‘I wish my parents would just split up and get it over with, like yours,’ she had said, making it sound quite casual, as if this was the sort of thing she said all the time, instead of the first time she had spoken it out loud.
Martha, who was whippet-thin and wore black a lot and had a husky voice, blew a smoke ring towards the rafters of the garage, where cobwebs festooned an ancient car roof-rack and a couple of rusty garden tools suspended there.
‘What makes you say that?’ she drawled. Her accent wasn’t quite American, because she’d lived in England all her life and her Dad was English, but she had a hint of something more exotic in her voice which Paula admired enormously and tried from time to time to imitate.
‘You wouldn’t believe how horrendous tomorrow is going to be. Mum will bang on about the Christmas spirit and insist on puke-making family traditions that she’s only just thought of, and the kids will squabble and Dad will get pissed.’
She used the word with a sense of daring, and shot a sideways glance at Martha, to see how it would be received. But Martha, whose mother’s language had always been uninhibited, seemed not to notice.
‘At least she tries. I like your Mum; she talks to me as if I was a human being instead of a teeny-bopper, which is what Hayley keeps calling me.’
That was another thing Paula admired, calling your mother by her first name. She had rehearsed it secretly – Elizabeth, Lizzie, Liz – but somehow it hadn’t worked. She still thought of her as Mummy, which had to be some kind of brainwashing.
Martha dragged the last puff out of her cigarette and ground it below her heel.
‘Come on, we’d better get back. If Hayley finds me smoking she’ll go ballistic. She’s got this awfully American thing about it.’
Obediently, Paula had ground out her own half-smoked cigarette, with secret relief, and followed her friend back into the house.
She had managed to sound cool, talking to Martha, but she still felt sick when she let herself think about the feeling she had constantly these days, that something was dreadfully, dreadfully wrong. And putting it into words hadn’t helped at all. Perhaps nothing would.
Now she had achieved her objective of outdistancing her mother and the kids without catching up her father. She reached the house only a few minutes behind him, but she saw the lights go on in the games room so she let herself in quietly. Her father had shut the door, which was a good thing. She could get herself upstairs and out of sight without anyone forcing her to help clear up their stupid party, or go through the toe-curling exercises of stockings and Santa Claus rituals.
Just as she crossed the hall, she heard the ‘ping’ of one of the telephone extensions being lifted, and stood for a moment very still.
Earwigging was no sort of taboo as far as she was concerned, but she could hear the rest of them coming up the garden path, Milla whining that she wanted to be carried up to bed. Swift as a lizard, she slid up the stairs and was in her bedroom with her own door shut tight and the comfort blanket of Capital Radio filling in any awkward silences.
***
Hayley Cutler switched on the lights as she came in the door, looked round the open-plan ground floor of the cottage, and groaned. Sometimes she thought it would be easier just to quit and do it herself, but hell’s teeth, she wasn’t the only able-bodied mortal around.
‘Would you look at this place? Mikey, go get some logs from the shed for the fire. And Marty, all that stuff in the corner is yours. Clear it, can’t you?’
‘Don’t call me Marty.’ Martha went across to pick up the litter of wrapping paper and ribbon as her younger brother went silently out. ‘You only do because you like to sound really American instead of half-and-half.’
‘So? That’s a crime, suddenly?’ Hayley went to switch on the coffee machine, her invariable first action on getting home. ‘I think Marty’s a really neat name, and if I’d known you aimed to grow up so prissy, I’d have never called you Martha in the first place. I had a great-aunt Martha once, and she died guessing.’
Martha was moving purposefully round the room, picking things up and straightening the big Kelim cushions on the floor by the log fire, now cold and dead. The expensively-faked Christmas tree in the corner, purchased complete with red bows, silver chains, imitation parcels and gold lights, looked even more tawdry with the lights off.
‘Why can’t we have a real Christmas tree?’ she grumbled. ‘The one at the McEvoys’ looked really brilliant, all covered with proper ornaments that they’ve had for years, and real little parcels and chocolates.’
