The Christmas Invitation

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Time fer a bite to eat, ain’t it?’ he said, wheeling the trolley into the drawing room ahead of us, then putting more wood on the fire.

  I sank down on to one of the sofas in a state of exhaustion, what with all this decorating business, the long walk that morning, and all the emotional turmoil that had stopped me sleeping the previous night.

  ‘Madeira cake,’ Henry said. ‘You have been busy, Den!’

  ‘Nah, Madeira cake don’t take no time at all.’

  ‘I think you’re a magician in the kitchen,’ said Clara, and Den looked gratified.

  Teddy began to tell Lex what was on the Christmas list he’d sent to Santa. It seemed both extensive and varied.

  Then his mother, Zelda, rang and after a word with Clara, she put him on the phone. Zelda must have asked him what he wanted for Christmas, because he began reciting down from the top of the list all over again, but he was less than halfway down when Lex removed the phone from his grasp.

  ‘Hi, Zelda,’ he said. ‘We’ve just finished decorating the trees, so Teddy’s a bit over-excited.’

  Teddy pulled a gremlin face at him, but having crammed another slice of cake into his mouth, he couldn’t protest.

  Lex listened for a few minutes and then said he’d relay that to everyone and see her soon.

  ‘Is Mummy coming now?’ asked Teddy, having eaten his cake. ‘Will she bring me a pony?’

  ‘No and no,’ said Lex. ‘She’s shooting an advert next week and then has an audition, but she’ll be here right after that.’

  ‘As long as she really does come,’ said Teddy, ‘because when she’s in a pantomime, she doesn’t.’

  ‘She’ll be here, but I hope the roads stay clear for her,’ said Clara. ‘Fingers crossed.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she’ll make it, one way or another,’ said Henry. ‘She’s very resourceful.’

  I suspected she wouldn’t have Teddy’s pony under her arm, though.

  ‘Her call reminds me, Meg,’ Clara said suddenly. ‘Your young man rang while you were all out walking this morning.’

  ‘What?’ I said, surprised. ‘I haven’t got a young man! Or an old one,’ I added, as a horrible suspicion dawned.

  ‘No, I remembered you telling me that, though it was definitely the impression he was trying to give me. His name was Rollo something.’

  ‘Rollo Purvis,’ I said resignedly. ‘He’s an extremely ex-boyfriend.’

  I looked up and found Lex staring at me with his straight brows knitted in that strangely attractive, slightly hawkish way he had. ‘Weren’t you already going out with him years ago, when you were at college? He’s that poet bloke who always turned up at student parties.’

  ‘I was. Then we broke it off … and got together again later. But I finally finished with him over six years ago.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like it,’ he said.

  ‘He’s become a bit of a nuisance and likes to ring and unload his existential angst on me from time to time. Lots of people seem to like doing that,’ I added pointedly and he gave me a black look.

  ‘A poet? I thought the name sounded vaguely familiar,’ said Henry.

  ‘He is, and also runs a quarterly poetry magazine called Strimp!’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, not with any great enthusiasm. ‘I’ve placed him now.’

  ‘Isn’t he very good?’ asked Tottie.

  ‘Not if the examples of his work I saw in a copy of Strimp! someone sent me once are anything to go by, no.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, too,’ I said, pleased to have my judgement confirmed. ‘Some of it’s quite clever, but somehow cold.’ I turned to Clara to apologize. ‘I’m sorry he disturbed you. I didn’t give him your phone number and have no idea how he got it. I hope he didn’t try to wangle an invite to visit?’

  ‘I quickly gathered that that was the real purpose of the call when he started saying how much he’d love to pop in and see you soon, when he’d be in the area, and how wonderful it would be if Henry could spare him a few moments of his time and give him an interview for his magazine.’

  ‘What cheek!’ I exclaimed. ‘I hope you told him to take a running jump.’

  ‘I was fairly polite, considering he’d interrupted me while I was working, and also I wasn’t sure if he might be a friend of yours, even if not your boyfriend. But of course, I told him there was no possibility of an interview with Henry.’

