The Magic of Christmas (3 page)

‘Someone told me they called her the Black Widow after Leo died, so it’s not surprising her third husband gave it up and whisked her off back to Argentina,’ I said.

Tom’s mother had started a whole new life out there, but her firstborn was packed off to boarding school and farmed out at Pharamond Hall in the holidays. That made us both orphans in a way, which had once seemed to make a bond …

Annie said, ‘Tom’s hardly seen his mother over the years, has he?’

‘No, or his half-siblings. He blames it all on his stepfather, of course, and won’t hear a word against her. Come to that, I’ve only met her a couple of times and we can’t be said to have bonded.’

‘You’d think she’d at least be interested in her grandson — Jasper’s such a lovely boy,’ Annie said fondly.

‘I used to send her his school photos, but since I never got any response, I gave up. In fact, with all this rejection, it’s wonderful that poor Jasper isn’t bitter and twisted, too!’

‘Oh, he’s much too sensible and he knows
we
all love him: me, Roly, even Mimi.’

I considered Unks’ unmarried sister, Mimi, who is not at all maternal and whose passions are reserved for the walled garden she tends behind the Hall. ‘You’re right, she
does
seem to like him, despite his not being any form of plant life.’

‘And Nick is fond of him — Jasper and he get on well.’

‘He only really sees him during our occasional Sunday lunch up at the Hall, when we’re all on our best behaviour for Roly’s sake, because Tom’s made it abundantly clear he isn’t welcome at Perseverance Cottage.’

‘How difficult it all is!’ Annie sighed, which was the under-statement of the year. ‘I always agreed with Mum and Dad that marriage should be for ever, but once Tom started having affairs and being really nasty to you and Jasper, I changed my mind. He’s not at all the man you married.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I reflected. ‘I think perhaps he is, it’s just that his true nature was hidden underneath all that charm. His sarcastic tongue has suddenly become a lot more vicious, though, which I expect is because he really wants me out of the cottage now, but I mean to try and stick to my original plan and hang on until I’ve got Jasper settled at university. It doesn’t do a lot for my self-confidence when Tom’s constantly belittling me and telling me how useless I am, though.’

‘You’re not useless,’ she said, ‘you’ve been practically self-sufficient for years in fruit, vegetables and eggs, made a lovely home for him and Jasper, and written all those wonderful books.’

‘I don’t actually get paid very much for the
Chronicles
— they’re a bit of a niche market — and I’m running late with the next, what with one thing and another.’

‘I suppose it’s hard to think up funny anecdotes to go between the recipes and gardening stuff, what with all the worry about Tom. But if you want to leave him right now, you know you and Jasper can move in here any time you like, and stay as long as you want,’ she offered generously.

‘I
do
know, and it’s very kind of you,’ I said gratefully, not pointing out that her cottage isn’t much bigger than a doll’s house: two tiny rooms up and down, crammed so full of bric-a-brac you can hardly expand your lungs to full capacity without nudging something over. Jasper, when he visits, tends to stand in the corner with his arms folded so as not to damage anything.

‘Once Jasper is at university I might have to take you up on that offer, but very temporarily. I’ll still need to make a home for him to come back to. I’ll have to get a job stacking supermarket shelves, so I can rent somewhere. I’m not really qualified to do anything else.’

‘Then what about Posh Pet-sitters? Business is expanding hugely since I added general pet-feeding and care to the dog-walking, and I could do with an assistant.’

Annie set up Posh Pet-sitters several years ago with a loan from her parents, and business seemed to be building up nicely, due to the patronage of several of the actors from the long-running drama
Cotton Common
, set in a turn-of-the-century Lancashire factory town, who have suddenly ‘discovered’ the three villages that comprise the Mosses.

Where they led, other minor celebrities followed, since although off the beaten track, we’re within commuting distance of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and the M6, and in pretty countryside just where the last beacon-topped hills slowly subside into the fertile farmland that runs west to the coast.

