The Present

by Charlotte Phillips

‘When you get back from this trip,’ she repeated. She looked down at the glass pear, not at him, turning it slowly in her hand. ‘This trip that you don’t need to take, this trip that’s basically being used to avoid Christmas rather than being about anything you really want or need to do.’

  ‘That’s the one, yes.’

  ‘You could stay, you know,’ she said, glancing up. ‘Just bin this bloody snowboarding thing and stay. Come and have Christmas day here if you don’t go to your family – it would still be a step in the right direction. It won’t be much, just a roast dinner, which to be fair I’ll be winging it on, but it would be a laugh. Then just some neighbours and friends might drop in. Might do a board game, or watch a movie.’ Then she frowned, as if she were thinking it over. ‘It sounded a lot more exciting in my head. I can tell you’re not sold.’

  Was it that obvious? It all sounded far too much like his own family Christmas for comfort. The urge to put as much distance between himself and anything as festive as a turkey dinner or charades was right there making his muscles tense up.

  ‘Maybe I’ll do it next year. Just take this time out and get my head straight. So when I get back, what do you reckon?’

  The want. The desire just to say yes immediately. All the while listening to him, to the way he avoided the subject, knowing she would have to say no. How could she possibly do anything else now, how could she just instantly put herself back up there for him, when her mother had just knocked her down? The happiness, the anything-is-possible high she’d felt after bringing Gran home, disintegrated. Her mother had just checked out of her life. She’d called that one the wrong way once too often. How could she possibly trust her judgement now with this? It would be madness. He clearly couldn’t bear the thought of family closeness, and the idea that she could somehow fit into his quest to live life like there was no tomorrow was just stupid. She would be lucky if it lasted a few weeks, and she couldn’t do this again. She couldn’t buy into this situation only for it to crash and burn.

  He was kidding himself. She could see in his eyes that he knew he was. And the rigid future she’d just stepped away from might have been too much to live with, but she really wasn’t sure she had room in her life for another person who had the ability to show up and disappear at random.

  ‘I reckon there will always be a next year,’ she said.

  Years could pass, and he would still be saying the same thing, stuck in this place and unable to take the next step forward. Escaping whenever it became too real for him.

  She smiled.

  ‘I’d love to, Jack. I really would.’

  He knew her well enough to pick up on that not being a yes.

  ‘But?’

  ‘But I really can’t be one of those girls you date who is happy with the all-night-wonder thing, or whatever it bloody well is, and who then don’t bat an eyelid when you duck out to go on this trip or that trip because your need to distance yourself kicks back in. I might have changed my mind about knowing the year I buy my first home, or where I will go on my next five holidays or my retirement age, but I haven’t quite achieved happy-go-lucky to that degree. I need someone I can count on. And I’ll drive you nuts within a week because of that. Maybe we’re just better as mates.’

  He looked so gorgeous when he smiled at her that her inner self wanted to take back every single word that she’d just spoken. In the long pause that followed, she wondered if he might try to persuade her. But of course, that was never going to happen.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you get on with your Christmas then, and I’ll call in sometime and see if you and your mother are still speaking when I get back in the country.’

  He stepped forward and pulled her into a hug. She breathed in the warm scent of his aftershave. She could feel the muscles of his back beneath his shirt as she pulled him in tight. In that hug was the hope that he would get past this. That she had Gran back, but that Sean was still gone. Jack had encouraged her to run with Gran’s past history when she had no one else who saw the importance of it, when Rod had told her not to waste time, and he had been right all along: it had been worth it to know the past, even if it had cost her the present as she knew it.

  A relationship with him would be the polar opposite of what she’d had with Rod, and she just wasn’t ready for slapdash on that kind of level. She wasn’t sure she ever would be. She couldn’t leave herself open to the let-down that would come at some point, sooner or later. It always did. Her mother had proved that point perfectly. At least this way she got to keep him as a friend, even though her body clearly hadn’t got the memo on that, and their hug had made her heart rate jump way back through the roof.

