Christmas Gifts at the Beach Cafe

by Lucy Diamond

Ruth lowered her gaze, feeling a clash of emotions. She’d never let any of the children toss the pancakes on Shrove Tuesdays gone by, fearing mess and disaster, greasy splatters on the floor or ceiling. ‘I’ll do it,’ she’d always said impatiently, when Hugo and Isabelle had clamoured to try. She preferred to turn her pancakes neatly, using a spatula, rather than letting them fly free in the air; it was the tidiest way – everyone knew that. She’d certainly never worn a colander on her head, either. It hadn’t even occurred to her that one could be used for anything other than draining vegetables over the sink. I mean, hello! Basic hygiene!

  Hygiene aside, though, she had to admit that Evie’s way was more fun. And in the eyes of her children, Evie was more fun, full stop, she thought, sipping her coffee and watching as Isabelle, next to try, pretended to limber up like a boxer about to enter the ring. Self-doubt pierced Ruth’s heart, painful and sharp. Was she failing her own children? Was she the wrong kind of mother? The dull, snappish kind who forbade them to flip pancakes and managed to lose random dogs?

  A sudden rap at the front door jolted her from her thoughts. ‘Could you get that?’ Evie asked, her hands on the pan-handle with Isabelle’s. ‘I think we’re going to make this first one a team effort, right, Iz?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Isabelle said, flushed with anticipation.

  Ruth got up and walked out of the café kitchen, aware that they were all still in their pyjamas, that she hadn’t so much as brushed her hair or washed her face that morning. Back home, she was always dressed and primped before she had breakfast, but somehow the day was running away with her here. Nearly eight-thirty and she must look a complete sight. She just had to hope that the postman, or whoever was at the door, didn’t have high standards when it came to early-morning appearances. She comforted herself with the thought that Evie’s postman had surely witnessed far worse in his time, making deliveries here.

  Through the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the café, Ruth could see that the sky was a pale pinky-blue now and she began thinking ahead to a long, bracing walk with the children that day, maybe a picnic out on the cliffs. They could even scramble down to some of the caves in the next bay along, she thought – and she’d prove that she could be a fun mum too, with stories of smugglers and stashes of gold. Not that she advocated smuggling as a good thing, of course . . .

  She opened the door, feeling a shade more positive. But it wasn’t the postman standing there with an armful of Christmas parcels. It was a man with floppy brown hair, rectangular glasses and a charming smile. ‘Hello. I’m Robert Wickham. Sorry to bother you so early, but I gather you’ve found my dog?’

  Chapter Six

  Evie

  I had never seen Ruth look quite so crestfallen as she did when that idiot Robert turned up at the café and started yelling at her. Isabelle had just landed her first pancake with spectacular skill in the kitchen when we all heard his voice, loud and angry. I switched off the gas and pushed the frying pan to the back of the hob. ‘Hmm,’ I said, worried for a moment that it was Tim, come to bawl her out again for not letting him see the children on Christmas Day. ‘I’m just going to see who that extremely noisy person out there is. You guys wait here, okay?’

  Out in the café, the first thing I saw was Ruth’s stricken face, one arm around her own waist as if trying to protect herself, her other hand holding the top of her dressing gown to keep the two sides of it together. She has always been the most prudish person in the world, even when under attack.

  ‘What do you mean she’s not here? You’ve lost her?’

  Ruth’s mouth tightened and her eyes blazed at the criticism. ‘Er, excuse me, but wasn’t it you who lost your dog in the first place?’ she retaliated.

  Touché, I thought. Sock it to him, Ruth. Maybe she didn’t need my help after all.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked, even though I had already joined the dots and worked out exactly what was going on. I went and stood next to my sister, trying to look businesslike, despite the fact that I was in Ed’s dressing gown and a pair of striped pyjamas, and my hands were sticky with lemon juice and sugar. Thank God I’d remembered to take the colander off my head at least. ‘I’m Evie, the manager of the café. Can I help?’

  ‘It’s my dog. Bella. I was told by the lady in the shop that you’d found her and were looking after her.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said, in my most authoritative voice before he could go any further. Don’t get all hoity-toity on me, love, I was thinking. Not when we were only trying to help you. ‘Obviously it’s not exactly convenient for me to take in a dog, what with this being a café and all, but in the circumstances we didn’t have a lot of choice.’

