Kate was shoveling in her last spoonful of an unctuously treacly sticky toffee pudding when Richard said:
“Why don’t I come back to yours for a nightcap?”
Kate froze. She tried to play it cool, chewing for longer than she needed to, intimating to him with her face and hands that she’d answer him as soon as she had swallowed. She didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t had sex in a really long time and she didn’t doubt that Richard would be a great lover. And my goodness, she’d like to. But still.
“Maybe not tonight,” she found herself saying. “The house is a mess”—it wasn’t—“and I’ve got a ton of work to do”—she didn’t—“and I’ll be burning the midnight oil as it is!”—she wouldn’t.
Really, mouth! Kate chastised herself. Why would you go and say that? We could have had sex! Actual sex! But her mouth seemed to carry on regardless.
“Would you take a rain check?” she went on. “It’s just tonight’s not a good night.”
Richard smiled. He leaned toward her and lightly kissed her sticky toffee lips.
“Another night, then,” he said. “I can wait.”
Kate smiled and licked her lips involuntarily. Damn you, sensible mouth! She had a distinct sense she had just passed over the chance for a very splendid night indeed.
She called Laura when she reached the top of the hill, having assured Richard she didn’t need to be walked home. Aside from anything else, she wasn’t sure she could have Richard outside her house and not be tempted to ask him in.
“Well, good,” said Laura. “I think you made the right decision. There’s no need to rush into anything.”
“I’m a grown woman,” said Kate. “I should be able to have sex with someone I like and not worry if it leads to something or it doesn’t. What’s wrong with me?”
“Maybe you’re subconsciously biding your time until you’ve finished all twelve dates, just in case you meet Mr. Right on the last one?” Laura suggested.
Kate was considering this as she turned in to the village square when she spotted Matt and Sarah going into the darkened café.
“Shit!” she hissed down the phone. “It’s Matt and Sarah.”
“Where?” asked Laura.
Kate ducked down behind a holly bush out of sight.
“What are you doing?” asked Laura. “I can hear rustling.”
“I’m hiding,” whispered Kate.
“In a paper bag?”
“In a bush,” Kate hissed.
“We’re not back to that, are we?” asked Laura. “It took years for the hedges of Blexford to stop being Kate-shaped!”
“I don’t want to see him!” said Kate.
“You’re going to bump into him sooner or later,” said Laura. “This is a small village, you can’t avoid him forever.”
Kate took a deep breath, keeping one eye on Matt and Sarah through a hole in the bush. The café lights flicked off again and they emerged from the café carrying two shopping bags each and headed toward Matt’s house; clearly Sarah had had enough space.
“Actually, I can avoid him forever,” said Kate, still crouched in the snow.
“What do you mean?” said Laura.
“I’m leaving Blexford,” said Kate. “After Christmas.”
There was silence on the line for a few seconds.
“But you can’t!” said Laura. “I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too. But I have to go.”
“But why?” asked Laura. “It was just a stupid argument, you two will get over it, you always do.”
“You know that’s not the reason,” said Kate.
More silence on the other end of the line.
“What about your house? You love your house,” said Laura.
“I’ll rent it out.”
“I can’t believe you’re going to leave Blexford,” said Laura. “Couldn’t you just avoid Matt for a while and then see how you feel in a month or so? Why rush into a decision you might regret in a little while? You and Richard might become a thing. You might forget all about Matt.”
“I’m in love with him, Laura,” said Kate. “I don’t want to be, but I am. And I can’t stay here and see him every day and know that he doesn’t love me back. I can’t do it.”
Laura was quiet again. Kate could hear her breathing on the end of the line. Laura gave a long sigh.
“I know,” she said. “I know. And I do understand. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
Now that Laura knew, all that remained was to tell her dad. The rest of the village would find out soon enough. But not until she was already gone, far enough away that she wouldn’t have to face the inevitable onslaught of questions.
* * *
• • • • •
The gingerbread house challenge was being held in the afternoon, and what a gray afternoon it was. It was snowing again. It had stopped overnight and begun again late morning, so that yesterday’s snow had had time to harden, making a perfect surface for the next deluge to lie on.
The dining hall was paneled in dark wood to half its height, with the remainder of the exposed walls painted dark green. Coats of arms and ancestral portraits of men, women, and children with foreboding expressions lined the walls.
The long banqueting table that ran the length of the room—usually mocked up to look as it would for an Elizabethan feast—was covered in thick white paper tablecloths. There were twenty-five places laid, each with a flat-pack gingerbread kit house, ready to be constructed and all the icing and bowls of sweets required to do the job.
Each workstation had place cards, as though they were about to sit down to a wedding breakfast. Kate found hers and Adam’s and sat down. Only four other people had arrived so far; they smiled nervously at one another down the vast table. Even the reps were nowhere to be seen.
Laura marched in wearing her uniform, looking very prim.
“Don’t worry, folks,” she said brightly. “The reps are out on the road directing the traffic in. The highways agency closed Blexford hill and diverted the traffic and everyone got lost!”
