‘I don’t suppose Jonas has been to the stall again?’ she asked, almost dreading to hear the answer, whatever it was.
‘No. Perhaps he’s got the message.’
‘I didn’t realise I was sending one,’ Cathy said.
‘You weren’t really; you’re far too nice for that. I was doing my best to get it over loud and clear though. A man like that shouldn’t be messing around, especially not with the feelings of a woman like you.’
A woman like me? Cathy held back a frown. What did that mean? Did Fleur view her as fragile? Someone who was damaged, vulnerable, gullible… even desperate? Cathy wasn’t sure what to say in reply to that. She’d always felt she looked as if she was coping, even when she wasn’t. But did Fleur see it differently? Did everyone see it as her boss did? Did something about her scream pity case?
‘Enough of that anyway,’ Fleur said, sparing Cathy the need to respond. ‘I expect you’ll be going to see your mum’s ashes soon, as it’s getting nearer to Christmas. If you are, you can take this…’ She produced a wreath from beneath the counter, fashioned from glossy holly studded with scarlet berries. ‘I made one too many for an order. I could sell it, of course, but I wondered if you might want it.’
‘How much is it?’ Cathy asked.
Fleur chuckled. ‘For you? A cake! What have you got for me today?’
‘Really?’ Cathy asked, touched at Fleur’s kindness. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I am! It’s like bartering, isn’t it? I swap something that I’ve made for something that you’ve made. Now, come on, don’t tease – I know you’ve baked something. The day you stop baking is the day the earth will stop turning.’
Cathy grinned. ‘You know me too well. I thought, as it’s almost December, it was time for mince pies.’
Fleur clapped her hands together. ‘Perfect!’
Cathy smiled as she pulled the plastic tub from her bag and offered it to Fleur. It was full of perfect circles of frilled pastry, dusted with icing sugar, and the rich smell of Cathy’s home-made, brandy-laced mincemeat wafted out. Fleur grabbed one and bit into it, looking rapturous as the flavours exploded onto her tongue.
‘Worth every scratch from those blasted holly leaves,’ she said. ‘Seriously, woman, I think you were put on this earth to make me fat.’
Cathy giggled. ‘Maybe I should give the baking a rest for a while then.’
‘No way!’ Fleur said, laughing as she popped the last morsel into her mouth. ‘The minute you stop bringing me cakes you’re fired!’
Fleur’s wreath really was beautiful. Cathy was sitting on the bus out of town, the wreath in a thick, padded plastic bag on her knee. Every so often she’d open it to have a look at the leathery leaves and bright berries, and it would give her a warm feeling. It was more than just an arrangement; it was a heartfelt gift. Cathy wouldn’t have been a bit surprised to learn that Fleur hadn’t made it by accident at all and that she’d made it especially for Cathy and had just told her that to make her feel OK about taking it. Fleur liked to give the impression she didn’t care about anything or anyone, when really she probably cared too much. While Cathy might not be certain if Fleur’s extra wreath had been purposely crafted or not, she was sure that if her mum could have seen it she’d have thought it beautiful too. Her mum loved Christmas and everything that came with it, and by now she’d have had the house decorated with holly and mistletoe, and a new poinsettia would have appeared on the windowsill too, scarlet leaves against a grey sky. Before she’d been too ill to get around she would have been cooking and baking for weeks, the air of the kitchen constantly warm and sweet.
As the bus rocked and rolled, climbing the hill out of Linnetford and towards the forest where Cathy’s mum now rested, Cathy let her mind wander back to the last Christmas she could remember her mum being well enough to bake. It had been non-stop for the week before – fruit cake, mince pies, sausage rolls, ham and egg pies, yule logs dusted with sugar and plain old fairy cakes made fancy with iced Christmas scenes – and there’d been far too much for the two of them to eat. They’d taken some to relatives and some to the homeless shelter and even then her mum hadn’t been able to stop. Cathy hadn’t minded. Miriam had been ill for a few weeks and had hardly bothered to move from the sofa, so it was good to see her feel like doing anything and even better to work alongside her. They’d sang along to the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack – her mum’s favourite. Hardly festive, Cathy had pointed out, so Miriam had fetched an old Santa hat from a box in the loft and put it on.
