She recalled it all, in pinpoint-precise detail. She had been the only child there for years, brought up by her grandparents after her mother left, and it was an often lonely existence. So Christmas was like an explosion of family and color and food. Her cousin Lucy’s obsession with Christmas, the award ceremonies for best presents and best Christmas outfit and best singing along with the carol singers who serenaded them on Christmas Eve. The new bottle of Baileys, Southpaw’s Rat Pack Christmas album, Martha’s gingerbread, the Christmas drinks party every year at Winterfold.
Now she was safe, secure, happy—and she had Joe, too—yet Christmas was the one thing Cat still hadn’t learned to enjoy.
“Is Lucy coming for Christmas?” Luke said, breaking into her train of thought. “Here. Look, over there.”
“Oh, you’re brilliant,” said Cat gratefully as she spotted the gray-green leaves, the chalky-black berries. She spread open the old cloth bag still kept in Southpaw’s study to collect the sloes in. “Why don’t you hold the bag open? I’ll pick. Not sure. Lucy’s being vague as usual.” She bit her tongue; Luke noticed everything, and she didn’t want him asking Lucy what that meant. “She has a new flatmate. She might spend Christmas with him. He’s called Orlando. She likes him a lot.”
“A new flatmate? What does that mean?” said Luke, solemnly holding the bag open as wide as he could.
“Irene moved out. She used to live in the flat. Now Orlando’s moved in.”
“Is he her boyfriend?” Luke was very keen on Lucy. He’d stand and stare at her and then timidly climb onto her lap, only for Lucy to exclaim with joy and kiss him repeatedly, at which point he’d immediately scurry off into the corner and stand there staring at her again.
“No idea.” Cat had had a conversation with her cousin the previous day that was inconclusive in almost every respect.
Was she coming for Christmas? She didn’t know. Did she know what was up with Gran? No, but she thought she might if she thought about it. Could she get Cat a discount at a garden center that advertised with Country Matters, the magazine she worked for? Perhaps. Was she going out with this Orlando bloke? No, not really, but they sort of cohabited as if they were man and wife and . . .
“I’m not sure, darling. She wasn’t really sure of her plans. It’s still only November.”
“It’d be nice if she had a boyfriend. Like you have Joe.”
“It would, but—ow!” Cat had reached toward a particularly gnarly patch, catching her finger on a long, tricksy thorn. She took off her glove, sucked the pinprick of blood, and then looked around, realizing it was suddenly almost dark. “We should go soon.”
“I like living here with you and Joe and Jamie,” said Luke.
“Well, I do too,” said Cat. She put the handful of sloes into his bag and gave him a quick kiss.
“Can you ring Lucy again and ask her to come for Christmas here, pleeease?”
“Yes, Luke,” said Cat. “Okay, then. What about Aunt Florence?”
Luke shook his head. Florence scared him. She’d once hidden in a cupboard and jumped out at him yelling, “PIRATE ATTACK!” and this had totally freaked him out for days. Unfortunately, he still remembered it. When Cat’s aunt had been over from Italy for Easter, Luke had been the one who’d hidden himself away, in his room for hours on end.
Cat smiled at the memory, and then she straightened up, alert as a meerkat. “Look, little one!” she said, pointing. “A whole load of them! Bingo! Quick!”
“Why are you whispering?” said Luke. “There’s no one else around.”
“You can’t be too sure,” Cat hissed.
They walked briskly to the corner of the field by the stile that led down to the lane, where shade and light had conspired to multiply the crop of sloes, which somehow had not been disturbed by man or beast.
The shadows were lengthening.
“Come on,” said Cat. “Let’s work fast. Then we can go home and have fish-finger sandwiches by the fire and watch The Princess Bride. How does that sound?”
“Can we not watch the Rodents of Unusual Size part?” asked Luke.
“Yes, we’ll fast-forward through it.”
“Good!” said Luke enthusiastically.
Together they began picking, nimble fingers plucking two, three at a time, and they sang carols as they went. Like all the Winters, they loved singing, and Cat, who had a lovely voice, sang here now, when previously she hadn’t. She hoped her grandfather was watching them, and that he approved, approved of it all.
