by Jill Mansell
“You mean if he went down on one knee and asked you, you’d refuse? Don’t make me laugh,” Joel retorted. “You’ll be asking me to believe in fairies next.” More gently, he went on, “Pan, don’t get upset. I’m thinking of you. These kind of people live their own lives. They aren’t like us.”
“You don’t know. You met Sean for all of three seconds,” Pandora accused him. “You can’t only judge people by what you read in the papers. His sister came around to see me this afternoon, and she couldn’t have been nicer.”
Joel gazed at her in total disbelief.
“You mean Cleo Mandeville? Now you really are having me on! I met her last night. She’s having a thing with Damien Maxwell-Horne of all people. Talk about pond scum,” he went on bitterly. “The man’s nothing but a gigolo. I even tried to warn her off him, more fool me, but she soon put me in my place.”
“You’re joking.” Pandora stared at him, dumbfounded.
“The silly bitch thought I was only doing it because I wanted to chat her up myself.” Joel shook his head in disgust. “Wrapped herself around Maxwell-Horne and flounced off in a huff. I mean, please! She may have the looks and the body, but there has to be more to life. Imagine trying to hold a real conversation with someone like that! Imagine,” he went on with a shudder, “having a relationship with the kind of girl whose idea of current affairs is whether Vogue says fur coats are in or out this year.”
Big, easygoing Joel seldom lost his temper, but he was certainly cross now. Pandora, who couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten so overheated, was both amazed at Cleo’s abysmal taste in men and grateful to her for having so brilliantly diverted Joel’s attention from her own sorry state of affairs.
Sadly, though, not for long.
“But that,” he said, “is only one more reason why you’d have to be out of your mind to get involved with Sean Mandeville. Don’t you see? People like them just aren’t—”
“This is silly.” He wasn’t helping. Pandora had had enough. “I’ve heard of racial prejudice, but celebrity prejudice? Come on, Joel. Besides,” she added flatly, “it’s not as if I’m asking you whether or not I should get involved with Sean. I already am involved. I’m having his child, for heaven’s sake! How much more involved can I get?”
Chapter 22
Of all the stupid songs to get stuck in your head, thought Cass, I have to get “Jingle Bells.”
Even more annoyingly, it wasn’t going to go away. Kingdom Radio had adapted and adopted it as this year’s Christmas jingle. Cass, who had heard it a thousand times over the past couple of weeks, wondered if she was ever going to get it out of her brain. Jingle bells, jingle bloody bells… She hoped every Kingdom listener in the country was as plagued by it as she was. Why should she suffer in silence and alone?
Still, only two days to go before Christmas, and it would all be over. As she reached home, driving through the gates at the bottom of the drive, Cass couldn’t help remembering those terrible weeks when the sidewalk outside had been awash with photographers scrabbling for position every time anyone either came or went to get the best shots. Jack moving his things out, Cleo losing her temper one morning and yelling at them all to piss off, Sophie looking pale and upset following the departure of her father…the press had gotten it all.
At least that was over now, Cass mused. As summer had drawn to an end, so public interest had gradually waned, the photographers had sloped off, and things had gotten back to normal.
Except it hadn’t been normal at all, because Jack was no longer there. He had gone. Shacked up with his carrot-headed floozy. They had even, among themselves, taken to calling her Flooze. Cass pretended it helped, but it didn’t really. She was still completely unable to envisage Christmas Day itself without Jack.
When she unlocked and pushed open the front door, the first thing she smelled was his aftershave.
She breathed in the achingly familiar scent, mingled with pine from the eight-foot tree shimmering in the hallway, and wondered if she was hallucinating. There had been no sign of Jack’s car anywhere outside. According to Sophie, he and Flooze were spending Christmas in Paris. He couldn’t possibly be here.
* * *
Jack was there. He hadn’t been able to stay away. Never a great drinker, several glasses of Chablis at the office Christmas party earlier that afternoon had weakened his resolve, exerting an almost mystical pull in the direction of Hampstead. The taxi driver who had brought him here, recognizing him at once, had been characteristically up-front.
