by Fiona Walker
This morning, Lester lingered in the stable, taking his time to tie up, watching him over his shoulder. Ears back, eyes huge, the crest of his neck like a nautilus shell, the horse snorted with rhythmic, feverish pent-up fear and fury.
‘Trust old Lester,’ he breathed gently. ‘You’re staying here.’
*
The text came through before seven, Petra’s phone vibrating on the dressing-table while she was rubbing half a tube of Protect and Perfect serum into her face to combat hung-over carol-singer skin.
Just tried to call but can’t get through. Case postponed because of snow. Coming home today after all. Not sure when – Christmas shopping first. Lots of treats for my beautiful wife!!! Will call from train. Love you. C xxxxxxxx.
The spelling was better than the previous night, but another unheard-of line of kisses made Petra jumpy, as did the early hour, the compliment and the fact it hadn’t yet snowed any further east than Cardiff.
Yet it was lovely to know he was coming back, and she wouldn’t have to endure a night alone with Gunny after all, that she didn’t want to dwell on it, just sending him back an equally long line of kisses and a hooray before hurriedly pulling on some clothes to take Wilf out in the hope of bumping into Ronnie. She had an urge to scream on a gate.
But there was no sign of her walking her dogs. As dawn’s steel gleamed brighter, she could feel the snow heavy in the air.
It started falling just as the Bags rode past her drive. Petra was still mucking out the Redhead in her overalls and dodging her amorous, coquettish tail-lifting attempts to engage in flirtation. It reminded her of herself with Bay. Thank God all that was over.
‘Lightweight!’ the friends all goaded her, as she waved them past.
They didn’t hang about, barely dropping below a trot as they kept up a bright chatter, heading off towards the short bridleway that circled the old iron-age mound of Compton Long Barrow, already out of puff because they weren’t used to keeping up the pace. Gill had appointments that morning, Bridge had childcare only until ten, and Mo – already falling behind on the slow cob – had to pluck turkeys and cut Christmas trees.
And Petra had her mother-in-law, who had already posted on her many social feeds that this year she would be uploading podcasts, vlogs and live streams from her son’s house entitled Christmasculine, or ‘A Man for All Festive Seasons’, insisting commuters like Charlie felt strangers in their homes and needed to reassert themselves.
In the farmhouse kitchen the children were having breakfast, watching CBBC from behind a barricade of Cheerios and juice boxes, with lots of spoon flicking and shrill giggles as the two girls ganged up on Ed and pelted him with small circular quoits of wholewheat cereal. Wilf was skittling around catching the fallout, Fitz propped at the island maintaining an aloof distance as he ate leftover tiramisu, hood up, phone on.
‘Can Tilly and Gracie come here today?’ demanded Bella. ‘We can take the ponies out riding in the snow.’
‘Not today,’ Petra said, searching for a new box of coffee pods. ‘Gracie only breaks up from school this afternoon and Tilly’s parents are...’ in a very unhappy marriage and I’m avoiding the father ‘...busy. Gunny’s train gets here in a couple of hours, and Daddy’s coming home after lunch.’
‘He’s coming back today?’ Fitz’s eyes gleamed in the shadow of his hoodie.
‘That’s right.’ She watched as he swung round and bounded into the boot room. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Closing the electric gates.’
‘Why?’
‘Gunny likes to see them closed.’ He glanced out through the window at the lane. ‘A man’s home is his castle and all that. Think Christmasculine, Mum.’
‘No wonder you two are getting on so well. You must charm her, Fitz. I thought she enjoyed being here over half-term, but her blog write-up was awful. She even posted photographs of the dust on top of the wardrobes. She could have done herself an injury balancing on a chair.’ She tried not to enjoy the idea too much.
‘She uses a selfie stick,’ he explained. ‘You should see her pictures of the cupboard under the stairs. That thing goes back miles. There could be bodies in it.’
‘There might be soon.’
*
Having dropped Ellis off at school for his last day of term, Carly pushed the double buggy to the bachelors’ field to see Spirit. It was empty, its snow blanket pocked with departing hoof marks that darkened in the gateway and spread mud crescents along the track towards the stud buildings, striped through with quad-bike tyre marks. The old tweedy boy must have moved them. More snow was forecast later that day, the sky overhead lowering its hammock of clouds ready to let drop.
