A Winter Flame

by Milly Johnson

  Quickly and strangely. Eve wondered what had happened between leaving the grotto and the Carousel to make his mood change so quickly. It was as if a storm-cloud had settled on him.

  Eve recalled the conversation she’d had with Phoebe when the carousel stopped. She had been quite disappointed to get off the ride and find that Jacques had gone.

  ‘I liked him. He has really nice trousers,’ Phoebe had said.

  ‘Nice trousers?’ Eve repeated.

  ‘His jeans,’ said Phoebe, leaning in as if to deliver a secret. ‘He gets them from Meadowhall. But not Topshop.’

  ‘Oh right,’ Eve had replied. What an odd conversation that had been.

  ‘You’re doing accounts on a Saturday night?’ asked Alison, nudging her out of her reverie.

  ‘Well, they need doing and I’ve got nothing else on,’ shrugged Eve, opening her arms to hug her very rounded friend goodnight.

  ‘Oh Eve,’ said Alison to the door when it closed on her friend. You should be going out with a nice man for dinner on Saturday night or going to bed early with him for a cuddle. She shook her head and wished her friend something better waiting around the corner than accounts on a Saturday night.

  Chapter 40

  First thing Monday morning Jacques called in at the ice-cream parlour with a special delivery box of menus, which had been on urgent order. He took one look at Violet’s face and knew she was seconds away from bursting into tears. He also knew that one kind word would tip them over her eyelids, so he chose his next words very carefully.

  ‘Here you go, Violet. Menus. Let’s just hope they haven’t cocked them up yet again. I think it was the only mistake Evelyn made, picking them to do the job.’ He avoided eye contact with her as he lifted the box onto the counter. ‘Do you want me to leave these here or put them in the back room for you?’

  ‘They’re fine there,’ sniffed Violet. ‘Sorry, got a bit of a cold today,’ she smiled sadly as she lied.

  ‘It’s the weather, it just doesn’t know what to do with itself,’ nodded Jacques. Today was as mild and sunny as a spring day. Yesterday had been full of high winds and the sun had refused to come out from behind the woollen grey clouds.

  ‘Pav about?’

  ‘No, I don’t know where he is. Again.’

  Violet’s head tipped forwards and she sobbed twice then waved frantically at her face in a brave attempt to get herself together. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Oh God.’ She quickly grabbed a serviette and blew her nose.

  ‘There’s a lot to do, I hope you’re not overworking yourself,’ he said softly, wanting to close his big arms around her. Wanting to tell her.

  ‘Sorry, he said he’d be back soon,’ said Violet, trying her best to recover.

  ‘Well, if you could ask him to call round to the Portakabin and see me, I’d be grateful.’

  ‘I will.’

  Just as Jacques opened the door, Violet’s voice arrested him.

  ‘Do you know where he is, Jacques? Who he’s with?’

  ‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t,’ was all he could say. Even though he knew where Pav was and the woman he was with, he couldn’t tell her any of it.

  Eve was reading the Daily Trumpet, which Jacques brought in with him every morning; the headline didn’t make for light entertainment. It carried the story of a young female soldier from the area who was going to be buried tomorrow. She came from Ketherwood, a district made up of a rough, sprawling council estate, and joined the army to better her lot, and for her effort had ended up dead at twenty-one. For once, the piece was written without any typos in it, unless they had totally made a mess of the details – there was no way of knowing if the soldier’s name really was Private Sharon Wilkinson from Red Grove. Not unless an apology appeared in the paper in a few days to say she was really Major Davina Pikestaff from Pogley Top and offering apologies to the grieving family. She folded up the newspaper and put it back on Jacques’ desk.

  Jacques plodded in with his eyebrows low, giving him the appearance of someone in deep thought, or not in the best mood – or both.

  ‘Morning,’ said Eve. To her surprise he barely grumbled the word back at her. His movements were very staccato as he threw off another in his big coat collection and grabbed a coffee. He was wearing Armani jeans, she noticed. Not from Topshop. She wondered why on earth Phoebe had thought he would buy his trousers there.

