Last Christmas (14 page)

Gabriel swallowed. Did he really want the lamb in the house? By rights, he should give it to the ewe who’d lost the twin, she had plenty of milk for both. He looked at Stephen’s expectant face. He couldn’t let him down.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix a box for it in the kitchen, and you can look after it.’

‘Can I?’ Stephen’s face broke into a huge grin and he hugged his dad even harder. ‘Daddy, you’re the best.’

Together they prepared a box of hay, and Gabriel gently lifted the lamb into it and carried it back to the house. They settled it down in the kitchen and Gabriel found a baby’s bottle he kept for the purpose. Soon Stephen was snuggled up on the sofa giving his new pet a bottle.

‘He’s just like me,’ Stephen declared, ‘he hasn’t got a mummy either. But I’m going to be his mummy now.’

Gabriel didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

‘You’re too thin.’ Marianne’s mother stood in the kitchen, looking her daughter up and down as if she were a prize cow. It was the only about the millionth time she’d said so. Marianne sighed. There was a reason she’d delayed coming home. And, after the first rapturous moments of welcome, the joy of a decent meal she hadn’t cooked herself, and the luxury of a bath in water that didn’t take three hours to heat up via the ancient immersion heater, she had quickly fallen back into suppressing her irritation at her mother’s fussing. She loved her mother dearly but, even though Marianne had left home years ago, somehow her mother still failed to recognise her daughter’s ability to be independent. Marianne had found her stifling growing up but, now she was an adult, she rebelled against it even more. She felt so hemmed in at her parents’ house, she longed for the freedom of the place she was beginning to think of as home. Back there, in a few short minutes, she could be striding out in the Shropshire hills, whereas here the only place to escape to was the drab local park, with its miserable patch of green, graffitied play area and confining borders. Marianne invariably came back from a stroll around the park feeling worse than when she’d left.

‘You’d hate it if she didn’t make a fuss,’ her father always said, and to a degree it was true. But Marianne felt faintly
depressed by the thinly veiled disappointment as another chance for her mother to plan a wedding had disappeared, and the prospect of grandmotherhood seemed to be fast disappearing into the distance. Marianne’s only brother was a permanent student who was currently travelling the world finding himself. He was about as likely to procreate as an amoeba, though Marianne frequently teased him about leaving a girl behind in every port.

‘I’m not too thin, Mum,’ said Marianne. ‘I’ve put on half a stone since Christmas.’

Mum sniffed, as if to say, likely story, and Marianne decided to ignore her. She knew her mother only wanted what was best for her, but it was hard enough coming to terms with a broken heart without feeling that her every emotion was being scrutinised by the maternal equivalent of Sherlock Holmes.

‘Leave the girl alone,’ said her dad, coming in from the shed. Lord knows what he did in there, but the shed, a shadowy feature of her childhood, seemed to have become his second home since retirement. ‘She looks perfectly healthy to me.’

Marianne shot him a grateful look. Dad had always been her champion, and helped deflect delicate situations with her mother. He had far more empathy than his wife did, and always knew just when to speak and when to keep quiet, whereas Mum always seemed to feel a silence was there to be filled.

‘So, there’s no chance of you getting back with that chap?’ Mum said. Nothing like the direct approach.

‘No,’ said Marianne.‘I think there’s
very
little chance of that.’

She thought back to the last few months without Luke. It had been hard but, to her surprise, she suddenly realised that she wasn’t now as heartbroken as she had been, and was thinking about him less and less.

‘Well,plenty more fish in the sea then,’said Mum.‘Anyone else in mind?’

‘Give over, Mum,’ protested Marianne. ‘I’ve only just come out of one relationship, I’m in no hurry to rush into another.’

‘Hmm,’ said her mother in disbelieving tones. ‘Well, at your age you should get on with it. No time to lose…’

The more Marianne protested, the less her mother seemed to believe her.

But then again, as Marianne went to load the dishwasher, and got a sudden flash of Gabriel’s face, perhaps it wasn’t altogether true…

Cat was on her way home from work. She was running late and feeling guilty because she’d promised to get back and help Mel with some science homework that was proving tricky. Science was really Noel’s department, but more and more of late he’d been distracted and she’d found it really hard to get him to engage with the children. Cat suspected there was a problem at work, but Noel seemed very tight-lipped about whatever it was and she’d given up trying to prise the information out of him.

Mel had emailed Cat at work with a panicky ‘Mum, Homework. Tonight!!!!’ email at lunchtime, and Cat had promised she’d get home in time to help her. An increasingly common feature of their relationship of late, Cat wryly noted, was that Mel expected Cat to drop everything for her. Of course, Cat compounded things by always doing exactly that, but she could still remember the uncertainty of her first year at secondary school and didn’t want Mel to feel she couldn’t ask for help.

