The Present

by Charlotte Phillips

  She waved her hands in an enthusiastic I’m-not-tired jazz hands gesture, even as she did it she wondered if she was actually going slightly insane. Rod stared at her as if he was thinking much the same.

  She didn’t mention that she also couldn’t wait to get her teeth straight back into Gran’s belongings with a new sense of focus on any mention of RAF personnel with the initial J. A name, a rank, a place. There had to be some tiny detail somewhere. She should start in the box where the official papers were for the Land Army, there could be something in there. No need to mention that, she would just have another look through while she fine-tuned the tidying up.

  ‘No need to rush,’ Rod said. He stood up, rinsed his coffee cup, and put it in the dishwasher, then put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a reassuring squeeze. ‘All of this is my fault, sweetheart. I’ve put too much pressure on you these last few weeks. What with Olive in the hospital hovering between life and death, and the house clearing, and all the extra Christmas arrangements because we’re hosting this year. I know better than anyone how critical my family can be. I’ve not been fair. You’ve been slicing yourself too thinly, and it’s no wonder that something had to give. But you don’t need to worry any more, I’ve sorted it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘The house clearance. I just took it off your to-do List. The whole thing.’

  He headed out of the room, and she followed him, her head groggy with lack of sleep. She so needed her head shoved under a shower and some strong coffee poured down her throat to wake her up. What exactly was he talking about?

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve taken the house clearance off my list?’

  He picked up the TV remote, flicked through a couple of channels.

  ‘I’ve sorted it, babe. It will free you up to get stuck into Christmas properly at last. Your mum’s dropped back in for the festive season. Turned up out of the blue last night, but said she’d had a chat with you the other day about staying at Olive’s while she’s in hospital. She’s seemed keen to be a bit supportive for once, and, really, you shouldn’t underestimate the impact it can have, a sick relative. She genuinely seemed to want to help, and I realised in a flash that the solution was just staring me in the face. I knew you wouldn’t want her under our feet staying here, so she’s staying at Olive’s house over Christmas. She can help with the hospital visits, and she’s going to sweep through the house while she’s there, save you the bother. Two birds – one stone.’

  Her brain struggled to cope with the news that her mother was even in the same postcode area as her, without the add-on horrific revelation that she was at Gran’s house right now doing anything that could possibly fit the description of ‘sweeping through’.

  ‘My mother is staying at Gran’s and has taken over the house clearance?’ she double checked.

  He gave her a wink, accompanied by a clicking sound, and made a gun-shooting gesture at her with his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘You can thank me later.’

  ‘Surprise!’

  The heating in Gran’s house had been hiked up to a sweat-inducing level, and when Lucy rushed in her mother was in the kitchen clad in beachwear in the middle of bloody December. She was surrounded by the pile of stuff that she and Jack had shifted down from the attic and painstakingly sorted through, adding items randomly to a large box marked eBay.

  ‘Mum, what are you doing here? I thought you weren’t coming visiting until the new year. And you cannot sell off any of that stuff, I need it.’ As she spoke, she took an ornate picture frame out of her mother’s hand, poised in mid-air on its way to the box. She could see some of Gran’s forties clothing already in there, along with some bone china crockery, and who knew what else.

  ‘Will you just step away from the mementoes,’ she hollered.

  ‘Mementoes? I thought it was just old tat that needed chucking. I saw the skip outside, assumed it was all going in there, thought we might as well make a bit of money out of it instead of just offloading. Won’t take me long to list these bits, I’m an eBay master.’ She pointed at Lucy with an emphatic finger. ‘You need to think about your carbon footprint. Recycle, don’t bin.’

  ‘Seriously? You’ve got the heating on tropical, and you’re lecturing me about the environment? What are you doing here?’

  ‘I thought I’d put family first, since your gran’s been ill. I thought I’d come and help out wherever I could, all hands to the pump.’

  Thirty years of behaviour spoke to the contrary.

  ‘What are you really doing here?’

