The Christmas Invitation

by Trisha Ashley

  She slowed right down as the houses clustered closely together, presumably so she could gesticulate more easily with one arm.

  ‘This is the centre of the metropolis of Starstone Edge, mercifully spared the Great Flood,’ she announced, with a lordly wave that encompassed the terraced stone cottages huddled on either side, a couple of ramshackle wooden sheds, one with an ancient rusty petrol pump outside it, and a few semi-detached properties from the twenties and thirties.

  A larger villa, painted an insouciant and incongruous lemon yellow and set back from the road, had a swinging wooden sign that had been shrouded in sacking.

  ‘That’s Bella Vista, run as a guesthouse during the season,’ Clara said, with another wave that sent the Range Rover halfway across the road. ‘Deirdre shuts it up in winter and goes to stay with her daughter in Australia,’ she added. ‘Then there’s the Adcock family, who live in the end cottage of the next row and do a nice little line in looking after Deirdre’s place, the holiday lets and the second homes, while their youngest son, Gil, runs the bar at the Sailing Club and keeps an eye on any boats stored there over winter.’

  ‘They sound a very enterprising family,’ I said.

  ‘They are, to make a decent living here all the year round. The Sailing Club is a fancy name for something that’s just a big hut, really, and most of the members only have little dinghies, or canoes and kayaks.’

  I peered out of the scratched windscreen, having caught sight of a flat window at the end of the final, straggling terrace. ‘Is that a shop?’

  ‘Yes, that’s Bilbo’s – sort of a souvenir-cum-New Age affair, though he sells ice cream and drinks from a hatch in the side wall when there are tourists about. This time of year, he only opens if someone rings the bell and shows him the colour of their money.’

  ‘Did you say Bilbo?’ The sign over the shop had certainly read ‘B. Baggins’ and, in larger letters, ‘Preciousss’. And now I came to think of it, they’d mentioned someone of that name as being part of the Solstice ceremony.

  ‘That’s right. The Bagginses are an old Starstone family, though he was Bob until he got totally Tolkiened. Such a lot of people seem to, don’t they? And then the surname, of course – it must have been too much to resist.’

  ‘I expect you’re right.’

  ‘Everyone calls him Bilbo now. He’s not a bad chap. The family moved up here when the valley was drowned. It was a handy little general shop before Bilbo took over. He’s got a wife and baby now … or I suppose she’s a wife. I asked her once and she said they’d jumped the broomstick and were handfasted.’

  ‘That’s more or less the same thing,’ I agreed.

  ‘She’s called Flower and the baby’s Grace-Galadriel.’

  ‘Quite a mouthful, for a baby.’

  ‘It is, but I call her Gladdie.’

  I wondered how that went down with the child’s mother.

  We were well past the last houses when a small lodge next to a pair of open gates appeared on our left. It looked habitable, if you were not claustrophobic. Maybe, I mused, Bilbo had a hobbit friend who lived there.

  ‘That’s the drive down to Underhill,’ Clara said, making one of her grand gestures. I wished she wouldn’t. ‘It used to be the rear entrance until the reservoir took away most of the land in front of the house. The gardener, Len Snowball, lives in the lodge. He’s a widower, a man of few words. His wife used to talk for both of them, so I expect he got out of the habit.’

  The road ended at a wider turning place just beyond the lodge. Clara stopped to point out the farm gate that led to the road over the moors, which looked more like the shiny dark trail left by a giant snail.

  ‘And the track that vanishes behind the gorse over there leads up to the Starstone. It zigzags about a bit, so it’s not too steep a climb. You can even get a quad bike up it almost to the top.’

  I peered upwards, but from this angle you could barely see the top of the joined stones.

  Clara consulted a large wristwatch and started the engine again, turning round within inches of the ditch on one side. ‘Better get going: I rang Lex to tell him we were collecting Teddy, so he didn’t have to.’

