The Christmas Invitation

by Trisha Ashley

‘No, afraid not,’ Clara said.

  ‘River went over there a couple of years ago to visit friends and went to see the owner of the bar where she’d been working. The man still had a holdall she’d left there with her passport and other things, but she’d never gone back for them.’

  ‘A complete mystery, then,’ said Tottie, looking at me curiously.

  ‘Meg was brought up in a commune in the Black Mountains and River is her adoptive grandfather,’ Clara explained. ‘Delightful chap. He’s going to come and stay for a couple of nights for the Winter Solstice.’

  And I, I thought, would now definitely be escaping with him afterwards if Lex Mariner was going to be around the place!

  I didn’t say that, though. My first impulse on seeing him had been to jump back in the van and make off, but I couldn’t do that. I’d accepted the commission and I’d paint Clara’s portrait. Then, if I hadn’t completed Henry’s, I’d decamp back to the Farm with River, promising to return later, though I wouldn’t. I’d have to add any finishing touches back at the studio.

  ‘Have another scone,’ Clara suggested, and I realized I’d wolfed down the one she’d already put on my plate. ‘It’s a good couple of hours till dinner will be ready, so they won’t spoil your appetite.’

  ‘I do seem surprisingly hungry,’ I admitted. ‘It might be the cold air outside. The temperature appeared to drop rapidly as soon as I left Thorstane and headed up over the moors.’

  ‘Yes, we have our own little weather system here in Starstone Edge. We’re surprisingly high up, so in winter it’s like living in a snowdome that a giant hand shakes from time to time,’ Henry said, poetically. He had an attractively light and melodious voice.

  ‘Grimlike Pass is only really driveable in good weather, so in winter we mostly rely on the road to Thorstane, and even that is often impassable because of snow or ice,’ put in Sybil.

  ‘We’re much higher than Thorstane, but the local farmers usually clear the road over the moors in a few days,’ Clara said nonchalantly. ‘And the electricity lines and phone rarely cut out, though we have oil for the range and heating, and lots of logs, candles and lanterns, so we’re fine if they do.’

  ‘Den and I would much rather not cook Christmas dinner on a temperamental old range by the light of a candle,’ Tottie said tartly, and I wondered how she – and indeed Den – fitted into the household. It was all a bit baffling and I felt too tired to get a grasp on all the relationships. Anyway, I expected they’d become clear in a day or two.

  ‘I’d better get back,’ Sybil said, putting down her plate and getting up. I saw then that she was in riding breeches and a heavy polo-neck jumper. ‘I left Juniper in the stable and it’ll be too dark to see where we’re going if I don’t set off now.’

  ‘I’ll come and see you off,’ said Tottie, and followed her out of the room.

  ‘We don’t keep horses any more, but Tottie often borrows Sybil’s spare hack and they ride out together,’ Henry said. ‘Our stables are always ready, if needed.’

  ‘I can ride,’ said Teddy. ‘Sybil borrowed a Shetland pony from a friend last summer and taught me.’

  ‘If Mark has anything to do with it, the stables at Underhill will be turned into spare guest or staff accommodation soon, and poor Sybil will have to pay for grazing her horses in the top pasture,’ Clara said.

  ‘Since George left her a good annuity, there’s no reason why she shouldn’t pay for her horses’ upkeep, is there?’ Henry said reasonably.

  ‘Sybil never seems to have any money, though,’ said Clara.

  ‘Perhaps she’s just the penny-pinching type, or has a secret vice,’ he suggested.

  ‘I can’t think of any vice, other than spending too much on spring bulbs, that she could possibly have,’ said Clara with a grin.

  ‘Nor I,’ he agreed.

  Clara turned to me and explained, ‘Mark was working abroad in hotel management when Henry’s older brother, George, died a couple of years ago. Sybil kept the estate going until he finally decided to leave his job and come back.’

  ‘He got all the plans in place to turn Underhill into a business first, though,’ Henry pointed out. ‘He realized he’d have to make Underhill earn its keep if he wanted to hang on to it. And if that’s as a wedding venue, he’ll have to make the money in the short season from spring to early autumn, so there’s no time to lose!’

