Last Christmas (3 page)
Authors: Julia Williams
‘Hey, Noel, you sexy beast, come on and dance.’ It was his secretary, Julie. Or rather, not his secretary anymore. Not since that jumped-up toerag Matt Duncan had got his promotion. Now Noel had to share a secretary. A further subtle means of making him feel his previous high standing in the office was being eroded. Time was, when people jumped to his beat. Now they jumped to Matt’s. Perhaps it was time to get a new job.
Noel hated dancing, but also found it nearly impossible to be rude to people, so before long he found himself in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by sweaty, writhing bodies, and unable to escape the feeling that everyone was laughing at him.
‘You’re dead sexy, you know,’ Julie was shimmying up
to him, and grabbing his tie. ‘Much more than that silly tosser Matt.’
No
,
no
,
no!
They had always had such a professional relationship, but she was clearly pissed and coming on to him. Not that she wasn’t incredibly attractive or anything. And not that Noel wasn’t sorely tempted for a moment. Would Cat even know or care if he were unfaithful? Sometimes he didn’t think so. Julie was lovely, uncomplicated and she was available. It would be so easy…
What on earth was he thinking? Noel shook his head. Definitely time to go.
‘Sorry, Julie, I’ve got to get back,’ Noel said. ‘Catherine needs me. Kids. You know how it is.’ Catherine probably wouldn’t care if he were there or not, judging by the notice she took of him these days, but Julie didn’t need to know that.
Ducking her alcohol-fumed kiss, Noel made his way out of the club, and into the welcome crisp air of a London December evening. It was still early enough for the third cab he hailed to be miraculously free, and before long he was speeding his way towards Clapton, secure in the knowledge that, despite the amount he’d imbibed, he’d got away without making an idiot of himself.
The cab drew up outside his house, an imposing Edwardian semi down a surprisingly leafy street. The Christmas lights he’d put up with the kids the previous evening flickered maniacally. One of them had no doubt changed the settings again. He bounded up the steps and let himself in to a scene of chaos.
‘I hate you.’ Melanie, his eldest daughter, came blasting past him and flung herself up the stairs in floods of tears, followed swiftly by his son, James, who shouted, ‘I so hate you too!’
‘Nobody hates anyone round here, I hope,’ he said, but
he was ignored and the house rang to the sound of two slamming doors.
‘Don’t want to go to bed. Don’t WANT to!’ his youngest daughter Ruby was wailing as Magda, their latest inefficient au pair, tried to cajole her off the floor of the playroom where she lay kicking and screaming. Noel noted with a sigh that the bookshelf had fallen down
again.
He wasn’t quite sure he was up to dealing with that, so he poked his head in the lounge and found Paige, his middle daughter, surreptitiously scoffing chocolate decorations from the tree.
‘Where’s your mother?’ he asked.
‘She’s on the bloody blog,’ said Paige calmly, trying to hide the evidence of her crime.
‘Don’t say bloody,’ said Noel automatically.
‘That’s what Mummy calls it,’ said Paige.
‘And don’t steal chocolate from the tree,’ added Noel.
‘I’m not,’ said Paige, ‘Magda said I could.’
‘Did she now?’ Catherine came down the stairs looking frazzled. ‘Come on, it’s your bedtime.’
She kissed Noel absent-mindedly on the cheek before going into the playroom to calm down not only the howling Ruby, but also a semi-hysterical Magda, who was wailing that these children were like ‘devils from hell’.
Noel stomped downstairs to the kitchen, got himself a beer, and sat disconsolately in front of the TV. Sometimes he felt like a ghost in his own home.
‘Angels! I need angels!’ Diana Carew, formidable representative of the Parish Council, flapped about like a giant beached whale. It was hard to see how someone so large could actually squeeze through the tiny door of the room allocated for the children to sit in while they awaited their turn to go on stage, but somehow she managed it.
Marianne suppressed the thought as being bitchy, but it was hard to take her eyes from Diana’s enormous bosoms. Marianne had never seen anything so large. And it gave her something to smile about while she sat freezing her arse off in this godforsaken tiny village hall watching the Hope Christmas Nativity taking shape, knowing damned well that any input from her was not actually required. In the weeks leading up to the nativity, Marianne had become grimly aware that she was only on the team because every other sane member of the village, including her colleagues at the village school, had already opted out.