The holly and the ivy,
When they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown!
O, the rising of the sun,
And the running of the deer,
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir!
“I’m excited about Christmas,” said Luke. “I think it’s going to be great. Better than in Paris.”
“Do you remember living in France?” said Cat curiously.
Luke breathed out hard, ruffling his thick dark fringe. He needed a haircut, though she hated how grown-up he looked when his hair was newly shorn.
“Sometimes. I remember Madame Poulain screaming at me. And the climbing frame in the park across the bridge from our apartment.”
“Jardin Albert Schweitzer,” said Cat automatically.
“And the compotes . . .” Luke paused. “We don’t eat compote much these days.”
She laughed. “No, we don’t, do we?”
“I’m glad we moved to here.”
“Me too,” said Cat, throwing her arm around him. “Oh, darling, me too.”
As they crossed the field, scant pickings swinging by her side in the cloth bag, Cat reflected that Christmas might not be so bad after all. She churned the thought around in her mind, wondering again why she still felt uneasy. Why something was amiss. As she locked the gate and held Luke’s arm to wait for a car to pass them in the lane, it suddenly occurred to her, like remembering a smell or a color: Gran. Someone crying in the night. The vague sense of something being wrong. Something was up with Gran, she knew it. She didn’t know what, though.
David Winter’s Sloe Gin
From October onward the hedgerows, lanes, and byways are brimming full of sloes. Collect as many as you can; we call it sloe-hunting. Enlist young fingers and sharp eyes if you can. My granddaughter Catherine comes up to my hip and is a ferocious sloe-hunter.
I put all the sloes I’ve managed to gather in with a liter of gin. A screwtop bottle is not ideal here; I use a preserving jar (something that doesn’t leak when turned upside down).
There is great controversy over whether to put the sugar in at the start—about 1¼ cups (250g) per liter—or after it’s been steeping for a few weeks. I say leave the sugar out as long as you can, but others—including my darling wife—disagree. The crucial thing is, every morning, to turn the jar upside down several times. I do this while humming the opening bars of “Night and Day” by Frank Sinatra; you may pick the tune you prefer. Da-de-da-da-da-de-da-da-da.
If we lived in an ideal world, one would let the sloes steep for three months, then add the sugar, turning firmly again, and bottle ready for drinking at Christmas. But picking them in late October when they are ripe means about eight weeks only if you want the gin to be ready for Christmas that year, rather than waiting patiently for the next. As I say, if one lived in an ideal world one would not have drunk it all the previous Christmas, but what use is sloe gin in June? I find eight weeks to be sufficient, if not ideal. It is the season of goodwill, after all.
An excellent cocktail can be made using one part sloe gin to three parts prosecco or champagne. This is known as the Harry for reasons now lost in the mists of time. Beware of serving your guests more than two Harrys. As they say of martinis, they are li
ke breasts: one is not enough, three is too many.
Florence
December
“So, Lucy!” Florence beamed at her niece over a menu. “What will you have? I must say, I love Peruvian food. Isn’t this place wonderful?”
She watched as her niece looked doubtfully around the restaurant at the other single customer pushing what looked like tar round his plate, at the waiter dolefully polishing a shiny plate decorated with faint flowers while staring into space. A hairy, loud fly dramatically flung itself repeatedly at the glass frontage, desperate to escape.
“Er . . . yeah. Wonderful,” said Lucy, who, being under thirty and living in Dalston, was fully conversant with Peruvian food and knew of two much better Peruvian restaurants nearby.
“I know it doesn’t seem much, but it’s great, honestly.” Florence held the menu up and scanned it intently and thoroughly. “I brought Jim here, and he loved it.” She scrutinized the choice of dishes. “Mmmm . . . well, the ceviche for me, I think. What about you?”
Lucy put the menu down. “I’m not that hungry. I’ll just have some rice.”