  Henry rose to his feet. ‘I think I’ll go back to my study for a bit till dinner, my dear.’ He stooped to kiss his wife, then smiled kindly at me.

  ‘I expect you’ll want to get the lie of the land and then settle in, Meg. I’m very glad you’ve come. Clara is so excited about the portraits and we’ll have great fun over Christmas. I was hoping to settle with Lex about fetching the tree,’ he added. ‘But he must have had something urgent to do at the pottery and had to dash back. I expect he’ll ring.’

  As long as he didn’t reappear in person, that was fine by me.

  ‘This must be all very confusing for you, Meg,’ said Clara. ‘My nephew, Lex, has brought Teddy back from school today. It’s in Great Mumming, where Terrapotter is.’

  ‘Terracotta?’ I said tentatively. I’d been a bit at sea during most of the conversation, but I’d come back to life at the mention of Lex’s name.

  ‘No, Terrapotter – it’s the name of his business.’

  ‘And … does he live there, too?’ I asked carefully.

  ‘Yes, in the cottage next to the pottery, the Old Forge.’

  That was a mercy. Maybe he wouldn’t come up to the Red House while he knew I was here.

  ‘Teddy can go and change out of his uniform while I’m giving you the shorter guided tour of the house and then you can unpack and rest,’ Clara said, rising without difficulty from the enveloping sofa. I floundered for a moment, trying to escape its clutches, then followed her.

  I swear that sofa was trying to eat me up whole. I’d rather not be a set of dry bones found down the back of it one day, like a new take on the Mistletoe Bride.

  6

  Verdant

  Clara led the way through the hall with about twice as much bounce as I’d ever possessed, even before my illness.

  ‘Now, this door to my left is Henry’s study, but we’ll leave him in peace for the moment,’ she said. ‘He likes the view from the side window over the fields and down to the reservoir. When the weather is clear, he can see Underhill, the family home, at the top of the valley too, and the Starstone. All his favourite points of reference framed in one.’

  She suddenly darted down a side passage, lit only by one dim bulb in an opaque glass shade painted with a Dutch scene of windmills and women in clogs and shawls.

  When I caught up with her, she’d opened the door to a surprisingly large studio that must have been added to the house about a century ago. The floor was covered in ancient mottled brown lino, and a large studio easel of antique design stood importantly in the middle of it beside a battered table still bearing an artist’s paintbox, its lid closed, and a large kidney-shaped wooden palette bearing the dull ghost traces of the paint that had last been scraped from it. Nearby lay a flat palette knife, two brushes and a rag, as if put out ready for the day’s work.

  It was a painterly version of the Mary Celeste.

  The room was long and at one end was a model’s dais, with a large, carved chair on it, facing the easel. The only other furnishings were a couple of smaller tables, a pair of battered easy chairs and some mainly empty bookshelves. A small, silent wooden clock eyed me balefully from the top of one of them.

  Though the studio had obviously long been disused, it still held that faint scent of turpentine and linseed oil that was perfume to my nostrils. You can keep your modern acrylic paints, as far as I’m concerned: they smell vile and the colours are dead.

  Faded green blinds were pulled down across all the windows, but above me I could see an expanse of dusky blue through the large skylight.

  ‘Tottie’s father had the studio built when
he inherited the Red House,’ Clara said, to my surprise. ‘Of course, he was getting on a bit when Tottie was born, so he died a long time ago.’

  ‘Tottie’s father?’ I echoed.

  ‘Yes, Tottie’s the last of the Gillyflowers and we bought the house from her over thirty years ago, on the understanding she continued to make her home here.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized that,’ I said, then added, ‘Wasn’t it difficult for her to stay on in what had been her own home, once she’d sold it to you?’

  I mean, call me nosy, but it was interesting.

  ‘Oh, no, she said it was a relief that she didn’t have the upkeep of a huge old house to worry about any more and could devote herself to the garden and her bees instead. Of course, we already all knew each other, so that helped, and we soon settled down together. I expect it’s much the same in a commune, isn’t it? You find your own interests and place in the group and … homogenize, as it were.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true,’ I said, thinking about it.

