‘No, Bridge, but I changed my diet, hit the gym, channelled my energies into something positive rather than negative, found—’ He stopped short. It would have been crass to continue and say, ‘found the right woman’, but it was true. Carmen acted like a balm on his soul. She was the calmest, most kindhearted woman he had ever met. They had differences of opinion but they could dispute without throwing things at each other, name-calling, hurting, blaming, fighting. The make-up sex with Bridge had been pretty spectacular – and they’d had a lot of that – but with hindsight it wasn’t worth the fall-outs they’d had to merit it. He had happily forgone urgent, fervid make-up sex in exchange for never going to bed on an argument and never having to play silent-treatment, sulking, one-upmanship, point-scoring games.
‘What about your family, Mary? Will they be worried about you?’ asked Robin, expecting the answer to be yes after their discussion while they were making breakfast.
‘I expect they will be. I told my brother I was driving Jack yesterday but I didn’t get the chance to tell him that I was okay. But they know me, they know I’m not the damsel-in-distress type.’
Jack felt a pang of guilt. What would Mary’s family think about her driving him up to the north-east when he should have driven himself if Fred couldn’t do it? They must have watched the snow start and panicked for her. He hoped that she’d told her family enough about him for them to be assured that she was safe with him, that he’d treat her with respect if they’d had to spend a night – or two – taking cover together. It didn’t make up for the fact that she’d miss Christmas with them because of him, because he had to meet Chikafuji to talk about scones on the morning of Christmas Eve instead of arranging to communicate with him via a screen. Because of her selflessness, she was in a proper pickle now.
Mary drained her cup and said, ‘I think I’ll look around and see if there are some games or anything like that in a bit. They’ll help to pass the time. There must be a pack of cards at least somewhere in the place.’
Charlie leaned over, picked up a log and tossed it on the fire. ‘We’re running low on these. Maybe we should ration them and just keep the fire ticking over rather than blazing.’
‘There’s a log store outside,’ said Bridge. ‘I saw it when I was trying to find a way into the place yesterday. There’s plenty of logs in it.’
‘We should get our luggage from the car, Robin,’ said Charlie. ‘We have a case full of boots and jumpers that we can share around if anyone needs to venture out.’ He began to rise from his seat. ‘I’ll go and get—’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ said Robin, pushing him back down into the chair by his shoulder. ‘You’re in no fit state to do anything that will exert you, you old fart. I’ll go and get the cases.’
‘I have plenty of pairs of socks, and packs of pants, all brand new, which you boys could have if you needed them. I do like fresh underwear for a holiday,’ Charlie went on. ‘I always over-pack.’
‘We may have to take you up on that if we’re here for the duration,’ said Luke.
From behind him Radio Brian’s voice drifted out of the speaker.
‘Do not go out even if it’s necessary, that’s the advice the other BBC is giving, fully endorsed by Brian Bernard Cosgrove – the real BBC.’
* * *
Robin insisted on going out to the car to fetch their suitcases alone, but Luke equally insisted on accompanying him. He begrudgingly removed his dry socks and slid his bare feet back into his still wet boots, already counting down the minutes until he could pull them off again. When Robin opened the door, the snow swirled in along with wind noise that belonged on a ‘serious winter sound effects’ album. Another inch at least had fallen since Jack and Luke had been out earlier.
‘Stubborn fool,’ said Charlie, standing with the others and watching Robin wobbling and sliding even on the relatively short trip to the car. ‘He’s got a dodgy knee, a creaking hip and an arthritic shoulder and yet he still thinks he’s the young ox he was thirty years ago.’
‘Let me go and help them,’ said Jack, feeling guilty at being a mere spectator.
‘No, don’t,’ said Charlie, clamping his hand onto Jack’s arm to stop him. ‘There’s nothing worse than stripping a man of self-belief in his abilities. Trust me, I know this. He’ll struggle, but he’s always been so very capable.’ Then he added on a sighing breath: ‘No one so proper, so capable as Anne.’
‘Who’s Anne?’ asked Bridge, brows dipping in confusion.
