Making Marion (16 page)

“Love all lovely, love divine?” He furrowed his brow. “Funny. I don't remember any lines about Santa.”

“Did you want something or are you just here to eavesdrop?”

Reuben grinned. A full-on beam of crisp December sunshine.

“Archie thought you might need some help. It was that or make stuffing with Sunny while his elves swung from my belt loops and bounced pigs in blankets off my head.”

“Are you ready then, for Christmas? Got all your presents?”

“Nearly. Erica usually writes me a list, but she refused to this year, and it's a nightmare trying to guess what she'd like. She thinks I should know her well enough to figure it out. I'm a bloke. I'll never figure it out. If ever I get it right, it will be a lucky fluke.”

“You really don't know?”

He leaned forwards slightly. “Why? Do you? Has she said something?”

I sighed. “Everybody in the whole entire forest knows what Erica wants you to get her for Christmas! It's the same thing she wanted last year. And for her birthday. And for Valentine's Day. And your anniversary. I can't believe you haven't cracked under the pressure. There was a sweepstake on whether you were going to do it at the festival.”

Reuben tightened his jaw. “I don't know what you're talking about.” Turning briskly, he stalked out of the doorway.

I took a few moments to make sure my bag was definitely fastened properly, checked it again for good measure, and having judged that to be long enough for him to have calmed down, I followed Reuben outside.

“What were you going to do first?” Reuben tugged at a star dangling from an oak branch. The rotten string snapped and it came off in his hand.

“I was going to undress the tree.” Even as I said it, a hideous flashback of my last cookery lesson slapped me across the face. I squinted at Reuben from the corner of my eyes, praying he hadn't noticed.

“Well…” his voice was breezy – “as long as it's only the tree getting undressed.”

Dumping a crate near the Christmas tree, I began tucking Grace's woven decorations into the nest of shredded paper. “Archie said you'd managed to explain what happened. That you're forgiven.”

“Erica trusts me.” He stretched up to unhook some of the ornaments that I couldn't reach. “And she trusts herself.”

“What does that mean?”

“She knows she's a great girlfriend and I have no reason to cheat on her.”

I thought about that for a few minutes, and wondered why, if Erica was such a great girlfriend, Reuben hadn't given in to expectations and asked her to marry him. Or move in, at least.

“Are you really staying here by yourself all week?”

“Yes. It'll be a blissful change. I might manage to get through Christmas Day without a relative-induced migraine.”

“So you wouldn't want to spend Boxing Day with us up at the Hall? There will be relatives, both immediate and extended.”

“Ah, but they won't be my relatives.”

I
drove to Nottingham on Christmas Eve and spent a couple of hours wandering around the Winter Wonderland in the old market square, until the scrum of desperate last-minute shoppers drove me into a café. There was a pay phone in the corner. I sipped my hot chocolate and stared at it. The warmth of my drink couldn't melt the lump of ice in the bottom of my stomach. I made a decision. This would be my Christmas present to myself: doing the right thing. In the midst of all my mistakes, I could tick this one thing off my list. I picked up the phone and dialled.

“Aye?”

“Eamonn, it's me.”

There was a hard silence.

“What do you want?”

“I'm sorry. Really, truly sorry. It wasn't about you – ”

“Is that it?”

“No, Eamonn, I…”

“Bye, Marion. Have a nice Christmas.”

I drove home, nauseous and wretched.

Sitting in the caravan on my bed, I opened the little box with the ring Eamonn had given me. I knew now that he did not love me – only the idea of loving me. I knew he thought of me only in terms of how I fitted into his life. He considered me too fragile, too small, to have hopes or dreams of my own. But he had genuinely believed it would make me happy to be the doctor's wife, to spend
my life looking after him and being protected by him. He had believed I needed a safe harbour, a calm sea, after all the storms I'd endured before. He had never realized that the peace I needed would come, not from my surroundings, but through making peace with myself.

By eleven-thirty I still felt restless with remorse. Old habits die hard in guilty Catholic girls. I grabbed my bag, picked my way through the deserted campsite with a torch and went to church.

I parked on the street outside Hatherstone village chapel. If the full car park hadn't confirmed my guess about there being a midnight mass, the warm glow of lights shining through the lead-paned windows would still have enticed me in.

