Kate shook her head to try to erase the image and changed the subject.
“So when will you be back?” she asked.
“We fly back to Spain on the twenty-ninth,” said her mum. “Why don’t you come over and spend New Year’s with us? You’d love it.”
“Maybe next year,” said Kate.
She could hear her mother pouting on the other end of the line.
“Oh, tut-tut, darling, you always say that!” said her mum. “What are you waiting for? I could set you up with a hundred different men out here. It’s not much to ask that I have grandchildren before I’m too old to pick them up!”
“Mum!” said Kate.
“I’m just saying,” she said. “None of us are getting any younger . . .”
“Mum!”
“Okay, okay,” said her mum. “How’s Mac?”
“He’s fine,” said Kate. “He’s great, actually.”
Kate wished she had something to say about her dad that would impress her mum, or make her think she might be missing out; she doubted his sprout trees, tall as they were, would do the trick.
Mac was a quiet doer. He’d retired from the civil service but kept his hand in on a consultancy basis. He grew things and he fixed things. He took long walks in the country and made notes for the RSPB on the birds that visited his handmade bird tables and feeders. These were things Kate loved about her dad, but they were not enough to light her mum’s touch paper. And there, Kate supposed, was the problem; her mum had always been the rocket to her dad’s Roman candle.
Kate was an absolute concoction of her parents. She had inherited her mum’s drive to succeed and her dad’s quiet determination. Her code of ethics and love of nature were all her dad, but the part of her that thrilled at a challenge was entirely her mum. And, though she didn’t like to admit it, perhaps some of her reluctance to commit to relationships was congenital from her mother’s side too.
Kate moved to the kitchen, still with the phone at her ear, and stoked the wood burner.
“Is he seeing anyone at the moment?” her mum asked.
“What do you care?” said Kate. It came out harsher than she had meant it to.
Her mum tsked.
“Tetchy!” she said. “You always were a daddy’s girl.”
“I just don’t know why you’re so interested,” said Kate. “It makes no difference to you whether he is or he isn’t.”
“I want him to be happy,” said her mum.
“Well, he is happy,” Kate said. “So, what will you be having for your Barbadian Christmas dinner?” She thought it wise to change the subject.
“We’re keeping it traditional, darling,” her mum told her. “We’ve booked into a five-star hotel in the bay for dinner.”
“Only five-star?”
“Don’t be glib, darling,” said her mum. “It’s an unattractive quality in a person.”
Kate pulled the stopper out of the wine bottle and poured herself a full glass. She took a gulp.
“I sent your Christmas parcel before we left,” said her mum. “Let me know when you’ve got it.”
“Will do.” Kate placed her dinner in the microwave and started the timer.
“I’ll be off now, darling,” said her mum. “Gerry’s making cocktails. Send my love to everyone. Love you, Katy-Boo!”
“I love you too, Mum.”
The call ended as the doorbell rang. Kate answered it with her glass of wine in hand. It was Laura, holding a cardboard cake box and grinning.
“One emergency cake delivery.”
“I love you,” said Kate.
“I know.” Laura’s grin widened.
“You coming in?”
“I can’t,” said Laura. “Ben’s mum’s got the kids. She’ll be about ready to hit the gin by now.”
“Fair enough. How was it, anyway?”
“It was really busy, a great atmosphere. I wish you’d have come up.”
“I didn’t really fancy being the only person on a mass date without a date,” said Kate.
“Oh, who needs that dick anyway,” Laura scoffed.
“His name was Richard.”
“He’ll always be a dick to me,” said Laura.
Kate waved Laura off, after pointing and laughing as she eighteen-point-turned her car in the narrow street and closed the front door on the cold evening.
The smell of lasagna filled the kitchen. Kate lifted the lid on the cake box. Ten beautifully crafted patisserie cakes lay side by side like tiny works of edible art. She smiled to herself as she pulled the curtains closed in the sitting room and queued up the BBC.
“Mr. Darcy, I’m coming to get you,” she said.
THE SECOND DATE OF CHRISTMAS
• • • • •
Christmas Cookery and Weeping Vegans
Two mornings later, the postman knocked, just as Kate was cleaning her brushes, after color-washing her early-morning sketches.
The sun rose a little before eight a.m. in December. Kate enjoyed the transformation of the landscape, as the winter sun crept across the fields in a voile of pale gold, chasing away the last vestiges of misty dawn; ice-crystalline blades of grass bent at the knees as the sun’s scant warmth whittled the frost.
It was an enchanted time of day and, when she could, Kate made sure she was out with camera and sketchbook to catch it.
“Looks like a package from your mum,” said Joe the postman.
“Looks like it,” said Kate.
“How’s she getting on these days?”
“Oh, you know,” said Kate. “Causing a Spanish whirlwind.”
“She’s a character, all right,” Joe said. And then: “Bummer about you getting stood up.”
“Yes,” Kate echoed. “Bummer.”
“Just changed his mind, did he?” Joe went on. “Didn’t like the look of you, maybe?”
“Maybe.” She tugged the package out of Joe’s hands a little more roughly than was necessary.
