A Midwinter Promise

by Lulu Taylor

  ‘I’m here now, don’t worry.’

  Alex said briefly, ‘I’ll be in touch, Sally,’ and headed out into the corridor. As soon as she got outside, she took a deep breath and muttered, ‘Oh God.’

  It had been some time since she’d seen Mundo. His London life and legal career kept him busy. He lived with a younger woman, a leggy Spanish beauty who was a model or an actress, or a combination of the two. He was not a part of Alex’s present, beyond the odd shared Christmas lunch or family gathering, but he had been a part of her past, his arrival tied up with that awful time when life had changed forever. Mundo had seemed quiet at first, but she soon learned that he was simply observing, biding his time before he made his mark in the family. Slotting neatly in age between her and Johnnie, he seemed to fit easily between them and he soon made it his hobby to try and cause mischief. Johnnie was his main target, and Mundo was adept at the art of annoyance. Besides nasty little tricks, the pinching and sly kicks, he liked to niggle, prickle and torment in tiny ways that gradually became unendurable, until his victim exploded with rage, and became the object of parental wrath. It was hard to explain that Mundo was doing whatever it was on purpose simply to provoke. The answer would usually be to put up with it.

  Pa would say crossly, ‘Why can’t he touch your football?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Johnnie would say, red-faced, ‘he keeps picking at it just to annoy me, even though I asked him to stop.’

  ‘Ignore him.’

  But Mundo didn’t want to be ignored. He desired a reaction. His games with Johnnie were straightforward – he liked to pitch Johnnie into a fury, then sit back and watch him get punished for reacting to his slow-acting torture. Later, he would lord it over Johnnie about just about everything: exams, girlfriends, clothes, music, possessions. Whatever Johnnie had, Mundo had better and liked to make sure Johnnie knew it. Johnnie learned to ignore him, but his confidence was badly undermined.

  His games with Alex were more subtle. He had been a dark force in her teenage years and she tried to do what Johnnie had done: wipe him out of her mind. She gave him barely a thought, hardly spoke to him when she saw him, determined to keep him at a distance.

  That’s not going to be so easy if he’s staying here. Let’s hope he has to get back to his work soon. I don’t know how I’ll cope if he’s around.

  She shivered as she headed back to the car.

  On her way to the Old Barn, Alex obeyed an impulse and drove past her gate, taking the road onwards, skirting the old wall of Tawray until she came to the entrance, then made her way between the old gates. The drive was bumpy, the potholes having been crammed full of gravel rather than properly mended, but it was still impressive, taking the curving road round to the house. It was so familiar that it was hard to believe the old house was no longer her home, that she couldn’t run in and up the stairs to her old bedroom with its wallpaper of oranges and lemons and the rattan lampshade, left over from the summer she demanded to be allowed to decorate it. Sally hadn’t wanted it but Pa had persuaded her, one of the few times he’d taken Alex’s part against his wife’s wishes. Sally’s condition was that Alex move into what had been the nursery and make that her room instead of the large room she’d had at the front of the house. Alex hadn’t minded, she preferred her new room, and Sally got to redecorate the old one just as she liked, in tones of peach and beige, with swagged, tasselled curtains, and a chintz bedspread with a mound of lace-edged cushions on it.

  But it’s not our house anymore, she reminded herself, and she wondered if the new owners would strip off her old wallpaper and make it all sleek and modern. I hope not. I hope they don’t start knocking through and making spaces that shouldn’t be there. The bones of it are just right. At least Sally never did anything to those.

  She parked on the gravel next to two other cars, and went quickly up the stone steps to the front door. The old bell chimed inside when she pressed the button, and she waited patiently, remembering how long it could take to answer the door if you happened to be upstairs when the bell went. After five minutes, she rang again, and waited some more. She was on the point of giving up when the door opened a small way and a woman’s face appeared in the gap. She was frowning and looked suspicious.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Hello, I’m sorry to bother you. I’m Alex Pengelly. I used to live here, years ago, before it was rented out and then sold. In fact, I grew up here.’ She waited a moment, expecting a reaction or an expression of interest, but there was nothing. If anything, the woman looked even more suspicious.

