A Christmas Cracker

by Trisha Ashley

  There were six missed calls, all from a number I now recognised as Guy’s, but I ignored those and had a little chat with Emma, instead. Then Marco insisted on coming on the line and informed me gravely that he couldn’t speak to me for long, because today he was an Arctic explorer and had to go and drag his wooden boat over the frozen wastes. I can’t imagine where he got that idea from and he put the phone down, so I couldn’t ask Emma.

  Before I could ring her back, my mobile jingled into life again. I never set it to play ‘Things Can Only Get Better’; it must have done that itself.

  ‘Tabby?’ demanded a voice from my previous life, which now seemed so long in the past that it took me a moment or two to recall who it belonged to. ‘Are you there? It’s me, Luke.’

  ‘Hi, Luke, this is a surprise! How did you get my number?’

  ‘Kate had written it in the address book, though it’s been unavailable for the last couple of days.’

  ‘That’s because there’s no reception here, unless I’m away from the valley, and even then I don’t always remember to turn my phone on. Were you trying to get hold of me for any particular reason?’

  I mentally added, ‘Like maybe apologising for having a lying cow for a wife?’

  However, it appeared the boot was on the other foot, because what he was burning to tell me was that I was the cause of a breach between him and the fragrant Kate.

  ‘Ever since you were exposed on that programme and then arrested, we’ve done nothing but argue and we used to be perfectly happy together,’ he said accusingly. ‘It’s all your fault.’

  ‘Mine?’

  He ignored my interjection. ‘I realise that she’s such a truthful little soul that she simply had to tell someone about the scam, once she found out, but she really should have discussed it with me first, and not gone running to that TV guy. And then, I found it hard to believe you’d been having an affair with that old bloke from Champers&Chocs.’

  ‘That’s because I wasn’t,’ I told him crisply, but he clearly just wanted to unload, because he wasn’t taking in a single thing I said.

  ‘Kate accused me of calling her a liar and insisted everything she’d said about you was true.’

  ‘No, Luke, it was the opposite of true.’

  ‘Now she says we need some space apart, so she’s moved into Jeremy’s granny flat and though it’s very kind of him to let her stay there, it makes it a bit awkward, since the three of us have been friends for so long. I mean, we still see each other every day in the staff room at school, but she won’t speak to me. Jeremy says she just needs a bit of time to forgive me for doubting her.’

  ‘My heart bleeds for you,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘I still don’t understand why she had to go to that programme if she felt so strongly about it and not the police – and it would have been even better if she’d just told Jeremy what she knew and let him deal with it.’

  ‘What, and given me a chance to defend myself against her fairy tales? That was never going to happen,’ I said. ‘Luke, have you ever even considered whether she really was telling the truth?’

  That did seem to get through at last. ‘What, about you having an affair with that man? Well, as I said, it seemed odd, when you—’

  ‘With the scam, numbskull,’ I interrupted. ‘The only thing I was actually guilty of was not reporting Harry Briggs when I found out what he was doing, and being naïve enough to believe him when he said he’d stopped. And no one in their right mind would think I was having an affair with a short, fat man, old enough to be my father, when I thought the sun rose and set out of Jeremy.’

  ‘That’s what puzzled me, but then your boss said so too, and that he’d sent you home with wads of cash after those late nights you spent at the warehouse.’

  ‘I was packing special orders and he’d always paid me in cash when I was doing casual work for him while Mum was alive, so I didn’t think twice about it. And it wasn’t wads of cash, it was the minimum wage plus a bonus for working late. Both he and Kate lied in court.’

  ‘But Kate’s the most truthful person in the world,’ he insisted. ‘Why would she lie about you?’

  ‘You tell me,’ I said.

  ‘Even Jeremy was convinced you were guilty,’ he pointed out, as if that was the clincher.

  ‘He obviously never really knew me at all, and I was so blinded by love that I didn’t realise quite how credulous and stupid he was,’ I said bitterly. ‘Did you know that as soon as I was sent to prison he cut off all contact? He didn’t even answer my calls and letters, and if my friend Emma hadn’t stood by me I’d have been totally abandoned, isolated and alone. I didn’t even know what had happened to my cat.’