  She took a deep breath to stop the burn at the back of her throat as she stepped away. And the pear decoration, still caught in her fingers, slipped and fell to the kitchen tiles, where it smashed into tiny pieces.

  There was a long silence as Lucy’s brain processed what the fuck she’d just done.

  ‘It’s an omen,’ she said dismally, staring down at the shards of pale green glass. ‘What have I done?’

  Tissue-thin glass had flown in all directions across the floor, under the table, beneath the range cooker. Only part of the leaf and stalk lay intact. It had survived half a century in the attic. It had been handed down for who knew how long before that. It had carried one of the last sentiments from James to Gran before she lost him for ever, and now she’d dropped it because she’d been preoccupied thinking about how delicious it had felt to be hugged by Jack and how she had to let him go.

  ‘Don’t be a muppet,’ he said. ‘It was an accident. And it’s a tree decoration. Try and keep some sense of perspective here. The sentiment isn’t gone just because it’s broken.’

  ‘It was antique. It was part of a set.’ She couldn’t take her eyes off the mess. Gran would be devastated when she woke up.

  ‘Which already has one piece missing, and has an overall meaning that won’t be remotely changed by the fact another piece is broken.’

  ‘Maybe some Superglue,’ she said, doubtfully. Some of the pieces were too tiny even to pick up with tweezers.

  ‘Seriously? Superglue is when you break a plate and it falls into two pieces. It’ll take more than Superglue to fix that.’

  She wrenched a hand into her hair. ‘Oh, bloody HELL!’ she wailed. ‘Something that precious just isn’t safe in my hands. It’s symptomatic of my crappy ability to manage relationships. Love is a ticking time bomb in my clumsy paws. How on earth am I going to tell Gran?’

  ‘Olive will not want you to be upset over something like this. You know that. It was an accident. They happen sometimes. Give yourself a break here.’

  She picked up what she could of the glass shards and swept the rest up into a paper bag. It seemed too brutal somehow to vacuum it up.

  ‘I’ll tell her later, when she wakes up, if she seems okay,’ she said. ‘It could set her back.’

  ‘Of course it won’t set her back. She will understand. The whole deal behind James’s notes was not to settle for material things, real life is more important than stuff, right? Try and think of it like that.’

  She managed a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it smile and obviously pulled it off well enough, because he smiled back. She stood outside the kitchen door and watched him walk across the gravel and drive away from Christmas and from her.

  Chapter 12

  An hour later and Jack loaded his flight bag into the back of the car and locked up the house.

  A knockback. That alone would be a novelty for him. The fact that it bothered him was even more of one. He got behind the wheel and started the engine. The Santa light display on the side of the neighbour’s building flashed in his peripheral vision. In a matter of hours he would be out of here.

  That thought didn’t bring its usual sense of relief. He looked through the windscreen across the icy street at the Christmas decorations. Escaping had always felt like the better option, getting away seemed to alleviate the sense of ga
ping absence. As if denial was commensurate with distance somehow. Now it felt as if he was missing out on something better by taking himself away.

  He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and dug out Sean’s bucket list. Old and dog-eared now, folded and unfolded so many times. Two or three things they had done together, then cave exploration and the Great Wall of China Sean had done alone. Taking on the rest himself had felt like some way of honouring Sean, of keeping him alive through the things that had sparked his interest and made him who he was. It had given him a sense of purpose, a structure on which he could move forward.

  Except that he hadn’t really been moving forward at all. He switched the engine off and headed back indoors.

  ‘It really doesn’t matter,’ Gran said. ‘It couldn’t matter less.’