She’d have liked to take Ronnie up on her offer to go and see him on the yard, but she had to get back to clean with Janine’s team all day.
She took out her phone, looked up Fitz and messaged: U ok?
The reply made her grin when she finally worked it out: A ok. B ok! C U soon ok?
She cracked a yawn, picked up Jackson’s kicked-off shoe and Sienna’s jettisoned drinking bottle from the road and wheeled around to trudge home and leave the kids with Ash’s mum again.
*
The second fall of snow – thicker than the first and drifting in a sharp wind across the Fosse Hills lanes – made it slow going into Broadbourne, and Petra was twenty minutes late to meet her mother-in-law’s train, a lapse for which she knew she would be punished.
Gunny was waiting in the coffee house opposite the station, wearing an oversized fake-fur hat and camel coat that made her look like a cross between a lion and Boy George, her fingers flying across her iPhone as she spread news around her social circle of her abandonment. Now she snapped a photograph of Petra as she hurried inside, tripping on the step.
‘At last!’ She deftly shared it with her followers before tossing her phone into her Kelly bag and standing up to accept a kiss on each hollow cheek.
‘Barbara, you look wonderful.’ More Botox, she noticed. Gunny’s face had long since lost expression and had now tipped over the balance point where mother-in-law had fewer wrinkles than daughter-in-law.
‘Where are the children?’ she demanded.
‘The boys are at home. The girls are waiting in the car.’
‘Is that safe?’
‘I’ve tied them up out of sight and double-locked the doors. The dog will bite anybody with a crowbar. He’s trained to.’
‘I always forget your wit.’
‘It’s easily forgotten.’
‘Quite so.’ Gunny gave a thin smile as Petra gathered up her cases – more than she’d pack for a family week in Cornwall – and led the way outside. ‘How are you, Petra dear? You look tired.’
‘Never better!’ she said tightly. ‘Good journey?’
‘So-so. Very dull company, especially after we left Kent. I looked out for somebody reading one of your books as usual but, d’you know, in twenty years of regular train and plane travel I never have?’
‘What a disappointment for you.’
‘I’m reading the latest Philippa Gregory for my literary circle. Have you?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You must. Now, she really can write history.’
‘You said that about Hilary Mantel.’
‘See how helpful I am!’
Well briefed by their mother, both girls gave shrieks of delight at the sight of their grandmother, although Bella’s enthusiasm was quashed when Gunny commented on how beautiful Prudie, her favourite, was becoming – a pale-skinned strawberry blonde in her own image – and how delightfully scruffy her youngest granddaughter looked. ‘You’d think with all that pony riding she’d be a skinny little thing, wouldn’t you?’ She turned back to Petra. ‘But quite the opposite. Must come from your side.’
She plucked out her phone and fired out messages as they drove – ‘Isn’t social media wonderful? Did you know I’m followed by Samantha Cameron’s mother?’ – while also keeping up a chirpy stream of sni
de comments as they drove back to the house. ‘I hear your parents are driving themselves down. So brave of your father to stick behind the wheel at his age, especially in that car, but I suppose things are tight on a teaching pension. Maybe they should think about getting the coach’; ‘That dog hasn’t been allowed near the annex since I last stayed, has it?’; ‘I hope you’ve remembered I must have feather pillows.’ While they waited for the gates to open, she caught sight of the fairy lights in the centre of the turning circle and she gave a stiff laugh. ‘I suppose that was the children’s idea? You shouldn’t indulge them, Petra. I’d have nipped that in the bud. Looks awful. Next thing you know you’ll have a neon Santa climbing up your walls. Poor Charlie.’
‘The lights were my idea,’ Petra said touchily. ‘The neon Santa’s round the back.’
That shut her up until they got inside.
‘I always forget how cluttered this kitchen is.’ Gunny looked around conspicuously for somewhere to put her handbag. ‘It’s already terribly battered, isn’t it?’
‘It was hand-distressed by the designer.’
