by Emlyn Rees
‘What is it?’ She couldn’t help feeling suspicious. She’d been annoyed that David hadn’t bothered buying her a present, but she realised now that that was preferable to being put on the spot like this.
‘Well, open it and see.’
She took the small package from him.
‘Sorry about the wrapping,’ he said.
Inside was a thin wallet envelope with the logo of a travel agent on it. ‘What’s this?’
‘It’s tickets to the opera. In Vienna,’ he said, blushing.
She stared at the envelope in her hand, not opening it. She couldn’t believe it. Suddenly, the room seemed to go very quiet. She noticed that the CD had stuck on ‘White Christmas’, so that Dean Martin was singing, ‘Why – why – why – why – why’ over and over again. As she looked at the shiny white wallet, she could feel everyone’s eyes on her.
Tickets to the opera in Vienna. It had always been one of their dreams to go there, a dream they’d both discussed, but a dream she’d entirely forgotten about because it didn’t mean anything any more. It belonged to the person she’d been before Paul had died. It belonged to the person who’d loved her husband, who’d thought their future would be happy, not filled with pain.
‘Darling?’ David asked.
She felt a flash of anger. She wasn’t his darling. How could David do this? In public. Like a coward. Because he knew full well what she’d have said if he’d handed her this in private.
What did he want? To pretend it was still Christmas two years ago? To skip back in time? Pretend that Paul’s death had never happened? Or that Paul had never existed at all?Pretend that they were still a couple who might swan off to the opera for the weekend?
‘Aren’t you pleased?’ he asked. ‘Say something.’
‘I don’t think we can go,’ Stephanie said, rubbing her eyebrows and handing the tickets back to him. She couldn’t tell him how she really felt. Not here. Not now, in front of everyone. She didn’t trust herself not to completely lose it.
‘Why not?’ David wouldn’t accept them.
‘You know we can’t. We can’t leave the children.’
‘Why – why – why – why – why –’ Dean Martin continued to sing.
‘But of course you can,’ Isabelle said, extricating herself from Elliot’s arms and grinning at David. ‘We’ve worked it all out. Nat and Simon can come and stay with us. Taylor will be back from school, so she can help out with them.’
‘But –’
‘You’re flying from Heathrow, so it’s easy,’ Isabelle hurried on, excitedly. ‘It’s all settled. David and I have discussed it.’
‘Why – why – why – why –’ Dean Martin screamed in Stephanie’s ear. She marched over to the CD player and stabbed the stop button.
‘Easy, Steph,’ Elliot said.
‘Why can’t I come with you?’ Simon asked David.
‘I told you before. It’s supposed to be a romantic trip for two, kiddo, that’s why,’ David said, pretending to punch him on the shoulder.
‘We’ll discuss it later,’ Stephanie said, icily.
Suddenly there was a crash, as Taylor toppled her pile of presents. They all looked around.
‘Are you OK, Muffin?’ Elliot asked, crouching down next to her. He reached out as if to stroke her hair, but she jerked away from him and gathered up her presents in her arms.
‘I’m bored,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’m going to lie down.’
‘Don’t go just yet,’ Isabelle said.
Taylor turned around to face her. ‘Why?’
‘Well, darling,’ Isabelle said, covering her mouth with her hands. ‘I want you to be here for this. I wasn’t going to do it like this, but as everyone is here, and in such a good mood, I might as well . . .’
‘What?’ Elliot asked.
‘I’ve got a confession to make,’ Isabelle said, lacing her fingers together. ‘I’ve been keeping something secret from you.’
‘Oh, darling,’ Elliot joked, ‘I told you not to buy me that Porsche.’
‘I’m serious,’ Isabelle said. ‘I’ve got some news, darling, and I wanted to save it for now. I only found out a few days ago, and, well, I wanted to tell you all at the same time. Because it’s Christmas, and Christmas is all about family. And so is this . . .’
She grinned manically and reached out for Taylor, to take her hand.
‘Elliot . . . Taylor . . . everyone. We’re going to have a new member of the family. I’m going to have a baby.’