The faces around the table relaxed.
“I’ve got my kitchen slaves rustling up vats of extremely alcoholic and alcohol-free mulled wine,” Laura trilled.
The faces around the table looked positively chipper. Laura made her way over to Kate and sat down.
“Can I talk to you later?” she asked.
“You won’t change my mind,” said Kate.
“I know,” said Laura. “But I need to talk to you all the same. Can you wait for me after this? I’ll give you a lift home.”
Kate agreed. Laura bit her lip and smiled weakly. Kate imagined she must be taking her news worse than she’d expected. The rest of the dates began to shuffle into the hall, and Laura excused herself and left.
Adam caught sight of Kate immediately. He smiled and walked over, shrugging out of his parka and pulling off his scarf as he walked.
“Kate!” He grinned when he reached her. “Nice to meet you.”
He had a strong Scottish accent, which, had Kate been in a different frame of mind, would absolutely have set her knickers on fire.
“You too,” said Kate.
Adam had the look of a slightly grizzled pop star. He was handsome in a sort of Alaskan pioneer way; Kate could very well imagine him living in a log cabin and chopping his own wood for the fire. His long hair curled at the ends where the snow had gotten to it, and the knitted stag’s head on his chunky sweater did nothing to dampen the image Kate had formed of him.
When everyone who was likely to arrive was seated and furnished with a goblet of mulled wine, the reps explained the fairly self-explanatory challenge. Each couple had two and a half hours to build their gingerbread house and decorate it, and the winners would win an all-expenses-paid meal out in London.
&
nbsp; Kate had built enough gingerbread houses in her time to feel confident that she had this challenge in the bag. What she hadn’t reckoned on was an architect with a highly competitive nature and a hatred for all things conformist.
“But a gingerbread house is a fairly traditional build,” reasoned Kate. “And they have only provided us with a traditional gingerbread template.”
This held no water with Adam. He insisted on leaving the back wall of the house off the structure, as this would be a glass feature wall. When Kate flagged up that they didn’t have any glass for the glass feature wall, Adam produced a piece of clear Perspex and a craft knife from his satchel and proceeded to cut it to the house dimensions.
Kate pointed out that the structure was supposed to be entirely edible, but Adam only laughed and said, “Did no one ever teach you to stretch the boundaries of your imagination? Call yourself an artist?”
“They did actually,” said Kate. “And I do call myself an artist. Working to brief is part of my job, and this brief says that a gingerbread house should be edible.”
It made no difference. Extra windows were cut into the front wall, and a balcony—fashioned from part of the redundant back wall—was fixed beneath them and ran the length of the house.
Kate looked round and caught the eye of the couple next to her. They opened their eyes wide and pulled eek faces toward Adam. The couple opposite did the same. On the other side a woman with close-cropped pink hair gave her a sympathetic smile.
The front door was made bigger and a Velux window was chiseled out of one of the roof panels and filled in with more Perspex. The chimney pot was discarded and used to make a chiminea, which sat on the decking at the back of the house, formed from the remnants of the back wall, after the balcony was constructed.
Annoyingly, it did look good. When Kate voiced an idea or suggestion, based on her long history of gingerbread-house-making experience, she was met with terse rebuttals.
At one point Kate took matters into her own hands; she built a gable for the oversized front door and was about to stick it on with white icing when Adam saw what she was doing and slapped her hand away.
“Did you actually just do that?” Kate was astounded.
“Gables are last century,” Adam said by means of explanation.
“Are you overly competitive or a just a maniacal control freak?”
Adam looked at her straight on.
“Both,” he said. And added: “I don’t like to lose, and I abhor the ordinary.”
“People like tradition,” said Kate. “If they didn’t they wouldn’t keep doing it.”
“People are stupid,” said Adam. “They don’t know what they want until you give it to them.”
In addition to the Velux window in the roof, four mirrored rectangles were attached. These, Kate was informed, were to serve as the solar panels.
By this time Kate had pretty much given up on the construction side of things and busied herself with sorting through the array of sweets provided for decoration. She looked around the room to find all the other couples having more fun than she was.
The girl with pink hair offered for Kate to come and work with them. They were having an absolute scream trying to get their house to stay upright. Every time it collapsed, they were helpless with laughter. Kate had the feeling those two would be seeing each other again. Kate was grateful but declined their offer.
The gingerbread houses around the hall ranged from fairly secure to subsidence and in some cases total destruction. The noise levels had grown now that the initial shyness had been overcome and the atmosphere was relaxed. It made the concentrated silence between Kate and Adam conspicuous.
“I’m going to start decorating,” said Kate, blobbing a globule of icing onto the front wall.
Adam reared back in horror as if she had vomited on the veranda.
“We haven’t discussed décor yet!” he said.
“We didn’t discuss the design of the house, but it happened anyway,” said Kate.
“But I have a vision,” he said.
“I thought you might,” said Kate.
“I want only white sweets on it,” he said. “And the front of the house is to be cladded,” he added, as if this were a perfectly normal state for a gingerbread house. “We can use cocktail sticks to create the woodgrain effect.”