Florence stared at her niece in consternation. “Lucy, what’s wrong with you? You normally eat like a . . . like a . . .” Florence trailed off, frowning at herself.
“Like a horse? A platoon of hungry troops? An army of cockroaches?” Lucy smiled weakly. “I’m just not feeling like food.”
“What’s up?”
“Oh . . .” Lucy wound a skein of fine hair around one finger. “Problems . . . problems with . . . oh Lord. I don’t know how you say it.”
“Lucy!” cried Florence, alarmed, looking at her niece’s pale face, the gray circles under her eyes, hearing her flat tone. “Darling, what’s up?”
“It’s nothing really serious.” She smiled again. “Don’t look so aghast, Aunt Flo. Merely problems in love. Gosh. That sounds so yucksome. I’m in love with my flatmate, is the long and short of it.”
“Ah.” Florence put her arms over her menu and leaned forward, thrilled to think she might be of help to her younger niece, of whom she was inordinately fond. “Well, that’s wonderful, Lucy. It’s a hard path, a love like that, even today when we think equality is closer than ever before. I applaud you.” She took Lucy’s hands, trying to conceal the deep surprise she felt, especially at Lucy’s choice: a particularly uninspiring young woman, to Florence’s mind. But then, what did she know about the mysteries of sapphic love? “Brava, to the both of you, you and . . . Irene, was it? Forgive me—I’m so bad with names.”
“Aunt Flo!” Lucy pulled her hands away. “Not Irene! I’m not gay, Flo. And if I was—good grief, no way. Irene moved out, thank God. She was awful, and Chairman Miaow was just the worst.”
“Chairman who?”
“Her cat. He was called Chairman Miaow,” said Lucy with a blank expression. “He had extremely disturbed guts. Living with him was an utter trial. No, it’s not Irene. It’s . . . Orlando.” She lengthened the vowels. “He’s new. He’s only been living with me for four weeks. Four weeks! He comes from Worcestershire. He grew up on a farm. He works on the magazine with me.”
“Oh, how wonderful. So you work together and live together. That’s lovely. What does he do on Country Life?”
“Country Matters, Aunt Flo. We’re the poor man’s Country Life. We’re its slightly chavvy cousin. We have ads for Ronseal and L’Oréal, not sales of pictures of horses at Sotheby’s.”
“But you’re liking it still?” said Florence.
“Oh, it’s just bliss after the Daily News. No one monitoring whether I’ve got any CC cream and what my views on jumpsuits are. . . .”
Florence felt, as she sometimes did with Lucy, that her niece was speaking a dialect, a version of English that she didn’t quite understand.
“I love all that countryside stuff, and these sweet letters we get from readers and people telling us things—I’m writing a feature on rook pie at the moment for March. I’ve interviewed a man who broke his back in three places climbing up into a rookery to get at the young birds.”
Florence made a face. “Sounds grim, darling. Poor things.”
“They live a happier life than the pigs who give you bacon, or the chickens you blithely eat who’ve never seen daylight and can’t move,” said Lucy briskly.
Florence nodded, chastened. “Of course, of course. Tell me about Orlando, though. Go on. Stop changing the subject.”
“Oh, it’s just hopeless, that’s why. He’s . . . he’s got thick, crazy hair and he’s so shy and weird!” Lucy clasped her hands together rapturously. “And he doesn’t understand London and he’s really lonely and I—I . . .” She trailed off. “Never mind. I sound like a loon. But oh, Aunt Flo, I was such a baby with Tom, and all the others. This feels different. We’re so—when I’m with him, I just get him. Finally, I get someone and what they want. Without either of us even having to speak,” she ended dramatically.
“Have you told him any of this?” said Florence, with a sympathetic pang of recognition.
“No, no.” Lucy shook her head and looked mortified. “It’d ruin everything. He’s very private. Plus, we’re flatmates. It’s just—I want to run my hands through his hair so much, plus I really want to snog him. And I’m terrified one day I’ll get drunk and creep into his room and assault him or something—”
She stopped as the waiter appeared and licked his pencil sadly, instantly blushing red in a manner that privately delighted her aunt.
