by Judy Astley
‘You can’t start celebrating a wedding too early,’ Sarah said. ‘I can’t tell you how thrilled we are that our first wedding at the hall is going to be Sean and Thea’s. I’m so looking forward to it.’
‘Ah yes, the wedding, that as well. Actually, mostly that. Definitely,’ Mike said as the champagne arrived. The waiter poured it and Anna raised her glass.
‘To Sean and Thea,’ she said. ‘And may it all go as smoothly as these things can. No snow, no storms and tempests and no—’
‘Cold feet,’ Mike finished for her. There was a silence. ‘What? What did I say? I was only joking.’
‘Not that funny,’ Anna said, glaring at him.
‘No really, it is,’ Thea said, laughing. ‘After all, why not say it?’
‘Any cold feet won’t be mine,’ Sean said. ‘Though I’ll feel safer once Thea’s excitedly trying not to tell me about the dress she’s going to wear. There’s last minute and there’s panic stations. We haven’t organized a single thing. But then we can’t think of anything that really needs doing apart from making sure we’ve got enough sausages and buns for the breakfast. And drink, of course, but I’m ordering that through the Cove Manor suppliers.’
‘I might not even wear a dress,’ she teased.
‘Even better,’ he said, grinning at her.
‘Bad man. I mean I might wear trousers, idiot!’
‘Children, children!’ Anna said. ‘Seriously, Thea, do you really still have no idea what you’re going to wear?’
‘Sort of. I’ve got a favourite shop in mind. That’s all I’m saying, apart from of course it won’t be trousers. Oh, and I don’t look good in white, especially in the middle of winter, so that’s out too.’
‘You’ll need to take someone with you. Don’t trust the shop assistants, they’ll just want you to get the most expensive thing and then add a zillion hideous trimmings,’ Sarah said. ‘I nearly ended up with something strapless, gold-sequinned and with a twelve-foot train. I’d have looked like a drag queen having an off day.’
‘Oh, don’t!’ Thea said. ‘Maybe I’ll just turn up in jeans and an old jumper. Strapless needs a woman who’s a bit more … er, woman-shaped than me and I’d be scared of it falling down. Plus it won’t be the weather for it.’
‘Also, it’s rather tarty,’ Paul said. ‘If you don’t mind me saying. And although I think there’s an enormous amount to be said for a bit of the tarty on a bride, it doesn’t look good with goosebumps. You’d freeze when you’re doing photos outside.’
‘How are you getting there? I suppose posh cars are out of the question on Christmas Day,’ Anna said.
‘Ugh, no, definitely not the Rolls-Royce option,’ Thea said. ‘I assume we’ll just go in Sean’s Land Rover. If he cleans it up a bit. Whatever I wear, I don’t want mud all over it.’
‘And flowers?’
‘Ah. Not really a lot about at Christmas, is there? I hadn’t really considered a bridal bouquet,’ Thea said. ‘Evergreens?’
Anna frowned. ‘Well, I suppose flowers are not compulsory but it’s quite nice to have something to do with your hands.’
‘There’ll be Christmas roses out – hellebores – but they tend to droop when picked,’ Sarah said. ‘But better yet, how about narcissi? I’ve got a friend with a flower farm on the Isles of Scilly. They’re sending out hundreds of boxes of them every day by Christmas.’
‘That sounds lovely,’ Paul said, ‘and we could get loads of them to mix in with the evergreens in the orangery. It would be very easy.’
Thea felt uncomfortable, having them all discuss the day. She still felt as if it was all a bit unreal. Too much detailed planning, she thought, and it might still all vanish into nothing like last time. She’d cross her fingers if it didn’t make it impossible to carry on eating. She concentrated on her sea bass instead, letting them all talk around her.
‘So long as there’s mistletoe,’ Sean said to her quietly, ‘our lucky thing.’
She looked up at him and smiled. ‘Exactly. You, me and the mistletoe. Everything else is superfluous really.’
