Last Christmas Read online

  When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,

  Thy touch can call us back to life again;

  Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:

  Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

  Stephen sang with a pathos to break the hardest of hearts. There was absolute silence when he’d finished. Gabriel smiled at his son through his tears. He watched Marianne putting her arm around Stephen and giving him a hug as she walked him back to his seat. Maybe hope and love could after all come again.

  Noel stood gloomily at the bar, wishing he were anywhere but here. At least Cat was with him at a work do for once. The only reason he’d come at all was because it had been made patently clear to him that everyone who was anyone at GRB was expected to go to the charity ball to raise money for eco towns in The Gambia. (‘It’s a global village,’ had become Gerry Cowley’s mantra recently.) Noel suspected it was because if they didn’t go en masse, the very lucrative contract that House the World were offering might get snapped up by one of their rivals.

  Since his trip to Shropshire, Noel had been expecting to be given his marching orders but, while no one had paid any attention to his suggestion that the site of the eco town was completely wrong, neither had anyone given him a hard time about it. Noel was half convinced that Matt was keeping Noel’s feelings about the project under wraps so Noel could do the donkey work on the calculations. It was becoming rapidly clear to Noel that Matt was a shit engineer who flew close to the wind at every available opportunity. But presumably even he had to get the calculations right, so now Noel was feeling even more disempowered as he realised that he had simply become Matt’s whipping boy. Was there no end to this downward spiral of humiliation?

  Apparently not. As he approached their table with the drinks, he was mortified to see that Matt was cosying up to Cat, who seemed to be lapping up his every word. Noel sat down moodily and sipped his pint. Cat barely seemed to notice his return, though she quickly tucked into the wine he’d bought her.

  ‘Hi, darling,’ she said. ‘Have you heard this outrageous joke Matt’s just told me?’

  ‘No,’ muttered Noel ungraciously, but Cat barely seemed to notice, leaning forward to laugh at the next thing Matt said, and drinking far more quickly than she normally did.

  ‘Do you have to drink quite so much?’ he hissed in her ear, as she stumbled up to go to the loo.

  ‘Don’t be such a killjoy,’ said Cat. ‘Come on, after the next course they’ve promised dancing. We haven’t been out together in ages, let’s have some fun.’

  But Noel wasn’t in the mood for fun. He hated these charity dos. The endless phoniness of people outdoing each other in their outrageous bids for bits of celebrity tat, the excessive amount of money spent on food and booze, when, particularly in this case, half the money spent on the event could probably build an eco town in The Gambia. Maybe it was time he moved on. Did something else. Got away from all these people he was beginning to hate. Yes, but then what?

  ‘Come on, big boy.’ Julie was standing before him, looking resplendent in a far too tight little black number. Little being the operative word. ‘You owe me a dance from the Christmas do.’

  ‘I do?’ Noel glanced over to where Cat and Matt were still in full flow. She barely seemed to know he was there. Well, two could play at that game.

  ‘Sure do,’ said Julie, and dragged him on the dance floor, where she proceeded to throw both of them around wildly. Next thing he knew, Cat was next to him with Matt.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ she snapped at him. ‘You look ridiculous. She’s young enough to be your daughter.’

  ‘No more ridiculous than you with your toyboy,’ Noel spat back.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Cat sighed. ‘It may have escaped your notice but Matt has just disappeared into a corner with one of your secretaries.’

  Noel looked over to where Cat was pointing and saw Matt all over a buxom girl from Accounts. He felt wrong-footed but wasn’t going to admit it.

  Meanwhile, Julie seemed to have sensed she wasn’t welcome and had disappeared, leaving Cat and Noel glaring at each other. Bryan Ferry was just admonishing them to stick together, when Cat said, ‘I’ve had enough of this. You’ve been like a bear with a sore head all evening. I want to go home.’

  ‘Good,’ said Noel. ‘I’ll call us a taxi.’

