Lissy gave Bobbie what she hoped was an encouraging smile.
Bobbie picked up on it. She reached out a hand and laid it on Lissy’s for a moment.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘Well you’re all ears now so I’ll begin.’ She picked up her cup and took a sip. ‘It is, of course, the age-old story. I was seventeen. I met him at a car promotion for Ford. The latest model – the name of which I’ve now forgotten. I was starting out in the world of modelling and took just about anything that was offered to get my name out there back then. I was hired to wear a bikini and drape myself over the bonnet. I’m not proud of it now but you do all sorts of stupid things when you’re seventeen and think you know it all, don’t you?’
She looked from one to another around the table inviting confidences, needing them perhaps. Lissy could have taken the title ‘Miss Goody Two Shoes’ at that age because all she’d been able to think about doing was pleasing her father – whose heart her wayward mother had broken – by studying hard to become an accountant and join him in his practice. Janey merely nodded. It was Xander who picked up the baton.
‘God, yeah. Berry Head was nearly the end of me. Despite all the warning signs not to dive off the cliffs or climb them, no prizes for guessing what I did. There was a bottle of whisky that nearly put me in hospital as well. An older woman who turned out to be toxic came into it as well.’
He looked at Lissy, wondering perhaps if he’d said too much. If this was something she didn’t want to know, but all she could think was how kind he was helping Bobbie out when she needed someone to – and maybe he was just saying those things to make her feel better and none of it was true anyway.
‘Got it in one, Xander,’ Bobbie said. ‘He was older. Much older. My local MP as it happened. Going through a divorce. So he said. Very, very handsome with it. He began inviting me to dinner in expensive restaurants. He asked me to be his escort at functions a few times. I think he liked having me on his arm – a younger woman who knew how to dress. My hair was jet black in those days. And I was as thin as a reed. Catsuits were the rage, and I was wearing a black one. This is probably too much information but after one particular function where the wine had flowed even more freely than it usually did, we had a little bet, him and me – how fast he could get me out that catsuit if I were to go upstairs with him. There were rooms. I said I was going to win that one because there was no way I was going to sleep with him, not that sleep was on his agenda.’ Bobbie sighed, then took a sliver of brownie, pulled off a few crumbs and ate them.
‘I’ve always thought that was a strange expression,’ Janey said. ‘Sleeping together. A contradiction in terms if ever there was one.’
‘Quite,’ Bobbie said.
The joy in Bobbie’s face that she’d spoken to her son who, Lissy was guessing, she’d not heard from before, was sliding now.
‘If it’s too painful recalling all this,’ Lissy said, ‘you can stop now.’
‘What was it Bamber Gascoigne used to say?’ Bobbie said, pulling her back up straighter. ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish?’
Everyone laughed and Bobbie took another sip or two of her coffee.
‘Of course, the inevitable happened. We did go upstairs and it was me who got myself out of the catsuit. I found out in quick succession that he a) wasn’t going through a divorce at all, b) that he had no intention of facing up to any sort of responsibility for his child and c) my parents thought more about the neighbours’ feelings than they did mine.’
‘They threw you out?’ Janey asked.
‘Ultimatum time,’ Bobbie said. ‘If I was even considering keeping the baby then they’d disown me. That’s what happened back then. There were mother and baby homes all over the country bearing that out. You didn’t go to the one nearest where you lived, of course, but got sent to one thirty miles away or so where no one was likely to see you at the hospital keeping ante-natal appointments. Anyway, somehow my cousin Pamela got to hear about “my condition” as it was called, like it was a nasty bout of flu or something. She was childless but not by choice. So she offered to take the baby and bring it up. It seemed the best solution at the time. I had no way of earning a decent living – modelling didn’t make the money then that it does now – and my parents weren’t going to step in and do the caring of my baby for me.’
Bobbie reached for the coffee pot and topped up her cup. Lissy realised it was probably just for something to do rather than the fact she needed it. She was buying time while she thought about how she was going to tell the next bit, wasn’t she?
‘I can’t imagine what it must be like to give your child away,’ Xander said.