Chapter 16
‘Kellie!’ Ben called up the stairs. ‘Are you there?’
It was just gone one o’clock and Ben was sweating as if he was on a Caribbean beach, even though he’d just stepped into the cottage from the freezing cold outside.
He had a cut on his forefinger, which he’d bandaged with a piece of kitchen roll wrapped round with a strip of electrical tape he’d found in a drawer. He glanced into the oval wooden mirror on the wall and saw that he was smiling nervously like a school kid, which actually came as no surprise, because that was exactly how he felt. He’d shaved. His hair was wet from where he’d brushed it back from his face. He stared up the cheap, scuffed pine staircase which led to the small bedroom in which Kellie had slept last night.
Would what he was about to show her be enough to make her think of him differently? he wondered. Would it make her like him any more?
He almost laughed at himself. Because these weren’t the thoughts of a grown-up but, again, of a kid. He was a company director – or ex company director, at least – a manager. He hired – had hired – and had occasionally even fired people for a living. He’d also just nose-dived out of a messy divorce and the last thing he needed was to become emotionally involved with someone else, especially someone he hardly knew, and who was already involved, albeit only ‘sort of’, with another man.
Or perhaps Kellie was exactly what he needed, because, from the moment she’d left him, he’d missed her. He’d felt her absence like a slap. Just when he’d thought he’d been getting to know her, she’d slipped through his fingers like sand.
One step forward, two steps back – that was how it felt, being with her. Like the snowball fight this morning: in the very moment he’d got her to relax, he’d watched her shut back down.
Well, he wasn’t going to be put off that easily. He’d smiled more, felt more, and feared more for somebody else’s life in the last twenty-four hours than since he’d first met and fallen in love with his ex-wife, but not even with Marie had he ever felt the need to impress as he did with Kellie today. Maybe it was being ignored that did it. Perhaps the very fact that Kellie had been able to walk away from him – because she had someone else waiting for her at home – was what was galvanising him now. Was it this competition, with a man he’d never met who’d left Kellie alone at Christmas, that had made Ben so determined to catch her eye, to make her stop and stare? But it felt deeper than that. Whatever was driving him on felt less to do with pride and more to do with hope.
‘Kellie!’ he called up again.
He heard a creak on the landing, then she was there, rubbing at her eyes with the heel of her hand, pushing her fingers back through her wavy brown hair. She was dressed in a baggy white V-neck jumper, a long grey cardigan, faded blue jeans and thick woollen socks, all of them borrowed from Sally. A necklace glinted at her throat in the glare of the bright ceiling light.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she half-said, half-yawned, ‘because I already know . . .’
‘What?’
‘That I look like a tramp . . . or a member of a vaudeville act.’
‘I was thinking more Robin Williams in The Fisher King, or a kids’ TV presenter – maybe from Sesame Street, circa nineteen seventy-nine.’
She smiled sleepily and warned him, ‘Spare me the theme tune, Ben. Did you have any luck?’ she then asked, as she walked down the stairs, the tail of her cardigan trailing behind her like a wedding train.
He stared at her blankly.
‘With Jack’s dad’s computer.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that. Yep, all fixed.’
She stood against the radiator and looked through the small arched doorway beneath the stairs which led into the tiny kitchen. There was a loaf of bread and a can of beans on the worktop.
‘Lunch?’ she asked.
‘It was all I could get.’
‘It’s better than nothing, and I make a mean beans on toast.’
‘What if you could have something else?’ he asked.
‘Like what?’
‘Anything. If you could click your fingers, right now, like a genie, and summon it up . . . What would be your ideal Christmas lunch?’
‘In this weather? A roast. Definitely. Beef, or chicken, or turkey. Anything.’
‘With potatoes,’ he said, ‘and gravy . . .’
‘Green beans . . .’
‘And carrots and peas . . .’
She laughed. ‘Stop it. You’re making me drool.’ She pushed away from the radiator and walked through to the kitchen, where she picked up the can. ‘Beans on toast for
two,’ she said. ‘Coming right up.’
