Last Christmas (18 page)

The sun shone as Gabriel took his ewes and lambs down the lane and out to pasture. He’d delayed getting them back on the hills because up until Easter Monday the weather had been so dreadful. But spring was definitely sprung, and it was a fine clear morning to be out on the hillside. He whistled as he made his way up the valley. He loved these early mornings here, the freshness of the air, the vast blue arc of sky above him, the gentle sound of sheep baaing, the rooks cawing in their rookeries, and the soft spring of the heather under his feet. And the colours on the hillside never ceased to amaze him, ever changing with the seasons. In summer he knew the soft pinks and purples of the heather would become lost in a blaze of glorious gold and green, and by autumn the hills would be red and orange, before fading to the muted soft greens of winter. He felt lucky to be here, at one with nature, enjoying the view.

And since the Monday Muddle he felt luckier still. Marianne seemed to be slotting into his life in a comfortable and easy way. If Stephen had a late club at school, she often walked home with him and stayed for a cup of tea. The three of them had driven over the hills to an isolated country pub for Sunday lunch and then a long yomp across the fields. It had felt natural and right and, when they’d swung Stephen between them, Gabriel had realised with a
jolt that this was what he had always been missing with Eve. Precious family moments had been few and far between, either because Eve couldn’t ‘cope’ with Stephen, so Gabriel had taken him out alone, or because, when she had come with them, invariably something would happen to create tension and he and Stephen would have to be on tenterhooks for the whole day. Gabriel tried and failed to think of a single day spent with his wife and son that had been this easy.

He whistled as he wound his way into the valley near the proposed eco town. He could see that work had started already but was amused to notice that the foundations of the proposed houses were deep in mud, and the new back gardens, which led down to the river, were awash. When would they learn? This was such a bad place to build, any fool could see it. Although the weather had perked up of late, the river banks were swollen, and the last few weeks in March had brought severe flood warnings that so far hadn’t come to pass. But if they did, Gabriel was fairly sure the river bank wouldn’t hold, and the eco town might get swept away before it had even been built.

A few hours later, Noel was standing in the same muddy field looking round him in dismay. By dint of fudging things so that the bulk of the houses in the eco town would be built on the hillside, while the communal areas would be in the spot where there were potential floods, as per the government guidelines, the project been allowed to go ahead.

Coming as he had from the rural beauty of Hope Christmas, it seemed more shameful to Noel than ever that they were tearing up this beauty spot for what was at best going to be a shiny new town with no heart and soul, and at worst was going to be a disaster, leaving both houses and GRB in a quagmire. The sun was shining but he was
standing in a swamp and the river was flowing dangerously fast. Even Matt Duncan had blanched when he’d arrived. The soil was so damp, and had been for weeks, work had ground to a halt on the site, the foreman having pushed his workers off and put them on another job that they could actually finish. Noel didn’t blame him. In these financially turbulent times it made sense to get a job done so you could get paid. GRB’s finances were probably so precarious at the moment, the chances of the builders getting paid on time were slight to say the least, and any delay meant GRB’s credit controllers would be rubbing their hands with glee at the thought they could stall paying someone. Noel always failed to understand how credit controllers operated. Presumably they realised that their counterparts in the customers’ firms were playing the same game? Sure, they were saving GRB money, but someone, somewhere, was making sure GRB didn’t get paid, which in the end could be the difference between keeping your job or not.

Noel swallowed slightly. He still hadn’t told Cat about the precarious nature of his situation, and though his heart wasn’t in this eco project at all, he felt duty-bound to give it his best shot. Maybe then his job might be safe? And maybe that promised bonus would materialise. But somehow Noel doubted it. There was a chill wind blowing across the business map these days. If he lost his job, for the first time in his life Noel wasn’t certain he’d get another one.

‘How’s it all going, chaps?’ Great. Luke Nicholas came swaggering up in a Barbour and this time, Noel noticed to his amusement, wellingtons, looking every inch the country squire.

