Nan shook her head. ‘A holiday fling? Nico’s too mature to sow his seeds in a garden he didn’t wish to tend.’
Hannah gasped a shocked laugh. ‘Nan! Is that as rude as it sounds?’
Nan stuck out her chin. ‘It’s euphemistic.’ She scratched beneath her cast, which was grubby at the edges now. ‘Don’t you think you ought to talk to him, duck? You never know—’
‘I want to go away, if you can spare me,’ Hannah interrupted firmly.
Mo put both her soft, comforting arms around Hannah. ‘I can help Nan now. Don’t worry about that. But you will come home for Christmas?’
‘Maybe.’ Hannah laid her cheek on her mum’s shoulder. ‘I’ve brought my gifts to leave here, in case I don’t. If – if you see Nico and the girls, will you give them theirs, please?’ She rushed on. ‘You’ll have Rob and Leesa and Nan. Everyone at The Three Fishes and The Angel you’ve known your whole life long. They’re here for you.’
Jeremy chirped up. ‘And for you, Hannah. Don’t forget that. And for you.’
Hannah nodded, then arranged her Christmas gifts beneath their half-decorated tree and spent an hour driving The Bus under Jeremy’s instruction. ‘Such an old gal has her little ways,’ he explained, as they sailed sedately up Main Road and past the cotton-wool snowman outside the school. ‘I’ve fitted a quick shifter so she won’t shake you to bits when you change gear. Go gentle with her. Fifty’s top speed or you’ll blow her up.’
‘I’ll take it steady,’ she promised, wondering whether she’d blow up if the engine did and if she’d care.
In freezing rain that matched Hannah’s mood they filled up with fuel and checked tyre pressures. Jeremy showed her how to transform the seat into a bed. ‘And, see,’ he said. ‘The radio looks retro but it’s repro and has iPhone connectivity and DAB.’
‘Wow,’ said Hannah, mechanically.
She hugged everyone goodbye, battling guilty tears at white, anxious faces, then drove carefully back to Nan’s, feeling strange and high up compared to her normal driving position. The engine was at the back and clattered like a giant sewing machine. At the cottage, she flung in her bags and bedclothes and didn’t bother connecting her phone to her dad’s smart radio. She got in as stiffly as if her heart was pumping slush through her veins, and drove.
Anywhere that wasn’t here.
Nico stayed up late in case Hannah came, thinking about her warm lips and hot mouth. Waiting, tied to the cottage by sleeping girls upstairs, he opened the Christmas box of Roses chocolates and ate about twenty. For the seconds the sugar was in his mouth he felt better.
When the comfort swung to guilt he drank black coffee to drown the taste of the chocolate and resisted the urge to purge. It was strong but he was stronger, he told himself. Everyone got urges and you had to challenge those suckers. That’s what he’d told Loren this evening.
Why hadn’t Hannah come to discover why he and the girls hadn’t attended the Christmas Opening of Carlysle Courtyard? He was glad she hadn’t walked into Loren and Vivvi’s visit, though. They’d upset the girls, disturbing the happy, calm atmosphere with their false smiles and supposedly disguised conversation that Josie had kept catching on to. ‘What do you mean “if things change”? What responsibilities?’ With them there, it had taken all his powers of persuasion to get the girls to bed, Josie still questioning, Maria clinging.
Then Loren had grabbed his hands. ‘Nico, you’re my only hope.’
He’d pulled away. ‘No, I’m not. I’m the fucking easy answer.’
Vivvi had lost her temper. ‘I should just leave Loren here!’
Nico had replied through gritted teeth. ‘Don’t try to manipulate me. How would abandoning your daughter affect her mental health?’
Vivvi burst into tears. ‘Everything’s been left to me. Nobody worries about my mental health, living with an invalid and a flake.’
‘No one worries about mine but I’d never use such insensitive language,’ Nico had been stung into lashing back.
She’d flashed triumphantly, ‘See! You do still care!’