In her stormy life, Hayley Cutler had fought every inch of the way. She didn’t play by the rules – as someone once memorably said, there are no rules in a knife fight – and you didn’t take home too many popularity prizes, but you fought, or you went under. She swung round from the kitchen area to face her daughter’s truculence.
‘Why now, honey, I’m sure there are some sugar canes around someplace, if you rake among those packages, and you could hang them on the tree. Switch it on anyway, for goodness’ sake, and it’ll look better. And tomorrow, if you’re heading for a traditional phase, you and Mikey can fix popcorn and thread it on strings just like I did when I was knee high to a grasshopper.’
Her intonation parodied the notion as well as the expression, and her voice sharpened.
‘And before you ask me about tomorrow, we’ve got a delicious lunch all worked out between kind St Michael and the microwave. And if you’re about to match me up against sweet St Elizabeth McEvoy, I’d just ask you to remember that some of us have to work for a living and haven’t the time to make a career out of being a domestic martyr. I’ve filled stockings and basted turkeys with the best of them, but you all are old enough now to see the whole Christmas farce for what it really is. If it’s just an excuse for a party, and we’re the only guests, well, hell, let’s enjoy it, OK? Let’s all of us enjoy it, instead of everyone checking out my performance and giving it points out of ten.’
She waited, a verbal pugilist weaving and ducking on her toes, to see if Martha would reply, before she poured herself a mug of the strong black coffee that was never far from her elbow, as Michael came in with the basket of logs which he set down on the wide hearthstone.
‘Do you want me to light it?’ he said politely. He was always polite to his mother; it set her at a distance far more effectively than Andy’s tempestuous rages or Martha’s confrontations.
‘I guess not, unless you kids –’ She was cut short by the ringing of the telephone.
‘Quarter of one? Now who could that be?’ She wondered aloud. ‘Oh, it’s most likely Grandad, phoning to say Merry Christmas. I’ll take it in my bedroom.’
She disappeared and brother and sister looked at each other.
‘Most likely Grandad!’ Martha mimicked her mother’s tone. ‘Most likely Nigel, I reckon.’
‘Or Eddie. Or one of the others we don’t know about yet. He’s probably married, phoning after his wife’s gone to bed.’
Michael’s voice hadn’t broken yet; the world-weary sentiments sounded odd, so delivered. ‘I’m going to bed. Don’t let any fat red-faced men into your bedroom.’
‘I’ll yell for help if I need it. I might wait up for Andy anyway.’
The door shut behind her brother. Through the floor-boards Martha could hear the rise and fall of her mother’s voice.
She looked at the cold white ashes of the fire and the unlit Christmas tree. It was all very well for Paula McEvoy to moan about her mother making a fuss about Christmas. Paula was only a baby who hadn’t the least idea what it was like out here in the big world where you had to look out for yourself because no one else would.
Her eyes filled with tears, though she would have let them pull out her fingernails with red-hot pincers before she would admit to them. She wanted to be looking forward to Christmas Day, to the magic she remembered, if vaguely, when she was a very small child. But there wasn’t a chance in this family. Sometimes she thought her
mother simply hated Christmas.
***
Upstairs, Hayley Cutler replaced the receiver with a grimace. She couldn’t quite believe she was stooping this low; doing the dirty on a friend, behaving like...Well, she wasn’t going to figure out that side of it too closely.
Lizzie might be a sweet girl, but she wasn’t exciting, and Hayley had always been coolly aware of her own attractions. Piers McEvoy just couldn’t believe his luck, and he couldn’t keep his hands off her, either. Surely she could convince him that he owed it to himself to have a wife who could really make things swing.
Not that her idea of a dream lover was someone who looked and tended to behave like Toad of Toad Hall, but time was moving on. Too many men had treated her badly of late, and she could almost hear that clock ticking. It was time for a long-term solution.
