The Magic of Christmas

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘It’s always Jasper, isn’t it?’ he said pettishly.

  ‘You should be pleased because he’s your son too, whatever mad ideas you’ve got in your head. But I’m not playing your games any more, Tom — you can believe what you like.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Jasper’s the spitting image of Nick, my dear old no-blood-relation cousin — and don’t forget I caught you in each other’s arms at the hospital when Jasper was ill.’

  ‘I’ve told you repeatedly that he was just comforting me — and you could have been doing that, if I’d been able to get hold of you! But I conceived Jasper practically as soon as we’d got married and I never even looked at Nick in that way — or any other man! No, there’s another obvious reason why both you and Jasper look like Pharamonds, only you’d rather believe ill of me than your mother!’

  ‘We’ll leave my mother out of this,’ he said, that ugly look in his eyes. ‘But the sooner you clear out, the better.’ Turning back towards his board he said dismissively, ‘Fetch me a beer out will you? There’s some in the fridge.’

  ‘Fetch it yourself. I didn’t come out here to wait on you. Oh, and here’s a restaurant bill from Leila. I only hope the meal was worth it!’

  ‘What?’ He swung round and snatched it from me, glanced at it and then looked up suspiciously. ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘Nick called by early this morning. You left Leila’s without paying the bill, and she wants her money.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think this is Leila’s idea,’ he said, crumpling the bill into a ball and tossing it into a corner. ‘I’ve already paid her — in kind. Bed and board. So now you know, and presumably Nick also knows.’

  ‘Suspects, perhaps … but … Leila can’t possibly be “Dark Heart”!’ I blurted.

  He took a menacing step towards me. ‘What do you know about Dark Heart?’

  ‘I found a bit of a note in your pocket when I was sorting the washing, but it didn’t sound like Leila,’ I said, standing my ground.

  ‘It isn’t,’ he said shortly. ‘It’s someone else … someone more conveniently local, who’s prepared to please me in ways you wouldn’t have, even if I’d asked, dearest wife.’

  ‘Is it someone I know, Tom? And Leila — was that a one-off? She isn’t the woman you’ve been having an affair with since before Jasper was ill, is she?’

  He didn’t reply, just smiled rather unpleasantly. I hoped he hadn’t been running two of them in tandem even then. But someone local … who could it be?

  Oh God, he hadn’t got drunk and started an affair with that drippy girl who played the electric violin and sang in the Mummers, had he? I’d noticed she hadn’t been able to look me in the eye for months, but thought she’d maybe been one of his one-night flings. Evidently, he wasn’t going to tell me anyway.

  I thought of something else. ‘Where’s your van?’

  ‘It broke down in a lay-by about twenty miles away. I had to get the garage to bring it in — think the gearbox’s had it. Now, any more questions? Only I need to finish this board because I’m off down to Cornwall at the weekend to deliver it, assuming the van’s fixed by then.’

  I stared at him, thinking how normal a monster could look.

  ‘If you aren’t leaving immediately, you could make yourself useful and fetch that beer,’ he suggested.

  ‘Fetch it yourself! I’m going for a walk in the woods to think all this over, and then later I’ve got a Mystery Play Committee meeting, the first of the year,’ I said, and saw a flash of anger in his eyes.

  As I left I heard the music restart, and the hissing of the spray.

  Outside I practically fell over Polly Darke, our local purveyor of stirring Regency romances — and I use the term ‘Regency’ very loosely, since she never let historical facts come between her and the story. She gave me one of them once and I noticed the words ‘feisty’ and ‘lusty’ appeared on practically every page to describe the heroine and hero.

  And now I came to think of it, she never let facts come between her and a modern story either, since she was always snooping about under one pretext or another, and twisting things she saw and heard into malicious gossip. Divorced, she had lived in her hacienda-style bungalow between Middlemoss and Mossedge for several years, and I’m sure was convinced that she was accepted everywhere as a local.

  While I didn’t suppose she could have heard anything much through a wooden door, that wouldn’t prevent her from spreading lurid rumours about me and Tom around the three villages by sundown.