  Her mother threw perfectly manicured hands in the air that clearly hadn’t been anywhere near hard work anytime recently.

  ‘It comes to something when a person can’t visit their ailing mother without there being an ulterior motive assumed,’ she said.

  ‘So there isn’t?’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘How’s Giorgio?’ Lucy said pointedly. Her mother’s most recent boyfriend had lasted a couple of years. In the scheme of things, that was something of a record.

  Her mother turned to the sink and fiddled with the crockery in the drainer. A dead giveaway, because Lucy had no memory of her ever doing something as domestic as the washing up.

  ‘We broke up last week, and as he owns the resort, my position there is untenable.’

  As if she were CEO of a multinational rather than a nightclub singer. There it was, right there.

  ‘I knew it!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s the real reason you’ve turned up out of the blue. It’s the same reason as always. Your life’s gone tits up and so you’ve come back home to regroup until you get fed up and disappear again.’

  ‘Not this time. I’m here to pitch in.’

  Lucy watched her mother take a couple of plates from the drainer and open random cupboards until she found the right one.

  ‘I’ve heard it too many times, Mum,’ she said. ‘What’s the catch?’

  ‘There is no catch.’

  There was so a catch.

  Her mother picked up a couple of mugs and hung them on the empty hooks on the wall.

  ‘Home, Lucy,’ she said airily, ‘is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’

  ‘Whoever wrote that was obviously talking about one-off crisis situations. Not repeat bail-out home visits over the course of thirty years. Home can only take so much!’

  She pressed a hand to her forehead in a monumental effort to calm down. As she took a deep breath, her eye lit on the pile of Gran’s belongings that her mother had been sorting through. A scarf and a couple of books, neither of which had been in the loft – they were way too current for that.

  ‘Where did you find these?’ she said, stepping over to them and sifting through the pile. ‘What exactly have you been clearing out?’

  Her mother sighed and looked up at the ceiling.

  ‘Well, it looked as if you’d made inroads in the loft, so I switched to the bedroom, thought I might make a start on the chest of drawers and—’

  ‘Mum, that’s Gran’s private stuff,’ Lucy said, shocked. ‘You can’t just go through it without asking her first.’

  ‘You’ve ransacked the loft. I don’t see any difference.’

  ‘Gran knew we were clearing the loft out, and it’s full of stuff that hasn’t been touched in decades. Her bedroom is full of her personal things.’

  Veronica flapped a dismissive hand in her direction.

  ‘What a ridiculous fuss. It’s just a lot of clothes, and some old books and papers.’

  Lucy frowned.

  ‘What papers?’

  She sorted slowly through the pile. A funeral order of service for Grandad, the sight of which gave her a sudden pang of sadness. A few old birthday cards. She seethed inwardly at Veronica. And suddenly, an envelope, the address on the front leaping out at her. Horston Green. She snatched it up in disbelief. It was empty.

  ‘Where’s the letter?’ she
snapped, scrabbling through the pile. For heaven’s sake, possibly the single most important clue to Gran’s suitor, and her mother had probably used it to light the Aga.

  Veronica held her hands up in an it-wasn’t-me gesture.

  ‘I swear, I haven’t even looked through that pile! I just emptied the drawer and carried it down. It’s all there.’

  Just an envelope? She turned it over and looked at the return address on the back top corner.

  J Whitbourn-Marsh, Waltham House, Ware

  Her heart leaped into thundering overdrive, interrupted by a double tap at the side door, followed by the sound of it opening and slamming. She knew immediately it was Jack just from that routine. Always knock, never wait for a reply before opening. It had irked her at first, but now she found she liked knowing that it was him. Her mother jerked to attention like a meerkat at the sound of footsteps down the hall, and Lucy collided with her on the way to the door to head him off. She made a futile attempt to grab Jack’s elbow and manhandle him from the house before her mother could force an introduction.

  Too late.

  ‘Aren’t you going to introduce me?’