  ‘Tottie’s father had spent a lot of time in France and Italy, learning to paint at various ateliers, but he was something of a dilettante. The family fortune came from their brewery, but he sold Gillyflower’s Ales to a larger company and then lived on his capital. A bit like Henry’s brother, George, who sold out of the army the minute he married an heiress, and had no sense with money … though Tottie’s father doesn’t seem to have drunk to excess, womanized or gambled, which is something.’

  ‘I … suppose it is!’ I was taken aback by this frankness and her words also cast an unedifying light on the late George Doome. The brothers were obviously totally unalike.

  Clara turned to more practical matters. ‘We had the studio rewired along with the rest of the house when we bought it and it’s been updated again since, so there’s lots of lighting. We had these wall lights installed.’

  She demonstrated and the long wall opposite suddenly sprang into a patchwork of paintings of all sizes, stretching from floor to ceiling and with barely an inch between them.

  I went across to have a closer look. ‘Were all these painted by Tottie’s father?’

  ‘Yes, they’re all Adrian Gillyflower’s work. There are still one or two dotted around the house and several in Tottie’s bedroom, but she moved most of them in here when she was attempting to run the place as a bed and breakfast. What do you think of them?’

  I could see they were mostly portraits, or still lives of fruit and flowers, and his style appeared to have been totally uninfluenced by any artistic trends later than the eighteenth century.

  ‘Competent but uninspired,’ I said at last, cautiously.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I thought, too. You can learn technique in any art form, but not everyone can breathe life into it. But Tottie thinks Papa was an undiscovered genius, so we won’t disillusion her.’

  ‘No, of course not, I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  ‘So, will this studio suit you? Of course, you can set up camp in here, but paint me and Henry elsewhere in the house if you want to. See how you feel about it tomorrow, when you’ve settled in and got your bearings.’

  We went out and she indicated another door that led to her own study overlooking the rear garden, the small library, which was apparently Tottie’s domain but which she mainly used to store the materials for various kinds of craftwork, and the passage that led to the formal dining room, a garden hall with a cloakroom and the door to the conservatory off it, the kitchen and utility rooms. A faint clashing of pan lids and voices could be heard from that direction.

  ‘That’s Den and Tottie making a start on dinner,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave them to it. Den can be quite an inspired cook, but Tottie has no imagination. She wasn’t brought up to cook and clean, which was part of the reason her B&B business never took off. Dumping a loaf, butter and pot of jam in front of your guests when they come down for breakfast and telling them to help themselves to the stewed coffee on the hotplate, because she was off out to see to her bees, or do some gardening, was never going to go down well.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ I said, though if I’d been one of the guests I’d have quite liked that.

  ‘It was home-made jam, though: she has learned to make preserves and pickles, and also wine and mead.’

  ‘Oh? River makes a kind of medicinal mead from the honey bees at the Farm.’

  ‘Then they’ll have something in common to talk about when he visits,’ Clara said. ‘Tottie’s officially our housekeeper-cum-gardener, but she’s cast herself as occasional cook’s assistant to Den. Den’s such a blessing! Henry picked him up in Greece years ago, before we married. He’d just got out of the local gaol – some slight disagreement in a bar – and he’s proved quite invaluable ever since. He can turn his hand to anything.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, thinking that Clara and Henry seemed to attach people to them. I was already starting to get the feeling that they wouldn’t turn a hair if I never left at all either, just embedded myself in the studio and appeared for meals.

  Not that that was likely to happen, with Lex Mariner in the offing …

  ‘So, Tottie and Den aren’t … ?’ I paused, searching for the right phrase and Clara looked at me, puzzled. Then her face cleared.

  ‘Oh, no, they’re not in a relationship, just good friends,’ she said.

  I’d thought they seemed an extremely unlikely couple, but you just never knew with these things!

  ‘That tattoo on Den’s neck is … interesting. He told me he’d got it in Brixton. The prison?’