‘Wait.’
‘What?’
‘The cooker . . . it needs a new gas bottle. Sally said we should take the full one from the empty cottage next door, but it’s heavy, so I’m going to need a hand.’
‘No worries.’ She put the can back down, and donned a tatty Harris tweed overcoat and a pair of oversized, paint-spattered trainers.
The wind whipped at them as they stepped outside, but the door to the next cottage along in the pub annexe was already unlocked and Ben quickly ushered her in.
This cottage was identical in dimension and design to the one they’d slept in, but far from looking unoccupied, its lights and radiators were on. It was much warmer than the other cottage, on account of the fire which was blazing in the grate. He closed the door behind them and they stood in silence, side by side.
Ben waited for her to speak, but she still didn’t open her mouth. He felt itchy with nerves. Why had he picked now, of all times, to quit smoking?
‘Please don’t tell me you’re like that girl in Gremlins,’ he said, ‘the one who hated Christmas because when she was a child her father tried climbing down the chimney in a Santa outfit and slipped and broke his neck?’
‘Er . . .’
‘Or, that you’re a sworn disciple of the Grinch, or a member of a fundamental Christian sect which believes that Christmas lunch is an heretical celebration of greed set before us by the very devil himself?’
‘Well . . . no, but . . .’
‘In which case,’ he said, ‘I can only conclude that the absence of a smile on your face is simply indicative of the fact that you’re a lawyer, and as such have an instinctive and overwhelming aversion to surprises of any kind . . .’
She wrapped her arms around him in a huge hug.
The gesture took him by surprise, so much so that his arms hung uselessly. By the time he thought to move them and hug her back, the moment was gone.
Letting him go, she turned to face the room. Stuck along the black wooden beam which bisected the low ceiling were pieces of A4 paper, each with a letter scrawled on it in blue biro. Together, they made up the message:
HAPPY CHRISTMAS!
Coal glowed in the fireplace, beneath the shimmering flames. The smell of roasting meat filled the air, drifting through from the kitchen where the table had been laid with two chipped tea mugs, some mismatching plates and an opened bottle of white wine.
‘Roast chicken,’ Ben announced, with a theatrical flourish of his arm. ‘Potatoes, carrots, cauliflower cheese and peas. It should all be ready in about ten minutes. I’d like to apologise in advance for the stuffing, which is out of a packet – and the cutlery, which is two bent forks and one knife between us, because that’s all they had in the drawer . . .’
This time, her silence delighted him. It was exactly the reaction he’d hoped for as he’d beavered away in here these last few hours.
‘But how?’ she finally asked.
‘Would you expect David Blaine to reveal how he lasted so long in that glass box above the Thames without food?’
‘No . . .’
‘Or Houdini how he made an elephant vanish?’
‘No.’
‘Exactly. A good magician never reveals his secrets. Let’s just say that I’m a better scavenger than I am a sailor.’
‘Like Tom Hanks in Cast Away,’ she suggested.
He smiled, remembering the film, and remembering, too, that she’d yesterday listed Hanks as one of her favourites.
‘Exactly,’ he agreed. Then he remembered the volleyball, which Hanks’s character in Cast Away had used to chat with as if it had been a real person, to stop himself from going insane. ‘Only I do hope you’re going to provide me with better conversation than . . .’
‘That ball,’ she said, obviously thinking the same thing, ‘that he decided to call –’
‘Wilson,’ he said.
‘That’s right, Wilson.’
She picked up a sprig of holly from the corner table and turned it over in her hands.
‘This is amazing,’ she said. ‘You’re –’ But she never finished the sentence. Instead, she turned away. ‘Thanks, Ben,’ she told him. ‘It’s such a lovely thing to have done.’
