‘So, can you help me out or what? No pressure.’
Amy grinned.
‘With the corner cutting? Hell yeah, I’ll throw something together. That doesn’t exactly help with the rest of the stuff on that list though, does it? When exactly are you supposed to fit having a good time into this? Christmas is meant to be about having fun, not driving yourself into the ground. Rod needs to lighten up a bit, honey. I mean, is it any surprise you’ve ended up looking to hot gardeners and old tat for diversion?’
‘I am not looking at the hot gardener,’ she said, exasperated. ‘I am perfectly happy with Rod. I’m not some downtrodden girlfriend, you know. In actual fact, he’s been dropping hints about making it official. I actually like the life I have, the prospects, the plans. Just because you’re happy to cruise rudderless through life doesn’t mean we all have to.’
Unfortunately her phone pinged into life on the table between them at the moment, and Rod’s text asking if she’d remembered the dry-cleaning was perfectly readable upside down.
Amy patted her hand, grinning.
‘I’ll take rudderless, honey,’ she said, nodding at the phone sympathetically.
Gravel crunched under Lucy’s feet as she stood in Gran’s driveway in the mid-afternoon gloom and watched a truck manoeuvre its way back to deposit an empty skip as close to the house as it could get. Even bundled up in her parka with the hood up, the cold bit sharply against her cheeks and nose. The sky was white, with the heavy stillness that sometimes comes in the winter, as if it was full of snow waiting to fall. After a run of wet, rainy Christmases, the TV forecasters were falling over themselves with excitement at the prospect of the first white Christmas in years. She turned at the sound of the side door slamming shut, and watched Jack trudge across the gravel in a shirt and jeans. He didn’t so much as shiver as he came to stand next to her.
‘Do you not feel the cold?’ she said, stamping her feet to try to stop her toes going numb.
‘You forget, I’m superhuman,’ he said. ‘And I finished the ceiling. So if you need to get the estate agent in there’s no danger of them disappearing through the floor when they measure up the attic.’
‘Very funny.’
He looked at her watching the truck driver disconnect the chains from the skip. There was something that felt very wrong about putting an attic full of history into one of those things without a moment’s thought.
‘You’re going ahead then, are you?’ he said. ‘With the clearance?’
She wrapped her arms tightly across her body and held her elbows with her gloved hands.
‘I’m thinking more along the lines of bunging a few things in the skip as I go along with my investigation. I can multitask a perfect family Christmas at home, and do a bit of nosing around on the side.’
‘Investigation?’
‘Into the Christmas decorations we found. I showed them to Gran, and honestly, Jack, you should have seen her. She’s been so weak and frail, it’s all I’ve been able to do to get her to say hello, or say my name. She was so animated when she saw them.’
She was looking up at him now, full of excitement, her eyes shining, her nose and cheeks pink from the cold, He found it hard to look away from her face.
‘Did you ask her about them?’
‘She can’t really talk much at all yet. She did give me a place name, I looked it up. It was a hostel for Land Girls during the war.’
‘The bossing about in the garden definitely makes a lot more sense now I know she was a Land Girl,’ Jack said, nodding at the lorry driver as he approached. ‘She once tried to tell me a better way to mend a fence. I was like, who’s the carpenter in this scenario?’
Lucy smiled sideways at him, and he waited while she signed off the skip paperwork, then walked with her back to the house.
‘Also, whoever sent the decorations, it definitely wasn’t Grandad,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine if I could find out some more about them and be able to tell her about it? It might really help her recovery pick up. What if the person who sent them is still alive? I could track him down.’
‘You’re thinking you could track down and reunite your gran and her wartime friend in three weeks flat, like something off Long Lost Family, while you simultaneously get this house straight, and do all your Christmas stuff?’ he said. ‘You don’t actually think this might actually be a bit of a massive ask?’
‘I can channel Davina McCall if I want to,’ she protested. ‘I do investigate for a living.’ She paused. ‘Well, at least I ask people questions a lot, and attend lots of community events and stuff. It’s not exactly Fleet Street. But I know how to track a story down. And I’m not looking that far ahead, to be honest, I just want to try to find out a bit more, that’s all.’ She closed the side door behind them with a grateful sigh. ‘Wow, standing outside for twenty minutes makes the crappy heating in here seem tropical.’
She pushed the hood down on her parka and unzipped it. Her hair was messed up underneath, and she ran a hand through it, which actually made it worse.
‘I know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘It just seemed really important to Gran, and whatever I might tell myself, I do know she isn’t going to be around for ever. I feel like I’ve been given a chance to get to know her in a whole new way. I’m not going to pass that up because my back’s against the wall over a few Christmas plans.’
‘Want some help?’
Even as he said the words, he couldn’t quite believe that he was making the offer. What was he thinking? It was the chance thing, of course. The thought of having a chance to find a piece of someone to treasure that you could keep, even after they were gone.
‘I thought you were only around for a day or two? Don’t you have to be sledging down a mountain or something?’ she said.
‘Not for a few more days yet. I’ve got a bit of time on my hands.’