Lissy’s heart skipped a bit, remembering how Xander had said recently, and with such sadness, that he wanted children.
‘I didn’t think of it as that,’ Bobbie said. ‘Pamela was family. She was just child-minding to my naïve mind. I would see Oliver – as I eventually called him – now and then. Pamela would keep me informed of all his milestones. There would be regular photos. I could send birthday and Christmas presents, and cards, and he’d be told they were from his birth mother and in my innocence I thought he would write me little notes and thank me for them. Except …’
‘Except that didn’t happen,’ Lissy said, giving Bobbie time to compose herself.
‘No. They went to Australia instead. I’ve no idea how because I imagine there might have been a passport issue for Oliver or something. I suspect they changed his surname pretty quick.’
‘There are always ways and means,’ Xander said. ‘If money changes hands.’
‘Probably,’ Bobbie said. ‘Pamela and Charles had plenty of that, far more than I did for a very long time. I still sent things, of course, but then they moved and didn’t give me any forwarding address. So I stopped sending presents and cards at Christmas and on Oliver’s birthday. But I didn’t stop buying them. Every year since then I’ve bought Oliver something and stashed it away in a cupboard. Madness, I know.’ She looked from one to the other and Lissy’s heart went out to her.
‘Not madness at all,’ Lissy said. ‘How do any of us know what we’d do in the circumstances?’
‘And now,’ Janey said in her quiet, calm voice, ‘you can give them to him.’
‘I’m not sure he’d want a T-shirt with Dr Who on it,’ Bobbie said, her voice breaking.
‘Of course he will,’ Xander said. Lissy saw him swallow hard – fighting back tears of his own at a guess. ‘Because you bought it for him. Because all those cards and presents will tell him how deeply he’s been in your heart and your mind, and now you can give them to him.’
‘My guess is he won’t be taking it all back to Australia with him when he finds out. Anyway, that’s for the future, for when we meet.’
‘If he’s not in Australia anymore, where is he?’ Lissy asked.
‘London.’
‘London!’ the other three said in unison, in joint disbelief.
‘I know. The irony of it. He thought to surprise me. Actually he wrote me first. I had a letter with an Australian stamp on it via my solicitor a week ago and was afraid to open it, so I didn’t. I thought it might be from Pamela and Charles telling me something bad had happened to Oliver – I’d always been dreading that – and I didn’t want to find that out before coming here and being with you all because it would have spoiled things, rained on your parade, Lissy.’
‘Oh, Bobbie,’ Lissy said. ‘How did you bear such anguish?’
‘I did what many people do … filed it away in the part of my mind that’s got a lock and key on it. Out of sight, out of mind.’
‘Except it never was, not really,’ Janey said.
‘Got it in one,’ Bobbie said. She sighed. ‘And now he’s been to my house and I’m not there when I could have been, all because I was too scaredy cat to open his letter.’
‘And, perhaps, you should have been,’ Lissy said.
The time without Bobbie wouldn’t have been the same, but that didn’t mean that she and
Janey, and Xander, couldn’t have had a perfectly lovely time without her.
‘No. I think it’s been for the best. I wouldn’t have had anyone to share the news about getting the letter – and what it contained – with. How lonely that would have been!’
‘Did you bring the letter with you?’ Xander asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want to read it? Now, I mean?’ Lissy asked.
‘No,’ Bobbie said. ‘Olly said he was telling me just about, word for word, what he’d written in the letter. I’ll read it later, in my room. But I’m just so glad you three are here to share the news with me.’ Bobbie’s smile was wider than the proverbial Cheshire Cat’s. ‘His daughters have found me on Google and know all about my career now. They’re made up, Olly said.’
‘I bet they are!’ Janey said.
‘Are you going to go home? Now?’ Lissy asked.
She hadn’t envisaged the party breaking up quite so soon but if it had to, it had to, and what a wonderful reason for it.
‘I thought about it. I sat there looking at the phone for ages after the call ended as though just thinking about Olly would make him appear in front of me. I have no idea what he looks like.’