The only trouble was, of course, her work life was rarely accommodating of her home life. Just as she was about to leave, one of the subs had queried a line in her last feature
on ‘How to Detox Your House’, and Bev wanted her urgent opinion on the October cover layout, and suddenly it was gone six and she still hadn’t answered her emails. She rang Magda to say she was running late, and tried Noel who, judging by the list of missed calls, had been urgently trying to call her. But when she rang back all she got was a ‘This mobile is switched off ’message, and his work answerphone was proclaiming he was away from his desk. She was about to leave when her mobile rang. Mum. She’d better answer that.

‘Hello?’ Cat gathered her bag over her shoulder, and headed for the door. The phone went dead. Odd. She rang back and got a busy tone. Damn. On the way down the corridor she kept trying her mother, and continually got the engaged tone. Well, it can’t have been that urgent.

The phone rang again as she headed down the road to the bus stop.

‘Catherine, there you are,’ her mother sounded a bit flustered. ‘I’ve been trying to ring you for hours.’

‘I’ve been trying to ring you,’ said Cat, ‘but you were engaged.’

‘Because I was trying to ring you,’ said her mother.

This was going nowhere. ‘Was it anything in particular? I’m just on my way home.’

‘Oh, nothing,’ said Mum. ‘Just. This is a bit daft. Can you remember? Do I need flour or eggs in an apple pie? I’ve got Auntie Eileen coming for dinner, and I keep looking at the ingredients and they both look wrong.’

Cat frowned. Mum was the best cook Cat knew. How strange that she should have forgotten how to make pastry.

‘Well, I’ve never made pastry with eggs,’ she said, trying to laugh it off. ‘But you do need flour.’

There was a pause.

‘Well, of course you don’t use eggs in pastry. At least not if you’re making shortcrust pastry. Why on earth did you think you did?’

It was on the tip of Cat’s tongue to make an acid remark about why her mother had bothered to ring her then, but she paused. There was something very odd about the tone in her mother’s voice. In fact, the whole conversation was very odd.

‘Mum, are you all right?’

‘Never better, dear,’ said her mother. ‘I will be seeing you all for lunch on Sunday, won’t I?’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Cat.

‘Well, bye then,’ said her mother, and put the phone down, leaving Cat feeling unsettled.
Was
there something wrong with her mum? And if so, what, if anything, could she do about it?

The last of the ewes had finally delivered her lambs, twins again, but this time neither had died. Gabriel settled mother and babes and made his way back to the kitchen where a sleepy Stephen was sitting with Pippa as he fed his pet one last time before bed.

‘Everything all right?’ Pippa nodded in the direction of the barn.

‘Fine, thanks,’ said Gabriel. ‘And thanks for looking after Stephen, again. I feel bad about always asking you.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t,’ said his cousin briskly. ‘That’s what families are for, to help each other out. Besides, if you hadn’t had the kids for me on Saturday, Dan and I wouldn’t have been able to get out for that meal.’

‘True.’ Gabriel felt he did little enough for his cousin, so the least he could manage was the occasional sleepover if it helped her and Dan out. ‘Stephen enjoyed it anyway, so it was no hardship.’

‘I’d best be off,’ said Pippa, gathering her things. ‘I don’t really like leaving Dan to deal with everyone at bedtime.’

‘No, of course not,’ said Gabriel. ‘Are you going to the Monday Muddle on Easter Monday?’

‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world,’ grinned Pippa. ‘Besides, Diana Carew said I could have a stall to showcase our produce, didn’t Dan tell you?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Gabriel. ‘Mind you, I’ve been so busy recently everything’s going in one ear and out the other. Still, that’s great. The Monday Muddle’s a brilliant opportunity to show people what we can offer.’

The Monday Muddle was an annual village event held every Easter Monday, along with a traditional market. Part football match, part free for all, the origins of it were lost way back in the mists of time, but everyone in the village turned out to see a football, reputedly two hundred years old and made of an old leather sack, alleged by some to have covered the head of a notorious highwayman, kicked high in the air. In the ensuing scrum, whoever picked up the ball was meant to run with it as fast as they could, without letting go, to the village pub. Miraculously, the event hadn’t yet been cancelled by the health and safety brigade, which was remarkable considering how many people ended up injured in the scrum. The person who managed it was then bought pints by everyone else for the rest of the day. All the village men were supposed to take part, but Gabriel often declined.

‘Daddy, you are going to go in for it this year, aren’t you?’

