The Magic of Christmas

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘So it’s still performed up at the Hall on Boxing Day?’ Gareth asked.

  Miss Pym nodded. ‘In the coach house. The doors are opened wide and the audience stands in the courtyard, with lots of braziers about to keep them warm. The stables on either side are used as dressing rooms. It lasts about five hours, with breaks for refreshments, of course, and musical interludes.’

  ‘Musical interludes? Indeed?’ Gareth brightened. ‘Hymns, perhaps? I’m hoping to breathe a little life back into the church choir.’

  ‘No, actually a local group perform — the Mummers of Invention,’ I told him. ‘My husband sings with them and they’re quite good. Sort of electric folk style.’

  ‘Mummers of Invention?’ he murmured, looking bemused.

  ‘The last vicar had the strange idea that the play was blasphemous in some way,’ Clive said, ‘but you could see yourself from the video that it’s the exact opposite, couldn’t you? It’s all bible stories, and the entire parish is involved right down to the infants’ school. The children always play the procession of animals into the ark.’

  ‘And they helped me to make the Virgin’s bower last year with wire and tissue paper flowers,’ Miss Pym said, ‘though since it kept falling on Annie’s head (your fifth and last appearance as Virgin, wasn’t it, dear?) it could not have been called an unqualified success.’

  Annie caught the vicar’s eye, went pink, and looked hastily away — but at least now she had noticed him.

  ‘And you run the Mysteries committee, Clive, and direct the play?’ Gareth asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. In September we start giving out the parts and rehearsing. No one can play the same role for more than five years except God, so things change, and different people come forward or drop out.’

  ‘Some of the new actors who’ve moved into the area lately have volunteered,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, like Ritch Rainford,’ Annie murmured dreamily, and I gave her a look. I hope she’s not going to get a serious crush on the man, since it’s unlikely to lead anywhere.

  ‘But most of them don’t live here all the time, Annie, and you need people who do, especially when there are more rehearsals just before Christmas.’

  ‘Yes, so the parts are usually played by local people and someone always volunteers if there’s an emergency, like last year when Lazarus broke both ankles falling off his tractor,’ Dr Patel said. ‘He could have lain down, but there was no way short of a real miracle he was ever going to rise up and walk. So Lizzy’s husband, Tom, stepped in at the last minute.’

  ‘He made a very good Lazarus: I gave him four stars in the parish magazine review,’ Clive broke in.

  Gareth turned to me. ‘So, your husband is Tom Pharamond, and he also plays in a band called the Mummers? I don’t think I’ve met him yet, have I?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so, he’s not much of a churchgoer. And he said he wouldn’t take part in the play again this year, it was a one-off, Clive — sorry. You’ll need a new Lazarus.’

  ‘Pity,’ Clive said regretfully. He coughed and shuffled his papers together. ‘So, we’ll ask for nominations for the parts and rehearsals will start in the middle of September in two groups, one on Tuesdays and the other, Thursdays. As usual, I’ll need a director’s assistant for each scene. Lizzy, will you take on the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation, and Adam and Eve? You are still doing Eve this year, I hope?’

  ‘Yes, my fifth and final go too, thank goodness — even a knitted bodystocking is perishingly cold in December. I had to keep warming myself over a chestnut brazier last year and a couple of my fig leaves got singed.’

  ‘You could try thermal underwear?’ suggested Miss Pym. ‘Those thin silk ones for under ski suits.’

  ‘That’s an idea! Not so bulky.’

  ‘Miss Pym will do Noah’s Flood, of course, and Marian will oversee Moses. One of the tablets broke last time; someone will need to make a new one …’ Clive made a note, and ticked off Moses.

  ‘Vicar, if you could be in charge of the Nativity — Annunciation, Magi, Birth of Christ, Flight into Egypt?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Gareth agreed, though rather numbly, I thought. But unlike the last vicar, at least he hadn’t started gibbering and lightly foaming at the mouth by this stage.

  ‘Dr Patel has offered to do the Temptation of Christ, the Curing of the Lame Man, the Blind Man, and the Raising of Lazarus: all short scenes.’