From the outside, the chapel looked a typical English country church. Within, it had been surprisingly modernized. Rows of padded chairs greeted me instead of the pews I expected. The floor had warm carpet instead of old stone, and I could see no ancient relics or statues at all. Bright banners hung on the walls, and dozens of paper lanterns filled with coloured lights dangled from the rafters. None of the familiar landmarks I associated with church were visible – no altar or stations of the cross, no pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. If it hadn't been for the box of white candles stacked behind the last row of chairs, and the wooden nativity scene on a table beside the door, I wouldn't have known where I was.

Most of the hundred or so chairs were occupied. The glass door from the porch creaked as I slipped inside, and about ninety of the hundred people there twisted round in their seats to see who had come in late. I recognized some of the faces, including Jo from the café. She pointed to the empty chair next to her and, grateful to squeeze in near the back, I scurried over. A teenage girl at the front was about to begin a reading, struggling with the clip on her microphone. I used the empty moment to send up a silent prayer:
Forgive me, God. It's been a long time. But then I guess you know that already. And what I did to Eamonn. I'm not sorry for leaving, but I am ashamed of how I did it. I won't make excuses for hurting him; I just
wanted to say I'm sorry. If you can, help him to forgive me so he can move on without anger. Bless Ma, and the rest of them. Oh, and I hope you don't mind me being in this weird church. I don't even know what one it is. It was the best I could do at short notice. Amen.

I settled back and listened as the girl began. It had been years since I'd heard the Bible read. Father Francis had moved to a new parish when I was twenty and I had rarely attended mass since, only making an exception for cousins' weddings, their children's baptisms, and maybe a first communion if it was someone I especially liked. The words washing over me felt familiar, stirring memories and feelings long forgotten, but at the same time, it was as if I'd never really listened to them before, never connected the syllables together to understand what they actually said.

I thought about that: no longer being afraid. Having great joy. Finding peace. It all sounded so simple. I didn't know much about anything, but life was never simple – this I did know.

The girl sat down, and a bunch of musicians took her place. A woman sang a carol I hadn't heard before, about light in the darkness. Her voice was clear and strong, and she sang as if she had heard this good news, and her heart would break with the great joy of it. Then an older man read some more verses, about Jesus being the light of the world.

Somebody turned the lanterns off. The room went black. A hundred people held their breath. There was no sound except for the brief rustling of clothes, a child coughing. The room smelt of pine trees and polished wood. The man spoke again. His voice, though cracked with age, sounded resonant and vibrant in the darkness.

There came the faint rasp and hiss of a match igniting, and a tiny flickering candle flame lit up the man's face in front of us. A child, maybe nine or ten years old, went to stand in front of the man, and he dipped his candle to one held in the boy's hands. Two flames now glimmering, the boy turned to light the candle of the young woman behind him, and so it went on, until every single person in the church held a glowing flame, the brightness shining all around us. The darkness fled.

 

At gone one o'clock I still lay awake in bed, thinking about churches where people smile instead of tutting when you walk in late, and the person in charge (a priestess? A vicaress? I had no frame of reference for women who ran churches) has skinny jeans, high-heeled pointy boots and a laugh that bounces off the rafters.

Then my thoughts skittered to a dead halt as I heard a crunch. Then another one. The soft tread of footsteps in the frost outside my window. Slow steps, hesitant,
secretive.

I held my breath through the familiar wobble of the caravan as somebody climbed the steps outside. I waited for a knock. Or a crash. Neither came. I heard the door rattle, then a bump. The van wobbled again as whoever it was scrunched away.

Great.

I lay in bed a while longer, letting the adrenaline subside, wondering where my phone was.

“Was that you, Santa?” If it was, he wouldn't have been fooled by my bluster. And besides, my mother had made it very clear that Santa was a big, fat, jolly sack of reindeer droppings.
What are you crying for, you pathetic brat? Santa wouldn't visit a girl like you anyway.

I flipped the covers off, forcing myself to get up. This worked, caravans in December being deathly cold. I dug out a thick cardigan, and carefully laced up my trainers, just in case I had to make a run
for it, of course – nothing to do with putting off opening my front door. Peeking through a chink in the corner of my living room curtain revealed nothing; too dark to see. I carefully turned the key in the door, trying to be as quiet as possible even though I had heard the footsteps walk away, and gingerly opened the door a tiny crack.

Well, there was another one in the eye for my mother. Santa had been after all. The sack was a proper brown, Santary one, with a red ribbon tied around the top. Somebody had tried to hang it on my door handle, but the weight had caused it to slip off and thud onto the top step. Still cautious, I slowly took hold of the ribbon with two fingers and dragged it inside, slamming the door shut after it. I faffed about for a few minutes, poking the bag, nudging it with my foot, even sniffing it (to see if it smelt like a bomb?). I finally decided that, quite possibly, I had received a nice message for once.