‘Festive enough for you?’ she’d laughed, before launching into the chorus of ‘The Music of the Night’.
Cathy had been more of a pop music girl at that age and she hadn’t appreciated her mum’s music taste, though she’d always loved to hear her sing and these days loved to listen to those old soundtracks herself. But even back then she’d joined in, laughing at the absurdity of it as they both got louder and louder to sing over the sounds of the food processor as they made breadcrumbs for far too many Scotch eggs for them to eat in a year, let alone a week. They’d been so happy that day and they’d had the loveliest Christmas that year – not full of parties or lavish three-course dinners dressed in their finest like some of her friends were having with their families, but humble and quiet, cosy and full of love.
Twenty minutes later Cathy got off the bus with tears in her eyes. Hastily, she dried them and hoped nobody would notice. She had another ten-minute walk to the edge of the forest where her mum’s ashes were scattered but she had a day off work, another five or six hours of daylight and nowhere better to be. The weather was bright and brisk today, and even from this distance she could hear the snapping and creaking of branches as the wind snatched at them in the forest ahead, a sort of low collective grumbling. To the west, her home town of Linnetford lay in a valley, a far-off jumble of grey roofs and brown bricks, shot through by black roads like threads on a loom. The sound of its traffic was now too far away to be heard and Cathy took in a long breath of cold, clear air. Even though the town was right there, in plain sight, it felt a million miles away up here. Everything looked different and smelled different, and if you closed your eyes it wasn’t hard to imagine yourself in some Nordic wilderness rather than on the edge of an old town in the north of England that was still trying to shake off the grime of its industrial past.
Cathy began to walk.
It was quite difficult to identify the exact spot where her mum’s ashes had been scattered so Cathy had given up trying long ago. Once she felt certain she was in the general area she stopped. Under her feet was a carpet of soft, fragrant pine needles, some browning and brittle, others fresher, and overhead the sky had all but disappeared behind the boughs of the huge trees that towered above her, only visible in flashes of blue and white here and there. All was peaceful and Cathy closed her eyes for a moment to soak it up. Her mum could hardly have picked a more perfect place to take up her final rest. Cathy loved it here, and she had a feeling that her mum’s decision to have her ashes spread here was almost as much a recognition of that as it was her own wishes. It was just the sort of thing she would have done, to give Cathy somewhere lovely to come and visit rather than some dreary cemetery that she’d know her daughter would feel it was her duty to go to but would hate.
When Cathy opened them again she went to the nearest sturdy trunk and laid her hand against it, taking a minute to visualise her mum’s face, to recall the sound of her voice. Already it seemed to be harder and harder each time she came, but she had to remember – she had to do at least that one small thing for her mum now that there was nothing else she could do for her. She thought about the way her mum laughed at things that weren’t funny, when Cathy would roll her eyes and pretend to be annoyed. She thought about her fussing over the silliest things while being stoical about the hard stuff, about how she rarely complained even when Cathy knew she was suffering, how she tried to stay bright and positive even at the end when her lungs had all but buckled b
eneath the weight of the disease that would kill her. She was never hurt or offended at Cathy’s frustrated outbursts, though Cathy suspected she often felt guilty about the burden she’d placed on her daughter.
Perhaps she felt guilty about the lack of a father in Cathy’s life too; though that wasn’t her fault, Cathy wondered if she’d felt like it was. Cathy’s dad had been missing for a long time and Cathy could barely remember him. She only knew that one day he’d kissed her goodbye, and the next he was gone. A congenital heart defect. They’d said the attack he’d had aged thirty would have killed him instantly and he probably wouldn’t have known anything about it. Miriam had never exactly got on well with his family, even less so once he’d gone, and although they tried to get along for Cathy’s sake while she’d been little, as soon as Cathy stopped being a cute little kid and began to come with adult burdens of her own, they’d abandoned her.