‘I’m not surprised he was distressed. It looks as though you bought it second-hand on eBay. It’s never quite worked, has it? Now, make me a cup of tea. You have bought in decaffeinated Earl Grey, I hope.’
*
‘Sorry I didn’t make it this morning!’ Pip hurried into the tack room to find Lester filling in his diary. ‘I had a lovely lie-in, then watched the snow. Isn’t it beautiful?’
Lester looked up in surprise. ‘You feeling all right?’
‘Fabulous, thanks for asking. I didn’t bake anything, sorry.’
Pip had, in fact, been so monstrously hung-over that morning that she had spent most of it eating every carbohydrate she could find in the house, which was rather a lot. Two tins of biscuits, some leftover mince pies, an entire rum bundt intended for Mrs Bentley – which might, on reflection, have been hair of the dog – and a refrigerator crumb cake. Later, she’d felt stable enough to take a long bath, then lie on the sofa watching daytime television until the residual weary weakness passed.
She wasn’t quite sure what had happened last night – it all went a bit woolly after walking along Plum Run with the carol singers, woollier still after the Orchard Estate, and a complete blank after the bus stop – but whatever it was it had involved Bay Austen and she felt certain that it had been distinctly womanly. She’d woken up wearing her most sophisticated nightie, which had lace panels and a plunging neck, and she had a rash on her face, which, when she’d googled it, was consistent with stubble rash. (It was either that or acne rosacea, which she didn’t like the sound of.)
‘So, do you need anything doing?’ she asked Lester breezily, swinging her leg over the long, central saddle rack in what she felt was a lover-of-Bay-Austen way.
Lester was looking even more surprised. He seemed happier today, though, she noticed. Everything was happier today, especially with the snow. Pip loved snow.
‘Nothing for you to do here until afternoon stables,’ he told her, glancing up at the clock. ‘I’ve got to get Cruisoe in and turn the other one out for a bit, then walk Horace in hand.’
‘I can do that!’ She did some imaginary rising to the trot, wondering if she should ask Lester to have another go at teaching her to ride while he was in such a chatty mood.
‘Best you go see if Ronnie wants anything doing in the house.’
Pip couldn’t pinpoint it, but something about that sentence had sounded wrong. ‘What’s Ronnie doing in the house?’ That must be it: she normally spent all day on the yard.
‘Christmas cards.’
‘Oh, I’m good at addressing envelopes.’ She did a flying dismount. ‘I can hand-deliver them for her. Do you think she’s sending one to the Austens?’
*
Jocelyn and Ann Percy had been keen photographers of horses and dogs, far less so of humans. As far as Ronnie was aware, her late husband Johnny hadn’t taken a photograph in his entire life. Apart from ancient rolled school photographs, in which she appeared as a boatered dot, there was almost no visual record of her without a dog or a horse in it; even her wedding had involved two Jack Russells and a Burghley winner. The same was true of Alice, Tim and Pax.
The three grandchildren had taken photographs of each other growing up, though. Born to Generation X, with its love of instant and disposable, theirs were photo-booth selfies and Polaroid legends, their coming-of-age captured on 110mm film with flash cubes that burned a bulb with every moment they immortalised. Their adolescent albums weren’t a thousand near-identical moments stored up in a cloud or on micro-cards the size of almond flakes, shared on social media. They were physical things one could run a finger across to trace a long-forgotten smile.
Ronnie had stumbled on them quite by chance, searching for the Christmas decorations, and she found them so heartbreakingly fascinating that she couldn’t stop looking at them. These were the three childhoods led in parallel to which she was only ever a satellite, the birthdays and Christmases to which she’d never been invited, the backdrop familiar and unchanging. They grew bigger, the haircuts and fashions changed, the dogs went from puppies to grey-muzzled to gone, but growing up at the stud altered very little from generation to generation. Being raised by pragmatic, disciplinarian Jocelyn and Ann Percy was something Ronnie had in common with her own children, but of course they had had each other to share the experience with, and she was enormously grateful for that, for the three faces pressed together and beaming into disposable cameras.
