The Little Village Christmas

by Sue Moorcroft

  He made up his mind to treat this trip to Didbury as a normal family interaction: a son visiting his parents. Build a bridge for once instead of a wall. They could enjoy a nice afternoon and evening. He was pretty sure his mum would have something in mind that, if not fatted calf, would constitute a special meal. If it proved to be one of Lloyd’s favourites instead of his he wouldn’t remark on it. He’d sleep in his old room tonight and tomorrow he’d leave with a smile.

  Decision made, he opened his mouth to apologise for being out of touch.

  But Victor got in first, rolling out one of his great sighs. ‘I suppose you heard I was asking for you in Middledip as you’ve been so damned coy with your address?’ He shifted in his seat, his brow gathering in familiar furrows. ‘I’m glad you’ve made the effort. Each time we see Lloyd he asks when you’re going to see him.’

  Ben closed his mouth again. All his good resolutions vanished as surely as if he’d opened the shiny flip-top bin in the corner and shoved them in.

  He pulled Lloyd’s letter from his pocket and tossed it onto the table.

  Slowly, Victor smoothed it out and he and Penny pressed themselves shoulder-to-shoulder to read it.

  ‘Now what’s he done?’ whispered Penny as she sat back. There was no sign of her earlier smiles.

  Victor sent her a look. ‘Don’t go borrowing trouble.’

  Ben glanced from one to the other, scalp prickling at the oddness of their manner. ‘Why should he have done anything?’

  Victor refolded the letter and offered it back to Ben, granite-faced. ‘No reason in the world. Your mother worries.’

  Fingering the folds of paper Ben thought hard, trying to make sense of the sudden change in the atmosphere. ‘I confronted Imogen today. She still won’t admit they had an affair.’

  Victor rose restlessly to prowl to the window, jamming his hands in his pockets and looking out over the garden where the leaves were drifting onto the lawn. ‘Then maybe they didn’t.’

  ‘But until this letter Lloyd’s never protested his innocence.’ Ben switched his gaze from parent to parent, taking in his father’s frowning restlessness and the way his mother’s fingers were covering her mouth. ‘What’s conspicuously absent is an explanation of what they were up to on the night of the accident.’

  Penny gave a tiny gasp. Victor returned to his seat beside her, taking her hand in his. Neither of them spoke.

  ‘Do you know what “it” is?’ Ben pressed.

  Like puppets controlled by the same strings Victor and Penny shook their heads.

  Ben’s hands curled into fists as he fought down a hot surge of anger. ‘Don’t you care? Imogen and I are getting divorced. Lloyd’s in prison. How could the truth make things any worse?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Victor said hoarsely, ‘it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie.’

  Ben laughed harshly. ‘Best for Lloyd?’

  ‘Not just Lloyd.’ Victor glanced at his wife.

  Penny’s gaze was fixed to half a black cherry Jaffa Cake on her plate. ‘I don’t even know why we’re protecting him any more,’ she whispered.

  Victor sighed, his eyes still on her. ‘We always agreed—’

  ‘But it’s such a strain, and it might be doing more harm than good.’

  Ben’s temper glowed red at this opaque exchange. ‘Why are you protecting Lloyd? Why’s it always Lloyd? I sometimes wonder if you only had me in case he ever needed a kidney,’ he added bitterly.

  Victor’s face set in its habitual harsh lines. ‘We tried to protect both of you.’

  Penny began to cry.

  Ben, though he watched his father slide an arm about his mother’s shaking shoulders, steeled himself against her tears. ‘I never noticed you protecting me.’

  Victor gathered Penny closer, pressing a kiss upon her hair. ‘You not noticing was the idea. We covered it up when it started and the time never seemed right to uncover it. Your mum got so upset every time.’

  Penny gulped. ‘We didn’t want anyone knowing. And it made things all right for you. You didn’t have the worry.’ She wiped her eyes on the sleeves of her cardigan, fumbling in her pocket for a tissue so she could blow her nose. ‘This time, all we know is that there’s something. We recognise his behaviour when he refuses to admit he’s done wrong. I’m scared for Lloyd.’

