The Magic of Christmas

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Lawrence Durrell’s “spirit of place”,’ I agreed. ‘Middlemoss gets your creative juices flowing. Mine, too — this is my real home and I’m not sure I could write anywhere else.’

  ‘If you can call your stream-of-consciousness burblings writing, any more than you can describe your recipes as cookery,’ he said. ‘We can only be grateful you do your ghastly Chronicles under your maiden name and disguise anything that might give away the location!’

  ‘At least anyone can make my recipes, you don’t need a thousand pounds worth of equipment and three underlings to help you!’ I shot back rather unfairly, since I know very well he whips up his recipes in his own kitchen, or the one at the Hall: personally tried and tested before being unleashed in his Sunday newspaper cookery page, or in his books. They’re mostly straightforward recipes too, not nouvelle cuisine or anything, though some are still a little fancy for my taste. I like to keep things simple.

  ‘Plebeian’, he once called me, when he found me devising a recipe for strawberries and custard bread-and-butter pudding. But then, as I recall, he ended up eating two plates of it … and now I come to think of it, I haven’t made that for quite a while and it’s yummy … real comfort food.

  ‘I think we’re digressing,’ he said, sounding pleased as always to have got a rise out of me. ‘I’m going to London to tell Leila that I’m instructing my solicitor to start divorce proceedings, whether she wants it or not. After that, I’ll be back at the Hall, so I’ll be around if you want me. Don’t tell anyone about the divorce yet. I’ll break the news to Roly later. I’m not sure how he’ll take it, and I don’t want to give him any more shocks.’

  Actually, I thought Roly would be pleased rather than shocked, but I didn’t say so. ‘No, I won’t mention it to anyone and—’ I broke off as a thought struck me. ‘Nick, I don’t think Leila knows about Tom yet! How awful, I forgot to tell her!’

  ‘I’ll tell her and I’ll be back before the funeral,’ he said, and put the phone down.

  If he’d been here in person, I wondered if he would have given me a big, comforting hug like he had in hospital that time, when Jasper was ill … and looked at me with that same startled expression in his slate-coloured eyes, as though surprised to find himself doing it?

  He does have a softer side and, although he can be a bit taciturn, he’s all bark and no bite.

  In the event, Nick wasn’t back before the funeral, calling from London to explain briefly that Leila insisted on being present at it and was refusing to discuss anything about the divorce until afterwards, so he’d be driving her up on that morning.

  There wasn’t anything for him to do, anyway — I was pretty well organised, Annie having taken over the finer details. When you’ve been Leader of the Pack (Brownies) for years, these things come naturally to you.

  The funeral being on a Tuesday, the preceding Monday’s CPC meeting had been cancelled and instead my friends all brought to Perseverance Cottage food for the buffet and then stayed to help get everything ready. Annie must have spent half the night making little sausage rolls, Faye had baked both sweet and savoury scones, Marian brought the makings of three different kinds of sandwich and Miss Pym had assembled two huge platters of cold meats.

  So by late Monday afternoon the preparations for the Feeding of the Five Thousand — or however many turned up to be fed and watered after the ceremony — was complete. Every surface in the kitchen and larder groaned under the weight of plates and bowls and platters. The fridge door kept trying to spring open, and plastic bags of yellow candyfloss swung from the rack above the kitchen table. The very air could have been sliced up and served with whipped cream, it was so loaded with mingled aromas.

  Annie came back later, and she and I sat in the tiny sitting room, drowning our sorrows in elderberry wine and eating some of the mincemeat brownies intended for tomorrow, while Jasper was out the back, immolating Tom’s favourite surfboard on the garden bonfire. He was accompanied by the strange, small dog (rather like a hairy haggis with legs) which Annie had brought with her, along with Trinny, and it had immediately attached itself to Jasper.

  He came in from his bonfire with the creature under one arm and vanished up to his Batcave in the attic to bludgeon his emotions with loud music.

  ‘Annie, that dog—’ I began.

  ‘Jasper’s agreed to foster it until he goes to university,’ she interrupted brightly. ‘The kennel was full, and no one seems to want to adopt it.’

