The Magic of Christmas (34 page)

‘Why? What was so wrong about—’

‘I’m not discussing it,’ I said. ‘Just forget it, OK?’

He gazed at me, black eyebrows drawn together in a ferocious frown. ‘
Forget
it? Come on, Lizzy, it must have meant something to you!’

‘Shock makes people do the strangest things, Nick. But if you like, you can put it down to an excess of gratitude that you saved me from serious burns,’ I suggested.

‘I don’t want your damn gratitude,’ he snarled, and then slammed out, making everything on the dresser rattle.

After putting the cake in the oven I sat down and scraped the mixing bowl clean. It tasted salty — but that was probably all the angry tears dripping into it.

In the morning I had just begun icing the Christmas cakes when Mimi and Juno popped round to describe how the family had been banished to the kitchen and small morning room, while the hallway, staircase, drawing room, dining room and family silver were all being buffed up to a high polish.

‘Only there isn’t much family silver,’ Mimi said, ‘unless we drink out of Roly’s racing trophies.’

She was more than a little overexcited, so I suspected that Juno’s main reason in bringing her was to get her away from the Hall for a little while.

‘You’ve never seen anything like it!’ Juno said. ‘Mrs Gumball is in high dudgeon and says if people wanted to see their faces in the furniture, they should have let her know years ago.’

‘Yes, and Juno slipped and nearly fell in the hall, because they had polished under the rug,’ Mimi said, helping herself to a scrap of fondant icing. ‘She might have broken her leg all over again!’

She didn’t sound terribly regretful about this, but I think she’d relished the unusual amount of freedom she’d enjoyed while Juno had been laid up.

‘Stupid thing to do,’ Juno agreed. ‘But it’s all nearly ready for tomorrow now.’ Then she added, casually, ‘Nick’s been very bad-tempered today.’

‘Isn’t he always?’ I asked.

‘Oh, no, he only looks gloomy most of the time, he isn’t really,’ Mimi said. ‘But since he said he was going to visit you yesterday, he’s been really ratty. Did you fall out?’

‘None of your business, Mimi!’ Juno said reprovingly.

‘We may have had … just a little misunderstanding,’ I confessed. ‘But we know where we both stand, now.’

‘Where’s that?’ Mimi asked irrepressibly, but was frowned down by Juno.

‘Are all these little cakes the ones for the WI hampers?’ she said, tactfully changing the subject.

‘Yes, we’ve done six each but we decorate them all the same, so no one knows who baked which.’ I opened the old biscuit tin in which I kept the cake decorations and laid out half a dozen plastic sprigs of holly, robins sitting on logs and gold Merry Christmas plaques. ‘Perhaps you could put one each of those on the tops for me, Mimi, while I look out the cake bands?’

I also got out the fruitcake I made yesterday, and neither of them complained about the taste, so perhaps I only imagined the mix tasted salty.

When they’d gone I put the small cakes away in the larder, ready to deliver to Marian at some point, then turned to our own, decorating it exactly the same way I do every year, with Santa emerging from a little forest with his reindeer sleigh. The bristly fir trees were firmly stuck together in the tin like an early form of Velcro, and had to be prised apart.

Annie and Gareth collected me in her car next day and we all agreed that it seemed very odd to be getting glammed up for a smart dinner before it was even lunchtime. Mind you, I dress up smartly so infrequently that it would have felt odd at
any
time.

They were looking forward to it, but I would have cried off, even at this late stage, if I could have done it without upsetting Unks. I mean, it wasn’t even as if we could
eat
the damned food, since it was all going to be either fake and glazed with something to make it photograph prettily, or sit under the lights for so long it would be rife with three strains of salmonella.

Mimi had already rung me to describe how Christmas had arrived at Pharamond Hall very early that morning in a large van, along with a miscellaneous assortment of photographers, food technicians and the like, plus a snootily elegant grey-haired woman, whose job was to ‘dress’ the rooms they were to use: deck the Hall with boughs of holly.

Mrs Gumball let us in at the kitchen door and said that they’d already photographed in there and the hallway with its garlanded oak banister, until she was fit to scream, and she’d be glad when they were done. Then she took our coats and sent us through into the dining room, which looked strangely unfamiliar.