  Ben sat frozen, his heartbeat thudding in his ears, while Penny dried her eyes. The tantalising sensation of being on the cusp of significant discovery consumed him. He had to rein in the compulsion to roar, ‘WHAT did you cover up? Just TELL ME!’ and thump the table. Fury was never the way to solve an issue with his parents. His mother would cry and his father would get loud and defensive. It was why he’d developed the habit of simply withdrawing, leaving them to focus on Lloyd. It had seemed easiest.

  But that had been when he was a teenager. Now he was an adult and it was time his parents began treating him as one. He imagined his throat made of silk to coax out a voice, reasonable and calm. ‘It seems really important, what you’re trying to tell me. Can one of you begin from the beginning, so I understand?’

  ‘I wish you’d leave it alone.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  With a sigh, Victor rubbed his forehead as if it would help him marshal his thoughts. ‘It began when Lloyd was fifteen. You were nine. There had been –’ he paused to clear his throat ‘– incidents before that.’ He swallowed. ‘Lloyd was questioned at school several times about stealing but there was never anything but circumstantial evidence and Lloyd always protested his innocence.’

  ‘Stealing?’ repeated Ben blankly. ‘Lloyd?’ He almost wanted to pinch himself to check he wasn’t imagining the words. Lloyd had been in trouble at school for stealing? Lloyd the golden child?

  Penny took up the story. ‘We didn’t want you to know. We thought it was a phase, and there was no reason to make your brother look bad in your eyes or for you to share the shame.’ She had to pause to wipe her eyes again. ‘Then a substantial sum was involved. It had been collected for a school trip and the teacher had to run out of the classroom to help a child who’d fallen down some nearby stairs. All the kids had crowded out into the corridor but then a teacher with first aid qualifications arrived to help the student and Lloyd’s teacher was back in his classroom faster than Lloyd had bargained for.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘He was caught red-handed.’

  Victor took up the tale once more, voice bleak. ‘We were called to the school. We begged the head teacher not to get the police involved or expel him. He agreed, so long as Lloyd apologised and saw the school counsellor about his behaviour.’

  ‘Mrs Ives.’ Lloyd had gone to sixth-form college by the time Ben moved up to senior school, but she’d been school counsellor then, too.

  Victor nodded. ‘What came out was that he was stealing to fund playing on the fruit machines. Those gambling machines should be banned, out there in public where children have access. It was a hell of a job to keep Lloyd away from them. Mrs Ives suggested we keep him as fully occupied as we could so I used to take him to football, rugby, whatever he was good at.’

  ‘You used to coach his teams,’ Ben supplemented.

  ‘It kept me involved.’

  ‘I hardly saw you.’

  Victor’s eyes, grey like Ben’s own, grew defensive. ‘I used to try and get you to come along sometimes. You were resistant.’

  ‘Because, “Why don’t you come along and support your brother?” wasn’t particularly appealing. Not like, “What would you like to do today, Ben?” might have been.’

  Victor rubbed his eyes tiredly. ‘Benedict, we were at our wits’ end with Lloyd. I’m sorry if it meant I didn’t spend much time with you. You were not much more than half Lloyd’s age so I couldn’t invite you to train with his team, could I? And Lloyd kept saying, “Don’t tell Ben,” and I thought it was a good thing that he knew you’d be ashamed of him. That somewhere inside himself he did know right from wrong. You looked up to him in those days.’ Victor began to sound a
s if admissions were being ripped from him. ‘Then money began to go missing out of his teammates’ bags. Nothing was proved against him,’ he added, hastily. ‘But all my attention was taken up with trying to keep him away from those damned machines.’

  ‘Holy shit,’ Ben murmured. If his parents had confessed Lloyd to be a unicorn he could scarcely have been more surprised. ‘I do remember holidays where he sneaked off to the arcades and you were furious. I used to kick around while you did the family counsel thing, bored stiff, wishing I was on the beach or the cliffs.’

  Penny had stopped crying, though she still clutched her tissue. ‘You were such an easy child in comparison. You never got in trouble and you were happy doing your outdoorsy things. You seemed so self-sufficient, oblivious to what we were dealing with.’

