Christmas at Hope Cottage

by Lily Graham

  ‘You don’t think it’s hers, do you?’

  Emma opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  Evie hesitated. ‘Your mother changed over the years. It’s partly my fault, partly her own, partly this village and what it means to be a Halloway in a place where not much has changed in over two-hundred years… you’ll learn about that soon enough, but for now all you need to know is that this was hers, and that there was a time when she wrote in this, when she liked nothing better than her life here at Hope Cottage.’

  Evie opened the notebook to the back cover and approached Emma. ‘I’m just going to show you this, okay?’

  Emma took a hesitant step backwards as Evie handed her back the notebook, pointing to where an old, sepia-toned photograph was pasted inside.

  Emma’s mouth parted in surprise. It was a girl, close to her own age, with thick black hair, head thrown back in laughter, her arms wrapped round a somewhat younger and plumper Evie. They were standing before the same old, navy range in the kitchen. Beneath the photograph, written in childish script, was: ‘Margaret and Evie Halloway, Hope Cottage, 1974.’

  Emma crept forward, her fingers tracing over her mother’s face and the Halloway name in wonder.

  ‘Did you know it’s a family tradition to keep the Halloway name for girls, even after they marry and have children?’

  Emma looked up at Evie in surprise. She knew that lots of people didn’t understand why she didn’t have her father’s last name – her father included, who’d felt a little betrayed that his child didn’t have his last name. Officially her birth certificate said Emma Rose McGrath Halloway. It was something that always came up when her parents were arguing, when they thought she couldn’t hear them. ‘Girls are always Halloways, even I can’t go against that,’ her mother had said once when she’d had a bit too much to drink, trying to explain why she’d gone behind her husband’s back and filled in Emma’s birth certificate when he’d left the hospital for a cup of tea. He’d said she could have at least called her Emma Halloway McGrath.

  ‘It’s because of this,’ said Evie, pointing to the enormous book open on the table. ‘It’s the Halloway Recipe Book. It’s over two hundred years old, and filled with all the recipes Halloway women have made over the years – all our hopes, our secrets too. It’s why it never leaves this cottage. Some say if it did, well… who knows what may happen?’

  Emma’s lips parted in surprise and she crept forward to see, smoothing her long red hair behind her ears. The book was enormous; the cover was made of pale blue cloth with tiny white flowers that had been faded by time to the texture of fine linen, soft as butter. It was brimming with pages that had been crammed together and stitched inside. Each page told a story, offering a window into the past: the types of foods that were fashionable in the 1800s; the sorts of spices that were favoured when King George IV was on the throne; surviving the rations and the two world wars. There were recipes from all the years in between, in times of plenty and times of lack. Some of the pages were crisp and white, others had newsprint in the margins, where old headlines and adverts rested alongside the recipes, telling them to ‘Make Do and Mend’ and ‘Keep Calm and Have A Cup of Yorkshire Tea’.

  ‘We used newspaper during the war years – when paper was a little scarce – we painted it white, then wrote on that. Then later, newspaper became scarce as well,’ Evie said.

  There must have been thousands of handwritten recipes. Some were elaborately hand-lettered in perfect calligraphy; others were scrawled, jotted in haste. Some had beautiful watercolour illustrations to accompany them; others were in simple copperplate, with no adornment beyond the date of their creation.

  The recipe names made her pause. Some were austere and rather puzzling, like one called The Sinking Ship, which spoke of turning tides and changing fortunes; others were tongue-in-cheek and made her smile as she silently mouthed the words. She looked at Evie in surprise. They weren’t like any recipes she’d ever heard of before. The ones she liked best were a little bit funny and had names like the titles of old songs, Come Together Stew, Mend Fences Flambé, Hit the Road Roulade and Just in Time Tagliatelle.

  ‘They say what they mean, not what they are,’ explained Evie, who had a fondness for naming some of the recipes she created after old rock ’n’ roll tunes, influenced, no doubt, by the local vintage-music station, The Old Whistle, which was always on. ‘A good recipe isn’t just about making something that tastes good, you see?’

  Emma shook her head. She’d always thought that taste was the most important thing.

  ‘The trick to a great recipe is first having a clear intention of what you’d like to achieve. Food does so much more than feed the body, you know? It can feed the spirit too, help it to grow, if you have the right ingredients and a firm intention, that is,’ Evie said, picking up the basket and beckoning Emma to follow out the back door.

  When she opened it, though, she stopped short, shook her head and sighed, raising her eyes heavenward, as if to seek guidance up there. For there, by the low garden gate, were two women, waiting with rather expectant grins.

  One was plump, with pale, nearly white, flyway hair and glasses as thick as the end of a jam jar. The other was tall and stout with thick, short dark hair and the somewhat mistaken belief that riding boots complemented any outfit.

  ‘Ah,’ said Evie.

  ‘Ah, indeed,’ said the tall, stout one, blue eyes dancing.

  ‘Were you on your way to us?’ asked the plump one, with a wide grin. ‘Wouldn’t that have been funny?’ she went on. Even with the distance between them, Emma could see that her nail polish was a pearly sort of purple, and most of it was chipped away.

