A Winter Flame

by Milly Johnson

  But despite his chauvinistic ways, no one could take away from him that he was a damned good foreman. There was no lounging about on long, infamous builders’ tea breaks when he was in the area.

  She imagined his Welsh eyes burning into her bum as she climbed the four steps into the Portakabin. The office was full of the smell of fresh coffee; Jacques had beaten her in again, it seemed. She hoped he would bugger off and not be hanging around when Nobby Scuttle arrived. She poured herself a coffee and sat down, because the pain in her back really was dragging her down. It felt as if she had been thumped by a hammer. She wasn’t in the mood for Jacques’ jolly ‘Bonjour’ as he blasted into the office with a giant flying jacket on, and she hoped that was indicative of him making a flying visit. But he settled on his chair, threaded his fingers, and looked as if he didn’t really know what to do with himself next. He started whistling – a syncopated, annoying version of ‘Away in a Manger’, which made Eve lose her thread of concentration.

  ‘It’s going to be great, isn’t it? I love Christmas,’ he enthused. ‘If we weren’t spending it on my grandparents’ farm in France, we were at home with lots of relatives staying over. Big fires, lots of laughter, kids, animals, games.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful,’ sneered Eve.

  ‘Oh, it was,’ nodded Jacques. ‘We used to have a twelve-foot Christmas tree and every visitor had to bring a bauble for it.’

  ‘Wowee.’

  Jacques studied Eve.

  ‘You don’t like Christmas very much do you, Eve?’

  ‘No,’ she replied flatly. ‘But I do appreciate its commercial attraction, which we are here to cash in on. Which brings me to the point that I need the office to myself for an hour or so,’ she said in a clipped tone. ‘I’ve got a meeting with a novelty man at ten.’

  As soon as she said it, she saw Jacques’ eyes spark up with mischief. ‘A novelty man?’

  Before he could give her some smart-aleck comment she clarified, ‘A man who sells novelties. For the gift shop. So if you could . . .’

  ‘Yep, no worries,’ said Jacques. ‘Absolutely no worries at all. I need to oversee some tree-cutting so I’ll be pretty busy all morning.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, lifting her laptop out of her bag whilst Jacques quietly sipped his coffee. She was just thinking how very quiet he was when he started talking again.

  ‘Bet that is great fun, looking at novelties for the shop.’

  Eve carefully underplayed it. She didn’t want him to think it was such an exciting job that he would abandon his forest duties for it.

  ‘It’s not really,’ she said with a shrug of her shoulders. ‘I think making an enchanted forest out of a load of trees is a far more pleasant job than picking out shop stocks.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll go and see what’s happening there when I’ve finished my coffee,’ he said.

  Eve tried to concentrate on her computer screen but was aware that Jacques was watching her. ‘What is it?’ she snapped. ‘Why are you looking at me?’

  ‘Would you rather I totally ignored you?’ he laughed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s off-putting having you stare at me.’

  ‘You’re very nice to rest my eyes on,’ said Jacques.

  Here we go again, Eve thought, tutting loudly. She didn’t dignify that with an answer.

  ‘You remind me of your Aunt Evelyn sometimes,’ he said. ‘You have some of the same mannerisms. You blink a lot when you concentrate.’

  ‘I do not,’ refuted Eve, although she knew that her Aunt Evelyn did exactly that.

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  ‘If you say so.’ He wanted to draw her into conversation and she had no time nor patience for him. This gnawing ache at her side was starting to make even breathing a chore. She hoped if she continued to look as if she were concentrating very hard at her screen he would take the hint, and so it was with a huge amount of relief that she watched him drain his cup and stand up.

  ‘Right, I’ll go and oversee some forestry. What time is your “novelty man” coming?’

  ‘Ten,’ said Eve.

  ‘Ten,’ he repeated, and was gone.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Eve said when the door closed on him.

  ‘I heard that,’ said a loud voice behind it.

  At 9.50 Jacques returned, much to Eve’s chagrin.

  ‘Everything is going well in tree land so I thought I’d sit in on your meeting with the novelty man.’

  ‘I don’t think you will,’ she said crossly.

  ‘Oh, go on,’ Jacques punched her arm gently. ‘I need some negotiating tips from a master.’

