A Family Man
Page 32
John was a few yards from the house when the necklaces of lights – arranged by him with much cursing – among its tangle of rampaging ivy sprang to life, triggered by a timer switch, which, no matter how cunningly he tried to outwit it, continued each year to pursue a schedule of its own.
Every year John treated Pamela’s suggestion that a new device might be a worthy investment with a gruff dismissal. Like the single sprout on the plate of each protesting grandchild, grappling with willful Christmas lights had somehow become integral to his view of the festive scenery: a challenge when they resisted, a cause for immense satisfaction when they didn’t.
Besides, he didn’t like throwing things away. Even things that didn’t work. It felt too much like giving up and he’d never been one for that.
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Cassie, at thirty-seven the youngest of John and Pamela Harrison’s children, pulled her bedroom curtains shut, kicked off her shoes, which looked fabulous but hurt like hell, and settled herself among the half-unpacked clutter on her bed. She would put them back on to go downstairs, slip them off under the table during dinner, then put them on again for church. A family Christmas had always demanded a certain sartorial elegance, which she enjoyed – being grand did make things feel special – and in a week or two the shoes would be fine. It was her feet that were the problem, small and wide, so that practically everything rubbed in the wrong places to start with even if they got to be as comfy as slippers later on. She had been staring out of the window for some time, thinking that the veil of rolling mist was just as atmospheric as snow and wondering whether to make her own small contribution to it by lighting a cigarette (she was supposed to be on five a day and had already had six) when she spotted her father wheeling his barrow of holly up from the copse at the bottom of the field, Boots waddling at his heels. She raised her knuckles to rap on the window, but stopped at the last minute, overwhelmed by troubled fondness at how decrepit he looked, as lumbering and stiff-limbed as his dear old hound. He wouldn’t see her anyway, Cassie told herself, tugging the curtain shut, feeling suddenly that she was spying. These days, his eyesight was poor, a problem compounded by his reluctance to acknowledge it and the family’s tacit willingness – led by Pamela – to collude in the process. The hair- raising experience of a car journey in his company was never due to his glasses’ prescription being out of date but to the bloody-mindedness of other drivers. They were all protecting him, but from what? He would die anyway, whether he wrapped his car round a tree, lost his footing on the reedy edge of Ashley Lake or had a heart-attack.
Cassie sat down on her bed with a sigh, trying to picture a world without her parents, who annoyed her terribly at times, but to whom she was unequivocally devoted. It was impossible to imagine pain of any kind, she decided, impossible really to feel anything in advance of the feeling itself. Especially not on Christmas Eve when everything was poised and perfect, and when all she really wanted to think about was Daniel Lambert, a London GP for whom she felt an altogether different and entirely consuming love; whose very presence on the planet, even miles away in Derbyshire, surrounded by his wife, children and, by all accounts, quite hideous in-laws, made Cassie feel both immortal and blessed. Placing her mobile phone tenderly on the pillow next to her, even though Dan had warned that he probably wouldn’t call, she folded her arms and looked round the familiar contours of the room, which had been hers ever since she could remember and which always made her feel a curious combination of comfort and frustration.
She was an established freelance interior designer, Cassie reminded herself, with a string of clients and her own website. Yet sitting now on the old threadbare beige counterpane, she felt as if she had never moved on from being a little girl and never would. Her surroundings were like a kaleidoscopic snapshot of the first two decades of her life: the pin-board of faded rosettes, the framed music and ballet certificates, the collection of soft toys propped against each other like a band of war-weary veterans on top of the bookcase, the beads she no longer wore draped round the mirror on the dressing-table, the trinket boxes containing obsolete coins and single earrings whose partners had gone missing, but which she still hoped, vaguely, to find one day. Peachy silk curtains had replaced the Barbie pink on which she had insisted as a schoolgirl and several layers of creamy paint had long since freshened the once fuchsia walls. The carpet was still the same, however, covered in rugs these days to conceal its age, but fraying visibly at the edges, especially where it met the little cast-iron fireplace set into the wall opposite the bed. Overhead, the heavy roof timbers, which ran the length of the top floor of the house, seemed to sag slightly, as did the stretches of ceiling between, as if the entire structure was preparing to cave inwards. As a child Cassie had devoted many dark hours to worrying about this, especially when she could hear the scrabble of rodent feet behind the plaster, which conjured terrifying images of debris and animals with sharp teeth tumbling out of the night on top of her. A series of Ashley House cats had eventually sorted out the problem, the latest of which, a ginger tom called Samson, was lying now in the furthest corner of the window-seat, curled up tight with his head half buried under his paws, stoutly ignoring both Cassie and the muffled thumps coming from downstairs.