  She was looking her usual strange self, in a severely truncated purple Regency-style dress, and with her hair cropped and dyed a dense, dead black. She clutched a small blue plastic basket of field mushrooms to her artificially inflated bosom, which might or might not be a fashion statement — are plastic baskets currently a must-have accessory?

  Apart from the kohl-edged eyes and puffy, fuchsia-pink lips (which reminded me, strikingly, of a baboon’s bottom), her face was pale as death. Paler.

  ‘Oh, Polly, are you all right?’ I asked. ‘You haven’t been eating your own home-bottled tomatoes or anything like that, have you?’

  From time to time she fancied herself as the Earth Mother type and tried her hand at jams, chutneys and bottled goods, which she then gave to all and sundry, in my case together with a generous dose of botulism or something equally foul. Just my luck to get that one!

  ‘Oh, no, I haven’t had time for any of that, Lizzy — I’ve got a book to finish, you know.’

  ‘Yes, Senga does like you to keep them coming, doesn’t she?’

  Having fallen out with two agents and three publishers, Polly had been taken on by my own agent, Senga McDonald — and may the best woman win.

  Her dark eyes slid curiously to the closed workshop door and back to my face. ‘I thought I heard raised voices — is everything OK with you and Tom? Only sometimes lately you haven’t seemed entirely happy, and you know you can always depend on me if you need a shoulder to cry on.’

  Oh, yes, but only if I kneel down first, I thought, as she smiled at me in a horribly pseudo-sympathetic sort of way.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said shortly. ‘We were just discussing business. Were you looking for me?’

  She gave a start. ‘Oh, yes. I picked loads of mushrooms in the paddock this morning early and I thought you might like to swap them for some quail eggs? But if it’s inconvenient, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, not at all. I’m just off for a walk, but you know where they are in the small barn? Help yourself and leave the mushrooms there,’ I told her, and walked off, not caring whether she thought me rude or not. When she first moved to Middlemoss she went all out to be my best friend, but we had absolutely nothing in common (apart from Senga). Anyway, I already have a best friend in Annie.

  Nor, it occurred to me, was she the type to skip about the fields at dawn gathering mushrooms, which in any case looked suspiciously like shop-bought ones, small, clean and perfectly formed. My marzipan mushrooms looked earthier than those!

  I headed for the woods, for I found their dark, cool depths wonderfully soothing, especially on a hot day. They restored a sense of my unimportance in the great scale of things, shrinking my problems down to a more manageable, acorn size.

  Luckily I was wearing a pinky-red T-shirt, so Caz would spot me if I strayed onto the smaller paths he stalked so relentlessly. But if he was out there with his gun, he didn’t make himself known. He’s not much of a talker in any case; but then, most of his dealings are with squirrels, so he doesn’t need to be.

  After a while I found my thoughts turning away from more painful subjects onto the comforting one of food, wondering which member of the Christmas Pudding Circle would come up with the best recipe for brandy butter ice cream.

  More than likely it would be Faye, since she’s a farmer’s wife who has diversified by opening a farm shop and café, where she sells her own home-made organic ice cream. She was already perfecting a Christmas-pudding-flavoured one.


  Eventually, as the shadows lengthened, I reluctantly had to turn for home, even though I dreaded seeing Tom again. But there was no need: he wasn’t there and, more to the point, neither was my car.

  Come to that, even the punnet of mushrooms Polly Darke had presumably left had vanished into thin air, though possibly Caz had been around and fancied them. He knows he can help himself to anything edible he can find, though it seemed a bit greedy to take them all. (He keeps the freezer I gave him locked, so goodness knows what’s in there. Better not to know, perhaps?)

  I searched for a note saying where Tom and my car had gone to, but there was nothing. Unless he came back by the time I returned from the Mystery Play Committee meeting, Jasper was going to have to cycle home that evening, and I would be extremely annoyed.

  I fed, watered and generally cared for everything that needed my attention, then changed and set off for the village hall — on foot.