  The route down Grimlike Pass was hairy. I was glad we were on the left side of the road, hugging the cliff face, where rock scree had been steel-netted off to prevent landslides, for it was narrow with few passing places and the other side only bounded by a low stone wall. I noticed ominous light patches where it had been rebuilt, and below the ground fell sharply into a narrow valley beneath the dam.

  ‘You can still see the old lower road,’ Clara said, though I was happy to observe that she now kept both hands on the steering wheel. ‘But no one uses it much, because you don’t really want to drive up and picnic under a dam.’

  ‘No, you certainly wouldn’t!’

  She whipped round the last few bends with panache and emerged at a T-junction with a slightly larger road.

  ‘Left takes you to Thorstane and right, where we’re heading now, to Teddy’s school, and then, if you carry on, to Terrapotter and the urban delights of Great Mumming. It’s the nearest place for shopping and metropolitan gaieties like cafés and wine bars.’

  She turned in through a pair of stone gateposts too quickly for me to read the sign that was swinging in the stiff breeze and followed two more cars up a short drive to a large, ugly, foursquare late Victorian house.

  ‘Here we are. And there’s Teddy, just coming out with one of the Rigby sisters. There are three of them, all teachers and very good, but not really people persons, you know. Though they seem to communicate with the children all right, which is the main thing. Teddy is very bright, so we think he’ll get into the grammar school later.’

  Once Teddy had been installed in his child seat in the back, we set off home. I was more than relieved to find that Clara went the long way, by Thorstane, where we made a brief stop for liquorice allsorts.

  ‘The Pike with Two Heads is an odd name, and especially for a pub up on the moors, isn’t it?’ I remarked, once we’d set off again and were passing it on the road that climbed up out of the village.

  ‘There’s a pike with two heads in the bar – I’ve seen it,’ Teddy announced. ‘It’s dead and it’s got stuffing in it.’

  ‘It’s a very old mutant pike from the river that ran through Starstone,’ Clara explained. ‘It was caught and used to hang on display in the village pub. Then when the reservoir came, the Golightlys bought this place – The Drover’s Rest, I think it was named then – and renamed it. But they’re very enterprising and have built a row of motel rooms at the back, as well as serving meals. They do quite well out of the locals in winter and the tourists in summer.’

  ‘Mummy says Starstone Edge is at the arse end of nowhere,’ confided Teddy.

  ‘Well, it suits us, doesn’t it?’ Clara said to him, unfazed, as she changed down the gears for the climb.

  We crested the hill, and below us in the gathering gloom shone the bright lights of the Red House and the long sparse string of firefly flickers from the village.

  We swooped down into the darkness, between thorn hedges, and emerged on to the bottom road.

  ‘Home is the hunter, home for his tea,’ misquoted Clara, pulling up outside the front door of the Red House in a scrunch of gravel, under the great glass lantern that shone above the porch. ‘We’re home!’

  11

  A Moveable Feast

  Afternoon tea was ready in the drawing room when we got back, so I thought it must be an everyday thing, not just laid on for my arrival, though this was a more low-key offering than the previous day, with sultana scones and a biscuit barrel full of digestives. I suspected all this food was not only going to put back the rest of the weight I’d lost while I was ill, but speedily insert me into a permanent fat-suit.

  Tottie carried Henry’s share and his cup of tea through to his study, since he was apparently still wrestling with an intransigent ode. Every so often you could faintly catch the staccat
o rattle of the typewriter keys.

  Teddy had been sent to wash his hands and change out of his school uniform of black trousers and sweatshirt with ‘Gobelins’ across the front in swirling gold letters. I’d never seen a black school uniform before, but it suited Teddy, with his mop of dark curls and the aquiline nose so like his great-aunt’s … and his uncle Lex’s. In fact, Lex must have looked very much like Teddy at this age.

  The strong features didn’t really suit a small boy, but I knew he’d grow into them and turn into a handsome young man. I don’t usually want to paint children – their faces are generally so unformed – but Teddy would make a good subject.

  It was just a pity I wouldn’t have the time.