Cathy often struggled to recall the details of the time around her father’s death but one thing had always stood out clearly. Her mum had insisted on doing much of the catering for the wake herself. Cathy recalled now that she’d been like a machine in the way she’d tackled it, like someone Cathy hadn’t recognised. Even now, Cathy was struck with that same sense of how strange it had felt to see this completely new person inhabit her mother – how the usually bright smile had disappeared, how she’d stopped singing songs from shows and her beautiful eyes had become dull hollows. Cathy remembered that she’d been scared by this woman she no longer knew and that she hadn’t known what to do or how to behave around her. She’d watched as her mother whizzed feverishly around the kitchen making hot-water crust pies and flaky sausage rolls and sponges and rich Madeira cakes. She didn’t stop, didn’t tire and barely showed any emotion other than grim determination.
But it had all been a lie and later that night, the night before her father’s funeral, after Cathy had been sent to bed, she’d cracked. Cathy hadn’t been in bed when it happened. She’d been sitting on the top stair in her flannelette nightgown, listening to the sounds from downstairs and wishing she could have her mother back. She had no idea how long she’d been there but something had given her the courage to venture down and that’s when she’d found her mum slumped over the old stoneware mixing bowl that had been in the family longer than Cathy herself, sobbing uncontrollably.
‘Mummy…?’
A tentative hand found her mother’s shoulder, a tiny uncertain voice issuing from little Cathy’s throat, barely loud enough to trouble the sound of her mother’s crying. Cathy understood so little of what was happening but she felt it, so powerfully that she began to cry herself, barely knowing why except that her daddy had gone somewhere he wasn’t coming back from and her mummy was very unhappy about it. She didn’t understand it and yet there was something instinctive that made her understand more than she realised, more than any five-year-old should ever have to comprehend.
‘Mummy… Please don’t cry.’
But she kept on crying, floodgates of emotion now open and the torrent they had unleashed too powerful to let them close again.
Cathy stood at her side, hand resting on her mother’s shoulder, helpless and afraid to speak again for the fear she’d make it all worse, that her simply being there was making it worse, but powerless to leave. Perhaps her being there was making it worse, but not for the reasons Cathy would have imagined – never for those reasons. Years later the moment would come up in a candid yet painful conversation and Cathy would discover that hearing her daughter’s voice had only served to remind Miriam of how terrified she’d been at the thought of bringing her up alone, how she felt she’d ultimately fail and had already been blaming herself for a failure that was yet to happen.
After what seemed like hours, Cathy’s mum looked up. Her face was streaked with tears, her sobs stuttering to whimpers and then to a final heaving breath that stopped them in their tracks.
‘Mummy…?’ Cathy whispered.
‘I’m alright,’ her mum replied, though she could have had no idea what Cathy’s question had really meant. Even Cathy didn’t know what her one-word question was asking. It was so much more than a direct question, more of a vague but desperate plea for reassurance, for her mum to do more than say she was alright but to really be alright. She dried her eyes and pulled Cathy onto her knee, hugging her tightly – almost too tightly so that Cathy gave a little squeak.
‘I love you,’ she said.
Cathy burrowed further into her mum’s arms and let those words wash over her. It was almost enough to make her feel better, almost enough to make her believe that perhaps the mum she thought she’d lost to an emotional vacuum had finally found her way home. But not quite. What she needed to truly believe it was for something normal to happen, something that the real mummy would have done.
After a few moments of silence in her arms, Cathy’s mum peeled away to look down at her. She’d stopped crying now, though her face was puffy and her eyes red and swollen. ‘You ought to be in bed – you’ll be exhausted tomorrow and it’s going to be a long day.’
‘Can’t I stay with you?’
‘No – I have too much to do here.’
‘Please, Mummy.’
‘No; it’s bedtime. Don’t make life hard for me right now, Catherine; I’ve got enough people trying to do that.’