‘That’s a line from Persuasion, isn’t it?’ said Mary.
Charlie was impressed. ‘How clever of you to recognise it.’
‘Anne Elliot,’ said Mary, explaining for the benefit of the others. ‘She’s a character completely in the background, forgotten, overlooked, who gets her second chance with the man she loves, the dashing Captain Wentworth. It’s he who says the line because he knows she’s someone to be totally relied on. It’s my favourite book of Jane Austen’s. Everyone always goes on about how fabulous Mr Darcy is but compared to Captain Wentworth… whoof.’ The sound was heavily loaded.
‘It’s my favourite of hers too. Isn’t it marvellous?’ gushed Charlie, delighted to have found a fellow Austen fan. ‘Can you remember the part of the story when Wentworth says the line about Anne being capable, Mary?’
‘Of course I do.’ Mary’s eyes glittered.
‘It’s when we readers find out he still has feelings for her.’ Charlie smiled a smile of literary joy.
‘No, that’s when he puts her in the carriage with his sister because she’s tired. His will and his hands put her there. Oh my, you can just imagine him helping her in, can’t you, Charlie? His hands on her waist as he lifts her.’
Mary’s smile was as broad and reached all the way up to her eyes. Jack couldn’t ever remember seeing his meek PA so animated before. Then again, he couldn’t imagine she had cause in the office.
Charlie clasped his hands. ‘Yes, of course you’re right. And when his declaration of love is made in that letter… oh my!’ He began to quote as if he were Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic.
‘You pierce my soul, I am half-agony, half-hope—’
Mary took over: ‘Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever.’
‘You see, Wentworth feared that Anne’s feelings for him were dead, at the point when his for her are too big to contain,’ Charlie enlightened a bemused Jack and Bridge.
‘There is no more romantic book ever, anywhere,’ said Mary. ‘Anne is such a lovely girl, sitting on that spinster shelf, invisible, unable to truly move on from her one and only love who flirts in front of her and she’s only in her mid-twent—’ Mary stopped abruptly, realising she might as well have been talking about herself and Jack. Then she scrambled to find something else to say because her sudden halt made that conclusion even easier to jump to. ‘…twenties, which is absolutely no age. But back then it was… a very different ballgame to be single like Anne.’
‘That was always my nickname for Robin: Annie, after her,’ said Charlie with a fond expression. ‘Because there is no one more capable than him. No one.’
‘I was a Heathcliff girl myself,’ said Bridge with a sniff. ‘But then, I’ve always been attracted to twats.’
‘I’m sure we have a copy of that book upstairs in the room,’ said Jack. ‘There’s a sort of reading corner with a chair and—’
Charlie interrupted him. ‘Oh, Jack, would you go and get it, please? I’d love to read it while I’m here.’
‘Okay,’ said Jack and promptly headed upstairs.
‘You have to read Persuasion, Bridge,’ urged Mary.
‘And I will now, I promise. You’ve sold it to me.’ Bridge had really taken to this young woman and felt as if she’d known her so much longer than she had. She turned her attention back to the window. ‘Well, they’ve made it to the car. They’re having to clear the snow so they can get in the door. I can’t tell where it starts and they end, they’r
e all white blobs.’
Jack came back downstairs, handed the book to Charlie. It had seen better days and the corners of the spine were frayed but at least the pages seemed to be all there.
‘Thank you, Jack,’ he said, clutching it to his chest. ‘I feel as if you’ve just given me an early Christmas present.’
An alarm rumbled from Robin’s phone on the table at that moment.
‘Oh, that’ll be for my tablets,’ said Charlie. ‘I’d better go up and get them. Robin’s a stickler for regimentation. He says it throws the timings out if I don’t take them on the dot.’
‘Can I get them for you and save your legs?’ Mary offered.
‘Oh, would you, my dear, thank you, that’s kind. There’s a leather bag on our bed full of medication. He’s colour-coded them, so it’ll be the green bottle. I need two. Do you mind awfully?’
‘Not at all,’ said Mary.
‘What a delightful girl. I bet you’re glad you have her,’ Charlie said to Jack when Mary was out of earshot.