  Oh, bloody hell! She did her best to make it brief.

  ‘Jack, this is my mother. Mum, this is Jack, Gran’s gardener and maintenance man.’

  Her mother fluffed her hair and slowly held a hand out. Jack stared at it for a moment.

  ‘Veronica,’ she said, enunciating every syllable.

  Oh, for goodness’ sake! Lucy was barely hanging in here on the cusp of being swamped by Christmas stress. Gran was still unconscious in the hospital … she could take it. Her Christmas tasks were burying her alive … she could take that. Rod was seriously pissed at her … yup, she could carry that one too. But her mother rocking up and flirting with Jack could well be the thing that pushed her over the edge. Just no.

  ‘Jack’s just leaving,’ she said, widening her eyes at him in an attempt to communicate escape-while-you-can.

  ‘Just came to drop off something,’ he said.

  ‘Great! In the car, is it? I’ll come out.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ Jack called over his shoulder as Lucy propelled him back out of the door so quickly that he practically fell back over the threshold.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he said.

  ‘Sorry. She descended yesterday while we were in Hertfordshire. I haven’t yet got to the bottom of what she’s doing here.’

  ‘You forgot to take the box of stuff out of my car.’

  She had been in such a rush to get back this morning and explain things to Rod that she’d literally got out of his car in the driveway and got straight into her Mini to drive home. Of course, had she happened to go inside the house, she would have got a shock to find her mother in situ.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, nodding at the envelope in her hand.

  She gave it to him. His eyes widened as he saw and understood what it was.

  ‘Horston Green? Bloody hell, is this him?’

  She looked down at her feet.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It must be, right? What are you going to do?’

  ‘It could be nothing,’ she heard herself say.

  He paused and gave her an odd look.

  ‘It could be. But it might be the key to the whole thing, right? That could be his home address back in the 1940s. Okay, so he might not be there now, but at the very least you have his home town to go on.’

  She looked at him. He was right of course.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ he said. ‘Aren’t you going to research it some more now?’

  She held a hand up and closed her eyes, forcing away the surge of excitement that threatened to just take over, making herself think about everything else for a change. It was time to stop acting impulsively, dropping everything else on a snippet of information. Everything else was too important to drop, and she tried hard to prioritise. She hadn’t even managed to get to the hospital and check on Gran yet because she’d legged it here on the back of Rod’s revelation that her mother had rocked up. Yes, she wanted to please Gran with this past history stuff, but that would mean nothing if she wasn’t even looking after her care properly today. Now she had all the hassle her mother brought with her everywhere she went, not to mention that Rod was very legitimately fed up with her taking her eye off the domestic ball. She swallowed hard and pasted on a smile.

  ‘I’ll think it over,’ she said.

  She took the envelope from him and stuffed it into her jeans pocket.

  He stared at her, his mouth slightly open.

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  She avoided his incredulous gaze, knowing perfectly well what he must be thinking.

  ‘Look, I can’t think about this right now,’ she said, staring down at the gravel. ‘I messed up yesterday, missing the ball, I haven’t even visited Gran yet because my mother’s turned up out of nowhere. God only knows what her agenda is. I have got to get back on track. It’s Christmas in just over a week, and I haven’t so much as bought a stuffing ball.’

  There was a long and very awkward pause.

  ‘Understood.’ He held his hands up and backed away towards the car. ‘Not a problem. I’ll let you get on.’

  She saw him shake his head disbelievingly as he lifted the box out of the car and put it down on the snow-coated gravel instead of carrying it into the house. He got behind the wheel. Her stomach gave a miserable churn. So now she’d managed to hack Jack off too. She filed that one away for later. There was only so much falling short of the mark that she could cope with at once. She watched him drive away, and tried to get her mind back on track. Back on a present-day Christmas that would live up to Rod’s family memories.

  Since getting things back under some level of control was the only thing to do here, it made sense to delegate as much of that to other people as she could. Ideally to people who weren’t likely to have an ulterior motive for helping. Her mother, for one.