  Teddy returned and, barely stopping to wash down a scone with diluted blackcurrant juice, fetched a painting book, planting himself firmly on one of the sofas next to me. (There were three sofas and this time I’d chosen the one that didn’t try to eat me.)

  ‘I bet you haven’t seen one of these before, Meg,’ he said. ‘It’s a magic painting book!’

  ‘You’re quite right. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a magic one.’

  He turned the pages, revealing old-fashioned pictures of ladies in crinolines, horses pulling ploughs and women in bonnets, feeding hens. The black outlines had been washily filled in with a limited palette of slightly mottled colours.

  ‘I’ve done half of them already.’ He turned a page to a fresh one, featuring a thatched cottage fronted by a border of flowers. ‘You don’t need any paint, you just use water and then the colours appear – like magic.’

  ‘I’m not sure you can get those painting books any more,’ said Tottie. ‘I remember them from when I was a girl, but Sybil found a few unused ones in the old nursery at Underhill, when she was having a big clear-out after her father died, and she gave them to Teddy.’

  ‘It looks like fun,’ I said.

  ‘It is,’ agreed Teddy, ‘but you have to stay inside the lines and not use too much water on your brush, or the colours run into each other. I’ll show you.’

  ‘Not on the sofa, darling,’ said Clara. ‘Put the book on the end of the coffee table.’

  She pushed the tray containing the teapot up a bit to make room.

  Den, who’d been silently sitting on one of the Egyptian leather poufs, consuming scones at a rate of knots, said he’d fetch a mug of water, if someone else would take charge of stopping Lass, who was lurking greedily beneath the table, from stealing the eatables. Soon Teddy was demonstrating the technique of producing colour from thin air. Or thin water.

  He allowed me to paint one of the tall hollyhocks and it was strangely satisfying when it suddenly blossomed into a grainy yellow. It made me remember the time, many years ago, when the postmistress in the nearest village to the Farm had given me a small painting-by-numbers set of a swan on a river. I’d dutifully filled in each section with the numbered colours and then, stepping back, seen how surprisingly they blended together into a whole. I’d realized then that nothing in nature was one colour, but made up of many different shades, some of them quite unexpected. It had been exciting … and the oily smell of the little pots of paint a part of it.

  Presently, Henry came in to have his teacup replenished and sat down next to Clara, who looked questioningly at him.

  ‘Sometimes the words flow, other times they trickle, and occasionally you have to squeeze them out of the tube,’ he said.

  ‘Henry’s writing a book of linked poems about Starstone and the Great Flood, pulling in several of the ancient stories of other great floods, including the biblical one,’ Clara told me. ‘It’s sort of autobiographical. And I’m writing my actual memoirs, non-poetic and just for fun, really.’

  ‘They both sound fascinating,’ I said, though I wondered how Clara found the time to fit any more projects into her busy life.

  I was already starting to become familiar with the very assorted inhabitants of the Red House and could well understand how they had compacted into the informal, workable, extended family unit it now was. It was much the way the core members of River’s commune had settled down and taken their permanent places in the structure, while the summer helpers – transient yurt visitors and those who used the campsite – came and went like colourful flotsam on the tide.

  I expect that was why I was so quickly feeling at home here, and had it not been for Lex’s dark presence hovering just off-stage and due to take a more central role over Christmas, I might just have found myself sucked in and settled there indefinitely …

  As if on cue, Clara said, ‘Lex always starts his Christmas stay with us from the day of the Solstice, and it will be so nice for him to have an old friend here this year, Meg.’

  ‘I’m hardly that,’ I said quickly. ‘And in any case, since the portraits should be well forward by then, even if not quite finished, I’ll be able to leave at the same time as River. I’ve realized how much I’d miss the Yule celebrations at the Farm.’

  Henry looked deeply disappointed. ‘Oh, please don’t run away before Christmas! It would be so much fun to introduce you to all the traditions.’

  ‘Of course you’ll stay,’ Clara decreed. ‘I know you’re simply being polite, because you think you’d be intruding on a family party, but that isn’t so at all.’