  Chapter 5: Sweet Mysteries

  The Mystery Play Committee will reconvene on the 19th of August with rehearsals to start in September as usual. If any member of last year’s cast cannot for any reason continue in their role, would they please inform Marian and Clive Potter at the Middlemoss Post Office.

  Mosses Messenger

  The members of the Middlemoss Mystery Play Committee were gathered around a trestle table in the village hall, which exhibited reminders of its many functions: the playgroup’s brightly coloured toys poked out from behind a curtained alcove and their finger-painting decorated one wall, while the other bore posters of footprints illustrating the various new steps the Senior Citizens’ Tuesday Tea Dance Club were trying to master.

  Personally, I thought salsa might give one or two of them a bit of trouble, but I was sure they would all give it a go. Their line dancing ensemble at the last Christmas concert had been a big hit, and Mrs Gumball, the cook up at Pharamond Hall, had got so excited she fell off the end of the stage. But fortunately foam playmats were always stacked there after an incident a few years back, when one of Santa’s little elves fell over, causing a domino effect along the line until the last one dropped off and broke a leg.

  ‘I think we might as well start, Clive,’ I suggested to the verger, opening the plastic box of Choconut Consolations I’d brought with me and setting it in the middle, so everyone could help themselves. ‘I don’t know where Annie’s got to, but Uncle Roly’s gone to the races. He said after all these years he could do the Voice of God in his sleep, so you could sort it all out without him.’

  This year’s committee was formed of the usual suspects; some of them also CPC members. There was Dr Patel, our semi-retired GP, Miss Pym the infants’ schoolteacher, the new vicar — untried and untested and looking more than a little nervous — and Clive and Marian Potter, who between them ran the post office, the Mosses Messenger parish magazine and also pretty well everything else that happened round Middlemoss, including directing the annual Mysteries. Then there was my humble self, for Clive liked to have a token Pharamond on tap, since Uncle Roly was inclined to give his duties the go-by if something more interesting came along. Annie was presumably held up somewhere.

  ‘Very well. I’ve convened this meeting earlier than usual for two reasons,’ announced Clive, who is like a busy little ant, always running to and fro. Marian is the same, and I have a theory that they never sleep, just hang by their heels for the odd ten minutes to refresh themselves, like bats. Come to that, they’re so in tune with one another they have probably leaped up the next rung of the evolutionary ladder and communicate in high-pitched squeaks us mere bog-standard humans can’t hear.

  ‘First off, I thought the vicar might need a bit more time to get to grips with the Mysteries, it all coming as a bit of a surprise to him, like.’

  The vicar, a carrot-haired, blue-eyed man with a naturally startled expression, nodded earnestly: ‘But I’m delighted, of course — absolutely delighted.’

  I wondered if anyone had warned him that the last vicar was currently having a genteel nervous breakdown in a church nursing home near Morecambe. An elderly man, he’d been hoping for a quiet country living, I feared, where he could jog along towards his retirement, not the whirl of activity that is the Mosses parish. But at least the new one was younger and unmarried. I observed with interest the way he suddenly went the same shade as his hair when Annie, breathless and dishevelled, rushed into the room.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, subsiding into the seat next to me. ‘One of the dogs slipped its lead and was practically in Mossrow before I caught him.’

  She smiled apologetically around at everyone and, apart from the vicar, who was still looking poleaxed, we smiled back, since Annie is Goodwill to all Mankind personified. Even though I’m her best friend, I have to admit that she is a plump, billowy person the approximate shape of a cottage loaf and, although her hair is a beautiful coppery colour, that pudding-bowl bob does not do her amiable round face any favours. She certainly doesn’t normally cause men to go red and all self-conscious …

  ‘We were only just starting,’ I assured her. ‘Clive’s called the meeting to familiarise the vicar—’

  ‘Do all call me Gareth,’ he interrupted eagerly, finding his voice again, but I expect most of us will just carry on addressing him as ‘Vicar’ because we are nothing if not traditionalists in Middlemoss.

  ‘And you must call me KP,’ said Dr Patel agreeably, ‘like the nuts.’