  That took the wind out of his sails – well, for a whole five seconds anyway. He nodded curtly, point taken. ‘Right, and I appreciate that,’ he said, ‘but now I’m hearing that you let her out this morning, unaccompanied, and—’

  ‘It was less than two minutes,’ Ruth said crossly. ‘Less than two minutes while I propped the door open, so that I wouldn’t get locked out on a freezing, dark beach. How selfish of me to take a precaution like that.’ Her voice dripped with sarcasm. ‘And yes, of course I’m sorry that she’s gone, and if I’d had my wits about me I would have found something to use as a lead or whatever, but it was six-thirty in the morning and she’d just woken me up, so . . .’

  Ruth in full battle mode was pretty awesome, there were no two ways about it. I put my hands on my hips in solidarity and glared down her opponent, who suddenly looked a lot less sure of himself.

  ‘So don’t you start yelling at me,’ she went on. ‘Because I was out there for over an hour trying to find her, in the dark, in the cold, in my bloody pyjamas. And it’s not even my sodding dog, all right?’

  I could hear Thea’s little voice in the background sounding gleeful as she reported back to the others. ‘Mummy thed thum bad words.’

  Now he was the one to look crestfallen. ‘Sorry,’ he said, pushing his glasses up and rubbing his eyes. ‘Okay, fair enough. I’m sorry, too. That was out of order. I was just so relieved when I heard last night you’d found her and . . .’ His shoulders slumped and he gave a nervous laugh. ‘My kids will be gutted.’

  I felt sorry for him all of a sudden. ‘Look, don’t worry – she can’t have gone that far,’ I reasoned. ‘We’ll help you look for her, just as soon as we’ve finished breakfast. In the meantime, can I interest you in a pancake?’

  I wasn’t unduly surprised when Robert declined the offer of a pancake, given the way we’d both berated him. He left shortly afterwards, giving us a business card with his phone number, just in case Bella turned up here again.

  ‘You okay?’ I said to Ruth as we returned to the kitchen.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘As soon as I realized he was a fellow hapless divorcee, I stopped feeling quite so cross with him.’

  ‘Why do you think he’s a divorcee?’

  ‘No wedding ring, for starters. Bad-tempered and shambling, paranoid about upsetting the children . . .’

  I was just about to assure her staunchly that she was absolutely not bad-tempered and shambling when we went back in the kitchen, saw the flour everywhere and she gave an ear-splitting banshee screech. ‘For crying out loud!’

  ‘Thorry, Mummy,’ said Thea, who looked like a little white ghost. Then she giggled, not looking all that sorry any more. ‘It was thnowing,’ she explained.

  Ruth opened and shut her mouth, but no sound came out. With one thing and another, it had already been a very long morning.

  ‘Right, you monkeys,’ I said, taking charge. ‘All up to the bathroom and shower this lot off. Hugo, you’re in charge of your sisters while I sweep up in here. Once you’re clean and dressed, we’ll have the rest of the pancakes and then . . .’ I let the pause lengthen, deepening the suspense. ‘Then we’re going on a dog-hunt. Now, scram!’

  Ruth lowered herself into a chair and gave a shaky laugh as they thundered upstairs, small, floury dust c
louds in their wake. ‘Sorry, Evie,’ she said. Then, to my horror, she put her face in her hands and started to cry, tears spilling through her fingers. ‘I can’t do this any more,’ she sobbed. ‘I just cannot do this.’

  It was a dreadful moment. I couldn’t ever remember seeing Ruth cry before. Throughout the summer she’d been nothing but steely, even during the most excruciating death-throes of her marriage. That upper lip of hers had never been anything but stiff. Yet now . . . Now she was weeping in my kitchen as if something had finally broken inside her. ‘Oh God, Ruth,’ I said, aghast. I rushed over and put an arm round her, not sure what else to say. What did she mean, she couldn’t do this any more? Couldn’t do what?

  ‘I’ve failed my own children,’ she snivelled. ‘I’ve let them down so badly.’