  She was propped up against the pile of pillows on the bed that Jack had helped Lucy bring downstairs just a day or two ago, just to one side of the fireplace with a high table next to her so she could reach drinks and the Christmas nibbles Lucy kept bringing out, in an effort to build her up. She had heard nothing from Jack since he’d left. He was probably in the middle of the mountains somewhere now, out of mobile phone range, and feet deep in snow. Good for him with his Christmas avoidance, because the sitting room was deliciously festive and cosy, and he would not like it one bit. A log fire burned in the grate, she’d lit lots of candles on the sideboard, and strung fairy lights around the tree along with James’s decorations. All except for the pear of course. Her stomach still lurched whenever she thought of it.

  ‘I wish I could believe that,’ she said. She sat on the edge of the bed and reached for Gran’s hand.

  ‘It’s true.’ Gran squeezed her hand gently. ‘Lucy, that pear decoration had sat in the loft for half a century. Do you think the fact I never looked at it in all that time meant I didn’t think about James? They’re just things. Material things don’t matter. I’ve got him up here.’ She tapped the side of her head.

  ‘And you married Grandad in the end,’ Lucy said.

  ‘Yes, I did. Not for a long time though. That’s the thing about love like that, you see. What happened with James was just so special. I’d been courting your grandad for a while. James knew about him. You can see in some of the notes he sent that he worried I would just carry on and settle down, take the easy route, the one that carried no risk because everything was laid out in the future waiting for me. He wanted me to wait for him, even though he knew that was never going to be the easy option. Things were different in wartime; our paths would never have crossed if it hadn’t been for that. I’d probably have carried on living at home, eventually settled down with Arthur, and never been any the wiser.’ She smiled at Lucy. ‘But I would not have undone those few months for anything, despite how devastated I was when James was killed. I was oblivious that there was more. I’d thought that I was happy. I could see a future with Arthur, a perfectly comfortable, perfectly good future; the future my parents were so keen on. In those days he was really a catch for a girl like me. I would have been secure and looked after. We would have had good prospects. And then I met James, and it was as if I’d been asleep and had woken up. It felt like there was a shift in the universe, like everything was suddenly aligned perfectly. That kind of feeling is very hard to let go.’

  ‘Did you break things off with Grandad? While you were working the land, I mean. When you met James?’

  ‘I did. For a few years, in fact. We remained friends. And over time there was a mutual respect, a real affection. He was a very good person. I did love him. But I never loved him with that fire I’d felt for James.’

  ‘There’s something I meant to ask you,’ Lucy said, suddenly remembering. ‘What about the Five Gold Rings? The decoration for the fifth day of Christmas. It’s missing from the set, and Jack and I searched the loft for it, but then Elizabeth and James’s brother both said that decoration was left out. It seemed so strange to me that the set was never completed. Was there always one missing?’

  Olive smiled, looking across the room at the tree. The decorations twinkled in the firelight.

  ‘There was never a tree decoration for the fifth day, that was true,’ Gran said. ‘When they arrived, they came one at a time. One each day. By day three or four of course my friends and I were so excited to see what would come next, and then, on day five, there was nothing. No decoration turned up. Nothing at all. I checked in the morning, and I checked when I got back from work in the evening. And I asked everyone I could think of in case someone had taken the package by accident. But there was nothing. I thought that would be it, four. There wouldn’t be any more. But then the following day there was another, and it started up again.’

  ‘Nothing ever arrived for the fifth day?’

  ‘Not for that day, no.’ Gran smiled wistfully. ‘But then on day thirteen, James came back and brought me something else.’

  The romance of it just took her breath away.

  ‘What was it, the gift? We didn’t find it in the loft with the other decorations.’

  ‘I didn’t keep it in the loft. I keep it in my jewellery box, up in the bedroom. Pop upstairs and get it for me, darling.’

  There was still a vague smell of plaster and fresh paint lingering in Gran’s bedroom from where Jack had fixed the mess where she’d fallen through the ceiling. She looked up, and thought of Jack. Exactly what she’d been trying not to do. Had it really only been a few weeks since they’d met? She pushed the thought away, hard. He was in the middle of nowhere shutting out responsibility, and mulling after him was not going to change that fact.

