Chapter 4
‘Can I just say,’ Amy’s voice was unimpressed in her ear as Lucy held the phone with one hand, and turned the ignition in the freezing cold car and then the heater up to tropical level with the other, ‘that time you held my hair when I puked all night after Gavin Carsdale’s party and then told my mum you were the one who was drunk? That is the level of favour this is. You can never call that one in again. It will be used up. Finito.’
Lucy closed her eyes briefly.
‘I know, I know. I know I’m putting you on the spot.’
‘You’re more than that, honey. I’ve got an in-house office Christmas party for a law firm tonight, first-time clients; they could throw a ton of business my way. It’s not like your food hasn’t been ready to collect since this afternoon.’
She couldn’t expect Amy to bail her out, this wasn’t fair. She pressed a hand over her eyes and tried to come up with another solution. Any solution.
‘Look, I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s fine. I got myself into this mess. I’ll just nip into Lidl on the way home and pick up a few bits, it won’t take a minute. Forget I even asked.’
There was a shocked pause.
‘Step away from the budget supermarket!’ Amy hollered. ‘I mean, I might be having a bit of a moan about it … a JUSTIFIED moan, but no friend of mine is going to resort to frozen party pack nibbles at £1 a pop. Not while there’s breath in my body.’
At half past six, there was already a thin film of frost clinging to the windscreen of Jack’s van. He hadn’t realised how long he had spent looking through old stuff with Lucy. Perhaps because sitting around a table was really not his idea of a distracting way to spend your time. It hadn’t seemed right to keep looking through Lucy’s family memories without her in the room, so he’d left the pile of World War Two memorabilia exactly as it was on the table, and locked the house up with the spare key Olive had given him.
He passed the skip on his way to the van. Virtually empty except for a pile of old cushions and an ancient broken TV set. Not much had made its way outside the house yet. The quest to find out more about Olive’s war years seemed to have knocked all Lucy’s priorities down the list, and he could completely understand how she felt. Hadn’t he spent weeks himself clearing Sean’s flat after he’d died? The slightest nondescript thing had been almost impossible to throw away. A toothbrush. A half-empty bottle of aftershave. His mobile phone. Disposal of things so fundamentally part of Sean’s day-to-day life: to throw each of them away brought the crushing fact home over and over again that he had been here, and now he was not.
The Christmas lights competitiveness was well under way down his road. It was five minutes’ drive away from Olive’s house, but light years away in terms of living space. His entire house could probably fit in the kitchen and hallway of Olive’s rambling old place, with its generous garden and driveway.
The Robinsons two doors down from him had a holly wreath hung on their front door, and blue fairy lights strung haphazardly around their front window. The Websters, his next-door neighbours on the left, had a Santa Please Stop Here sign stuck in an empty window box, and the Tuckwells on the end of the terrace were really pushing the boundaries with a fairy-light covered reindeer and sleigh hung above their porch. His own house, standing in darkness, was letting the side down. It was a two-up-two-down mid terrace, and it was totally devoid of Christmas, which was exactly the way he liked it.
He let himself into the sparse hallway. Unfortunately, the phone happened to kick into action on the console table just as he walked past it, and, with his mind still preoccupied by all things World War Two, he picked it up without thinking.
‘At last!’
Fuck.
His mother’s voice had a note of triumph at finally cornering him. He’d succeeded in avoiding all family for a good month now, and had been hoping to string that out a bit further by leaving the country next week for Austria, where he planned to let Christmas just drift by unnoticed. He would return somewhere between Christmas Day and New Year, having avoided all nostalgia, which at this time of year had an extra seasonal family-based blow that could smack you between the eyes out of nowhere if you let it.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days.’
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Apart from the fact I haven’t a clue what’s going on in your life and I don’t know whether to set you a place at the table on Christmas day, everything is as fine as it can be. Your Aunt Deborah and Uncle Norman are coming for the day, and then Susan and Frank are coming in the afternoon with the children.’