Gabriel groaned. Stephen had pressured him into going in for it last year, and he had reluctantly agreed. He had never got over the trauma of doing the event in his teens when he’d been a total lightweight and Dan and all his cronies had inevitably sat on him. Dan in fact was still the undisputed champion of the event, being a broad six-foot-plus rugby
player. Gabriel, with his wiry build, was fine on speed, but lacked the brute strength to win at such a physical event.

‘No,’ he said.‘You know I hate the Monday Muddle. Besides, Uncle Dan will beat me hands down, don’t you think?’

‘He might not,’ said Stephen. ‘You don’t know if you don’t try, do you?’

Raising his eyebrows at Pippa at having one of his constant sayings to his son parroted back at him, Gabriel saw his cousin to the door.

‘Go on, give it a try,’ she urged. ‘You never know, you might even enjoy it.’

‘I think you can safely say I won’t,’ said Gabriel, ‘but just for you, I’ll think about it.’

‘I think Marianne’s coming back for it too,’ Pippa added slyly.

Gabriel’s heart gave an unexpected leap at the thought of Marianne being there. ‘I thought Marianne was away for the whole fortnight?’

‘She was supposed to be,’ said Pippa, ‘but she’s just texted me to say she’s going mad at home, so I rang her and suggested she came back for Monday. She thought it might make the perfect excuse for coming back.’

‘Oh right,’ said Gabriel. Now he really didn’t want to take part. The last person he wanted to see him making a fool of himself was Marianne.

‘So now you have to take part, don’t you?’ teased Pippa.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Gabriel.

‘Well, I told Marianne you would be,’ said Pippa. ‘And she said she couldn’t wait.’

‘Pippa,I could kill you sometimes,’sighed Gabriel.‘Don’t you ever stop interfering?’

‘Nope,’ said Pippa. ‘But it’s for your own good, so one day you’ll thank me.’

The pub was heaving. Noel was incredibly touched by how many of his fellow GRB sufferers were prepared to come along to cheer him up once the news spread about his change of circumstances. Feeling that he was in the worst of all possible worlds, Noel had seen no other option than to go to the pub. He’d rung Cat to say he’d be late, but kept getting her work answerphone and her mobile was switched off. So he rang Magda, who sounded utterly disinterested but at least promised to pass the message on to Cat. He tried Cat one last time. Still no answer. Leaving a message to say he was going to the pub, but not feeling able to say why, he snapped his phone shut and went to the bar and ordered another pint.

Four pints and no food later, Noel was feeling more than a little unsteady on his feet. He really should go home.

‘Are you coming to eat?’ Julie appeared by his side with a couple of her cronies.

‘I think I’d better be off,’ said Noel, aware that he was swaying and also aware that he was probably looking like an undignified, middle-aged twat.

‘No, come with us,’ commanded Julie, and suddenly he found himself swept up in a wave of youth, beauty and drunken enthusiasm. He tried to ring Cat again, but her mobile was still switched off, and he was so useless at texting sober he couldn’t even begin to think about it drunk.

Hours passed and suddenly it was midnight and he was sitting dishevelled in a dingy nightclub, his tie undone, feeling a complete wreck. Really, it was time to go home.

‘Come on, come and dance.’ Julie was dragging him to the dance floor.

‘I’ve got to go,’ he protested feebly.

‘No, you haven’t,’ said Julie. ‘Come on, we’re having fun.’

Fun. Yes. Noel remembered that. Last time he’d had any fun had been sometime in the Dark Ages.

He let himself go, for a minute forgetting all his troubles under the bright light dazzling his eyes, finding a strange drunken rhythm to the thumping rap of the dance anthem blaring out from the floor. He moved closer and closer to Julie. She was exceptionally pretty. And she’d always been so nice to him…

‘I really like you, you know,’ Julie shouted in his ear.

‘I really like you too,’ said Noel. He looked down at her. Julie. Julie, his sexy, sweet little secretary. She looked at him. His mouth suddenly went dry and then they were kissing, passionately, stupidly, frantically, as if there was no one left on earth to kiss.

Oh dear God, what was he doing?

Noel broke away in confusion.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t have done that. Sorry.’

‘I’m not,’ said Julie, looking at him lasciviously.

Oh my God. Time to go. Now.

‘Julie, you’re lovely, but I can’t,’ Noel said. ‘Sorry. Really I am. I didn’t mean to be such a shit.’

He fled the dance floor, and ran out into the cold air. He turned his mobile on. Five missed calls from Cat. He leant against the wall of the nightclub gulping in the cool night air. What on earth had he done?