  ‘You surprise me,’ I said tartly. ‘It nipped my ankles when it came in and it sheds so much hair it leaves a trail behind it across the carpet.’

  ‘I expect Jasper will give it a good brushing. You’ve still got all Harriet’s stuff, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t want another dog at the moment, and what if Jasper gets attached to it? He can’t take it to university with him. You’ll have to take it away with you right now!’

  Putting my glass down I went upstairs, determined to oust the creature before things went too far. Jasper’s door was open just a crack and through it I saw him sitting on his bed, his face buried in the hairy haggis and his shoulders shaking.

  Silently I backed away and tiptoed downstairs.

  ‘It can stay for a couple of weeks,’ I conceded to Annie, ‘but that’s it. You’ll have to keep looking for a permanent home for it.’

  ‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Unless you find you want to keep her, after all.’

  ‘I doubt it. I’ve got puncture marks in my ankle.’

  Annie went home soon after that. She was going to come here straight after the church service the next day, instead of attending the interment, and organise the Women’s Institute volunteers who are manning the buffet at the funeral feast in the greenhouse.

  Around three in the morning, entirely unable to sleep, I went downstairs and whipped up a batch of strawberries and custard bread-and-butter pudding à la Lizzy Pharamond, and then Mimi wandered in out of the night, dressed in wellies and with a man’s Burberry overcoat over her nightie.

  ‘Hello, dear, I’ve come for tea,’ she said brightly, sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘And to tell you that Tom’s dead.’

  ‘I know,’ I said, handing her a portion of bread-and-butter pudding and the cup of cocoa I was just about to drink myself.

  She seemed very taken with the words, and was still repeating softly: ‘Tom’s dead, Tom’s dead!’ all the time I was walking her back up the dark drive to the Hall later, which was a little trying.

  When we got there, Juno had just discovered her absence and was frothing gently at the mouth. But there was no harm done, though the sooner her leg is healed so she can keep tabs on Mimi again, the better.

  Chapter 9: Soul Food

  I had one of those confused moments standing at the edge of the grave, where I couldn’t remember where I was — or even who I was — let alone who was six feet below me, tastefully attired in sustainable Norwegian pine. The coffin was crowned with a home-made wreath of dried hops (Tom had been a great devotee of real ale), bearing the handwritten epitaph: ‘For the Tom we loved, from Lizzy and Jasper’. We had refrained from adding ‘if he ever existed’.

  The circle of eyes fringing the grave reminded me of a stargazy pie, except that they were not blank and dead, but expectant — and fixed on me. What could they want?

  There was Nick’s tall, broad-shouldered figure, his purple-grey eyes dark and brooding, possibly because his chic French wife was hanging tightly on to his arm, as she did to all her possessions.

  Next to him was his father, Nigel, in whom the strong Pharamond genes had surprisingly been subjugated by the more nondescript ones of his mother, his expensive suiting trying to turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

  Dr Patel, Marian and Clive Potter and Faye, wearing a borrowed-looking black hat jammed over her dark curls and with her squarely-built, rosy-cheeked husband in tow. Miss Pym, nodding encouragingly at me, as if I were a recalcitrant four-year-old. A ragbag of Tom’s old surfing
chums, looking shifty. Polly Darke, wearing a short and inappropriate black chiffon garment cut low over the twin pink Zeppelins of her bosom, hovering uninvited and unwanted on the fringes of the crowd. Gareth, the new vicar, with his pale, interestingly knobbly face, bright red hair blowing in the slight breeze like a fiery halo …

  Jasper nudged me with a bony elbow. ‘Mum?’

  As though his action had opened the sluice gate, a scummy dark tide of realisation rushed into my head: I was Lizzy Pharamond, widow, mother of the willowy youth next to me, and now expected to toss earth onto my late husband’s remains like a cat tidying up after itself.

  The husband who had once had a quirky sense of humour, until something dark, angry and increasingly nasty had slipped in to inhabit that space instead. I’d been mourning the loss of the old Tom for a long time, but now these last rites seemed to form an epilogue to our life together and a full stop.

