She shouldn’t be down, she told herself, her eyes prickling with tears while she peeled potatoes. She had a fabulously exciting job offer, one with the potential to provide everything she could possibly want.
Except Ben.
But you couldn’t own people. She’d told Seb often enough. Nobody belonged to anybody. They might belong with, but that was a choice that had to be made by both parties. When the veggies were all prepared she went upstairs to change into a shiny red top and black trousers.
She’d grabbed the time a few days ago to fling up her twinkling Christmas tree and the decorations she’d made in previous years, but she didn’t bother with her Santa hat.
Ben and Gabe arrived first, bringing with them cold air and a tub full of kittens. Ben stooped to kiss her but, as if shy in front of Gabe, she turned so it only landed on her cheek. If the kiss had landed on her lips she’d have felt as if she were stealing it from Imogen. She’d only ever had Ben on loan and Imogen would probably never know even that.
Carola and her girls arrived. Charlotte and Emily were glued to their Christmas iPhones while everyone else exclaimed about The Angel and how absolutely amazingly well it was going, that Carola would have to find help immediately and it had almost been a shame to shut for Christmas and Boxing Day.
They all helped in the kitchen and the meal somehow turned out effortlessly fabulous. Maybe because Carola did everything Alexia forgot.
Ben carved the turkey and they crowded around the kitchen table because Alexia didn’t have a dining suite, gorging on roasties and bread sauce, pulling crackers and laughing. Gabe enjoyed so much sherry he almost fell asleep in his chocolate mousse. The kittens awoke in time to climb up everyone’s legs under the table, which was no fun for Emily who was wearing tights and a skirt.
After lunch Carola cried, ‘Presents!’ and led the charge into the sitting room where everyone had piled gifts beneath Alexia’s little artificial tree. Carola had sportingly relabelled smaller gifts she’d bought for her girls so everyone had something for them.
‘Oh, enchanting,’ she cried, when she unwrapped the glass angel from Alexia, then snorted with giggles because her gifts to everybody were angels, too – little bronze ones.
Gabe had had a lady in the village make corn dolly angels. ‘And we all thought we were being clever and original,’ he beamed, pouring another sherry.
In the light of the Imogen development Alexia felt hot with embarrassment in case she’d bought Ben too much. When he looked pleased at the experience day and Maltesers and sent her a wink over the whisky tumblers, relief that she didn’t have to be mortified made her drink half a glass of wine straight down.
He’d bought Alexia an angel, too, of the most delicate rose gold, dangling from an intricate chain. ‘Oh,’ she breathed as he fastened it around her neck, the touch of his fingers tingling across her skin. ‘How beautiful.’ The words came out all strangled and she felt her eyes burn.
‘Hey, hey!’ He pulled her gently into his arms. ‘It’s not meant to make you cry.’
She laughed through her tears as if she were just overcome with the gift, pressing her face bashfully against his jumper. It was typical of his kindness that he was letting Christmas play out happily before going home to Didbury.
But then it seemed she’d be denied even that crumb of comfort because over brandy – or lemonade if you were Charlotte or Emily – Ben announced plans to finish his contract on the Carlysle estate then start his own business once again. ‘It’ll take me a while to get everything in place because I let most of my equipment go when I sold up before but I’ve had enough of working for someone else.’
‘Oh.’ The exclamation shot out before Alexia could smother it.
He turned his gaze on her and she read consternation in his eyes. ‘Actually, we need to discuss …’ He fumbled awkwardly.
Her heart plummeted so hard it hit her toes. It was real. He was going back. Old life. Old wife. Old line of business. She was glad for him. Really. She was.
She could take that job with Verity …
Her heart gave a sickening squeeze. Could she leave Middledip now, when she had to give Ben up too? Even The Angel was on the brink of getting along without her. She wasn’t sure she could lose everything all at once.
She jumped up. ‘I’m gasping for a cuppa. I’ll put the kettle on.’ It was only a couple of strides from her sitting room to her kitchen but she was glad of the isolation to grab a ream of kitchen roll and blot her eyes.