It was true. He did. He couldn’t fathom why heaving tat into a skip held any appeal for him, except that she had looked so grimly determined, standing outside in the freezing cold with her lips almost blue, to run herself into the ground by Christmas all in the interests of hanging on to the past. He could relate to the need to do that better than anyone else.
‘You must have something better to do if you’ve got some time free. I mean, it is Christmas.’
His parents flashed into his mind, the guilt-trip family Christmas visit that he had been telling himself, along with them, he simply couldn’t fit in.
‘I really don’t,’ he said. ‘I can bring stuff down from the attic for you. It will take you for ever on your own, and you’re basically an accident waiting to happen when you’re left to your own devices. I don’t want that on my conscience, and I’m pretty sure Olive would want you to make it out of the house sale alive. Take it or leave it.’
She smiled up at him.
‘Go on, then. I should probably tell you to go and crack on with your Christmas, but I need all the help I can get.’
In the space of a day, the kitchen and hallway ended up looking like the attic. She had succeeded in executing the opposite of house clearance. But there was the odd discovery that was really worth waiting for during the endless trawl through inconsequential receipts and old cracked ornaments, and the buzz of finding even the tiniest thing was becoming a bit addictive.
This latest box was full of treasures. Lucy picked up a lace-edged handkerchief and held it up. The faintest whisper of perfume still clung to it.
‘Gran still wears this perfume,’ she said, holding it to her cheek. How soft it was.
Jack put a mug of coffee down on the table in front of her.
‘You’re very close to her, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘I mean, there’s plenty of people who just put their ailing relatives in a home. You know, outsource the care and get on with their own lives.’
She put the handkerchief aside, leaned into the box, and rummaged some more.
‘She’s always been there for me,’ she said. ‘My grandad too. My m
other wasn’t the stay-at-home type.’
‘You said.’ He pulled a stack of bound photograph albums from another box and added them to the table top next to her. ‘These could be good.’
She felt as if she was really on a roll here.
‘Brilliant, I’ll look at them next.’
‘What about your father, then?’ he said.
‘What father?’
She laughed. The response the thought of him elicited after all this time was just that – a laugh. She sat back in her chair for a moment and picked up her coffee, smiling at Jack’s bemused face. He obviously had lovely normal, reliable parents. Growing up, she had thought everyone did except for her.
‘Sorry. It’s really no biggie. I was a holiday romance baby. Tenerife in the eighties. Neither of them went into it expecting to come out of it with something as permanent as a kid. They weren’t expecting anything more than a piña colada and a one-night stand.’
He raised an eyebrow.
‘Riiiight.’
‘He bailed after about six months. My mother’s been trying to do the same thing for the past thirty years.’
She could feel his eyes on her as she sipped her coffee. He thought it bothered her. He thought this was awkward. That’s what came of having well-adjusted parents. Whereas she was a long way past giving a toss except insomuch as her mother’s behaviour affected Gran.
‘To be fair, she was very young and she was really just acting up. But she still managed to get pregnant on a ladettes’ holiday. Steady was an alien concept.’ She thought of her mother, still dressing as if she was in her twenties, still life and soul of the party. ‘Even now, to be perfectly honest. She gave up going out for a while, then she progressed to taking me to parties in a carry-cot, then, when I got bigger, she called on anyone and everyone to babysit. Eventually Gran and Grandad stepped in. I moved in with them, and everything got better overnight.
‘Do you stay in touch?’
She flipped through a stack of official-looking letters with a stab of exasperation. Only a hoarder of serious commitment would surely keep gas bills from 1996. She relegated them to the box that had become the holding place for the skip and which prevented constant trudging in and out to the cold driveway.
‘With my father?’ She pulled more papers from the box and spread them on the table in front of her. ‘I get the odd postcard. I had one a year or so ago with a donkey on the front wearing a sombrero. I think he still thinks of me as a little kid, it’s been that long since he actually saw me. He’s living in Spain, has been for years. Running a bar now in Benidorm. Never married. For him, life is one endless holiday romance I guess.’
‘That really sucks,’ Jack said.
‘Does it?’
She stopped for a moment and considered.
‘I never really thought about it that much, to be fair. It wasn’t like I had a father and lost him. I mean, at least he realised he didn’t have it in him to step up to the plate early on and ducked out instead of messing with my head for thirty years. I had Grandad.’
Jack nodded.
‘I never met Arthur. He died before I started working here. Olive always talked about him a lot though.’
She reached across the table for a pile of photographs, and flicked through them until she found one of her grandfather.
‘This is him,’ she said. She skirted the table to show Jack, leaning in to look at it herself as she held it out for him to see. Grandad somewhere in the late eighties, in a room with garish wallpaper, standing straight-backed as he always did, and holding her beaming toddler self in the crook of one arm. The picture had the orange fuzzy quality of an old Polaroid. Grandad wore a patterned jumper, and had his trademark long moustache. Nostalgia caught a little in her throat. Ten years he’d been gone. Had it really been that long?
‘It’s a great picture,’ Jack said. She was suddenly aware that she was in his personal space, leaning over him, picking up the scent of his aftershave. It was something woody and masculine, perfectly suited to him. She stood up quickly and went back to her seat to grab her coffee.