‘We’re having a few difficulties with the builders’, explained Noel, seeing that Matt looked like he was going
to fudge the issue once more. ‘They’re saying it’s not possible to carry on building in this swamp, so they’ve downed tools and swanned off to another job.’

Luke’s eyes narrowed, and a vein began to throb dangerously on his upper temple. Noel stared at it, fascinated. It seemed to be developing a life of its own.

‘Not good enough, people,’ he said. ‘We have investors to keep happy here. Investors who need reassurance in these difficult times that this particular investment is safe.’

Wondering how on earth anyone was going to guarantee that the houses here would actually be sold now that the world’s finances were in such a downturn, Noel simply said, ‘What do you suggest we do?’

‘Throw money at it,’ was the succinct reply. ‘Whatever the other job is offering them, double it. We’ve spent too much on this to back out now. And you two. You’re the engineers. Find a solution. Presumably you can find
some
way of drying the earth out so the building can recommence. It can’t be that hard, can it?’

‘It’s not quite as straightforward as that,’ began Noel, thinking of the fact that they were building on clay, which was going to lead to subsidence problems anyway once the earth had dried out, but he knew he was wasting his time as soon as Matt chipped in with, ‘That’s fine, Luke. I’m sure we can work something out, can’t we, Noel?’

Noel said nothing. There was no point. But he looked at the swamp again and knew the project was failed. No matter how much money Luke Nicholas thought he could throw at it.

Cat was ostensibly working at home on the Christmas issue but so far this morning she’d managed to put on three loads of washing, clear a space on the floor in the chaos that was Ruby’s room and make herself three cups of tea.
Cat had forgotten how very difficult it was working from home and trying to juggle the competing demands of seeing what needed to be done in the house with that of an editor screaming for copy yesterday.

Since Magda’s departure, Cat had been trying to wangle more and more days at home so that she could at least do the school run without relying too heavily on Regina. Regina had been fabulous, it was true, and would help out at the drop of a hat, but Cat knew it wasn’t fair to expect it of her friend. She wasn’t often in a position to pay back the favour—having to work like a demon in between sorting tea out and getting the kids to bed, Cat couldn’t manage to cope with Regina’s mob for tea more than once a week—and she was guiltily aware that in the school-mum-helping-each-other-out bank she was heavily in her friend’s debt.

In the first couple of weeks after Magda had gone, Cat had asked her mum to help out, but things hadn’t gone according to plan. Mum had needed to be reminded every day she was picking the children up from school and, when she got home, the children had started complaining to Cat that Granny Dreamboat was either paying them no attention, or getting cross with them for no good reason. When quizzed about it, Mum was incredibly vague, and Cat was beginning to realise she couldn’t even rely on her mother to cook the children’s supper when she got in. Nine times out of ten when she got home, Mum would have been ‘just about to’ put the tea on, the kids were starving and snappy with each other, and the house was in more chaos than Cat could have thought possible.

It was becoming increasingly clear to her that though her mother continued to be delighted to see her grandchildren, and frequently moaned that she didn’t see enough of them, the reality was they were exhausting her. And after
two more occasions when Mum had simply forgotten to turn up on the school run, Cat reluctantly came to the conclusion that her mother was no longer to be relied on. She pushed away the gnawing ache of worry that that was engendering in her. She had enough to deal with, without thinking too hard about the fact her mother appeared to be losing it. Besides, the thought of something being wrong with her clever, capable mother made her shrivel up inside. She wasn’t ready to face it.

Particularly not at a time when both Noel and Mel seemed to be locked in their respective bubbles of misery. Noel had clammed up completely on her. He was taking quite a few days working at home (funnily it never seemed convenient for
him
to do the school run), but, whether at home or work, he seemed silent and morose. She couldn’t even get him to row with her, which at least would have shown some spark of something. It was as though Noel had lost interest in her and the children. While Mel, Mel was becoming harder and harder work. Cat knew the transition from primary to secondary school had been difficult for her clever, sensitive daughter, but, whereas the other mothers she knew were reporting their children settling down into their new schools, Mel seemed more and more closed in on herself. It was Cat’s secret fear that her daughter was being bullied, and she was keeping a weather eye on Mel’s MSN account to make sure nothing untoward had happened. It caught at her heart to see her daughter so very unhappy and be unable to do anything about it.

