creatures actually arrived they’d be much more flexible and easier dealt with than Emily could ever anticipate. There was no point trying to explain this to her for a hypothetical child is nothing like an actual kid. Negotiating with something that’s yet to come felt a lot like trying to talk the apocalypse down. Damn I hated those hypothetical children. They were always getting in the way of things. They did not want me to have any fun. By the third year of our marriage the little buggers had driven me round the bend. I’d have taken an axe to every one of them, if such an act had been at all possible. But you cannot kill a hypothetical child.

Hypothetically speaking it was possible that the hypothetical children would never actually exist. Emily was almost forty and we had been trying for quite some time. Yet, here we were going big on Christmas, getting rid of the back garden pond, and maintaining friendships with couples we didn’t even like just so their kids could play with our hypotheticals kids at some point in the hypothetical future. Hypothetically speaking, it felt insane. I knew I’d have to do something about it, before Emily drove us both around the twist.

I took her aside on the first week of December, before she could get the Christmas tree up. “Hypothetically speaking,” I said, “what would happen if we didn’t have children? What if it was just the pair of us?”

Emily didn’t even pause to draw breath. “Hypothetically speaking?” she snapped back at me, “I wouldn’t like that one little bit. We’d be rattling round this big old house. All alone with nobody to talk to.”

“Hypothetically speaking, we’d still have each other,” I said and tried to wrap my arms around her.

She shrugged me off. “There’s no point in going down that road,” she said. “Wondering how we’d manage if it was just the two of us. It’s only conjecture at this point. We don’t know how things are going to turn out.”

Hypothetically speaking, I had to admit that she was right. That weekend I helped her decorate the Christmas tree. I could feel the hypothetical children gloating. They’d won yet another battle, but I knew they wouldn’t be satisfied until they ran me out of the house and had Emily all to themselves.

Inspired by a line from Agatha Christie’s 1958 novel, Ordeal by Innocence