Christmas at Strand House

by Linda Mitchelmore

  They were nearing the pier now and quite a crowd had turned up. Some were already in costumes with towels over their shoulders, others in wetsuits, and a few spectators were in fancy dress.

  ‘Here we go,’ Bobbie said, laughing. ‘It’s skinny-dipping after all. All this other stuff about categories was just a blind.’

  ‘It’s been known,’ Xander said. ‘But not that. For all those who complete their categories satisfactorily there are discount vouchers for breakfast butties, in variety, up for grabs in the Port Light. Take it from me, they are second to none in the area. Oh, and coffee, tea, hot chocolate. Ana, who runs the place, doesn’t have a drinks licence but she’ll turn a blind eye should anyone want to tip a tipple in their drink.’

  ‘Sherry before breakfast,’ Janey giggled, ‘brandy before lunch. You’re turning me into a dypso, Xander.’

  ‘Only at Christmas,’ he said. ‘Right, here we are.’

  A handful of people came up to Xander saying how pleased they were to see him there again and he made the introductions. Bobbie had already got out of the jogging pants and sweatshirt Lissy had loaned her and was wrapping a huge towel around her shoulders. Janey was stripping off more gingerly, while Lissy wriggled deliciously into her wetsuit.

  Everyone taking part was assigned a second with a stopwatch. Bobbie had instructed hers on how to operate her smartphone so she could have evidence for her granddaughters. Xander went to the official sign in area – someone’s summer gazebo weighted down with piles of stones to stop it blowing away – and paid the fees for everyone.

  Just a few short weeks ago he wouldn’t have thought in his wildest imagination that he’d be doing this; being here with three women with whom he’d just spent Christmas, and whom he’d come to love, although being in love with only one of them which was a totally different, wonderful thing.

  The man with the klaxon walked across the prom and Xander rushed to join the others. Once the klaxon sounded it would be a mad rush for the sea.

  Wearing trunks – and no T-shirt as some blokes were – Xander reached for Lissy’s hand. How good it felt, her hand in his.

  ‘Best to run in as far as we can without stopping. Armpits for preference. The cold will take your breath away for a few seconds, but if you don’t open your mouth in shock you’ll recover quickly enough.’

  ‘Now you tell me!’ Lissy said as the klaxon went and everyone ran to the water’s edge.

  ‘Keep striding,’ Xander said, the force of the water giving his leg muscles a workout. He was dragging Lissy along now and worried she might duck out. ‘It gets easier, trust me.’

  And then they were up to their armpits.

  ‘Ready?’ Xander said, letting go of Lissy’s hand. ‘Dip your shoulders under the water. Now.’

  Lissy dipped, her mouth closed despite the shock of the cold water as he’d advised her to.

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Xander said, stealing a quick kiss. ‘See you in ten.’

  And then he began a front crawl, powering away to join the other ten-minute swimmers, knowing Lissy would be perfectly fine, as would they all.

  Xander was a strong swimmer. He’d kayaked in his youth, and sailed, and been tipped into the sea doing both, more than a few times. He couldn’t imagine living anywhere else but by the seaside and he hoped with all his heart that Lissy would stay here now. Now she was in his life he didn’t want to let her go.

  On and on he swam towards Hollacombe – once a small fishing village but now swallowed up by the bigger town. The summer chalets at beach level, all in ice cream colours, were boarded up for the winter against any rough seas. Strand House stood out on the highest part of the headland way above them. In the low winter sunshine it shone, its whiteness accentuated by the rusty-coloured sandstone cliffs on which it was built, and standing out like a beacon against the pale blue of a cloudless sky.

  Claire seemed to be with him as he swam. But when he tried to remember the feel of her skin on his, he was shocked that he couldn’t. All he could remember as his arms powered him forward at that moment was Lissy’s skin on his, her lips on his, and how that had felt, and how it would feel in the future if he gave her space to make her own decisions about selling Strand House or not, about moving here permanently, or not. And about them.

  He turned and began the swim back and Claire wasn’t with him anymore. He’d never forget her, but she was his past and now he had a future. As he neared the pier he saw Lissy – his future? – waving her bright turquoise towel at him. He raised a hand high in the air above him and waved back.