Everyone, that was, apart from the very lovely and immensely supportive Philippa (or Pippa to her friends). Marianne had only got to know Pippa in recent weeks, since she’d been co-opted into helping on the Nativity, but she was fast becoming Marianne’s closest friend in Hope Christmas and one of the many reasons she was loving living here. Pippa was bearing down on her now with a welcome cup of tea and a barely suppressed grin. Together they watched Diana practically shove three reluctant angels on the stage, where they joined a donkey, two shepherds, some lambs, Father Christmas and some elves, who were busy singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ as they placed gifts at Mary and Joseph’s feet.
‘I have to confess,’ Marianne murmured, ‘this is a rather, erm,
unusual
retelling of the Nativity. I can’t recall elves from the Bible.’
Pippa snorted into her tea.
‘I’m afraid the elves are here to stay,’ said Pippa. ‘Diana does a slightly altered version every year, but the elves always feature. It dates back to when she ran the preschool in the village. And it’s kind of stuck. Everyone’s too frightened of her to tell her to do it differently.’
‘Are there actually any carols involved in this?’ Marianne
asked. So far, on the previous rehearsals she’d been roped into, the only thing remotely carol-like had been ‘Little Donkey’.
‘Probably not. At least this year she’s dropped “Frosty the Snowman”,’ said Pippa. ‘Mind you, it took the Parish Council about three years to persuade her that really, it didn’t
actually
snow in Bethlehem on Christmas Day. She loved that snow machine.’
Marianne hooted with laughter, then quietened down when Diana hushed her, before continuing to marshal the children into order and berate them when they’d got it wrong. She was quite formidable. And her version of the Nativity was sweet in its way. It was just…so long. And had so little to do with the actual Nativity. Marianne liked her festive season—well, festive. There was a purity about the Christmas story that seemed to be lacking in everyday life. It was a shame Diana couldn’t be persuaded to capture some of that.
The natives were getting incredibly restive and parents were beginning to arrive to pick their offspring up. Diana looked as if she might go on all night, till Pippa gently persuaded her that they still had the dress rehearsal to have another run-through of everything.
Marianne quickly helped sort the children out of costumes and into coats and scarves. The wind had turned chill and there was the promise of snow in the air. Perhaps she might get a white Christmas. Her first in Hope Christmas, with which she was falling rapidly in love. Her first as an engaged woman. This time next year she would be married…
Nearly all the children had been picked up, but there was one small boy sitting looking lonely in a corner. Stephen, she thought his name was, and she had a feeling he was related to Pippa somehow. Marianne hadn’t been in the village long enough to work out all the various
interconnections between the different families, many of whom had been here for generations. Marianne didn’t teach him, but the village school was small enough that she’d got to know most of the children by sight at least.
‘Is your mummy coming for you?’ she asked.
The little boy looked up and gave her a look that pierced her heart.
‘My mummy never comes,’ he said. ‘But my daddy does. He should be here.’
Poor little mite, thought Marianne. Presumably his parents had split up. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Perhaps she should go and let Pippa know he was still here.
Just then she heard a voice outside the door. A tall man entered, wearing a long trenchcoat over jeans and a white cable-knit jumper. A thick stripy scarf was wound round his neck. This must be Stephen’s dad.
‘Daddy!’ Stephen leapt into his dad’s arms.
‘Woah,’ said the man. He turned to Marianne and looked at her with deep brown eyes. Soulful eyes. She shivered suddenly. There was such pain in those eyes. She felt she’d had a sudden glimpse of his soul. She looked away, feeling slightly uncomfortable.
‘Sorry I’m so late,’ he said. ‘Something came up.’
There was something about the way he said it that made Marianne feel desperately sorry for him. He looked as if he had the weight of the world on his shoulders.
‘Is everything all right?’ Marianne nodded at Stephen who was clinging to his dad’s side for dear life.
Stephen’s dad stared at her, with that same piercingly sad look his son had.
‘Not really,’he said.‘But it’s nothing I can’t handle.Come on, Steve, I’ll race you to your cousins’. I think it’s going to snow tonight.’
‘Can we build a snowman?’