  Ben thought he caught a whiff of reproach. ‘Being kept in the dark isn’t the same as being “oblivious”. I felt ignored.’ He heard the old sense of injury echoing in his voice but he couldn’t suppress it. ‘Everything seemed to be about Lloyd and I didn’t understand. If I did get your attention I knew it could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.’ He took in his mother’s white face and the shock in his father’s eyes. ‘Sorry. That was blunt. But it’s how I saw things. All Lloyd’s sporting trophies were evidence that he was your golden child.’

  He jumped up and started making more coffee, needing to occupy his hands. ‘Only Gabe seemed to have time for me. Even before he had his smallholding, when he still lived with Auntie Rona, he helped me build a tree house in his garden and bought a rowing boat that we took on the river.’ Coffee granules spooned into each cup, he poured on steaming water and added a dash of milk, setting mugs in front of each of his parents.

  He took his seat again. ‘But, to move on: how on earth did Lloyd manage to go from lifting other people’s money to being a lawyer?’

  Victor wrapped his hands around his coffee mug. His hair was beginning to thin rapidly now, and his sixty-two years seemed to be weighing down the flesh of his face. ‘To be honest, when he wanted to go to university and study law we were delighted.’

  ‘We thought it meant he’d reached the end of a weird phase and was ready to grow up.’ Penny sounded wistful. ‘We used to read books about dealing with teenagers and they all talked about “phases” and “bad patches”. That risky behaviour was about the way some adolescents’ brains change, affecting their ability to reason. That they’d learn the difference between wrong and right sometime in their twenties.’

  Victor chipped in. ‘And he was never caught doing anything wrong again.’

  ‘Until the accident,’ Ben pointed out.

  His parents nodded sadly.

  Silence fell. Ben was not at peace with his thoughts. His parents had created fictions and hidden secrets but what he’d seen as an isolating lack of attention they’d considered to be shielding him from unpleasant truths. Ironically, his reaction had been to create shields of his own, such as visits to Gabe and outdoor activities; the venture scouts while he’d been a schoolboy, then a countryside management and environmental studies course at college.

  Unwittingly or not, Ben had been contributing to the gulf that was ever growing between them all the time his parents had been battling to keep his brother from permanent disgrace. Trying to keep it all hush-hush.

  Regret almost took his breath away. ‘I suppose it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease,’ he said, almost to himself.

  ‘Yes!’ Penny smiled eagerly. ‘Exactly. Lloyd was the one who needed our help.’

  Ben had been thinking from the perspective that it was the one who made most noise that got the attention, but he didn’t contradict her. Instead, he elected to try to erase some of the distance he now regretted by introducing a happier topic. ‘It’s your birthday soon, Mum. How about I take you both out to dinner tonight? Where would you like to go?’

  Penny’s eyebrows flipped up in surprise. A hint of colour returned to her cheeks. ‘Dad and I sometimes like to walk down to the Thai Garden and drink Tiger Beer with our dinner. How about that?’

  ‘Perfect.’ Ben grinned because he’d expected her to preferences to lie with a little bistro or maybe a jazz bar. ‘Let’s do that.’

  Victor managed a rusty smile of his own. ‘Better take your credit card, boy. Mum can guzzle her way right through that set menu.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell us about what you’ve been doing in Middledip?’ broke in Penny tentatively.

  Recognising that he wasn’t the only one making an effort, Ben settled back in his chair and told them about the Carlysle estate and helping Gabe at The Angel, about the money disappearing and that only one of the original party had stuck by Gabe. A picture of Alexia flashed into his mind, widening her eyes at him like Betty Boop. For some stupid reason he felt his cheeks heat up.

  His parents didn’t seem to notice, though. They listened with so much interest that Ben almost relaxed and began to believe that the heart-to-heart, uncomfortable as it had been, had heralded an era of understanding between him and his parents.

  That is, until that evening when the three of them were strolling into Didbury towards The Thai Garden and Penny took his arm. ‘I am sorry if you’ve ever felt you’ve been treated unfairly, Ben. But, when it comes right down to it … well, you’re all right, aren’t you?’

  He saw no reason to pretend. ‘I haven’t been all right for the past couple of years, no.’