  ‘Seems appropriate,’ agreed the doctor, adding generously, ‘and the Water into Wine and Feeding of the Five Thousand too, if you like.’

  ‘I’ll see to the Last Supper, Judas, the Trial and Crucifixion myself this year — the Crucifixion’s always tricky, but you might want to take that on next year, Vicar — and then that leaves just the Resurrection, Ascension and Last Judgement.’

  ‘I’ll do those again,’ offered Annie.

  ‘We do the final dress rehearsals for the whole thing up at the Hall in a couple of sessions before Christmas,’ Marian helpfully explained to the vicar. ‘In random order, or it would be unlucky. But since at least two-thirds of the players will have done their parts before, it’s just a question of making sure the new ones know their lines and where to stand, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, good,’ said poor Gareth weakly. He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get back — I’ve got a funeral to prepare.’

  ‘Yes, our Moses — such a sad loss,’ Miss Pym said. ‘We will have to recast that part, too.’

  Clive stuffed his papers and clipboard into a scuffed leather briefcase and then he and Marian started transforming the hall into a snooker parlour for the Youth Club, turning down my offer of help.

  When I went out the vicar was already halfway across the green with Annie, heading in the direction of the church. I bet they were only talking about something totally mundane like Sunday school, though, and she hadn’t noticed at all that he fancied her.

  Miss Pym climbed into her little red Smart car and vanished with a vroom, and Dr Patel wished me good night and got into his BMW.

  I wended my way home to Perseverance Cottage, where I did not find my husband or, more importantly, my car, but did find a telephone message on the machine from Unks, asking me to ring him back. When I did, he told me that Mimi, his elderly sister who lived at the Hall with her long-suffering companion Juno, had been arrested by the police at the Southport Flower Show, having temporarily got away from Mrs Gumball, who’d volunteered to keep an eye on her. You can’t blame her, though, since Mimi is very spry for an octogenarian while Mrs Gumball is the human equivalent of a mastodon, so moves slowly and majestically.

  Unfortunately, Mimi is a plant kleptomaniac: no one’s garden is safe from her little knife and plastic bags, and she really just can’t understand why anyone should take exception to her habits. Still, the police had merely cautioned and released her this time and, since the coach had by then set out on the return journey, drove her and Mrs Gumball home in a police car.

  Roly said she was under the impression they had done it to give her a treat, and was hoping next year’s flower show would be as much fun.

  Then he added, rather puzzlingly, ‘And I hope Tom told you that you can stop worrying about ever losing Perseverance Cottage, my dear, because after I’m gone, it’s yours and Tom’s. I would have said before, if I’d known it was on your mind.’

  ‘But I wasn’t worried, Unks! In fact, the thought never even entered my head,’ I assured him. Since I would have to leave soon, it was immaterial to me, but Tom had evidently used me as an excuse to find out how things had been left. How Machiavellian he’s becoming!

  After this, I unpacked Annie’s candyfloss machine to distract myself from worrying until Jasper arrived safely home. The instructions absolutely forbade me to use any natural essences or colourings other than special granulated ones designed for the purpose, which was disappointing from the point of view of making Cornish Mist, until I discovered one of the tubs in the box was lemon.

  Fascinating how th
e floss forms inside the bowl like ectoplasm, and you have to wind the near invisible threads onto wooden sticks. Fine, sugary filaments drifted everywhere, and the kitchen took on the hot, sweet, nostalgic smell of funfairs.

  It was really messy but fun, which Jasper said was a good description of me, too, when he got home and saw what I’d been up to, though by then I was sitting among the debris, writing it all up for the Chronicle.

  Maybe I’ll have ‘messy, but fun’ as my epitaph.

  Chapter 6: Driven Off

  I wonder if plastic bags of fluffy white candyfloss labelled ‘edible Santa beards’ would go down well with children at Christmas? I expect they would try them on and get terribly sticky, though.