‘Yes, she’s very efficient.’
‘How long has she worked for you?’
Jack tried to work it out. ‘Two… three, yes three years… I think.’
‘Six and a half,’ corrected Bridge. ‘She told me yesterday.’
‘Is it?’ Jack pondered on it. ‘Yes, I suppose it must be. She worked for my father when she first arrived. And then he retired four years ago and that’s when I took over the full running of things and inherited her from him.’
‘You make her sound like a chattel,’ said Charlie, but not unkindly. ‘I bequeath you all my worldly goods – and Mary.’
‘Good PAs, and I mean really good PAs are hard to find,’ said Bridge, a little annoyed by Jack’s not knowing. ‘I might be poaching her if you aren’t careful, Jack.’ It was only half a joke.
* * *
Mary walked into Robin and Charlie’s room and was immediately greeted by a mixture of their colognes, still present in the air. It made her senses happy, made her think of her father who always smelt lovely. As a family they weren’t rich by any means, but his one indulgence was a stupidly expensive aftershave, ‘Pluie d’Automne’. Autumn Rain. She had bought him a bottle of it with her first monthly wage packet and she could see his face now, his kind, blue eyes. ‘Oh, love, what have you gone and done this for?’ ‘Because you didn’t have any left and it’s too far long to wait until Christmas or your birthday,’ she’d answered him. It had brought her so much joy to buy it, there was nothing she would rather have spent her first proper earnings on. It was only in the last year that she’d been able to bear the smell of it because it did odd and upsetting things to her brain.
Robin and Charlie’s scents were nothing like her dad’s though, they were lighter, lavender and citrus lingering on the air. They’d made the bedroom their own, placing a hairbrush, glasses and toiletries, a book, a notepad on the dressing table and bedside cabinets. The bed was perfectly made, the white duvet cover smoothed like icing with a warm knife. There was a black Montblanc toilet bag sitting on it, just as Charlie said. Six bottles of pills inside, all with different coloured labels. She pulled out the green one, as instructed, took out two tablets, read the label before she put the bottle back into the bag.
* * *
‘I had quite a few secretaries, as we used to call them back in the dark ages,’ said Charlie. ‘One had light fingers and had to go. One decided to try and befuddle me, blaming her many days off on “women’s complaints” but I came from a family of ladies and I know more about gynaecology than a consultant obstetrician, so there was no wool pulled over my eyes. She certainly wasn’t going to embarrass me talking about menstrual cycles and sanitary towels. Then I decided to take a chance on a young man who walked into my office with a big chip on his shoulder because he’d been hounded out of his last job by homophobes.’ His voice softened. ‘It was the best move I ever made.’
‘Robin was good at his job, I take it?’ asked Jack.
‘Exceptional. Faultless. Meticulous. He started out being my chauffeur, but he quickly became more of a personal assistant. It was strictly work only for a few years, but I fell fast and hard for him. I kept it to myself, because there was a twenty-four-year age gap between us so I never thought he’d be interested in an old wreck like me. Why would I? Then I fell down the bloody stairs and he came over to the house to help me. Moved in for a week and never moved out again. People warned me he was just with me for my money, but I’ve always been so very good at spotting fakes.’ He smiled, his eyes hopping from one to the other of them, eventually coming to a stop at Bridge.
‘I was a PA once myself,’ she said. ‘I realise that in the cases of the best ones, you don’t always know what they do until they stop doing it. If everything is in place: your diary, your train tickets – if everything is as it should be, then it’s because you have a master “sweeper” on the ice, making sure that your stone runs smoothly on the curling track. Is that what Mary’s like for you, Jack? Do you notice her more when she isn’t there or when she is?’
‘Mary is very efficient,’ said Jack.
‘Efficient,’ Bridge repeated, her tone neutral.
‘Yes, totally.’
That word again, noted Bridge. Like a rote. Cold and businesslike. Mary might as well have been a printer or an iMac.