She could hear Pip stomping about upstairs, unimpressed to be tasked with finding the missing Christmas decorations, an ancient selection of tin-cut rocking horses and glass baubles in a wicker hamper that Ronnie doubted had seen the light of day in a decade but which featured extensively in the backgrounds of her children’s photographs. She wasn’t planning to put them up – there was no point when she would be gone by the third day of Christmas – but she’d decided to send one to each of her children with their cards. Alice had accused her too often of trying to buy them all with presents for her to send gifts any more, but Ronnie hoped she would see this gesture differently. It was giving them a little bit of shared memory.
Having grown up envying Hermia her big family Christmases – the Austens regularly had twenty or more sitting down to eat turkey – Ronnie hadn’t entirely given up hope that she would one day be the sort of annoyingly adorable granny who raked the sports-car in on the gravel on Christmas Eve, inappropriate gifts spilling from the back.
‘Would you like a spot of lunch, Ronnie?’ Pip appeared at the door. ‘I can start looking in the attics after that. I know I’ve seen them somewhere.’
‘You’re an angel, Pip.’
‘You wouldn’t have said that last night.’ Pip giggled earthily, and skipped off.
53
Within hours of welcoming her mother-in-law to the Comptons, Petra had already knocked back an illicit daytime gin and tonic, run into the paddock to scream and texted Gill half a dozen times. An expensive lunch at Le Mill in Broadbourne had been deemed ‘very ordinary’ and Gunny’s main course sent back twice while she kept up a live stream of @GunnPoint comments to followers – doubly embarrassing because their waitress had been Carly from the village. The children’s table manners had been criticised – ‘You can tell their father’s not here much. Charlie could have dined anywhere from an early age’ – and Fitz’s hair had come in for particular stick: ‘Is that supposed to look attractive or is it some sort of social comment?’
The awful thing was that Petra had grudgingly agreed with her on all points. The food had been disappointing; she was always hauling the kids up for shovelling food into their mouths with just their forks; and Fitz’s hair did look a bit weird. But did Gunny have to be so rude about it? And put it all online?
Leaving her to write up the restaurant on Trip Advisor – she was, she boasted, one of their top reviewers and, like Michelin, never gave anywhere more than three sta
rs – Petra had escaped to the dining room to write a few last-minute cards to London friends.
Instead she found herself gazing out at the snowy scene, a robin sitting on the branches of the magnolia in the centre of the farmhouse’s turning circle around which she’d trussed the LED Christmas lights that she loved, Gunny had disparaged and Charlie, predictably, would hate. Their merry glow cheered her, their very own live Christmas card.
Petra forced herself to return to her latest batch of afterthought Christmas cards. Why did people she’d just struck off the list always insist on sending theirs at the last minute? It was the annual festive face-off, a chicken run that went right down to the wire and left her feeling mean-spirited and eager to make amends if she missed sending even one. Christmas was a nostalgia narcotic for Petra, her heart opening with every flap of the Advent calendar. Now, when she should be charming Gunny, brining ham, delivering the neighbours’ cards, adding last-minute items to the online grocery shop and calling her own mother, she was folding yet more round robins, adding names at the top by hand and signing off with a personal message.
It didn’t matter that she saw so many old London friends on Facebook each week, liked their holiday snaps, Sunday lunches, baby scans and pets. A letter in a card was not a public post, status update, tweet or timeline: it was a physical thing, something she’d held in her hand. And for old acquaintances not on Facebook – Fitz called them ‘masks’ – this was the only contact they ever made to mark a friendship that had once shared so much more, an ever-decreasing circle of city friends, neighbours and school mums that dispersed a little more each year, only for a few to whirlpool back at the last minute.
Petra stacked her pile of envelopes together, ready to add stamps, and glanced at her watch, wondering how long she could leave Gunny. Another ten minutes, surely.
She looked out of the window again, the farmhouse’s grand gateposts framing their glorious view across the narrow country lane, over orchards filled with snow-bent trees, across cats’ cradles of hedgerows sketched on a broad white canvas of fields, the lines narrowing into the far distance as they swept up into the milky Malvern hills, all crowned by a sky the same deep blue as Bay Austen’s eyes.