  Chapter 38

  Bobbie

  ‘Oh, this is nice,’ Bobbie said. There were tables and chairs set up outside the Port Light, with a pile of fleecy throws in a huge log basket for people to help themselves to. Outside heaters too, spreading their warmth and hissing slightly as though they were some sort of benign beast. Bobbie helped herself to a fleecy throw, sat down at a table, and draped it over her knees even though she wasn’t cold. The water had been chilly enough but hadn’t been as icy as she’d thought it might be, despite Xander’s selling of it as unseasonally warm. It had been invigorating, adrenalin coursing through her, awakening all her senses. Afterwards, having dressed again in the makeshift changing cubicles she’d been warm again in no time. ‘It’s very Med here, I think. I sat outside something very like this many years ago. Cannes, I think. Could have been Nice. Or maybe Antibes. South of France anyway.’

  ‘Name dropper!’ Xander said.

  ‘Oh, I can do more … Acapulco, Genoa, Marseilles, Venice … shall I go on?’

  Everyone laughed and then Janey said, ‘You’re like a different person this morning, Bobbie.’

  ‘That would be the sub-zero temperature my legs were subjected to,’ Bobbie said. It wasn’t, and she knew it. It was Oliver’s phone call and everyone’s reaction to it. How kind they’d all been, how understanding. People’s attitudes to anyone having a baby out of wedlock were so different these days to how they had been back then. Not all change was for the better, but so much was and that had to be the biggest thing. Well, it was for Bobbie. She looked from one to the other of her friends who were all so very dear to her now, all sitting down, draped in fleecy throws, waiting to have their vouchers collected and to place their orders.

  The Port Light had fairy lights draped in the windows and a huge HAPPY CHRISTMAS banner over the door. Lots of other people had obviously completed their categories because the tables were filling inside and out now. There was lots of chatter, lots of laughter, and the air was electric almost. How glad she was that she’d accepted Lissy’s invitation to be part of her Christmas. They might have to wait a bit to be served but no matter. Bobbie felt her shoulders drop down another notch. She even allowed her stomach muscles to relax a little, not holding them in every waking hour as she usually did. It felt good.

  ‘Do we have to take our tickets inside and order?’ Janey asked.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Lissy said. ‘Vonny always said everyone just waited patiently, invigorated by their dips. Is that right, Xander?’

  ‘Yep. And here’s Ana now.’

  A young woman with chubby rosy cheeks – like little crab apples, Bobbie thought – and very dark hair brushed through with red streaks of colour, arrived at their table.

  ‘Good morning, everyone,’ she said. ‘Congratulations that you finish your swimming tasks. Vouchers?’

  She held out her hand for the vouchers Xander had collected for them all and they gave their orders – soup for Bobbie and Janey, a fried egg roll for Lissy, and the full Monty breakfast roll for Xander.

  They all ordered cappuccinos.

  ‘Me? A cappuccino?’ Bobbie said when Ana had left with their order. ‘This will be an absolute first.’

  ‘Too many calories?’ Lissy said.

  Yes, far too many calories for Bobbie who had always counted every single one she’d taken in. In control of earning her own living from the day she’d given Oliver to Pamela and Charles,
she couldn’t afford to be anything less than perfect when she went for jobs where she was given clothes that were a stock size eight to get into and be photographed in from every angle.

  ‘Not now,’ Bobbie said. ‘I know I’m hardly likely to turn into a cuddly mum at this stage of my life but, well, I feel I need to knock off a few of the hard edges I’ve had all my life before I meet Oliver. Well, meet him again because obviously I was the first person to see him.’

  ‘You’re not hard,’ Janey said. ‘A bit spiky maybe … oh God, sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘Yes, you should,’ Bobbie said.

  She’d put up a sort of fence around her emotions for the past forty-four years, rarely letting anyone in – apart from Sebastian – afraid to get close to anyone, physically as well as emotionally. If anyone was the mistress of the non-touching air kiss then she was!

