The Christmas Angel (7 page)

‘Daddy got his shovel out,’ he says to Janna, ‘and dug a path for us. Can I have sausages?’

‘Not for breakfast.’ She looks down at him, touches his blond hair very lightly. ‘Maybe for lunch. How about porridge? And then toast and honey?’

He considers and then nods: if he’d been at home he might have argued about which cereal he wants but he remembers that he is supposed to be helping Janna. And, anyway, he likes porridge and toast and honey.

‘Get some spoons out of the drawer there,’ she tells
him
. ‘Three spoons, one each for you, me and Daddy, and put them on the table. Can you do that? Listen. I think the Sisters are coming out from Morning Prayer.’

He puts the spoons on the table just as Mother Magda comes into the kitchen. She raises her eyebrows at him in a kind of smiling surprise and makes him a little ‘Good morning’ bow. He is quite used now to this form of silent greeting and he bows back to her, very seriously, and then picks up Stripey Bunny and makes him bow too with his long floppy ears falling forward. Mother Magda’s smile becomes a wide beam and he laughs with her, sharing the joke.

She and Janna speak softly together and Janna takes the bowls out of the lower oven and begins to fill them with porridge. He watches Janna put four bowls on the tray with a jug of milk and carry them into the refectory; Mother Magda follows her. The toast pops up; four pieces in the long silver toaster and, as he stands beside his chair, the room grows brighter and is suddenly filled with light; long fingers of sunshine reach through the windows and touch the flowers and the pebbles.

Janna comes back. She fills a bowl with porridge for him, mixes it with some cold milk, sprinkles sugar over it and puts it at his place. He scrambles onto his chair, still watching her as she puts the toast into the rack. She is like nobody else he’s ever known, with her wild lion hair and thin brown face and bright strange clothes. Beside the elderly sober-clad nuns she is vivid and exciting. Today she’s wrapped herself in the apron that has words printed on it: ‘SAVE WATER. DRINK WINE.’ She’d read them to him and even then he hadn’t understood, but Sister Emily said, ‘Now I think that is
such
a good idea.’ And they laughed together, silently, bending
close
, with Sister Emily’s wrinkled, thin hand on Janna’s warm, strong arm. Sister Ruth came in and paused, looking at them both, her chin high and forbidding, and Janna moved away, still smiling secretly to herself.

Now she turns suddenly, holding the toast rack, and catches his stare.

‘OK, my lover?’ she asks, and there’s a tenderness in her voice and in her look that makes him feel a bit odd: shaky and upset, and wanting to run over to her and bury his face in the warmth of her body and snuff up the scents of her skin. He has a little pain in his chest, as though something is missing, that he’s lost something really important, and he wants to hold on to Janna. He feels as if he might cry and, as if she understands, she puts the toast on the table and comes swiftly round to him. She kneels beside his chair and puts her arms round him, and he buries his face in her warm breast and cries without knowing why, although Daddy has explained that it happens because he lost Mummy just after he was born and it’s all quite natural and nothing to be worried about, and that Daddy feels the same way too, sometimes.

Gently Janna smooths his hair and wipes his cheeks with her fingers. ‘Poor Stripey Bunny needs some porridge,’ she whispers to him. ‘Poor old Stripes. He’s all thin, look.’ And she squeezes his middle so that he flops about and looks funny, and Jakey manages a smile and takes up his spoon. And then Daddy comes in saying how cold it is and they’ll build a snowman after breakfast, and suddenly everything is quite all right again.

Clem eats his porridge gratefully. He knows he’s lucky that the Sisters are prepared to stretch a point with Jakey so
that
he is allowed into certain parts of the house and the grounds as long as he is quiet and good. It had to be part of the contract and Mother Magda was quick to see that there needed to be a readiness to adapt on both sides. It’s odd, actually, how readily Jakey has accepted convent life. He seems to understand the reverence required and even enjoy it. Of course, he got used to going to church in London but even so it’s a great deal to ask of a small boy. He remembers, when he brought Jakey to be introduced to the Sisters, how Sister Emily shook his hand and then asked to be introduced to Stripey Bunny.