  Ten minutes later they were speeding home, neither of them speaking, the atmosphere feeling as poisonous as Noel could ever remember. Why had he ruined a perfectly good evening? He and Cat hadn’t been out together for ages. They’d spent a fortune and had a rotten time.

  They arrived home in silence and were shocked by the sound of music playing at top volume from their lounge.

  ‘What’s that bloody girl doing now?’ Noel growled.

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ said Cat. ‘I’m not her keeper.’

  Noel strode into the lounge and flung open the door to tell Magda to turn the music down.

  ‘Oh my God—’

  Magda was splayed across the sofa, and Noel was mesmerised by the sight of Sergei’s firm buttocks bouncing up and down on top of her.

  Chapter Ten

  Cat moved swiftly to the CD player and turned Amy Winehouse off.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Magda sat up and for once had the grace to look rather sheepish.

  ‘I did not know you would be back so soon,’ she said. She pulled her satin slip up to cover the bits Cat would rather she hadn’t seen, while Sergei hurriedly zipped up his trousers. Without a word he pushed past Noel and ran out of the front door.

  ‘It’s immaterial what time we got back,’ said Cat, trying with great restraint to keep her voice steady. ‘You shouldn’t have been shagging Sergei here anyway.’

  Magda rapidly went into an orgy of explanation, which went something along the lines of how difficult it was for her and Sergei to find any privacy now he had nowhere to live. Cat felt tired and fed up. Her evening out with Noel had been an utter disaster and now this. Magda was now sulkily getting dressed and Cat got another flash of her silk camisole, which looked remarkably like one of Cat’s…

  ‘What gave you the right to steal my clothes?’ The bloody cheek of the girl. She’d pinched Cat’s underwear! God knows what else she was wearing that belonged to Cat.

  ‘You have so many nice things,’ whined Magda. ‘I am poor. You do not understand.’

  ‘I understand you’re a thief and a liar, and not to be trusted,’ said Cat. ‘I shall be calling the agency in the morning. And I want you out of here by the afternoon. Is that understood?’

  At this Magda let out a great wail.

  ‘But I have nowhere to go. And now I don’t have Sergei. He will finish with me for sure. And I need money for my sick mother. Please, you can’t sack me.’

  Cat felt herself relenting. Magda was after all very young. Perhaps, if she’d been in the same situation in her early twenties she might have taken similar advantage. (No you wouldn’t have, her inner voice admonished sternly.) Besides, if she got rid of Magda tomorrow there’d be no back-up plan. She’d be left without childcare. And she had a busy week ahead of her.

  Cat looked at Noel, who was still standing in stunned silence.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  ‘Your call,’ said Noel. ‘But if she really is down on her luck…’

  Lord, he was such a soft touch, although of course that was one of his most endearing qualities.

  Cat turned to Magda.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘This is your very last chance. You can count tonight as a verbal and written warning. I shall be ringing the agency to tell them what has happened, and if there is any repeat of this, I mean ANY at all, you’ll be out on your ear.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Cat-er-ine, thank you,’ said Magda effusively, the tears on her face miraculously drying. ‘I promise it won’t happen again.’

  ‘You bet it won’t,’ said Noel with fe
eling.

  Magda gathered her things and disappeared up to her room, while Cat busied herself putting the room to rights.

  ‘Fancy a nightcap?’ said Noel.

  ‘I think I need a triple after that,’ said Cat. ‘I also feel the need to fumigate the room. Honestly, it could only happen to us.’

  She looked at Noel and they both burst out laughing, the tension of the evening dissipating as if by magic.

  ‘Give you something to blog about,’ said Noel, as they made their way down to the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Cat. ‘I’m sure the Happy Homemaker’s au pair would never behave like that.’

  The rain was still coming down in sheets as Gabriel strode across his land. There’d been a storm earlier in the week and one of his fences had come down. It shouldn’t take him long to mend, but he was soaked through and just wanted to get home and dry. He’d never known a wetter spring. Gabriel had hoped that if the weather improved he’d be able to get the lambs back out on the hillside, but they were still too small to withstand this onslaught. In fact, though Gabriel was quite hardened to the weather conditions, even he felt like curling up in front of the fire toasting marshmallows and drinking hot chocolate with Stephen while they watched CBBC together. He’d been most envious of Pippa who’d offered to take Stephen for him again, and was busy making hot chocolate as he left.