  ‘So . . .’ She smiled brightly, trying to cover her awkwardness. ‘I don’t suppose you know, but it’s a tradition to decorate the house at Christmas with dried flowers, and let people in to see it, and I wondered if you might consider carrying it on. I can tell you all about it, how it works, all that. I realise it’s a big ask, but I do the flowers; I run the Tawray Flower Company, we’re based over there’ – she pointed in the direction of the Old Barn and the flower fields that lay to the east of the house, away from the sea – ‘and I’d be happy to do them again. In fact, I’d like to.’

  ‘No thanks.’ The face disappeared and the door started to close.

  ‘Wait. Are you sure? I mean, it’s a real tradition, it would be a shame to lose it . . .’

  The face reappeared, blank and uninterested. ‘We’re not going to be here at Christmas,’ the woman said. ‘We spend it in Antigua. The house will be shut up, I think. Sorry. Bye.’ The face disappeared again, the door closed firmly.

  Alex stood staring at it, unexpectedly upset.

  ‘You don’t have to be so rude about it!’ she said loudly, then turned on her heel and ran off down the steps. She realised that she’d been expecting to be asked in, welcomed almost, and that the new people would be interested in the history and traditions of the house.

  As she drove out of the gates, she realised she was crying.

  ‘Idiot,’ she said aloud. ‘You’re a bloody idiot.’

  She meant herself.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On the way to the hospital the next day, Alex noticed that all the festive lights were up. Christmas was coming, and quickly. The girls had been talking about the various concerts and activities that would be going on at school. They were worried about their grandfather and yet they seemed to have a blithe confidence that everything would be normal by the time it came to Christmas.

  Usually, they were either with Sally and Pa, or at the Old Barn, but Johnnie and his family always stayed with Alex. Last year had been particularly awful, with her and Tim hosting the whole thing but barely able to speak to one another. Sally had been bright and cheerful, acting the part of the perfect guest, while delivering barbed compliments or asking innocently skewering questions. Alex had done everything necessary: the tree, the presents, the decorations, the food and drink, the stockings and mince pies, and ticked all the dozens of boxes that had to be ticked; she stayed sane by holding on for Tim’s departure to America in January. She hadn’t known it was going to be the last Christmas they spent together, but she would not have been surprised if someone had told her. The communication between her and Tim, never wonderful even in the first flush of their relationship, had grown weaker and then eroded away to nothing. He’d seemed bored by her, uninterested in her work, her friendships, her life. He shared little of his own life with her, determined to focus only on the practical as though that was the measure of a relationship: being able to make a timetable and stick to it.

  I probably would have been relieved if I’d known it was coming to an end. But I would have been heartbroken if someone had told me it would be Pa’s last Christmas.

  Pa had kept out of everyone’s way, usually nursing a glass of something by the fire with a newspaper or a book, coming obediently when summoned to the table, contributing just as much as was required. He loved the girls, and they gravitated to him quite naturally. Sometimes Alex found him engrossed in a card game or in front of a Lud
o board with one or both of them, usually when Sally was out of the way doing something else. It reminded her of the Christmases at Tawray, which now were such vague memories, they were more like dreams.

  At Tawray, the huge tree in the hall reached up nearly to the landing, decorated with the flower baubles. There hadn’t been many presents under the tree, nothing like the mass of stuff that seemed to collect there these days, and stockings had been Pa’s old socks mostly full of fruit and bags of nuts, along with chocolate and a book. Christmas lunch, after church, had been a simpler affair as well, without the astonishing array of extras a modern Christmas seemed to require. A quick walk and the giddy excitement of the afternoon film had completed the day, and then it was all over and back to normality. It hadn’t been the great month-long festival she had to endure these days. The only real extravagance was the glorious bounty of dried flowers adorning the hall, the drawing room and the state rooms, exquisitely pretty with their vintage colours and fragile petals.

