Twelve Days of Christmas

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘I wish I had Lady here,’ he said at one point, and then later murmured, as if to himself, ‘and I wish you would take your clothes off!’

  ‘I bet you do, but it ain’t gonna happen! Look, Jude, I’ve gone numb down one side, so can I move now? I must have been standing here for hours.’

  ‘Oh. . yes, I suppose you have,’ he said, blinking at me as if he’d forgotten I was an animate object, with a voice and a lot of opinions. ‘I think I’ve got enough to make a start.’

  ‘On a sculpture?’ I climbed down slightly stiffly and fetched the flask of coffee I’d had the foresight to bring with me.

  ‘Yes, but I’ll make a maquette or two, first.’

  ‘Maquette?’

  ‘A small three-dimensional study, exploring ideas.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We’ll see if Lady will oblige with the same pose without the rug when she comes in later and then I can take a few more pictures. And I’ll need you down here again tomorrow.’

  He came and sat next to me on the wooden edge of the model’s dais and I handed him a plastic mug of coffee and a mince pie from a plastic box.

  ‘I can hardly wait,’ I said politely. ‘It wasn’t so bad, was it?’ he asked, sounding surprised. He was close enough so I could see all the fascinating little specks of gold — probably fool’s gold — suspended in his molasses-dark eyes.

  ‘Well, no. .’ I admitted, ‘though I thought you were only going to do one or two quick sketches, not dozens.’

  ‘You’re going to be immortalised in brazed and welded steel for posterity,’ he promised, which has to be the best offer of any kind I’ve had for a long, long time — and certainly one up on the popcorn and Coke Sam bought me the time we went to the pictures.

  ‘Where’s Merlin?’ he asked.

  ‘I left him up at the house. I wasn’t sure if he was allowed in the studio or not.’

  ‘Yes, he always comes with me, unless lured away by visiting dryads,’ he said wryly and then we sat there silently, but fairly companionably, drinking our coffee and eating mince pies.

  ‘Sorry I bit your head off earlier, I was upset about something,’ I said eventually.

  ‘That’s okay — anything you want to share?’

  I looked away from his enquiring eyes and shook my head firmly. ‘The others have gone into the attic to look for costumes for the play,’ I said, changing the subject. ‘The way Coco’s carrying on, we’ll end up having to act out our parts too, though in my case I’ll have to read the lines, because I won’t have time to learn them by heart.’

  ‘I don’t know them by heart either: it used to be Becca, Tilda and Noël who did most of the reading. At least it doesn’t take long, because not only is it quite a short play, but Noël’s edited out all the slapstick and Malvolio stuff and filled in with a brief linking summary,’ he said, then glanced at me from under his heavy dark brows and added, his already thrillingly deep voice going even lower, ‘But if we act them out, then I expect I can manage a few appropriate actions.’

  The corner of his straight mouth quirked up again, but I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that, since most of his actions towards me so far have been highly inappropriate, like dragging me into his bedroom on Christmas Eve!

  Jude came back to the house with me and we went round through the stableyard, where we found that Becca had just brought the horses in and started grooming Nutkin.

  ‘I was playing hide and seek with the others, but me and Tilda got spotted first, behind the sitting-room curtains,’ she said. ‘One of my feet was sticking out. They’d found everyone except Coco when I thought I’d better do the horses, so I left them to it. She’s so skinny, she probably slipped between a crack in the floorboards.’

  ‘That’s a slight exaggeration, but she is worryingly thin now,’ Jude said.

  ‘I’m thinking about confiscating her laxatives,’ I confessed. ‘I don’t want her to waste away while I’m doing the cooking and have her on my conscience.’

  ‘Even if you do, she’ll probably just go back to them when she leaves,’ he pointed out.

  ‘Perhaps, but at least I’ll have tried.’

  Jude removed Lady’s rug and took some more pictures of me standing with her, though I declined to take my wellies off this time, even if I did reluctantly part with my anorak. He even drew a couple of quick sketches, though the light wasn’t exactly brilliant in there and Lady kept trying to nibble the edges of the paper.

  ‘You’re a muse now,’ Becca said, pausing in her steady brush-strokes. ‘I’ve read about artists and their muses, you need to watch yourself!’ And she laughed heartily.

