The Night Before Christmas (11 page)

‘Thanks, Jo.’ Alex mustered a smile. ‘It does help to hear you say it. Now all I have to worry about is that I am going to have a baby! Fuck!’

‘Are you scared about the labour?’ Lydia asked her, as Joanna topped up her glass with her second large whiskey. The warmth of the alcohol was slowly melting through her body, and had done a lot to take the edge off her secret nightmare. Besides, hopefully the men would be gone for a very long time, and here she was in front of a crackling fire with some good whiskey, a mountain of mince pies and her favourite people. For a few hours at least, life was okay. ‘Because my dad’s latest wife says it’s not as painful as you think it’s going to be, and when it does get so painful that you think you might die, that’s when you know you’ve reached the hardest part and it’s all downhill from then on! Unless something goes wrong, of course …’

‘Thanks, Lyds, if it was the labour that I was worried about, then, yes, that would definitely put my mind at rest,’ Alex said sarcastically. ‘But no, it’s not that. It’s what comes after.’ Alex smiled fondly at Tilly, who was
curled up asleep with Vincent on the sofa. ‘I’m not like you, Katy. I’m not a natural mother. I do what I want, when I want to. If I want to go for a sponsored trek along the Andes, at a moment’s notice, then I go. I don’t even ask David, I tell him. But I can’t do that with a baby, can I? A baby’s going to need me, to feed it, and stuff. And you can’t run twenty miles a week with a baby in tow, or work ten-hour days. I was really happy when I fell pregnant, so excited, and then one day I couldn’t bend down to lace up my trainers, and it hit me. I’m not really a baby person.’

‘Of course you are.’ Joanna patted her on the knee. ‘I’m sure you are, I don’t think God would let you get so royally knocked up unless somewhere deep in there, beneath that tough exterior, beats the heart of a woman made to smell of baby sick and need incontinence pads.’

‘Bitch!’ Alex smiled despite the insult.

‘I don’t think you have to worry,’ Katy said, stroking Tilly’s forehead. ‘Nobody’s a natural mother; I know I wasn’t. For the first three months after Jake was born, I felt like sticking my head in a gas oven every day. Thank God we only had electric …’

‘So far, none of this is helping,’ Alex told her friends ruefully.

‘What I mean is, just because you get pregnant, you don’t suddenly and automatically have all the maternal wisdom in the world downloaded into your psyche. You have to learn by your mistakes and sort of feel
your way. And, yes, it is a pain not being able to do what you want, when you want, any more. But all of that is outweighed by the totally amazing, all-consuming love you will feel for your baby. Even when it throws up on you and you don’t notice till you’re in the supermarket …’

‘But what if I don’t love it?’ Alex asked Katy anxiously. ‘What if it hates me?’

‘Have it adopted!’ Joanna suggested, making Lydia giggle. ‘By Madonna or Elton John – oh, or Angelina. She likes a baby.’

‘I promise you right here and now that you and that the little person in there …’

‘Massive person,’ Joanna interjected, digging Lydia in the ribs.

‘… will adore each other unreservedly,’ Katy finished, shooting Joanna her best chastening look.

‘I hope you’re right,’ Alex said. Katy leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

‘Of course I am. Trust me, becoming a mother is the one thing I know something about.’

Alex looked a little reassured as she balanced her empty mug on her bump. ‘I tell you what, though, what I wouldn’t do for a good old-fashioned forward-facing fuck!’

Lydia glowed with happiness as she watched her friends dissolve in giggles at the unexpected comment. Despite all of the nasty surprises that life might hold
in store for a person, there was always one thing she could count on. Her friends – they would never let her down. And at that moment, she knew with total certainty that nothing and no one would ever make her do anything to hurt any one of them. As long as Jackson Blake could keep their past relationship to himself, then so could she.

Chapter Seven

The sun had long since retreated behind the low and brooding cloud that hung, full of snow, over the peaks of the mountains, when the men returned, plus one. It was no coincidence that by that time all the women – bar Alex – were a little tipsy, and even she had caught the girly, giggly mood, despite her enforced sobriety. The girls could spot the little party, torches flashing, coming round the bend, and went en masse to greet them.