  There was a short pause in which I hoped he might finally be attempting to look at things from a point of view other than his own for a change.

  Really, I was starting to think you must have been able to get onto teacher training courses at the time he did simply by signing your name on the application form!

  At last he said slowly, ‘I knew your mother was dead, but surely you had other relations to visit you and—’

  ‘I’ve no other relatives,’ I said. ‘I had no visitors and no outside contact other than Emma, until an elderly prison visitor kindly took pity on me. He was the one who arranged this job for me, or I’d either be still at the open prison, or living in a hostel.’

  ‘But the sentence was quite lenient, really. They said you’d be out in a couple of months.’

  ‘Oh, yes, very lenient, especially since I didn’t commit the crime in the first place! First I was locked up in a prison over Christmas, unable to contact anyone and desperate with worry about Pye, and then I was moved to an open prison at the other end of the country, so even Emma couldn’t visit me. Yes, that was lenient all right,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘But I didn’t know … I mean, I didn’t think about it,’ he confessed. ‘Still – you’re already out, so you weren’t in there long.’

  ‘I have an electronic tag on my leg. They don’t just open the door and release you, they ring you like a pigeon and put you under nightly house arrest,’ I snarled. ‘And all this happened because your wife lied right down the line about something I’d told her in confidence.’

  ‘But Kate can’t have lied,’ he reiterated. ‘I mean, she liked you and she said how that made it hard to tell anyone what you’d been doing.’

  ‘Did she? Magnanimous of her,’ I said.

  ‘I suppose she might have misunderstood what you told her and you weren’t quite as involved as it seemed …’ he conceded grudgingly.

  But I could see he was struggling and I was tired of trying to convince him to take off the rosy-tinted specs, so I cut him off short.

  ‘Luke, I don’t really care what any of you think any more. Why don’t you just go and tell Kate you’ll never doubt another word she says? Then she’ll come back to you and you can all three live happily ever after in each other’s pockets, just the way you were before I came along,’ I said, then turned the phone off.

  I suspected Kate was having a fling with Jeremy now, under the guise of ‘time out from the marriage’, but for all I knew, she could have been conducting the affair under Luke’s nose for years.

  The conversation brought back all the feelings of betrayal and abandonment I’d felt at the time, especially Jeremy’s. Now he was sleeping with the enemy, too … On reflection, however, I thought they probably deserved each other.

  Trudging back up the hill I was so lost in thought that it was only when Dorrie Bird called to me that I noticed she was standing at her cottage door. She invited me in for a coffee and a nip of her home-made sloe gin.

  ‘Though we won’t tell Mercy about it, because she’s convinced we’re all as temperance as she is. I don’t know what she thinks we drink up at the Auld Christmas – lemonade, perhaps?’

  Her cottage sitting room was tiny, bright and cosy, cluttered with rugs, ornaments, candles and throws. It was all very Out of Afr
ica by way of Ikea.

  Over slices of violent pink- and yellow-squared Battenburg cake, I found myself telling her about the call. I suspect this was due to inadvertently drinking too much sloe gin, but I was out of the habit and, in any case, had never had much of a head for spirits.

  ‘That Jeremy doesn’t sound much of a man to me,’ she said disparagingly. ‘Guy Martland now, he’s a proper man – and a proper scoundrel, too!’

  ‘I think I’ve grasped that,’ I said.

  ‘He’d be good for a quick fling, if you were in the mood, luv,’ she said, in her warm Liverpool accent. ‘But the first hint of you getting serious and off he’d fly.’

  ‘I’m not a fling sort of girl,’ I said. ‘In fact, I think I’m a settling-down-into-a-mad-old-spinster-with-my-cat one, so I’ll leave trying to clip Guy Martland’s wings to someone else.’

  She pressed on me another glass of gin and a slice of Battenberg and then told me a few things about her deprived but jolly-sounding childhood in Liverpool, where there was a shortage of everything except love.

  It still struck me as odd that she could look so like Maya Angelou, yet sound purest Cilla Black.

