The Present

by Charlotte Phillips

  ‘And did you know who sent them?’ Lucy couldn’t stop herself from asking. ‘A name, or just anything about them that you can remember? The notes wrapped up with them are anonymous except for the letter J, and I haven’t found any reference to a name in any of Gran’s letters.’

  Was that so unexpected though, she wondered now. If Grandad had been the ‘chap back at home’, Gran was hardly about to tell anyone in her letters about receiving gifts from another man, was she?

  Elizabeth frowned, thinking hard, eventually sighed.

  ‘I can’t remember his name. It might have been something like John or James, but I just can’t remember. I’m sorry, dear.’

  ‘It’s fine …’

  Lucy crushed her disappointment.

  ‘… but I’m sure he was from the airbase. I think he was a pilot, perhaps. Once, Olive got back late after a dance, and one of the girls sneaked downstairs to let her in because she would have been in real trouble with the warden. We had a curfew, you see. I’m sure he’d walked her back. There was a cemetery down the lane from the hostel, and none of us liked walking past that alone. Yes, definitely. One of the boys from the airbase.’

  The airbase. Something to go on. Perhaps if she looked back through Gran’s things with a focus on that, she might find something. Her disappointment must have shown on her face, because Elizabeth reached across and covered her hand with her own.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help more. I can see I haven’t got all the answers you were hoping for. I wish I could remember more. It’s been such a long time.’

  Lucy smiled at her.

  ‘You’ve been a massive help. Really you have. It’s been so great just hear to what it was like. I can’t wait to talk about it all with Gran. I can go back home and look into the airbase now, perhaps see if I can track some names down. I need to go to the National Archives and dig up some military records. Thank you so much.’ She looked down at Elizabeth’s hand, still holding hers. ‘I’ll come and visit you again, and I’ll bring Gran with me when she’s better.’

  Elizabeth smiled back at her.

  ‘I’d like that very much.’

  Lucy attempted to catch Jack’s eye across the room.

  ‘I hope you have a lovely Christmas,’ she said. She closed the box of decorations, standing beside them on the table. ‘It’s such a shame there’s one missing,’ she said, tapping the lid. ‘The one for the fifth day of Christmas. Five gold rings.’ I’ve trawled Gran’s attic looking for it, but it hasn’t turned up yet.’

  ‘Oh no, there always was one missing,’ Elizabeth said.

  Lucy stared at her.

  ‘What do you mean, always?’

  ‘On day five nothing arrived. Of course, by that point we were falling over ourselves every time we got back to the hostel to see if something new had turned up. Day five came and went, and we thought that was an end to the presents. And then the next day they started up again.’

  ‘Do you think it was some kind of mistake?’

  Elizabeth shrugged.

  ‘I have no idea. It’s a mystery, isn’t it? Merry Christmas, Lucy.’

  ‘Merry Christmas, Elizabeth.’

  Seeing that Jack was just about to waltz past her, she held out an arm to make another grab for his attention. Seamlessly, without missing a single beat of the music, he offloaded the arm of a tea-dress-clad, hip-swinging pensioner to another resident, leaned down, and swept Lucy up by the waist. One moment she was sitting on the edge of a chair, the next she was in his arms.

  The music was jaunty, a forties dance, filled with brass instruments and foot-tapping rhythm. It melted away into background noise in Lucy’s sudden awareness of Jack. Of how it felt to be held by him.

  She was acutely aware of his hand pressed into the small of her back. His other hand felt huge, closed over hers. Her mind followed her own fingers, how they knitted perfectly into his. She could feel the long muscles in his thighs as he moved against her, she could feel the way his shoulders moved beneath her fingers. He was taller than she was, and she had to tilt her face up to make eye contact with him. His expression was serious as he met her eyes, not joking, as if this were not some show-off, game-for-a-laugh situation, as if they were not acting the fool in a room full of old people, but as if this universe, in this moment in time, was only for the two of them. He pulled her in tighter.

