Last Christmas Read online

‘Please No-el,’ Magda pleaded, ‘he has no bed tonight. He can stay here, please?’

  Cat looked helplessly at Noel. It was gone midnight and, if Sergei really had nowhere to go, it was a bit harsh to throw him on the streets. She felt herself weakening. Shit, she always weakened in the face of Magda’s dogged persistence. The trouble was, if she didn’t give in, she was treated to hours of Magda sobbing and right now it was too late and she was too tired to cope with that.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘He can stay, but just for tonight. I want you to promise me you’ll find Sergei somewhere to live in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you, Catherine, you are very nice person,’ said Magda, hugging her with such effusiveness Cat began to think that it might have been better to brave the tears.

  She and Sergei quickly disappeared upstairs, as if worried that Catherine might change her mind.

  ‘Well done,’ said Noel. ‘You’re always the one saying we should be tough on Magda.’

  ‘Don’t,’ said Cat. ‘It’s late, I’m knackered, and I couldn’t cope with the thought of Magda’s hysterics.’

  ‘Good point,’ said Noel, finally putting down the cricket bat and going to shut the kitchen window firmly. ‘I can’t believe you left this unlocked.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ protested Cat. ‘I’m sure I locked it after tea, before Magda went out…Oh, bloody hell, you don’t think she left the window open deliberately so she could sneak Sergei in?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past her, would you?’

  ‘Bugger that girl,’ groaned Cat. ‘I am damned if she’s going to pull the wool over my eyes again.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a secret Russian mafia plot to steal all our valuables?’ said Noel anxiously. ‘Perhaps I should take the bat to bed with us. Just to be on the safe side.’

  Cat looked at him.

  ‘Don’t be daft,’she said.‘Sergei’s harmless enough.I think if he is a villain he’s probably a pretty inept one, or he’d have managed to break into the house properly. Come on, let’s go to bed.’

  They turned out the lights and headed upstairs, Noel pausing to put the bat back.

  ‘I can’t believe you thought that a plastic cricket bat would work,’ said Cat, giggling as she climbed into bed. Suddenly she could see the funny side, and the vision of her husband defending their home by swinging a kid’s toy bat above his head made her feel a sudden burst of affection for him. She cuddled up close to him. ‘What were you going to do, hit the burglar over the head saying “Biff, kapow!” like some kind of cartoon superhero?’

  ‘I hadn’t thought that far ahead to be honest,’ admitted Noel. ‘I just grabbed the first thing to hand.’

  ‘Well, Superman, do you fancy grabbing what’s to hand right now?’ Cat said suggestively.

  Noel grinned.

  ‘Okay, Lois. If you insist,’ he said.

  Marianne was out walking early on Saturday morning. Now she’d finally come to terms with the fact that she was staying in Hope Christmas, she’d taken to exploring the hillside paths around the village at the weekends. The countryside was stunning, and she was constantly discovering new and unexpected valleys as she followed the sheep paths that crisscrossed the countryside. Often she saw no one apart from the sheep and the odd solitary buzzard flying high in the sky. Even on glowering grey days, of which there’d been many of late, Marianne found it exhilarating to walk here. But on a bright sunshiny day like today, there was nothing like a brisk walk to dispel her wintry gloom and brush away the cobwebs. And she found that it stopped her sitting inside and brooding about Luke, who had been spotted in and around Hopesay Manor recently, according to Pippa. There were rumours afloat that his eco town idea was causing some kind of controversy now, and that he wasn’t seeing eye to eye with his grandfather about the project. Marianne knew very little about his plans, but Pippa had snorted when she’d told her where the proposed site was, a lowlying valley a couple of miles from Hope Christmas.

  ‘He’s got to be bonkers to build out there,’ Pippa had said. ‘It’s known as the Lake District round here. It floods nearly every year. Even if we have a drought year, the ground’s always soggy in winter. I wouldn’t buy a house there if you paid me.’

  Seeing Luke’s plans through Pippa’s eyes was doing Marianne good. She had been so seduced by his good looks and easy charm, she’d failed to see a certain ruthlessness in Luke. People in Hope Christmas certainly didn’t seem to be all that excited by his eco town or even to like Luke very much. Marianne was beginning to think that just maybe she’d had a lucky escape. And ever more so on days like today, when she climbed over a stile at the top of the steep hill she’d climbed and looked down the valley towards Hope Christmas.