He followed her through to the kitchen. She trailed her fingers along the edge of the table. She looked at the cheap, dented steaming pans on the flickering blue gas burners, and the old plastic chopping board and broken potato peeler on the stained white Formica worktop. The cheaply veneered cupboard doors were all open, as if they’d been ransacked by a thief, but all they had inside were assorted odd teacups and dusty saucers and plates. By the back door was a gently buzzing, yellowed fridge, which looked as if it had been liberated from a scrap yard, and on top of it was a small clock radio, which looked like the timer for a primitive bomb. Through the crackle of static came the intermittent sound of carols being sung. There were cobwebs at the windows and an open orange flip-top bin stood in the corner of the room, piled high with potato peelings. On the wall above was a faded calendar, with a photo of Fleet Town. The date above it read June 1986.
‘It’s a bit of a time warp, I’m afraid,’ Ben said. ‘Like something out of an episode of Doctor Who.’
Kellie pressed her palm against the wall. ‘Only the scenery’s a lot less wobbly . . .’ She stared up at the beige pinstriped pelmets above the window. ‘Some of this stuff is so far out of fashion, it’s come back in,’ she said, ‘but who cares, eh?’ Breathing in deeply, she knelt down and gazed through the darkened, greasy glass oven door at the chicken roasting inside. ‘And the chuck smells great. But how the hell did you manage to –’
‘Michael,’ Ben explained, ‘the kid at the pub. He got it for me. Sally and Roddy had offered to have us over for lunch, but I told them I’d rather cook for you myself.’
‘But why?’
‘Because I wanted to. As a way to say sorry for having messed up your Christmas.’
‘No more apologies,’ she told him. ‘OK?’ She held out her hand for him to shake. ‘Let’s just draw a line under it.’
‘For a lawyer, you sure are letting me off the hook lightly.’
‘And for a businessman, you sure don’t seem to know much about quitting while you’re ahead.’
He took her hand and shook it.
‘You’re cold,’ he told her as he let go.
She rubbed her hands together, then something on the table caught her attention and she leant forward and picked up the name card he’d made for her out of a rectangle cut off the box of stuffing. She stared at it in silence. It read, KELLIE ???
‘My mystery guest,’ he said. ‘An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, wrapped in pair of borrowed trainers and a moth-eaten tweed coat. Talking of which,’ he said.
She turned her back on him and shrugged it off into his hands.
‘God
,’ she said, ‘it’s nice to be warm at last. I can’t believe how hot you’ve got it in here.’
As she turned round to face him, Ben took a closer look at her necklace, which was impossible not to stare at, presented the way it was in the V of her jumper. He knew a little about jewellery, just from the pieces he’d bought for Marie over the years. Even beneath the harsh fluorescent tube the diamonds shone like ice in sunlight against her throat as she looked up into his eyes.
‘That’s a stunning necklace,’ he said.
She brushed her fingers against it self-consciously, as if she’d forgotten it was there.
‘It was a gift. From a friend.’
She didn’t elaborate, but then, she didn’t have to. He could tell from the way she’d said it, from the wistfulness in her voice, that it was from him: her ‘sort of’ boyfriend. And she was thinking about him now. Ben hung her coat over the back of a chair.
‘It seems crazy,’ she said, staring down at the name card which she still held in her hand, ‘that even the people who send me my gas and electricity bills know my surname, but you don’t.’
‘So tell me,’ he said. ‘Then the next time your boiler breaks I can come around and fix it.’
‘It’s Vaughan. And what about you? Let me guess: Dover.’
‘You’re wasted as a lawyer. You should have been a satirist,’ he said with a smile. ‘Or, then again, maybe the Christmas cracker joke industry might have been more your thing.’
‘Thanks a bunch.’
‘My name’s actually Stone. Ben Stone.’
‘It suits you,’ she said.
‘It does?’
‘Yeah. It’s solid. Like a rock. Like you had to be to get us through yesterday. To get us safely back here.’
‘Even though I got us lost.’
‘Sure, because then you got us found again.’
He looked away, embarrassed, and turned up the volume on the radio. ‘The Little Drummer Boy’, by Rolf Harris, drifted out at them.
She laughed. ‘Wow, you’ve even come up with some Aussie music. What more could a girl want?’