Eventually, reluctantly, the two women had returned to Reading to let Nico think things over. Maybe it’d been a blessing Hannah hadn’t shown up but he couldn’t sleep for wanting to know she was OK. He wished like hell Maria hadn’t washed his phone or that he had a handset to plug into the landline. The messaging app on his laptop wouldn’t work without the mobile phone to sync to. He’d never had a use for Hannah’s email address so didn’t have it. He jumped on Facebook but there was nothing more recent from her than a picture of the snowman family in Lars’s garden. He didn’t bother trying Rob because it was late … and surely he’d find Hannah at Nan Heather’s tomorrow.
Then Maria woke screaming, pointing to a shadow on the floor and yelling, ‘Witch! Witch!’
Nico dredged up the strength to chuckle. ‘It’s not a witch. It’s your shadow, sweetheart. The shelf behind you is giving it a pointed head, that’s all.’
Josie complained sleepily, ‘No one’s afraid of their own shadow, Maria.’
Nico lay down to cuddle Maria back to sleep. Next thing he knew, it was Sunday morning and she was shaking him awake by his nose.
Whether it was sleeping late or tension from the evening before, the girls greeted the day in difficult moods.
‘Has Mum gone? Is she back at Grandma’s? Are we still going to be with Hannah for Christmas?’ Josie demanded, her small face pinched.
He tried to distract her. ‘Shall we go for a walk through the village to count Christmas trees after breakfast?’
But she refused to be distracted. ‘Is Mum taking Maria back? I don’t want her to.’ She threw herself at him and clung, sobbing. Maria screwed up her face and joined in, seeking comfort. ‘Mydad! Mydad!’ It was impossible to do anything but gather them up and say soothing things – not that he had a huge stock of those.
Loren was entitled to take Maria back. The child’s welfare was paramount – Gloria Russell, the case worker, had told him that – but what was best for Maria was not clear-cut. Loren could probably do an OK job if she remained with her parents but if she took Maria back to Islington alone Nico would never have a quiet minute, unless he took Josie back to Islington too, ready to step in, even though he assumed social services were watching the situation too.
He could see exactly why Loren had come up with her plan. Forming the four of them into a family unit would give her someone to lean on, Maria a reliable parent and Josie both her parents in one place. It would change all their lives.
After a beautiful frosty day yesterday, rain now beat at the windows. Hoping it would ease, he put up their Christmas tree, tested the lights then let the girls loose on the decorations, all of which were unbreakable. Usually he would have been entranced by their joy, watching Maria pull faces at her own fish-like reflection in the curve of a bauble and be charmed by Josie combing the hair of the tree-top angel. The magic of Christmas touched him via the children but it didn’t make him forget that Hannah still didn’t come.
Mid-morning, regardless of the downpour, he got the girls into coats and boots and set out for Nan Heather’s, his heart trotting uncomfortably as they neared the red-brick cottage with its cute dormers. His heart fell when he noticed the lights were out on the small Christmas tree at the window. The car Hannah had been using wasn’t outside and, when he knocked on the door, nobody answered.
‘Urgh, this weather’s yuck,’ moaned Josie, while Maria looked doleful under her dripping hood.
‘Yeah. Let’s go home.’ Nico felt as miserable as the weather. Then inspiration struck. ‘No! Let’s jump in the car and go out for lunch.’ There was a tea room at Carlysle Courtyard and maybe Hannah was working there again today.
‘Yay!’ shouted the girls.
They cheered again to see the balloons and lights and he had to put Maria on his shoulders to keep track of her. At Santa’s grotto he asked an elf if she’d seen Hannah. Santa looked up from his sack of presents to obs
erve, ‘She put together a cracking opening for us yesterday but I haven’t seen her today.’
They queued for sandwiches at Posh Nosh but the dark-haired woman behind the counter shook her head when he asked after Hannah. ‘Don’t think we’re expecting her.’ Nico decided he wasn’t going to wait a week for his phone to dry out. Where the hell was Hannah? And how was his dad? They drove to Bettsbrough and the kids bickered over colouring things at a play table in a phone shop while he sorted himself out with a new model – at huge cost; he’d have to check out his insurance policy – then returned to Honeybun to wait for it to activate while the girls snuggled up with him to watch Disney.