  ‘Of course you haven’t!’ I replied automatically. ‘Absolutely not!’ Inside, though, I was frightened. Self-doubt didn’t exist in Ruth’s lexicon. She was one of those ‘No such word as “can’t!”’ people. ‘Ruth, look at me,’ I ordered. ‘You haven’t let anyone down. No way. It’s tossers like your husband and so-called best mate who’ve let you down.’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’ Her next words were lost in sobs. Something about pancakes. Then, ‘I wish I was more like you!’ she burst out.

  I almost laughed, until I realized that she actually meant it, and wasn’t even kidding or drunk. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous,’ I said. ‘No, you don’t.’ I elbowed her. ‘You’d change your mind after five minutes in my head, I promise. You’d be horrified at what a complete fuckwit I really am.’ I gave her a squeeze. ‘I mean, I know I give the impression of being an incredibly competent, go-getting high achiever, but here’s a secret: it’s actually all an act.’

  ‘I think the kids like you more than they do me,’ she said, with a watery smile as if she was joking, but there was a desperate undertow to her voice that belied her face.

  ‘Of course they don’t! Christ, you’re not serious, are you?’

  ‘No,’ she said quickly, but then shrugged. ‘Well. Sort of.’

  ‘Oh, Ruth.’ I took her hands. ‘Didn’t you always feel a bit like that about Jo, though, when we were kids? I used to wish we could live here with her sometimes, especially when Mum and Dad bored on about homework, or tidying our bedrooms, or not scuffing our school shoes. That’s just the joy of being an aunty, though, don’t you think? That you can be less strict, that you get to be “the fun one”? It’s a completely different relationship.’

  ‘Mmm. Yeah. I suppose.’

  ‘Meanwhile, you’re the amazing role model, the one who gets to keep them and wake up with them every single day; the one who sees them grow, and who they turn to when they’re scared or troubled. You’re the lucky one, Ruth.’ An unexpected note of yearning had entered my voice, surprising me.

  ‘Do you think you and Ed will ever have children?’ she asked, obviously noticing it.

  I got up and busied myself wiping down the flour-dusted worktops so that she couldn’t see my face. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I hope so, but . . .’ I shrugged. ‘We’ve only been together a year and a half; I’m not in any rush to change things just yet.’ My nonchalance was completely feigned, I should add. Over the summer I had found myself noticing babies in a way I’d never done before: chubby little arms and starfish hands reaching out for a cuddle. Delightful gurgles of joy when something amused them. The beautiful calmness of a slumbering baby, eyelashes trembling mid-dream on a round, peachy cheek. Oh yes, I’d noticed them all. My biological clock – something I’d always written off as an invented, patronizing sort of myth – had definitely twanged into action and had been ticking ever since.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said quickly, wanting to shine the spotlight back on her, ‘if we ever do have children, I hope they’ll be as lovely as your three. I mean that. I absolutely adore them. And whatever you might think, you’re a great mum.’

  She dabbed her eyes and blew her nose. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘No arguments.’ I rinsed the cloth in the sink. ‘Come on, don’t be hard on yourself. You’ve had a really tough year, but you’ve made it this far, right? You kept going, you kept it together. You’re allowed to cry, you know. It’s absolutely fine.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, her eyes red. ‘I’m just struggling a bit. We don’t feel like a proper family any more; we’ve become this weird new shape that doesn’t feel right, and I’m floundering around, out of balance trying to be everything to the children . . . It’s not good enough.’ She bowed her head and I saw her fingers clench briefly into fists. ‘And I’m still so angry with Tim, too. So angry and so bloody tired.’

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ I said. ‘I feel angry with him, too. I thought it might be him at the door earlier, and I was all set to lamp him with the frying pan.’

  Ruth flinched and I wondered if I’d gone too far. She was a responsible adult after all, a mother of three, who probably disapproved of all acts of violence. Then she gave a small smile. ‘Not if I’d got there first,’ she said, the colour returning to her cheeks. ‘You can have the rolling pin.’

  ‘Deal,’ I told her. My stomach rumbled and I realized how ravenous I was. ‘Now, I don’t know about you, but I could eat a bloody horse. Do you want to carry on with the pancakes while I sweep up this flour? With a bit of luck, we can get a few cooked and eaten before the children come back.’