‘He was quite a bit older than Gran. Old school, really. Regimented. He did like his rules. It drove my mother nuts. She still talks about it now, how she had to stick to this ridiculous curfew, and how he never let up on nagging her about school work: she was never allowed a boyfriend, blah, blah. I never minded any of that, I liked feeling looked after.’ It had been exactly the steadying environment needed to counteract the here-one-minute-gone-the-next antics of her mother, while she’d struggled her way through her school years. ‘Why would I need a perpetual holidaymaker when I had everything I needed right here?’
He held up the top one of a stack of plates in a colour that might once have been a cheerful red, but was now faded to a kind of corned beef puce.
‘Keep or chuck?’ he said.
She pulled a face.
‘Chuck. Do you really need to ask? Don’t really fancy eating off something the colour of cat puke.’
He put them into the skip box while she pawed through a new pile of letters in sudden fascination.
‘Jack?’
He looked up.
‘Yup? Change your mind about the cat puke plates? Cos I can fish them right back out and make you a sandwich on one of them.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Never mind about the bloody plates. There’s letters here.’ She scanned the top one quickly, excitement bubbling up in her stomach, moved on to the next. ‘They’re letters home from Gran. From the farm.’ She stared down at the letters. It really had been worth trawling through all the clutter after all. ‘She must have written to her family while she was there. There’s the hostel address for the Land Girl posting. It’s all gossip about what she was doing. Here, have a look.’
She halved the pile and pushed some of the papers across the table at him. He didn’t pick them up.
‘You sure you’re okay with me doing that?’ He looked down at them doubtfully. ‘I mean, these are your gran’s private letters, right?’
She frowned. It hadn’t occurred to her to look at it that way, she was just happy to have someone else she could share this with and bounce ideas off. And there was no denying the extra pair of hands made a huge difference, since she was stealing time from all over the place to go through everything.
‘I’ve got to treat this like I would if it was my job. If I’m going to follow it up enough to be able to cheer Gran up with it, then I’m really strapped for time. You don’t need to read every word, just maybe scan through them. If you’re okay with it, I just need to look for the next clue, maybe a name. Anyone she was there with, anyone I could try to track down now and talk to.’
‘Okay,’ he said, unfolding the top letter. ‘If you’re sure, I’ll get looking. This is the kind of thing you do day-to-day?’
She shrugged, her eyes fixed on scanning through a letter.
‘Sometimes, when I’m lucky. It’s my favourite part of the job. I’m not exactly Middle East correspondent for the broadsheets, you know. I cover local news, and some of it can be really dull stuff, local shows, fetes, that kind of thing. But then there can be the odd story with a real human interest. I love looking into things, finding out about exciting things people are doing, or places they’ve been. Like getting a glimpse into someone else’s life, good or bad, it’s always interesting.’
Her mobile phone suddenly buzzed into life in her back pocket, and she dragged her eyes away with enormous effort from the faded, thin paper in her hand.
‘Hmmmm?’ she said, absentmindedly, as she held it to her ear, reading. How perfect Gran’s slanted handwriting was.
‘It’s gone six o’clock,’ Rod said. His voice had a terse quality to it that she usually only heard when things at work weren’t going his way.
‘Gosh, is it?’ She checked her watch, frowning. ‘I’ve been mad busy with the attic clearance; I must have lost track.
‘Lucy, I’ve got half the office management
team showing up in an hour and a half, and there’s not so much as a vol-au-vent in the kitchen that I can see.’
Oh fuck!
How had she managed to forget? Disbelief rose in her stomach and made it churn unpleasantly. Partly panic that she was on the brink of pulling the social rug out from beneath her boyfriend’s feet, but more shock that she, reliable and organised Lucy, could possibly have forgotten something so important as his impress-the-boss drinks and nibbles. Realisation of the extent of the logistic mess she was in kicked in as if she’d had a bucket of cold water thrown over her. There was no way she could make it across town now to pick up the food from Amy, then get back to the house in time to change and be ready to greet the guests.
‘No need to worry,’ she said brightly into the phone, while simultaneously racking her brains for a solution that didn’t require time travel. ‘I’ll be home really soon, everything’s under control. I’ve organised finger food for twenty people, and my dress is hung up ready to be changed into. People won’t arrive for at least an hour yet. Have a drink, and I’ll see you in a bit.’
She was on her feet before she had even ended the call. The letters were left in a haphazard pile on the table. Jack leaned back in his chair on the opposite side of the table, watching her.
‘Did you just …?’
‘What?’ she said, shrugging into her jacket and scrolling madly through her phone for Amy’s number. If she could just get Amy to drop the food off to the house instead of having to pick it up herself, she might be able to buy enough time to fix this mess.
‘Promise someone you could deliver a drinks-and-nibbles event in an hour’s time?’
He was looking her up and down in her messy jeans and T-shirt combo, with a pencil stuck haphazardly through her ponytail.
‘I totally can,’ she said. Perhaps if she said it with enough conviction she really might be able to pull it off.
‘Really? Are you superhuman too?’ he said.
She pulled a sarcastic you’re-not-helping face as she bolted from the room.
‘Imagine what our kids would be like!’ he called after her.
The Present Page 5