The phone came to life on his original number and he rang Carina first. ‘Dad’s taking things easily and drowsing in front of the TV,’ she reported, which left him free to ring Hannah. He knew with deep, gut-clenching certainty that the Loren nightmare wouldn’t seem so bad if he could talk it over with her, even see her smile and feel her arms around him. It wasn’t like him to be the one in need of a cheerleader but her acerbic good sense would banish the spectres that danced around him.
There were a few messages from her from yesterday and also some missed calls, but nothing since. He called her and got voicemail. He left: ‘Hannah, are you OK? Can you get back to me?’ He texted, too, in case she was somewhere she couldn’t take a call. After an hour he called again. And again.
No response.
Late in the afternoon, though it was still raining, he got the girls back into their outdoor things and they splashed through the puddles to Nan Heather’s. His heart lifted to see the windows lit from within and the jolly mixture of coloured lights on the tree. Impatiently, he rapped at the kitchen door.
After a short wait, Nan answered, holding her arm awkwardly in its cast. ‘Wondered if I’d see you,’ she said, her slippers squeaking on the quarry tiled floor. ‘I’m at sixes and sevens because I’ve only just come back but my daughter’s brought me a lovely basket of French goodies from her travels. Would you like to help me unpack them, girls?’
‘Yes, please!’ cried Josie. ‘Where’s Hannah?’ She looked around expectantly.
‘Not here, I’m afraid.’ Nan shot a sidelong glance at Nico and his senses went on alert.
Something was wrong. His heart heaved. ‘Is she OK?’ he asked quickly.
‘Far as I know, duck.’ Nan led the children to the adjacent dining room and pointed at a basket on the floor, circular with an enormous hoop handle, decorated profusely with red, white and blue pompoms. ‘Pretty, isn’t it? But I can’t undo the cellophane.’
Nico recognised unpacking it as a job invented to keep kids busy but Josie happily unhooked the cellophane, trying to preserve the silver ribbon and began lifting the packets of biscuits and jars of preserves and passing them to her tiny sister to ‘carefully, carefully, carefully, Maria!’ stand them on a tray Nan brought in.
Nan slid the arm without the cast through Nico’s and kept him in the doorway to watch the girls. ‘She didn’t say “don’t tell Nico”,’ she said in her hoarse voice. ‘I think you ought to know what your ex-mother-in-law’s done. She’s a piece of work, by the sounds of it.’
His head whipped round. ‘What? Yes, she is.’ Every muscle tensed.
The wizened skin around Nan’s lips quivered. ‘She’s got our Hannah thinking she’s a tart who’s been leading you astray.’ She blotted her eyes with her sleeve. ‘She called her your “entertainment”.’
Nico swore viciously – in Swedish, so he didn’t have to hold back.
Nan’s voice creaked more than usual. ‘She’s gone away!’
‘Where?’ he demanded.
Nan’s lip quivered. ‘She wouldn’t say.’
On Monday, Nico spent a lot of time thinking. He rang Maria’s case worker, Gloria, who said she was in the area and would like to call in and see how the girls had enjoyed Sweden. The girls were happy to tell her all about it – Josie in entire sentences and Maria in exclamations. ‘Snowman! Wolf!’ Then Nico took Gloria in the kitchen while the girls watched TV in the tiny sitting room and he told her quietly about Loren’s pleas. It was good to open up to someone unbiased yet experienced. Not as good as a heart-to-heart with Hannah, but useful.
She talked through the situation and said, ‘I’ll offer what support I can to promote the best outcome for everybody concerned.’
On Tuesday morning, Loren and Vikki returned to Honeybun.
Loren’s coat looked too big as they trudged up the drive. Vivvi was firing words at her, forehead corrugated by a frown.
Nico had learned from the last unannounced visit and, as the girls were watching Frozen II in the sitting room, he said to them, ‘I’m going to shut this door so if I make a noise in the kitchen it won’t spoil the movie.’
‘’K,’ Josie murmured, evidently on a level of entrancement way beyond removing her gaze from the screen on which Anna and snowman Olaf danced along a railway track while Anna sang about things never changing.
He closed the door before letting his visitors in. ‘I was going to call you,’ he said. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought and I agree that something has to change.’
A wide smile of satisfaction slid over Vivvi’s face but Loren’s expression barely altered. She looked dull and ill and her hair was stringy. ‘What’s that mean?’ she asked.