Although it was barely midday, the crimson curtains were shut and the only light came from thousands of candles glittering off the polished dark panelling. Very realistic swags of festive foliage studded with gilded baubles were draped everywhere, in a colour scheme of crimson, gold and an ecclesiastical deep purple that must have made Gareth feel quite at home.

There were a lot of strangers milling about with cameras and lights and things near the dining table, on which gleamed an unfamiliar silver candelabra and a lot of sparkling cut glass, but the family were all gathered round the fire next to a large fake Christmas tree, among a litter of discarded festive giftwrap.

Nick, looking darkly morose and Mr Rochester in an immaculate dinner jacket, leaned on the mantelpiece with his foot on the fender, gazing into the flames and barely acknowledging our entrance.

Unks made up for this, however, by saying jovially, ‘Come in! What excellent timing, because they’re almost ready for us to do the Christmas dinner scene. Annie, my dear, you look lovely,’ he added, kissing her. ‘Being engaged suits you! You’re a very lucky man indeed, Gareth.’

‘I certainly am,’ the vicar agreed, looking devotedly at Annie, and she blushed.

‘Lizzy looks pretty too,’ Mimi commented brightly, ‘don’t
you
think so, Nick?’

‘She certainly looks different,’ he said, actually looking at me properly for the first time and taking in the figure-enhancing effect of my new dress with a raised eyebrow. I suddenly wished I hadn’t bothered dressing up, but come in the dungarees I wear when I whitewash the henhouse.

‘We’ve been opening presents,’ Mimi said. ‘They were all empty, but we are having real crackers.’

‘And real wine,’ Unks added. ‘Need something to keep us going!’

‘The Christmas tree pops up, decorations and all, like magic,’ Mimi confided to us. ‘Roly, can
we
have one of those?’

‘No, I like the real thing, smelling of pine,’ Roly said. ‘And you like decorating it, don’t you, m’dear?’

‘Oh, yes, I hadn’t thought of that,’ she agreed.

‘Can you take your places at the table, please?’ someone called, and we went where we were directed, which in my case was between Juno and Nick.

People darted in to tweak, dab and twitch everything to perfection as we posed, slightly self-consciously, as directed. I was already aware that my new green dress fitted where it touched — and it touched almost everywhere — but when the photographer kept zooming in on my cleavage I began to wonder if it might be a bit over the top in more ways than one. Then Nick glared at him and he backed off a bit.

‘Can we pull the crackers now?’ Mimi asked plaintively. ‘Haven’t they finished yet?’

‘OK … go ahead,’ a man’s voice said from the dark shadows.

They were certainly big, expensive-looking crackers, with equally pricey-looking novelties inside. Mine, which I pulled with Nick, contained a gold-plated pen, a gilt cardboard crown and a tightly rolled piece of paper.

‘Does your motto make sense?’ Juno asked, puzzling over hers. ‘I think mine is supposed to be a joke, but I’m not sure. I mean, how
could
you cross an elephant with a mouse? That’s not physically possible!’

‘Read yours aloud, Lizzy!’ ordered Mimi gaily. She was becoming flushed and excited.

I unrolled the long, thin strip of paper and found it entirely covered in Nick’s instantly familiar spiky handwriting. ‘Mine doesn’t make sense either,’ I said quickly, crumpling it into my hand. ‘Do you want my pen to go with your little photo frame and gold dice, Mimi? They seem to match, don’t they?’

‘Oh, yes, please!’ she said, but just as I was handing it over, there was the sound of a loud altercation outside the door and a bit of scuffling.

Then Mrs Gumball lumbered in, with a small, rotund and apoplectic man hard on her heels. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder in his direction. ‘It’s that little twerp Lionel Cripchet, from over Rivington way.’

‘
Sir
Lionel,’ he snapped, bobbing up in front of her and glaring generally round, but though we must have presented a very
Night Watch
sort of tableau, the strangeness of it escaped him under the urgency of his anger: ‘I’m here for an explanation!’

‘Are you?’ Unks said mildly, taking another sip of wine. ‘Well, now you
are
here, I wouldn’t mind an explanation myself about that supposedly sound horse you sold me a couple of years back. Remember? The one that mysteriously went permanently lame the day after I bought it?’

‘I’m not here to talk about horses, but squirrels! Yes, that’s taken you by surprise, hasn’t it? I suppose you thought I wouldn’t find out!’