‘We have returned bearing expertise!’ Jim said, his ruddy cheeks due either to the cold or beer, or most likely both. Jake was slung over one shoulder, clutching a can of fizzy orange in one hand and a packet of Skittles in the other. Lydia could almost see Katy waving goodbye to her easy bedtime and unbroken night.

‘A little bit worse for wear,’ Stephen told her, kissing her fondly. ‘Hey, hey … Shall we go and light the fire in the bedroom, know what I mean?’

‘So who is this?’ Joanna had wound herself around Jackson the moment she’d seen him, practically dragging him inside and out of his coat, and kissing both
of his cheeks feverishly. But even in the first throws of love, Joanna was not blind to a new male specimen standing in the hallway.

The handyman stood looking rather awkward, with his hands in his pockets, glancing around at the house, finding a particularly fascinating bit of cornicing to focus on as the women rather obviously studied him. He was a little younger than Stephen, probably more or less Lydia’s own age, with longish, dark curly hair and eyes as black and deep as the waters of the lake at the bottom of the garden. A growth of stubble added just the right finishing touch to his windswept look, which, even in his sensible country-person snow wear, had quite an impact on the girls.

‘Blimey, you’ve brought us Heathcliff!’ a slightly tipsy Lydia found herself saying out loud, drawing the attention of the handyman from the ceiling to her flushed face. ‘Er … um. No offence, or anything.’

‘None taken,’ he said, with a smile, his accent pure Cumbrian. ‘But you need to go back down south a hundred miles or so, if you want real Brontë Country.’

Lydia was surprised, and then in turn horrified that she was surprised he’d even heard of
Wuthering Heights
. As if he might be as wild and feral in all respects as he looked, and hadn’t bothered going to school as he was too busy out killing deer with his bare hands, which as it happened wasn’t such a terrible image.

‘Are you sure you’re qualified to look at my boiler?’
Katy asked him, the whiskey making her perhaps a tad more confrontational than was polite. Joanna and Alex cracked up, giggling like schoolgirls. ‘Because, I have children in this house, and despite their father’s insistence on poisoning them with additives, I do not wish them, or any of my friends, to be killed in an explosion.’ She finished off her statement with a rather wayward point in the general direction of the boiler, followed by a little hiccup.

‘Sorry, mate.’ Jim clapped the handyman on the shoulder. ‘Wife appears to be a bit rat-arsed.’

Lydia liked the handyman’s twisty-mouthed, repressed smile. He was trying very hard not to laugh at them, which oddly enough only added to his allure.

‘I’m Corgi registered, for installation and maintenance,’ he told her politely. ‘My name’s Will, Will Dacre. I’ve got my paperwork, if you want to have a look?’

He rooted about in his tool kit, and produced some papers, which Katy took off him and scrutinised for several seconds before turning them the right way up and reading them again.

‘Will’s doing us a big favour,’ Jim told his wife, depositing Jake unceremoniously on the floor and dropping a heavy arm around Katy’s shoulder’s, knocking her a little off balance. ‘Not only did we have to drag him away from his lunch, it took us about an hour to walk back, and only partly because we are quite drunk.
The snow is mental, plus Will here reckons it’s going to chuck it down some more in a minute. So the very least we owe the man is a drink and a hot dinner.’

‘Do you understand the weather, Will?’ Joanna fluttered her lashes, letting loose her hold of Jackson a little. ‘Does your country upbringing mean you are terribly in tune with nature?’

‘No, but I do have a weather app on my iPhone,’ Will said. That twisty, trying hard not to laugh smile appeared again.

‘So anyway, be nice to him, wife!’ Jim commanded Katy.

‘I suppose he looks qualified,’ Katy said, eyeing Will suspiciously. ‘And don’t call me wife.’

‘Right, men, draw your torches, let us commence to the cellar and fix shit!’

‘Don’t let him touch anything,’ Katy warned Will. ‘That’s how it got broken in the first place. ‘I’ll make you some coffee.’

‘Alcoholic coffee!’ Jim shouted, as Stephen blew Lydia a kiss and followed the others towards the cellar door.

‘Oh, my God,’ Alex said. ‘We are all going to die.’