  The hillside was scattered with sheep baaing gently in the bracken, and a fresh wind whipped at her hair and made her catch her breath. It felt gloriously wonderful to be alive, to be alone here on the hillside, the only person revelling in the beauty of her surroundings, watching a red kite circling up ahead and listening to the chattering of the rooks in the trees behind her. She had a sudden absurd impulse to run down the hillside, like Laura in Little House on the Prairie. It felt like a long time since she’d been so content.

  Deciding, in the end, that she was more likely to catch her foot in a pothole and break her neck, Marianne instead made her way down the hill in a sedate manner. Recent rain had made the ground muddy, so she’d probably been wise not to run. She’d just rounded a bend in the path when a black and white collie came bounding up towards her, panting and barking. It came up to her and submitted to her petting. A minute later a little boy came running up. ‘Benjy!’ he called, ‘I’ve got your stick.’ He was followed by Gabriel.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ said Marianne, feeling suddenly shy.

  ‘Hi yourself,’ said Gabriel. ‘You know Stephen, and this is our dog, Benjy. We’re out checking on the pregnant sheep. It’ll be lambing time before I know it, and I need to start thinking about getting them inside.’

  ‘Don’t they lamb on the hillside?’ asked Marianne.

  ‘They can do,’ said Gabriel, ‘I just prefer to get mine indoors.’

  ‘How big’s your flock?’ said Marianne.

  ‘Not that big,’ said Gabriel. ‘I’ve recently taken over my parents’ farm. Since the foot and mouth outbreak they’d really downsized and had half the flock they used to. Pippa, Dan and I are planning to expand the business and produce our own beef and lamb and sell that along with the vegetables we grow locally. Dan farms the cattle and I farm the sheep.’

  ‘It sounds lovely,’ said Marianne. ‘I’m such a townie, I know nothing about farming.’

  ‘Well, maybe I should show you,’ offered Gabriel.

  ‘Maybe you should,’ said Marianne, smiling.

  ‘Da-ad, come on,’ said Stephen, ‘I want to go looking for monsters.’

  ‘Oh, and that’s the other thing we’re doing,’ said Gabriel. ‘Going on a monster hunt is about the only way I can get Stephen out sometimes. Pippa’s brilliant, but I can’t always rely on her as a babysitter.’

  ‘It must be tough,’ said Marianne with sympathy.

  Gabriel gave her that familiar sad look.

  ‘We manage,’ he said.

  ‘Da-ad.’ Stephen was clearly getting impatient.

  ‘Right, I’d better…’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Marianne waved them goodbye and set off down the hill, a small smile playing on her lips. Of all the reasons to stay in Hope Christmas, getting to know Gabriel North better was probably as good as any…

  ‘Mum. Let me take your coat,’ Noel greeted his mother with a perfunctory kiss. As usual, a feeling of dread came over him when she walked through his front door. Would the kids behave themselves? Would Magda do something shocking? (On her previous visit at Christmas his mother had gone on and on about the horror of meeting Magda in the bathroom exposing her bare midriff.) Would he show her yet again how much he’d failed her in the son department?

  Mum
hadn’t always been so bitter. She’d always had a sharp tongue, true, and Noel and his brother, Joe, had been left in no doubt that their sister, Kay, was the favourite, but when his dad died things had started to go badly wrong. It hadn’t been Noel’s fault that Dad being ill had coincided with Cat’s first pregnancy. He’d done his best to balance the two sets of demands, but it had been incredibly hard being in London and his parents being in Stevenage, and Noel was conscious at times he hadn’t been the conscientious son he’d wanted to be. The only comfort at the time had been presenting his mum with her first grandchild, but, instead of taking the event as a positive, she’d turned it into a negative in a way that only she knew how. From the first, Cat had dubbed her Granny Nightmare. She’d barely stayed five minutes to look at her new grandchild, she never offered to babysit when she came to stay and, when the others had arrived in quick succession, had made sarcastic comments about living beyond your means. If it weren’t for Cat’s incredible generosity and insistence that he should keep on good terms with his mother, Noel might have been tempted to cut her out of his life altogether.