‘And I have a friend with a fabulous Moroccan tent that he said you can borrow for the wedding breakfast.’ Sarah was on a roll now. ‘He said he’ll put it up on the beach below Cove Manor the night before so long as he’s got some help from a few big strong blokes. He’s one of the school dads, Thea – in fact I think you met him the other day. He’s the one who built the climbing frame.’
‘They’re a fabulous lot, aren’t they?’ Thea said. ‘I love the school, absolutely love it. It couldn’t be more different from where I work. The head there even gets cross if a child has the wrong colour socks on. So much for personal expression.’
‘So long as they’re comfortable and safe in what they wear, we don’t mind what it is,’ Sarah said. ‘You get the odd one turning up in a mermaid outfit or as Superman but mostly they wear old clothes that can get filthy. All we insist on is that they have something waterproof. But it’s not all rolling in the mud; we start the day quietly with a little yoga session.’
‘Yoga? For tiny children?’ Anna asked.
‘Yes. It gets them breathing deeply and thoroughly, warms up their bodies and helps them to feel lithe and physically confident. And they have to concentrate quietly while they do it so that’s helpful to put them into a learning mood.’
‘Is that a Steiner thing?’ Mike asked.
‘No, it’s a me-thing!’ Sarah told him. ‘I’ve taken elements from Steiner, Montessori and others and, like on X Factor, I’ve made it my own.’
‘I’d want that for my own children if I had my time over again,’ Anna said. ‘I don’t agree with hot-housing and endless testing. Nobody tests adults every couple of years – why do it to children?’
‘We had tests every month at my primary school,’ Mike told them. ‘We had to sit in class in the positions we’d scored in the tests. So one month I might be near the front but a month or two later I’d be a couple of places back.’
‘Oh God, that’s awful,’ Sean said. ‘What about the children at the bottom of the class? They must know they’re forever going to be over there in a corner at the back. How brutal is that? I wouldn’t want it for our children, at all.’
There was a short silence and Thea realized they were all trying not to say something about whether the two of them would have babies, a silence thankfully interrupted by the waiter with the pudding menu. Sean squeezed her hand under the table and she squeezed his back. One day, she thought, perhaps they might have children enrolled at the Meadow School. Who knew?
‘OK,’ Mike said when the pudding arrived, ‘there’s one more thing we can celebrate.’
‘Are you sure, Mike?’ Anna said. ‘It might still fall through.’
‘What might?’ Thea asked. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Well, we’ve … er … made an offer on a house. And yes I know it’s a bit mad but we liked it and wanted to bagsy it before someone else got in.’
‘What? When? Where?’ Thea was astounded. Her parents had lived in their London home for all her lifetime and quite a bit more. How did you suddenly get to celebrate moving on quite so blithely?
‘“What” is a house overlooking the sea. “When”, yesterday morning, and the “where” bit is not far from here, near Penzance.’
‘Down here? Wow.’ Thea sipped her champagne and tried to absorb the news. ‘But that has to need another question: why?’
Mike shrugged. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. The others don’t know yet so don’t go phoning around, will you, Tee?’
‘No. OK, no, I won’t. I can imagine what Emily will say though. She’ll have complete hysterics and say that it means she’ll never, ever see you again or something.’
‘No she won’t,’ Anna said. ‘Because I want her to understand that it’s to be a house for everyone. It’ll be home for us when we’re not out and about, because that’s what we’re going to be doing, but it’s also a holiday place for th
e rest of you. And it’s easily rentable as a last resort if we need to. If I were the sort of person who says it ticks all the boxes, then I’d say exactly that.’
Outside the restaurant, not much later, Sean and Thea went and sat on a bench overlooking the harbour. It was cold and Thea pulled her scarf up tight around her face. Now the tide was up, over by the harbour entrance a pair of young-teen boys in wetsuits and neoprene hoods were jumping off the steps and into the water, whooping and shouting as they splashed in.
‘Are they crazy?’ she asked. ‘What is it about you lot that you want to leap into freezing-cold water in November?’
‘Habit? Sheer love of the stuff? This is nothing – in the summer there are dozens of kids jumping in. It’s a regular after-school thing. If we …’ He stopped.
‘Go on, if we what?’
‘If we have kids, I was going to say. But I won’t because I don’t want to presume.’