  There was none of his customary whistling this morning as he sat at his desk and glued his eyes to the computer screen. He hadn’t shaved, Eve saw. She noticed that when he was clean-shaven in the morning, by the end of the day stubble had started to grow. By rough calculations, she reckoned he hadn’t shaved all weekend.

  ‘Have you seen Effin this morning?’ she asked, as something to say so she could better gauge his mood. This was a very different Jacques from the one she had been accustomed to. She couldn’t help but be curious as to the change, especially the timing of it, because she suspected it had something to do with Phoebe.

  ‘No,’ he replied, and quite abruptly too. He picked up the newspaper and read the front page.

  ‘Sad, isn’t it?’ said Eve. ‘Hardly a life. Who’d be a soldier?’ That’s a real soldier, by the way. Not a pretend one that prances around in a uniform in front of the mirror, she added to herself.

  Jacques screwed the newspaper up and launched it at the bin.

  ‘She died doing something she loved,’ he said, his mouth a grim line. ‘How many of us can truly say that?’

  ‘For God’s sake. She was only twenty-one years old.’

  Jacques came back at her. ‘She was a soldier. Only a fool would join the armed forces not knowing that dying on the job was a distinct possibility.’

  Oh yes, he’d know all about what real soldiers thought. But she bit her lip because Jonathan had said the same thing to her more than once. He said that he hoped that when he left her he would come back, but he knew there were no guarantees. It took a brave man – or woman – to do a job like that which carried such a risk. And Jonathan Lighthouse was a brave, wonderful man who was prepared to risk his life for his country’s demands. The army was so much more than a job to him: it was his life – and he had been hers.

  Jacques yanked open his filing cabinet and pulled out a large black book. As Eve watched him silently, he opened the book, checked something, then closed it again and replaced it back in the cabinet, slamming the drawer shut again. The sound it made was still reverberating in the air when Jacques stood up with such energy that his chair went rolling right across the room behind him. He exited the Portakabin without saying where he was going, and his big presence left a hole in the atmosphere of the room.

  Eve hadn’t seen that big black book before and wondered what it was. His secret drawing book of uniform designs? She checked through the window that he really had gone, then she quickly snatched the drawer open to take a look. It was labelled ‘Wedding Chapel’. On the first page was a note of the only booking and she felt her cheeks warm up with rage so much that she was sure if she looked in a mirror she would be the colour of Violet Beauregarde. Post-blueberry juice. She didn’t care what mood he was in, he needed to come back to the Portakabin and explain. The man was impossible.

  Eve rang him on his mobile but it went straight through to voicemail. She left a message but was too wound up to sit and wait for Jacques to bother to pick it up and respond to it, so she put on her coat and headed off to find him. None of Effin’s men had seen him, though; neither had any of the elf-men and women who were busy unpacking boxes full of wooden toy parts to be hammered together and painted by children in the workshops, nor the elf-actors painting scenery in the tiny theatre. He wasn’t to be found in his usual haunt – ‘Santapark’ (that sign really did need to be changed before her brain blew all its fuses), or the grotto or the chapel and nor had Tim, the reindeer and horse keeper, seen him. He wasn’t in the snow-globe museum, the shop or the café. She scuttled past the ice-cream parlour but it was obvious he wasn’t in there either
. Eve was boiling with anger by the time she got back to the Portakabin – only to find him sitting there, putting a jug of water through the coffee machine.

  ‘I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ she hollered. ‘And I rang you.’

  ‘Oh, have you?’ was all he said.

  ‘I need a word,’ Eve said, her eyebrows matching his now for crossness. ‘A big word.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I had a look in the wedding-chapel book.’

  Jacques’ eyes narrowed. They were a cold blue today – glacial ice chips. ‘You snooped in my drawer, you mean,’ he levelled at her. ‘Quite a master at it, aren’t you?’

  What that meant Eve had no idea, nor did she have the time or disposition to analyse it.

  ‘I didn’t “snoop”. As far as I was aware, this is our park. Not yours.’

  ‘You said we should run separate projects, if I remember correctly. The chapel falls in my remit.’

  He was deliberately winding her up now, throwing her own words back at her like some clever barrister. She wondered if he had a wardrobe full of silks and wigs as well for when he fancied another alter ego.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she yelled.