  Noel knew from Kay that his mother had felt let down that he hadn’t been around more to help sort out his dad’s estate, but at the time he’d been the only member of the family tied down with children of his own. Besides, he hadn’t expected her to sell up and move out of the family home so quickly. In his darker moments he thought Kay had engineered things so that their mum would give her some cash as a down payment on her first flat, but Cat had accused him of being paranoid.

  The final nail in the coffin had been the discovery that, in his mother’s determination to cut loose and start again, she’d got rid of all Dad’s war memorabilia—including his medals—without telling him or Joe. How she could have done that was beyond him. Noel had always been aware that his parents didn’t enjoy the happiest of marriages, but that seemed spiteful beyond belief. The resulting row when he’d told her so had taken several years to recover from. And it was only now (mainly at Cat’s insistence) that he was beginning to see a bit more of his mother again. Every time she came, he hoped she wasn’t going to stay long. But, for someone who exuded displeasure at her surroundings from every pore, Granny Nighmare also seemed quite happy to ensconce herself in situ for days and sometimes weeks at a time.

  ‘I see you’ve still not mended that shelf,’ were his mother’s first words on entering the playroom. One day he really would get round to fixing it.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not really a priority at the moment,’ said Noel between gritted teeth. ‘Why don’t you go down to the kitchen and see Cat, while I put your bags upstairs?’

  He knew it was a copout, that he was being unfair to Cat, but somehow her toleration of his mother outreached his own and, within seconds of seeing her, she’d already got him riled.

  He dug the children out of their respective foxholes—instinctively they’d all vanished when their grandmother arrived—and went to put his mother’s things in the spare room. Cat had spent hours cleaning it, and had even found a vase to put daffodils in, but Noel knew from bitter experience there was bound to be something wrong with the room. The only thing his mother seemed to tolerate about coming here was Ruby. Which was ironic as, being the youngest, she was also the most hard work and the one most likely to have a tantrum.

  Noel made his way downstairs with a heavy heart. He could already hear his mother quizzing poor Melanie about her school grades (not, as it happened, as good as they should have been, but she’d had problems settling into her new school), and picking on James for not being sporty like his Uncle Joe. It was going to be a very long week.

  ‘I saved you a seat,’ Gabriel whispered to Marianne as she snuck in at the back of the second public meeting about the post office campaign. Impressively, Vera had managed to inveigle the MP for South Salop to come and speak on their behalf. He’d given an impassioned speech about the future of rural post offices and promised to raise the matter in the House. Gabriel had his doubts as to whether Mr Silent, a backbench Lib Dem, could actually make any impact, but at least he’d turned up, which was more than the MP from the neighbouring constituency had done—but then it was his government’s policies which were leading to such closures, so he probably wouldn’t be seen anywhere near a meeting like this.

  No one from the Post Office had come either, which was no surprise. To Gabriel’s amusement, Vera had installed a cardboard cutout of Postman Pat. Someone was filming the meeting and planning to put it on YouTube. Very droll.

  ‘Have I missed anything?’ Marianne whispered.

  ‘Only John Silent’s fight ’em on the beaches speech,’ said Gabriel.

  Vera had now got up and was thanking them all for coming again.

  ‘I’ve got good news and bad news,’ she began. ‘The good news is that we have nearly 15,000 signatures on our Downing Street petition,’ (this raised a cheer) ‘the bad news is that I can’t get hold of anyone from the Post Office to come and meet with us and discuss a compromise. So we’ve decided to take the issue to them. And we’re planning a trip to London to visit the Post Office headquarters, as well as presenting our petition at 10 Downing Street. We’d like as many of you to sign up for this as possible, of course. Thanks to Ralph Nicholas, who has several friends in the media, we’re hoping to get some national coverage to raise our campaign further.’

  ‘Blimey,’ said Marianne, ‘that sounds impressive.’

  ‘Good for Vera,’ whispered Gabriel. ‘I never knew she had it in her.’