‘Of course,’ said his dad. He turned back to Marianne. ‘Thanks again for looking after him.’
‘No problem,’ said Marianne, and watched them go. She wondered what was troubling them so deeply, then dismissed it from her mind. Whatever their problem was, it was no business of hers.
Chapter One
Marianne stood in the kitchen fiddling with her drink, looking around at the shiny happy people spilling into Pippa’s cosy farmhouse, an old redbrick building with a slate roof, oozing tradition and country charm. Marianne had fallen in love with this kitchen and its wooden beams, battered old oak table and quarry-tiled floor. It was all so different from the pristine newness of her family home, and exactly the sort of house she’d hoped she and Luke would live in when they were married.
When they were married.
What a distant dream that now seemed.
If it wasn’t for Pippa, who had been like a rock to her this last week, she’d never have come. She wondered how soon she’d be able to leave. It was strange how numb she felt, as if she was detached somehow from those around her. There was ice running through her veins. The life she had hoped for and looked forward to had fizzled away to nothing. She had no right to be here, no right to join with these happy relaxed people. Her new year wasn’t a new start but a reminder of everything she’d lost. How could her life have altered so abruptly—so brutally—in just a week? She should be in Antigua with Luke right now, just like they’d planned. Instead…
Don’t. Go. There.
Marianne had been determined not to
cry tonight. She knew she was the subject of a great deal of gossip. How could she not be in such a small place? It was the downside to country living of course, and one she didn’t relish now. But Pippa had persuaded her to hold her head up high and come out tonight to her and Dan’s annual New Year’s bash. So come she had. She wouldn’t have done it for anyone but Pippa, but the way she was feeling right now, Pippa was the only good thing left about living in Hope Christmas. Not that she was going to stay here much longer. Not after what had happened. As soon as school started next week, she’d look for a new job and go back to London where she belonged.
Marianne watched the crowds surging in and out of the comfortable farmhouse, which seemed Tardis-like. Pippa and Dan had the enviable knack of making everyone feel welcome—Dan was on hand pouring bubbly for all the guests while Pippa worked the room, making sure that the grumpy and irascible (Miss Woods, the formidable ex-head teacher of Hope Christmas primary, who had stomped in with her wooden stick, declaring her antipathy towards New Year: ‘Never liked it, never will,’) were mollified with mulled wine; the shy and retiring (Miss Campion, who ran the post office, and Mr Edwards, who played the organ in church) were encouraged to fraternise; and the party animals (including Diana Carew, those enormous bosoms taking on a life of their own on the dance floor) had room and space to throw some shapes in Pippa and Dan’s new conservatory.
‘More fizz?’ Dan was suddenly at her side refilling her glass. Was that her third? Or fourth? She probably should eat something. She hadn’t eaten properly all week, and the bubbles were going straight to her head. She was starting to get a slightly surreal floating feeling. Perhaps she was
going to be all right after all. No one had paid her any attention yet, so perhaps she wasn’t the hot topic of discussion she imagined.
Or maybe not. Marianne wandered into the hall, where three people in animated conversation suddenly went silent as she approached. Feeling uncomfortable, she left, only to hear one of them cattily hissing, ‘Well, to be honest, it was never going to work was it, the lord of the manor and the teacher?’
Blinking back tears, Marianne knocked back her champagne and grabbed a bottle from Dan, who looked rather taken aback. Marching up to Pippa, she said, ‘Fancy getting absolutely bladdered?’
‘Are you sure that’s such a good idea?’ said Pippa cautiously.
‘Never been surer,’ said Marianne as the strains of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ filled the room. ‘My mum always says hold your head up high and sod the consequences. Come on, let’s dance.’
An hour later, all danced out, and having moved on from champagne to vodka and orange, Marianne’s emotions had lurched from deep misery to a wild ecstasy that bordered on the unhinged. So what if her engagement was over? She was young, free and single again, it was time she took control of things. There must be
some
decent men at this party.
Having worked her way around the entire confines of Pippa’s house and discovering that, no, there really weren’t any decent men there, Marianne’s cunning plan to start the New Year was beginning to look a little shaky. Perhaps it was time for plan A—an early night. Marianne was heading for the hall when the doorbell rang. No one appeared to be taking any notice, so she went to answer it. Standing
there was a dark-haired man who looked vaguely familiar. He had the most amazing brown eyes.