Kate made herself a coffee and opened the package. There had been an unfortunate incident three years ago, with a gift that—unbeknown to Kate—was a wheel of Cabrales cheese. After two weeks festering under the Christmas tree, in the warmth of the open fire, the smell was so pungent, Kate had begun to wonder if the builders had bricked a body up in the walls of her new kitchen extension.
A similar incident the following year with a selection of Spanish deli meats had taught Kate never to save her mother’s gifts until Christmas Day.
She needn’t have worried this year. The only edibles were the chocolate kind: a bar with cacao nibs and almond shards, a bag of chocolate-coated almonds, and a tin of drinking chocolate, all of which made Kate salivate.
As well as these, there were two self-help books: Find Love before You’re Forty and Is That My Body-Clock Ticking?
Thank you, Mother, thought Kate. Beneath these was a bottle of Chanel perfume wrapped in what could only be described as porn-star lingerie: a push-up bra with see-through fabric where her nipples would be, and a pair of matching crotchless panties.
Kate texted her mum:
Thanks for the presents. Interesting underwear!
* * *
• • • • •
“Don’t be disheartened just because one wholly let you down.” Laura’s voice crackled through the phone loudspeaker.
“I’m not,” Kate assured her. “I’m just going to finish off these mince pies for Matt and then I’ll get ready.”
“I still don’t know why you didn’t just come up anyway; the banqueting hall looked amazing, even if I do say so myself,” said Laura. “What are you wearing?”
“What, now?” Kate asked. “Are you being pervy?”
“No, dumb-arse,” said Laura. “For the date!”
Kate dusted the rolling pin with icing sugar and
began to roll out the pastry.
“Jeans and that sequined jumper I bought when I was out with you.”
“Jeans!” exclaimed Laura.
“It’s a couples’ cooking night, not a cocktail party, Laura.”
“Okay, okay. So who are you coupled with tonight?”
Kate pressed the fluted cutter in the pastry and gently pressed the bases into the muffin tin.
“His name’s Michael. He’s a vegan. Divorced. No children. Works for an art gallery in Soho,” said Kate, reeling off the scant details sent to her by the dating agency.
“Ooh, that sounds promising,” cooed Laura. “What does he look like?”
Kate dusted her hands off and picked up her phone, flicking through her emails until she found the one she wanted.
“Blond hair, kinda foppish, cute smile, crinkles around his eyes,” she said. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into this; it feels like I’m shopping from a man catalog.”
“Because you need a little push,” said Laura. “You haven’t seen anyone properly since Dan. I’m not saying you’re going to meet Mr. Right at these things, but it’ll help you to get back into dating again. And anyway, who’s to say that the man of your dreams won’t be at one of these events? It could be a Christmas miracle.”
Laura and Kate had been friends since primary school. They went to university together and shared a house for three years, until Kate went off to go traveling and Laura came back to Blexford to take up her position as trainee curator at Blexford Manor and marry her childhood sweetheart, Ben.
Kate laid pastry stars onto the mincemeat, brushed them with milk, sprinkled them liberally with granulated sugar, and put them in the oven to bake. The first batch were cooling on a wire rack and the whole house smelled of citrus and spice. She got cleaned up and changed while they cooked; she would have to go on her date smelling of mince pies, but there were worse things to smell of.
She boxed up the cooled pies and put the hot ones on the rack. While she waited for them to cool, she leafed through some of the brightly colored sketches that were scattered over the battered kitchen table. She’d emailed photographs of her latest designs to the printers and would pick up the resulting test fabrics from her London office—a dainty spring design of nodding daffodils and cerulean hyacinths—when they were ready.
She scooped the papers into a rough pile and rinsed out her brushes and the jam jar they’d been sitting in. Then she boxed up the last of the mince pies, zhooshed her hair quickly in the mirror, and set off for the café.
The Pear Tree Café was so named because of the giant pear tree in the garden. It wasn’t the only fruit tree in the garden, but it dwarfed the plum, cherry, and apple trees and made a mockery of the gooseberry bush.
Kate and Matt used to spend their summer holidays messing about in the garden, climbing the trees—when no one was watching to tell them not to—and making tents out of broken chairs and old curtains. Laura’s parents weren’t together, and so during the holidays she would go to her dad’s house in France.
Kate’s parents worked in the city, but her mum worked a three-day week during school holidays. With Matt’s mum working full time in the bakery and tearooms, it made sense for them to pool their childcare resources.
On the days when Kate’s mum was home, she would take them to the beach or rambling, or they’d spend the day in Fitzwilliam Park. And the rest of the time, Kate and Matt would stay at the bakery, with as much barley water and buns as they could manage from the tearooms at the front of the shop and free rein of the large garden at the back of the kitchen.
Come autumn, there were more pears than any one family could consume, even with Matt’s mum preserving them in brandy and selling them in the shop or making them into jam. So she would invite the villagers into the garden for a “pick your own” party. It became a tradition. Blexford’s very own harvest festival. And year after year it got bigger and bigger until it was an event in the village calendar; gazebos would be set up on the green for an American-style supper after the great pear harvest.