  ‘And I’m Lizzy,’ I put in hastily, seeing Gareth’s puzzled expression at KP’s old joke. ‘You’ve already met Annie, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. ‘At church.’

  He was just Annie’s type and clearly smitten, but she didn’t seem to notice!

  ‘Perhaps we’d better get on?’ suggested Clive. ‘Only the Youth Club will be in here tonight for snooker, and I’ll need to set the tables up. First, could you all please read this quote from a recently published book.’

  He passed round a bundle of photocopies.

  Although called the Middlemoss Mysteries, this surviving vestige of a medieval mystery play, annually performed in an obscure Lancashire village, is in reality a much debased form. At some point in its history it was reduced to a mere series of tableaux illustrating several key Biblical scenes, such as the Fall of Lucifer, Adam and Eve and the Nativity. Then, early last century what little dialogue remained was rendered into near-impenetrable ancient local dialect by Joe Wheelright, the Weaver Poet, and this is constantly reinterpreted by each generation of actors. The head of the leading local family, the Pharamonds, traditionally speaks the Voice of God.

  We all read it in silence.

  Then Annie said, ‘Well, it’s not so bad, is it, Clive? We can’t hope to keep the Mysteries a total secret, so we always do get some strangers coming along, especially since the Mosses have suddenly become so terribly trendy to live in.’

  ‘No, it’s the folksy visitors who would want to take over and fix the whole thing like a fly in amber that we want to discourage,’ I agreed. ‘The Middlemoss Mystery Play is just for the locals, something we’ve always done, like that Twelfth Night celebration they have up at Little Mumming.’

  ‘That’s hardly comparable with our play, dear, since I’m told it’s only a morris dance and a small miracle scene of George and the Dragon,’ Marian said.

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Clive. ‘But they keep it quiet: I’ve even heard that they block the road into the village with tractors on the day, to deter strangers.’

  ‘I think the best thing about our Mysteries is the way each new generation of actors adds a little something to their parts, even if we do now stick more or less to the Wheelright version,’ I said, though actually, while the acting itself is taken very seriously, I often suspect the Weaver Poet of having had a somewhat unholy sense of humour.

  ‘I don’t think “debased” is a very polite description,’ Marian said, looking down at her photocopy again and bristling to the ends of her shor
t, spiky silver hair. ‘And what does he mean, “impenetrable dialect”? If the audience doesn’t know the bible stories before they see it, then they should, so they’d know what was going on!’

  ‘Er … yes,’ said the vicar, with a gingerly glance at Dr Patel, who was sitting with his hands clasped over his immaculately suited round stomach, listening benignly.

  ‘Oh, don’t mind me,’ the doctor said, catching his eye. ‘I went to infants’ school right here — my father was the senior partner at the practice — so I know all the bible stories. So did all the Lees from the Mysteries of the East Chinese takeaway in Mossedge, and there’s usually at least one of that family taking part in the play.’

  ‘We have many mysteries,’ I said helpfully. ‘Even the pub is called the New Mystery.’

  ‘Little Ethan Lee made such a sweet baby Jesus last year,’ Miss Pym said sentimentally. ‘He simply couldn’t take his eyes off the angels’ haloes.’

  ‘None of us could,’ Annie said. ‘We’d never had ones that lit up before.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Gareth, clearly groping to make sense of all this. ‘Well, Clive has kindly loaned me the videos of last year’s performance, which I’ve watched with … with interest.’ He cleared his throat. ‘While I’ve seen the Chester Mystery Plays and, er … although the format of scenes from the Old and New Testaments have similarities to that, otherwise they don’t seem much alike …’

  ‘They’re not, Vicar,’ Clive said. ‘They might have been at one time — you’d have to ask Mr Roly Pharamond, he’s got all the records. But when the Puritans took over and tried to ban it, the squire — another Roland, he was — he told the players to cut it right down, so it could be performed in one day up at the Hall, instead of here on the green.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Marian, ‘and on Boxing Day instead of Midsummer Day, because fewer strangers would be travelling about then. Then, when it was safe to perform the Mysteries in public again — well, we’d got used to doing things our way.’