  ‘You slept with a Tom Hardy lookalike and nothing happened?’

  Amy’s café was everything that a café ought to be at Christmas time. The air smelled of cinnamon and spiced orange from the seasonally themed hot chocolates, and the glass cabinets were full of gingerbread, Christmas cake and panettone. A bauble-festooned Christmas tree stood in the corner, reminding Lucy yet again that she hadn’t put her own one up, and there were sprigs of holly above the pictures. She sipped a cinnamon latte in between dictating a list of Christmas-treat food from Amy’s catering menu, headed, ‘Pass off the perfect spread without putting down your Prosecco’.

  ‘We were in a car in the snow in the middle of nowhere, with no heating, or, for that matter, a bed. It was hardly a suite at the Ritz. Can you put in one of those cold chicken pies? And a dozen or so of those sausage rolls you make with the stuffing in them?’

  ‘It sounds bloody romantic to me.’ Amy narrowed her eyes. ‘And surely there is no situation that can’t have potential with Tom Hardy in it.’

  Lucy stirred her latte.

  ‘That’s because you’re overlooking the fact that we had to sleep fully dressed on reclined lumpy seats, the toilet facilities were freeze your arse off behind a tree, and then there was the morning drive home with no coffee, no toothbrush, no shower, no hairbrush, and no change of clothes. Oh, and also the fact that he is NOT TOM HARDY.’ She suddenly realised she’d missed the most important fact of all, and so she pointed at Amy with her coffee spoon to make it count. ‘Plus, I. Am. In. A. Committed. Relationship.’

  ‘How could I forget?’ Amy said. ‘Has he proposed yet?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t.’ She realised uneasily that the excitement she’d felt at first at that prospect was distinctly absent now. ‘And anyway, Jack’s met my mother now,’ she rushed on, ‘so any opinion he might have had of me will have plummeted.’ Not to mention his incredulity at her pressing the pause button on the World War Two stuff. And why those two things needled her so much, that bothered the hell out of her too.
>
  ‘I actually had tea and biscuits with Elizabeth Warrender,’ Lucy said, squeezing Gran’s hand. Then she remembered the letters. ‘Lizzy Warrender, I mean. From Horston Green. We talked all about the Land Girls, the farm, the hostel, what it was like. As soon as you’re well enough, we’ll go and see her together, and you can bore each other rigid with old war stories.’

  She watched Gran’s hand closely until she had to give up and blink. Nothing. Not even the tiniest of responses. She tried again.

  ‘Jack and I got stuck in the snow, and we had to sleep in the car, can you imagine? He had to drag me out of a ditch!’

  Nothing again.

  She sat back with a sigh and turned on her smartphone. For the first few days of Gran’s stay she’d fastidiously turned it off every time she entered the building, as per the stern notices that festooned every wall, but which everyone else in the place seemed to openly ignore.

  Whitbourn-Marsh, Waltham House, Ware, she typed into the search engine, not remotely expecting anything to come back.

  A single listing, followed by a lot of random dross about Ware. A smiling photograph of an old man with crinkly blue eyes and a shock of white hair standing in a bunting-draped marquee, holding up an enormous pumpkin.

  She stared down at it in amazement.

  The picture was linked to an old edition of Ware’s local newspaper. And no story, just a caption to the picture. Mr Whitbourn-Marsh of Byron Avenue, Ware, won best in show in the Food Fair with his giant pumpkin.

  Her mind was a whirlwind. Could it possibly be him? What if he still lived in Ware, just in a different street? He looked about the right age. And Whitbourn-Marsh was surely a really uncommon name, wasn’t it?

  ‘She was awake for a while this morning.’

  Lucy looked up in surprise at the staff nurse, flipping through the chart at the end of Gran’s bed. The picture was instantly forgotten in the face of that smile. It looked alarm-bell-ringing sympathetic. She dropped her phone in her bag.