Ben’s voice came from behind her, making her jump. ‘What’s up?’ Warm arms slid around her and turned her softly to face him.
She pinned on a smile. ‘Nothing …’
He stared down, disquiet in his storm-grey eyes. ‘I call bullshit. Is it me starting my own company again? Sorry I launched it on you in front of everybody. I suddenly realised I should have told you first.’
‘You don’t owe that to me.’ She sniffled. ‘I’m three-glasses-of-wine emotional. I want you to be happy.’
‘Oh-kay.’ He paused. ‘You crying doesn’t make me happy. In fact –’ he flushed ‘– it’s taken the last couple of crazy days to realise what will make me happy.’
‘It’s all right.’ She forced the corners of her mouth to turn up in an approximation of a smile. ‘I know.’
He furrowed his forehead. ‘About Kent?’
‘Kent?’ Alexia stopped trying to shelter behind a fake smile. ‘What about Kent?’
He sighed ruefully. ‘They do have trees there.’
‘Obviously. But—’
‘It would make me happy to base the business in Kent.’ His words came out in a rush. He gazed at her stupefied expression for a moment, then his arms fell back to his sides. ‘Shit. I’ve presumed too much. I know you find it suffocating to be committed but I thought if you were in southeast London, Kent would be close enough. For us to sort of give things a try.’
Her heart began a slow and heavy beat. ‘Us? What about Imogen?’
Ben shook his head and shrugged. ‘What about her?’
‘I saw you holding her as if she was made of something delicate and precious. You said she’d offered you your old life back. You were quiet and strange. You stayed away from me yesterday with hardly a word so I thought …’ She took a steadying breath, tears gathering like a ball in her throat. ‘I thought you’d patched things up. I assumed you starting up your business again was part of you returning to your old life.’
His eyes widened. ‘Holy hell. If only you’d heard the conversation between me, Lloyd and Imogen yesterday! Nothing could be further from the truth. Lloyd and Imogen told me they’re together now.’
Horror shot through Alexia, making her gasp. ‘That must have been awful to hear. I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be. OK, it’s uncomfortable, but things between Imogen and me went past the point of no return a long time ago.’ He looped his arms more securely around her. His eyes were darkly intense. ‘I admit to being dazed on Saturday but I didn’t mean to shut you out. I couldn’t just walk back into the opening day furore and spill my guts. I’d finally been told the whole truth and it wasn’t pretty. I was trying to absorb it. When my parents hung on the extra day while Lloyd and Imogen went home I felt I had to try and provide some kind of quality Christmas time with them and Gabe. I wanted to involve you but you were helping Carola. I thought – hoped – I could introduce you to my parents another time. I knew I’d see you today and thought we’d have the rest of … well, whatever, to talk.’
Alexia felt her heart skip, remembering how she’d spent yesterday imagining Ben with Imogen. ‘Imogen had already left the village with Lloyd?’
Carola burst through the kitchen door. ‘We’re all dying of thirst – oops, sorry!’ At seeing them entwined, she turned smartly round and disappeared.
Ben rolled his eyes and, pulling Alexia with him, leant on the door so it couldn’t be opened again. ‘They insist they weren’t having an affair at the time of the accident – though,
privately, Lloyd admitted he’d been in love with her for a long time. He hadn’t acted on it because of me.’
‘Oh.’ Alexia digested this information. ‘That’s good. Isn’t it?’
He inhaled slowly. ‘Suppose so. I’ve only just realised how hearing that would once have messed with my head. Now … I suppose it’s just part of him finally coming clean. Welcome, but not my focus.’
He glanced away for a moment, as if it would be easier to say what came next without the weight of Alexia’s gaze. ‘They did have something to hide, though. Lloyd had begun gambling at online casinos. To fund his habit, he dealt in “legal highs” – substances that were escaping the letter of the law by not yet being classified as drugs. When that loophole in the law closed he still had a stash. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy it so arranged to meet people he’d supplied in the past and sell it on wholesale.’