  ‘And I’m being self-indulgent again, talking about me and Oliver and …’

  ‘Stop it!’ Lissy said. ‘I think if I’d been through what you have and if I’d had the phone call you had yesterday then I wouldn’t be showing the patience you are in still being here. I’d have got the first train back to London. Or a taxi. I might—’ she paused, reaching out to pat the back of Bobbie’s hand ‘—I might even have walked!’

  ‘I wouldn’t put that past you,’ Xander said.

  A look passed between them, Xander and Lissy, and Bobbie had a fast-forward moment pop into her mind to how she might – might – be sharing looks like that with Sebastian, if she got back in touch with him. If.

  Their food and drinks arrived then and it was only at that moment that Bobbie realised she had neglected to ask what the soup was.

  Leek and potato as it turned out – something else she’d always rejected as being too calorific. But not now. Now it was just what she needed. The after-glow of the swim was beginning to wear off a little. She pulled the fleece more tightly around her neck.

  ‘Cold?’ Xander asked, noticing.

  ‘Not really. It’s clouding over a bit now though.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Xander said. ‘I checked the Met Office site this morning and it seems snow could be on its way. Dartmoor will take the brunt of it.’

  ‘Really?’ Janey said. ‘Gosh, how romantic that would be! Snow at Christmas. Just like on the Christmas cards.’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath!’ Xander said. ‘We might see a few flakes.’

  ‘That would do me!’ Janey said.

  Bobbie listened to their banter, happy that a gesture from her had sparked yet another happy conversation between her friends. But she was beginning to feel the cold now. She wasn’t as young as the others although part of her had stopped at eighteen – the length of her hair for one thing, which she’d not had cut short since that day, only trimmed. That was, she knew, a psychological barrier she’d put on herself. It had become her look, especially now that she was older and still getting work because of it and she had to be grateful for that, but still … she’d never been who she could truly be, had she? She’d been preserved in some sort of mental aspic, hadn’t she?

  The others were tucking in to their food, heads down, concentrating.

  Would she enter the portals of fast food places like McDonald’s or Pizza Express with her granddaughters? Would she bring them here to the Port Light? She hoped the latter at least. So many possibilities and Bobbie felt dizzy with them.

  But she was ready for all that now.

  ‘Guys?’ she said and waited a few seconds for them to look up. ‘Do you think it’s time I cut my hair short?’

  ‘Goodness,’ Janey said. ‘You’re a surprise a minute, you are! You ask the most unexpected questions!’

  ‘Doesn’t she just!’ Lissy said. ‘But I can see you’re feeling the cold a bit now, Bobbie. Am I right?’

  ‘Yeeees,’ Bobbie said with a dramatic shiver for effect, but warmed by the thought that Lissy had noticed, as Xander had when she pulled the fleece closer around her neck.

  ‘Everyone done?’ Lissy asked, gathering her plates and mug together, and reaching for the bag with her swimming things in.

  There was a chorus of ‘yeses’. Bobbie looked up and saw that the blue had almost disappeared from the sky now, replaced by rather strange coloured clouds – a sort of dog rose mixed with beige mixed with a yellowish hue. She shivered some more, and sent up a silent prayer that if it did snow it wouldn’t prevent her from going back to London in the morning.

  ‘I’ll just nip home and check on Felix,’ Xander said. ‘I left a fanlight open for him but the temperature’s dropping by the minute and I know the old boy won’t go out if it’s too cold for him.’

  How kind Xander was, how caring of his pet, and of all of them around this table too. She wondered if Oliver had had a pet as a child, or if his granddaughters had, which was something she’d not even considered before – so many things to ask her son, so many years to catch up on. She could hardly wait. She’d have to sit on her hands to stop herself texting Oliver to ask question after question when they all sat around the table again at Strand House for the Boxing Night dinner.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ Janey asked. ‘I could suss out future painting projects.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ Xander said.

  Chapter 39

  Lissy

  Lissy and Bobbie were lounging – a couch each – at Strand House waiting for Xander and Janey to come back. How comfortable it felt, just the two of them, at ease in one another’s company and to think Lissy had had second thoughts at times about asking Bobbie in the first place!