‘To presume I want them or that we’ll be able to?’
He smiled at her. ‘I suppose I don’t want to jinx the chances by mentioning it.’
‘A bit like the wedding,’ she said. ‘Not being over-organized just in case.’
‘That’s the kind of thing.’
‘OK then, let’s just leave it as a kind of “enough said” for now, shall we?’
‘And see what happens?’
‘Exactly.’
Emily exercised a massive amount of self-control and managed to wait till the evening when Milly and Alfie were asleep and Sam was out in the office writing his column. She took the envelope from under its nest of tea towels in the dresser drawer. She hid it beneath her jumper and quickly skipped up the stairs, treading as lightly and silently as she could, as if being found out would be the most disastrous thing ever. Perhaps it would be; for now, with nobody knowing, she could keep her little fantasy going, with no one finding a list of reasons to put her off and tell her it was all a silly nonsense. And those would be the words that were most likely to be used. Sam would say it kindly but slowly and precisely as if she were the same age as Milly and asking for the moon on a stick. Her parents would come up with reasons why it was crazy; they’d be practical and use words like ‘unsettling’ and ‘on a whim’, which, coming from a couple whose plans were to flog the family home and just drift, would be a bit much.
Once safely in her bed, Emily opened the envelope. Of course she’d already seen the house on the internet and looked at the photos, over and over again. She’d seen the little orchard, the sun-flooded terrace with its pots of lavender and the rose arch leading to the broad lawn and then the vegetable garden. Oh, but to touch the glossy photos was so much more sensuous. She stroked her fingers over each one as if she could make the scenes come alive, people the rooms with her family, see Alfie riding his trike on the terrace and watch Milly fishing for frogspawn in the duck pond with the little net she’d used in the rock pools down at Cove Manor last Christmas. The pond would need a fence; that much she’d insist on. A child could drown in inches of water; you heard horror stories.
The house itself was a cottage at its core – at least to look at – but with its loft converted to one long room and bathroom. There were extensions housing a gorgeous family kitchen and utility areas and it didn’t have the low ceilings that she’d always assumed came with that kind of territory. There would be one more bedroom than this current house had but it was the location (as Phil and Kirstie always said) that clinched it. It was centrally placed in a little Wiltshire town, one that had a weekly market, a beautiful old high road, a choice (not a big choice admittedly) of schools. A community. Sam would point out that nowhere was crime-free and he’d be right but they’d be able to breathe good fresh air, keep chickens, maybe ducks for that pond. She’d seen Indian Runners on Countryfile and loved the graceful upright way they ran, all swirling along together like a white-feathered ballet.
‘What’s that you’ve got?’
Emily jumped, abruptly evicted from her reverie by Sam. ‘Oh – er, just something that came in the post.’
‘Can I see?’ Sam sat down on the bed beside her and took the brochure. ‘Wow, you get a lot for your money once you go beyond the M25. Always amazes me why it’s not the other way round.’ He flicked through the pages. ‘So this just casually flopped through the letter box then?’ he asked. ‘Or …?’
Emily looked over to where Ned, for once in his crib, was starting to stir. ‘Or,’ she admitted. ‘I know, I know. It was just a thought.’
‘It’s not a bad thought. I wish you’d shared it with me earlier.’
‘Really? Don’t you think it’s a mad one?’
He shrugged. ‘No, not really. It’s just too far for commuting, but then I don’t commute. You do though.’
‘But I am the office. It can come with me.’
‘You’ve thought this through.’ He looked at the photos again. ‘It’s big enough for weekend visitors. You do know we’d be spending half the time running a sort of bed and breakfast for mates but without the income? Still, they’d bring stuff. Bottles of wine, swanky cheeses that they think we can’t get, prosciutto and fancy veg from Borough Market that’s three times the price it should be.’ He laughed. ‘No, I don’t think it’s a crazy idea at all. But … can it wait till after Christmas? Can we get your sister’s wedding out of the way first?’
‘It might have gone by then,’ Emily pointed out. ‘I want to have Christmas here, like we agreed, but we could just maybe drive down and have a look.’