  ‘Probably. He did have a chequered career before he met Henry, but just petty larceny and he could never resist an expensive car if he found one for the taking. He can drive Henry’s vintage Jaguar whenever he likes now, though, so he doesn’t do that any more.’

  She turned and headed briskly for the main staircase. ‘Come on, I’ll show you your bedroom and the nearest bathroom, then leave you to unpack before dinner.’

  She grasped the fierce wooden eagle on the newel post familiarly round the neck as she began to climb up to where, at the top, a passage led off on either side.

  ‘Teddy’s room, mine and Henry’s, and Lex’s are to the right,’ she said. ‘You’re down here to the left, near Tottie.’

  ‘I thought you said Lex didn’t live with you?’ I blurted out, startled.

  ‘Oh, no, but some years ago he did live with us for a time, before he set up his business in Great Mumming. He often stays at the weekends, and over Christmas, too, of course.’

  That did it! I’d be very sure to leave with River after the Winter Solstice and only hoped Lex kept clear till then. It was only a fortnight, so surely he could manage that? He must want to see me as little as I wanted to see him.

  My room was right at the end of the passage and Clara threw open the door and switched on the light.

  ‘It has a lovely view of the reservoir when it’s light enough to see anything,’ she said. ‘There’s a bathroom directly opposite across the passage and you do have a washbasin, which is as en-suite as we’ve got so far.’

  ‘That’s absolutely fine,’ I assured her, because it was verging on luxury compared to a lot of places I’d stayed in, and while I was growing up, River had been more concerned with the ecological disposal of waste water from bathrooms rather than convenience.

  Anyway, I found the room delightful, with little trace of the Gothic darkness that must have once prevailed, other than an imposing mahogany bed with a sort of half-circle of ornate woodwork jutting out above the head, from which hung heavy, looped-back faded red brocade curtains. It looked entirely suitable for a ‘lying in state’ and I would have to resist the urge to sleep on my back with my arms folded across my chest and my toes turned up.

  The prevailing colour of the décor was a deep, old rose pink … and I really wished I’d had my hair done that colour, rather than green.

  ‘It’s lovely,’ I enthused. And it was warm, too, which also was not the case in several country piles
I’d previously stayed at while working on commissions.

  ‘That little door over there leads to some stairs that take you up to one of the turrets – the pepper pot one. It’s like a tiny sitting room of your own.’

  It sounded very Rapunzel, though I didn’t have enough hair for the role.

  ‘There are lots more rooms in the attic that were once used for servants, but we only utilize it for storage.’

  ‘What about Den?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘He lived in at first, but then we made him a flat over the garage. He likes his privacy and also, he can cook up the kind of food he enjoys there: bangers and mash, that sort of thing. I suspect he slips Tottie the odd bacon sandwich, too, but we don’t ask.’

  ‘It’s a bit like that at the Farm, over fish,’ I told her. ‘River and I both eat it when away from home, but we don’t mention it there.’

  ‘You still call the Farm home,’ she observed with interest. ‘I suppose it’s where your roots are, just as Henry’s and mine lead directly to Starstone, even if they’re now washing about underwater.’

  I looked at her questioningly and she added, ‘I was born and lived in Starstone until I was eight and the reservoir was built. My father was the vicar there. Henry and I knew each other as children, then met up again at Oxford.’

  And now they lived at the Red House, looking down at where their home once was … and presumably still was, under the waters of the reservoir.

  ‘Come down to the drawing room as soon as you’re ready, Meg,’ she told me. ‘We dine at seven during the week, because of getting the child to bed at a reasonable hour.’

  My bags were sitting in the middle of the faded carpet. When I was finally alone I resolutely decided not to reopen the can of worms that was Lex right then, but save it for later, when the first shock of finding him here and part of the family had worn off.

  I unpacked everything into the large wardrobe and a chest of drawers almost as tall as I was, then washed in the bathroom opposite, which was old-fashioned, but had an electric shower installed over the claw-footed bath. The radiators were all warm and so was the water. Clara and Henry obviously liked to be cosy and had the resources to heat such a big house.