The Perfect Present

by Karen Swan

  ‘Do you mean Cat?’

  ‘Who else?’ he snorted.

  ‘She’s just . . . abandoned her?’

  Joe looked straight at her. ‘Nail on the head.’

  ‘And that’s why you’ve hated me on sight. It was nothing to do with Pocket’s diet at all. You feel I’m perpetuating the glossy myths around her, when all she’s done is hurt your wife.’

  Joe was silent for a minute. ‘It breaks my heart to see her talking up that woman like they’re still so close. Reminiscing about their glory days when, in reality, Cat hasn’t bothered with her for years.’

  ‘But they got on so well in Verbier.’

  ‘Yes. Because Mrs High and Mighty had an audience.’

  ‘I really don’t think Cat’s like that,’ Laura said quietly. ‘She went out of her way to be friendly to me when she really could have just ignored me altogether, and there’s no agenda there – she doesn’t have any idea that I’m doing the necklace for her.’

  ‘Then there’s another reason she’s currying favour with you. Cat Blake doesn’t do anything for anybody unless there’s something in it for her. Kitty outlived her usefulness years ago.’

  Laura fell quiet. There was no point in arguing the toss. He’d known Cat since childhood. Who was she to tell him he was wrong? He didn’t need her to lecture him that friends very often do just grow apart. She watched him discreetly as he stopped at a junction and pulled out on to the main road. His chin was thrust forward defiantly, proudly. She might not like what he was saying about Cat, but she liked what he was doing for his wife. And for the first time, Laura began to understand what it was that Kitty saw in him.

  Laura leaned against the wall, her clasped hands resting against her mouth – partly to stop her from laughing, partly because the scene in front of her ranked as one of the most adorable she’d seen in her life. On the darkened stage, the children of Ottersbrook Primary School were singing ‘Little Donkey’ in joyous tunelessness and Kitty’s chaotic homemade costumes. The shepherds had tea towels fixed down on their heads, jam jar-style, the donkey was boasting a Rasta mane Bob Marley would have been proud to call his own, and poor Mary and baby Jesus were being completely upstaged by the stars – the pretty little girls in reception who were twinkling gloriously in white tutus and LED fairy lights. Laura had so far successfully managed to identify Lucie, Kitty’s second, who was the inn-keeper’s wife, Tom, who was a king, and Samuel, who was a rather blotchy-faced sheep. The fact that he was holding on to his companion duckling for grim death suggested he had thrown a major tantrum backstage and refused to go on without it.

  Kitty and Joe had managed to bag seats in the third row, but Laura – despite Kitty’s entreaties that she sit with them – had insisted on not taking a place intended for proud parents and was perfectly happy leaning against the back wall instead. She could see equally as well from there, she’d said.

  It was just as amusing for her to watch the families as the children anyway. Before her lay a sea of inclined heads – some greying, some balding, many blonded – the shoulders beneath them hunched with anxious anticipation until lines had been safely delivered. The dark space running up to the stage was lit up like a circuit board as hundreds of red blinking lights recorded the play for posterity and absent grandparents. Five, eight, ten years earlier, these very people would have been holding up white lighters at festivals and concerts, but this performance – better than anything they’d ever seen at the O2 – marked their new life stage as clearly as stretch marks and baggy eyes.

  She let her eyes swing over the audience like a beam of light, watching their profiles as women leaned in to whisper to their husbands during the carols, or their hands fluttered to their mouths nervously as their children spoke their lines. This was what it was to be a mother, she saw – pride and fear intermingled with something fierce and tender all at once. Something complicated, something universal, but uniquely theirs all the same. Had she been wrong to walk away from it so lightly? Had Jack? If she had been pregnant, would he really have left her?

  Laura searched out Kitty again, and she noticed Joe lip-synching as Tom delivered his lines. She watched for a couple of minutes, enchanted. The man was secretly soft!

  And then she saw him – Rob – sitting two rows back, slightly further to the left so that he was almost directly in front of her. It was his curls, so identifiable even from behind, that she noticed first. To his right was Cat, hair gleaming as though the lights were trained on her. Even from behind they made a beautiful couple. Laura looked back at Rob again, feeling her heart galloping like a thoroughbred. All day last night’s veiled conversation had lingered in the back of her mind like a shadow on her heart. What had he wanted to say to her in the hall? She had lain awake for hours afterwards, wondering, wincing as she heard the front door close twenty minutes later.

