A Merry Mistletoe Wedding

by Judy Astley

  Thea, thinking this was possibly too much information about her lovely nephew, took mugs of tea out to Mike and Anna, who were on the garden bench with the Sunday papers. Then she sploshed the remaining dishes about in the sink, and had a quick look out at where Milly and Alfie were lining up some snails they’d found and were trying to make them race across the terrace by waving lettuce leaves at them.

  ‘Are you two OK out there? Do you need anything?’

  ‘A biscuit?’ Milly asked quickly.

  Emily preferred them to have fruit rather than biscuits, Thea knew, but she was their aunt not their mother and, besides, she wanted them to be happy staying overnight with her so they’d want to come again. She wanted to have a baby of her own, but if – and she tried not to think like this, and the doctors had given her no reason to but occasionally it crept up – if that miscarriage had been only the first of several, then she’d want to be the best aunt she could be and at least have the delight of seeing (and helping as far as possible) her sister’s and brother’s children grow up.

  ‘Jammie Dodgers?’ Thea took the packet out of the cupboard and Milly and Alfie skipped into the room looking far more thrilled than ordinary biscuits deserved.

  ‘Yeah! Wow!’ Alfie gasped as if she’d offered him priceless truffles and an array of top-class pâtisserie.

  ‘Mummy says biscuits will break all our teeth and they’ll fall out and we’ll have to eat with our gums and only have horrid soup for ever and ever,’ Milly said, chomping into a biscuit. Thea felt a tiny moment of guilt. Perhaps she should have respected their mother’s views and given them more strawberries instead. There were still some in the fridge so she took them out and put them on a plate with a couple more biscuits each. ‘I’m sure that just for once your teeth will be safe. You can give them an extra good scrub at bedtime.’

  ‘Will we have our new brother or sister before we go to sleep?’ Alfie asked.

  ‘I don’t know, darling. I suppose you might. If it comes, your daddy is going to call to tell us.’

  ‘Will the baby want a biscuit? Should we save one for it?’ he went on.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ Milly gave him a scornful look. ‘Babies don’t eat biscuits. They haven’t grown any teeth yet. They just have juice and stuff.’ She thought for a moment. ‘They have milk. From breasts.’ She looked down and pointed to her own chest.

  ‘Ugh, that’s ’gusting,’ Alfie spluttered.

  The two of them went back outside to line up their snails again, leaving Thea strangely emotional at the thought of Alfie already wanting to include his as-yet-unborn sibling in the biscuit allocation. He was only just six and it seemed so sweet and automatically loving to accept – without question or jealousy or any sense of being displaced as the family baby – that there’d be someone else to consider. When her phone rang, she had to take a few seconds to blow her nose and wipe a silly tear away before answering.

  ‘Did you tell them? What did they say?’ Sean sounded anxious, excited to hear her family’s reaction to their plans. Thea took her phone up to her bedroom and opened the window to let in the scent of the roses that were still blooming generously on her wall. A small chill breeze sneaked into the room, a reminder that although the day had been hot and sunny, autumn was out there, getting closer. It would be almost dark by eight too. In Cornwall, Sean would get half an hour longer of daylight but darker mornings. On some nights in early July, it had hardly seemed to get dark at all there.

  ‘Sorry, Sean, I was desperate to but I didn’t get a chance,’ she told him. ‘I was just starting to tell them, but then at the crucial moment Emily scuppered it by going into labour, so the moment passed and everyone was busy making sure she got off to the hospital OK. As a lead-up, I did slightly mention them all possibly going to Cornwall again at Christmas but Emily was definite that she wasn’t planning on going anywhere but her own home and that she’d hated it last year so I feel a bit up in the air now. I expect it’ll be OK. Somehow.’

  ‘You want her to be here with us though, don’t you?’

  Thea felt a bit choked up all over again, ‘Well, of course I do. How can I get married without my awful grumpy sister being there to be picky about what I’m wearing, about the venue, the flowers, to criticize my hair and so on?’ She sniffed and reached for a tissue from the bedside table. ‘Yes, I want her there. But I’m just being selfish. She’s got more to think about right now than whether to buy a hat or not. I’ve got the children here for the night. Also Mum and Dad are still here being all nervy about Emily. We all are.’