  ‘Mum?’ Jasper said again, more questioningly, draping a sinewy arm across my shoulders. For a teenage boy this was touchingly demonstrative and, for the first time that day, I felt painful tears at the back of my eyes, though earlier I’d struggled to suppress grossly unbecoming giggles during the vicar’s eulogy, when he tried to reconcile wildly conflicting descriptions of Tom’s character by using surfing as a metaphor for his journey through life and on into the great ocean that was Death.

  I remembered what was expected of me. Slowly I reached into my large, gaily embroidered shoulder bag and took out Tom’s mobile phone and the TV remote control, then tossed them with a clatter into the open grave on top of the coffin. Grave goods: the things most dear to him — apart from his favourite surfboard, immolated by Jasper of course. But even that was here in spirit, for as I turned and left amid stunned silence, I stumbled over its effigy worked in wired flowers, with a card attached reading, ‘Yo, dude! Catch a big one.’

  From behind me came the light patter of earth as the mourners hastened to cover up the evidence of my eccentricity, though I fear Tom will be gone but not entirely forgotten until the battery on his mobile runs out. He was always popular with his drinking companions.

  At the end of the gravelled path stood Tom’s white van, which had done duty today as his hearse, and I suddenly recalled how the six mismatched surfers and Mummers of Invention had earlier tried to shoulder the coffin before carrying it into the church.

  A hysterical bubble of laughter attempted to force its way up my throat, though I managed to stop it escaping by clamping my lips together. But two painful tears squeezed out and ran down my cheeks, compounded of laughter and sorrow, inextricably mixed together with an over-heavy seasoning of the guilt that seems to be an inescapable accompaniment to death.

  ‘Ow-do, missis,’ Dave Naylor said. The proprietor of Deals on Wheels had driven Tom’s van to the funeral and was now leaning against it, rolling a cigarette between scrubbed but darkly cracked fingers.

  Another Naylor, you note — and also, on less official days, likely to address me as ‘our Lizzy’. I really must do a bit of family research some time!

  ‘Bear up, lass. It’s all sorted now and a great send-off it were, too. Them Mummers singing “Amazing Grace”?’ He shook his head in slow wonderment. ‘By heck, we’ll never hear the likes of that again.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope not,’ I agreed fervently. ‘And thanks for driving the van, Dave. You are coming back to the cottage, aren’t you?’

  ‘Aye, but I’ll let the fancy cars go first. I’ll take the van back to the garage with me afterwards and drop your new car off in the morning.’

  ‘That’s fine — see you later,’ I said gratefully, and carried on to where Roly Pharamond awaited me in his long black Daimler on the main pathway, having sensibly eschewed the interment in favour of a sit-down and a swift nip of brandy. His sister, Mimi, seemed to have eschewed the funeral altogether.

  Joe Gumball, husband of Roly’s cook and jack of all trades up at the Hall, got out of the driver’s seat and opened the door for me. He was wearing the hat and jacket of a chauffeur over faded blue dungarees and wellington boots.

  Jasper, who was silently following me, got in the front and I slid onto the leather back seat, where Roly patted my hand with his thin, dry one and said gently, ‘All done and dusted, my dear?’

  ‘All done and soon to be dust,’ I agreed numbly. ‘It seems so surreal — and the way everything keeps undulating slightly isn’t helping,’ I added. This underwater rippling feeling had been going on ever since I got the news of the accident, and nothing, not even the best elderberry wine, could entirely make it go away.

  He shook his head sadly. ‘I never thought to outlive Tom — but there, anyone can have an accident. Well, better get the bun fight over with, I suppose. Mimi should be along later with Juno.’

  Joe pulled out and headed for the cottage where, with the help of Annie and two ladies from the WI, the big, ramshackle greenhouse would have been turned by now into a venue for the funeral baked meats. Trestle tables and folding chairs had arrived this morning, borrowed from the village hall, along with tea and coffee urns.

  We’d moved what plants there were towards the far end, but an aroma of tomatoes and moist earth scented the air. Still, I’d judged that better than holding it in Tom’s wooden workshop, with its stale smell of dope, and the spray paint he used to customise the surfboards, several of which were propped in various stages of completion around the walls.