  She watched him tilt his head to listen to something Cat was whispering in his ear, and he appeared to frown and shake his head in reply. Suddenly she lost them as the weighted hem of the curtain landed on the stage with a thwump! and they were swallowed up by the upsurge of cheering parents who took to their feet.

  Laura craned to see them in the crowd, but it was impossible to keep tabs on anyone as mothers cried, grandparents roundly congratulated, children ran into outstretched arms, and fathers swapped cordial handshakes for their ‘good to see you’ once-a-term meetings. Over the crowd, she could hear Kitty, boisterous in her happiness, as she tried to simultaneously congratulate the music teacher and round up her brood. All around her, people jostled and laughed and chattered, children darted past her knees, and her toes were run over several times by mothers with sleeping babies in prams.

  ‘Aunty Laura, Aunty Laura,’ a little voice called up, and she felt a strong tug on the hem of her jumper. She looked down to find Martha squinting up at her. ‘I can’t find Mummy.’

  ‘What? Oh, but she’s just down by the stage,’ Laura replied distractedly, her eyes falling upon Kitty, who was conducting an impromptu nit-check on Tom.

  ‘People keep treading on my toes,’ Martha whined.

  ‘Well then, just stay here with me. Let’s just . . . let all these people get through first, shall we?’ she said, taking Martha by the hand and gesturing towards the bottleneck of people shuffling through the narrow doors, only to find, just twenty feet away, the Blakes.

  Rob’s eyes met hers a split second before Cat’s.

  ‘Laura!’ Cat gasped, waving a manicured hand across the sea of heads. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Snowed in!’ Laura called.

  Cat cupped her hand to her ear. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m snowed in!’ Laura shouted. But it was useless. They were being swept away by the nativity tide.

  ‘Meet us outside!’ Cat called as she disappeared from sight.

  Laura nodded, squeezing Martha’s hand excitedly. She let the crowds rush past, and Laura looked back for Kitty and Joe, just catching sight of them as they disappeared through the emergency exit beside the stage.

  ‘Oh, come on, Martha. Let’s go this way.’

  ‘I always knew Tom would make a great king,’ Kitty was saying proudly, clutching the poor mortified boy by his shoulders, as Laura and Martha met up with them in the car park. It was all but deserted – no one was stopping to chat in the freezing night temperatures. Fluffy snowflakes were fluttering down, illuminated in the pools of light thrown out by the lamp posts.

  ‘He’ll make a better farmer,’ Joe snorted.

  ‘And as for Lucie – I mean, the way she delivered her lines. I never had that kind of composure when I was her age.’ Kitty had her hand smacked over her heart in utter amazement.

  ‘She was great!’ Laura beamed, stopping next to her. ‘And I loved Sam holding his duckling too. So sweet.’

  ‘Huh! That’s what you call it,’ Joe muttered.

  Kitty rolled her eyes. ‘Ignore him, old Misery Boots,’ she mouthed.

  But Laura just gave him a knowing smile.
His secret was out with her. She hadn’t forgotten his quiet pride beaming out in the dark hall.

  ‘You really ought to have sat with us, though,’ Kitty tutted. ‘There was honestly no need for you to stand at the back.’

  ‘No, it was packed in there. I was fine. I had a great view.’

  ‘You could have sat with us, Laura,’ Cat smiled, looking richer than the Three Kings in a honey-coloured sheepskin coat. ‘There was plenty of room next to us proud godparents.’

  Laura shrugged, wishing she hadn’t borrowed Kitty’s coat – a Millets fleece-lined parka that was better suited to fell-walking in Cumbrian rain than Christmas plays in the Home Counties.

  ‘So how come you’re here?’ Cat asked her again. ‘Are you staying with these guys?’

  ‘Yes. I got snowed in. Apparently I was the only person in the country not to know that it was going to snow this week and decided that driving cross-country to London and Surrey was an absolutely cracking idea.’