  But whatever the factual accuracy of her memories – had Mum appeared with a roasted goose on a platter, a paper crown falling over one eye as she shouted, ‘Ta dah!’? – the emotional truth was the one she clung to: it had been the happiest of times, with the four of them full of joy and togetherness, living at Tawray even though it was so shabby and far too big for them. Life had been as close to perfect as Alex could imagine. And, if she remembered their last Christmas together rightly, then she’d got the skipping rope with red handles she’d wanted so badly, but better than that, her own gardening set and packets of seeds, and a patch of ground of her own in the walled garden.

  And that was her legacy to me – the flowers.

  The following year, Sally had been there. No more dried flowers until Alex had taken over the job again for herself. Now, whenever she was hanging her baubles on the tree, she felt close to her mother again. It was the only time she ever did.

  A bitter taste came into Alex’s mouth as she remembered the peremptory refusal of the new owner to have anything to do with the arrangement.

  I’ve lost that connection. It’s gone forever.

  The consultant had a talk with her and Sally that morning. Mundo had not accompanied his mother; Sally didn’t say why.

  ‘My husband should be at home with me,’ Sally insisted, though her voice was tremulous with emotion. ‘You say he’s been through the worst on the one hand, but you also say he’s not going to improve. I don’t want him lying here indefinitely when he could be at home where I can look after him. And if it’s all going to end in any case, I know he’d prefer it to be at home. Besides which, we’d be freeing up this bed for someone else.’

  ‘Arrangements can be made,’ the consultant said, ‘but you’ll have to make some provision for him.’

  ‘We’re in a position to do that,’ Sally declared.

  ‘You’ll need a ground-floor room. We can supply a hospital bed temporarily. But a nurse will also be required, there’s no way you can care for him alone.’

  ‘That’s not a problem. I told you, we can make the arrangements.’

  Alex felt that, for once, Sally’s obstinacy and insistence on her own way were a good thing. She would get what she wanted, and Alex agreed with her: Pa would be happier at home. If he regained consciousness, then he’d be somewhere familiar. If not, they would all have the comfort of being in his environment, not here, with its notes of urgency and temporal care. You were on your way somewhere in a hospital: to recovery and departure, or to the morgue. At home, you had arrived and no one would be hurrying you out to somewhere else. There would be peace and calm and time at home.

  ‘Alex will help, won’t you?’ Sally said, turning to her, her eyes enquiring.

  Alex stared back at her. She had never heard a note like this in Sally’s voice: beseeching, almost a little pleading, with something humble in it. She needs me now.

  Suddenly she saw herself and Johnnie as standing together at a crossroads. They’d arrived here after a long and difficult journey, and they’d been badly treated by others on the road. Now they were in a position either to repay cruelty with kindness, or to take pleasure in refusal, perhaps even in revenge. Johnnie, she felt, would be tempted to take the latter course.

  She thought suddenly of Johnnie’s suggestion that Sally and Pa had been having an affair, and that had caused Mum’s death. No wonder he hates Sally, if he thinks that. But could it be true? It was a monstrous thought. Alex had always taken it for granted that the order of things had followed correctly: Mum dying, Pa grieving, Sally supporting, a love affair beginning. It seemed too awful to consider that she might have got it all back to front. But watching Sally talking to the consultant, adamant and single-minded in pursuit of what she wanted, Alex considered for the first time that perhaps it could have happened that way.

  But that’s too awful. She searched her memory. She had always believed in the love that Pa had for her mother. If he hadn’t loved her, he would never have broken down the way he did when she died. No. I’m sure Johnnie’s wrong. Pa was devastated. Sally put him back together. That’s the way it was.

  Sally hadn’t waited for Alex’s reply. She and the consultant were discussing the practicalities of transferral, the necessary equipment and all the documentation that would need to be approved and signed before David was released to their care.

  They’re going to let him come home. That means they think he’s going to die. She looked at her father. Oh Pa. I wish we’d had the chance to talk – really talk – before this happened.

  Pa was going to be wrenched away without warning, just as Mum had been. Alex was gripped by a convulsion of grief. The house was gone, her parents were gone, her husband was gone. She still had her girls and her work, and the Old Barn. But she felt like she was standing on the deck of a ship abandoned by the rest of the crew, gazing out into unknown and stormy waters. The sky was dark, and she was afraid.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Netta asked, exasperation in her voice. Johnnie was in the utility room, hanging wet laundry out on a rack.

