The Christmas Invitation

by Trisha Ashley

  And I’d certainly wanted to kiss him back, until I came to my senses.

  It seemed there was a whole world of what-might-have-beens out there, like one of those films with several alternative parallel realities.

  But it was all a long time ago and now we were both older, wiser and, it seemed, destined to be friends.

  I hoped Lex would now be able to cast off the shackles of guilt. The ghost of Lisa, beautiful and sad, would always be there, but she wouldn’t have wanted her death to blight his life.

  Lex’s brief kiss before he drove me back last night had been meant to mark the end of hostilities and the start of a new relationship … of some kind.

  Kissing cousins … Mark certainly thought he was! I’d have to disillusion him about that pronto, before Sybil called the banns and Flora decided I was her love rival.

  I wriggled down a little further under the warm duvet and remembered the scene when Lex and I had arrived back at the Red House last night. It had struck me as odd that nobody asked what had kept us so long.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ Clara had said casually, with a beaming smile. ‘Just in time for a late dinner, or early supper. Den and Tottie are just putting the finishing touches to it, whatever it is.’

  ‘Cheese and onion pie, with winter slaw and red cabbage,’ River said. ‘Blackberry crumble and custard.’

  ‘Very hearty and warming,’ approved Clara.

  ‘It’s starting to snow hard out there,’ Lex told them. ‘Just as well it wasn’t like this earlier, or we’d have had a struggle to get up to the Stone for the ceremony.’

  ‘We’ve never postponed one yet, even if it’s only been the performers who made it to the top,’ Henry said, then added to River, ‘I’m afraid you might not be able to leave in the morning, but you’re very welcome to stay as long as you like.’

  River thanked him and said it was in the hands of the Goddess and he would wait and see how she directed things. I had a mental image of her as a kind of celestial Traffic Officer.

  Teddy said anxiously, ‘Will Mummy make it tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lex assured him, ‘even if I have to borrow Uncle Henry’s skis and carry her here on my back.’

  Teddy had thought that very funny and he was quite talkative and lively during dinner, until the excitement of the day caught up with him and he’d have gone face down in his dessert, fast asleep, only Tottie caught him in the nick of time.

  I’d felt a bit self-conscious with Lex – OK, a lot self-conscious – and tried to avoid looking in his direction, but on the one or two occasions when I did glance his way I found him smiling at me with a kindness that I found more difficult to bear than the animosity that had gone before.

  It hadn’t stopped me eating as if I’d been famished for a month, though. That must be what a near-death experience, followed by a lot of soul-baring, does for you.

  Everyone seemed to know I’d had a fall, but no one mentioned it as anything other than an accident.

  I couldn’t lie there for ever and it was starting to get light, so I showered, finding a few more bumps and bruises down one side, though you could barely see the thin thread of the scratch on my face, or the surrounding bruise, and my hands were only a little pink and puffy from the gorse, thanks to Sybil’s ministrations.

  As I reached the bottom of the stairs, giving the now-familiar wooden eagle a friendly pat on the head, Henry and Lex came in through the front door, stamping off the snow in the porch.

  ‘Is it still snowing?’ I asked Henry, avoiding Lex’s eyes, because I felt even more shy this morning than I had last night, having had time to think about it all.

  ‘It’s snowed a lot during the night, but it’s stopped now and the sun’s trying to break through.’

  ‘Some of the farmers have been out gritting the road through the village, so it’s passable from here to Underhill,’ Lex said. ‘It gets steadily deeper as you climb up towards the moors, though, so they’re going to see if it thaws out a bit this morning and then try the snowplough later.’

  ‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘even if they can’t get all the way through to Thorstane, they’ll still need to take feed to the sheep, one way or another.’

  They’d already had breakfast, but I found most of the others still in the kitchen and I apologized for my lateness.

  ‘I wasn’t even asleep, just lying there, too snug to get up.’

  ‘That’s all right, all our usual routines are slowly dissolving into the Christmas spirit,’ said Clara. ‘Tottie’s only just gone to let the hens out.’

  ‘If we had a pond, we could have a duck,’ Teddy suggested.

  ‘What do you call a duck at this time of year?’ asked Clara.