‘You’ll do,’ said Marianne, grabbing him by the hand and dragging him into the conservatory.
‘Er, I’d better just tell Pippa and Dan I’m here,’ he said, before she could get him onto the dance floor.
A wave of sobriety suddenly hit Marianne. What was she doing? She never ever behaved like this. What must this stranger have thought of her? But a more reckless side of her said, so what? It was New Year and her life was in tatters. She quickly brushed her embarrassment to one side, grabbed herself another vodka and orange and started dancing wildly to ‘I Will Survive’.
Someone shouted, ‘It’s nearly midnight.’ Suddenly, without warning, her sense of joyous abandon deserted her. Midnight. The countdown to New Year. Everyone singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Suddenly Marianne couldn’t bear it. She stumbled out into the garden, barely noticing that the temperature was below freezing. The alcohol coursing through her veins was keeping her warm. She sat down on a bench, and stared up at an unforgiving moon. The Shropshire hills loured out of the darkness at her, appearing gloomy and oppressive for the first time since she’d been here. She looked back into Pippa’s warm, friendly house, full of bright lights and cheerful people. Everyone was having such a good time and she was out here in the cold on her own, sobbing her heart out.
The back door opened and a shadowy figure came towards her.
‘Anything I can do?’ it said.
‘10, 9, 8…’
‘Nothing,’ sobbed Marianne. ‘My life is a disaster, that’s all.’
‘7, 6, 5…’
‘Well, if you’re sure. Only…you seemed…sorry, forgive me. None of my business. I’d better go in. You know.’
‘4, 3, 2, 1…HAPPY NEW YEAR!’ Screams and shouts came from inside. Marianne suddenly felt hatred for all these people she didn’t know who were having such a good time, and suddenly she couldn’t bear this stranger’s kindness. She didn’t want kindness. She just wanted Luke.
‘Yes, you’d better,’ she spat out.
‘Oh.’ The man looked slightly put out.
‘I hate everything,’ said Marianne, attempting to stand up, before falling back in the rose bushes. Her unlikely hero came to help her up. She sat up, looked into his deeply attractive brown eyes, and promptly threw up on his feet.
Noel sat at his desk wading through emails, most of which were completely irrelevant to him. Did he
really
need to be on the Health and Safety Committee’s minutes list? There were emails about three leaving parties at the end of January, he noted, people yet again leaving for ‘personal reasons’. The credit crunch was hitting his industry hard; building was always the first thing to go. And without anyone buying all those shiny flats in city centres, there wouldn’t be any need for new eco-friendly heating systems designed by the likes of him either. Gerry Cowley had been muttering under his collar for weeks before Christmas about the business needing to be leaner and trimmer. In the past, Noel felt he could have relied on his reputation as the brightest engineer GRB had ever employed, but then Matt had joined the firm. Matt, with his lack of dependants, bright-eyed young-man’s energy, and brown-nosing abilities. There was someone heading for the top if ever anyone was. And Noel had a nasty feeling that it would be at his expense.
No point thinking about what might never happen.
Noel could almost hear his mother’s voice. It had been her favourite phrase when he was growing up. Way back when they’d had some kind of relationship, before she’d turned into the mother-in-law from hell and, according to the kids, Granny Nightmare. Not that he’d ever had an easy relationship with his mother. Noel had spent most of his childhood feeling that somehow he’d disappointed her. Particularly after his younger sister was born, who apparently could do no wrong. He envied Cat her relaxed relationship with her mother, Louise, who was Granny Dreamboat in every way possible.
Cat.
Something was happening to them. He felt like the sands were shifting beneath him, and the world was changing without him. Ever since Cat had started the blog, and the Happy Homemaker thing had taken off, Noel felt Cat had had less and less time for him. All she seemed to focus on was her work and the children. The money it brought in was undoubtedly welcome, particularly when his own job was looking increasingly dodgy. But when a whole week had gone by and he’d barely seen Cat, let alone spoken to her, he wondered if it was all worth it. Sometimes Noel wondered if there was any place in Cat’s heart left for him anymore. And, after the way he’d behaved on Christmas Day, he wasn’t sure he blamed her.