  ‘Oh, I doubt that, Dot,’ said the other, opening the gate, giving Evie an almost apologetic look as she said, ‘We were in the neighbourhood…’

  Evie’s lips twitched. ‘That’s not hard, is it?’

  Dot grinned. ‘No, because we live here!’ she said, directing her reply to Emma.

  ‘Well, just up the road, anyway,’ she added, indicating the cobbled high street in the distance.

  Evie rolled her eyes. ‘Emma, meet my sisters. Dot,’ she said indicating the one with the bottle-thick glasses on the end of her nose, and ‘Agatha Halloway,’ she said of the other. ‘Or Laurel and Hardy.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ said Agatha. ‘What does that make you – Curly?’

  Dot cocked her head to the side and considered her great-niece, noting the freckles, the Halloway eyes, the small frame, then frowned.

  ‘Red?’ she asked, looking at Evie as if for guidance.

  ‘Red’, repeated Agatha, who looked rather taken aback at the thought as well.

  ‘That Scot…’ explained Evie.

  Two nearly identical pairs of round blue eyes widened. ‘That cheeky madam,’ said Agatha. ‘She denied it like nobody’s business, told me she was moving to London for work.’ Her eyes grew sad and a tear leaked down her cheek.

  Dot brushed the tear off her sister’s face, though her own eyes had filled too, just as Evie’s had.

  Evie nodded. She couldn’t help wishing things had been different – that Margaret hadn’t left that day, hadn’t felt the need to get away, hadn’t felt the need to change everything she was.

  ‘To be fair, it’s a nice change,’ said Dot, who had that air of someone who despite the worst of circumstances tries to put on a brave, kind face, glancing from Emma’s mane to Evie and Agatha’s wild crops of hair.

  Halloways were not often described as the sort of people who had ‘good hair days’, unless the definition was one that meant it was a day that one of them hadn’t broken a hairbrush, or made the local hairdresser consider closing up shop just because they had decided to make an appointment.

  Silence followed this rather sore point. Which Dot, with her relatively sleek-by-comparison hair, often pressed.

  ‘So… have you shown her The Book?’ asked Agatha.

  ‘She’s just got here,’ protested Evie. ‘But yes, I di
d. We’re taking it easy, mind – that goes for you two as well. I was hoping to introduce you both a little later, actually… Once Emma has had a chance to catch her breath,’ she said pointedly.

  Agatha gave Evie a long-suffering look; Agatha was not the type of person who believed in taking anything slow, or easy for that matter. ‘Because there’s an easy way to break the news to a six-year-old that she’s just been handed over to a family who many think are witches?’

  Emma gasped.

  Chapter Six

  ‘To be fair, the child doesn’t look scared any more,’ said Dot, cowering a little under Evie’s glower as the latter set down cups of tea in front of her and Agatha, with a heavy thud, then proceeded to pour a liberal amount of brandy into her own, despite the relatively early hour.

  Evie pinched the bridge of her nose, closed her eyes and prayed for strength. ‘That’s only because I told her the truth.’

  ‘Emma,’ she went on, addressing the child, who had been watching the exchange like a ping-pong match since Evie’s face turned tomato red and she began shouting at her sisters from the doorway, arms gesturing wildly, pointed fingers shaking; a few nosy neighbours started craning their necks over garden fences to witness the commotion, so Dot had shooed the four of them all into the cottage.

  ‘You remember how I explained about The Book?’ said Evie.

  Emma gave a hesitant nod.

  ‘Well, that’s really what Aggie means. It’s something all Halloway girls are born with – your mother too. We offer hope, which is a magic all of its own, and it affects the food we make.’

  ‘The boys get other things,’ chipped in Dot.

  Aggie snorted. ‘Like the power of evaporation – they disappear at will.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Dot. ‘Anyway, Daddy wasn’t a Halloway, technically.’

  Evie looked away. ‘It isn’t easy on the men, this, we have enough failed relationships in our family to attest to that, but that’s a story for another day.’

  ‘It isn’t easy on the women either,’ pointed out Aggie. ‘I mean look at your mother,’ she told Emma, whose ears perked up at her mention.

  ‘Oh, she was excellent in the kitchen, a real natural,’ enthused Dot, her eyes wide behind their thick lenses. ‘She cooked with her heart, and you often felt what she did in what she made. Which, of course, came with its problems, especially when she was a teenager, struggling with her emotions. And later too, really, perhaps it was harder for her because it called so loudly.’

  They nodded solemnly. ‘It’s why she resisted it so much,’ said Dot, wisely.

  To her credit, Emma didn’t look quite as frightened as a child in her situation would have had every right to be.

  ‘What do you think about this?’ asked Agatha.

  Emma shrugged.

  ‘She doesn’t speak,’ said Evie, shaking her head in exasperation. It wasn’t like she hadn’t told them about it. They just kept forgetting.

  Dot and Agatha shared a look. ‘Not a word?’

  ‘Nothing since the accident.’

  ‘Ah, poor thing,’ said Dot, standing up and consulting The Book. ‘I seem to recall an excellent recipe that Mother used on our evacuee from the Blitz, what was his name – Johnny?’