  ‘Of course you are. She’s the priority right now – her and the baby. How’s Sam?’

  ‘Ha, Sam! He’s being pretty cool about it all but in the end he hustled Emily off to the hospital as fast as he could.’

  ‘I’ll be able to come up next weekend. Maybe we can talk to them all then, together. Would that be OK?’

  ‘Oh yes, way more than OK – brilliant! It’s only been a couple of days but I miss you so damn much!’

  ‘And I miss you too, Elf. Is it all right if I bring Woody? I could leave him at a cattery but I think he’d rather be with us.’

  ‘Definitely. I can’t wait to see him again.’

  ‘More than me?’

  ‘Of course. Far more than you!’

  Once back in the kitchen Thea found Anna switching on the kettle for the third time that afternoon and rinsing out the mugs they’d been using.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how old you all get, it’s the default setting of a parent never to stop worrying about their offspring.’

  ‘You could have gone to the hospital with them,’ Mike told her. ‘Sam said he didn’t mind. He even actually invited you.’

  ‘Sam might not mind but I caught the look on Emily’s face when he suggested it. And I can’t say I blame her – I’d have hated my mother being in the room when I was giving birth. She’d probably have told me I was doing it all wrong.’

  ‘You wouldn’t do that with Emily,’ Thea said. ‘And you wouldn’t have needed to go into the actual delivery room.’

  ‘She’d have worried I could hear her. I’d have worried I could hear her. There’s nothing worse than your child being in pain, even if they aren’t far off forty. No, I’ll wait it out. Shall I bath the children? How about making up their beds? I need something to do.’

  ‘The beds are done – I did them yesterday. And Jimi will be back soon with their overnight things. You can read them a bedtime story if you like. I’ve got a heap of books for them.’

  ‘I’ll do that then,’ Anna agreed. ‘I just want to keep busy. Oh, and Thea?’ She turned back just as she was going to round up the children. ‘What was it you were going to tell us? It sounded important.’

  Thea smiled. ‘Oh, it’s fine, it was nothing much,’ she said. ‘Nothing that won’t keep.’

  SIX

  September

  Emily couldn’t stop looking at this strange new tiny person who lay in the transparent plastic crib beside her bed. His plump, pink little face was half-submerged in the clumsily knitted blue blanket that Charlotte had insisted on making for her. ‘I know it’ll be a boy,’ she’d said as she handed it to Emily. ‘So I wasn’t going to bother with some daft neutral just-in-case colour.’ Emily had decided then and there she’d manage to ‘lose’ the blanket somehow, and would wrap her baby in the soft old cream cashmere one she’d had for Alfie – but Sam had put this one in the bag at the last minute and she now found she felt very fond of it. Something handmade, however ineptly (the thing had several dropped stitches and one very wobbly edge), with affection and care could only be full of warmth and love: a baby, all instinct and no knowledge, would surely sense that.

  Emily couldn’t sleep, although she knew she should try to. She was desperate to go home even though it was only 5 a.m. The hospital hadn’t let her go earlier as she’d hoped to because her son had been born at 11 p.m. and the staff insisted on her staying until the morning to be sure all was well with the two
of them.

  One more hour, she couldn’t help thinking as she gazed at him. That’s all it would have taken to get him to 1 September. But whether those sixty minutes had blighted his future chances of getting into a top university eighteen years from today didn’t matter at all at the moment. There he was, all fresh, pink, perfect and asleep. Soon he’d wake for feeding, changing and a lifetime of needing her. No one could not love being needed.

  Like most of her new class, but not quite like the scary-looking shorn-headed little boys, Thea had had her hair cut for the start of the new school year. That Tuesday morning, she’d washed it in the shower, flicked it up, tufted it out and secured bits of it with gel. In the interests of not getting glared at by the traditionalist school head, she’d washed out the few pink and lilac streaks that had jollied it up over the summer, but she still kept it short and spiky as she had since she’d had ten inches cut off after Rich had left her a year ago. It had been a small act of defiance at the time, since he had preferred her with long hair, but she’d decided it suited her far better like this. She could always grow it again in the future when her jawline sagged and she needed something to hide behind.