  ‘A Christmas quacker,’ Den answered, spooning loose leaf tea into the pot with a generous hand. ‘That one fell out of crackers in the Dark Ages, didn’t it?’

  I put two slices of wholemeal bread into the toaster while Clara poured me a mug of coffee and pushed it towards me.

  ‘Flora rang first thing to see if we knew how the roads were,’ she said. ‘I told her the Thorstane road was blocked, but perhaps they might clear it later.’

  ‘So she didn’t take Rollo back to the pub last night?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he’s still at the guesthouse and she says his chill is much worse, so he’s staying in bed at the moment.’

  ‘He’s such a hypochondriac that if he’s really got something wrong with him it’ll send him into a panic without Mummy to hold his hand. He’ll be the patient from hell and have Flora running round after him.’

  ‘Oh, Flora’s adept at doing only what Flora wants,’ Tottie said, entering the kitchen in time to hear this. ‘The hens didn’t really want to come out,’ she added.

  ‘Not bleedin’ surprised. Even an ’en’s got more sense than to be out in this weather,’ said Den, opening a tin of digestive biscuits and dunking one in his mug of tea, which was a dark, rich mahogany colour. Half of the biscuit fell into the cup and vanished.

  ‘Bugger,’ he said.

  Teddy, who was picking the last bits of his cereal out of the bowl with his fingers, looked up and said thoughtfully, ‘Bugger’s one of the special Den words I’m not allowed to use till I’m grown up, isn’t it?’

  Tottie agreed that it was.

  ‘But Sybil said it too, when that Shetland pony she borrowed for me in the summer holidays bit her on the bum.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ said Clara. ‘We’re going to fetch Sybil and the dogs right after an early lunch and bring them here for Christmas. That’ll be fun, won’t it? Lex will run me and Henry there in my car with the snow chains on, if we need them.’

  ‘I should be on my way home by now,’ said River. His tunic today was the clear deep blue of his eyes and I now easily recognized the lettering around the bottom as cuneiform. ‘Perhaps the road will reopen later.’

  ‘I doubt it, and I don’t think you should try it today. Do stay until at least tomorrow,’ urged Clara. ‘We like having you.’

  ‘You’re very kind,’ he said, with one of his warm, serene smiles. ‘I’m enjoying being here immensely.’

  Lex came to report that Henry had gone back to his study, because being so near the completion of his epic work was too tantalizing to resist, even at Christmas. Then he asked what the rest of us meant to do for what was left of the morning.

  ‘I’m carrying on with my memoirs,’ said Clara. ‘I feel much the same as Henry: I can’t leave them alone for long. But now I know what happened to Nessa’s baby, I’ll have to resist the urge to jump ahead of the timeline.’

  Tottie said, ‘Olive was coming over to make up the bed in Sybil’s room and then give all the bathrooms a once-over, but in this weather—’

  ‘That’s Olive now – or the Abominable bleedin’ Snowman,’ said Den.

  Lex suggested he and I and Teddy clear the steps at the front of the house, but first, Teddy insisted we make a snowman and Den provided a carrot and lumps of charred wood from the emb
ers of last night’s drawing-room fire for nose and eyes.

  Lex and I began shovelling the snow from the steps after that, while Teddy went round the house to help Den clear the path to the garage.

  We didn’t talk, but the silence was thick with unspoken words, possibly in one of Clara’s ancient languages, because I had no idea what they were.

  ‘That’s it, then,’ Lex said finally, as he sprinkled grit on the cleared steps. He smiled at me in a tentative way that I found somehow heart-wrenching, so I returned it warmly.

  The cold air had whipped some colour into his cheeks and tangled his mop of dark curls. I suspect in my case it had just given me a cherry nose.

  ‘Shall we go and help the others now?’ I suggested.

  ‘OK,’ he agreed, shouldering his shovel and heading for the corner of the house … but suddenly the sight of that broad back was just way too tempting. I scooped up a handful of snow and threw it, hard. It splattered right on target.

  He turned slowly, regarded me with a serious expression that made me feel nervous, then dropped the shovel, grabbed a handful of snow and threw it right back.