  Her body totally missed any larking-about point, and insisted on zeroing in on how it felt to be held by him. Her heart was going crazy. Her mind whirled with thoughts of the past and the reality of right now, pulled in hard against him, on her toes in her Converse so she could keep up with him, his hand closed over her fingers, his heart pressed up against hers. This was exactly the kind of music Gran would have danced to all those years ago. Was this how it had felt for Gran, being held close and looking up into the eyes of someone who made her feel as if anything could be possible?

  He looked down into her eyes. The scent of the aftershave on his warm skin made her insides melt.

  The song came to an end, and there was a pause on the tape before the next one. In the sudden quiet he made no move to let go of her. She looked up at him, her heart pounding, groping for something to say.

  ‘You okay?’ she managed, her brain failing to come up with anything more engaging. What on earth was happening to her? She should not be feeling this way. Jack was a friend, doing her a favour, there was nothing more to it than that. Gran’s romantic history was obviously playing on her mind.

  It was as if time started back up. He blinked a little, and gently released her hand. She looked down at her fingers.

  ‘Well, when I got up this morning I didn’t expect the day to include waltzing around a care home lounge holding a pensioner,’ he said. ‘Life is full of surprises. Did you find what you wanted?’

  He took a step away from her. Reality slipped back in. They were friends, and he was helping her out. She smiled at him. A friendly smile.

  ‘A pilot. I think maybe he was a pilot at an airbase near to where she was working the land.’

  Oh, the bloody gorgeous romance of it just took her breath away. Her mind gnawed at how she could find out more. Perhaps she could get hold of a list of airbase personnel from somewhere.

  In her peripheral vision she could see the female residents circling them like sharks, waiting for Jack’s hand.

  ‘We really should go before there’s a stampede,’ she said, trying to channel normal, while her body was one step behind. Her pulse rate refused to die down.

  The drop in temperature took her breath away as she heaved open the front door of the tropically heated nursing home and stepped out onto the icy cold porch. She blinked a little.

  ‘It’s dark and snowing,’ she said, stating the obvious. ‘What time is it?’

  Snowing was a bit of an understatement. Huge soft flakes filled the glow from the car-park lights and settled in Jack’s hair. There was already a layer of snow coating the tarmac, and the sky was full of it. The wind was picking up, whipping her own hair around.

  He glanced at his watch.

  ‘Er, a bit past five.’

  She dug her phone out of her bag and saw the flurry of texts from Rod from the past four hours. They started out with the supportively interested ‘How’s it going?’ and gradually progressed to the most recent ‘ETA????’ Unfortunately, her attempt at a soothing, truth-fudging reply, ‘On way back, see you soon’ refused to send. She had not even a single bar of signal, and no Internet, possibly because she was in the middle of bloody nowhere, but more likely because this morning’s weather forecast had been seriously on point. She’d taken the gamble on it and, by the look of it, had lost.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me what time it was?’ she said irritably. She’d planned to be back on the road by four at the absolute latest.

  ‘I wasn’t in any rush,’ he said.

  ‘You cannot possibly drive back in this.’

  Lucy turned to see Elizabeth behind them, looking out through
the open door with a worried expression on her face. The tea dance had finished, and some of the residents were wandering back into the previously deserted lobby.

  ‘We have to,’ Lucy said.

  ‘No one has to go out in this. You could stay here. I’m sure some kind of arrangement could be made. Norman, they’re going out in this,’ she called to a man in a bottle-green hand-knitted cardigan who happened to be passing.

  ‘Bloody mad,’ he declared, coming over and peering out of the door.

  Lucy imagined Rod’s wrath if she were to call to say she was sleeping over at a care home of all insane places, instead of making it back for the ball.

  ‘It’s absolutely fine,’ she said, pasting on a reassuring, bright smile. ‘Jack’s got a 4x4. I’ve got a really important social thing this evening. Non-negotiable.’

  ‘She’ll be fine with me, Elizabeth,’ Jack said. ‘Don’t worry.’

  Elizabeth patted him on the arm.

  ‘At least take some food with you in case you get stuck. Don’t you leave until I get back.’ She headed back down towards the day room.

  ‘We wouldn’t dare,’ Jack said, smiling.

  Lucy stared at him.