  ‘He’s quite likely to turn up anyway and try to charm his way in,’ I warned her. ‘Because he’s not only pushy and thick-skinned, he has an over-inflated sense of his own importance.’

  ‘I’m only surprised your relationship lasted so long, then,’ said Lex, drily.

  ‘He’s changed a lot over the years – people do,’ I said, meeting his eyes directly.

  Lex gave me another of his knitted frowns: this one was so complex it was practically Fair Isle. ‘Why didn’t you just make a clean break, then?’

  ‘I tried to, but he’s so persistent, it was easier said than done.’

  ‘Never mind, dear, you can retire to your little tower above your bedroom and unloose the slings and arrows of outrageous prose at him from there, if you want to,’ suggested Clara. ‘But if you ever decide you want to marry a poet, I’d hold out for a good one.’

  ‘I think you’re both as mad as each other,’ Lex said, but an unwilling smile tugged at the corners of his lips.

  Clara

  I went off to Oxford, where both my parents had studied, though my poor mother had been considerably hampered by the restrictions that were then imposed on every aspect of a female student’s life.

  Even by the time of my arrival in 1959, there were still many rules and regulations we were supposed to obey, but largely ignored, or found ways around.

  I settled gratefully into the studious atmosphere of Lady Margaret Hall, for many of my fellow-students were working towards an eventual career, often in teaching of some kind. My interests, however, lay in epigraphy, archaeology and ancient languages, and I had no desire to teach anyone anything.

  Instead I intended to seize every opportunity that came my way to increase my knowledge, further my interests and gain experience in my chosen field.

  No lingering elements of misogyny were going to deflect me: I set my course and any minor idiocies of that kind scattered before me like the lesser vessels they were.

  Of course, it was fun to explore my new surroundings and meet the other students at Lady Margaret Hall, though one of them, a half-American girl called Nessa Cassidy, was to my dismay inclined to have what we used to term at school a ‘pash’ on me. Although she was by no means stupid – English literature being her forte, especially the Romantic Poets – she was also giggly, girly and with a head full of silly ideas about romantic love.

  I firmly discouraged her and to my relief she quickly gathered a small circle of like-minded friends around her, though there was no shaking her off entirely …

  Nessa was an orphan and, as she freely told everybody, an heiress, with American trustees who doled out the generous allowance with which she bought arty and expensive clothes and treated her circle to cream teas and the like. Since she was small in stature and already plumply curvaceous, I thought too much of this would soon render her quite spherical.

  She was generally considered very pretty, having a short upper lip, a thick, creamy skin, fine white-gold hair and eyes of an unusual light greenish-blue.

  I had forgotten most of these details until recently, when something brought them back to mind …

  But more of that later, for I must tell you about something wonderful that happened in my second week at Oxford: I came face to face with Henry Doome in Cornmarket Street!

  I’d have known him anywhere. He was a taller, wirier version of the boy I’d last seen in Starstone, with his handsome, bony face, straight Grecian nose and bright, cornflower-blue eyes. The wind was whipping his flaxen hair about and he looked as if he’d dressed in the first garments that came to hand that m
orning.

  I don’t expect I’d changed much either: the same tangle of dark curls and over-generous aquiline nose.

  ‘Clara, there you are,’ he said, as if he’d expected to meet me that morning. ‘Still poring over the runes?’

  ‘I’ve moved on to hieroglyphs and cuneiform, Henry,’ I replied. ‘Are you still scribbling the odd ode?’

  We grinned at each other and then embraced warmly, though such public demonstrations of affection between undergraduates were discouraged.

  And from that moment, the years that had parted us ceased to exist and our lives joined up again quite seamlessly.

  We were in separate colleges, of course – they were not co-ed then – and our studies mainly pursued different courses, with some overlapping, like Ancient Greek. But we became as inseparable as was possible under the circumstances.

  How wonderful it was to have a friend with whom I could talk on an equal intellectual footing and without constantly having to explain myself – just as it had been when we were children. But we were also soulmates, who could laugh together and share dreams of the future. I had no doubt that Henry would one day be a renowned poet, for his work was already then beginning to be published. For his part, he was absolutely certain that I would rise to be an eminent epigrapher.