  The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

  There was still no sign of my car next morning and, in a furious temper, I rang all of Tom’s friends that I knew about, or who I had mobile numbers for although trying to contact his surfing buddies down in Cornwall was always like waking the dead, and I got little sense out of them even when they did answer the phone.

  The first time or two he went missing for a few days I also rang the local hospitals and the police, but after that I learned my lesson.

  I woke Jasper early and saw him off by bike to the dig, then I called Annie to tell her I was without transport; but luckily she only wanted me to exercise the two Pekes and a Shitzu belonging to one of the more elderly members of the Cotton Common cast, Delphine Lake. She’d bought one of the expensive flats in part of the former Pharamond’s Butterflake Biscuit factory in the village and I’d walked her dogs several times before.

  Uncle Roly sold the Pharamond brand name out to a big conglomerate years ago for cash, shares and a seat on the board, which was both a smart and lucrative deal; so now the factory has been converted to apartments, a café-bar called Butterflakes, and a museum of Mosses history.

  Delphine’s dogs may be little, but they loved their walks, so it was late morning before I got back to the cottage and found a female police officer awaiting me on the doorstep. An adolescent colleague sat biting his fingernails behind the wheel of a panda car.

  I immediately thought the worst, as you do. ‘Jasper?’ I cried. ‘Has something happened to Jasper?’

  ‘Mrs Elizabeth Pharamond?’ she queried solemnly.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘I’m Constable Perkins and I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you.’

  She paused, and I was just about to take her by the throat and shake her when she added,

  ‘About your husband.’

  ‘Oh — thank God!’ I gasped devoutly, then burst into tears of relief.

  Wresting the keys from my nerveless fingers, she ushered me into my own home, where she broke the news that Tom had had a fatal accident. He’d driven off the road into a disused quarry, which was odd in itself, since there’s only one place within a radius of about fifty miles where he could have managed to perform that feat, and it’s up a little-used back lane.

  While her colleague made me tea, she spoke to me with skilful sympathy, though my reactions clearly puzzled her. But all I was feeling was an overpowering sense of relief that it wasn’t Jasper.

  And then I got to thinking that this was all so blatantly unreal anyway, that it couldn’t be true: it must be just some dreadful nightmare!

  This was a very calming idea, since I knew I’d wake up sometime, so I agreed quite readily to go and identify Tom’s body. My head seemed to be this helium-filled thing bobbing about on a string — or that’s what it felt like, anyway — but there’s no accounting for dreams.

  And Tom, apart from his thin, handsome face being a whiter shade of pale, looked absolutely fine. He was always one to land butter-side up …

  ‘Is this your husband?’ the policewoman asked formally.

  ‘Yes — Thomas Pharamond. Are you sure he’s dead? Only he looks just like he did when he was playing Lazarus.’

  She gave me a strange look, but assured me that Tom had broken his neck in a very final manner. Then she offered me yet another cup of tea, which I didn’t want, and took me home again, sitting beside me in the back seat while the adolescent did the driving. He feasted on his fingernails at every red light and I don’t know why, but it suddenly reminded me of the stewed apple with little sharp crescents of core snippings that they used to give us at school for pudding.

  The policewoman whiled away the journey by telling me that they thought the car (my car, which was now a write-off) had been at the bottom of the quarry for a few hours before it was found, and he must have died instantly, but I expect they say that every time. There would have to be a post-mortem examination, and probably an inquest. I think she said there would be an inquest. I wasn’t taking it all in, because of course it wasn’t real.

  When we got to Perseverance Cottage, she asked if there was someone who could stay with me.

  ‘Oh, yes — I’ll phone the family right now,’ I assured her, suddenly desperate to get rid of her. ‘Thank you for … for — well, thank you, Officer. I’ll be fine.’

  She looked a bit dubious, but drove off leaving me to it, and I thankfully closed the front door and leaned against it: that seemed solid enough. So did the cold quarry tiles beneath my feet when I kicked my sandals off …

  It began slowly to dawn on me that this really was happening and Tom was actually dead! In which case, I could only be glad that Jasper was at his dig, since I’m sure he would have insisted on coming with me to identify Tom, though actually his face had looked peaceful enough, if vaguely surprised by the turn of events. I felt a sudden pang of guilt, remembering how glad I had been that it was Tom who had died and not Jasper.