I cut the ribbon to save having to unpick it with freezing fingers, and tipped the contents of the sack out onto my sofa. A large rectangular present tumbled out. Did I leave it under my two-foot tree like a good girl, ready to open in the morning? Of course not.

It was a cookery book, published in 1979:
How to Survive in the Kitchen
by someone called Katherine Whitehorn. Hmmm. I remembered the conversation I'd had with my imaginary Santa before we took the grotto down. It wasn't hard to guess who was masquerading behind this Santa's beard. I could have killed him for scaring the pyjamas off me in the middle of the night. Except that as he took one final look at the murderous rage on my face I wouldn't have been able to hide how embarrassed I felt that he had overheard me having a pretend conversation with Father Christmas.

I hugged the book to my chest for a few minutes. Who was I kidding? He had snuck across sub-zero fields in the middle of the night to leave a cookery book
in a sack
on my doorstep. I loved it.

Stop being nice to me, Reuben Hatherstone!

I
took an almond and clementine cake to the Hall on Boxing Day. Homemade. I was so eager to arrive with the cake in one piece, I drove the quarter of a mile up to the house instead of walking.

Parking my car in between an Audi and Erica's Alfa Romeo induced a brief reality check. I wondered, between mute busters, how many other guests found themselves glued to the seat of their swanky cars by an overwhelming cascade of inadequacy. I restarted the engine. My drug, the promise of solitary silence, pulled at me with its invisible cord. But I knew that leaving now represented a fall off the wagon no less injurious than a shot of vodka to an alcoholic. I closed my eyes. Fought. Breathed. Nearly had a heart attack when the car door flew open.

Reuben. He reached over and switched the engine off before standing back, holding the door like a chauffeur. I scrabbled to undo my seat belt and clambered out, lifting the cake from its protective nest of blankets in the passenger footwell. As I took a step toward the house, Reuben moved in front of me, barring my way.

“You need a minute.”

“What?” I was still dizzy with the scent of isolation.

“Take a minute.” He held out one hand, in a gesture of greeting. “Hi, I'm Reuben. Nice to meet you.”

I shook his hand, which was dry and rough with calluses. “Hello?”

Reuben smiled. “There you go. That's all you have to do.” He
led the way as we moved across to the front entrance. “Oh, and you might want to do up the button on your trousers.”

The Hall looked like a set from a film. Pots displaying Christmas rose bushes stood on every step leading up to the front door. Half the garden shrubbery appeared to have been brought inside. Each room overflowed with winter greenery – lining mantelpieces and banisters, framing the vast mirrors, nestling on every surface. Tiny ornaments tucked among the foliage gleamed in splashes of silver and blue, and in the centre of the grand hallway the tree took pride of place. I nearly laughed when I saw it. A fat, lopsided, scrubby fir tree, barely higher than my head, scrappy, dog-eared decorations too tacky even for Jimbo's souvenir stall covered it entirely.

“I love your tree!” I moved past Ginger, who had welcomed us in, and took a closer look.

Ginger stroked one of the decorations, a clay star with a point chipped, painted with messy gold brushstrokes. “Our boys made these.” She smiled at me. “They might be less than perfect, and showing the odd signs of wear and tear, but aren't we all, Marion?”

About twenty others gathered in the main reception room, drinking mulled wine, sherry or fruit punch, chatting in small clusters as Sunny and Katarina weaved in and out bearing plates of nibbles and fancy looking canapés. I took a deep breath. I tried to recall Scarlett's lesson on party mingling (something about fat bankers?) and wafted the throat-girl away with a sturdy exhalation. She still hung around, but I was winning the battle. No invisibility tricks today.

“Marion!” Archie welcomed me into his huddle, which also contained Erica's father, Mr Fisher, with his wife Olivia, and a younger woman I hadn't seen before. “Is it too late to say Merry Christmas?
Was
it a merry Christmas? Out there in the forest all alone? Marvellous!”

“Yes, it was lovely, thanks, Archie. Very relaxing.”

This was true. I had opened my other presents: a scarf and gloves covered in pom-poms from Valerie, an elegant journal from Scarlett
with a quote inscribed on the inside cover – “Fill your paper with the breathings of your own heart – William Wordsworth” –, an indoor grow-your-own-herbs kit from Jake, and my new shoes.

