by Annie O'Neil
Josh sent his children back to the house with Audrey and, as he watched them disappear up his drive, asked Jess and Drea who had stood together, watching silently as the festivities dissolved, if they fancied coming to his for Sunday lunch. ‘Nothing posh,’ Josh said apologetically. ‘But the children and I make a mean batch of Yorkshire puddings.’
‘I love Yorkshire puddings,’ Jess patted her belly, suddenly hungrier than she had been in weeks.
Drea gave Jess a polite smile, then, to Josh a sincere, ‘May I bring anything? Veg? Pudding?’
Jess squinted at her. Who stole Drea and replaced her with Little Miss Happy Homemaker?
Josh shook his head, no. ‘We’ve got a routine. If it’s cool, we’ll stick with it, but …’ his eyes glinted as his smile broadened. ‘A nice bottle of that Picpoul you had the other night wouldn’t go amiss. I never drink when it’s just the kids and me, so …’ His gaze drifted to Jess, whose cheeks instantly pinked.
‘I’ll bring some, too. Wine. For drinking.’ She blithered a few more things before looking at her empty wrist and exclaiming, ‘Oh, gosh! Is that the time! I think my parents are ringing me. Better get back.’
‘Your parents in the Marshall Islands where it’s six in the morning?’ Drea asked, her lips twitching with amusement.
‘Yes. Early risers. Always have been!’
Jess ran into her house and slumped against the door. She had about sixteen hours to learn how to be in Josh’s presence and behave like a normal human. She squatted down and stared at herself in the as-yet-to-be-hung mirror. Her cheeks were flaming. It was going to be a long night.
18 December
20:42
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Bleurghhhhh
Hey Will –
Disaster. Your grandad came out tonight to one of the Christmas events which was amazing. And then he was helping this little girl who slipped, but to some of the parents it looked like he wasn’t helping and there were some not very nice things bandied about which made your grandad run for the hills (well, his house, but you know what I mean).
Just thought you should know. It was really awful. It made me feel exactly the way I did when the board of governors said it was ‘indecipherable’ as to whether or not I had genuinely been trying to help Ethan or if I was trying to hurt Crispy, so I can’t even imagine how it made your grandfather feel. Especially after what he went through with your gran.
Anyway. Sorry to dump this on you, just thought you should know. Tomorrow night’s Christmas Jenga, whatever that is, at number 19, but I doubt Arnold will be making a showing.
I’ll pop in on him, but if there’s any way you could show up, maybe that would redress the balance??????
Best x J(ess)
19 December
19 December
03:07
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Bleurghhhhh
Jessica –
Sorry. I missed something here. What exactly did my grandfather go through with my grandmother?
Late night. Sorry to be rushed. Christmas market in Harrogate tomorrow, then the final push until Christmas Day. Once all the invoices are in I can officially call the premises of The Merry Victualler mine.
19 December
08:08
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry
Hey Will –
Ummm … I shouldn’t have said that. If I had a sword I’d fall on it right now. It really is his story to tell and as it’s family stuff and I don’t know what your father’s told you and, obviously, I haven’t heard his side of the story which I’m guessing you have (??), I haven’t said anything. Obviously. Until last night when I said something.
#NotEntirelySureWhatToDoNow
xJ
19 December
08:10
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry
You could start by telling me what he told you.
W
Apologies for any typos. Email written in haste on iPhone
19 December
08:17
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: RE: RE: Sorrysorrysorrysorrysorry
Hey Will –
I guess it’s ridiculous to try and extract a pinkie promise from you that you won’t tell him that I told you, but … it is your family’s history, so … here goes.
Thirty-five years ago when your father was away studying in Scotland, your grandmother had what she thought was a cold …
‘Open up, Buttercup!’
Jess ran down the stairs, towel still whorled round her wet hair, and pulled open the door. ‘Wow. You scrub up nice.’