‘Still, the handyman’s a bit of a shag, isn’t he?’ Lydia commented, her tongue loosened by whiskey, just at the precise moment Will walked back in to retrieve his tool kit. The girls hooted with laughter, Katy snorting through her nose, Joanna doubled up as Lydia
stood there, two bright spots of colour igniting on her cheeks.

‘I’ll take that a compliment,’ Will said, picked up his back and headed back to the cellar.

After Lydia had banged her head several times against the nearest wall, and the others had mostly stopped pointing and laughing at her, they came to the collective conclusion that it was probably a good idea to sober up, at least temporarily, so that they stopped trying to throw themselves at the local hunk and at least tried to appear to be respectable grown-up women.

Katy sent Jake off to colour something with Tilly, and Alex went along to ensure that, this time, they didn’t colour in the enormously expensive reproduction wallpaper in the dining room, although she grumbled about always being the one to miss out on all the fun.

‘Right, I’ll start dinner – and Lydia, would you mind lighting the fires in the bedrooms, just in case Heathcliff down there doesn’t get the pilot light going.’

‘He can light my fire any time,’ Joanna giggled, peering out of the window where a new snowfall was being dashed against the glass by merciless winds. ‘With any luck, we’ll all be snowed in together and we can devour him whole, starting at his toes.’

‘You are doing the veg,’ Katy informed Joanna, dumping one pile of potatoes and one of carrots in front of her.

‘Doing the veg, you say?’ Joanna seemed to find it a difficult concept to grasp. ‘You know what you need? You need an EasyPeel Automatic Potato peeler, only fifteen ninety-nine, and with ten pounds worth of attachments absolutely free – yes, free, if you order before four p.m.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Katy said, ‘because I’ve got a peeler. It’s you. Get on with it, it will do you good to get your hands dirty, for once.’

‘Anyway Jo, why are you letching over Heathcliff? Aren’t you supposed to be in love?’ Lydia reminded her friend.

‘Yes, Lydia, I am totally in love. As are you, aren’t you? But how did you so succinctly put it? That Will is a bit of a shag, isn’t he?’

Lydia found that there was nothing so effective as several large glasses of very nice whiskey when it came to taking the edge off her situation. Here she was in Joanna and Jackson’s room, ignoring the rumpled bedclothes on the bed behind her and the trail of underwear Joanna had left across the carpet, and feeling really rather Zen about it. Perhaps it had been the look on Joanna’s face when she’d been talking about Jackson, or the news that he planned to take Joanna back to New York. Either way, no matter how she felt or thought she’d felt about him in the past, that moment in her life was gone now. As Lydia inserted the fire lighters in among the logs,
as Katy had shown her, she thought that, perhaps, as long as she remained permanently ever so slightly drunk on very good whiskey from now until the end of all eternity, she’d eventually be fine about it, and would maybe even possibly be a bridesmaid at Jackson and Joanna’s highly alliterative wedding.

Lydia sat back on her knees, so engrossed in the tiny lick of fire creeping its way across the wood that she didn’t notice the door open and shut behind her.

‘It’s a long time since I’ve found you in my bedroom,’ Jackson said, making her jump.

‘God, you gave me a fright,’ Lydia said, beginning a smile before remembering her new whiskey-fuelled resolution. ‘Sorry, Katy sent me off to be fire monitor. I’ll get out of your way.’ The room span a little as Lydia got to her feet, forcing her to take a moment and wait to find her feet.

‘Don’t rush off,’ Jackson said. ‘Jo’s up to her elbows in potato peelings. Let’s talk.’

Lydia sighed, forcing herself to look Jackson in the face – still that same boyish smile, those intense blue eyes, the look that made you feel like you were the only girl in the world, even though there was solid proof to the contrary.

‘I just can’t believe you’re here,’ Jackson said, looking her up and down with such close scrutiny that Lydia felt uncomfortable. ‘You look exactly the same; you look beautiful. I’ve missed you, Lydia.’

Lydia raised her eyebrows, wishing her feet would move from this spot to which they seemed rooted.

‘I know what you must be thinking, but you’re wrong,’ Jackson said. ‘I didn’t just disappear, or hide. That night, the night you insisted on going home to work on a case, I got a call from my mom. Dad had had a massive heart attack; it was touch and go. I had to go to the airport and get on a plane and deal everything else out later. All I could think about was being with my family. I never imagined it would be the end of us. I never meant for that text I sent you to be the last.’