He took her hands and looked down at them, the pads of his thumbs brushing over her fingers. ‘What I’m finding less easy to forgive is that he got Imogen involved. Apparently she was “burning out” owing to her pressured sales environment and he got her stuff that would help her relax. Then he began supplying it – via her – to her equally high-gas colleagues.’ He glanced up, sadness in his eyes. ‘She was as near a drug dealer as makes no difference. I understand why she was desperate to keep that from me. I hate that kind of stuff. Lloyd tells me I have “too many straight edges” but I could never have stayed with her if I’d known what she was doing.’
Alexia tightened her fingers around his. ‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.’
‘I want to. It’s just that finally knowing the truth, and it being such a tawdry truth, has knocked me for six. It seems I wasn’t married to the person I thought I was, which is a big adjustment. They went together to this party where Lloyd was supposed to do the deal. The so-called buyers waited till he was drunk and turned nasty about paying so he shoved Imogen into the car and put his foot down. Hence the accident.’
Alexia stared up at him, at the trouble in his face but the truth in his eyes. ‘But your brother’s a lawyer. “Legal highs” were always a grey area.’
He shrugged. ‘Apparently to him the area was black and white. Either something’s legal or it’s not, even knowing that people collapsed and died on the substances in question.’
She frowned, trying to arrange the facts logically. ‘Why did Lloyd write to suggest you ask Imogen about the truth? That doesn’t add up.’
‘I thought the same. But with our divorce going through, she’d been seeing him in prison. She’d felt the spark between them too, I suppose. He’s a good manipulator and he devised it as a way of forcing the issue – making her see that the marriage could never be saved if I knew she was mixed up in supplying dodgy substances. It was a gamble because if she’d confessed and I’d informed the authorities he would have had more jail time. It’s still a gamble because he’s out on licence so I could get him locked up again.’
Alexia froze. ‘And?’
He stooped and kissed the question off her lips. ‘I might be straight-laced but I’m not going to inform on my brother and my ex-wife.’
She knew it was wrong to be relieved. Sending his brother back to prison was a burden Ben could do without, regardless of whether Lloyd and Imogen had already paid enough for their sins. ‘Why did they come clean now?’
He glanced down at their linked hands. ‘Imogen wanted to clear her conscience and the only way she’d commit to Lloyd was if he finally faced me. They want to go off and start again somewhere – hence her comment about the way being clear for me to go back to Didbury. You can imagine family occasions will be awkward enough with my brother married to my ex-wife.’ He slid his hands up her arms and pulled her against him. ‘Their story was pretty hard for me to hear but she wanted to part as friends. The hug you saw was a final goodbye. I wasn’t holding her as if she was precious. I just felt awkward.’ He grinned, suddenly. ‘The space in my arms is Alexia-shaped.’
Heat flooded through her as she felt a genuine grin take over her face. For the first time all day she thought she might be catching Christmas joy.
‘So yesterday was a bit sticky with Mum and Dad,’ he murmured, pulling gently at one of her curls. ‘They’re blindly relieved that we’ve sorted everything out. The reason they didn’t come to see Gabe when he had pneumonia was that they could see the way things were going with Lloyd and Imogen and hoped to put off the evil hour as long as possible. I tried to tell them the whole story but they still shied away from it. They love both me and Lloyd and they don’t want to decide where to place their loyalty. Families are weird.’
Alexia watched his expression carefully. ‘So you could go home to Didbury? When we first met you were so missing your old life.’
His eyes darkened. ‘And you wanted to leave the village and take up a great new job. We can each have those things now.’
She laid her hand on his chest, feeling his heart beating through his shirt. ‘If we want them.’
‘I want to be where you are,’ he murmured. ‘I want it a lot. But only if you want it too. I don’t want you to go from Suffocating Seb to Bossy Ben. That’s why I suggested I base myself in Kent, close enough to you for us to see each other but not so close you can’t breathe.’
She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘What if Kent doesn’t work for me?’
A bleak expression stole across his features. ‘I suppose I’d ask what does work for you … but with diminishing hope.’
Slowly, she brushed his lips with hers, feeling his body heat enveloping her. ‘If you want Kent I’ll take the job. But, really … I want to stay here in Middledip. With you.’