  ‘You know, I still expect to open his workshop door and find him there,’ I said, following this train of thought. ‘Just like all the other times when he vanished for a few days and turned up as though he’d never been away.’

  Jasper turned around and looked anxiously at me, and I summoned a smile from somewhere. Luckily he couldn’t hear us, because the sliding glass partition was shut and Joe was playing muted country-and-western music.

  We drove over the hump-backed bridge crossing the stream, scattering the gaggle of five vicious geese, which had taken up residence there among all the innocently stupid ducks.

  ‘Must get something done about those creatures,’ Roly said absently. ‘The children are all too frightened to go to the playground, and I’m told you can’t feed the ducks without being attacked.’

  ‘That local animal rights group, ARG, might have something to say about that,’ I said. ‘But the geese are getting more and more aggressive, and they leave such a mess behind them, too. Someone is bound to skid on it eventually and then there will be hell to pay, though I don’t know who you can sue if no one owns them?’

  ‘Perhaps, since I own the green and the stream, I own them, too — or at any rate, the right to deal with them,’ Roly suggested. ‘I’ll ask my solicitor — Smithers will know. Or perhaps I’ll just get Caz Naylor to quietly round them up one night and move them somewhere else.’

  ‘How’s he doing with the squirrels?’

  ‘Very well. Constantly patrols the exclusion zone, of course, but that’s what you have to do, to keep the grey buggers out. Only way. Reds, that’s what we have at Pharamond Hall. Always have, always will. On the coat of arms, even.’

  I thought this showed a touchingly Canute-like optimism, since the tide of grey squirrels seemed to have swept over most of Britain. But then, the reds had got Caz on their side.

  ‘I think the signs Caz has put up on the main pathways might have caused some talk,’ I suggested. ‘“Red or Dead!” is a bit ambiguous and that new one just inside the gate that says, “Warning! Keep to Path!! Trespassers May Be Unexpectedly Terminated!!!” is a bit over the top.’

  ‘Only to outsiders — and what are they doing wandering all over my estate, that’s what I want to know? Locals — yes. They know the score: keep to the public footpaths, don’t wear grey.’

  ‘Are you still being targeted by ARG?’ I asked. ‘I don’t seem to be bothered by them so much now, but I suspect that’s because Caz’s keeping an eye on the place.’

  ‘Well, family, aren’t you?’ Roly said vaguely. ‘And the
y’ve eased up on the estate a bit since I put that piece in the parish magazine saying Caz uses humane live traps to catch the grey squirrels. Ingenious things: the reds can get out again, but the grey’s too big.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, because of course the question not to ask is: what does Caz do with the grey squirrels after he’s caught them?

  We passed between the impressively pineapple-finialed gateposts of Pharamond Hall, then turned sharp right onto the track that led down to Perseverance Cottage, which is just inside the estate boundary wall. I’d stuck a sign up earlier deflecting the mourners away from the Hall, but the ravening and curious horde would be hard on our heels, probably expecting an abundance of finger food and alcohol in a suitably sombre setting. Instead, they would find themselves in a huge glasshouse, eating home-made scones spread with jam and cream, strawberries and custard bread-and-butter pudding and other, even less usual, comestibles (I got a bit carried away yesterday), all washed down with tea or coffee.

  I’d noted the police presence at the funeral (PC Perkins and Little Boy Blue), but somehow their car had managed to arrive at the cottage first. As I got out, so did they, and Perkins came over and said they’d come to offer their condolences. But there was an underlying implication that she thought I was a merrier widow than I let on, and she’d been expecting me to cast myself onto the coffin with a last-minute confession. But perhaps I was becoming paranoid.

  ‘Do stay for refreshments in the greenhouse,’ I said politely and, after a small, uncertain pause, she said they would follow us over. At least her colleague would have something to eat other than his fingernails.

  ‘How the wheel came off is destined to be one of life’s great mysteries,’ I mused aloud, as we walked across the cobbled yard. ‘And why he didn’t stop the car from going over the edge. Still, at least I know who Dark Heart is now, so that’s one puzzle solved.’

  ‘Dark Heart?’ Roly said. I’d quite forgotten he didn’t know about Tom’s affair.