  Still, sooner looked at, sooner sorted, as his dad always said. He put his head against the wind and rain and soldiered on, wishing his parents hadn’t chosen this particular time in his life to go and find themselves. He missed his father’s wisdom and his mother’s comfort. Sometimes, even with all the help Pippa gave him, he felt horribly alone.

  It was pretty bleak on the hillside today, so Gabriel was surprised to see a figure coming towards him. Who on earth would be mad enough to be out in this?

  As the person approached he realised it was Marianne. Her cheeks were flushed from the exercise and her dark hair curled softly under her woolly hat. She managed to look lovely even in all-weather gear.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘What brings you out in this dreadful weather? I don’t need any assistance lambing today, you know.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Marianne cheerfully, who looked if anything even wetter and muddier then he did. ‘Unless it’s a ridiculous subconscious desire to end up with pneumonia. It wasn’t that bad when I left.’

  ‘Where are you headed?’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Well, I was going to nip round to the next valley and then back home,’ said Marianne, pointing to the path that stretched behind Gabriel and up the hillside. If you could call it a path—it was more of a boggy stream at present. ‘I just wanted to make the most of my last day here before I disappear for a fortnight but, judging by that horrendously muddy path, I think I may just call it a day and go home.’

  ‘You’re going away?’ Gabriel felt a pang of regret. He’d got used to seeing Marianne about the place.

  ‘Only for Easter,’ she said. ‘I’m going down to this demo at the Post Office, and then on to my parents’ for the Easter weekend. I’ll probably visit friends in London as well, but I may come back sooner if I’m bored.’

  She smiled at him and his heart gave a sudden lurch. Good lord, could he possibly be feeling what he thought he was feeling? A stab of guilt shot through him. Technically he wasn’t free, he shouldn’t even be thinking about anyone other than Eve, wherever she was. But Eve wasn’t here and Marianne was.

  ‘I’ll miss you,’ he said simply, and realised for the first time the truth of it. He would miss her. Marianne was fast becoming a necessary part of his life.

  Marianne clambered onto the coach a little breathless and late. She’d overslept, having had a restless night. She couldn’t put her finger on why. Part of it was to do with going home for the first time since Luke had dumped her—she’d been putting off dealing with her mother’s over-solicitousness—and part of it, she had no doubt, had been to do with her rather unsettling encounter with Gabriel on the hillside yesterday.

  Marianne had gone for a walk to blow away the cobwebs, having been cooped up all day with a bunch of over-excited reception children who’d eaten far too many chocolate eggs and been made doubly hyper by being kept in for play by the wet. She’d gone out for one of her usual hikes, setting off in a light drizzle that swiftly became a torrent, and she was soon soaked through. Somehow she didn’t mind though. There would be plenty of time to stay indoors in London; right now, right here, she felt elemental, and close to nature. It felt fabulous.

  Marianne had been lost in her thoughts when she’d run into Gabriel. He’d appeared over the brow of the hill, looking for all the world like some kind of dashing hero. Mr Rochester, eat your heart out. She’d always preferred him to Darcy.

  It was with a jolt that Marianne had realised that just meeting Gabriel like that was having a funny effect on her. Her back had felt all tingly and her legs had turned to jelly. And when he said he’d miss her in that lovely Shropshire burr, her heart had given a springlike leap of joy. Suddenly she’d realised she was going to miss him too.

  ‘Penny for ’em?’ Pippa had squeezed into the seat next to Marianne and was doling out food to the children.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Marianne, ‘just thinking.’ She daren’t mention Gabriel to Pippa. Dearly as she loved her friend, it was obvious that Pippa was itching for the chance to play matchmaker.