  ‘Did you mean it, Bobbie?’ she asked. ‘What you said earlier, about cutting off your hair?’

  ‘Yes and no,’ Bobbie said, reaching back with an arm and running her hand from the top of her head, down over the long length of her exquisitely cared for silver locks. She fanned it out over a shoulder. ‘More hypothetical, I think. When we were in the Port Light I had one of those flashes of insight. I’ve kept it like this all these years because that’s how it was – long, if black and not grey like it is now – the day I gave birth to Oliver.’

  ‘And that’s how you wanted him to see you? The mother you were then?’

  ‘Exactly that.’

  Bobbie kicked off her shoes and swung her legs up onto the couch. Lissy couldn’t imagine doing that in anyone else’s house, unless it had been family, but it felt good now seeing Bobbie do it. She must have got the welcome right.

  Lissy got the feeling that Bobbie wanted to say more but was probably conscious of being too self-indulgent as she’d said down at the Port Light. She waited a moment or two for Bobbie to continue and when she didn’t, she said, ‘You must have felt so cheated when your cousin reneged on her promise.’

  ‘Betrayed,’ Bobbie said. ‘Pamela was family. I thought you could trust family. My parents told me I could but … well, I don’t need to tell you again, it isn’t any prettier for saying it a second time.’

  ‘No,’ Lissy said.

  She got up to switch on the tree lights, and light a candle – tuberose, one of Vonny’s she’d found in a cupboard. It was starting to get darker outside, the sea like a sheet of platinum, and she wondered if Janey was busily making sketches somewhere – from the harbour wall perhaps. She closed the vertical blinds and went back to sit down.

  ‘You’ve not said much about your divorce,’ Bobbie said suddenly.

  Lissy hadn’t been expecting that. She’d scoured Cooper from her mind, very effectively she thought, but it only took the mention of his name to bring the bad stuff back. The lies, the rows, the humiliation that he’d been unfaithful more than a few times.

  ‘No,’ Lissy told her. ‘I did the opposite of you with the hair, though.’ She couldn’t help but giggle at the memory. ‘This,’ she went on, flicking out her loose curls with her fingers, ‘is the natural look. No amount of hair straightening can get rid of them, but I tried. Blonde was so not a good look for me either! I had to cut it all off very short in the end.
I looked about fourteen.’

  ‘Cleansing, though. Maybe fourteen was a good time for you and you needed to get back to that.’

  God, but this woman knew how to home in on things, didn’t she? When Lissy had been fourteen it had been the last time her parents had been together, the last time they’d been a proper family. For her fourteenth birthday they’d taken her up to London for the weekend. They’d stopped in a hotel near Marble Arch and done the sights. They’d eaten in the same Italian restaurant both nights and that’s when Lissy had been introduced to a different cuisine to school dinners and her mother’s roasts. Squid, olives, courgette fritters, anchovies and slivers of blood red lamb that had barely touched the heat but which melted in her mouth – Lissy had been in culinary heaven with it all. Her love affair had begun with food then.

  ‘How insightful you are,’ Lissy said.

  ‘It comes with experience,’ Bobbie said. ‘You’re not so dusty yourself. I’d say you’ve got the instinct about when to say something and when to wait for the other person to get off their chest whatever it is they need to say.’

  ‘Hmm, yes,’ Lissy said. ‘Maybe.’

  Yes, there was something she needed to get off her chest. Something she needed to tell Xander. She went into his room on Christmas night intending to tell him before they kissed – which she’d known they would – that Claire had told him she was going to leave him to give him the opportunity to have a child with someone who could make one with him, unlike her. Lissy recalled, almost verbatim, the conversation she’d had with Claire doing her best to persuade her that Xander wouldn’t think like that, it was her he loved. She didn’t like having that memory, but was it one she could, or should share?

  ‘That was an awfully long pause,’ Bobbie said. She raised an enquiring eyebrow. ‘Shall I go and make some tea and then you can tell? If you want to.’

  ‘Please,’ Lissy said.

  That was the trouble with telling secrets – the teller felt better to be free of it but sometimes the secret was more than the hearer needed to know, to be responsible for the keeping of it.