This was no bloody good. Time he pulled himself together and got on with some work. Noel started to check through the plans he’d drawn up before Christmas for the air-con system at a nearby leisure centre and sighed as he saw the notes from the architects querying why he couldn’t match their exact specifications. When would they learn that the real world didn’t operate in shiny boxes and out of plush offices but in the mathematical parameters that physical laws allowed you?
A head popped round the corner. Matt Duncan, looking mighty chipper with himself.
‘Have you heard?’
‘Heard what?’
‘Davy Chambers has copped it.’ Matt drew a finger underneath his throat, with barely concealed glee.
Shit. Dave Chambers was going? Dave was part of the furniture at GRB. If he was going,
no one
was safe.
Noel shivered. January seemed to have set in both chill and drear. He had a feeling a cold wind was blowing over the horizon.
So, Christmas over, turkey stuffed, cooked and eaten, house full of plastic toys—mainly broken—children back at school. It’s time for a spring clean. Yes, I know, technically we’re still in winter, but post-Christmas, full of New Year’s Resolutions, is as good a time as any to clear out the rubbish and it’s always good to start the year as you mean to go on…
Catherine stopped typing and looked idly out from her eyrie-like study at the top of the house as a half-starved crow flapped and flopped its way across the frosty attic roof. Bloody blog. Bloody Happy Homemaker. Some days she wished she’d never started it. It had begun as a piece of fun, posted between Ruby’s feeds, something to keep her sane while she worked out what to do about her career.
Catherine,whose idea of domesticity involved the minimum amount of cleaning compatible with reasonable hygiene requirements, had struck on the idea of an ironic take on the life of the twenty-first-century housewife—or homemaker, a term Catherine utterly loathed. She’d sat down and typed sarcastically:
So, here you are, once a busy, successful businesswoman,
tied to the home with a squawling baby and a stroppy toddler. Is it possible to be a twenty-first-century homemaker and survive, sanity intact? By applying the same management skills to your home life that you did to your work, I believe that not only can you survive, but that you can actually embrace the challenges being at home throws you. A happy home is one organised with military precision, which is why every Sunday evening we sit down as a family and work out our timetable for the week. A colour-coded copy sits on the freezer, so I can keep track of Kumon lessons and French club and when the baby needs her next set of jabs. I’ve even perfected my own clocking-in system. It works for me. It can work for you.
So had the Happy Homemaker been born and, to her astonishment, had been an instant hit. Unfortunately a lot of her readers failed to get the irony and took her far too seriously. Somehow she had stumbled into some kind of zeitgeisty thing where women appeared to be sitting at home with their offspring, willing to be lectured at by a complete stranger about how to run their homes. Soon she was getting several hundred hits a day, and achieving a massive following. Her blog became so popular it even got mentioned in the broadsheets, much to Cat’s wry amusement.
Before she knew it, she was doling out domestic advice on a near daily basis, and soon the Happy Homemaker was attracting attention in the wider world, not least from Bev, her old boss from
Citygirl
magazine, where she’d been features editor till the arrival of Ruby had finally convinced her that her home/work balance was all wrong. Bev rang her one day and offered her a regular feature at
Happy Homes
magazine, which involved both time in the office and at home. Coming as it had at a moment when Catherine had been worn out with the demands of a toddler and
going stir crazy on the school run, she had jumped at the chance. She’d organised herself an au pair, an office at the top of the house, and had looked forward to reclaiming part of her old life.
If only things were that simple. No one else at
Happy Homes
, including Bev, had the domestic ties she did. A couple of the girls had one kid certainly, but four? No one she knew apart from her and Noel had four children. They must have been quite insane.
Initially Cat had thought that going back to work now that the kids were older was going to be a piece of cake. But as the success of the Happy Homemaker grew, so did the pressures. She was constantly in demand in the media, writing articles for the broadsheets, appearing on radio shows, and even making the odd TV appearance. If she had no domestic ties this wouldn’t matter. But while she enjoyed the attention her newfound success was bringing her, not to mention the cash, particularly after years of feeling like a second-class citizen who got pocket money, Cat was struggling with balancing it against her family responsibilities, and was particularly conscious that she was giving Noel a lot less attention than he deserved.