And as far as Lizzie was concerned, if she got a good settlement and custody of the kids, she’d probably end up happier. Being weak, she brought out the worst in Piers, whereas Hayley had no doubt at all about her ability to put him in his place once the ring was on her finger. It would be good to ease off, face the future without this corrosive worry.
Downstairs she could hear the children moving about. Just for a moment the old Norman Rockwell pictures rose in her mind; the family gathered round the fire below the laden tree, the mother reading ‘The Night Before Christmas’...
A lump rose in her throat. She had lost them, somewhere a long way back; after the divorce, perhaps, when Chaz Cutler had removed his worthless self from their lives and even the CSA had given up trying to get money out of him. She had had to be tough then, and the children had stopped expecting cuddles and home-baked cookies from a mother who was permanently stressed-out. She tried to think of the last time she’d hugged one of them, and couldn’t. Tears spilled over, slid down her cheeks.
She dashed them away. She couldn’t afford the sort of weakness that candles and carols and too much champagne produced, which was one of several reasons why she hated Christmas. But this Christmas was bleaker than ever.
Beside her bed lay the letter from her bank manager about the future of the employment agency, which she had read so often in the hope that this time she could make it mean something different that it was dog-eared and curled. All those readings told her only one thing; at whatever cost of self-loathing, there was no way but to follow her reluctantly-chosen course, or lose everything.
She had borrowed in the belief that the recession was at an end, but somehow there still weren’t the jobs available, and if there were no clients, there was no commission. If she lost that, all of the sacrifices – of close, warm family relationships and the right to act feeble and pathetic when you felt that way – would have been for nothing. She hadn’t been able to loll around the place being a homemaker and learning gourmet cuisine, she had gone out and hustled for herself and her family instead of sitting on her butt with her hand out, and this was her reward.
And she had made an enemy. She tried not to think about it because it made her feel sick to her stomach. She had always, somehow, been an outsider, and this forced her to admit that she didn’t even know which of the people who disliked her hated her this much. The anonymous letters were bad enough of themselves – three of them, bitchy and poisonous. But this last one; that had really scared her.
This one had been threatening, talking about striking at her heart in the best melodramatic style. She had torn it up and burned it, of course, told herself that nutters who were perfectly harmless acted this way, and tried, unsuccessfully, to put it from her mind.
Then she had come downstairs the other morning to find a pretty, polished red apple sitting in the middle of the kitchen table, with one of her kitchen knives stuck through its core.
When she had checked that none of the kids had suffered from a suddenly-abandoned snack-attack, she had sat down and stared at it in mesmerized horror. The back door was locked, the windows were latched.
The hideous, inescapable conclusion was that the person who hated her had a key. And there were only three people who kept a key of hers; they all kept them for one another. Suzanne Bolton, Elizabeth McEvoy, and Laura Ferrars.
***
Suzanne Bolton parked the car neatly in the garage, so that the cork she had suspended from the roof to show where to stop just touched the windscreen. It was an old-fashioned wooden garage, and Ben had had to get out to open the big double doors. She padlocked them closed herself, as usual, while the men, engaged in some earnest low-voiced conversation, went on ahead into the house.
It was not, naturally enough, in the same league as the McEvoys’ exquisite Lodge, but Suzanne was entirely satisfied with it. When you had lived in a succession of army houses, even a cottage like Bentham’s which was short of space and cursed with the sort of sloping ceilings that meant that half the room was unusable was a dream come true. They had spent what money they had on good carpets, immaculate decoration, and a good kitchen and bathroom, and if the furniture came from one of the cheaper discount warehouses at least it was new and smart-looking. She had seen Piers McEvoy’s lip curl when they came to dinner, but then she wouldn’t have given houseroom to some of those shabby rugs he put on his floors.
All over the house the evidence of Suzanne’s skills as a needlewoman, seamstress and homemaker were displayed. As she entered the hall now, the lights of the Christmas tree which stood at the foot of the stairs greeted her, and she viewed it with satisfaction.