  Approximately twenty-seven pancakes later, when we were finally all washed, clothed and fed and I had slapped together a picnic, we bundled up in warm clothes and left the café. It was like releasing a pack of wild animals – the children immediately forgot they’d been winding each other up for the last twenty minutes and promptly tore off in different directions across the beach. ‘First one to find Bella wins fifty pence,’ I yelled as Ruth and I tramped down the steps after them.

  ‘Bella!’ they were already yelling. ‘BELLAAAAA!’

  ‘Poor creature, they’ll scare her off for good with that racket,’ Ruth said as they rampaged noisily into the distance.

  The children combed the sand dunes, their colourful coats flashing through the long, prickly grass as they ran, their high voices reaching us on the wind. ‘Bella! Bellaaaa!’

  No luck. We climbed up to the small car park on the far side of the beach, just in case she’d been enticed there by the interesting smell of the bins, but drew another blank. Then we walked along to Heron Bay, the next inlet to the east, and searched in all the tiny caves and around the jumble of granite boulders. Not a single paw print to be seen.

  It was almost midday by now, so we spread out the picnic blanket and tucked into potted-crab sandwiches and Ed-baked sausage rolls that I’d discovered in the freezer and defrosted earlier, followed by sticky squares of gingerbread with lemon glacé icing. Mindful of the fact that I was meant to be judging the village Christmas Bake-Off in less than two hours, I tried to hold back on my food intake, but the fresh air had given me an enormous appetite and it was only the sight of Hugo’s admiring expression as I tucked into my fourth sausage roll – ‘You can eat a lot, Aunty Evie’ – that eventually forced me to rein in my greed.

  It was a bright, blue-sky winter’s day, cold but clear. Once again we had the bay to ourselves, with only the jabbering seagulls to disturb the tranquillity. Halfway through the picnic, we heard a dog barking and our heads swivelled as one up to the cliff path, but it was only a big brown poodle being walked by an elderly man who waved down at us. We waved back, feeling disconsolate.

  ‘Maybe somebody’s found Bella and taken her to a rescue centre,’ I suggested, as we shook the crumbs from the picnic blanket and packed up. I could tell by the children’s downcast faces that they wanted to have been the ones to find her, though, not some other random do-gooder. ‘Or maybe she simply remembered the way back to her family all by herself.’

  Thea pursed her lips as if this was a ridiculous thought. ‘Thee didn’t,’ she said mutinously.

  I turned to Ruth. ‘What do you want to do? I’ve go
t to be up at the village hall for two, so I should be heading back in a minute to brush my hair and make myself a bit more presentable.’ I glanced down at the scruffy old parka I was wearing over one of Ed’s chunky fisherman jumpers that I’d recently nicked. Mary Berry chic, it was not. ‘Do you want to come with me or . . . ?’

  Ruth shook her head. It was obvious to see where Thea’s stubborn streak had come from. ‘We’ll carry on,’ she said, with more than a note of I’ll find that dog if it’s the last thing I do in her voice. Oh dear, I thought. Being shouted at by that Robert bloke had really got to her.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, heaving myself up and brushing sand from my jeans. ‘Then I’ll see you all later. Good luck. Hope you find her.’

  ‘We will,’ said Ruth, and Thea nodded solemnly.

  ‘We will,’ she echoed with all the determination it was possible for a four-year-old to possess.

  Chapter Seven

  Evie

  The Christmas Bake-Off was a new thing for the Carrawen villagers this year, and the inaugural judging was taking place in the hall at the top end of the village. It had been suggested by a relative newcomer to the area, a thirty-something woman called Sarah, who’d been a powerhouse in the City, then left it all behind to become a freelance consultant, moving to Cornwall with her husband and two young children in search of a better life. Led by Sarah and organized by a team of volunteers, the Christmas Bake-Off had three different categories: Christmas cake, mince pies and miscellaneous.

  Ed and I had both been asked to judge, as had Graham, the chef from the Golden Fleece, and Ella Shipley, who ran the bakery in Tregarrow. As I trudged up the hill towards the village hall, passing all the colourful lights in the shop windows and glimpsing Christmas tree after Christmas tree in family homes, I found myself missing Ed more than ever. With Ruth’s arrival, and the whirl of noise and activity that came with the children, I’d barely had a minute to myself, but now that I was alone again I was conscious of Ed’s absence. I had been in denial, I realized, about how hard it was going to be, spending Christmas apart this year.