Epilogue
Almost one year later
You are invited to the opening of
THE SHOWCASE
the new function room at
The Angel Community Café
Christmas Eve from 6 p.m.
Alexia was feeling ridiculously excited as she smoothed her new dress of forest green silk. ‘It’s only The Angel in Middledip village,’ she scolded herself. Which was true. But the knowledge didn’t settle her butterflies.
She looked round the brand new function room in what was once the kitchen of The Angel public house. Now it was literally a showcase – for a lot of things that had belonged to The Angel and had eventually been recovered from the illicit warehouse of one Shane Edmunds/Niall Radstock when he decided co-operating with the police might ameliorate the severity of his punishment, even to the extent of helping them pick up Tim (whose real name turned out to be Frank). Alexia’s many photos of the features in situ had been helpful in Gabe getting his property returned.
What to do with the returned period features had been the subject of many a discussion between Gabe, Alexia, Ben and Carola. It would interrupt operations at The Angel to refit fire surrounds in the Bar Parlour or Public now the chimney accesses had been bricked up and, anyway, nobody wanted to mess with The Angel’s new look. It was Alexia who’d come up with The Showcase idea.
She ran her fingers over the original polished bar that had stood in the Bar Parlour for well over a century, and had been recovered complete, to her joy, with its etched glass screens. Cast iron fireplaces graced the other three walls of the rooms. None of them was fitted to a chimney but they looked fabulous stuffed with flowers. Mirrors lined the walls and two imposing light fittings hung overhead. They didn’t match because one had originally hung in the Bar Parlour and one in the Public, but that was a talking point. A section of panelling from an upstairs room was framed on one wall with another light, this time a three-armed wall sconce, shining down on it. Nearby hung the storyboards for the refurbishment that never was.
The room was decorated for The Angel Community Café’s second Christmas but Alexia had stood firm that it shouldn’t be with twenty-first century bling. Swags of real woodland greenery hung over the fireplaces and a Christmas tree stood in the corner, smelling wonderful because the on
ly decorations Alexia had allowed apart from replica Victoriana such as smiling Santas, solemn cherubs and satin balls seeded with beads, were oranges threaded with ribbon and studded with cloves. Tiny white lights danced amongst the branches like fairies.
Under an arch of berried holly the old pantry was now a compact kitchen area for caterers to use when they brought in their crates and trolleys to provide for funeral teas or birthday parties. Today its shelves were groaning with angel-shaped cakes made by Carola, Jodie and Alexia, and Gabe had even risked the wrath of Tubb at the pub by obtaining a temporary alcohol licence to cover them for the wine, beer and fizz waiting in tubs of ice behind the bar.
Carola panted in. She’d been running in and out all afternoon, leaving Jodie – now working at the café part time – in charge. Happily divorced these days, Carola frequently climbed out of paint-spattered jeans or her smart catering smock and into more flattering outfits such as the navy blue lace dress she wore today in honour of the occasion. ‘Got it!’ Triumphant, she jumped up on a chair and placed a pious Victoriana angel on the top of the tree. ‘Bloody delivery man had left it with a neighbour instead of in the stipulated safe place.’
She stopped and studied Alexia. ‘You look fantastic.’
‘Oh!’ Alexia blushed hotly. ‘My dress feels too short and too low.’
‘Pfft!’ Carola waved that idea away. ‘You’re too used to overalls.’
Ben came through from the Bar Parlour in a black suit that made him look as if he’d just stepped out of GQ. His gaze fell on Alexia. ‘You look hot.’
She beamed as he hooked her to him. ‘My dress isn’t too short or too low?’
‘It’s both. That’s why I like it.’
Gabe arrived at the same time as Charlotte and Emily, who were dressed in black, with aprons, to show they were responsible for circulating the cakes. From six o’clock villagers began to flock in, all happy to ooh and ahh over The Showcase as they drank the wine and dug in to gingerbread and cakes of the angel-shaped variety. The level of noise rose and rose as more people trickled through the door until there was barely room to stand shoulder to shoulder let alone juggle glasses and plates.
The Little Village Christmas Page 30