‘How do you do, Mr Stripey Bunny,’ she said gravely, shaking his paw, and Jakey gazed at her for a moment in surprise, and then they chuckled together, sharing the joke. Mother Magda laughed too, and took Stripey Bunny’s paw but Sister Ruth watched with her hands hidden in her sleeves, not reacting when Jakey looked hopefully towards her, inviting her to share in the game. Clem could tell by her expression and body language that here was a woman who feared any kind of loss of control; who instinctively disliked any relaxation of the rules. He stiffened a little, anxious for Jakey lest he was hurt by the rebuff, but Jakey was already turning back happily to Sister Emily and Mother Magda – his new friends.

Clem finishes his porridge and puts his bowl aside, still brooding on the oddness of bringing up a child in such a place as Chi-Meur. The point is that they are all bringing Jakey up: Janna, the Sisters, Father Pascal, Dossie, Mo and Pa. Clem watches Janna cutting soldiers of toast and spreading honey on them. She puts them on to Jakey’s plate and he eats them, relishing them and offering bites to Stripey Bunny at intervals.

It is as if we are a family, Clem thinks. And I’m sure Jakey is happy here.

Janna smiles at him and pushes some toast towards him and he thinks: If only I could fall in love with her, how simple life would be.

The snow falls, freezes, and falls again: in Cornwall the schools are closed and roads are blocked with drifting snow.

‘Unheard of down here,’ Pa says crossly, staring disconsolately from the bedroom window. ‘Climate change. We can look forward to this kind of thing now: floods, snow, heat waves. All this energy in the atmosphere; that’s what’s causing it. Tsunamis, volcanoes erupting. How am I supposed to get the dogs out in this?’

Straight-backed, one hand clenched in a fist behind his back, he raises his coffee mug and drinks. Mo watches him from the bed. His intensity, his high-octane energy, has always been slightly exhausting, even when they were both young; now it is poured out in tirades against the government, roaring at the television, raging at newspaper articles. She is terrified that these storms will cause another stroke. Their GP has been understanding about her anxiety but realistic about Pa’s character.

‘We know him,’ he says, resigned. ‘And it’s no good trying to change him at this late date. He’ll probably crash down with another stroke, just like he did before, and it might be worse next time, but can you honestly imagine him sitting quietly on the sofa with a tea cosy on his head? Might as well let him get on with it, Mo. I know it’s hard for you …’

And it is hard. At first she watched anxiously as he bellowed down the telephone at an unknown voice trying to sell him double glazing – ‘Can’t you understand what I’m
saying
?
This
is a grade-one-listed
property
. We can’t
put
in double glazing. Why don’t you check your facts before you waste people’s time?’ – or she’d keep an eye on the clock whilst he spent an hour digging a trench for the runner beans, popping down the garden at intervals to make sure that he hadn’t collapsed again. Gradually she built up a defence against the fear, knowing that her anxiety added to his awareness of his vulnerability and weakness, and by degrees they’d fallen back into their old cheerful ways.

‘If you could get the ride-on mower out of the barn somehow,’ she says now, ‘you could fix something on the back and make a path through the snow to the lane. They’ll have the tractors out soon, so as to get to the stock. The dogs will enjoy it. Wolfie can ride on the mower with you.’

She can see by the alert tilt to his head that he is thinking about it. She stretches her hand to Wolfie, curled on the quilt by her knees and, at the bottom of the bed, John the Baptist beats his tail on the rug. He’s always been sensitive to Pa’s occasional outbursts – ears flattened, an eye rolled backwards to glance at his master whilst he laid a conciliatory head on Pa’s knee – and even in his most fiery moments Pa’s hand is tender on the black head, gently pulling an ear, smoothing the soft coat. John the Baptist understands all about barks being worse than their bites and he adores Pa.

Mo finishes her tea. She watches Pa’s shoulders shrugging inside his disgraceful old dressing gown, his fingers clenching and unclenching, as he plots and plans and works things out.

‘
If
I can get it out,’ he says, with a kind of gloomy relish, ‘I suppose it might work. The snow’s drifted across the barn doors again. It’ll be hell’s own delight shifting it.’ But
when
he turns to look at her, his face is bright with intent; concentrated with purpose. ‘All right, Mo?’ he asks – and she smiles as she nods her ‘yes’ to the old familiar question. He’s asked it all their lives together: speeding along in his Austin Healey Sprite; racing before the wind in sailing boats; walking on the cliffs; lying on beaches in the sun. At all the crucial moments, birth and death and celebration, there has been the look and the question: ‘All right, Mo?’ like an arm around the shoulder, an embrace.