  Luckily I got back into the house and to my rooms without seeing anyone other than Pye in the kitchen, and by the time I was called for dinner (fortunately running a little late tonight), I’d splashed my face with lots of cold water and could pass for sober.

  I went into the library later to type up some notes, but first rang Emma back to tell her all about Luke’s phone call.

  Then I relayed an invitation from Mercy to bring Marco over for the day on 13 April, a Saturday.

  ‘If the weather’s nice, I thought we could walk up to the village,’ I suggested, and then described how Mercy was pressing on with alterations to the inside of the mill, despite not yet having planning permission for the redevelopment.

  ‘She seems certain she’ll get permission to open it, so I hope she’s right! But the cracker factory regeneration can go on anyway and we’ve already made up some trial crackers to new designs,’ I said, and added proudly, ‘I can now make a cracker good enough to sell! Only it takes me five times as long as any of the others.’

  ‘Are you managing to do any of your own art work?’

  ‘I’m aiming to keep sending out designs to the greetings card companies, because it’s so lucrative, but there’s not that much time to do any, even though I’m bubbling with ideas – Godsend seems to have totally inspired me! I expect when the Lord and Master is here as full-time manager, he won’t need my help, but until then, I have to do everything I can to make the regeneration scheme a success.’

  ‘Where is the Lord and Master?’ she asked.

  ‘In Peru, or Mexico, or possibly somewhere else by now, sending Mercy emails telling her not to trust me further than she can throw me!’

  I smiled reluctantly when she giggled.

  ‘You know,’ I said, a sudden thought occurring to me, ‘everyone keeps telling me how bad Guy Martland is – so maybe he’s not as bad as he’s painted, either!’

  Chapter 27: Queen for the Day

  Q:Why couldn’t the elves lift Santa’s sack onto the sleigh?

  A:Elf and Safety!

  By the time Emma drove over to Mote Farm with Marco the following Saturday, I was more than ready for a rest, for the mill now resembled an ant’s nest that had been stirred with a stick.

  Workmen were everywhere and Mercy had added electricians to their number, so that strange bunches of cables now hung from freshly excavated caverns in the walls, or from the ceilings.

  There had been a near-mutiny in the cracker workshop, until Mercy got the builders to concentrate first on finishing the wall that divided her workers from the rest of the mayhem and put up a draped ceiling of translucent polythene, but it was still touch and go until the viewing windows had been fitted.

  I was getting along well with the second storeroom, though by the time the builders had filled in the opening between that and the first room (leaving space for an emergency fire door, since there was access to the outside in the cracker factory stockroom, via the loading bay), I had to dust off all the boxes again.

  I was totally ready for a bit of time off.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ I told Emma, meeting them at the garages near the house. ‘I was half afraid Desmond would come home early for some reason and scupper our plans!’

  ‘No, he’s still in Dubai until the end of the month,’ she said, opening the back door and letting Marco out, trailing a blue velvet cloak.

  ‘You look very fine today, Marco,’ I said admiringly.

  ‘I’m a monarch,’ he explained. ‘Where’s Pye? I’ve brought him a catnip toy. Mummy bought it; she says he’ll like it.’

  ‘He will and he’s in the house waiting for you with Mercy, the lady I’m working for. Let’s go in and say hello, before we decide what to do after that,’ I suggested.

  Job opened the door with a flourish as we approached – he’d been polishing Silas’s shoes in the scullery earlier, so actually I think he was just on the point of leaving.

  He bowed. ‘Welcome to Mote Farm. Madam is awaiting you in the drawing room,’ he intoned sepulchrally.

  ‘Thanks, Job,’ I said, and my guess was right, because after we passed him he shut himself on the other side of the door.

  Marco was round-eyed.

  ‘A butler?’ whispered Emma. ‘And where’s he gone?’

  ‘He was a former butler but now he just helps Silas, Mercy’s brother, and lives in one of those cottages near the mill. He slips back into the role all the time – it’s like being in a P. G. Wodehouse novel!’