Drea struck a pose. Jess whistled, then shivered, quickly ushering Drea in out of the mid-winter drizzle. She looked amazing. Her hair, outfit and make-up were immaculate. The overall effect was effortless beauty. A style Jess had achieved a solitary time when Martin had invited her to a swanky do hosted by a modelling agency who booked short-term lets from his company. She’d booked the longest appointment she could at a MAC store and then tried not to blink or smile for the next few hours. It had been hell.
Drea, who clearly did not suffer from Jess’s problems with clumpy mascara, wayward eyeliner and streaky blusher, struck a new pose in the doorframe to Jess’s lounge. ‘Catalogue chic, or … wistful yet aspirational perfume?’
‘Both,’ said Jess noting the almost imperceptible veneer of fragility cloaking Drea’s need for feedback. ‘You look like Angelina Jolie but healthier.’
Drea fuzzed her lips, but Jess could tell she was pleased. She scanned Jess’s hastily pulled together ensemble. Chunky knit cotton jumper. Teal. Winter-green corduroy skirt with appliqué flowers. Thick woolly tights. Purple. Fly boots, soooo comfortable but not even close to being FMBs. Not that she wanted that to be what her outfit said when she and Drea showed up at Josh’s. Did she? No. Maybe? With Drea looking all fabulous and Sunday-lunch glam, she felt more mousey school teacher than fun, thirty-something, singleton neighbour. Oh, God. Now she was having an identity crisis on top of it all.
‘Why are you running so late?’ Drea asked, crossing to the painted Christmas tree and scanning through the ‘decorations’.
Jess climbed a stair or two, huffing out a dramatic sigh. ‘Mr Winters.’
‘What? You’ve been down to his?’
‘No.’
Drea made a ‘so why are you telling me this’ face.
‘I told Will about him.’
‘Will the secret grandson?’
‘The one and only.’
‘I thought the secret grandson already knew about him.’
‘He did – does. But he didn’t know why Mr Winters hadn’t spoken to his dad in thirty-five years.’
Drea went hawk-eyed. ‘And you do?’
Jess touched her trembling hand to the towel round her head. ‘Umm. Why don’t you pour yourself a pre-lunch wine? It’s in the fridge. I just need a couple minutes to dry my hair.’
‘Oh no you don’t, young lady.’
‘Yes,’ Jess took a pointed look at her watch, then flicked her thumb in the direction of Josh’s. ‘I really do.’
‘No,’ Drea morphed into Maleficent before her eyes. ‘You really don’t. You’re going to sit down on the toilet and I’m going to do your hair for you while you tell Auntie Dré-Dré all about it. If something needs fixing before December the twenty-fourth on the off-chance my l
ittle boy shows up, I’m going to fix it. Or, more accurately, you are. Understand this …’ Her green eyes flashed as she hit the first step of the stairs. ‘Nothing is going to eff-up my son’s Christmas. So come Christmas Eve? I want this street blazing with holiday cheer. Got it?’
Jess swallowed. She got it, but how was she going to achieve it?
Drea, it turned out, would be such an asset at Guantanamo or wherever it was spies extracted state secrets these days. Jess told her everything. From the suspected cold to the fight after the funeral to the thirty-five-year cold war, the family Robert had raised in Scotland, the grandson who, despite having never met him, seemed to think there might be some possibility of peace. Peace and support Mr Winters so desperately needed, especially after last night’s debacle.
Though part of her felt awful for blabbing, another part was relieved that someone else knew Mr Winters wasn’t being a grumpy old man just for the fun of it. He was experiencing genuine, bone-deep pain and, much like the way she’d felt over the past year, couldn’t see a way out of it.
‘Do you think Will might make more of an effort to get in touch now that he knows?’ Jess asked, scalp tingling as Drea whorled a brush through her fringe one last time, stood back, and examined her handiwork with a frown, her gaze dipping to Jess’s.
‘Don’t know. What sort of bloke do you think he is? This … Will.’