Jack, hearing the word reflected back at him, became aware it wasn’t big enough by half to describe Mary. Do you notice her more when she isn’t there or when she is? There was a telling question. His brain pulled him down a lane in his memory to what office life was like before her, when he was his father’s deputy. Carol had been his first PA, a middle-aged woman who made Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction look like Anne of Green Gables by comparison. Then there was Jasmina, who had a terribly aggressive telephone manner, and another whose name he couldn’t recall who took slack to a whole new level. On the few and far-between occasions when Mary was absent, her replacement Kimberley never delivered that same standard of service; Jack even thought she made mistakes deliberately so that he would give her the oxygen of his attention.
With Mary as his PA he never had to worry about the minutiae. She reminded him of meetings, edited his diary, even sorted out petty factory squabbling when it occurred so he wouldn’t have to deal with it himself. Coffees appeared on his desk just as an alert of dryness went off in his throat; he never had to check letters she put in front of him for signing. She was like a good fairy working magic in the background, invisible as air and ironically the least memorable of all his PAs because of her efficiency.
‘A lovely girl, too,’ said Charlie, heading for an armchair. ‘Another Anne Elliot, like my Robin.’ He sighed. ‘If only there were more people like them in the world.’
Footsteps on the creaky staircase. Conversation about Mary immediately closed down.
‘What progress, Bridge?’ Charlie asked instead.
‘They’re on their way back,’ reported Bridge.
‘Here you go, Charlie,’ said Mary, with a bright smile, handing over the tablets, which she had wrapped in a pastel-coloured tissue, pulled from a box of them in his room. She hadn’t seen those in the shops before and wondered if they were new.
‘They’re the ones. Like horse tablets,’ said Charlie, taking the two bulky bullet-shaped pills and popping them into his mouth.
‘I’ll go and get you a glass of water,’ said Mary. ‘You need to take them with a third of a pint at least or they won’t work properly.’
‘Going back to 1934 now,’ said Brian from the radio. ‘Can you believe that’s when this song was written? “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”.’
‘Yes I can actually, Brian,’ replied Bridge. ‘Any chance of something by an artist who’s still frigging alive?’
Mary returned from the kitchen just as Robin and Luke walked in, leaving the winter wonderland behind them.
‘Ah, Captain Oates, you’re back,’ remarked Charlie.
‘Oh very funny,’ said R
obin, depositing suitcases and bags on the floor before blowing on his hands. ‘Especially after I have risked life and limb to fetch you clean underpants.’
‘I appreciate it muchly, my darling,’ said Charlie with a beatific smile.
‘How long did you say you were going away for?’ asked Luke, also putting down two trolley cases, all matching oxblood and black. Mary saw some smart and fitting vintage-style luggage; Jack and Bridge saw at least two thousand pounds per piece.
‘So we now have at our disposal: gloves, scarves, a selection of jumpers, many underpants and socks, two pairs of wellington boots, more insulated anoraks and two pairs of snow shoes,’ said Robin.
‘Skis would have been useful,’ said Luke. ‘And a Saint Bernard.’ He expected a look of disdain from Bridge and was rewarded with exactly that.
‘Robin, your alarm went off. Mary kindly fetched the tablets from upstairs,’ said Charlie.
‘Two from the green—’
‘I know, Robin. Two from the green bottle. Now go and dry your very brave self out by the fire.’
Luke had removed his boots and was already plonked in an armchair, holding his feet up to the flames. ‘You can’t buy this feeling,’ he said. ‘If I could, I would at any price.’
‘I’m going to have a root around now and see what I can find to entertain us,’ said Mary, trying not to look gobsmacked when Jack said he’d help her.
Chapter 12
They started in the cellar. The stairs down to it were steep and Jack went first so Mary would have had a soft landing if she fell, so he said. A rare joke. She had the feeling there would be more jokes and lightness inside him if only he would release the catch and let himself go.
The lighting was excellent in the cool cavernous cellar where there were barrels of beer, stocks of wine and spirits, mixers, boxes of crisps. They could hear the others conversing above them in muted tones, Robin and Charlie having another of their pretend spats, ensuing laughter.
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day Page 9