They were Sherwood Forest shoes: deep brown walking boots with a chunky heel and thick tread. Grace had embroidered them with leaves in three different shades of green: oak, chestnut and birch. Around the thick rim of the sole she had painted a tiny row of mushrooms. Among the leaves I found a ladybird, a spider's web and a silver arrow. The laces had deer running up and down them, and inside woolly white fleece lined my beautiful boots. I was to walk for miles through the forest in my Sherwood Forest shoes. They returned mud encrusted, but I knew that was how they were meant to be.

Erica sought me out through the groups of guests. Cucumber cool in an ice-blue shift dress, she fondled the sapphire pendant dangling between her collarbones.

“Marion! I'm so glad you came. Not that I would have blamed you for staying away after what happened.” She widened her eyes at me. “I don't know what came over me. I was so tired and stressed that for a moment I actually thought that something was going on between you and Reuben. You! And Reuben!”

I sipped my drink.

“Anyway, all's well that ends well. I heard you spent Christmas in your caravan. You're so brave, Marion. I really admire how you don't care what anyone thinks and aren't afraid to show it. Although…” Erica eyed me up and down – “you do look really nice today. And you've had your hair styled. It suits you.” She smiled. “Perhaps I'll have to keep my eye on you and my boyfriend after all.”

Katarina rescued me with a tray of mini salmon tarts.

“Lovely, Katarina!” Erica helped herself to the decorative sprig of salad. “Are we still all right for punch?”

Katarina swung around, leaving Erica face-first in the mound of her impressive back. “Huh! Some guests need to be remembering that they are still holding the status of guest and not anything more than this yet.”

As always, Katarina's disgruntled mutter reached every ear in the room. “And some young men should be realizing they have plenty enough attractiveness to locate a woman who will not try to control their lives with their bossy and patronizing manner.”

Erica's neck flushed purple. She blinked several times, her eyes darting around the room.

“Um…” I said, dumping my drink on a mahogany side-table. “I'm going to the loo.”

We were in a part of the house quite new to me and, having retraced my steps back to the main hallway, I opened up the two nearest doors, leading into a study and a dining room respectively, before moving down a corridor deeper into the building. A white door with an iron latch opened onto a bathroom, and I nipped inside. This did not look like guest facilities. Towels had been left strewn across the floor. A pair of lacy pink knickers hung over a wicker chair next to an overflowing laundry basket. A tube of Anusol perched on the edge of the sink.

I was quickly washing my hands when a second door, one carefully designed and wallpapered to blend in with the stately decor, so that unsuspecting bathroom users wouldn't notice it, crashed open. The door swung toward me, momentarily blocking me from view. I instinctively ducked further behind it, as if that could make any difference. Panic overrode my rationalization that nobody would really mind me being here.

Hiding didn't make any difference, because even if I had stuck the pink knickers on my head and performed a tap-dance on the terracotta floor, the writhing, steamy, conjoined couplet of Archie and Ginger wouldn't have noticed me.

They groped their way along the wall toward the other side of the room, murmuring frantic endearments into each other's mouths. Archie stumbled on a discarded towel and they tumbled to the floor in a burst of giggles. I took the opportunity to make myself scarce.

That second door led to a magnificent master bedroom. Yet everything about that room faded into a monochrome haze
compared to the high-definition, technicolor photograph sitting on a chest of drawers, as splendidly alone as it was distinctive.

Little John. The Little John captured in the first annual Robin Hood Festival programme. The Little John with one arm around my father, the other one reaching over to grab his pointy green hat. He grinned at me from somewhere in the early nineteen-eighties and I saw, with the advantage of foreknowledge, Ginger's warm smile in the curve of his cheek and the arch of his lips.

With the sound of the lord and lady's tryst jarring in my ears, I wrenched my phone out of my bag and took a picture of the photograph. I had to unlock the bedroom door to get out, only hoping the couple wouldn't notice, or if they did, would blame it on absent-mindedness or other preoccupations.

I rejoined the partygoers now clustered around the grand piano. Fisher banged out some seasonal tunes, while those comfortable enough sang along. I sidled along the group until I reached Reuben and tapped him on the arm.

He broke off mid-line when he saw my face.

“What's happened?”

“Nothing. Can I talk to you for a second?”

He nodded, and we moved down to the other end of the room. My hands betrayed my agitation as I fumbled with the buttons on my phone.

“Do you know him?”
Please, please, know him.

Reuben blanched. “Where did you get this?”

I didn't say anything.

“Have you been snooping around?” The muscle in his cheek twitched.