  17

  Eaten Up

  Soon after tea, Lex announced that he would have to go back to the pottery, but Clara and Henry wanted him to stay for a proper Sunday dinner of nut loaf, with roast potatoes, onion gravy and all the trimmings.

  ‘I hate you missing out on a good feed,’ said Tottie, as if she’d just filled a nosebag with oats for him.

  He certainly didn’t look malnourished to me. His tall, broad-shouldered frame had filled out with what I suspected was solid muscle in the years since I’d last seen him. Probably due to pummelling the hell out of giant lumps of clay and carting huge pots about.

  ‘We usually have dinner at about one on Sundays, instead of in the evening,’ Clara explained to me. ‘Then have Welsh rarebit or something simple later. But with the tree and everything, today’s different.’

  ‘I’m sorry I’ll miss dinner too, Clara,’ Lex said, ‘but I promised Al I’d be back to help unload the kiln tonight. We’ve got a big order of urns heading off to a stately home tomorrow – a Christmas present from the owner to his wife.’ He grinned suddenly and added, ‘He asked me if we did gift-wrapping, but I think he was joking.’

  ‘If he’s not, I hope he has a couple of strong men to help him do it,’ said Henry.

  ‘He particularly wanted them to arrive tomorrow, because his wife’s away and he can hide them in an outbuilding.’

  ‘Let’s hope they’re what she really wanted for Christmas, then,’ said Clara. ‘I know it’s what I want – another lovely giant pot for the garden.’

  ‘Just as well, since that’s what I always give you and Henry,’ he said. When his face relaxed into amusement, he suddenly looked so much like the younger Lex I’d tumbled headlong in love with at first sight, so very long ago … First love, not the lasting kind.

  Mind you, my second love didn’t prove all that durable, either.

  ‘I think I told you that Lex makes the most amazing huge antique-style pots and urns, didn’t I?’ Clara asked me. ‘At least, their shapes are like antique ones, but when you look closely at the decoration and mouldings, you realize they’re very contemporary.’

  ‘The ones encrusted with barnacles or coral do look like antique ones, dredged up from the seabed,’ said Henry. ‘We must take you down to Terrapotter one day, Meg. I’m sure you’ll be interested.’

  I really was and would have loved to have visited Terrapotter … provided Lex and Al were not there, not to mention Lisa’s younger sister, though she at least would have no idea who I was.

  As if he’d read my mind, Lex said insincerely, ‘Yes, why don’t you come, Meg? Al and I would love to show you round.’

  ‘That sounds so irresistible,’ I said. Not.

  I got up. ‘Well, I’m going to take Clara’s portrait into the studio and look at it for a bit, so I’ll say goodbye now, Lex.’

  Since I half-suspected he’d invented the reason for his early return to the studio in order to remove himself from my vicinity, I hoped perhaps our next and final meeting might be on the night of the Solstice, when I’d have the comforting presence of River to fortify me.

  But I wasn’t to escape another encounter before Lex left, because Teddy literally dragged him in to see Clara’s portrait first.

  ‘You don’t mind, do you, Meg?’ Teddy asked me anxiously, and I couldn’t very well say ‘Yes, I do!’ because Lex was already inside the door, held fast by a small, relentless hand.

  ‘Teddy insisted I—’ began Lex, then broke off abruptly as his eyes fell on the painting, which I’d propped on the old easel. There was a long, still silence, like the aftermath of an avalanche.

  The portrait had quickly sprung into shape and already Clara’s face was leaping from the bones of the drawing, swirling into three dimensions with every slash and squiggle of paint. It seemed to be internally illuminated by the bright light of her intellect and character, rather than externally, from the screen of the computer.

  ‘It’s good, isn’t it?’ I said humbly, for a force outside myself makes that connection between my eyes and hands when I’m painting and I, Meg Harkness, am only the instrument it uses.