  ‘Elf,’ she said to herself in the mirror once she’d finished tweaking her hair, but it didn’t sound the same as when Sean said it. Only a day after they’d first met, he’d pulled at one of the sticking-up fronds, laughed and said she looked like a little elf. If a woman had said it, especially one taller than her, she’d have felt patronized. When Sean did, even that first time when they’d barely spoken more than a few sentences to each other, the term simply felt warmly fond.

  The day was hot and still summer-dusty but on the drive to the school Thea passed more than one restaurant and pub that had a board up on the pavement, advertising early-booking terms for office Christmas parties. Not yet, too soon, Thea thought, as she did each September. It felt wrong, all this fast-forwarding too far; it was too much like wishing one’s life away. Still, this year Christmas was something to look forward to – that is, once she had the family onside. Otherwise, well, she and Sean might as well elope. They could run off to get married among hotel strangers on a tropical beach somewhere. She didn’t fancy that at all, though she could imagine many would. However glorious and sunny the weather, for her there’d be something cold and a bit sad about having no one from home to celebrate with.

  ‘Hey, welcome back to the madhouse,’ Thea’s friend Jenny greeted her as she walked into the school’s staffroom. ‘Did you have a good summer?’

  ‘Pretty much perfect, thank you. The only downside was coming home.’

  Jenny laughed. ‘So it’s all going well then. You two are still at the icky romantic stage. Yuck!’

  There was still time for a mug of tea before facing her new class and the onslaught of anxious mothers ushering them in, each one of them wanting ‘a word’. Thea had already thoroughly checked reports on her incomers from their previous class teacher – one child was a selective mute (although not in the playground), another was terrified of birds and there was one who couldn’t be separated from his toy giraffe, a stuffed animal that was almost as big as he was. There’d be several more with problems – imagined or otherwise – whose parents hadn’t mentioned them before but who were sure to think that day one of the new school year was the perfect moment, so a bit of fortifying wouldn’t go amiss.

  ‘We seem to be. And, er, well, actually, guess what …!’ And Thea couldn’t help herself: having failed to tell her news at the weekend, it was just dying to break free. ‘We’re getting married!’ It was safe enough to tell Jenny; her family weren’t likely to run into her any time soon, so no chance of it getting back to them on any gossip grapevine.

  ‘Wow, you don’t hang about. Congratulations!’ Jenny gave her a hug. ‘So when? Next summer?’

  ‘No, not summer. We thought Christmas would be good. It sort of goes with how we met, you know? I always think we had such a lot of help from the magic of a massive bunch of mistletoe, so it feels like the perfect time to do it. The day we met, Sean asked me to sneak out after dark on a secret mission to get a huge bunch of the stuff. I had to hold the ladder while he went up and cut some down. He got spooked by an owl and nearly came crashing down.’

  ‘Bit bloody lucky for you that he didn’t then. So, Christmas next year? Great idea.’

  ‘No, this Christmas. No point in waiting, is there? Neither of us are teenagers or anything.’

  ‘This Christmas? Like, only about fifteen weeks away?’ Jenny stared at her, wide-eyed and with her mouth a bit gapey. Thea fought an urge to reach forward and push it shut.

  ‘Well … yes. Why not? What’s to wait for? Now we’ve decided, we just want it to happen, as soon as possible!’

  ‘Why not? Thea, do you have any idea how much planning a wedding takes? There are so many things to consider. My cousin had a whole website and database thing full of plans and projects when she got married. She had a huge fat folder just for napkin options for the reception.’

  ‘Oh, but I do know. Remember I started organizing one before, when I was with Rich? It was his idea to have some chintzy hotel reception and everyone done up in morning dress and so on. That is till he changed his mind about that and about me. I don’t want anything like that this time round. Definitely not. We only want a teeny event, nothing mad, definitely nothing elaborate. I hate a massive fuss. I want just Sean and me and a few others. That would feel just right. I can see it now, all soft light and evergreens, muted colours – no glary white frock or anything.’ Thea poured the boiling water into two mugs. Jenny was looking as if she could use one as well.