  He looked up from where he was carefully draping a pair of underpants over a rail. ‘I heard the washing machine finish its cycle so I thought I’d unload it.’

  ‘Right.’ She came over, sighing a little. ‘That’s very nice of you, but you need to hang it like this.’ She took the pants, whipped them out so the creases fell away and then placed them neatly over the rail. ‘Or else they dry sort of crunchy.’ Her eyes travelled over the rest of the haphazardly placed clothes. ‘But obviously . . . I appreciate it.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, feeling foolish. ‘I was . . . just trying to help.’

  ‘I know.’ She looked as if she was going to say something else, then turned and went back into the kitchen.

  Johnnie stared at the rack. His experience of a near-miss on the road had shaken him. He hadn’t felt so grateful to come home in years; walking through the door had felt like a miracle. The ordinary things in his life appeared like magical blessings, and the sight of Netta and his sons had inspired a deep and powerful joy. That night, pressed against her warm body in bed, he had inhaled the scent of her skin and hair like a drowning man gasping in sweet air. She was life, and he was life. They had made life together, and they were present, on earth, right now: hearts beating, lungs inflating, synapses sparking, blood pulsing around them, alive. There was Pa, cold and unconscious in a hospital. There was the alternative Johnnie, dead in a smash on a Cornish road, an RTA statistic. There were all the people who’d gone before who’d had their time and were now dead. But he and Netta were alive, still young, still healthy, still here. He’d kissed her until she woke up, drowsy, warm and welcoming, and he’d made love to her, feeling everything with such intensity it was almost like some kind of acid trip. He never wanted to feel numb to life again, even though he knew it was impossible to exist permanently in such a heightened state.

  I want to make it up to her. I want to be the best husband I can be, while I still can.


  He was guilty sometimes of sleepwalking through life, and he wanted to open his eyes, see and participate. He’d come so close to death, he had to grasp life, live it well and make up for his failings so he could show Netta how much he loved her.

  Johnnie hung out the rest of the laundry, trying to imitate Netta’s method but finding that the wet garments didn’t behave for him as they did for her. Then he went back into the kitchen. Bertie had already gone off to school with his driver and the twins were upstairs, doing their teeth. Netta was sitting at the kitchen table, wrapped in a towelling robe, her short black hair wet, and she was crying.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, concerned, coming over and sitting next to her. ‘What’s wrong?’

  She lifted reddened eyes to him. ‘I’m stressed, Johnnie. I’ve got a hell of a day in front of me, a big presentation to a load of tax lawyers, I’ve got to leave early for Joe’s nativity play and I’m supposed to take Christmas treats for everyone as well. Plus Nathan’s got football later and his kit is wet, and I don’t know how I’m going to pick him up from that, and get Joe fed and be back in time for Bertie, because Lydia can’t come today. And now’ – tears welled up and flowed down her cheeks, turning her brown eyes hazel and making her nose go pink – ‘you’ve hung the laundry all crooked.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was trying to help.’

  ‘I know. I can’t explain.’ She began to weep hard. ‘I mean, it just . . . I hate seeing it like that, all wonky, knowing it will dry wrong. But how can I complain when obviously it’s nice of you to make the gesture?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. It was frustrating that his efforts had backfired and he seemed to have made things worse when he wanted to make them better. He tried to stay sympathetic. ‘I know you’re under a lot of pressure. Christmas is tough, and you do such a lot to keep everyone happy. Can I do anything to help you with the day?’

  ‘What can you do?’ She shrugged. ‘You’re at work in town.’ Her shoulders slumped. ‘I just feel that . . . the work of the family, the work of the house . . . that’s all on me. You let me do the lion’s share with Bertie, you know you do. I’m the one who copes with him most of the time. And I have a job. Your job seems to excuse you from all that other stuff, and when you do a bit of it, you don’t even know how to do it properly. And what does it matter to you? You won’t be ironing it, or putting it away, so what it does matter if it dries wrong?’