  ‘Yes we would,’ she hissed. ‘Every second counts. Let’s get the car revved up.’

  After what felt like hours, Elizabeth reappeared with one of the kitchen staff and a large bag.

  ‘Coffee for you,’ she pointed at Jack. ‘Mulled wine for you, Lucy. Mince pies, some other bits and pieces. If you’re not going to stay the night, then the least you can do is take some food with you.’

  Lucy opened the bag. The mince pies gave off a delicious aroma of Christmas spices, and her stomach rumbled in response. Lunch had been a hastily grabbed fast-food affair on the motorway hours earlier. Perhaps the extra time spent waiting was worthwhile after all.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ Lucy said, giving her a hug.

  The snow already crunched under her feet as she crossed the car park. She held up her phone. No signal whatsoever. Oh, just bloody typical. She pressed buttons madly. Despite the dark it was still not that late, right? If they could make the motorway by six it was surely not outside the realms of possibility that she might still make it to the ball. Perhaps if she did her make-up in the car, threw on her frock the second she walked through the door, and got Jack to drive the entire way above the speed limit. He seemed the type to rise to that kind of reckless challenge.

  ‘How fast do you think we can get back to Canterbury if you really put your foot down?’ she said.

  Chapter 7

  ‘What time did you need to be back again?’ Jack asked in exasperation, after she checked her phone screen for what felt like the hundredth time.

  The beam of the headlights was filled with whirling snowflakes that were hurled back into the windscreen at a rate that the wipers just couldn’t keep up with. The road was thick with snow. He kept to a low gear. They’d managed to make it out of the village and along the first few B roads of the route back. At first he’d thought it would be okay, that if they could make it back to the motorway, the roads would be passable, but that had been before the snow had upped its game to blizzard proportions. In the absence of street lights on these country roads, he didn’t dare go above twenty or so miles an hour for fear of ending up in a ditch on a bend, or worse, wrapped around a tree.

  ‘The ball is seven thirty for eight, but what the hell, right? You’ve got a 4x4.’

  She spoke as if another term for 4x4 was magic wand.

  ‘So you keep saying. It’s not a bloody snowplough. You need to face facts. It. Is. Snowing. I can’t just put my foot down on these roads for the sake of a ridiculous ball, it would be suicide. Trust me, you would not thank me for it.’

  ‘It is not ridiculous. Rod’s whole career is hanging on making a good impression. He will be going absolutely postal waiting for me, and I need to at the very LEAST let him know I’m not going to make it. I just need two minutes with a phone signal, that’s all.’

  Like what was he doing even having this insane argument?

  ‘He will not expect you to risk your life attempting to find a phone signal. He’ll see the news. He’ll realise you’re stuck in the weather, and he’ll understand that you can’t just snap your fingers and turn up at his pain-in-the-arse Christmas ball like bloody Cinderella.’

  ‘It’s the English countryside, not bloody Siberia,’ she snapped back. ‘Honestly, this whole COUNTRY goes to pot at the tiniest wisp of snow.’ She threw open the car door and a blizzard of epic proportions slammed it wide and swept a mess of freezing snowflakes into the car. To his utter disbelief, instead of closing it again immediately, she actually scrambled out. It took him a moment of amazement to process that she could possibly have done something so stupid, and by the time he’d forced his way out of the car to follow her, she was striding down the road holding her phone aloft. He abandoned the car with the engine running and the headlights on.

  He caught up with her halfway down the road, where she had stopped to hold her phone above her head and jump up and down like a lunatic.

  ‘Will you give this up and get back to the car,’ he shouted. The wind whipped his voice away the instant it was out of his mouth, so he held her closer and yelled in her ear. ‘Of course you haven’t got a bloody signal in this. Snow is not a toy. You can actually DIE in rural Hertfordshire if you don’t have the right gear, and you are pissing about in jeans and Converse.’

  ‘That is where you are wrong!’ she shouted in triumph, scrutinising the screen through driving snow. ‘I’ve got one baaaaaaaaar …’

  The final word elongated into a strangled yell as she lost her footing and disappeared from view.