  Luckily I don’t think Jude took in what she’d said, because he seemed to have mentally retired to his own little Planet Zog again, closing his sketchbook and walking off to the house without another word to either of us.

  We exchanged a look and then I put my anorak back on and started to groom Lady, which has to be one of the best arm-toning exercises going.

  When I went into the house a little while later, Coco was still missing and they were getting anxious about her.

  ‘I can’t think where she’s got to,’ Guy said. ‘We’ve even looked in the attic, which was supposed to be out of bounds, but there’s no sign of her anywhere.’

  ‘Did you check to see if her coat and hat were missing? She might have gone outside,’ I suggested.

  ‘Yes, I thought of that,’ Michael said, ‘but they’re still there. I don’t think she’d have stayed out very long anyway, it’s too cold. And she’s not exactly the hillwalking type, so she won’t have got lost.’

  ‘No, I just thought she might have had a sudden impulse to set out for the village, but obviously not.’

  ‘Did you look in all the chests and trunks?’ asked Tilda from the sofa, where she was comfortably reclining while watching the hunt. ‘Only I suddenly remembered that story about the bride playing hide and seek on her wedding day and vanishing, only for them to find her skeleton in a chest years later.’

  Noël looked very struck by this. ‘Of course! It’s just the sort of silly thing she would do — and there are two or three in the attic, as well as the sandalwood chest on the landing.’

  Guy, Jude and Michael dashed upstairs, but I couldn’t myself see Coco squeezing herself into a trunk. ‘Did you check the cellars?’ I asked Jess.

  ‘Yes, and the utility room and everywhere else I could think of. Come on, let’s go up the backstairs and see if they’ve found her yet.’

  I followed her upstairs, stopping to check the wardrobe in my room and Michael’s and the linen cupboard between them. And then suddenly I remembered Noël telling me there was another door at the top of the staircase, leading to a stairway to the unused servants’ rooms in the smaller attic over this wing. It was in a dark corner, easy to miss, but from behind it came a faint scrabbling and a wavering cry of, ‘Help! Heeelp!’

  ‘Coco? It’s all right, we’ll have you out of there in a minute,’ I called, tugging at the handle, which wouldn’t budge. ‘Quick, Jess, go and get your Uncle Jude and the others, I can’t shift this.’

  Jude could, though, and with one mighty wrench it creaked open, revealing a tearstained, pallid figure huddled on the bottom stairs.

  He picked her up as if she weighed nothing and she clung to him whimpering, ‘I thought no-one would ever find me and I was going to be there forever! And I went upstairs to see if there was another way out and something big and white flapped at me!’

  Shuddering she turned her face into his shoulder as he stroked her hair and said gently, ‘It’s all right, Coco, I’ve got you now.’

  At that moment I felt a sudden pang of something that I feared might be jealousy: I had never been held so tenderly in someone’s arms as if I was feather-light and fragile! (Alan would have fallen over, had he tried.)

  ‘You’d better put her on her bed,’ Guy suggested. ‘Come on, Coco, you’re safe now and we would have found you eventually.’

&nbs
p; ‘I hadn’t even noticed that door was there,’ Michael said.

  ‘Noël told me about it and I suddenly remembered. But Guy’s right and she ought to go and lie down for a bit. Someone make her a hot drink and I’ll sit with her.’

  ‘Guy can do that while I check for the mysterious ghostly thing,’ Michael said. ‘If I vanish, you know where I am!’

  I followed after Jude, who had laid Coco down on her bed and was now attempting to detach her arms from their death grip around his neck.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ he said to me with some relief.

  ‘Guy’s making her a hot drink and Michael’s gone to see what frightened her in the attic.’

  ‘Oh, it was horrible, swooping at me out of the darkness!’ Coco shuddered, reaching for Jude again, though he was now out of reach.

  Guy brought a mug of tea and said, ‘I’ve told the others we’ve found her and Michael says there was a pigeon up there — one of the windows is broken — so that must be what flew at you.’

  Coco sat up and took the mug, pleased if anything with all the attention she was getting and starting to look a lot better. ‘Is there sugar in this?’ she asked after a sip.