  ‘It’s not good at all – it’s better than that,’ he said at last. ‘In fact, if you don’t mess it up at the end with overpainting, it’ll be bloody brilliant!’

  He managed to drag his eyes away and looked at me in a new way … or rather, in a way familiar to me before he started imagining I’d turned into some kind of Mata Hari and tempted him with the apple of infidelity when he was having a weak moment.

  It was the look not only of recognition, but of the respect that one artist of equal stature gives to another.

  ‘I always know when to stop,’ I said, and the expression in his agate-green eyes transitioned back to unfathomable again. Turning on his heel, he strode off without another word.

  He’s very good at that. If I tried it, I’d probably fall over my feet, or get my scarf trapped in the door, or something.

  Teddy, wearing the expression of one whose protégée had proved her worth, called breezily, ‘See you later, Meg!’ and rushed off after his idol to say goodbye.

  He left the door ajar and Lass wandered in, wrinkling her nose against the mingled aromas of linseed oil and turpentine, which she evidently didn’t find as delicious as I did.

  I remembered where there were a couple of biscuits, which had arrived with morning coffee the other day, and offered them to her.

  She took them gently, one at a time, and ate them with appreciation. I expect she was hungry, for Den’s voice suddenly called her.

  ‘Lass? Din-dins!’

  She paused only long enough to give my hand a hasty lick of gratitude and then left as precipitately as Lex had.

  The kitchen door slammed a moment later and silence descended.

  While I knew everyone was still in the house (apart from Lex), and busy as bees in their own little hive cells, I suddenly felt myself alone in it, shrunk to the size of a minute and oddly dressed porcelain doll in a gigantic Victorian doll’s house.

  I relived again that moment when Lex had looked at me as one artist does to another, recognizing an equal, for his work had been brilliant at college and he’d been set for success until he dropped out before the second year of his MA.

  I was glad I’d shaken him into realizing I wasn’t just some two-dimensional shadow-demon from the past, even if not shaken enough, perhaps, to make him open to the idea of listening to my version of events, otherwise known as The Truth.

  But part of me was now sorry if my arrival had taken him back to a time of his life that was clearly still as painful to remember as ever, even if he’d got my small part in the tragedy completely wrong.

  M
y reverie was finally broken by the door swinging wide open again with a creak, as if an invisible hand had pushed it, for there was no one there. Then the small wooden clock that sat on one of the bookshelves, and had been entirely silent until this point, suddenly began to tick loudly.

  Weird.

  I closed the door and was soon lost in the portrait again. It might be the best thing I’d ever painted …

  I only emerged from the studio when I was summoned to dinner. The clock was still ticking, though the time was set for a parallel universe. Maybe it was the one Lex and Al lived in.

  I wondered if I could face yet more food, but despite dinner being earlier because of Teddy having school tomorrow, my mouth watered when the fragrantly savoury nut loaf, roast potatoes, bright medley of home-grown winter vegetables and jug of onion gravy were carried in.

  The starter had been melon balls, piled into old-fashioned shallow glass sundae dishes and topped with a swirl of raspberry sauce.

  Teddy’s enquiry, ‘Aunt Clara, do melons have b—’ had been firmly quashed by Tottie before he could properly get going.

  We were all tired and the conversation desultory. Tottie’s description of how she clamped her carrots in sand over the winter and put polythene tunnels over the winter cabbage nearly sent me to sleep.

  Henry asked me if I’d enjoyed decorating the tree and I assured him, with complete honesty, that I had adored it.

  He and Teddy seemed to have entered into a Christmas conspiracy to wring the last drop of relish from every festive aspect, from the Advent calendar that hung in the kitchen, with all the doors popped open to today’s date, to release the chocolate Nativity figures within (though eating them seemed sort of sacrilegious), to the day they would put up fresh holly and ivy, and fake mistletoe.

  ‘But good fake,’ said Clara. ‘The real berries are so poisonous, we’re all afraid they’ll fall down and that silly dog will eat them.’

  ‘One year she ate a whole bowl of peanuts roasted in their shells, but luckily she threw them all up again in the garden hall,’ Tottie said.