‘Is the man mad?’ Juno asked. ‘Why is he blethering on about squirrels?’

‘Yes, spit it out, Cripchet,’ Roly said amiably. ‘Why are you blethering on about squirrels?’

‘You know very well,’ he exclaimed slightly wildly, looking at the vicar and Annie as if he expected them to come out in support, despite their baffled expressions. ‘I’ve been overrun with the little grey bastards these last two years and now — last night — I finally caught him in the act!’

‘Who?’ asked Nick, then added, after a moment’s thought, ‘And what?’

‘Your gamekeeper, Caz Naylor. His Land Rover was parked up a track next to my estate at one this morning! Now, what do you say about
that
?’ Sir Lionel demanded triumphantly.

‘Is Caz still around?’ Roly asked Mrs Gumball.

‘In the kitchen. Shall I send him in?’

‘Do,’ he agreed. ‘I am quite sure he has a perfectly innocent explanation.’

‘Ha!’ said Sir Lionel, moustache bristling.

Caz slid silently into the room a moment or two later, but no further than the dark shadows just beyond the reach of the candlelight.

‘Ah, Caz, Sir Lionel wants to know what your Land Rover was doing parked up a track next to his estate in the early hours of the morning,’ Roly said. ‘Were you indeed there?’

Caz nodded, almost imperceptibly.

‘And I’m sure you had a very good reason?’ prompted Unks.

‘Of course he had a damn good reason!’ yelled Cripchet, going puce and practically dancing up and down on the spot. ‘He was releasing hordes of flaming grey squirrels onto my land, that’s what he was doing! There’s standing room only and they’re fighting for territory. It’s like World War Three out there!’

‘What do you say to that, Caz? What
were
you doing?’

‘Courtin’,’ he said laconically.

‘Courting?’ demanded the infuriated baronet. ‘
Courting?
You can’t expect me to believe that, Caz Naylor!’

‘Actually,’ the vicar interjected quietly, ‘Caz and his fiancée, Ophelia Locke, have just asked me to put up the banns, so I see no reason to doubt him.’

‘That’s right,’ agreed Caz, and then, clearly feeling that enough had been said, sidled back out of the door again.

‘But the squirrels …’ began Sir Lionel, baffled and furious.

‘You know, Caz said he’d found a lot of the traps sprung but empty lately,’ Unks said, with an air of sudden illumination. ‘And that animal rights group, ARG,
are
very active around here, so I dare say they’ve been releasing them onto your land, that’s what it is.’

Cripchet’s lips worked silently and his skin went an even more ominous shade of puce.

‘A drink before you go?’ suggested Nick hospitably.

Sir Lionel looked from one to the other of us and said slowly, ‘It’s a damned conspiracy! You’re all in league together!’ and then he slammed out.

The magazine crew, who’d been watching with silent appreciation, broke into a spatter of polite applause. Roly bowed.

‘There, all’s well that ends well, isn’t it?’ he said happily. ‘And if you have finished with us, too, ladies and gentlemen, then I suggest we adjourn to the kitchen for something real to eat and leave you to pack everything up.’

When I got to my feet I discovered I still had the curl of paper from the cracker clenched in my hand and, for want of a handbag, shoved it down the front of my dress when no one was looking.

Mrs Gumball had hot soup and sandwiches ready, and by the time we’d finished those, Christmas had been dismantled, packed away and driven off again. Evidently it took much less time to do that, than set it all up.

Annie and Gareth were giving me a lift home and as we left, Nick called out to me, ‘Lizzy, I’ll have to go away tomorrow, but I’ll be back by the end of the month, so I’ll see you up here bright and early on the first of December.’

I stopped dead. ‘You
will
?’

‘Yes, it’s the Senior Citizens’ Christmas dinner, remember? Mrs Gumball is expecting us to both help cook it.’

‘That’s right,’ she agreed.

‘But surely, if Nick’s helping, you won’t want me under your feet, too?’ I suggested hopefully.

‘Many hands make light work,’ she said firmly. ‘And I’ve three geese to cook!’

The note in the cracker was Nick’s recipe for prize-winning apple pie and I instantly saw that there was no startling difference between his and my own. So if his really
was
better, then it must mean that he had a lighter hand with the pastry, which was even
more
unforgivable.