A Christmas Cracker

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Definitely after lunch,’ she said vaguely.

  ‘Yes, I caught a glimpse of her heading out, about two,’ I agreed, but didn’t add that the glimpse had included Guy.

  ‘Then I’m sure she’s back at the house and I hope her headache has gone,’ Mercy said kindly, though as Silas had wickedly said to me earlier, Lacey was as much use as a chocolate teapot.

  Randal and I went round the building checking that all was secure before setting the new alarm and leaving. The shadows were dark and thick in the valley and there was a hint of damp wood smoke in the chilly air to remind us that autumn was well on the way.

  ‘I feel so shattered I’m not sure my legs will get me up the hill,’ I confessed. ‘I don’t know where Mercy gets her energy from.’

  ‘She’s always been a little dynamo,’ he said with the attractive grin I’d seen all too rarely. He took my arm. ‘Come on: we’ll have to help each other up.’

  But then his hand suddenly dropped away as Lacey walked round the corner of the building from the direction of the track to Little Mumming, snuggled up in her fake yak coat and Ugg boots. We were surprised, but she looked quite taken aback.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ exclaimed Randal. ‘We thought you must have gone back to the house.’

  ‘I did, but then I needed some fresh air.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit late in the day and too cold for that? And Mercy thought you were going to put dinner in the oven for her.’

  ‘I’m not really into all that domestic stuff,’ Lacey said, as if he’d suggested she clean the loos and dust the banisters.

  ‘I’m not sure any more exactly what kind of thing you are into,’ he said. ‘But going for country walks on your own on chilly evenings hasn’t seemed to be one of them till now.’

  ‘You don’t know everything about me,’ she snapped.

  ‘It certainly appears to be that way,’ he said.

  I started to feel embarrassed: if they were going to have an argument, I’d so much rather not be there.

  ‘I’ll see you back at the house,’ I said, and dashed off before they could come with me.

  Let them sort out their own differences and if, as I suspected, she’d been with Guy, then probably Randal suspected too, by now.

  Pye and Pugsie met me at the bridge: they’d sensibly avoided the noise and activity surrounding the mill today, and even Ginger and Bing had only emerged from hiding after the last visitor had gone.

  Relations between the happy couple at dinner seemed a little strained, though Lacey was doing her best to win Randal round.

  She followed me into the kitchen later when I went to make the coffee, but not to help: it seemed I’d been selected for the role of confidante.

  ‘I suppose you guessed I’d been with Guy this afternoon?’ she said, leaning against the fridge, her pretty face dissatisfied.

  ‘Yes – and I don’t think I was the only one.’

  ‘If you mean Randal, I can twist him round my little finger whenever I want to,’ she said, though so far as I could see, the twisting hadn’t seemed to be getting the desired results this time.

  Then she said she’d got engaged to Randal because he was Mr Right, but she still had a weakness for Guy. ‘Randal’s attractive but … I don’t know … he leaves me cold, really … while Guy just does it for me.’

  ‘Too much information,’ I said, but between the two men, how on earth could she think Guy was more attractive than Randal?

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, Guy’s not serious, he’d just dump me again the minute he’d got me back,’ she said impatiently. ‘I’ll settle for Randal: he’s a safe bet and once we’re married I’ll make sure that things round here are run to suit me – starting with stocking that empty cellar downstairs. I’m dying for a drink!’

  ‘Is it fair to marry Randal when he’d be second best?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course – Randal’s mad about me,’ she said confidently.

  He was certainly mad: he walked in just then and demanded to know if we were having coffee tonight or not, but the effect was slightly spoiled by the tiny pug dog tucked under one arm.

  Chapter 50: Fireworks

  Q:What did the snowman say to the blizzard?

  A:It’s been ice snowing you!

  The mill being closed on Sunday and Monday at least gave us a chance to recover and prepare to do it all over again on Tuesday, albeit without the bells and whistles – or the arguments.