  A battle ensued until I admitted defeat by running off round the side of the house, though wading through snow required a lot of effort and Lex got me with one last snowball.

  River, bundled up in layers and with the rainbow pixie hat pulled firmly over his pointy little ears, was gritting the part of the path already cleared in front of the kitchen door, while Henry had now joined the party and was helping Teddy and Den shovel snow from the rest of it.

  ‘It’s good to hear the sound of laughter,’ River said, beaming at us. ‘Meg, I rang Oshan before I came out, to warn him not to expect me yet, and then I went down the garden to talk to the bees and the hens.’

  ‘The bees are all fast asleep. Tottie told me,’ said Teddy, leaning on a child-sized red shovel.

  ‘Bees can absorb words even when they’re asleep,’ River assured him.

  ‘Did the hens say anything interesting?’ I asked, and he gave a puckish grin.

  ‘They said they were glad they lived in a vegetarian household.’

  ‘Except fer the fish,’ pointed out Den. ‘Come on, let’s finish this, before I die of the perishin’ cold.’

  The snowball fight seemed somehow to have broken the ice between me and Lex. Though we still didn’t speak much to each other, at least now the silence was comfortable.

  We thawed ourselves out with hot soup and then, when Lex was getting ready to take Henry and Clara to fetch Sybil, we heard the sound of a tractor and saw it slowly ploughing its way past the Red House and up towards the moors.

  There was a Land Rover parked at the bottom of the drive, with bales of hay and two lively Border collies in the back, and Den went to find out what was happening. He reported that Billy was waiting to see how far up the tractor got.

  ‘That’s Billy Banks from Berry Edge Farm,’ Henry told me, then smiled. ‘What a lot of alliteration!’

  ‘Pete’s the one on the tractor and ’e’ll plough as far up as ’e can, won’t ’e?’ said Den. ‘Billy’ll follow ’im up and drop some ’ay off fer the sheep.’

  ‘Do they think Pete will be able to get all the way over the top?’ asked Clara. ‘Zelda will be getting a taxi from the station this afternoon and I hope it can make it through.’

  ‘Told ’em about Zelda,’ Den said. ‘They’ll do their best.’

  ‘Being Zelda, she’ll probably bat her eyelashes and someone will carry her over the drifts,’ Lex said cynically. ‘I think we’d better go and fetch Sybil now, while the road through the village is well gritted, don’t you?’

  When they’d gone, Tottie agreed to sit for her portrait for an hour or so in the conservatory.

  Den had vanished, probably to his flat, and River said he and Teddy were going to construct a Christmas collage to brighten up the hall.

  In the conservatory, Tottie took up her pose and then became lost in thought, her expression rapt.

  I stopped after a while – I was already laying paint on the face – and enquired what she was thinking about.

  ‘Spring bulbs,’ she said simply.

  I asked her to hold the pose for another few minutes while I quickly blocked in the fruit and vegetables spilling out of the end of the cornucopia, so they could be returned to the kitchen. I’d put in the final details later, from the photos I’d taken.

  Teddy came round a bend in the path and stopped under the large fan of a date palm.

  ‘You’ve been ages. We’ve finished our picture and put it up. Don’t you want to see it?’

  ‘Of course we do,’ I assured him. ‘Just let me clear up here and we’ll be there in a moment.’

  We duly admired a panorama that featured a lot of dragons circling the Starstone, while tinfoil stars peppered the heavens.

  ‘Where’s River now?’ I asked.

  ‘In the kitchen with Den, baking,’ he said, and when we went to make coffee we found a caraway seed cake cooling on a rack. It was a favourite of River’s and he’d got Oshan to email the recipe over.

  Tottie and I took our coffee into the drawing room and she put a match to the laid fire, which soon blazed up. Teddy had followed us and spread out his magic painting book on the coffee table, but he’d barely dipped his brush in the water pot when there was the sound of wheels crunching up the drive and then a horn beeped.

  ‘They must be back with Sybil,’ I said, going to the window to see. But instead of Clara’s car, I saw that the farmer’s Land Rover was pulling up, with two familiar Border collies jumping about in the open back. No hay this time, though.