Cat sighed. Maybe she should blog about Mel’s problems. One of the bonuses of the blog, she’d found, was that talking about domestic problems she had (not that the Happy Homemaker often admitted to having problems) usually resulted in a wave of supportive posts from people who had been through similar. She’d do that now and get
going on the magazine later. It was important that she keep her blog posts up, they’d become a bit sporadic of late.

It’s every mother’s nightmare. The thought that your child is being bullied and you can do nothing about it. But how do you know if you’re child is being bullied? And what, if anything, can you do to prevent it?

Cat began to type and was soon lost in her words. It was one way to stop herself worrying.

Marianne raced late into the latest Post Office Meeting. Vera had called it at short notice, so Pippa and Gabriel had both said they couldn’t make it and she’d agreed to let them know how it went.

How it went was very simple. Vera got up, looking ashen-faced, and said in a straightforward manner,‘I’m really sorry everyone, but our campaign has failed. Despite the petition and the picketing of Mount Pleasant, I heard today that my post office licence is being withdrawn. It’s nobody’s fault, really, they’re just following government guidelines, but there’s nothing more any of us can do. I really appreciate the help you’ve given—’

She stifled a sob and sat down again, looking stricken. Mr Edwards, who was sitting next to her, patted her hand sympathetically and handed her a tissue.

‘That’s outrageous!’ Diana Carew boomed from the back of the hall. ‘There must be something we can do.’

‘Absolutely.’ Miss Woods came up, banging her stick determinedly into the ground in a way only she knew how.‘Never say die, that’s my motto. Can’t we use the interweb a bit more? Set up a Spacebook account or something?’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Diana, and Marianne smiled at the sight of the two of them, for once on the same side, though really she didn’t feel like smiling at all.

‘Why don’t we run our own community post office?’ said
Miss Woods. ‘I’ve been skiing the interweb and discovered all sorts of places where communities have kept their post offices alive by working together. We could move it here, to the village hall, and work together with the village farmers to sell some of their local produce. Pippa, you could use it as an outlet for your produce. See, I printed something off about a village in Somerset that did the very same thing.’

‘What an excellent idea,’ said Diana, who only looked a little put out that she hadn’t thought of it herself. ‘And what with the new eco town, we might get an injection of new blood into the area, so why don’t we suggest to the developers they get involved too?’

Marianne stifled the thought that Luke wouldn’t be at all interested in developing anything if it involved the word community. It was a good idea. Maybe it would work.

The meeting broke up in a muddle of excited talk and gloomy harbingers of doom declaring the scheme was doomed to failure. Marianne set off for Pippa’s to tell her what had happened, but she paused before she got there and, without questioning herself as to why she was doing it, she walked further up the lane to Gabriel’s house. Since the incident at the Monday Muddle she’d been seeing him regularly but, despite her epiphany, to her disappointment nothing had yet happened between them. Gabriel was an inscrutable kind of character, quite hard to read, but she thought he liked her. Trying to calm down her nerves, which were on edge, and her heartbeat, which was so erratic she wondered she hadn’t gone into cardiac arrest, she walked down the path and knocked on his cottage door. Maybe she was making a mistake. Perhaps she should have told Pippa what had happened at the meeting and just run into Gabriel in the normal way.

The dark path flooded with light as Gabriel came to the door.

‘Marianne, how great to see you.’ His warmth seemed genuine.

‘I just came—’ She hesitated, suddenly feeling like a total idiot. ‘I thought you might like to know how the meeting went.’

‘And there was me thinking you were coming to see me,’ quipped Gabriel.

‘I was…I am…well, both.’ Marianne blushed in confusion.

‘Good,’said Gabriel. ‘Come in and have a drink.I’ve been meaning to ask you anyway.’

‘You have?’ Marianne’s heart skipped.