  I went to the Quaker meeting with Mercy and Silas and I felt so vacant with tiredness that I thought my mind would be wide open to Higher Thoughts. But instead, an image of Randal’s face kept filling it, looking down at me the way he had after Luke’s visit, as if I was a problem that had to be solved.

  While we were out, he and Lacey had gone off somewhere in the car and came back again on better terms, so she must have been right about being able to twist him round her little finger and had convinced him she wasn’t in the least interested in Guy. It was unfortunate that Guy had to come and collect her for the journey back to London after lunch, slightly undoing her work.

  Randal took her small suitcase out and stood talking to Guy for a few minutes. His back was turned, so I couldn’t see his face, but his stance didn’t look exactly friendly.

  Perhaps Randal hadn’t been entirely convinced by whatever line Lacey had spun him after all, because he turned restless when we’d had dinner and said he needed some fresh air, then invited me to walk up to the Auld Christmas with him.

  ‘Yes, do go, I’m sure a walk will do you both good,’ Mercy said, and found us a large torch to light our journey home.

  Randal spent the whole walk in brooding silence, so I might as well not have been there, though he did cheer up when we found Jude and Holly had utilised their Sunday abundance of babysitters again to pop to the pub for an hour.

  Randal wasn’t as silent on the way home, taking me by surprise by asking me whether Lacey had ever mentioned Guy.

  ‘Only she’s so beautiful that he can’t seem to resist flirting with her, even though she doesn’t encourage him at all. And I’m afraid after I found out he’d also been on that holiday to St Lucia, I may have jumped to conclusions a bit … I even thought she’d been meeting him in the woods yesterday, when she was only having a walk to clear her headache!’

  ‘She hasn’t said a lot about him to me, only that she doesn’t like him very much and she knows his flirting is just a game,’ I said carefully.

  ‘Yes, that’s what she told me and pointed out that he flirts just as much with you.’

  ‘I suppose he does, though I don’t encourage him either,’ I said.

  ‘I still didn’t like seeing Guy picking her up earlier … but she says she’ll drive herself up in future.’

  If she comes up, I thought and Randal’s mind must have been heading in the same direction, because he added ruefully: ‘You know, I hadn’t realised she was such a town girl until her first visit here. I thought she’d love it as much as I do, but she was disappointed. I think she’d got the mad idea that the Marwoods were landed gentry with a huge pile in the country.’

  ‘But it’s a beautiful old house!’ I exclaimed. ‘I don’t know how anyone could want to live anywhere else.’

  He turned his head and looked at me, his face clear enough in the moonlight, even though his eyes were unfathomable pools of darkness.

  ‘Of course, I intend moving out before your wedding day,’ I told him hastily, in case he thought he was stuck with me as a lodger for ever. ‘Lillian says I can always have her spare room, until I can afford to rent somewhere.’

  That rare smile appeared, softening the hard lines of his face. ‘You don’t have to move out for me: I’ve got used to having you around now. A bit like Pugsie,’ he added.

  ‘Gee, thanks,’ I said, but in my heart I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear living in the same house when he and Lacey were married, especially if she kept telling me things I’d
rather not know!

  That was assuming that she would go through with the wedding in the end. She’d probably never had to choose between her head and her heart before, and there was no certainty that Guy had a heart, so perhaps better a Randal in the hand than a Guy in the bush, as it were.

  The mill reopened on the Tuesday morning and once the initial teething troubles of the first few days were solved, it began to run smoothly.

  Soon I could divide my time between making crackers and running errands for Mercy, though of course Randal was inclined to yell for me whenever he needed another pair of hands, or even just a sounding board for his thoughts.

  On the whole, he and I were now oddly companionable, probably because we had a common interest in the mill. Since that first time we walked up to the pub together we’d done it again a couple of times, when the weather was fine, and either had a quiet drink or joined the cracker workers if any of them were there. I loved being out in the dusk, though I wouldn’t have walked back through those woods on my own in the dark, even though I knew no wolves were about, not even Guy.