Some of the actors live in the new walled and gated estate of swish detached houses in Mossrow, but others have snapped up whatever has appeared on the market, from flats in the former Pharamond’s Butterflake Biscuit factory, to old cottages and farms.

‘Did you go and see Ritch Rainford yesterday?’ I asked, suddenly remembering how excited Annie had been at getting a call from the singer-turned-actor who plays Seth Steele, the ruggedly handsome mill owner in
Cotton Common
. (All that alliteration must have been too much for the producers of the series to resist!)

He’s bought the old vicarage where Annie’s family used to live, a large and rambling Victorian building with a brick-walled garden, in severe need of TLC and loads of cash. (The new vicar is now housed in an unpretentious bungalow next to the church.)

Annie’s pleasantly homely face, framed in a glossy pudding-bowl bob of copper hair, took on an unusually rapt — almost holy — expression and her blue-grey eyes went misty. ‘Oh,
yes
! He’s …’ She stopped, apparently lost for superlatives.

‘Sexy as dark chocolate?’ I suggested. ‘Toothsomely rum truffle?’

‘Just — wonderful,’ she said simply. ‘He has such charisma, it was as though a … a golden light was shining all around him.’

‘Bloody hell! That sounds more like finding all the silver charms in your slice of Christmas pudding at once!’ I stared at her, but she was lost in a trance.

‘Lizzy, he’s so kind, too! When I explained that I used to live at the vicarage, he took me around and showed me all the improvements he’s made, and told me what else he was going to do. Then he just handed me a set of keys to the house so he could call me up any time to go and exercise or feed his dog.’

‘Well, if your clients didn’t do that, you wouldn’t be able to get in,’ I said drily. ‘What sort of dog does he have?’

‘A white bull terrier bitch called Flo — very good-natured, though I might have to be careful around other dogs.’

‘And what’s the new vicar like?’ I asked, but she hadn’t noticed, being full of Ritch Rainford to the point where her bedazzled eyes couldn’t really take in another man. However, a crush on a handsome actor was not likely to get her anywhere.

Annie was once engaged, but was jilted with her feet practically on the carpeted church aisle. Since then she had safely confined her affections to unsuitable — and unattainable — actors.

‘I’ve heard he’s single
and
has red hair,’ I said encouragingly since, despite her own copper locks, she has a weakness for redheaded men.

‘He hasn’t got red hair, he’s blond!’ she protested indignantly, and I saw that she was still thinking of Ritch Rainford. Perhaps I ought to watch
Cotton Common
to see what all the excitement was about.

Eventually Annie ran me home, since I wanted to be there when Jasper returned. I was by then attired in one of her voluminous cardigans — a bilious green, with loosely attached knitted pink roses — to hide the dried but dubious-looking stains on my T-shirt.

She said she was going to come in with me and give Tom a piece of her mind, which would not have gone down well, but luckily Tom, his van and some of his clothes had vanished. He’d also locked me out; but not only did Annie have our key on her ring, I kept one hidden under a flower pot, so that wasn’t a problem.

‘Looks like he’s gone away again,’ I said gratefully. ‘Thank goodness for that.’

Of course he hadn’t thought to feed the hens, who had put themselves to bed in disgust, or the quail, so Annie helped me to shut everything up safely for the night.

As we walked back to the cottage Uncle Roly Pharamond’s gamekeeper, Caz Naylor, sidled out of a small outbuilding and, with a brief salute, flitted away through the shadows towards the woods behind the cottage.

He’s a foxy-looking young man, with dark auburn hair, evasive amber eyes and a tendency to address me, on the rare occasions when he speaks, as ‘our Lizzy’, thus acknowledging a distant relationship that all the Naylors in the area seemed to know about from the minute I set foot in the place for the first time at the age of eleven.

Annie looked startled: ‘Wasn’t that Caz? What’s he doing here?’

‘I let him have the use of the old chest freezer in there. Since I cut down on the amount of stuff I grow, I don’t need it,’ I said, for I’d been slowly running things down ready for the moment that I knew was fast approaching, when I must leave Perseverance Cottage. ‘He comes and goes as he pleases.’