His cousins, their kids. He closed his eyes briefly at the thought of sitting around a table in paper hats, the festive chatter, the board games, when the one person missing from the room would be more present than anyone else there. At least for him. He understood that his parents found comfort in family life, that this was on some level working for them in dealing with his brother’s sudden death. They had one Christmas under their belt, and last year’s family get-together approach obviously had been bearable. He had, on the other hand, successfully managed to avoid the day last year by heading up to Scotland. They had actually been quite understanding of his request to deal with things in his own way, that first raw Christmas. Since then, the idea of returning to some kind of normality had been pushed on him more and more. The guilt he felt at not turning up was less than he would feel if he did, at least as he was at the moment. As he had been for the last eighteen months. He couldn’t manufacture enjoyment or Christmas cheer. How could he possibly do anything but bring gloom to the day for the rest of them? They were better off without him, even if they didn’t know it.
‘What’s that?’ his mum said, her voice going briefly quieter as she covered the phone and spoke to someone else. Then she was back. ‘Oh, your father’s asking about that contract again, for the stately home refit.’
She followed that comment up with the same exasperated sigh at the prospect of talking shop that he recognised from years of sitting around the dinner table growing up. Accompanying his father to carpentry jobs during the school holidays, he had been keen to talk endlessly to him about the working day and had clearly bored the pants off everyone else. Unmoved by carpentry, Sean had taken after their mother. Intellectual rather than hands-on creative, studious and articulate, he had eventually found his way into a legal career.
‘I’m still waiting to hear on that one,’ Jack said vaguely.
A couple of years ago the prospect of a lucrative nine-month contract on a housing development would have been exactly the kind of work he wanted to add to his growing portfolio. Ironically, now he had been offered it pretty much for the taking by a long-term building industry contact, he felt absolute zero enthusiasm for the project. The thought of being tied in for that length of time filled him with a sense of dread. The focus and responsibility it would require, the commitment to staying put, the inability just to escape whenever he felt like it.
‘I’ve still got plenty of ad hoc stuff on though,’ he continued, ‘and everything slows down over Christmas. I’m taking advantage of it, going to have a few days out of the country. Snowboarding. Back to nature. Perfect conditions.’
He could feel the disappointment down the phone in the enormous, loaded pause that followed.
‘Does that mean you won’t be coming to us for Christmas Day?’ He could tell just from her voice that her mouth was pursed disapprovingly.
‘The trip does cover Christmas week,’ he said, avoiding the blatant I-am-not-coming-for-Christmas statement.
Another pause.
‘We’re all feeling it, you know,’ she said, her voice suddenly clear and loud. ‘It’s one of the hardest times of year, Christmas and birthdays, everyone knows that. We can get through it though. Together. It’s what your brother would have wanted.’
It was what Sean would have wanted if he were here. There had been year after year of family Christmases. The exciting gift-focused on
es of childhood, riding around the block on their first bikes. The down-the-local-pub ones of later years with Sean and his father, balancing the holding out for one last drink with their mother’s patience, heading back home for turkey with all the trimmings. The thing was, Sean wasn’t here. And was it so wrong not to want to reframe Christmas quite yet as something else that no longer included him? Out of everyone in his life, Sean would have got it. The help that could be gained from pushing yourself physically, from the distraction that an edge-of-your-seat challenge could offer.
‘I will absolutely come down and see you soon,’ he said.
The ultimate non-specific fob-off, he supposed. But she took it without further argument or guilt tripping. Perhaps she did get it a little bit after all.
‘Don’t you think you are cutting it a bit fine?’
Amy had delivered half a dozen trays of posh nibbles five minutes before the first guests were due to arrive at the house, in the nick of time, managing not to undermine her company selling point … stunning food that looked as if you could have made it yourself. Tagline: No one need ever know you burn water. Rod, dressed in jeans and a relaxed but smart open-necked shirt, stood to one side of the kitchen. Lucy could feel his disapproving gaze on her.