  ‘What were you doing in London and Surrey?’ Cat asked.

  Laura stalled. It was a reasonable enough question, but Laura couldn’t answer it – not without giving away Rob’s secret present. She saw Rob shift his weight nervously.

  ‘Oh . . . you know . . . visiting friends,’ she nodded.

  Cat looked between Laura and Kitty, and Laura saw the flash of hurt that she hadn’t been included in the grand tour. ‘You must have seen Laura last night when you went to get the cakes?’ Cat asked Rob. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  He gave a careless shrug. ‘Laura went to bed early. I didn’t think to mention it. What was there to say?’

  ‘I would have liked to know! I could have come over today for some girly chat and some of Kitty’s world-famous cake.’

  Kitty puffed up with pride. ‘Well, if you want to come over tom—’

  ‘How long are you staying for?’ Cat asked Laura.

  ‘Hopefully I’ll get back tomorrow. I need to start getting everything ready for the launch party.’

  Cat’s face fell. ‘You’re going so soon?’

  ‘I’ve imposed far too much as it is. I’m eating these guys out of house and home, using up all the hot water . . .’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Kitty admonished. ‘We love having you to stay.’

  ‘Well, if it’s a bother for Kitty, I’ve got a fabulous idea,’ Cat gasped suddenly.

  ‘But it’s not a b—’ Kitty tried.

  Cat’s hands gripped Laura’s forearm excitedly. ‘There’s a big charity auction tomorrow night at the Mandarin Oriental. And you’ll never guess who’s chairing it.’

  Laura shook her head. She was quite sure she wouldn’t.

  ‘Bertie What’s-his-name.’

  ‘Penryn, Cat,’ Rob muttered. ‘Christ, why can you never remember his name?’

  Cat swatted his arm lightly. He wasn’t the one in her sights. ‘What do you say? Come with! It’ll be the perfect opportunity to introduce you, and then we can work on him to come to the party next week.’

  ‘Oh, Cat, it’s so kind of you, but I couldn’t possibly. I’d be a gate-crasher and, I mean, I don’t have anything to wear—’

  ‘So? We’ll go shopping! And I’ll take you for lunch at my favourite place.’

  ‘But it’s far too late notice. Surely there are seating plans organized, and I probably can’t afford a ticket anyhow.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about all that! Rob’s company’s taken a table. We can have whoever we want.’ She pointed her finger at Laura, Kitchener-style. ‘And I want you!’

  She burst out laughing, and Laura giggled nervously, star-struck and stunned. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Rob, tell her.’

  But Rob did nothing at all other than shake his head and stare at his feet. The last thing he was going to say to Laura was that he wanted her too!

  ‘Tch. Ignore him. He’s just worried about his Amex bill. Oh, please say you’ll come.’

  ‘But how are we supposed to get into London from here? There are no trains running. The auction might even be cancelled, mightn’t it?’

  ‘We’re not relying on public transport, Laura. Heaven forbid. They can scarcely do the job on a summer’s day. We’re hitching a lift in a friend’s chopper. They’re shooting in Lincs, but sweetly said they’d drop us off at Battersea heliport on the way past.’ She tipped her head pleadingly. ‘What were the chances of me bumping into you like this? It’s a sign. I know it is. You’re meant to be there.’

  Laura looked from Rob to Joe to Kitty. It was hard to say who looked more thunderous. She had no such conviction that she was supposed to be anywhere other than her studio in Suffolk in the middle of a creek.

  ‘In fact, let’s make it easier still,’ Cat said, clearly on a roll. ‘Come back with us now. That way, you’re out of the Bakers’ hair and we’re all ready to go straight off in the morning.’

  Laura looked over at Kitty, who was holding a child on each hip. Martha was leaning against her legs and sucking her thumb. The poor woman could scarcely remain upright.

  ‘I suppose it would make things easier for you guys if I skedaddle off,’ Laura said.

  Kitty opened her mouth to say something but then appeared to think better of it, and closed it again.

  ‘You’re right. You go,’ Joe said coldly, wrapping an arm tightly around Kitty’s shoulders. ‘It’ll mean we can turn the heating off in that room tonight.’