Cathy stared at her mother. She rarely called her Catherine. The strangeness of it started her bottom lip trembling. ‘I don’t want to go to bed. Please can I stay with you?’
‘Why don’t you want to go to bed?’ her mother asked wearily. ‘I wish I could.’
Cathy shook her head, eyes wide. ‘I’m scared.’
‘What are you scared of?’
Cathy paused. She was scared but she couldn’t understand what she was scared of, let alone articulate it. Had she been thirty years older perhaps she still wouldn’t have been able to. She shook her head again. ‘I don’t know.’
Cathy’s mother studied her for a moment. But then she gave her head a firm shake, as if coming to a decision.
‘Alright,’ she said in a voice steeled with determination once again, all trace of the emotional wreckage she’d been only moments before gone. ‘If you’re staying up you can make yourself useful and help me. I have to roll some pastry for cheese puffs – do you think you can do that?’
Cathy gave a mute nod. As long as she was close to her mum she didn’t care. She was handed the rolling pin and together they got back to work.
Cathy’s mind returned to the forest of here and now, her eyes glazed with tears that she sniffed hastily back. She’d often felt guilty herself since her mum’s death, even if she could have felt no more than helpless over her dad’s, for all the times she’d complained or been less than patient. Her mother had been cursed with a hard life and Cathy had rarely appreciated that as fully as she ought to have. If she’d had to do it all again she would have, only this time, knowing what the aftermath would feel like, she’d have done it willingly, without complaint, always with a smile on her face. She’d have told her mum more often that she loved her, that she was grateful for the years she’d spent bringing her up, that it was now her turn to care and that there was no reason to feel like a burden. Cathy had felt those things, of course, but sometimes articulating them had been much harder to do.
She thought back now to what Fleur had said the day before, how it had been laden with subtext. Did everyone see Cathy as fragile or vulnerable? She didn’t feel it – if anything she felt strong, she felt like a survivor; after all, look at what she’d survived so far in her life. She didn’t want people to see her that way or feel sorry for her.
Her eyes stubbornly filling with tears again, she took Fleur’s wreath from the carrier bag and laid it at the foot of the tree.
‘Hope you like it, Mum,’ she said.
She lingered a moment longer, and then turned to find the path out.
Cathy got off the bus a few stops early. It had been a last-minute decision, a sudden urge to w
alk home via the canal path, even though the sky was darkening and it would soon be dusk. If she hurried, though, she’d make it back long before then, and you never knew who you might meet on the way. It had been a strange and melancholy day of reflection and she really needed something to cheer her up; something to give her hope. But almost as soon as she’d watched her bus drive on she regretted her decision. It started to rain, heavy and freezing, and she still had a good thirty minutes’ walk before she could get out of it. It was at times like this she wished she’d kept the car she’d sold; after her mother’s death she’d decided that she didn’t go far enough to warrant keeping it on.
Pulling the hood of her coat up and fastening the top button, she shoved her hands deep in her pockets and did her best to stay dry as she began the trek home. She allowed herself a wry smile, despite the cold and wet. There was only one reason she was adding this extra time to her journey and, when she really looked at it, it was a very silly reason. She looked for him anyway as she walked the path, even though it had always been morning when she’d seen him before with his dog, and even though she had no reason to believe that he was always going to walk his dog in exactly the same place every day.
As she walked she scanned the path. The rain smashed into the water of the canal, the surface a mess of tiny solar systems radiating from each drop. If she hadn’t been so cold Cathy might have taken a moment to appreciate how pretty it looked, or how the town was shrouded in a heavy grey blanket of cloud that somehow softened its hard edges, or how the clouds whipped across the horizon, throwing the landscape into a fast-moving patchwork of light and dark.
But she was cold and she barely gave these things a second thought, and she was soon annoyed at herself because it was clear that nobody else was stupid enough to be out on an afternoon like this. By the time she’d reached the turn-off, where the path led back to a housing estate that led to her own home, she’d seen not another living soul.
Cathy's Christmas Kitchen: A heart-warming feel-good romantic comedy Page 14