  ‘You patronizing—’

  ‘Patronizing? Moi ?’ Jacques’ eyebrows rose to the ceiling. ‘Not at all, dear lady. Besides, I want to see what a “novelty man” looks like.’

  Eve’s face was just going a lovely shade of scarlet when there was a sharp rap on the door. Nobby had arrived and Eve didn’t want to argue with Jacques in front of him. Plus she didn’t have the energy for a verbal tussle. It would be easier just to let him sit in and play with some of Nobby’s free samples. Hopefully a wind-up toy might engage his tiny brain and distract him from making any comment.

  Nobby Scuttle was a very wide man with an unhealthily ruddy complexion. He made even Effin Williams look like a twig. The block-black toupee he wore did nothing to reclaim any of his youth; in fact it gave him more than a passing resemblance to an old music hall ventriloquist’s doll. And one that had been sitting too close to the fire. His suit had damp patches under the arms, despite the early hour of the morning, and he wafted in with breathy wheezes and a cloud of sweat and very strong cologne. It was a heady mix at the best of times, but in a very warm Portakabin and not feeling her best, Eve hoped this was going to be a very short meeting. She had to decide quickly on some novelties to keep children who visited the park happy. It shouldn’t be too complicated a job, then she could send him on his way.

  After damp handshakes, Jacques took it upon himself to pour coffees whilst Nobby Scuttle wheezed a bit more as he leaned over to get inside his briefcase. He sounded like a broken pair of bellows.

  His fat sausage-fingers handed over a brochure with lots of Post-it notes stuck between the pages, highlighting things which Nobby had recommended. There was nothing out of the ordinary: rubbers, pencil sharpeners, cheap-looking spiral-bound pads.

  ‘Anything you see in the brochure will be emblazoned with your logo.’ He swept his hand through the air as if touching some invisible lettering. ‘We supply to all the main theme parks and the zoos. You won’t find any better on price.’

  He let that information – and some more sweat-smells – sink in. Eve felt the annoying presence of Jacques peering over her shoulder.

  ‘Bit ordinary, isn’t it?’ he sniffed, saying exactly what was in Eve’s mind, yet still she felt like huffing. It was up to her to deliver that line if anyone, not him.

  ‘People just want to buy anything with the name on it. You don’t need to put a lot of effort into choosing things. They’ll sell anyway,’ Nobby winked confidentially. ‘Kids have bottomless pockets in these sorts of places.’

  ‘I don’t think Santa would agree with that,’ said Jacques. Eve closed her eyes and blew out her cheeks. Nobby Scuttle gave an amused little laugh, presuming Jacques was joking, even though his expression said he wasn’t.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ he asked then.

  ‘I think he means that we are actually looking for some “less ordinary” ideas as well. That other people don’t supply,’ suggested Eve, before Nobby rang for some men in white coats for Jacques.

  ‘Well, I mean that and—’ began Jacques, but Eve cut him off.

  ‘We do need a lot of these cheaper-end items but—’

  ‘We don’t want any rubbish,’ Jacques interrupted right back. ‘And, er, excuse me for saying, but this is proper rubbish. Can you show us something that no one else has?’

  Nobby Scuttle’s neck started mottling with purple. His stuff had nev
er been awarded the title ‘rubbish’ before, obviously. He had presumed this was going to be another lazy sale – palm them off with a few rubbers and pencils and cheap crappy watersnakes – and ker-ching.

  ‘Puzzles,’ said Nobby, reaching in his briefcase for a sample of a sliding tile puzzle.

  ‘Seen ’em dozens of times,’ sniffed Jacques dismissively, before Eve could pick it up from the table. What the hell was wrong with her? She seemed to be functioning on ever-reducing power. The ibuprofen tablets weren’t working at all. Eve stretched out her back and tried to massage the pain surreptitiously. It was getting so bad that finding any respite from the pain was taking priority over telling Jacques to butt out. She was forced to stay silent whilst Jacques dissed everything that Nobby Scuttle pulled out of his briefcase: the souvenir clotted-cream fudge, the plastic reindeer figures, the water pistols.

