THE kitchen seemed to her the most familiar place on earth. Certainly she had spent more time in here than just about anywhere. It was not much of a kitchen, at least by comparison with those she saw in the magazines that came with the newspapers her children read.

No, it was a simple room, large enough for a cooker, the old table that had been a wedding present, and the cupboards Arthur had painted over. He'd done a hurried job and the paint had dried rough and lumpy. His handiwork had chipped with age. She did not mind these imperfections, much as she tolerated the fridge that rattled and the washing machine that sounded to be in pain.

Arthur loves a Christmas cake. No, Arthur loved a Christmas cake. She had to get the tenses right and this was not always easy. "I'm a silly old fool," she told herself. "Making a cake when there's only me to eat it."

This thought might have saddened her but it did not. Something about the making of a Christmas cake lifted her spirits. "Perhaps it's the spirits that lift my spirits," she said out loud with a giggle. A little brandy or whisky was part of the magic and you couldn't have a cake without it, whatever anyone said, and that included her friend Enid, who made do with something unmentionable from a shop.

"That woman just has no sense of style," she said for the benefit of the cat. Tar Very Much she called him, on account of his extreme and uninterrupted blackness.

"We'll have fun doing this all by ourselves, won't we?" she said to Tar. The cat purred with magnificent indifference and left via the flap Arthur had fitted so badly they'd had to employ a carpenter to put things right.

She assembled the ingredients on the old table: ground cinnamon, mixed spice, cocoa powder, mixed dried fruit, along with the sultanas and currants. She left out the glac cherries because she couldn't abide the sticky things, substituting dates, which she loved.

Then came the blanched almonds, softened butter, dark brown sugar, four eggs already beaten, the rind and juice of a lemon, a slosh or three of whisky and a little milk if necessary. She couldn't really say that any of this was necessary, but she felt like doing it all the same.

She set to, sifting the flour and stirring in the spices, then adding the dried fruits (but not those gaudy cherries). In another bowl she creamed the butter and sugar using the electric whisk Jack gave her, then added the eggs. Putting everything together, she admired the rich, dark mixture that formed in the caramel-coloured mixing bowl with its familiar chipped rim. She liked the small piece gone missing and had grown indignant when Jack had suggested buying her a new bowl. "You could get me one of those modern whisks instead," she had said.

The cake mixture worked a kind of alchemy, or so she supposed. She stood still for a moment, hearing all the voices, especially the boys agitating over who could lick the spoon or clean out the bowl.

"It's my turn this year, he got the bowl last year and there's more mixture in the bowl than on the spoon."

"That's not true and anyway there's hardly anything left in the bowl."

Arguing will curdle the mixture, she tells them. Then, the woman who is not yet old takes a Christmas slurp of whisky and rubs out the pencil mark on the bottle, replacing it with another lower down. He'll never notice, she reasons. Besides if he does, I'll say it was for the cake, which is only a sip away from the absolute truth.

Jack and Johnny settle their dispute and turn to her, their faces smeared with cake mixture.

"Do you like making Christmas cakes, Mum?"

"It's my favourite job of the year, the first sign that Christmas is coming," she says. And this is true, because she is always happy about the cake, just as she is about the decorations and the tree, and stringing the cards from red ribbons. These are the happy things, away from the worries about money, the pressure to get everything done and the relentless jollity. All that and Arthur's mother, with her criticising ways, the cantankerous old...

"Do you think you'll always make a cake, Mummy?" says Jack. Or maybe it is Johnny. "Yes, I'll always want to make a cake. There's nothing better than baking your own cake," she says, before returning the whisky bottle and going upstairs to lift the decorations from their sacred hiding place, a big old suitcase in the loft.

The cat-flap flipped open, indicating the arrival of Tar in search of a meal. He would have to wait until she'd got the cake in the oven.

That cake took hours, just like it always had done. It filled the house with the smell of Christmas. By the time it was cooked, Jeremy Paxman was on the television giving some politician or other a hard time.

She placed the cake on the table and watched the heat rise from the dark slab of deliciousness. Something else rose too, a vision of some sort, an angel or a spirit perhaps. It must be that whisky you had earlier, she told herself. The vision stayed for a moment, as fine and fragile as frost on a window. And then it melted from its wing tips and disappeared.

The phone rang and made her jump. "Not disturbed you, have I, Mum?" It was Jack. After complaining about his job for 20 minutes, he asked if she would like to come for Christmas. She told him about the cake, saying she'd saved him a job. Jack said that Sarah liked to buy one from Sainsbury's.

They chatted without again mentioning the cake, then rang off. The woman who was no longer young smiled at the oddity of life. Now it was her turn to be an awkward old mother in law. Before going to bed she broke off a burnt crust of cake and popped it into her mouth. All the Christmases she'd ever had seemed to be in that one piece of cake.

Updated: 11:05 Thursday, December 19, 2002