  She stared out of the coach window as it left Hope Christmas and everyone cheered. When she’d come here she’d been so much in love with Luke. And then he’d broken her heart. But over the last few months she’d come to love Hope Christmas and the people in it more than she’d ever loved Luke. She wondered how much she could let that include Gabriel. Could she think about a relationship just yet? And more importantly, should she? Gabriel had a lot of baggage, even if he were interested: she wasn’t sure it would be wise to get involved. But, then again, Marianne thought, as the coach pulled away from the Shropshire hills and the sun broke out through the clouds, what had wisdom got to do with love?

  Noel was cutting through Mount Pleasant on his way back to work after rather more of a liquid lunch than he’d intended with an old school friend, when a demonstration caught his eye. There was a TV crew and a bunch of people holding banners. They appeared to be protesting against post office closures and, weirdly, when he got up close he realised they were holding banners saying ‘KEEP HOPE CHRISTMAS ALIVE! HANDS OFF OUR POST OFFICE!’

  ‘That’s such a coincidence,’ he said out loud.

  ‘No such thing as coincidence.’

  To his surprise, Ralph Nicholas was standing to one side of the group, looking on with a mischievous gleam in his eye.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Can’t have my local post office closing down, can I now?’ said Ralph. ‘It’s bad enough that my beloved grandson and your chums are seeking to destroy what remains of our local environment with their wretched eco town schemes. If the post office goes, Hope Christmas will surely die.’

  Noel thought back to the pretty village in which he’d stayed on his various site visits. Every time he went up to Shropshire he’d fallen a little bit more in love. He’d even started fantasising about living there. If only Cat could be persuaded to leave London. If only he could find himself a job up there. If only the grass were greener and there were gold at the end of the rainbow.

  ‘That’s a great pity,’said Noel. ‘It looks a lovely place to live.’

  ‘It is,’ said Ralph. ‘You should come and stay properly. See for yourself. Then maybe persuade your company not to get involved in my grandson’s harebrained schemes.’

  ‘If I had my way, we wouldn’t be building the eco town,’ said Noel. ‘But sadly my clout isn’t what it was. No one wants to listen to me anymore.’

  He felt maudlin when he said it. He was approaching his mid forties, washed up, his career going nowhere, his wife paying him little attention. What was there left?


  ‘There’s plenty left,’ Ralph said briskly, as if somehow he’d read Noel’s mind. ‘If you do ever decide to come to the country, you can always give me a call. My company could do with a decent engineer.’

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Noel. He rather liked this eccentric old man. ‘Good luck with your campaign by the way.’

  ‘Don’t forget to sign our petition,’ said Ralph, tipping his hat at Noel before going off to engage the manager sent out by the Post Office to discuss the situation with him.

  Noel did as he was asked and then walked back to the office.

  Move to Hope Christmas? Get a new job as Ralph’s engineer? It was a fantasy and he knew it. Let’s face it, he had no more chance of moving than of flying to the moon.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘Okay, peeps, listen up.’ Beverley had gathered the troops together for the bi-monthly forward planning meeting. ‘I know we’re all in Easter Bunny land right now, but it’s time to give some thought to the Christmas issue.’

  There was a collective groan round the table. Every year, agreeing upon the contents of the Christmas issue seemed to get harder than ever.

  ‘Now, now, folks, that’s not what I expect,’ said Bev. ‘Come on, let’s do some brainstorming. I’ve ordered sandwiches for lunch so we can keep going as long as possible.’

  ‘I could do top ten make-up tips for the party season,’ offered Abi, the new fashion editor, who looked to Cat both depressingly young and even more depressingly thin.

  ‘Hmm, we’ve done that every year since forever,’ said Bev, ‘as has every other mag out there. Can you come up with a twist?’

  ‘Well, I suppose I could funk it up a little,’ said Abi. ‘Maybe how to be a Christmas fashion victim with a difference? Marrying clothes and colours you wouldn’t normally expect. Your little black dress with some glitz and sparkle perhaps?’