  ‘Jason,’ said Evie.

  ‘Ah yes, poor lad. He didn’t speak either, in the beginning.’

  ‘I’ve decided on the tomato tagine,’ said Evie. Gentle was best.

  ‘That slow burner?’ said Aggie, tutting. She stood up and went to stand next to her sister, skipping through the pages. ‘Why not something with a bit of zap, a bit of fizzle – how about this?’ she said, settling on one that promised quick-fire results. Lightning Bolt Lemon Pie was exactly the sort of recipe Agatha would choose, the sort of thing only someone with a gambler’s heart would try. ‘It worked on old Bob Hogson, remember?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Evie in exasperation, pinching the bridge of her nose again. ‘The family wanted a bit of peace and quiet from his constant moans—’

  ‘Well, they got it, didn’t they?’

  ‘Yes, only they realised that his constant griping was the only thing that had been keeping him alive! He withered away soon after that with nothing left to care about.’

  Evie shook her head, took The Book from her sister and flipped it back to the tagine, giving the page a firm pat. ‘We just want a bit of calm. No whirlwind changes. Slow and steady wins the race,’ she said, decisively.

  Aggie looked at her in disbelief. ‘Clearly, you know nothing about racing.’

  * * *

  Emma learned that Dot and Aggie were a part of Hope Cottage, just as much as Pennywort and The Book. Dot lived in a spacious bungalow with her husband Jo, who ran the used car dealership in town.

  If you visited her house, you’d almost always catch her in her bathrobe and slippers, even at midday, though she always had her make-up on; she was a bit vain about her big, round eyes and full Cupid’s bow mouth and always wanted them to be seen at their best. As soon as you were inside she’d ply you with tea, then dash off to get changed, all the while telling you secrets through the closed bedroom door. Dot liked nothing better than telling stories, and she could suck you in and make time go past faster than you could blink. Before you knew it, you were agreeing to another cup of tea and listening to the latest gossip. Some said that Jessica Flynn, the newscaster on local radio station The Whistle Blower, kept Dot on speed-dial for her nightly round-up of the village news, because no one knew more about the residents of Whistling than her.

  She told her stories with drama and intrigue and an uncanny knack for voices. Emma learned, like many of the residents of Whistling, that you visited Dot when you had time to spare – and at your own peril if you didn’t. Minutes and hours and afternoons could pass without you realising you’d fallen under Dot’s spell. She served endless pots of tea and old-fashioned cakes that left your mouth watering for more; there were Eccles cakes, rich with nutmeg and currants, mountains of singin’ hinnies, hot and rich with honey, and before you knew it, even though you’d just come for a cuppa you’d left after the last game of cards, well after dinner and well past dark.

  But she was more than just a storyteller. Dot was the one you called when you needed calm and cheer, when it felt like all hope was lost. Aggie was the one who brought luck. Though, somehow, she’d never managed to stumble on any of it for herself. After husband number three, one would imagine she’d given up, but she was a romantic at heart.

  ‘Aggie is the oldest,’ said Dot. ‘And should have been the one to run Hope Cottage—’

  ‘Only I ran away with a drummer when I was eighteen,’ said Aggie. She’d married Stan straight away. His band had had a few hits back in the sixties. Michael was next – he became a professional poker player. And Bill, in her thirties when she thought that maybe it would be a good idea to date another artist like herself. The short version was that it had not been.

  Aggie lived in a flat just off the high street, where she painted enormous canvases filled with rushes of black swirling paint that she said sometimes reflected her moods. Shadow art, she called it. The first-time Emma visited her flat and stood in Aggie’s studio, she realised she recognised them, or at least ones like them; there had been several hanging in her old London flat, her home with her parents.

  ‘You know these?’ she asked, as Emma stared at them in wonder. Tears came to her eyes as Emma nodded.

  Aggie stared at her. ‘Your mother was one of my first customers – we used to be very close, she and I. Same temperament,’ she said, with a grin. ‘I just wish she’d told us about you,’ she went on, squeezing Emma’s shoulder.

  ‘That makes two of us,’ said Evie.

  ‘Three,’ said Dot, who was wiping away a tear. They’d been doing a lot of crying and talking about Emma’s mother, which was something that Emma found helpful; at least she wasn’t alone in her grief.

  ‘And I got married soon after, to Jo,’ said Dot, who didn’t have any chil
dren of her own. This had been a devastating blow; of all of them, Dot was the most motherly.

  ‘So, running the cottage fell to me,’ said Evie, ‘but it’s all of ours really – yours too.’

  Chapter Seven

  Present day

  * * *

  It was after midnight when Emma heard the door to the cottage open and low footsteps crossing the flagstone floor, en route to the fridge.

  Emma switched on the light.

  Sandro was standing with a stack of trays balanced one on top of the other, which he almost dropped, making at the same time a funny, rather high-pitched cry.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said, his eyes wide, when he saw her.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Emma, snorting. ‘You scream like a girl by the way.’

  He laughed. ‘You try making a manly scream, Pajarita, when you think someone is about to attack you with that,’ he said pointing at her crutch, which was casting a rather ominous scythe-like shadow across the wall.

  Emma started to giggle.