‘Possibly, but I’d have thought it pretty unlikely by this stage. If it’s not under offer by now, I doubt it’ll be flying off the market before Christmas. People don’t want the hassle of moving at this point, do they? I certainly don’t. Why not give them a call and see what the score is? We’d also need to know what we’d get for this one, though I’ve a pretty good idea. I think the answer would be “way too much for a glorified end-of-terrace”.’
Emily smiled. ‘Location though, you see. Our house would sell in a heartbeat, Christmas or not. If we had an open day there’d be queues. There always are round here.’
‘I’m happy for us to go and look at the cottage,’ Sam told her, sounding serious, ‘but not yet; only if it’s still on the market later. We could call now and let them know you’re interested, but not go till we’re on the way to Thea’s wedding. That would work, wouldn’t it?’
Emily said nothing. There wasn’t anything she could say – she’d set herself up for being trapped in that particular corner. She stroked the glossy picture of the stone front of the house and imagined it was like an advent calendar with tantalizing little windows that she couldn’t yet open. How far was Wiltshire? Surely she didn’t have to go all the way on to Cornwall as part of the deal?
‘Nice try, Sam, but you’re not getting round me that way. I really, really don’t want to spend Christmas in Cornwall and you promised we wouldn’t have to. I’m just too … not ready. Too … scared.’
EIGHTEEN
So what use was that? And he called himself a doctor. Emily, furious, stamped down the steps of the group practice and out into the cold, cuddling Ned in his sling closer to her and pulling his woolly hat further down so it covered the back of his soft little neck. How dare the weather be so damn cold, she thought as she looped her scarf across him for extra warmth. She blamed the season: hated it. Tiny babies needed to be warm, for heaven’s sake, not have evil winter inflicting its worst on them. It felt almost cold enough for snow and that was one thing she, baby Ned and everyone in the world could sodding well do without. Everything felt so very much against her. There was Sam trying to blackmail her into going to Cornwall, Thea so selfishly getting married on bloody Christmas Day of all bastard days, and now her GP – a man she’d known since long before Milly was born, a man she’d counted on to be on her side in all things ‘health’ – was telling her that she was perfectly well. How dare he? She strode across the road at the junction before the green man showed, annoying a woman waiting
with two small children who was loudly instructing them in the fine art of road safety, and she barged in through the door of the pharmacy to get some cream for Ned’s nappy rash. There was a queue at the counter for prescriptions and after she’d found the cream on the shelf, she stood tapping her fingers furiously on the glass countertop, glaring at those who held their precious little prescription slips.
Why couldn’t she have one? She’d looked up on the internet exactly what was safe to take when you were still breastfeeding and had found what she thought would work. It would only be a short course, a few little pills to tide her over, to help her be more bearable to live with so that Sam wouldn’t actually run right out of patience and start to hate her. She wouldn’t blame him if (when?) he did. With her GP’s back-up she could have shown Sam that she’d been right all the time – she really wasn’t well enough to carry on as normal. Not well enough to travel all those miles away at bloody Christmas, to risk leaving the safety and comfort of her own home just to please other people. But no. To be fair, Dr Mackenzie hadn’t laughed at her, hadn’t dismissed her totally. He’d gone through the motions – but then he did that for everyone, even those who’d come in with an immovable splinter. He took her blood pressure, asked her about Ned, admired him even. He asked how the feeding was going and if she was attending the baby clinic and still checking in now and then with the health visitor. She’d tried, truly she had, to get some help, and she answered all his questions like the good mother she was. In exchange all she required was a touch of medication that even Sam thought she needed.
‘Go and see the doc, please, Emily. I’ll drive you there if you can’t face walking round the corner,’ he’d said when she’d flopped at the kitchen table that morning in her dressing gown and with unbrushed hair, too spaced out to deal with Alfie’s spilled Coco Pops. She’d simply stared at the mess as if that would make it clear itself up. Milly hadn’t helped, though she’d tried to, grabbing a roll of kitchen paper and using it to blot the liquid without actually tearing any sheets off so that the whole roll was instantly sodden from outside to centre and no use for anything except for being shoved straight into the recycling.