‘It’s all under control, I just got a bit held up at Gran’s,’ she said, transferring canapés at lightning speed from the foil trays to her own dinner service plates. The oven was on and a couple of trays of hot nibbles were warming through. She’d pulled it off, and all she wanted right now was a very large glass of wine to calm her down.
‘Half an hour before people arrive is more than a bit held up,’ he said. ‘I was expecting the Christmas tree to be up at the very least.’
‘There’s still two weeks to go,’ she pointed out.
‘Half the street has got their decorations up,’ he countered. ‘And this is undeniably a Christmas get-together. This is all so last-minute it makes me concerned about Christmas Day. I mean, wasn’t the whole point of you taking December off work that we can still be totally organised about Christmas commitments even with the extra hassle of dealing with your gran’s house?’
The worst thing was, he had a point. There was an unnerving churning sensation in the pit of her stomach, the kind she felt if she was late for a meeting, which incidentally only ever happened as a result of something out of her control. Lucy Jackson did turning up early, she did to-do lists, and perfect organisation. She really didn’t do dinner parties by the seat of her pants with barely fifteen minutes to spare. She grabbed a bottle of Pinot Grigio from the fridge and poured herself a glass, since Rod was obviously not going to.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I hate being late. I just got distracted by all the stuff I was looking through at the house, but I’m here now, and everything’s sorted.’ She sent up silent thanks for Amy, to whom she now owed a favour the size of a small continent.
‘At least the food is up to scratch,’ Rod conceded, pinching a smoked salmon blini from one of the plates. ‘You really could pass yourself off as Delia Smith with these.’
Lucy wondered randomly if she should be alarmed that Rod’s subconscious linked her to reliable, wont-let-you-down Delia, as opposed to someone more like sex goddess Nigella Lawson. What the bloody hell was she wondering that for? Perhaps the stress of the last hour flying through the traffic and getting changed and made-up in ten minutes flat had actually made her a bit bonkers. She really didn’t cope well without total control of a situation. A strand of hair had fallen out of her hastily put-together updo, and she rammed a hairpin grimly back into it just as the doorbell chimed. She followed Rod down the hallway with a welcome-to-our-perfect-home smile plastered on her face.
Rod really was in his element with his work colleagues. He fitted right in. It took effort, she realised, to fit right in at this level. She brought in a second round of canapés, and watched him work the room from the corner of her eye as she offered them around. He spent just the right amount of time with each group, gauging where his loyalty was best directed. When he topped up glasses, his own was refilled with a non-alcoholic mixer. He was never going to be the kind of workmate who got pissed at the office party and photocopied their arse. Which was probably why he had gone so far at Holfield and Holfield, where the watchword was quietly respectful. He was the perfect employee. Tiredness must be taking its toll on her because right now she could think of nothing more exhausting than channelling perfect supportive partner in this room. She just wanted to bow out, possibly taking the bottle of Pinot Grigio with her.
Instead she poured herself another glass of it, took a deep breath, and headed for the nearest guest, who just happened to be the wife of the senior partner.
‘What a beautiful box. Is that holly carved on there?’
She definitely didn’t look like she’d done her hair in five minutes by virtue of dry shampoo and too many hairpins. Her dark hair was pulled back into a smooth chignon, and her lipstick matched her beautiful silk top in that exact shade of berry red that screamed Christmas. She pointed at the wooden box of tree decorations that Lucy vaguely remembered shoving on the sideboard as she’d flown into the house in the shadow of Rod’s wrath a couple of hours earlier.
‘Lucy’s clearing out her grandmother’s house, Angela,’ he said now, ducking in to refill their drinks. ‘You know what pensioners are like, lace mats everywhere, loft full of clutter. I thought that set was going on eBay, darling,’ he added pointedly to Lucy.
‘I’ve just been enjoying a bit of the history of it,’ she evaded, opening the box and taking out one of the decorations, which just happened to be the ballerina.