Florence looked up. “Hello. The ceviche, please. And the prawns.”
“There is no prawns,” said the waiter flatly. “We can do battered octopus. That is what we have today.”
“Oh.” Florence was disconcerted. She shrugged. “Fine. Bring whatever’s best. I leave it to you!” She handed him the menus with a flourish.
“A good choice,” said the waiter, and bowed, so that the tiny bells on his waistcoat jangled.
“Jingle bells,” said Lucy, as he retreated. They smiled at each other. “Oh, and that’s the other thing. Christmas. Orlando is spending Christmas on his own. In London.” She looked out the window, at the traffic speeding down the anonymous North London road. “How grim. Just him alone with a Christmas cracker, and no one else.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t decide whether I should just stay with him. Say my family’s in Barbados again—”
Florence shuddered. “Never again.”
“Oh God, no,” agreed Lucy.
“Darling Luce,” said Florence, “you can’t stay with this boy at Christmas. Think how much we’d miss you! He wouldn’t ask that of you.”
“He wouldn’t, no, but perhaps I should. He says no one in his family wants him for Christmas, and he’s better off staying here. His family sounds awful. His dad actually told Orlando he wished he wasn’t his son. And his brother, Orlando lent him some money, and he never paid it back. And Orlando is so clever and bright they hate him for not wanting to work on the farm. And he doesn’t like London, he’s like a lost soul in a tweed jacket and wellies wandering around Dalston. Oh, it’s so sad!”
Florence decided privately that Orlando sounded like the kind of man who might well be asked to spend Christmas alone. She said brightly, “Well, we shall miss you a great deal if you don’t come back. What will I do without you to read with me?”
They had a tradition, the two of them both bookworms, of rereading an old Christmas classic each year. Last Christmas, in the sweltering heat of Barbados, both of them had reread The Pickwick Papers—the Christmas section—dreaming of English lanes piled high with snow, heavy-laden tables, jolly friends, and roaring log fires.
But Lucy shrugged. “I don’t know, Flo. We have to face up to the fact we won’t always go to Winterfold for Christmas.”
Florence swallowed. “I know, darling. But it makes me awfully sad, to think of you all on your own in London while we’re all enjoyin
g Joe’s Christmas lunch.”
“Joe’s doing Christmas lunch?” Lucy’s eyes widened. “Oh, but that’s major. What does Gran say?”
Florence shrugged. “Not much. She said it was fine when I saw her.”
“When did you see her?”
The fly buzzed louder than ever next to Florence. She batted it away.
“Last week. She came down for the Gothic Imagination exhibition and we had tea. Jim said he thought she looked rather peaky, but this time of year—it’s always hard for her.”
“We’ll see.” Lucy put on a brave face. “How’s work?”
“Great. I’m doing a Christmas lecture on nativity scenes in Renaissance art at the National Gallery later this month.” Florence rubbed her hands together. “Should be wonderful, but I’m rather nervous about it. Do come. It’s on Friday, December nineteenth, I think.” She looked over. “Oh, marvelous! This looks delicious.”
The waiter put three plates down: some greens, something black, and a dish full of red peppers.
“Lucy, is your stomach rumbling?”
“Perhaps,” said Lucy. “I bet your lecture will be wonderful, Flo. You always were the best aunt.”
“Well, not much competition.”
“No, but you were. The best person to read stories and play with us, and explain things. Oh, you always explained everything so well! About history and people. And at Christmas reading me and Cat Narnia and . . .” Lucy trailed off. “Oh dear. I think I’d better come home for Christmas. I’ll be too miserable in London, thinking of you all there having a wonderful time.”
“Well, I think that’s the right decision,” said Florence happily. She blew her niece a kiss, nearly knocking over her water glass. “I’m looking forward to Joe’s attempt at Christmas, aren’t you? I’m sure it’ll be wonderful.”
“Absolutely. . . .” Lucy paused. “As long as he doesn’t do beef. He always bloody well cooks beef, and I hate it.”
A Winterfold Christmas Page 2