  Tottie looked over my shoulder as the driver got out and waved to us, then pointed at the cab.

  ‘That’s Billy Banks again, and I think he may have brought Zelda!’

  ‘Mummy?’ exclaimed Teddy eagerly, and beat us to the front door by a head.

  Billy had hurried round to the passenger side by then and was tenderly helping down a small woman in a long, pink quilted coat and with a ridiculously huge Russian-style fake fur hat pulled low over a lively, pretty face with dark eyes and a tilted nose.

  I didn’t need Teddy’s cry of ‘Mummy!’ to know who that was.

  Tottie put a hand on his shoulder in time to stop him dashing out in his slippers.

  ‘Darling!’ cried Zelda, her red lips curving in a warm smile, and she practically swam towards us, arms outstretched. You could tell she was an actor.

  Behind her, another figure was emerging more slowly: a tall, elderly man with white hair, dressed in an old-fashioned thick woollen overcoat and Burberry scarf. He turned and surveyed us with the palest of ice-blue eyes.

  ‘We thought you’d make it, one way or another, Zelda,’ said Den, edging past the mother and son reunion. He’d discarded his brown linen overall in favour of a battered donkey jacket and slipped his feet into wellies.

  Then he spotted the extra passenger and said, disgustedly, ‘Gawd! Yer running a taxi service now, Billy?’

  ‘Aye, seems like it,’ he said laconically. ‘Makes a change from carting sick sheep about.’

  He grinned, gap-toothed, at Zelda.

  ‘You’ve been so kind – you and Pete are angels!’ she told him.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, then explained to us, ‘The taxi got as far as the pub. Then when the snowplough went up from that side, Fred followed it with his Land Rover – and the post van followed him. The top’s too deep to plough, though, so they hailed Pete on this side and we managed to get them across.’ He grinned again, good-naturedly. ‘We had a bit of a job, what with the drifts and the old gent, and them having luggage.’

  The ‘old gent’ didn’t look too pleased to be described this way.

  ‘Is the luggage in the back? I’ll help yer get it out, won’t I?’ said Den.

  Teddy and his mother had vanished inside, but Tottie and I were still blocking the entrance and the elderly man gave us a frigid glare from under bristling white eyebrows a
nd snapped, ‘Well, Charlotte, are you going to let me in before I die of hypothermia?’

  From Tottie’s expression, she thought that would be a good outcome, but she reluctantly made way and he pushed past us into the hall.

  We followed and Tottie demanded, ‘What are you doing here, Piers? Nobody’s expecting you.’

  So this must be the Piers Marten that Sybil had been angsting over, though from what everyone else had said about him, he hadn’t sounded the most pleasant of characters.

  ‘Then they should have been,’ he was saying. ‘I knew Sybil would want me to come for Christmas, whatever plans that young cub of hers had. He never liked me, so I thought he was just getting her to put me off, until Zelda told me that Sybil is spending Christmas here.’

  ‘She is, because Mark’s going to be doing a lot of work on the house over Christmas. I know she’s been trying to ring you and leaving messages to tell you so,’ said Tottie. ‘The others have gone to fetch her. They’ll be back soon.’

  ‘I only saw the first letter and then I moved to my club, because my central heating boiler broke down. No one seemed to want to fix it this side of Christmas.’

  He turned and gave me what he obviously imagined was a charming smile, though it didn’t warm his eyes.

  ‘Zelda told me about her new-found cousin, too. You must be Meg. I’m Piers Marten.’

  ‘Yes, I’d gathered that, because I’ve heard about you, too,’ I said, shaking the hand he held out, which was encased in unpleasantly clammy thin leather.

  ‘I can’t imagine why you’re here, if you got Sybil’s letter putting you off and after Zelda told you why,’ said Tottie. ‘You should have turned round and gone back to your club. But perhaps Billy wouldn’t mind dropping you off at Underhill on his way home – he goes right past.’

  ‘I’m too frozen to go any further and if Sybil is staying here, then there’s no point in it. Mark’s unlikely to give me a warm welcome.’

  I suddenly remembered Clara saying that she wouldn’t have him staying under her roof, so I didn’t think that she would welcome him with open arms on her return, either.