‘Nice,’ she said, feeling as though the word didn’t quite cover it. It was hard to say without having met the man. On paper, and on email, he seemed really kind. Genuinely kind, in fact. He was obviously hard-working, had been through some tough times emotionally, but had come out the other side stronger and more aware of how his behaviour affected others and how he wanted to treat those around him in future. He wanted to develop a relationship with his grandfather, which suggested strong family bonds meant a lot to him. And, apart from this morning’s exchange, there was something easy-going about him that made Jess feel extra-comfortable spilling her guts to him and, from all accounts, vice versa. The past few weeks had felt, in a weird way, as if they’d been on a long-haul flight together. Happily buckled up, side by side, instinctively knowing they shared one of those rare, instant connections that made it easy to tell one another their life stories ten thousand feet above the rest of the world.
‘C’mon,’ Drea said, clearly not expecting a long-winded answer. ‘Get up. We’re late.’
After a quick glance in the mirror and a tight, fierce thank you hug for getting her errant fringe to look even a fraction like Claudia Winkleman’s, the pair of them collected their bottles of wine and, in Drea’s case, a box of chocolates ‘for the kiddos’, and headed to Josh’s.
Three hours later, Jess was riding quite the food-and-wine buzz. Or maybe – and she was only admitting this silently, cautiously and a little bit wishfully – maybe she was riding a ‘feels good to be part of something bigger than herself’ buzz.
Josh’s house was bustling. Before they’d even entered, it hummed with happy noises, all cosy looking and inviting, with steamed-up windows and awash with amazing smells. Inside, stacks of school uniforms were draped on one end of the sofa, half of which had been dismantled into a fort where Eli had been teaching Audrey how to read. Zoe was wearing an oversized adult’s t-shirt as a dress – her mum’s, maybe? It must’ve been from her hen do – unless ‘Before she says “I Do”, let’s have a Drink or Two’ referred to squash. There were tumbles of children’s books and stacks of paperwork Josh hastily tidied on top of the laptop he swooped off the dining table along with the iron. He put it, a basket overflowing with Lego, and an extremely impressive dressing-up box, made out of an actual steamer trunk with a sticker on it for Timbuctoo, by the stairs.
Josh had also, it turned out, totally lied about his cooking. He claimed their delicious meal was simply a case of reading the recipe, but the man clearly knew his way round a roast chicken. And the yorkies! Double yum. Josh was clearly loving ‘grown-up’ time, but had a great way of engaging his children in actual conversations rather than the list of instructions so many parents counted as ‘active parenting’.
Drea had kept conversation flowing like a normal human. There was job talk (Josh was head of IT at the university where the Nishios taught); shared angst over Christmas shopping (painful for Eli but in Zoe’s case anything with a unicorn or glitter usually worked); bills (never-ending, but things could be worse. They counted themselves lucky.) All this while Jess and the children spent the bulk of the meal, including the demolition of Drea’s unbelievably delicious White Forest roulade, speculating about Santa, how busy he was, whether or not he liked houses with more or less decorations outside, whether having a very skinny chimney was a genuine problem come Christmas Eve, and also what Jess’s plans were at the primary academy for making sure they got chocolate cake more often. With hundreds and thousands. Apparently this was a big discussion point among the five- to eight-year-olds. Zoe had also talked her through why their kitchen counters had an abundance of casserole dishes with Post-its on them. Apparently, even though Josh had thought he’d made it clear he was good with making dinner for the children after his wife had passed, many of the neighbours had built making ‘just a little something for him and the children’ into their routines. As such there was Monday cottage pie from the Nishios; Wednesday was usually some sort of veggie pasta bake or lasagne from one of the Gem’n’Emms and so on. Josh actually knew all of their names and surnames and the Rob’n’Bob’s names. Completely impressive and yes, she’d asked for a cheat sheet because the first day of school was going to be totally embarrassing if she couldn’t name one of them.