  ‘This pen doesn’t even write,’ said Jacques, scribbling on a pad on his desk with one of Nobby’s samples.

  By this time, Nobby was the colour of beetroot with a blood pressure problem. The smell of sweat was getting very heavy in the air as Nobby’s underarms were pouring it out. Eve forced herself to concentrate on the novelty pooing reindeer before she retched and both insulted Nobby and showed herself up.

  Nobby took the pen from Jacques, none too gently, and tried it himself. It didn’t write, however much he ground the nib into the paper.

  ‘It was working earlier,’ he said in a tone that almost accused Jacques of wrecking it. ‘We always check my samples before visiting clients.’

  ‘Have you got another?’ Eve asked Nobby. She needed to wrap up this meeting quickly. The pain in her back was wearing her thin.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Jacques, wondering why Eve was growing as pale as Nobby was turning aubergine. It looked as if he was absorbing all her colour by a process of osmosis.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ she said, trying to sound okay and not as if she was going to collapse into a heap any minute.

  Nobby picked out another pen from his magic briefcase, putting it down firmly on the table, resisting the urge to chuck it at the big chap who seemed intent on sabotaging his pitch.

  That pen didn’t work either. Nobby grabbed it and started shaking it as if the ink had crawled up the shaft deliberately. Jacques sat there watching him, arms folded across his chest, an amused smile playing on his lips.

  ‘I wonder if you’d care to leave the samples with us and let us discuss them,’ said Eve. If she didn’t get out of this Portakabin and get into a bath to ease this muscle pain she was going to pass out.

  ‘I’ll bring you more samples,’ said Nobby, also keen to get out and return with higher price-point items if that’s what they wanted. He’d kill his assistant when he got back to the office, sending him out with broken goods.

  Eve stood to usher Nobby and his briefcase out, but the next few minutes passed in a blur because all she could think about was the gnawing ache in her body. Nobby was taking an eternity to say goodbye to them and then decided to drag an enormous diary out of his case to pin them down to another meeting. Eve couldn’t even remember what she arranged with him then as he and his sweat-cloud were gone and she slumped into the chair, pulling in some heavy, calming breaths before reaching for her handbag and checking her car keys were in there.

  ‘You look grey,’ said Jacques. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

  ‘Perfectly,’ said Eve, mustering every bit of strength she had. ‘However, I appear to have hurt my back, so I’m going to have to go home to rest it.’

  ‘Do you want me to drive you?’

  Eve had a sudden picture of being in a car with Jacques. A clown car with doors that blew off, and a dashboard where flowers sprang out whilst he took corners at G-force and honked a giant horn.

  ‘I’ll manage,’ she said, putting a brave mask on and walking out to her car. She knew that Jacques was standing in the doorway watching her and so made a monumental effort to walk normally. She wanted to turn around and tell him that it was all right, she wasn’t going to collapse, but the effort would have been too much because half of her really did believe that if she didn’t get home fast enough, she definitely would collapse in a heap.

  Chapter 14

  ‘Shingles,’ declared Dr Gilhooley in his soft Irish brogue. He appeared very impressed as he examined Eve’s right side. ‘And quite a beautiful specimen of it, too.’

  ‘Shingles?’ Wasn’t that something old people got, thought Eve.

  ‘I’m presuming you had chicken pox as a child,’ said the doctor as he wrote out a prescription.

  Oh yes. She’d had chicken pox one Christmas. She’d been in bed feeling lousy whilst the sounds of her mother’s party from the floor below filtered up to her. People kept coming into her room thinking it was the toilet.

  ‘Well, the virus doesn’t leave your body. It stays there waiting for a time to spring back into life again,’ went on Dr Gilhooley with all the drama of a Shakespearean actor.

  ‘I’ve got grown-up chicken pox?’ Eve questioned. Never. She felt as if she had been run over by a steamroller.

  ‘I thought it might be shingles when I saw the rash and heard the symptoms. Jeff once had it in the same place,’ said Susan. Eve hadn’t made it all the way home when she set off from Winterworld. The pain had forced her to curtail her journey and make a pit stop at her aunt’s in the hope she could borrow some more supplies of ibuprofen. Susan had taken one look at her niece and pushed her into Violet’s old room, then she rang for the doctor. Dr Gilhooley seemed almost smitten by the superior rash on her stomach. He appraised it like a Van Gogh masterpiece.