“Season of goodwill, eh, mate? Gonna make it up wiv the missis? Wanna watch out; good-lookers like Cass don’t ’ang around forever. Reckon you oughta snap ’er back up quick before someone else does.”
It wasn’t a question of snapping Cass back up; Jack had just needed to see her again. He had needed to see his family, to make sure all the decorations had been put up properly and the tree was standing in its usual place.
Everything, to his relief, was as it should be, from the eclectic assortment of baubles they had collected together over the years to the battered papier-mâché bells made by Cleo in her last year of primary school, festooned with scarlet-and-silver ribbons and hung—along with a football-sized bunch of mistletoe—above the kitchen door.
And although Sean was out, Sophie had been touchingly pleased to see him. Even Cleo, just back from a weeklong assignment in the Seychelles and in a more forgiving mood than usual, had teased him for not being as brown as she was and offered him a microwaved mince pie.
Jack, who missed his family desperately, had been more than happy to just sit there in the kitchen, catching up on his daughters’ news, watching Cleo paint her nails red and sign her way through a pile of Christmas cards destined—if he knew Cleo—never to be mailed. Sophie, who had sent all hers off three weeks ago, was simultaneously wrapping presents, updating him on the amount of conversational Swahili she was now able to speak, and making tremendous headway through a family-sized jar of chocolates.
The kitchen was warm, the atmosphere friendly, the chatter nonstop. One of Mrs. Bedford’s specialties, steak-and-kidney casserole, was baking in the oven. Cleo was singing along intermittently with the Christmas CD playing in the background. When Jack heard Cass’s car draw up outside, he felt his pulse break into a gallop.
And here she was at last. As his wife appeared in the kitchen doorway, her blond hair glittering with rain, Jack stood up. She was wearing a white angora dress he hadn’t seen before. She looked beautiful, even with slightly smudged gray eye shadow and all her lipstick—after a hard day in the studio—worn off.
“No need to stand.” Cass dumped her coat over the back of a chair and nodded gratefully at Sophie, who was putting the kettle on. “This isn’t a job interview.” She glanced across at him. “I thought you were in France anyway.”
“Flying tonight.” Jack watched her ease her leather boots off and thought of all the hundreds of times he had massaged Cass’s tired feet for her. “Not until eleven. I thought I’d just drop by and see how you all are.”
“Pretty much the same as we were four days ago.”
That was when he had called around to deliver the Christmas presents.
Leaning forward in her chair, Cass gently massaged her own feet. “And you?”
She didn’t mean to sound stilted; it just came out that way. Jack’s unexpected arrival had unsettled Cass, who was spending far more time than was sensible imagining him celebrating Christmas in a fabulous Paris hotel with Imogen. She hadn’t asked, but they would undoubtedly be staying somewhere swish, either the Four Seasons George V or the Ritz Paris. When Sean and Cleo had been tiny and she and Jack had still been terrifyingly poor, they had left the children with her mother and escaped to Paris together for a much-needed weekend break. Their hotel, in the foggy back streets of Montmartre, had been a Gauloises-infused fleapit with damp crawling up the walls and a manager permanently out of
his mind on Pernod, but it had been one of the most romantic, magical, idyllic weekends of her life.
So much for romance, Cass thought. She carried on rubbing the soles of her feet.
“I’ll make it.” The kettle had boiled. Jack rose to his feet once more. “Tea or coffee?”
“Coffee. Better make yours black.” Realizing he’d had one or two lunchtime drinks too many, she couldn’t resist making the dig. “You wouldn’t want to miss your plane.”
“Cards, Mum.” Sophie pushed this morning’s arrivals across the table before the bickering could escalate into an argument.
The third one Cass opened was from Terry Brannigan in New York: “To Cass, Jack, and kids,” he had scrawled across the inside in his hectic handwriting. “Here’s to the best Christmas and happiest New Year yet! Much love to you all, Terry.”
“Our cards must have crossed somewhere over the Atlantic.” Cass had to smile at the cartoon on the front of a depressed radio presenter playing “Lonely This Christmas.” She passed it over to Jack. “I sent his off last week, telling him you’d moved out.”