  ‘He didn’t want you to know.’

  ‘This,’ she gesticulated wildly around the Portakabin, but meant much further beyond, ‘is my business too. I have a perfect right to know something like that.’

  ‘Yet,’ put in Jacques, ‘he wanted you to know when he was ready to tell you. And asked me if I would be complicit in that.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Eve laughed without humour. She would have to be careful not to let rip about secrets and intrigue. ‘It’s wrong,’ she said. ‘You have to cancel it.’

  Jacques shook his head in thin amusement. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘It’ll be a nightmare, that’s why. No one in their right mind would want that to happen. Least of all . . .’

  Jacques stood up to his full height of six foot four and looked imperiously down at Eve. ‘You haven’t a clue, Miss Douglas. You haven’t a clue what people want or need because you are too out of touch with everything.’

  Eve felt herself bucking inside at his patronizing and blatantly incorrect analysing. ‘How dare you,’ she said. ‘How dare YOU tell me I’M out of touch.’ Ha. A fantasist telling her she didn’t know what real life was. How funny was that?

  She wasn’t prepared for his hands landing on her arms, for being twisted around, for being pushed forward and forced to face herself in the long rectangular mirror which hung on the wall.

  ‘That woman whom you see there is as part of the real world as a nun in closed orders on the moon,’ said Jacques, an alien, bitter tone in his voice. ‘And she will shrink more and more into herself and away from the world with every passing year. Look at her, Eve. When did that woman in front of you last laugh? When did she think to herself that she was truly enjoying life?’

  ‘Will you get off me.’ Eve struggled, but Jacques was a powerfully built man and his hold on her was unbreakable.

  ‘She can’t see people in front of her any more because she has no eyes for the present, only the past. And when she does realize she could have had a future, it will be too late. Haven’t you learnt anything from your Auntie Evelyn, woman? Do you think she wanted you to follow in her footsteps? Don’t you think that watching what was happening to you made her realize all the years she had wasted?’

  ‘I don’t need you to analyse me. I am none of your business. What you are intending to do, however, is,’ said Eve, still trying to wrest herself from his grip.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Jacques. ‘Stay out of it. You can’t stage-manage what other people want when you’re such a mess yourself.’

  He let her arms go and she still felt where his hands had gripped her.

  ‘A mess? A mess? What do you mean I’m a mess?’ She wasn’t a mess. Mess-people didn’t have jobs or money or ambition – or drive brand-new BMWs. How the fuck could she be a mess? She was less of a mess than anyone she knew. She moved time barriers to organize last-minute events, she couldn’t do things like that if she were a mess. ‘At least I . . .’ She stopped herself just in time. He waited for her to finish her sentence, but she remained silent, rubbing at her arms.

  ‘I think your aunt made more mistakes than employing a rubbish printer,’ said Jacques, palming his keys from the desk.

  ‘Didn’t she just,’ Eve called out to his back as he exited with a grim flourish. Ooh, that sounded as if he might be starting to want out. Was she wearing him down? She should have been quite excited about that, so why wasn’t she? Why was she stinging from his words and hating him for knowing her more than she knew herself?

  Chapter 41

  Eve held a carrot whilst Holly nibbled delicately on it. She was a funny thing: small and gentle with beautiful, trusting eyes and almost ladylike in the way she ate. Blizzard and the newly named Noel were a little more confident now and didn’t cling on to their mother’s shadow as much. Noel was sipping from the trough; Blizzard was lying down asleep, his head turned towards his feet, looking like a ghost version of Bambi.

  For two days now a tennis match had been playing in Eve’s head. The ball that was being batted to and fro had ‘Do I tell her?’ written all over it. It fell in the ‘Yes’ court, then bounced into the ‘No’ – back and forth. It had given her a headache the previous day and she’d had to go to bed early after taking some tablets.

  ‘Oh Holly, I wish you could talk,’ said Eve, getting an apple out of her coat pocket. But reindeer didn’t talk, and neither did candle flames, as she found out often when she asked Jonathan to send her some help, some sign when she needed direction on which path to take. The candle flame just flickered in the air disturbed by her breath, and Holly kept chewing. Flames and reindeer did not give advice: this one was down to her. She regretted that she had ever seen that damned black book.