John the Baptist gets up and goes to him, tail wagging, and she looks at them both with love and sudden gut-wrenching panic: how would she possibly manage without them? She pushes the quilt aside and swings her legs rather painfully over the side of the bed.

‘Well, dress up warmly,’ she says. ‘Is Dossie up yet?’

He shakes his head. ‘Lucky we’ve got plenty of supplies in. Good old Dossie. She’d have made a first-rate purser. She can sleep in and I’ll cook the breakfast.’

But Dossie is not asleep. For once the snow has not had its usual effect upon her. She is neither delighted by its magical transforming qualities nor excited in a childish way by the white stuff. She is quite simply irritated by it: she will not now be able to keep her lunch date. She’s exchanged several emails with the amusing Rupert French, whose holiday properties are mainly to the south of Truro, and it seems a natural progression to meet him for lunch.

‘I buy a run-down old cottage or a barn with planning permission,’ he told her, ‘and live in it or in a caravan while I do it up. Then I move on to the next one. My wife and I used to do it together but now … well, now I’m working on my own.’

His voice changed when he said that. He sounded rather bleak and she didn’t like to ask him whether his wife had died or whether they were divorced.

Chris at Penharrow is pretty certain that she died. ‘I heard some rumour that she was very ill and that she went upcountry for treatment. Bristol, I think it was. It was a while ago now. I really don’t know him all that well, only through the trade. He’s based more on the south coast. But he sounded quite cheerful when he phoned to ask about your new scheme.’

Huddled in her duvet, Dossie wonders why she feels so disappointed that they won’t be able to meet up as they’ve planned. After all, a phone call and a few emails are nothing to go by, though she knows that he’s rather dishy. There is a photograph of him on his website with some of his clients outside one of his cottages and she’s studied it closely. He is laughing into the camera and he looks quite tough and rather fun. In one of the emails he wrote:

I’m not that far away from you at the moment, working on a little cottage up near the edge of the moor. The first one I’ve bought outside my usual area and it’s still in a bit of a state. A cross between a builders’ merchant’s and a squat! I haven’t had the telephone connected yet and I have to go up to the village hall to send emails. We must meet up some time and talk all this through. I’ve got a lot of clients I know will be really keen to try it out. How about a pub lunch?

And so it was arranged and they exchanged the numbers of their mobiles in case of some emergency, though he warned her that the signal was very patchy. Dossie wonders how he
is
faring, up on Bodmin Moor, and reaches for her mobile phone on the bedside table: no message. She’ll get up and check her emails. Sitting up, pulling the duvet higher, she texts quickly to Clem:
Snowed in. Hope u r ok? xx

Clem and Jakey will be quite safe at Chi-Meur: they are so self-sufficient and she knows that the freezer is well stocked up. Pulling on her dressing gown, she slips next door into her study and switches on her laptop: no emails. She glances at her watch: barely eight o’clock. It is much too early; he’ll hardly manage to get up to the village hall before breakfast. Meanwhile, she can smell bacon frying. Mo puts her head in at the door.

‘So you
are
up. Pa thought you were still asleep. He’s got a little plan to dig us out but he might need some help.’

‘I know what that means.’ Dossie comes out of the study and closes the door behind her. ‘It means lots of hard labour on my part and a great deal of shouting on his.’

Mo chuckles. ‘It’s my fault, darling, I’m afraid. I suggested it. He gets so fretful if he can’t be doing. You know what he’s like.’

‘Don’t I, though.’ Dossie looks resigned. ‘OK. I’ll get dressed but tell him to save me some bacon.’

Back in her room she checks her mobile again. There was a message from Rupert:
Cant get car out. Gutted. How about u
?

She texts back:
Same here
– and then hesitates. Is he asking if she is gutted or merely snowed in? She doesn’t want to sound too keen but she feels pleased that he is gutted. However, she wipes her message and starts again.
No luck today. B in touch
, and leaves it at that. But his message has cheered her. She feels excited, on the brink of something, and is almost glad that the meeting is postponed so that the
expectation
can continue to grow for a little while longer. He is disappointed: gutted. She hugs the sense of excitement to her and looks out upon the pastoral scene with equanimity now.