He gazed at the woman he used to love, the woman he shared a child with. ‘A few days ago somebody told me something that affected me on a fundamental level. I had no inkling at the time, but it’s the key to the future.’ He took her hand. ‘When you’re in a plane crash you have to get your own oxygen flowing before you can help others.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
Hannah put her phone on Do Not Disturb, ignored the little red circles that denoted calls and messages racking up, switched off notifications and refused to let herself turn tail for cosy old Middledip.
Instead, all Sunday she drove slowly, numbly, south through England until it was dark and she found herself near the coast of Kent, spent and needing to stop. Wanting people nearby, not to mention loos and showers, she accessed the internet and found a site a few miles away open over Christmas. They kindly squeezed in her small camper by moving flower tubs aside. As it wasn’t a designated pitch there was no electrical hook-up and Hannah, Jeremy’s warnings ringing in her ears, was frightened of flattening the battery. It wasn’t the one that fired the engine but she was terrified of being left without light. Wearily, she made up the bed and switched on the gas for the heating and the tiny hob.
Red, green and blue lights made the campground twinkle like a grotto and campers wore beaming smiles along with their gumboots and coats as they strode to the shower block but all Hannah saw was icy puddles between iron-hard wheel ruts and Jack Frost breathing on her windows. Morning in The Bus was like waking up inside an ice cube, nothing like gazing out on magical snowy Stockholm from the sanctuary of a warm hotel.
It might have been different if she’d shared the space with Nico. The cramped quarters could have been intimate and even the dread of having to hurry across the dark campground for a wee in the night laughed off.
How was he doing? And Josie and Maria? Maybe he was moving back to London so the Pettersson Family Unit Mark II could spend Christmas together. Or – her heart squeezed so hard she gasped – had Loren moved into the warmth of sweet little Honeybun Cottage?
Monday and Tuesday dragged. She walked to a local pub and drank two large glasses of wine but they didn’t make her feel better. It was hard to concentrate on reading or watching something on her phone. She hadn’t switched off banking transaction notifications and so saw the international transfer finally arriving from Albin but felt none of the triumph she’d anticipated. Thousands in the bank but emptiness in her heart.
On Wednesday she toyed with checking messages but wasn’t sure she could bear to face any Nico might have left. She posted a daily don’t worry, I’m fine on the family WhatsApp and felt guilty that her hiding out i
n The Bus was worrying them all. But the thought of going home and perhaps seeing Nico if he hadn’t left the village flattened her. She and The Bus could spend Christmas together. It was just another day. And there would be people here on the site. They came every year and had a riotous time, someone in the shower block had told her.
Thursday was Christmas Eve. Fellow campers wished her ‘Merry Christmas!’ every time she ventured outside.
Trying to outdistance her misery, Hannah got The Bus ready to roll and paid her fees then drove towards Folkestone with a vague idea of crossing to France. But the mere idea of trying to get on a ferry or a Eurotunnel train, let alone locating a French camping ground open for the festive season, made her stop short on an isolated clifftop where she could switch off the chattering engine and watch the grey, corrugated sea. Here, it was possible to ignore Christmas. Not a single gaily decorated tree or glowing white star reminded her that there would be jolly parties in Middledip, that Carola would be leading sing-songs in The Three Fishes, Mo and Jeremy would have friends round with Nan joining in, wrinkles lifting as she laughed.
But she didn’t need the sound of party poppers to remind her that her family would be missing her. Dark clouds flew like ragged flags above white horses racing on the waves. Seagulls soared and swooped like fighting kites. Grass and gorse topped chalk cliffs curving in either direction. She could not see a single other human being.
Stiffly, she pulled on her outdoor things and got out. The wind met her with an unfriendly shove and tried to snatch her hat before slamming the camper door with a bang that would have made Jeremy faint. Hardly caring whether the gale spat her over the cliff into the booming sea Hannah coiled her hair under her hat and staggered along a path frozen to iron, almost enjoying the fight.
Christmas Wishes: From the Sunday Times bestselling and award-winning author of romance fiction comes a feel-good cosy Christmas read Page 30