  But now I’d have to break the news to him about his father … and to Unks and Mimi and Tom’s mother out in Argentina …

  Stiffening my trembling legs I tottered into the sitting room and dialled the Hall, getting Uncle Roly.

  I don’t think I was the mistress of either tact or coherence by this stage, but he took the news well, if quietly, and offered to phone Tom’s mother and stepfather in Argentina himself, which was a huge relief. Then he said he would also try and contact Nick, still off touring the eateries of the rural North-West.

  ‘And Jasper?’ he asked. ‘I take it he is at the dig, and doesn’t know?’

  ‘Yes, and I think I’ll just wait for him to come home before I tell him,’ I decided, for why rush to give him the bad news? ‘Anyway, Tom was driving my car — his van broke down — so I haven’t got any transport.’

  When I phoned Annie she was out and the message I left was probably unintelligible.

  Roly thoughtfully called in later in the Daimler to say Joe Gumball was driving him over to the dig to collect Jasper and he could break the news to him on the way home, if I wanted.

  ‘Oh, Unks, you are kind!’ I said, gratefully. ‘But it must be just as hard for you. You don’t have to do it.’

  ‘My dear, having lived through the war, I’m inured to breaking bad news.’

  I offered him some of the damson gin I’d been drinking to try to dispel that feeling of being underwater with my eardrums straining, but which had just seemed to make everything more unbelievably bizarre, and said anxiously, ‘I can’t believe Tom isn’t going to walk back in through that door at any moment, the way he always turned up after he’d been missing for a few days.’

  He patted my hand. ‘There, there, my dear. Leave everything to me. I’ll be back with Jasper in no time.’

  Mimi phoned me up just after he’d left, but halfway through offering me her condolences in a graciously formal manner, she completely lost the thread and said she was too busy to talk to me just now. Then she put the phone down.

  But at least her call had jarred me into remembering to feed the poultry. It was a bit late, but when I called, ‘Myrtle, Myrtle, Myrtle — Honey, Honey, Honey!’ they all came running.

  Round the side of the big greenhouse I came unexpectedly nose to bare (except for the camouflage paint) ch
est of Caz Naylor, who indicated with a nod of his head and a raised eyebrow that he would like to know what was happening.

  ‘Tom’s driven off the quarry road,’ I said. ‘In my car.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘Car?’

  ‘That’s a write-off, too.’

  He grunted non-committally, then handed me a small blue plastic basket containing one slightly decayed mushroom. ‘Poison,’ he said, prodding it with a slightly grimy finger.

  ‘I know,’ I began, recognising it, but he turned and flitted off back through the shadows until he’d completely vanished into the woods.

  That was the longest conversation I’d had with him for ages … and what was the significance of the poisonous fungi in a punnet that looked suspiciously like the one Polly Darke had brought me full of field mushrooms … was that only yesterday? Perhaps she’d inadvertently picked a poisonous one? After my previous experience of Polly’s way with foodstuffs, I should have been more cautious in accepting them anyway!

  Or perhaps Caz had simply taken to giving brief nature lessons in his spare time.

  Jasper was very quiet and pale when he came in, and though we shared a long hug, said he’d like to be alone for a bit and vanished up to his room. I thought it best to leave him to talk in his own time.

  He did reappear when Annie arrived and seemed pretty composed by then, though he being the quiet stoical type it’s hard to tell, even for me.

  I thought I was quite composed too, but as soon as Annie walked through the door I burst into tears, as though her arrival was some kind of absolute proof that it really wasn’t all a ghastly nightmare. I left a full set of grubby fingerprints up the back of her lavender Liberty cotton shirt.

  She hugged Jasper too, something which he would normally go out of his way to avoid, even though he is fond of her. Then we all just sat around in a fuzzy cloud of disbelief and damson gin.