Having eaten her body weight in some of everything – roasties, chicken, honey-roasted carrots and three Yorkshire puds – and not strictly refusing each time Josh refilled her wine glass, unlike Drea who demurely slid her hand across the top of her glass (weird and totally unlike Drea), Jess was now paying the price for her gluttony. Propped up against the side of the sofa, she was on childcare duty after Drea airily announced, ‘the adults would see to the cleaning up while Jess did her ‘thing with the kiddies’.
‘I think you should wear this,’ Zoe announced, handing Jess a conical princess hat with a gorgeous swish of diaphanous fabric speckled with sparkly bits.
Eli was currently draped in a Darth Vader costume with an Olaf head perched atop his own. His eyes, visible through Olaf’s mouth, were glued on the television as the chaos of Home Alone played out for the gazillionth time across the UK, the rest of him moving as and when Zoe changed her mind about what she wanted him to wear. He was very amenable, Eli. She suspected Zoe would dress him up for their night, tomorrow, when they’d decided that the evening’s entertainment would be a Best-Dressed Holiday Pet show. If no pets were available, it was agreed a stuffed animal could stand in, but not stuffed spiders, because stuffed spiders weren’t Christmassy even if they had on red hats. (Zoe was a stickler for details.)
‘What about Audrey? Do you want to show me what she’s going to wear?’ Jess tried not to slur. Or yawn. She was very sleepy and super comfy. Maybe she could ease on down to a casual horizontal position and have a teensy tiny … A large furry nose presented itself in front of her then gave her cheek a lick. ‘Hello, Audrey.’
Zoe plopped herself down in Jess’s lap and took the Bernese’s face in her hands. ‘She always looks good in red,’ she said after a minute’s consideration. Zoe clambered out of Jess’s lap then lifted a few things out of the dress-up box, swiftly rejecting one thing after another until eventually settling upon a Wonder Woman headband, a Princess Leia arm cuff and a Red Riding Hood cloak. ‘Okay. Sit there and put your arm around Audrey,’ she instructed Jess.
Eli was rearranged so that he was lying like a sultan on the sofa above Jess. Zoe climbed back into Jess’s lap and struck a thoughtful pose while Audrey opted to parade back and forth, clearly enamoured with her new get up.
‘Daddy! Daddy! Bring y
our camera.’
When Josh came into the lounge, his face went through a kaleidoscope of expressions. Amused. Delighted. Happy. Sad.
The sadness hit Jess right in the solar plexus. Had his wife been a fan of dress-up and Jess an unwitting usurper of the role? Claire’s photo was hanging in a couple of places round the house and, when Zoe had insisted on giving her a full tour, she’d seen specially framed photos next to each of the children’s beds. She looked energetic, pretty and very much in love with her family. She exuded the special ‘Top Mum’ glow she and Amanda used to pray for when the next round of students and parents arrived at the school gate. The type of women who simply … were. No airs, no graces, just kindness. Usually a bit hassled, because what parent wasn’t, but always laughing and giving a ‘what can you do?’ shrug when their child threw up on their shoes. Exactly the sort of woman Jess would’ve been proud to call a friend.
‘Daddy, take a picture,’ Zoe demanded. ‘We’ll leave it for Santa with his carrots.’
Drea appeared behind Josh, her own features going through an entirely different kaleidoscope of expressions. Surprise, yearning, and something that looked so much like hope Jess didn’t quite know how to respond. Audrey plonked herself down across Jess’s shins and Josh scooped his phone off the hall table and was telling them all to smile, but Jess couldn’t keep her eyes off Drea. She looked as if big knots of longing and despair were tangling up in her chest and making it difficult for her to breathe. As if this were a moment of family life she’d always imagined having and never would. Jess made a silent note to play dress-up with Drea next time they hit the Picpoul. It wouldn’t be quite the same, but …
‘Everybody say cheese!’ Josh instructed.
After a few more poses, Audrey started to paw off her mask, was wearing her cape like a bib and had somehow lost her arm cuff. Zoe tried to get Eli to change his costume, but he wouldn’t because he wanted to see Home Alone Kevin receive his room service, which prompted him to ask his father if he could get room service for his breakfast in the morning.