  I have no idea how Pye knows when I’m coming back, on these occasions, but he and Pugsie always met us at the bridge over the stream and we’d all head home up the hill together.

  But there were no more confidences during these walks – and come to think of it, no more visits from Guy. It made it blatantly obvious to me, at least, that he’d only bothered coming up here recently because of Lacey, but perhaps that hadn’t occurred to Randal.

  He went down to London for a couple of days when things at the mill were slightly less hectic, in order to start the process of putting his flat on the market, and came back complaining that Lacey had dragged him to some minor celebrity’s birthday bash and he’d never met a more vacuous set of people in his life.

  I bet he was the life and soul of the party.

  When we were alone together in the kitchen later he told me that Lacey seemed to be cold-shouldering Guy now, so when she’d said she really didn’t like him, she must have meant it.

  I could only hope she’d come to her senses and realised she really did love Randal after all and wasn’t going to risk losing him by playing with fire.

  Liz went skiing with the school at half term. I’m sure Emma would have preferred to have spent her and Marco’s break doing that rather than having to go out to Qatar because when she got back and we met up so she could tell me about it I could see she’d already made up her mind that she and Marco weren’t going to live there.

  ‘It’s way too hot, for a start, and though I’d be able to drive there and go about on my own, I still think I’d find it a bit restrictive and claustrophobic,’ she told me. ‘I took Marco to see the International School and they give the children a great education … but I’m not sure how well he would fit in and he’d miss all the after-school things he does, too, like his drama classes.’

  ‘Did you tell Des?’

  ‘Nooo …’ she said pensively. ‘He thinks it’s wonderful out there and of course he’d just love having me under his eye all the time, with no one else I knew around!’

  ‘So what will you do?’

  ‘I thought perhaps if he takes the contract, we could fly out for some of the school holidays,’ she said. ‘That could be a compromise. But I’ll leave it a bit before suggesting it.’

  ‘But you’ll have to tell him before he actually signs a new contract.’

  ‘I know, and I will, but I’m not looking forward to it.’

  To divert her mind a bit I told her everything Lacey had confided in me about her and Guy, including how she felt about Randal.

  ‘And it’s so unfair to him, because she’s obviously still in love with Guy, she just doesn’t think he’s serious – which is probably right – while Randal is good, solid husband material, so she’s going to settle for him. Only he’s worth so much more than Guy and he shouldn’t have to be second best.’

  ‘Oooh,’ she said, looking at me wide-eyed, ‘you’ve fallen for Randal yourself, haven’t you?’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, going pink. ‘We argue all the time and he’s only just stopped thinking I’m cooking the books and stealing the silver.’

  ‘I don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ she said stubbornly.

  Trust your best friend to guess the one thing you’d like to keep hidden!

  ‘I do find him attractive, though I’ve no idea why,’ I confessed. ‘He’s bossy and keeps trying to order me about. And he’s never going to look at me when he’s engaged to someone as stunning as Lacey.’

  ‘I’ll have to take your word for it, because I haven’t seen the woman,’ she said. ‘She sounds a pain to me, though. Maybe you should save him from her?’

  ‘I couldn’t if I tried,’ I said.

  While Lacey didn’t come back to visit, she rang Randal constantly and he probably saw her on the quick trips he made down there, coming back each time with a car full of stuff he wanted to keep from his flat. Luckily there was plenty of space in the attic rooms for him to stash it in till he had time to sort it out.

  He had some nice paintings, though: he asked me to go up to his sitting room and help decide where to hang them, but I noticed mine was still in his bedroom.

  All the cracker orders needed to be completed and delivered by the end of November, so we were flat out in the workshop. I didn’t know about the others, but I dreamed nightly that I was tangled in tartan foil and bound with red ribbon.

  I’d almost entirely lost my snap.

  Everything went swimmingly until the weekend after Guy Fawkes Night, when the Little Mumming bonfire was to take place on the green.

  Freda had told me that they all always watched the fireworks from the pub window, which was cosier but not as exciting, so Randal offered to drive me up there.