‘Really.’ Lydia crossed her arms. ‘So what happened, then? You suffered temporary amnesia about how to use a phone and your dad made a miraculous recovery?’

Jackson dropped his eyes from hers ‘Hardly. It was the worst time of my life. He hung in there for a while, and we got to take him home, but he was very sick. A few weeks later, he was gone … I wanted to call you, to speak to you. But my mom needed me, and there’s so much to deal with when someone dies. Not just the emotional stuff. I had to arrange my father’s funeral, support Mom while his estate was settled, try and get used to the idea that the big, brash bull of a man I’d worshipped wasn’t in the world any more. That kind of blotted everything out for a while …’

Chastened, Lydia saw the shadow of pain pass across his face as he remembered his father’s death. She couldn’t help but feel sympathetic, thinking back to
Alex having to deal with the aftermath of her mother’s death, emotionally, practically and bureaucratically. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered, feeling her heart melt a little at Jackson’s confession. She knew he was telling the truth about his father, at least. Or if he was lying, he deserved an Oscar for his performance. No, it must be true. After all, no one would lie about such a thing. But even now she knew what had happened, there was one thing that bothered her. ‘But why didn’t you call me … after?’

‘Well, the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, and suddenly it felt too late just to call you. After all, I pretty much just left; I know that, even if I did send you a text. Given that, I really thought it was all over for us. In fact, I planned to stay in the US and help my mom, but then I found out that my job was on the line if I didn’t come back to the UK, and Mom told me I had to come back. She knew how much I’d loved London. I’d been talking a little bit about you. She persuaded me to come back, and to come and find you.’

‘You didn’t look very hard, did you?’ Lydia said, unsettled by the way he was looking at her.

‘I did, I came to your chambers, straight from the airport. I saw you with Stephen. You looked so happy, so over “us”. I realised I’d missed my chance and that maybe I didn’t deserve a second one anyway.’

Lydia stared at him, unable to speak. ‘Is that true?’ she said at last.

‘Of course it is,’ Jackson told her. ‘I tried to put losing you behind me. I moved on. I got through a lot of women trying to forget you, Lydia. And then a few months ago, I was at this publisher’s bash, a launch for some chat show host’s novel, and there was Joanna. Beautiful, funny, sweet Joanna. Exactly the kind of woman I wanted in my life if I couldn’t have you. We e-mailed and texted for a while, and then eventually I asked her out on a date. And it turns out that she is pretty great.’

‘She is great,’ Lydia said, still reeling from what he’d told her. ‘She is one of the best people I know. So, let me get this straight, you didn’t call, or text, or even send me an e-mail because you saw me with another man? I mean, what if Stephen had been my brother, or my gay best friend?’

‘I don’t think you’d kiss either of those the way I saw you kissing him,’ Jackson said, wincing as if the memory still grated. ‘No, it was clear to me you’d moved on. And then, when I met you here … Jo’s talked about her girlfriends, about how wonderful you all are and how much I’ll love you all. She calls you “Lyds”. I never made the connection. I never guessed that Lyds was you. Until I saw you, and now …’ Lydia waited. ‘I wasn’t prepared for how I felt when I saw you standing there.’

‘Jackson,’ Lydia warned him.

‘The way I felt about you back then, it hasn’t gone away …’

‘No, Jackson, don’t do this.’

‘Lydia.’ It only took a fraction of a second for Jackson to cross the room and kiss her, but Lydia watched it all as if it was taking place in slow motion. Knowing what was about to happen, unable to react, as those deep blue eyes locked on hers, and she was lost. She felt his arms encircle her, his lips crush against hers, and although rigid with shock for a moment, all too soon her body answered his as she remembered the heat of that lost summer.

‘Hello?’ At the sound of Stephen’s voice, they sprang apart, Lydia pressing the back of her hand to her enflamed lips just as Stephen wandered into the room.

‘There you are!’ He grinned at her. ‘That Will fellow’s done the trick. Got the old boiler going again, so the house should warm up pretty soon. Looks like he’s staying over, too, as the weather’s come in something shocking out there. You want to get down there, Jack, and guard your woman. The girls are all of a flutter over him.’