  She found the jewellery box and picked it up. It was years old, made of black leather, with lots of tiny hidden drawers and slots for rings, spaces for earrings, and a mirror laid into the inner lid. She had happy memories of watching Gran when she was a little girl, sitting at the dressing table and choosing her jewellery from it. She took the box downstairs and settled back down next to Gran.

  ‘He came back,’ Gran said. ‘He had one day and one night of leave just before Christmas, and he just showed up without any warning. It was dark so early and absolutely freezing. I’d finished work, and I was filthy dirty, covered in mud, trudged up the lane to the hostel, and there he was waiting for me. And he gave me this.’

  She pulled a tiny drawer out in the base of the jewellery box. In it was a piece of paper with something hard at its centre, folded into it. Gran handed it to her.

  She unfolded the note and a ring fell into her palm. It was gold, with the dark dull gleam of age.

  ‘I’ve read that note hundreds of times over the years,’ Gran said.

  There’s usually five, but there’s only one of these because there’s only one of you.

  ‘He asked if I would marry him when the war ended. We had that evening. That one perfect night, and then, early in the morning, he had to leave.’

  ‘Oh, Gran.’

  Her heart was clenched. To have had that, to have had the future lined up, and to have lost it.

  ‘It was the last time I ever saw him. There were no letters from him after that. There was just nothing. I was used to that because you could go months hearing nothing. I waited. I would have waited as long as it took. And then his brother got in touch a while after Christmas to tell me the news. He’d been shot down a few weeks after I saw him.’

  That moment where everything you feel you should say is an inadequate cliché. She said it anyway because she couldn’t bear the silence.

  ‘Oh Gran, I’m so sorry. That’s so sad.’

  Gran shook her head slowly against the pillow and smiled.

  ‘Sad would have been if I’d turned him down,’ she said.

  ‘You kept the ring?’

  ‘I wore it for a long time, not on my wedding finger. I was determined to be strong about it and not be some ridiculous Miss Havisham type hankering after what might have been. I got on with the war effort. What else was there to do? When the war ended, I went back to my old life, came back to
Canterbury, and moved back in with my parents. That wasn’t the easiest of things either, I’d got used to the freedom of living away. I missed the open land and the fresh air. Even though the hostel was managed, it was very different to living by my parents’ rules. I got a job, and went out to work, I got on with life. That didn’t mean I forgot.’

  ‘And then you married Grandad.’

  ‘Not for a long time afterwards.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘Arthur was always a mainstay in my life. He didn’t give up on me, and I knew I could always count on him. What we had was very much built over time. A very different kind of love. When I made the choice to marry Arthur, I put James’s ring away. It was the right thing to do. And I kept the decorations too, but I didn’t trawl them out every year, that really wouldn’t have been fair.’

  Mainstay. That was what Rod would be, if he waited for her to ‘find herself’, as he called it. Was that how Grandad had seen it, waiting for Gran? Completely reliable, always there to be counted on? A future with Rod would be secure and predictable, and there was a lot to be said for that. The question was, whether it would feel like just settling now, when she knew there could be something more.

  There was a delicious smell of roast turkey and stuffing drifting from the kitchen, and Christmas music coming from somewhere inside the house. Jack took a deep breath and knocked on the door at Olive’s.

  ‘You pulled off Christmas, then,’ he said, when Lucy opened the door. She was wearing a Christmas jumper with a reindeer on it, and her eyes sparkled when she smiled. Having Olive home had obviously made her happy. ‘It seemed like it was touch and go for a while there, with that list of yours.’

  She laughed. His heart jumped a little at the sound.

  ‘I actually seemed to do better once I binned the list. I know I will have forgotten something somewhere, but I remembered the wine and the turkey, right?’

  She narrowed her eyes.

  ‘What are you doing here, Jack?’

  He held up two bottles of wine, one red and one white.