The phone rang. Cleo answered it.
“Mum? The Daily Mail wants to know what you’d most like for Christmas.”
Jack, who had been studying Terry’s cartoon, glanced up at Cass. For an instant, their eyes met. Hope flared in Jack’s heart.
“That’s easy,” said Cass without a flicker of emotion. “A divorce.”
* * *
Arriving back at the flat an hour later, Jack was met at the top of the stairs by Imogen.
“You’re late. I phoned the office, and they said you’d left ages ago. For heaven’s sake,” she said crossly, “we have to leave for the airport at eight.”
“I had to see the kids.” Jack was sober now. Compared with the glittering house in Hampstead, the flat seemed dreadfully bleak. Imogen, not one of life’s Christmas decoration putter-uppers, was unable to see the point of doing anything at all if they were going to be in Paris anyway. Her one concession had been to buy a small, severely elegant fake tree from Harrods, hung with seven matte, dark-blue glass icicles and nine olive-green ones.
Imogen was packed, ready, and sipping a gin and tonic. “What for? You saw them the other day.”
“It’s Christmas.” With a weary gesture, Jack pushed his fingers through his hair. “I wanted to see them again.”
“And they’re hardly kids.” Imogen didn’t ask whether or not Cass had been there too. She knew these feelings of jealousy were futile, but they wouldn’t go away.
“Sophie’s only just fifteen.”
“And more of a grown-up than I am,” Imogen said tightly. She glanced at her watch. “Look, I hate to sound like a nagging wife, but are you planning to pack a case or not?”
When Jack didn’t move, she was gripped with fear. In an instant, her composure dissolved.
“What is it?” Fearfully, she searched his face. “You don’t want to come to Paris, do you? You’d rather spend Christmas with them.”
Jack watched the tears slide slowly down her cheeks. He felt terrible. Torn. How honest did Imogen seriously expect him to be?
“Look, I’m sorry. They’re my children…they are Christmas.”
“And you want to be with them.” Imogen fished desperately in her jacket pocket for a handkerchief.
Of course I do, thought Jack. But it wasn’t even that simple. He wanted to spend Christmas with his family, and Cass wanted a divorce.
“Don’t cry. We’re going to Paris.” He put his arms around Imogen’s heaving shoulders and kissed her wet, freckled face. “I love you. We’ll have a wonderful time. Come on.” Tenderly, he took her hand. “Come and help me pack.”
Chapter 23
The doorbell rang at eleven thirty p.m. on Christmas Eve. Cleo and Sean were both out, and Sophie was in bed. Cass, in her dressing gown with her hair tied back and her face shiny with moisturizer, was up to her eyes in tape and curly ribbon, frantically wrapping the last of the presents for Sophie’s stocking.
She almost passed out with shock when, having peered through the peephole, she saw who was standing on the doorstep.
“Terry!” Utter amazement turned her fingers to Play-Doh. Finally, after fumbling for several seconds with the lock, she managed to open the door. “I don’t believe this!”
“The ghost of Christmas very much past.” Terry Brannigan threw his arms around her.
Cass found herself being lifted into the air and spun around like a top. It seemed an age before he put her down.
“Oops, my dressing gown’s coming undone.” Laughing, Cass retied it before hugging Terry again. Then she slipped her arm through his and led him through to the sitting room where a fire still burned in the grate. “You’re freezing. Sorry about the mess. I’m doing a stocking for Sophie. Goodness, I still can’t believe you’re actually here. Do I look as dazed as I feel?”
“You look like heaven on legs,” Terry assured her. He meant it too. As far as he was concerned, Cass always had been the most beautiful girl on the planet. Now, at thirty-nine, she was an even more beautiful woman. Her dressing gown, in Terry’s opinion, could come undone as often as it liked.
“I got your card three days ago,” he explained when Cass, having poured him a spectacular measure of Jack Daniel’s, had curled up beside him on the sofa in front of the fire. “I couldn’t believe it. You and Jack, of all people…after all this time. What happened? Did you boot him out?”
Sixteen years had passed since they had last seen each other, yet the old magic, that instantaneous rapport, was still there.