  ‘Sweetener,’ Guy said, though I was sure he was lying. He exchanged a look with Jude and they both made their escape, while I seized the moment to give Coco a good lecture on the danger to her health from guzzling laxatives like sweets. She took it like a chided little girl and I felt about a century older and quite mean by the time I’d finished.

  Then I removed her stash of Fruity-Go from the bedside table. ‘I know you’ve got more in your handbag, but I suggest you ration yourself to a normal dose every day until you run out, then stop them altogether. If you eat small, sensible meals, you’ll be fine, you really don’t need them.’

  ‘And you won’t tell Mummy, will you?’ she asked, since I had used this as a threat, without any intention of carrying it out. ‘Only she’ll have me locked up in some ghastly addiction clinic!’

  I agreed that no, I wouldn’t do that, before carrying away my spoils and flushing them straight down the nearest loo. It took several flushes before they all vanished.

  Coco came down later in a slightly chastened and quiet frame of mind, but soon showed signs of reviving since everyone was being nice to her, in their own way. She’d brought her handbag with her and kept a firm grip on it at all times, so she was obviously afraid I would change my mind and empty that of laxatives, too!

  After supper, Jess showed me the long satin dress she’d picked out for me, which was not only a fairly sickly shade of salmon pink, but about twelve inches too short, though apparently for most of the play I would be disguised as a man anyway.

  Coco had appropriated a white dress in which she looked like an emaciated bride and Jess herself wore a crown made of papiermâché and glass jewels. She’d been wearing it to supper, too.

  ‘I just like it,’ she explained. ‘I don’t have to have a real costume since I’m only Props, though Michael said that’s one of the most important jobs in the theatre. I have to make sure everyone is dressed for their parts at the right time, with all the things they need.’

  ‘I think you’d better wear a man’s overcoat until the end of the play, where you’re revealed as Sebastian’s sister — there’s one hanging up in the hall. Your boobs are way too big,’ Coco said to me, making me immediately sorry I’d been kind to her earlier — but I expect now she was feeling better she was getting a bit of her own back about the Fruity-Go.

  ‘I find myself unable to second that opinion,’ Guy said and I gave him a cold look.

  ‘Holly’s in perfect proportion,’ Jude said. ‘I should know, because I’ve spent most of the afternoon drawing her.’

  I wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed about having my figure discussed in this way, or take this remark as a compliment.

  ‘She’s too tall though, even for a model,’ Coco objected.

  Jude looked slightly surprised. ‘Do you think so? She seems about the right height to me.’

  ‘I am perfect, all the top designers say so,’ Coco said.

  ‘Well, it’s a strange world and it takes all sorts!’ Noël said cheerfully. ‘Now, what did we find for Jude to wear in the play?’

  ‘Just this dark blue velvet cloak,’ Jess said. ‘And a sword and moustache.’

  ‘I don’t mind wearing the cloak, but I draw the line at stick-on moustaches,’ Jude said firmly.

  ‘I daresay he could grow one by tomorrow if you insisted on it,’ Tilda remarked from the sofa in front of the fire. I think that might have been a slight exaggeration. . maybe two days.

  Guy went back to the half-finished jigsaw, though going by his expression, it annoyed him that I had stuck a couple more pieces in earlier. He gave me a suspicious stare that reminded me strongly of his brother.

  We pulled chairs into a half-circle near the Christmas tree, ready to read through our parts for the first time, but first Noël gave us a brief run-down of the plot and the characters we would be playing.

  ‘Orsino, Duke of Illyria — that’s you, Jude — is in love with Olivia, played by Coco.’

  ‘“If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it; that, surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die,”’ declaimed Tilda thrillingly from the sofa.

  ‘Precisely, m’dear,’ Noël said. ‘Now, Sebastian and his twin sister Viola — you and Michael, Holly — are shipwrecked. Viola thinks her brother is dead, so she disguises herself as a man, and takes service with Orsino, as Cesario.’

  ‘All this cross-dressing must have been even stranger in Shakespeare’s time, when Viola would have been played by a young boy, playing a woman, disguised as a man,’ Michael said, with a grin.