Cassie’s was the only bedroom in the house without a basin (a cause, at some hazy adolescent stage of her life, for serious complaint), but it had a wall of oak panelling, which none of the others did, and a dear little roll-top desk full of tiny drawers that had belonged to her grandmother and where she had once spent many hours pretending to be a serious student. Unlike her elder sister Elizabeth, who had been sent away to a fierce school run by nuns, Cassie had been allowed to remain a daygirl until at sixteen she had decided to board, opting for a small co-ed school where everyone had pets (by then she had been through her horsy phase and had taken with her a beautiful lop-eared rabbit called Horace) and where getting a part in the school play was given as much praise as doing well in exams. With a mind that retained interesting but not necessarily useful facts, Cassie had acquired respectable exam results without managing anything spectacular. Even now, as a fully fledged grown-up, she struggled to remember who was in charge of which government department and how to work out percentages and what the names were of all the countries in Eastern Europe. That her three elder siblings were all more obviously academic than her was something Cassie had always accommodated with ease, as much a fact of life as the tear-shaped birthmark next to her tummy-button and being the only one to have blonde curly hair. Bobbing along as the baby of the family in the less pressurised slipstream of family life, Cassie had watched the highs and lows of her brothers’ and sister’s faltering advance through adolescence to adulthood with a combination of compassion and curiosity. Particularly Elizabeth’s, for there was no doubt that her sister had suffered most.
Through a combination of being unhappy at school, arguing with Pamela (a maddening adversary because she never got cross), opting for disastrous hairstyles in the seventies (pudding-basin page-boys and frizzy unforgiving perms), misguided dalliances with fashion (hot-pants, miniskirts, thick multi-coloured knee-length socks) and even more misguided dalliances with men (Elizabeth’s first marriage to an unemployed journalist, called Lucien, had lasted three years), her sister had had a very bumpy ride indeed. Cassie had quietly observed it all, finding her sibling, who was nine years older, easier to love for these struggles but inwardly determining that she would never endure such public and catastrophic failures herself.
Trying to behave as if she wasn’t waiting for the phone to ring, Cassie began to fish all the presents out of the bottom of her suitcase and line them up across the bed: a blue cashmere scarf and a book on cooking curry for Elizabeth (she and Colin, her second husband of fourteen years, were mad about Indian food); a state-of-the-art chrome corkscrew for her eldest brother Peter; a bland but safe silky grey scarf for his wife, Helen, who made a habit of dressing severely even for country walks; a book of after- dinner speeches and a silly
tie for Charlie, her other brother, who at forty- three was the closest in age to her and who, in spite of being a civil servant, was the joker of the family; an arty print of some flowers for his wife, Serena; a set of tapestry wool for her mother and a pair of leather gloves for her father. For Colin there was a bottle of wine, looking worryingly bubbly from its ride in the bottom of her bag, and for all her nephews and nieces there were cheques as usual, fifteen pounds each, apart from Roland, Elizabeth and Colin’s nine-year-old, who was her godson and therefore got twenty. The only child for whom she had ventured to buy an actual gift was Tina, Serena and Charlie’s sixteen-month-old, the fourth and youngest of their brood. After much agonising, Cassie had settled on a rag doll with yellow woollen hair and freckles stitched across her nose, which reminded her vaguely of a much-loved dolly she had once had. To give a baby money didn’t feel right, she had explained to Serena that afternoon, worrying both about appearing fair to all the children and her choice of toy, which in retrospect seemed a bit unimaginative. Serena had laughed, then said it sounded lovely and that Tina would probably enjoy the wrapping-paper just as much as whatever was inside it. Cassie had laughed too, while hoping secretly that this would not prove the case, since the doll was handmade and had cost rather a lot.
Cassie’s phone rang when, absorbed in writing gift-tags, she had at last forgotten about it. ‘My darling,’ she whispered, her heart leaping as it always did at the sound of her lover’s voice. ‘My dearest darling, how are you?’
‘Missing you.’
‘Me too. Is it awful?’
‘Fairly.’
‘I can hardly hear you, it’s a bad line.’
‘I’m outside, pretending to put the rubbish out. I just had to call. I miss you so much.’
‘And me. I’m in my room. Refuge from children and noise.’
‘I wanted to thank you for my present. So sweet.’
‘It’s only a little thing.’
‘A beautiful little thing. Like you. I shall treasure it. And you liked mine, didn’t you?’
Cassie’s fingers leapt to the gold necklace concealed under the collar of her shirt. ‘I love it,’ she whispered, ‘and I love you.’
‘I love you too, but I’ve got to go. I’ll call when I can. Think of me tomorrow – our first Christmas.’
‘Of course, my sweetheart, of course.’
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About the Author
Amanda Brookfield is the bestselling author of 15 novels including Good Girls and Before I Knew You, and a memoir, For the Love of a Dog starring her Golden Doodle Mabel. She lives in London.
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This edition published in Great Britain in 2021 by Boldwood Books Ltd. First published in 2001
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Copyright © Amanda Brookfield, 2001
Cover Design by Charlotte Abrams-Simpson
Cover photography: Shutterstock
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The moral right of Amanda Brookfield to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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