She had chosen it carefully; it was a good shape, and it was certainly worth the extra to get the kind that were treated to stop them shedding needles everywhere. She had bought new lights for it, silver and gold instead of the old coloured ones, and this year she had gone for huge tartan bows. There was an evergreen garland over the fireplace in the hall, also caught up with a tartan bow, and there was a pile of presents under the tree. A few, the ones wrapped in dark green tissue and tied with tartan, were her own for Patrick and Ben, and the people they would see tomorrow. She always felt faintly aggrieved that by Christmas Day the packages were such a motley lot; it really looked nicer two weeks before with all her own coordinated parcels ready for posting.
She went through to the kitchen to check that the timer had gone on for the turkey. Patrick’s parents and one of his aunts were coming for lunch at two o’clock, and she wanted it cooked ready to slice cold by then. They were expected for drinks again at the Lodge – she spared a sympathetic thought for poor Lizzie – and she didn’t want to be fussed by having too much to do when they came back.
The black and white kitchen was immaculately tidy, with the culinary mise-en-place set up for tomorrow with the same precision she employed when she set up the instrument table for an operation. If you were theatre sister in a London teaching hospital, disorder of any kind made you feel threatened and uncomfortable.
From the scullery Tigger set up a yapping and she let him out – a quick, neat little Jack Russell bought as a companion for Ben once she had managed to establish, quite firmly, that he would have no siblings.
‘Tea, Patrick?’ she called, switching on the kettle as he followed her into the kitchen.
He contemplated the suggestion. ‘I don’t know if I want tea. Perhaps I’ll just go straight up to bed.’
‘You’d better have at least a couple of glasses of water before you do,’ she warned him, ‘or you’ll regret it in the morning. In any case –’
She jerked her head meaningfully towards Ben, who had drifted into the kitchen and was kneeling on the floor accepting the dog’s extravagant greetings.
‘Do you want some hot chocolate, Ben? Or a biscuit? No? Then off you go upstairs, and bring your stocking down to the hall and we’ll get it hung up by the fireplace.’
She surveyed him fondly – tall and thin for eleven, with the horn-rimmed spectacles he had insisted on having giving him a quaintly severe expression. He was such a good boy, and she was coming to rely on him more and more, as Patrick became more and more unsupportive
.
Ben unfolded himself obediently from the floor, went slowly to the door, then hesitated.
‘I can’t remember where it is.’
‘Good gracious, where it’s always kept, silly! In the middle drawer in the chest on the landing. Hurry up now – it’s very late.’
Patrick had filled a glass with water and was sipping it doubtfully.
‘It just seems such a lot to drink, when you’re not thirsty,’ he complained.
‘You’ll pay for it if you don’t,’ she said crisply. ‘Now, once Ben hangs up his stocking, if you take him up and see him into bed, I’ll get the presents from the cupboard under the stairs.’
‘Er –’ Patrick said awkwardly. ‘I wonder, isn’t he perhaps getting a bit big for Santa Claus? I’m not sure that other boys his age hang up their stockings. Apparently Mike Cutler stopped years ago.’
If Suzanne had thought about it, she might have guessed that he had been reluctantly put up to address this subject. But she was finding it hard at the moment to see their relationship in perspective, and she flushed. That little pinprick was so like Patrick. Everything he said seemed designed to deflate her, to make her feel that all her efforts to hold down an important and demanding job without compromising anywhere else, were unappreciated. No, worse than that; they were actively resented, and the only reason she didn’t know was because she was too insensitive and people were too polite to tell her. She knew it was spiteful and untrue, of course, but she had to work hard to keep up her self-respect under attacks like these.
‘Hayley Cutler,’ she said stiffly, ‘is too lazy and too wrapped up in her own gratification to put herself out for anyone. It’s got a lot more to do with that than whether or not poor little Mike wants a stocking. You’re a long time grown up, and the Christmas traditions are the things you remember all your life – if you’re lucky enough to have them.’
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