“No. I was looking for the toilet, and then your parents came in – you know,
occupied
– and I snuck out through a different door. I wasn't looking. It hadn't crossed my mind to look here. But then, I couldn't believe it when – ”

Reuben took hold of my wrist and pulled me out into the corridor.

“Slow down.” He shook his head. “I don't want to know how
you ended up in my parents' bedroom. I would like to know why you're asking about my brother, and why you have his picture on your phone.”

“Your brother? Little John is your brother?”

“His name was Henry.” Reuben's eyes were steel. My throat set like brittle toffee.

“I need to explain.”

He nodded,
Yes, you do.

“Can I have some water?”

Reuben marched me through the maze of corridors to the kitchen. I poured myself a cup of warm water, and drank it slowly, facing the kettle, before taking my usual seat at the table.

“I'm trying to find out about my da.”

“I heard. Henry isn't him.”

“No, I know. But he knew him. I found a different photograph, of Da at the Robin Hood Festival, the first one, with another boy. Your brother.” I took another drink. “There was no name. The caption called them Robin Hood and Little John, but they had their arms around each other. They were friends.”

“So, they knew each other. What does that tell you? Henry's dead. You can't ask him anything.”

“There's more to it than that. When Da left England, he changed his name from Daniel Miller. To Henry. That has to mean something.”

Reuben said nothing for a long time. He ran his hands through his hair, took a gulp of my water.

“Henry died in 1981, in a horrific accident. He was eighteen. Mum and Dad still don't talk about it. Or him. I know they were broken, completely devastated, until I was born.” His eyes found mine. The pain there was startling. “I'm asking you, Marion. Please don't mention this to them. There's nothing you can learn from their faded memory of one of Henry's friends that is worth opening that wound.”

I didn't want to say that I wouldn't ask. I knew there was something here. Reuben knew this too. He sighed.

“All right. But will you wait? See what we can find without bringing them into it? Then decide?”

This I could do. We stood up to leave, just as Erica entered the kitchen, carrying a tray of dirty glasses.

“Oh!” She drew up short. I stood there for a brief eternity, knowing that the guiltier I felt about looking guilty, the worse it became; wondering why, even though I had no reason to feel guilty – and this was, quite possibly, the worst time ever to look it – I was growing hotter and hotter, despite the blast of Erica's icy glare.

“What are you two doing hanging around in here?” Her smile got so tight that her face looked close to snapping in half.

“Marion needed a glass of water.” Reuben kissed his girlfriend on the mouth, taking hold of the tray at the same time. “Leave these; come back to the party with me.”

Erica took Reuben's offered hand, melting under his genuine affection. I followed behind them back to the drawing room, pretending to ignore the look Erica levelled at me over his shoulder as she stopped in the hallway and kissed him again. Message received, loud and clear.

 

I was proud of myself for going to the party. See, I told myself, look what happens when you take a risk and do something you're scared of, instead of wriggling back into the depths of your duvet. You stomp on your self-pity, giving yourself a chance to become a nicer person to be around, liking yourself a bit more and reducing your self-pity levels, completing the cycle to go around again until you actually enjoy being a fun, fabulous, pity-free you. And not only that, but you might even have discovered some vital information unlocking the mystery of Da's past, securing hope and a fellow detective in one fell swoop.

Slightly carried away on the crest of my post-party high, I made a New Year's resolution for once aimed at neither losing weight nor resisting strangling my mother. I wrote it in the front page of my new journal: “
I will take more risks and do things I'm scared of, instead of wriggling back into the depths of my duvet.
”

I read it back, and deciding that it wasn't specific enough I added an extra clause: “
Never avoid a party just because I am scared.
” Then one last line: “
Never avoid
anything
just because I am scared. Fear will not control my life.
”

So when Jake asked me to go to the Hatherstone New Year's Eve party, I said yes. Later on, changing into my new jeans and silky top, I racked my brains for other reasons to say no, as fear didn't cut it any more. I could safely assume I was now single. I found Jake attractive. The heating wasn't working properly in my caravan. I had run out of books and had nothing else to do.

How about not wanting to give the wrong impression? I was not ready, or willing, for any sort of relationship. But then everything I knew about Jake strongly suggested that he had no interest in commitment either. I had come to the conclusion that I offered a reasonably interesting distraction for Jake. We got on okay, and my refusal to succumb to his charms intrigued him. Over the past couple of months he had played it cool, restricting himself to the occasional flirty comment, but for the most part accepting that his advances only pushed me further away.