  ‘Oh, dear. I’m sorry if we didn’t support you as we should.’ Then Penny brightened. ‘You’re through it now, though, aren’t you?’

  With a rueful shake of his head, Ben gave her hand a squeeze. ‘Shall we reserve judgement until we find out what Lloyd and Imogen are trying to hide?’

  Penny halted so abruptly that Ben almost tripped over her, her eyes wide with panic. ‘What’s the point of trying to find out? You said yourself, the worst has already happened.’

  Victor loomed protectively over Penny, his mighty frown taking over his forehead. ‘Remember what I said about sleeping dogs, Benedict.’

  The three of them stood gazing at each other on the pavement in a street of ordinary houses where ordinary people lived, Ben’s mother in her ‘going out’ uniform of black trousers and a pretty top, his father wearing a tie because, to him, a shirt didn’t look right without one. Ben sighed. ‘But following your logic that the worst has already happened, then what’s to be lost by knowing the truth?’

  Penny adjusted her glasses uneasily.

  It was Victor who enlightened Ben. ‘Lloyd’s automatic release date’s coming up. He’ll serve the rest of his sentence out on licence.’

  Ben felt suddenly lightheaded. ‘And?’

  ‘He’ll be subject to supervision. If he breaches his conditions he’ll be back in jail.’ He eased his collar. ‘Obviously, were some difficulty to come to light …’

  ‘He’ll be back inside, back in court, and his sentence might be extended. And you’re worried in case whatever happened that night fits the bill.’

  Ben felt sick as he realised that it wasn’t just that his parents didn’t know what Lloyd had done.

  They didn’t want to know.

  Chapter Eleven

  Alexia knocked on Gabe’s door, glad he’d invited her for a Sunday afternoon pow-wow because, although Jodie had occupied Alexia’s spare room for only a few months, Alexia now felt very conscious of her absence. Had Jodie moved on in an open, friendly way, or if Alexia had realised her plans to move down into the Greater London area, Alexia knew things would have been different. There would have been a plethora of texts and phone calls instead of the current pronounced silence. Alexia hadn’t tried to contact Jodie because she needed a little more recovery time before she’d trust herself not to say something she might regret, but she could only speculate why Jodie hadn’t got in touch with her. Shame? A sense of grievance? Alexia hadn’t even caught sight of her around the village.

  ‘It’s open!’ Gabe’s voice called. ‘But don’t let any cats in.
’

  Alexia checked the vicinity and could see only one cat, Luke, black with a white paw, and he was on the windowsill of an outhouse, curled up in the sun as if he didn’t intend to move for anything less than an earthquake.

  Assuming Gabe’s caution would prove to concern one of his chickens, brought indoors for attention, she opened the door and stepped carefully into the warmth of the homely kitchen. But it was no chicken that met her with a beady stare. ‘Barney?’ Alexia closed the door behind her as the young owl jumped down from the open door of Gabe’s dishwasher and sidled up to check her out with a flap of his good wing, like a villain swirling his cloak.

  Gabe looked over his silver-rimmed glasses from the paperwork strewn across his kitchen table. ‘I didn’t realise you two had met.’

  Alexia hung her bag on the back of a chair then stooped to let Barney investigate her fingers with his beak, glad Ben didn’t seem to have shared the news of his and Alexia’s encounter with his uncle. ‘Ben let me feed him once. Has Barney moved in with you?’

  Barney lost interest in her and floppety-hopped off to pounce on one of Gabe’s wellies, which stood by the back door. The boot wavered and then toppled onto the floor, causing Barney to flutter quickly clear before spinning round to give the fallen boot an appraising stare.

  ‘He’s just on a weekend break here while his human’s away.’ Gabe shuffled a pile of paper together. ‘If you’d like a cup of tea, feel free to put the kettle on.’

  Alexia took the hint, scooping up the kettle from on top of the range cooker. As she filled it at the tap she searched for a way to ask where Ben had gone without looking too obviously interested. ‘Barney might have liked to be included if Ben’s flown off on his broomstick.’

  Gabe poised his pen thoughtfully over a big pad of lined paper. ‘Wizards fly on the backs of eagles, don’t they? Barney might be intimidated.’ He noted something down then frowned at a column of figures on his pad.