She shook her head. ‘All the Naylors are strange …’

‘But some are stranger than others? My mother was a Naylor too, don’t forget! Descendant of some distant ancestor who made good in Liverpool, in the cargo shipping line — which at least explains why I’m such a daughter of the soil and feel so firmly rooted here.’

She smiled. ‘I expect Roly told him to keep an eye on things after that animal rights group started targeting you.’

‘More likely he’s keeping an eye on his freezer,’ I said, though it was true that the only evidence of ARG (as they are known locally) I’d spotted around the place lately were the occasional bits of gaffer tape where a banner had been ripped off my car or the barn. ‘Perhaps they just aren’t bothering with me that much. I mean, I can see why they might target Unks and Caz, especially since no one knows what Caz does with all those grey squirrels he traps, but why me? I’m not battery farming anything.’

All my fowl lived long, happy and mainly useless lives, except for an excess of male quail and the occasional unwanted cockerel, which Caz dispatched for me with expert efficiency.

‘I expect they just include you in with the Pharamond estate, since your cottage is part of it,’ she agreed. ‘It’s not personal.’

We cleaned up the mess in the kitchen as well as we could and then Annie left, since it was clear enough that Tom wasn’t coming back that night, at least — and I thanked heaven for small mercies.

‘What happened to your face, Mum?’ Jasper asked, getting his first good look at me in the light of the kitchen, when a friend dropped him home later. ‘That looks like a bruise coming up. And why are you wearing one of Auntie Annie’s horrible cardigans?’

‘Your father dropped a plate and a piece hit me,’ I explained. ‘Annie loaned me the cardigan to cover up the gravy stains on my T-shirt and I forgot to give it back when she went home.’

He looked at the dent and new marks on the plastered kitchen wall and said, ‘He dropped a plate
horizontally
?’ in that smart-lipped way teenage boys have.

‘Yes, he was practising discus throwing,’ I said, and he gave me a look but let the subject drop.

He didn’t ask where his father was. But then, at that time, he never did.

Tom had been gone a couple of days when Jasper pointedly enquired after dinner one night if there was anything I wanted to discuss, but I just said we would have a little chat before he went to university and he gave me one of his looks.

I knew he was now an adult, and at some point I’d have to explain to him that I was going to leave his father and the cottage as soon as he’d gone off to university, but at that moment he was so happy that he’d got the exam grades he needed for his first choice, I didn’t want to rain on his parade.

Next day, when I let out the hens, I found it was one of those delicious late summer mornings that reminded me of the early honeymoon weeks of our marriage in Cornwall: dreamy swirls of mist with the warm sun tinting the edges golden, like pale yellow candyfloss wisps. You could easily imagine King Arthur and Queen Guinevere riding out of it in glorious Technicolor, all jingling bridles and hooded hawks, though if they had they would probably have been surprised to find themselves transported from the land of legend into a Lancashire backwater like Middlemoss.

The last remaining acres of darkly watchful ancient woodland that crowded up to the back of Perseverance Cottage would have looked normal enough to them, I suppose — apart from Caz Naylor, who as usual was camouflaged from headband to boots, Rambo-style. I spotted him flitting in and out of the trees only by the white glint of his eyeballs and the sweat glistening between the green and brown streaks on his naked chest. A blink and he was gone, back to wage war on the dangerous alien life form known to the uninitiated as the grey squirrel.

Still, even in Arthurian times they would probably have had some kind of shamanistic Green Man and so would be used to such goings-on, and the duckpond, chickens and vegetable patch out front would look reassuringly normal to them. But what would they have made of the huge, tumble-down old greenhouse, the remains of a previous tenant’s abortive attempt at market gardening? Or my battered, once-white Citroën 2CV? A 2CV that, I now noticed, had its hood down, so the seats would be soaked with dew and very likely lightly spattered with hen crap. Or even, which was much, much worse, duck gloop.