Kate stared at Adam for a long moment. And then attached a large red jelly sweet to the icing blob on the wall. Adam looked from the sweet to Kate and back again.
“I’m blowing your mind, aren’t I?” said Kate.
She grabbed the tube of icing, drizzled a line along the roof edge—avoiding the window and solar panels—and sprinkled a handful of multicolored sugar glitter onto it. Adam stood up; his chair made an ugly grinding noise. Kate wondered what he was going to do.
Adam’s mouth opened and closed as he tried to form words. Kate took the tube and squirted icing in up and down zigzags around the base of the wall and stuck green chewing sweets to it.
“That,” she said, pointing at the sweets, “is grass and ivy.”
She whirled the icing around the door frame and pressed pink and red candy into it.
“Rambling roses,” she said. “Every cottage needs a rambling rose.”
Adam looked on with revulsion. He held a small clear Perspex box in his hand, which he’d told Kate matter-of-factly was the observatory tower, which would sit on the roof instead of the chimney.
Kate smiled sweetly at him and continued to haphazardly squirt icing at the house and stick gaudy mismatched sweets to it.
Ordinarily Kate would take her gingerbread house decorating rather more seriously; she liked to have rows of sweets in complementary shades and shapes. She would, as Adam would say, have a vision of how she wanted it to look. But Adam’s attitude had pressed a devilish button in her and she found herself unable to stop throwing every glittery, sugary, jellified, luminously colored confection at his grand design.
The hanging of green-and-white-striped candy canes along the balcony proved to be a step too far. Adam gripped the observatory until his knuckles turned white and then used it to smash the gingerbread house to pieces.
The entire room stopped to stare. The reps stared. Custodians and tour guides, hearing the racket, came into the room and stared. Everyone stared at the grown man smashing a gingerbread house to smithereens with his bare hands.
Kate covered her mouth to stifle her laughter. When the house was nothing but a pile of soft rubble and tiny solar panels, Adam stood back. Kate picked up a piece of decking and popped it in her mouth.
“Mmmm,” she said.
Adam looked around the stunned, silent dining hall. He flicked his hair back and stalked out of the room with his nose in the air. Kate grinned. The other couples grinned back.
“Do you think I’m still in with a chance?” she asked.
The hall exploded into laughter. Kate found herself the recipient of a round of applause.
With her date showing no sign of returning, Kate left the dining hall and went in search of Laura.
She found her organizing a smaller, luxuriant dining room. The long table was laid with a heavy white damask cloth. Ornate silver bowls on filigree stands overflowed with fresh foliage: blood-red roses and poinsettias, ivy, holly laden with berries, bronze chrysanthemums, and white freesias, which cascaded down the stems of the bowls and spilled out across the table center. These were interspersed with candelabras as tall as four-year-olds and frosted fruits clustered together in pyramid triangles.
Each table setting had four sets of cutlery laid to attention beside gold-flute-edged dinner plates topped with matching miniature soup tureens.
“Wow!” said Kate. “This looks amazing.”
Laura wiped her brow and stood back, her hands on her hips. She fired off a couple of instructions to her staff and came to stand wi
th Kate. She was surprised that the gingerbread house challenge was over so soon. Kate explained that it was only over for her; the rest of the dates were still bonding over edible walls.
Laura looked stressed. Lady Blexford had long seen the value of Kate’s friend and relied on her to organize things personally when they had guests. Laura often joked that she could run an entire manor house and one hundred twenty-five staff but couldn’t handle two small children.
“Lord and Lady Blexford are spending Christmas at the manor,” said Laura. “With their family and friends. We’ve got formal dinners every night till the twenty-seventh.”
“Crikey!” said Kate.
“Yeah,” said Laura. “The chef’s gone crazy. He’s drawn up a ‘Christmas Dinner through the Ages’ menu. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve had to order in for him: pheasant, partridge, grouse, woodcock! I couldn’t even order that, I’ve got some guy shooting them for me on the estate! Wild boar, venison . . .”
“They’re going to leave here with gout,” said Kate.
“And diabetes,” said Laura. “You should see the sweets menu. And don’t get me started on the alcohol.”
“What do I have to do to get invited to this shindig?” asked Kate.
“Sleep with Lord Blexford,” said Laura.
“Done!” said Kate. “For that menu I’d sleep with old Wally.”
Laura pulled a face.
Kate grabbed a coffee and sat in the tearooms waiting for Laura to finish work. The tearooms closed at four thirty, but they knew Laura and the staff would be around all evening, working the restaurant next door, so they let Kate sit with her coffee and her thoughts.
She could cross off date number ten, she mused. She was sure the desire not to ever see each other again was mutual. She’d been looking forward to the gingerbread house challenge too.
Her mind drifted to Matt as she watched the snow fall outside. Just a week or so before they’d been laughing and joking together at the Christmas market. She would never have believed then that she’d be planning to leave Blexford altogether by now. What a difference a few days can make, she thought.
The Twelve Dates of Christmas Page 26