  Mercy had made coffee and brought it through, together with a plate of iced fairy cakes. Silas, who seemed to have come out in search of yesterday’s newspaper, was half-poised for flight back to his rooms. He rearranged his features from a scowl at being caught by visitors, into a politer expression.

  ‘This is my friend Emma,’ I said, making the introduction, ‘and this is her son, Marco.’

  ‘As in Polo?’ Silas said.

  ‘Polo is a game with horses and sticks, everyone knows that,’ Marco said, fixing him with the dark eyes that were so much like his late father’s.

  ‘Well, Mr Smarty-pants, Marco Polo was a famous explorer.’

  ‘That’s very interesting, I’ll find out about him,’ Marco said seriously.

  Silas, as if his knees had suddenly given up, tottered back and sank down into his usual chair near the fireplace.

  ‘Yes, do stay for coffee, Silas,’ Mercy said warmly. ‘That will be lovely!’

  ‘Huh!’ Silas said, then added, ‘Why is the boy wearing a ruff?’

  ‘I’m Queen Elizabeth the First,’ Marco said seriously, and then, spotting Pye, who was stalking invisible mice in a dark corner of the room, went over to pay his respects and hand over the catnip toy, which seemed to be well received. They’d always got on well.

  ‘What a fertile imagination your little boy has,’ said Mercy admiringly, pouring out a glass of orange juice for him, while I began to dispense the coffee and pass round the cakes. ‘How old is he, did you say?’

  ‘Nearly seven,’ Emma told her, with slight despair. ‘A neighbour gave him a box of old Ladybird history books recently and I made him the ruff when he wanted to be Shakespeare. But today …’

  ‘He’ll probably be Marco Polo next time,’ I said.

  Marco came back and asked, ‘Is there a man inside that suit of armour?’

  ‘There wasn’t the last time I looked,’ Silas said, ‘but you never know, someone might have sneaked in.’ Then he laughed at his own witticism, hauled himself to his feet and took his coffee cup off to his rooms. He only remembered to hobble when he was halfway across, so I deduced his rheumatism wasn’t too painful today.

  After coffee, Mercy returned to the little parlour, where Phil, who was good at anything mechanical, was tinkering and oiling the most recently donated sewing machines. There
were now about a dozen of them, ready to be dispatched to Malawi.

  Pye had gone back to the non-existent rodent extermination and showed no sign of wanting to come with us when we went out.

  I’d taken some bread to feed the ducks in the moat and Marco leaned over the low stone wall to toss it to them. The wind whipped his dark, silky-straight hair about, the ruff flapped and the folds of his blue velvet cloak, worn over his anorak, undulated. He could have stepped out of another century.

  Then he ran off down the hill towards the second bridge and hung over that parapet, too. ‘Oh, I hope he doesn’t fall in!’ Emma exclaimed.

  ‘He’ll be OK even if he does, because we haven’t had much rain lately and it’s really low,’ I assured her.

  ‘You can see Marco’s getting even more eccentric in his ways,’ she said, as we followed him down. ‘He was always bright and I don’t mind what flights of fancy his imagination takes him on, but Des doesn’t understand. He thinks I’m turning him soft by letting him dress up and act things out all the time and I should be making him go to football and rugby, not taking him to theatre club and modern dance classes. But at least he decided quickly that ballet wasn’t for him,’ she added, ‘because it gets very expensive paying for all these things.’

  ‘I think he’s going to become a great actor,’ I said encouragingly. ‘Remember when he was four and decided he’d be a dog? He kept it up for a whole day.’

  She grinned. ‘Yes, that was quite funny, especially when he ate his dinner from a dish on the floor and barked to go in the garden.’

  ‘He’s always tried on various roles, that’s why I think he’s destined for an acting career,’ I said. ‘And there’s nothing soft about him – he’s just focused on what he’s doing.’

  ‘Des seemed to find his ways amusing before we were married, but perhaps he thought all small children were like that and grew out of it. Now he’s so critical all the time that Marco steers clear of him. And he said the other day that he liked it much better when Des wasn’t there, because he shouts at me so much and makes me cry.’