  ‘Great!’ Cat beamed. ‘So it’s all sorted, then. We’ll take Laura off your hands and give you guys a break.’ She leant over and kissed Kitty roundly on each cheek before ruffling the children’s hair. ‘And you kids were superstars tonight. Well done, you!’

  Laura hung back awkwardly – Joe’s body language was warning her not to hug his wife. ‘Thanks so much for everything, Kitty,’ she nodded lamely. ‘I’ve loved staying with you. And you really were all brilliant tonight, you lot. You really were . . . superstars.’ Five pairs of blue eyes blinked back at her warily.

  ‘Come on, Laura, the car’s over here,’ Cat said, looping an arm through hers and leading her away.

  ‘Oh, Kitty! Your coat,’ Laura said, suddenly stopping and turning back as she remembered she was wearing the parka.

  ‘Keep it. You’ll need something to wear in these temperatures,’ Kitty said quietly.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ve got loads of coats Laura can borrow,’ Cat interjected.

  Kitty took the coat from Laura without a word as Cat led her towards the gleaming black Range Rover, chatting away excitedly. The doors closed with an expensively muffled dock sound and she looked out through the tinted windows at the big, bustling family standing unusually still and quietly in front of the little village hall.

  A helicopter, huh?

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Rob was the one who retired early that night. He didn’t say a word on the journey back – only taking his eyes off the road to throw furious looks at Cat every time she absently stroked his leg – and he didn’t give her ‘the tour’ of the house this time, either. It was down to Cat to show her to her room – one of five ‘spares’ – before cracking open a bottle of champagne for them both, even though it was gone ten when they got in. By the time Laura fell into bed – and she did quite literally fall, the room was spinning so fast – it was well past two.

  ‘Morning,’ Cat said cheerily as Laura staggered into the kitchen the next morning in yesterday’s clothes. Cat was sitting at a long white granite breakfast bar swirled with chocolate, wearing a black skinny jumper and even skinnier poppy-red jeans. Her skin glowed, her hair shone – and Laura felt even more deathly. How did she do it? How could she look so sparkly on four hours’ sleep and several litres of champagne?

  ‘Here, try this,’ she smiled, taking in Laura’s wan pallor. ‘My secret weapon. It’ll give you some zing.’ She pushed a tall orangey-pink juice towards Laura. ‘It’s full of antioxidants and vitamins. Goodness in a glass. Here, sit down.’ She pulled out a stool.

 
Laura sat down and sipped it suspiciously, not convinced that imbibing anything within the next ten hours was a good idea, but it was delicious. A cook in a grey uniform came over to her. ‘What would you like me to prepare for you, madam?’

  ‘Oh, nothing for me, thanks,’ Laura said, shaking her head.

  ‘Laura, this is Anchee, our cook. Fix her a Benedict royale, please,’ Cat instructed, before looking back at Laura. ‘You’re going to need some carbs or you’ll pay for it later in the chopper.’

  ‘What time’s it coming?’

  ‘About ten-ish.’

  ‘Is it just us going?’

  ‘Rob’s coming too. He’s working in the study at the moment. There was no way the roads would be clear enough to get him into the office from here.’

  Laura sipped some more of the power-juice and looked out through the arched windows at the beautiful garden. It was as if the snow itself had been topiaried, with conical trees and sharp hedges rendered in white.

  ‘When do you buy your Christmas tree?’ Laura asked, looking around curiously. There had been nothing festive in the cavernous hall or in any of the rooms she’d snuck a glance into as she’d passed. It seemed sad to think of the beautiful tree standing fully dressed and moulting quietly in the chalet in Verbier, its lights turned off and no one at home.

  ‘I prefer not to get the decorations out until Christmas Eve. What with the two events being so close, I’ve always delayed the onset of Christmas until after my birthday. That was how my parents tried to make it special for me. I can’t tell you the number of times I had a birthday party and people would turn up with my Christmas present instead.’

  ‘Oh no, I can imagine,’ Laura said, just as Rob came into the kitchen carrying an empty cup. ‘It must have been so disappointing. One of the things we always loved about having a May birthday was that it staggered the year into almost equal halves between the present bounties. Also, we got to have our birthdays in the garden.’