‘It’s absolutely gorgeous,’ Angela said, holding it up to the light. ‘Such a shame to get rid of things that are steeped in history.’
‘Within reason,’ Rod said. ‘But we just don’t have the room here to accommodate all this stuff. Excuse us a moment, Angela.’
He drew Lucy to one side by the elbow.
‘How exactly is the clearance going?’ He spoke through his beaming teeth so as not to ruin the impression of perfect host and hostess. ‘You sounded on the phone like you’d worked yourself into the ground to the point where you’d forgotten the time, and then it turns out you haven’t even offloaded those tree decorations when you said you would. Is the clutter under control at that place? Have you emptied the attic? I could still get a man in if you’re struggling. The sooner we can get the estate agent in to value the place the better, we need to be able to hit the ground running in the new year.’
‘It’s coming along,’ she said vaguely, shoving aside thoughts of the virtually empty skip and her monstrous Christmas to-do list with very few ticks on it. The last thing she wanted was some Neanderthal house clearance minion tearing through Gran’s possessions. ‘I’ve just been dabbling in a bit of Gran’s history as I’ve gone along, but the clearance is well under way.’
‘I really need your support with this,’ he carried on, as if she hadn’t even spoken. ‘This promotion isn’t a done deal by any stretch. I need to know you’re behind me, Lucy. We’re a team, right?’
It was one of their mantras. One that she actually liked very much. The idea of her and Rod forging a path through life, sharing goals, planning a future. He had been working towards this promotion for ages. She had been determined to support him in any way she could, had in fact thrown herself into it, had revelled in coming up with a list of life goals with him. What was happening to her?
‘Of course we are.’ She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m really sorry about the rush tonight. I just got distracted. It’s just that Gran is so ill, I’m finding it hard to think of anything else. It’s awful seeing her like that, and it’s been really lovely looking through her old things. I thought if I found out some bits and pieces about her past I could talk to her about them in the hospital and cheer her up. I was just looking through some letters and stuff, and I forgot the time.’
Forgot the present, more like.
He squeezed her hand back.
‘Don’t give it another thought. I know it’s been tough with Olive in hospital. I do realise it hasn’t been easy. No harm done, the food’s terrific, it’s all going swimmingly, and you’re here now, right?’
He put an arm around her, and she looked sideways at his hand on her shoulder with guilt churning in the pit of her stomach. This evening was important to him, and she should be supporting him. Instead, she had been standing in the corner critiquing him. What was wrong with her? She really needed to try to balance priorities here. Gran’s past was one thing, but she had other commitments right now that she really shouldn’t be losing sight of. And if he really was thinking about proposing, she needed to pull off a Christmas Day worthy of the Carmichaels, especially if she was hoping to be one herself in the near future.
‘Right,’ she said.
As Jack approached the house, Lucy appeared from the propped-open side door and tipped a box of old cassette tapes into the skip with a clatter. He checked his watch, certain it had been cockcrow on a Monday morning when he’d left his own house.
‘You’re here early,’ he said.
‘And you’re here on a Monday morning when you’d finished your task list,’ she said.
Days of the week were pretty much inconsequential in the scheme of his life right now.
‘If you want to give me an invoice I’ll make sure it gets sorted,’ she added.
He shook his head.
‘That’s not why I’m here. I just thought I’d finish up, see if there’s anything left to be done.’
‘I’m all over it today. I thought I’d get here early for a head start,’ she said.
He glanced into the skip. No kidding. She’d really made inroads by the look of it. Half the stuff that had been piled in the hall was now in there.
‘What about the wartime stuff? You found anything else this morning?’
She avoided his gaze, and strode back to the house as if she was on a mission. Which she apparently was. He had to make an effort to keep up with her. He followed her into the kitchen, where she picked up another box, did a U-turn, and headed straight back out again. He grabbed the nearest skip item, which happened to be an ancient television with an enormous back from way before flat screen, hefted it onto one arm, and headed after her.
The Present Page 6