  ‘No, indeed,’ said Tottie. ‘The more, the merrier!’

  ‘I want you to stay, too,’ Teddy said with flattering enthusiasm, looking up from the painting book.

  ‘It’s very kind of you, but I’m not just being polite,’ I said. I knew I would have stayed in a flash, if it hadn’t been for Lex.

  ‘Well, there’s plenty of time for you to change your mind later, if you want to,’ said Henry kindly.

  ‘True,’ agreed Clara. ‘And I’m certain that by the twenty-first, you’ll be so happily settled here and painting away in your studio that you won’t want to leave us.’

  I decided there was no point in saying any more just then: Clara probably wouldn’t believe I was really leaving until she saw me driving off!

  ‘Does the pottery close right over Christmas?’ I asked curiously.

  ‘They do officially close down operations, though Alan and Tara keep an eye on things because they live nearby. Tara has her own little studio at the Old Forge, making jewellery. But of course, with two small children, Christmas is a busy time for them.’

  The busier the better, I thought, because if I was going to be faced with Alan as well as Lex before I left, it would be the last straw.

  ‘Do their children go to the same school as Teddy?’

  ‘No, they’re younger and at the local infant and junior school, which is where Teddy was until he entirely outran the teaching and we thought he’d be better at Gobelins.’

  ‘Gobelins is a strange name for a school,’ I commented.

  ‘There aren’t any goblins really,’ said Teddy, looking up again, ‘unless you count Miss Aurora’s garden gnomes. It’s just the name of the house.’

  ‘I expect it was called after a previous owner,’ said Henry. ‘These things stick.’

  ‘“Gnomelins” wouldn’t have quite the same ring to it,’ offered Tottie, and for some reason this struck Teddy as so exquisitely funny that he burst into irrepressible giggles and rolled about on the carpet. Tottie had to grab the water mug before it went flying.

  Lass, unsure if she should join in with a game or protect Teddy, opted for the latter and tried to lie on him protectively.

  Chaos ensued for the next few minutes.

  After tea everyone scattered to their various pursuits and I went into the studio to brood over a sketch of Clara I’d made that afternoon, and which I’d pinned to the old easel. She’d settled down to work more or less in the exact pose I wanted, with the grimacing faces on the totem seeming to look over her shoulder and the light from the lamp shining on the honey-coloured piece of incised stone that she would absently pick up and turn in her hands, when she was pondering deeply.

  I prop
ped up the iPad displaying the picture of her I’d taken to set the pose, too.

  Now I was officially back in the land of the living I was remembering to charge my various gadgets up occasionally, even if I didn’t always turn them on. I dislike having my days punctuated by calls and messages and I certainly didn’t want my phone going off while I was working.

  But now I checked and to my irritation found several missed calls from Rollo and a series of voice messages:

  Are you there?

  Have you met Henry Doome yet?

  Did you mention me?

  Yes, yes and a resounding no, were the answers to those. In the next he said, If he doesn’t want to do an interview for Strimp! I’ve had a great idea.

  I bet he has, I thought, sighing as I scrolled down to the next.

  He could write the foreword to my new poetry collection. He’s old-school, but it would give it quite a cachet.

  ‘Wouldn’t it, just!’ I muttered.

  Ring me back, because I need to talk to you. I’m relying on you to pave the way before I contact him.

  ‘In your dreams, buster!’ I said aloud, then sent that back as a text message.

  I checked my emails after that and found only two, one each from Oshan and River, sent from the laptop in the craft centre office at the Farm.

  Oshan’s said,

  Hey, sis! Pop says I get to wear the Cloak of Power and wield the Staff of Mightiness at the Solstice this year, now he’s invited to stay with your current clients, though he’s coming back afterwards for the feasting. He wasn’t sure if you’d make it back with him or not, though.

  I replied assuring him that I’d have completed the commission before the Solstice, and intended returning to the Farm in convoy with River.