Patrick, from Old Blexford Farm, used to concoct a terrifying pear wine with his spoils. He’d dish it out at the Christmas caroling, hot and infused with cinnamon, cloves, and vanilla, guaranteed to keep you warm and give you a mild case of amnesia. Corinna would just happen to pass by with a tray of steaming glasses and leave them for her kid brother and his mates: the then fifteen-year-old Kate, Matt, Laura, and Ben, who would get merrily sozzled on the bench on the green.
When Matt’s mum and sister died, the pear parties stopped. Some people suggested they should continue: a good way to keep their memory alive. But Matt couldn’t face it; it was too soon, too raw, and nobody was going to argue with an orphan, especially one with Evelyn in his corner.
The Harrisons used to pile the windfalls into baskets and set them outside the front of the shop for people to help themselves. But the people after them didn’t bother, and once the place was boarded up, the pears would rot where they fell.
Kate had suggested to Matt that maybe he could consider inviting people back into the garden in autumn to pick the pears. It wouldn’t have to be a party, just a community get-together. So far, he’d been reluctant.
He had though, buckled under Kate’s persistence and made good on the garden the year before last. With her dad’s help, Patrick’s cultivator, and Barry’s muscle (Barry was landlord at the Duke’s Head), the five of them had stripped the wilderness back to its former glory.
They laid new turf and gave the fruit trees a mercy prune, and Evelyn helped shape and fill new flower beds. At the far end of the garden Kate’s dad built raised beds using the old boards that had been at the windows and then were left piled in the coal cellar. And Matt filled them with vegetables, herbs, and soft fruits.
The kitchen used to fill the whole back half of the building. But when Matt renovated the shop, he made the kitchen smaller and put in new customer toilets—previously the only toilet cubicle was the one in the garden next to the coal cellar—and a corridor that led from the café through to the garden.
Matt furnished the nearest end of the garden with sturdy wooden chairs and tables for customers. It was the first time the garden had been used for anything other than Matt and Kate’s playground. It was a beautiful space, popular year-round, and increased Matt’s seating capacity by almost double.
It was closing time when Kate arrived at the café. The music was turned down low and some of the chairs were already upturned on the tables, ready for the floor to be mopped.
A couple of die-hard customers skulked in the corner on easy chairs: always the last to leave, savoring the dregs of their coffees, determined to finish their newspapers before Matt finally put out the lights and turfed them out. They nodded at Kate over the tops of their glasses.
Louder music came from the kitchen along with the smell of something meaty being cooked in red wine. Carla and her mum were cooking up a storm. Kate’s stomach growled and she made a mental note to check Evelyn’s freezer to pick up one of whatever they were making back there.
Petula waved from the back of the café. Three tables were covered in polka-dot oilcloth covers and spread all over with bits of paper, craft knives, and all the glittery detritus left from Petula’s handmade-card-making class.
Petula’s cottage was far too small to fit her craft sessions in and so Matt let her use the café. It suited them both; Petula got the space she needed and Matt made money on all the coffees and cakes her class purchased while they crafted.
From now until Christmas the group would be making all manner of cards, decorative parcel labels, and place settings. Petula was one of the founding members of the Blexford Knitting Sex Kittens; her specialty was Christmas jumpers and Kate was her muse, a role that Kate, as a Christmas jumper enthusiast, was happy to fill. Petula was a multiskilled Sex Kitten; she could embroider and crochet and had been ma
king her own greeting cards long before it was considered trendy. She also worked part time in the Pear Tree.
“Hello, darling!” said Petula. “I was hoping to see you. I was wondering if you’d help me with one of my Christmas craft sessions. I think your design expertise would be a real boon.”
“I’d love to,” said Kate. “When were you thinking?”
“I’ve got a class next Tuesday afternoon,” said Petula. “I want to do natural Christmas cards and table settings using fresh and dried foliage.”
“Great,” said Kate. “Count me in.”
“Oh, super,” said Petula. “Oh, and Kate darling, I heard you got stood up by your first date. Don’t let that put you off. Onward and upward!”
Petula smiled and went back to clearing up from her class.
Matt came out from the kitchen. He smiled when he saw Kate and smiled wider when he saw the boxes full of mince pies.
“Hello, you,” said Matt. “Are those for me or are you just really hungry?”
Kate screwed her face up at him.
“As it happens, I am hungry,” said Kate. “But I will remedy this by cooking a meal with my hot dinner date.”
“Does he know you’re really bossy in the kitchen?” asked Matt.
“I’m not bossy, I am assertive,” said Kate. “And besides, I’m only like that with you because you’re so slack.”
“I prefer relaxed,” said Matt.
“Slack,” said Kate.
“My God!” said Petula from the other end of the café. “You two have been bickering like this since you could talk.”
One of the die-hards stifled a guffaw from behind his newspaper.
Simultaneously Matt and Kate pointed to each other and said:
“She started it!” “He started it!”
Matt beamed and pulled a large plate with Christmas trees painted all around the edge from a stack above the sink. Kate helped him pile the pies onto the plate, and Matt covered them with the dome of a bell jar, ready for the next day.
The Twelve Dates of Christmas Page 3