  ‘I’m dreading this afternoon, I don’t mind telling you,’ said Eve, after checking behind her to make sure no one was around to overhear her having a one-sided conversation with an animal. ‘My granny is a bit difficult, to say the least. I don’t want to go.’

  Violet’s Nan Flockton used to say Pat Ferrell had the eyes of a dead halibut. Nan Flockton, now that was the sort of granny to have: a fun, sharp woman, with a hug always ready in her arms. Neither Violet nor Eve had ever had a hug or a kiss from Pat. Eve felt very disloyal even thinking it, but she didn’t love her granny. She didn’t like her either, but today she was seventy-five and duty beckoned. At least she would be going with Susan and Violet, so she wouldn’t have to suffer the ordeal of sitting in that cold house with an even colder woman. Susan had suggested taking her mother out for something to eat, but Granny Ferrell didn’t want to, as her fancy man was taking her out for an expensive posh dinner and she wanted to be very hungry for that.

  Eve stroked Holly’s nose as she ate the last of the carrot. ‘Ah well, best go. See you later, Miss Holly.’ Checking again that no one was around, Eve leaned forward and kissed her quickly on the thick fur of her head.

  In truth, she would be glad of some company that afternoon – human company. She hadn’t seen Jacques since their bust-up in the office. His car hadn’t been there yesterday at all so he obviously wasn’t in. Such a loud, noisy man left a huge, silence-filled crater when he was absent. Eve found, though she liked to work in silence, that over the past two days the silence had been too silent. She had to get a fix of voices by making an excuse to go over to Santapark just to listen to Effin’s four-letter tirades – or rather fourteen-letter tirades – at his builders.

  ‘Bastads. Newch chi ladd fi yn y pen draw. Dw i ugain mlynedd yn hŷn ers cychwyn y blydi job ’ma.’

  She overheard Arfon translating for Mik.

  ‘Bastards. You’ll kill me in the end. I’m twenty years older since starting this bloody job,’ Arfon chuckled. ‘Oh, don’t worry, that’s nearly a compliment coming from him. You should hear him
when he really starts.’

  She smiled to herself as she recalled that incident, then her mobile rang and she lifted it to her ear. It was her Auntie Susan.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ said Eve, slightly stretching the truth. ‘See you in a jiffy.’ With perfect timing, the train chugged slowly towards her. ‘Is it mended?’ Eve called. ‘Any chance of a lift to the front gate?’

  ‘Totally,’ called Thomas.

  Eve’s hair was almost all blown out of her French plait when the train stopped. It was going more berserk with every journey.

  ‘I car-not understand it,’ said Thomas. ‘It was fine ten minutes ago. Oh, Effin is going to go bloody men-tal. Again.’

  Susan and Violet were waiting outside the front door when Eve’s BMW drew up. Violet was standing on the doorstep shivering, despite having her coat, gloves, scarf and hat on, as if the very core of her was frozen. She looked even paler than usual against the black of her clothes.

  ‘Oh, it’s lovely and warm in here,’ said Susan, climbing into the front seat whilst struggling with a bouquet of flowers. Violet didn’t say anything as she got in and closed the back door, carrying a bag of bottles which clanked together.

  ‘We’ve got her some champagne and some brandy,’ said Susan. ‘She’s into champagne cocktails now, ever since she went on that cruise with what’s-his-face.’

  Pat Ferrell had met a lonely widower with more brass than sense on a coach trip. He had taken her on a cruise to the Fjords recently and apparently they were spending Christmas in the Bahamas on the Mermaidia. He was just one in a very long line of men that Pat Ferrell had – and would – hone in on, chew up and spit out when the novelty wore thin. She would never have discovered her true potential for femme-fatalism if Grandad Ferrell hadn’t run off with Nicole from the Miners Arms just after Ruth had been born (a relationship which lasted less than six months, and one of Pat’s most treasured memories was telling him to piss off when he came crawling back.) Pat Ferrell made her younger daughter look like Mother Teresa. She should have been living in a web, not in a semidetached bungalow.