‘You didn’t think to look for him on Facebook?’ Xander asked. ‘I mean, that’s how I found you guys.’
‘No. There’s that element of spying, or stalking, that would have come into it. I would have been deeply uncomfortable about that.’
‘You could do it now,’ Janey said. ‘Now you know. Then you’d know what he looks like. I mean everyone’s got some sort of internet profile these days. Even me!’
Bobbie pressed her lips together, closed her eyes briefly before opening them again.
‘I could but I think I need another day to let it all sink in a bit. And I think Olly does too. So,’ Bobbie went on, ‘when Olly was eleven I got a letter to say any further correspondence would be through our respective solicitors. And it was. My solicitor has always been given any changes of address and phone numbers. First Charles died and then last September Pamela died too. It was then that Olly found the contact details.’
‘So that’s what’s brought about today’s phone call?’ Xander asked.
‘Yeah, that and a trunkful of stuff telling him he wasn’t exactly who he’d thought he was.’
‘Poor you, poor Olly,’ Janey said.
‘I can’t quite believe I invited you here and he’s come to London and you’re not there.’
Part of her wished she hadn’t done that now. Inviting her friends hadn’t been entirely altruistic – she’d need the company too, but all the same …
‘Don’t for God’s sake beat yourself up about that, Lissy,’ Bobbie said. ‘I’ve had a million scenarios about just this moment going through my mind and in all of them I’ve been alone with no one there to tell, and maybe after having an angry Olly on the phone, or in an email. I know I’m developing a bad dose of verbal diarrhoea here,’ Bobbie laughed, ‘but …’
‘Better out than in,’ Xander said.
‘Yes, oh yes,’ Bobbie said. ‘Seeing you in that dinner suit, Xander, threw me a bit. You looked so like Olly’s father had the last time I saw him; same outfit, same sort of age, same insouciant stance leaning against a doorjamb. I had a sort of mini time travel to way back then. But never in my wildest dreams did I think that before Christmas night was over I’d be talking to his son.’
‘Did Olly ask who is father is? Was?’ Janey asked.
‘No. But I’ll tell him. I’ve got photos. He was well-documented.’
‘How old is Olly?’ Xander asked.
‘Forty-four. I was a child non-bride.’
Everyone laughed. What a trooper. What a survivor. Such a Bobbie comment, Lissy thought.
‘Hey! We haven’t pulled the crackers yet,’ Janey said, picking up her cracker from beside her plate and waggling it in the air.
‘So we haven’t,’ Lissy said. ‘Ready guys?’
Lissy giggled as they all began that sort of arm and cracker origami, so each had someone different with whom to pull a cracker, and there was a simultaneous pulling and tearing and cracking.
‘Right, here we go,’ Xander said, pulling the joke from his now broken cracker. ‘What goes “Oh! Oh! Oh!”?’
‘Give up,’ Bobbie said with a theatrical yawn.
‘Father Christmas walking backwards,’ Xander said.
‘Oh, this is good,’ Lissy said. ‘Listen. What do you call it when you get a sore throat at Christmas?’
‘Tell us!’ Janey said. ‘I can’t bear the suspense!’
‘Tinsellitis!’
Xander groaned.
‘I’ve heard worse,’ he said.
Everyone put on the paper hat that came with their cracker and there was an exchange of plastic rings and miniature set squares and bagatelle games, and Lissy realised it had been a good idea to pull them after Bobbie’s surprise reveal because she was joining in and laughing. She was even wearing the silly paper hat on her usually pristinely presented head. It was as though Bobbie had physically and mentally relaxed following the phone call from Olly.
‘But, guys,’ Bobbie said, ‘I’d be lying through my expensively fixed teeth if I said I wasn’t bone-achingly tired right now.’
Lissy couldn’t help a giggle erupting at Bobbie’s comment – she might have been down a few times in her life but she’d obviously always bounced back, just as she was bouncing back now. Having Oliver back in her life might be good for them both, or not – who could tell? Sometimes these things worked wonderfully and sometimes they didn’t.
As if to prove how she was feeling Bobbie yawned.