  ‘Stress sometimes brings it on,’ said the doctor, handing over the prescription he had just scribbled to Susan, who was already putting on her coat to go to the pharmacy for it. ‘Give her some ibuprofen to start with. There are some strong painkillers on that prescription. She’ll need them.’

  ‘I remember my Jeff getting it,’ returned Susan. ‘He was absolutely felled by it.’

  Eve was so tired.

  ‘I’ll just have a little nap, Auntie Susan, then I’ll be out of your hair,’ she said. Susan and Doctor Gilhooley both gave a highly amused bark of laughter.

  ‘You’re going nowhere, young lady. For a start, you’re highly infectious and secondly, you will need to rest.’

  ‘She doesn’t know what rest is. That’s why she’s got shingles, most likely,’ said Susan, turning to the doctor. ‘But she sure as hell is going to learn.’

  ‘I can’t rest,’ said Eve, struggling to keep her eyes from shuttering down. ‘I’ve got too much work to do. I’ve got novelties to find, reindeer to cancel . . .’

  ‘Never mind all that,’ said Dr Gilhooley, presuming she was hallucinating. He closed up his old-fashioned Gladstone bag. ‘You can lie back in bed for the next couple of weeks and dream about them instead.’

  ‘Couple of weeks?’ Eve tried to swing her legs out of bed but the pain in her back was just too much.

  ‘Oh, at least,’ said the crusty-voiced doctor. ‘You’ll have to let someone else do the running for a while now.’

  ‘You can make one phone call,’ said Susan, reaching for Eve’s handbag, ‘then I’m confiscating your mobile.’

  ‘I’m allowed one phone call? Have I suddenly been transported to prison?’

  ‘Yes,’ said her aunt sternly. ‘Until you’re better, you are in my prison.’

  Eve weakly hunted in her bag for her mobile but Susan had to help her in the end. As her aunt followed the doctor out, Eve rang Jacques’ number with a feeling of dread as heavy in her stomach as the ache in her back was.

  ‘Ah, Lady Douglas. How are you? Feeling more comfortable I hope,’ came his annoyingly joyous voice.

  ‘Never felt better,’ said Eve, yawning. ‘Apparently I have shingles and am going to have to take a couple of days off.’

  ‘Ooh, nasty,’ he drew a long intake of breath. ‘Well, don’t worry, Winterworld is in safe hands with me.’ />
  About as safe as an orphanage would be in Herod’s.

  ‘I took some papers home to look at and sign last night. I need to get them back to you to countersign,’ said Eve.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. I’ll get hold of them somehow.’

  ‘I’ll give Violet a key to my house. I’ll ask her to get them for you,’ she said, in case he decided to break in.

  ‘Go rest,’ he said. ‘And don’t worry about a thing. I’m in charge.’

  Words which would have instantly made Eve panic, had she the strength to start shaking. She so wanted to sleep, to claim some oblivion from this ache in her back.

  ‘Jacques, please remember the word “winter”. Don’t even attempt to think you can convince me to turn this into a purely Christmas extravaganza.’

  ‘As if,’ said Jacques, sounding about as convincing as a dieter holding a pork pie in each hand.

  Eve clicked off the phone. She would prove Dr Gilhooley wrong. All she needed was a good sleep, then her shoulder would be back at that winter grindstone before her so-called partner ran amok. Work was all the medicine she ever required. She had Nobby to meet with again and then she had to sort out the food kiosks. The last thought on her mind before she lost consciousness was ‘Would it be feasible to sell reindeer burgers?’

  Chapter 15

  Three days later, Eve awoke with as much of a jump as her exhausted body would allow. The candle. It would be nearly out, if it wasn’t already. She tried to sit up, but it wasn’t happening. So she tried rolling over, which was more successful except that she couldn’t stop and ended up on the carpet, where she found herself stuck. She heard Auntie Susan’s footsteps thundering up the staircase.

  ‘Goodness gracious, Eve, what do you think you’re doing?’ said Susan brusquely, but her hands were kind and caring as she hoisted up her niece and deposited her back in bed.