  ‘I’m glad I don’t have to pretend to be a man, I’d never pull it off,’ Coco said. ‘Olivia is a ravishingly beautiful countess, but she doesn’t fancy Orsino.’

  ‘That’s one interpretation,’ Jude said. ‘But she’s certainly not very bright, because when Orsino sends Viola/Cesario to woo her, dressed as a man, she falls in love with her.’

  I was feeling confused already and Coco frowned, ‘I’m not too keen on that bit, can’t we change it?’

  ‘I think we ought to leave it as the Bard put it, m’dear,’ Noël said, ‘it’s integral to the plot. So basically,’ he continued, ‘Viola falls in love with Orsino, who thinks she is a boy. Olivia falls in love with Viola, ditto, Orsino thinks he loves Olivia, and Sebastian isn’t really dead, he’s on his way there with his friend Antonio.’

  ‘Then it all comes to a head with lots of misunderstandings and mistaken identities, until finally Sebastian is married to Olivia and Orsino decides he’ll settle for Viola.’

  ‘But only if she looks good in a dress,’ Jude remarked, with a sideways look at me, but I didn’t rise to the bait.

  We read it through aloud, with a bit of good-natured heckling by Becca and Tilda. Luckily, I didn’t seem to have too many soppy things to say to or about Jude/Orsino, since he doesn’t know Viola isn’t a boy until right near the end. It was a bit embarrassing when Coco had to pretend she was in love with me as Cesario, though. .

  Michael’s scenes with Olivia were also towards the end, when all the tangles get cut, but she still seemed dead set on getting him alone on the pretext of rehearsing them, a move he was clearly determined to resist to the death! I couldn’t work out if Coco had fallen for Michael (which wouldn’t be a surprise, since he’s very handsome, in a slightly drawn and haggard way), or simply saw him as a stepping stone to an acting career; but she’d certainly abandoned any claim on Guy and was going all out on a charm offensive.

  Meanwhile Guy still persisted in trying to flirt with me and the fact that he wasn’t getting anywhere increasingly appeared to puzzle him. He followed me into the kitchen later when I went to make cocoa for those who wanted it, which was just me, Jude and Jess, because the rest of the party were hitting the sherry or the hard stuff again.

  ‘You know,
I really like you, Holly,’ he said, ‘and I want to get to know you better. But let’s face it, I’m getting nowhere, am I? Why is that — am I too shallow, or don’t you like the colour of my socks?’

  ‘You simply aren’t my type.’ I was clattering pans and cutlery into the dishwasher for one final go of the day.

  ‘No? That’s strange, because I’ve always considered myself a universally appealing one-size-fits-all type,’ he said modestly.

  ‘Not as far as I’m concerned: and my gran would have said you were all mouth and trousers.’

  ‘Is that good?’

  ‘No. Don’t forget that I’ve seen first-hand that you’re a total love-rat, too — and everyone says you’re just like your Uncle Ned, who abandoned one poor girl when she was pregnant because he was already engaged to another at the time,’ I said acidly. ‘So no, I don’t think you’d be much of a proposition, even if I believed you were serious and not just being daft.’

  He sighed. ‘You’ve got me all wrong. . but I’ll change your mind. Till then, couldn’t you try and like me?’

  ‘I do a bit, sometimes,’ I admitted. ‘You can be quite funny.’

  ‘I’m not sure if that’s good or not. But the right woman would be the making of me, Tilda says so — and you look a bit of all right to me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought anything short of a frontal lobotomy would change you,’ I said dubiously, ‘but then, she knows you better than I do.’

  He laughed. ‘I wish now I hadn’t let Jude take my place as Orsino. He’s going to get all the hands-on action.’

  ‘There won’t be any hands-on action and I only agreed to do this stupid play to keep your wretched girlfriend in good humour, so she didn’t ruin Christmas for everyone else. . and to cheer her up a bit, because I felt sorry for her.’

  ‘She’s not my girlfriend anymore and she’s already got her sights on Michael to fill the vacancy. He’s proving surprisingly resistant to her charms, though, just as you are to mine.’

  ‘Yes, that’s because he’s not daft, either.’

  ‘Or perhaps because he’s got other interests?’