  ‘Well, you say that but there’s still your dress to consider, the reception, bridesmaids, their dresses, catering, cars, invitations. It’s why there are things called wedding planners.’

  Thea handed Jenny her tea and laughed. ‘Oh, Jen, we won’t need all that faffing about. It’s going to be a family thing in Cornwall. I can find a dress easily enough. It’s not as if I’m planning on a fairy-tale outfit of feathers and white velvet. Just something … lovely. I’ll give it some thought, obviously. But I’m not the fairy-princess type – it won’t be from a wedding shop kind of thing, not this time. Been there, done that. It wasn’t me.’

  ‘If you get stuck, I could help find one or has your sister volunteered for that?’

  Ah – the cloud in the perfect blue sky. Thea could almost feel a real one passing between her and the sun. ‘No – Emily has just had a baby, on Sunday. I had the family round for lunch and she went into labour as I was about to tell them about the wedding plans. So the announcement never actually happened, what with everyone rushing round making sure Emily and Sam got off OK. And that’s fine and as it should be. But it means I haven’t actually quite told them yet.’

  ‘Oh – that sounds a bit sad. Lovely about the baby, obviously, but it’s a shame you didn’t get to make the announcement. Still, they’ll know soon enough and they’ll be thrilled for you. After all, what’s not to look forward to?’

  ‘Well, that’s the slight fly and ointment thing. The one thing Sean and I really want is to get married down in Cornwall because of it being where we met and because we want to involve the sea and the beach for after the ceremony. And there’s the fabulous accommodation for everyone too, right there. We can even get Christmas Day itself for the ceremony, in this place called Pentreath Hall which belongs to his friends Paul and Sarah, and that’ll be fabulous. But the one thing Emily said she would absolutely not do this year is have Christmas anywhere but at her own home.’

  ‘I can’t not sympathize, to be honest. New baby, small children and all that,’ Jenny said, finishing her tea and rinsing her mug. The staffroom was filling up now with post-summer conversations and a welcome to two new staff members.

  ‘I know. I can understand how she feels. I don’t want to have our wedding without Emily being there but I don’t know how to change her mind, or if I should even try. Maybe we should change our plans rat
her than expect her to go along with us? But it would be so exactly what we’d love and Sean said he’s kind of booked the venue now, though I suppose it could be unbooked …’

  ‘I’d leave it for the moment,’ Jenny advised. ‘When it comes to it, she won’t want not to be there for you, will she? And she might get over the travelling thing once she knows the reason for going.’

  ‘I hope so. I really do. But I can’t be sure,’ Thea said. ‘Other priorities and so on. Anyway, into the fray – let’s meet this year’s tiny terrors.’

  Anna got off the bus in Chiswick and went across the road and up a side street to the address she’d written in her diary. It was Miriam’s turn to host the book group and she’d managed to get everyone to agree to an afternoon meeting instead of the more usual evening ones. ‘We’ll have tea and scones,’ she’d promised, but Anna had brought a bottle of white wine as that was what they usually had at their meetings and sometimes, given how heated the discussion could get, you just needed something calming. It was surprising how vehement people could get over whether Jane Eyre was a put-upon mouse or deep down a scheming gold-digger.

  She felt slightly nervous, even though she was 90 per cent sure Alec wouldn’t be there. He wasn’t a book-group member but he was Miriam’s son, lived fairly nearby and might have called in for a quick visit. In her head, Anna practised being casual about seeing him again. It would be the first time since Christmas, when he’d mistaken a flippant remark of hers for an actual invitation to join them all in Cornwall. OK, he’d been, briefly, her good-fun lover, but what on earth had he been thinking of, arriving out of the blue like that? He knew she was still married, even though – back then – she and Mike had been planning a divorce and were going through a bit of a play-act that involved pretending they didn’t mind each other having other relationships.