  ‘Well, you know what they always say about the quiet ones,’ said Marianne. The room was so packed her and Gabriel’s chairs were so close together their knees were nearly touching. She shifted a little in her seat to move away from him. She didn’t want him getting the wrong idea.

  The meeting soon broke up, with people going to sign up for the London trip and promising to write more letters of protest. Marianne found herself agreeing to take minutes of the next meeting, while Gabriel, having confessed to an interest in Photoshop, discovered he was now going to be running an entire poster campaign.

  ‘Honestly, this village is hopeless,’ said Gabriel. ‘Give an inch and they take a mile.’

  ‘That’s what public service is all about,’ sniffed Miss Woods, as she stumped by with her stick. ‘We need more altruism in this world, not less.’

  ‘True,’ said Marianne, laughing. She picked up her coat and started heading for the door.

  ‘You’re not staying for a drink?’ Gabriel felt a sudden stab of disappointment.

  ‘Oh, um,’ Marianne looked awkward.‘I hadn’t really given it any thought.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you’ve got plans,’ Gabriel said in a rush. ‘It’s just everyone else is going and I thought—’

  ‘No, I don’t have any other plans,’ said Marianne, ‘a drink would be lovely.’

  They made their way into the Hopesay Arms, the friendly local, which was cram-full of regulars and so busy it was three-deep at the bar.

  ‘I’ll get these,’ offered Gabriel. ‘What’s your poison?’

  ‘Half of lager,thanks,’said Marianne.‘I’ll look for a table.’

  ‘This is cosy,’ said Gabriel when he arrived eventually at the fireside table that Marianne had found.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t want you to think…’ Marianne blushed. ‘This was the only place I could find.’

  ‘Here’s fine,’ said Gabriel. He sipped at his beer, and there was a momentary awkward silence, before he said: ‘So, how does Hope Christmas compare to London, then?’

  ‘I love it,’ said Marianne. ‘Even though I grew up in London, I’ve never really felt like a city person. From the moment I came here I felt like I’d come home. Does that sound odd to you?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Gabriel. ‘I moved to London for work originally, then stayed for Eve’s sake, but my heart was never there. Not really. I always felt I was living in the wrong place, having the wrong life. Now…’ he paused for a moment.

 
; ‘Now?’ she prompted.

  ‘Well, even though Eve’s gone and everything,’ said Gabriel, ‘at least I feel I’m living the life I’m meant to be living. Does that make sense to you?’

  ‘Perfect sense,’ said Marianne.

  The evening flew by, and, before Gabriel knew it, it was nearly eleven.

  ‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the teenage daughter of my neighbour babysitting and she’s got school in the morning. I’d better let her get home.’

  ‘Oh, I assumed Pippa must be babysitting,’ said Marianne.

  ‘She couldn’t. She and Dan were meeting a possible new supplier tonight.’

  ‘I’d better be off too,’ said Marianne. ‘It’s way past my bedtime.’

  ‘I’ll walk you home,’ offered Gabriel.

  ‘There’s no need,’ protested Marianne. ‘Honestly, I’m a big girl.’

  ‘And I’m a gentleman,’ said Gabriel. ‘And, as your fellow Lonely Heart, I insist on walking you home whether you like it or not. I have to protect you from any potential lotharios out there intent on breaking your vow of chastity.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Marianne, ‘if you insist.’

  They got their coats on and made their way down the High Street towards Marianne’s cottage. It was a bright starlit night and the moon was full, the kind of night that was made for lovers, Gabriel suddenly thought. And whereas in the pub the warmth of the fire had led to a kind of cosy intimacy with Marianne, out here in the cold he was suddenly pulled back into the reality of both their situations. They really were two Lonely Hearts offering one another companionship. That was all. They walked the short distance back to her cottage in near silence. The intimacy from the pub seemed to have vanished somehow.

  When they got there, Gabriel felt suddenly awkward. Suppose she thought…?

  ‘Must get in, early start and all that,’ Marianne gabbled. ‘Thanks for a lovely evening.’

  She almost dived into her cottage. Gabriel was relieved. She clearly hadn’t been expecting anything. Which was good. As he had nothing to offer her. Nothing at all.