Cass nodded. “But only because he’d gotten himself a bimbo.”
“He didn’t!” Terry was genuinely appalled. “Is the man mad? A real bimbo?”
They had always been able to tell each other everything. “Well, no,” Cass reluctantly admitted. Then she told him all about Imogen.
“But I’m still alive,” she concluded some time later with a shrug and a ghost of a smile. “I thought the world had come to an end, but it hasn’t. We keep going. The kids have been brilliant. Everyone’s been brilliant. Even the show’s ratings shot up and stayed up. God knows why.”
“Maybe because the kids and ‘everyone’ aren’t the only ones who are brilliant,” Terry mock-scolded, because Cass’s modesty had always been one of her most endearing features. It would never occur to her that her ratings might have risen because she was good at her job.
“It’s Christmas Day!” At twenty past midnight, Cass had only just noticed the time. Reaching across, she cupped Terry’s stubbly chin in both hands and planted a kiss on his travel-weary cheek. “There, merry Christmas. I don’t even know why you’re here, but I don’t care. It’s just so great to see you again,” she said simply. “You’ve cheered me up more than you’ll ever know.”
“You’ve cheered me up,” Terry told her. He pointed to the card he had sent, which hung in pride of place above the mantelpiece. “See that miserable sod of a DJ? That’s been me for the last five years, that has. Yesterday, I decided I’d had enough and told them to stick their lousy job.” He squeezed Cass’s hand. “It was time to come home, I realized, and look up a few old friends.”
* * *
“Happy Christmas, Mum.” Sophie, already washed and dressed at eight o’clock the next morning, woke Cass with a kiss and a cup of tea. “By the way, do we have a burglar, or do you know something about the complete stranger I’ve just bumped into outside the bathroom?”
Cass stretched and rubbed her eyes before hauling herself into a sitting position.
“You mean Terry? That’s Terry Brannigan, sweetheart. He turned up last night after you’d gone to bed. He’ll be staying for a few days. You’ll like him.”
“I do like him,” Sophie murmured to Cleo later that morning as between them, they inexpertly basted the roast potatoes for lunch,
“but not a millionth as much as he likes Mum. You don’t think she fancies him, do you?” Sophie looked worried. “He’s ancient.”
“Not to mention obvious.” Cleo glanced through the kitchen window. The temperature outside had dropped several degrees, and a heavy frost had formed overnight. Cass was wandering arm in arm with Terry at the bottom of the garden, showing him around and chattering nonstop as they caught up on the events of the past sixteen years.
“I asked Mum how old he was,” Sophie went on. “She said fifty-two, but he looks miles older than that. What if they get married?”
“Calm down.” Cleo grinned. It was unlike Sophie to get so twitchy. “He only arrived last night.”
“Out of the blue.” Gloomily, Sophie slid the roasting tin back into the oven and gave the turkey a tentative prod. “I don’t think Mum even realizes what’s going on. He’s been living in New York for umpteen years. Then three days ago, he gets Mum’s Christmas card telling him Dad’s buggered off. By an amazing coincidence, the very next day, Terry packs in his perfectly good job and flies over here, turning up on Mum’s doorstep at midnight.”
“What you’re saying,” Cleo replied solemnly, “is that we need to sit her down and give her a good talking-to about getting involved with the wrong kind of man.”
“Don’t make fun. Well…yes.” Sophie’s glasses had misted up in the heat from the oven. She cleaned them on the sleeve of her new blue shirt, a present from Cleo. “And you know what I mean,” she persisted stubbornly. “Mum’s so nice, she wouldn’t want to hurt Terry’s feelings. She wouldn’t be able to say no.”
Sean, who had been on the phone in the study for the last twenty minutes, came into the kitchen grinning from ear to ear. “What’s this? Can’t say no? Are you calling our mother a trollop?”
“I’m calling you a lazy bum,” said Cleo. “We’ve been slaving away all morning, and you’ve done sod all.”
Sophie’s eyebrows rose. She hadn’t noticed Cleo doing any slaving unless you counted snipping the corner off the orange juice carton at breakfast.