‘Up the wooden hill with you, then,’ Lissy said.
Bobbie got up, and went around the table, hugging them all in turn.
Just twenty-fours ago Bobbie had said to her that – in the famed words of Scarlett O’Hara – tomorrow was another day. Her hug for Lissy went on just a little bit longer than it had for the others. Was she remembering that?
But just in case she wasn’t Lissy whispered into Bobbie’s hair: ‘Tomorrow is another day.’
‘So it is,’ Bobbie whispered back. ‘So it is.’
Chapter 32
Xander
After Bobbie went upstairs Lissy said she’d tidy up and that no, she didn’t need any help thank you. Xander had protested saying he was a fairly civilised member of the male sex and could do dishes and wield a J-cloth with the best of them, but Lissy had remained firm. She obviously wanted to be alone with her thoughts. She said Xander and Janey could go into the sitting room and put the TV on if they wanted to. Or some music. Xander’s thoughts were all over the place now. How would he feel if he’d found out just a short while ago that the mum and dad who’d brought him up weren’t his birth parents? Would he love them less? He didn’t think he would but how could anyone who hadn’t been in that position know? He thought about going up to bed himself but he wanted to talk to Lissy before he did. And Janey didn’t seem to want Christmas night to end either.
So there they were, both nursing cups of now quite cold coffee, in the sitting room. He could hear Lissy in the kitchen putting things down rather noisily, but then granite worktops were hard, and the kitchen was massive and sound echoed in it.
‘I’ve been thinking, Xander,’ Janey said. ‘The Christmas story is all about a baby. Right?’
‘Bobbie’s?’
‘No!’ Janey said. She gave Xander a mock exasperated-at-his-stupidity-in-thinking-that look. ‘Not Oliver. Jesus. I know we don’t all believe or if we do we rarely go to church these days but it’s still the birth of a baby at the centre of all this …’ Janey waved an arm towards the Christmas tree and the string of lights Xander had hung at the window. There were some glass angels and a big fat glass snowman on the coffee table in front of them. ‘Well, all this decoration and the traditional food and, well, everything really. It’s kind of surreal, don’t you think, that this has happened for Bobbie today?’
>
‘I know what you mean. If my mum’s reading a book and things like this happen she says she throws the thing across the room because it would be just too farfetched.’
Xander felt a sudden flush of tenderness, thinking about his mum. He felt a bit bad about not accepting her invite to spend Christmas with her but he’d had to do his own thing this Christmas instead of going with the flow of what others wanted for him. He was so glad he had because now he was on the cusp of something very special with Lissy.
‘I do that!’ Janey said.
‘Do what?’ Xander said, having momentarily lost the thread of the conversation. ‘Sorry, been a long day.’
And it had. First that rather fabulous breakfast and then the walk to the harbour along the coast with Lissy. Holding hands. Being physically close and getting emotionally closer. Then had come that rather embarrassing – well, for him it had been although Lissy seemed less so – moment when they’d reached his cottage and he’d assumed they’d go up to his bedroom and make love and then he’d chickened out.
No, chickened out wasn’t the right expression – he’d come to his moral senses. How could he have even thought it would be okay to make love to Lissy in the bed in which he’d made love to Claire so many times?
‘Hasn’t it just!’ Janey said, bringing him back to the present. ‘Not that I’ve done a lot apart from eat and drink, probably more than is good for me. I’ve done some drawing and a bit of painting. You wouldn’t believe how good it is to be able to do that and know I’m not going to be interrupted, know that I’m not …’
Janey clasped her hands together, squeezing so tightly Xander saw her knuckles had gone white.
‘Not what?’ he encouraged.
‘Not going to find that Stuart’s found out where all my art things are and made trouble for Annie and Fred, and trashed it all, trashing their shed in the process. I really, really want to take up this opportunity I’ve got now for doing something with my art. Both Lissy and Bobbie have said I can stop with them until I sort somewhere else to live. And some sort of income because I don’t think Stuart’s going to support me. I’ve never worked. Well, not since the day I got married. Stuart …’
Christmas at Strand House Page 18