  He lunged forward, craning in the faint light from the car headlights way back down the road. She was sprawled on her back in a snow-filled ditch, still with the phone held up to her face.

  Oh, for Pete’s bloody sake.

  He climbed down next to her and manhandled her back to her feet and up to the road. Her teeth were chattering and her clothes were caked in snow. He took his own heavy jacket off, wrapped it around her, and walked her back towards the car holding her against him in case she decided to bolt again. She huddled in tightly, as if she had suddenly begun feeling the cold.

  Despite the roar of the wind and the freezing snow whipping around them, he couldn’t help thinking how it felt to have her encircled in his arms. How easily his arm fitted around her. The curve of her shoulder, the slenderness of her waist. He pushed her back into the passenger seat of the car, slammed the door shut, and got back in on the driver’s side. The snowflakes that had settled in her windswept hair melted into droplets of water. Her face was almost translucent from the cold, except for a flush of pale bluish pink on her cheekbones and the tip of her nose. She was looking down at her phone with a forlorn expression, and he felt a burst of exasperation.

  ‘The world is not going to end because you can’t make it back to some ball!’

  She looked up from the screen.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, with chattering teeth. ‘Change of plan. So I can’t get a signal and let Rod know where I am, but if I can get there and just turn up late it will be something, right?’

  He stared.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said patiently. ‘We are in the middle of an epic snowstorm. The roads are impassable, and if you could see the TV right now they’d be doing that thing where they tell you not to travel unless you absolutely have to. Driving in this would be madness. You need to face facts. You couldn’t get back to central London in time for this thing now if you had a private jet.’ He took a deep breath. ‘We are going to have to sleep in the car.’

  Time was impossible to pin down in darkness this complete.

  Jack had moved the car down the road before it reached a point where it would need digging out, but even parked up in a more sheltered spot in a layby at the side of the road, the wind was still strong enough to make it rock and shake. The storm carried on and on outsid
e. Every hour or so, Jack ran the engine for a while and the air would warm up, then he would turn it off, and there was a slow descent in temperature from toasty, through to a bit chilly, down to put-the-blanket-over-your-head, face-numbing cold. The situation felt a bit less desperate after she’d drunk a couple of mugs from the flask of mulled wine. Jack stuck to black coffee. She opened the tin of mince pies, and the aroma of allspice and baking and oranges filled the car.

  ‘Smell that?’ she said, handing him one. ‘That is Christmas in pie form. The smell, the taste. I defy you not to like it.’

  He rolled his eyes.

  ‘It’s a mince pie. I can actually eat a mince pie on its own merit without buying into the whole seasonal madness.’ He took a bite. ‘There are worse provisions to be stuck in the snow with, I’ll give you that.’

  Jack lowered both front seats so they could lie flat, and dug blankets and a bottle of water out of the boot. Now she lay curled on her side wrapped up in one of the blankets. She looked across the gap between the seats at Jack, facing her just a foot or so away, his jacket zipped up as high as it would go. He seemed unfazed by the hassle she’d caused. He’d driven her all this way on horrible roads, and now he was stuck in the freezing cold and having to sleep in the car. This could have been her, stranded in the Mini with its temperamental heating system, in the middle of nowhere without so much as a bottle of water. She bit her lip at the thought.

  Who knew it could even be so perfectly, flawlessly dark? She was used to walking home in the haze of street lamps. The only light now was the glow from the dashboard when the engine ran, the only sound, the weather buffeting the car. They could have been the only two people anywhere. The real world seemed very distant. Somewhere in Central London right now, Rod would still be at the ball. She could imagine him in his tuxedo, networking his way around the room by himself. The thought brought a guilty churn to her stomach, and she pressed a palm against her forehead. The partnership had been a joint dream for a long time, this promotion was a huge step forward in their plans, and now it was almost within his grasp, and she wasn’t there to support him. She felt like the most rubbish girlfriend in the universe. He had every right to expect her to be there 100 per cent. She had been there while he’d worked towards this, putting in long hours, making new contacts, and developing relationships, creating the perfect impression for his bosses. And now, when the thing he’d worked so hard for was finally within his reach, she’d gone AWOL.