  ‘I’ve been once or twice and they collect wood for weeks, so it’s a good blaze. Nancy Dagger brews up her famous wassail for the occasion, too.’

  ‘Oh, yes, someone told me they drink that at the Twelfth Night Revels, another local annual event I’d love to watch.’

  ‘Well, you’ll be able to, though if the weather is icy the steep hill up to Little Mumming tends to get too dangerous to drive on, so you’d have to walk.’

  ‘I could walk up to see the bonfire, if you didn’t really want to go,’ I offered. ‘I can get a lift back from the pub afterwards, with one of the others.’

  ‘No, that’s OK,’ he said, ‘I’d like to go.’

  And the bonfire was spectacular, though the wassail, a drink served hot from what looked remarkably like a cauldron, was perhaps an acquired taste … and it was a cold night, so I attempted to acquire it in the hope it might warm me up. It didn’t taste that alcoholic …

  ‘Perhaps I should have sobered you up with coffee in the pub before taking you home,’ Randal said, sounding amused and putting a steadying hand under one of my elbows as we made our way along the grass verge back to the car. So many people were there that he’d had to park it on the edge of the village, in the gateway to a field.

  ‘I’m not drunk – my head is clear as crystal,’ I said indignantly. ‘It’s just that my feet keep wandering about. I try to put them one in front of the other, but it’s not really happening.’

  ‘Oh, well, at least Mercy and Silas will have gone to bed and you’ll be sober by morning, so they won’t blame me for letting you drink the wassail.’

  ‘It didn’t taste very alcoholic,’ I said.

  ‘It’s surprising – and I suspect people sneak more spirits into it as the evening progresses.’

  ‘I had a bag of roast chestnuts, that should have soaked it up a bit,’ I complained. ‘There was someone selling them outside the British Museum when I went down with Mercy,’ I added inconsequentially.

  ‘Yes, I’ve seen a chestnut-seller there too, and it always seemed a bit Dickensian,’ he said. ‘Did you buy any?’

  ‘No, because we were going to have dinner with Guy,’ I said
, and in the moonlight I saw his face go all shuttered.

  ‘I don’t want you to be another of Guy’s victims and end up with a broken heart,’ he said. ‘You’ve heard what he’s like.’

  ‘I won’t be, because I never took him seriously from the moment I met him, and he knows that. Any flirting with me is just because he’s running on his default setting.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it, because you deserve someone better than that and—’

  He broke off and grabbed me as I went headlong over an unfriendly tussock of grass.

  ‘Got you,’ he said, holding me upright with a firm grip while I got my unruly legs under control.

  ‘Who do I deserve?’ I heard my voice saying as I looked up at him … and then, I’m not sure how it happened, but we were suddenly kissing like it was going out of fashion and I’m sure I saw fireworks going off, even though they’d long since finished.

  ‘Oh hell!’ Randal said finally, pulling away and sounding unflatteringly horrified. ‘Sorry, I didn’t intend doing that.’

  ‘It’s OK, I know it didn’t mean anything – that wassail should have a health warning on it,’ I said shakily. ‘Let’s forget it – and here’s the car,’ I added brightly, though I fumbled the seatbelt fastening when I’d got in.

  He was silent on the short drive back, and then went straight upstairs, without having a mug of cocoa in the kitchen with me, as he generally did when we’d been to the pub together.

  Next morning I discovered he’d vanished like a thief in the night, leaving a note for Mercy saying he’d had to go down to London, but he’d be back tomorrow. We weren’t sure what time he’d left, so it was unclear if he meant to be back today, Sunday, or tomorrow, when we were supposed to be fine-tuning the plans for the second phase of the development.

  ‘Never mind – perhaps he was really missing Lacey and that’s what made him go off so suddenly,’ Mercy suggested.

  ‘Ppft!’ said Pye disgustedly, and poor Pugsie looked forlorn, as he always did now whenever Randal was away.

  Chapter 51: True Lies

  Randal