It Must Have Been the Mistletoe

by Judy Astley

  ‘I didn’t know what to say,’ she said eventually. ‘It’s just as much a surprise to me as it is to you. I blame that food poisoning last month. The Pill doesn’t like episodes like that.’

  ‘The dodgy prawns? I remember.’ He grinned. ‘You said you’d never eat another prawn in your life.’

  ‘You’re cross.’

  ‘I’m not. Of course I’m not. But I wish you hadn’t kept it a secret. I hate to think you’ve been worrying alone all this time.’

  ‘You are cross. So am I.’

  ‘But what’s the point of that?’ At last Sam came and sat beside her. ‘It’s not so terrible, is it? It’ll work out.’

  She wiped her eyes with one of Alfie’s vests. As always, Sam handed her a bunch of tissues and she blew her nose.

  ‘How can it work out, Sam? Do you mean I should have a termination? Or not? And if not, what about my job and the children and … well, everything? And I feel bad about Thea. She wanted hers so much and now look, I’ve suddenly got one, far too easily and carelessly, and she hasn’t.’

  Sam gave her a puzzled look. ‘You mean you don’t want it?’

  ‘Well, of course I do. But it’s so difficult. Three of them?’

  ‘Yeah. Three of them. Your folks managed it, didn’t they? If they’d gone by your thinking, you wouldn’t even be here.’

  ‘You can’t manage three – you get flaky enough with the childcare for these two. And we both know I have to hang on to my job. It’s a lot more secure than yours.’

  ‘We do know that.’ He nodded his head. ‘But there’s maternity leave and so on. It’ll work out. And anyway, by then, as Del Boy would say, we’ll all be millionaires.’

  She laughed and at last looked up at him. ‘So we’re having a baby, then?’

  He hugged her close and kissed her. ‘Looks like we are, doesn’t it?’

  Alec was very quiet and had cut himself off a bit from the rest of them. All morning he’d been in a corner of the smaller sitting room, in an armchair by the window either staring out of it in the kind of way that made Anna think he wasn’t really focusing on anything, or he was reading a four-day-old Guardian but never turning a page. Anna herself was busy in the kitchen. She’d cooked onions, chopped up tomatoes and counted out plenty of buns to put the sausages in. Charlotte had gone on kitchen strike, citing her newly varnished nails, and was lying on a sofa watching The Great Escape on TV and claiming that a friend of her mother’s had once slept with Steve McQueen. That had been yet another thing that made Anna feel her age, and it annoyed her. She didn’t normally think anything of being in possession of a Freedom Pass because she was already full of a lifetime of good times and fun. She must, she resolved for the New Year, learn to ignore such remarks or at least not read anything into them.

  Anna went to check the fires and found that Alec hadn’t even noticed that the one close to him had almost gone out. If she were being ridiculously fanciful, she’d imagine him on a polar expedition, showing signs of being the first one to crack and silently pondering that long walk out into the snow.

  ‘Are you OK?’ she asked as she carefully offered the fire some more kindling and smaller logs in a plea to get it restarted. ‘You’re very quiet.’

  ‘I just checked the website and there are no trains,’ he said, looking glum.

  ‘Well, there weren’t going to be any today, were there? So what does it matter?’ She sounded, even to herself, a bit aggressive here. ‘Sorry, I meant, well – it’s Boxing Day. You couldn’t escape yet even if there wasn’t any snow.’

  ‘The line’s blocked, apparently. There’s a warning for when the trains start running again. It could be months.’ He sighed. Clutching his book and leaning back in the chair, he briefly reminded Anna of some swoony, consumptive Victorian heroine. She managed – just – not to laugh.

  ‘You’re being a bit dramatic, aren’t you? Of course it won’t be months. It wasn’t even that long when the line got broken by the floods, and this is nothing like so bad. Are you so fed up with us all?’ She went and sat on the arm of the chair and stroked his hair. It was quite long and soft and felt like a young boy’s hair. She removed her hand quickly.

  ‘That was nice,’ he said, giving her a wan smile. The consumptive look again, she thought.

  ‘You’re just bored,’ she told him, feeling a bit impatient. ‘If you’re short of something to do, you could go and empty the dishwasher. It’s just finished its cycle.’ Even to herself she sounded like a mum chivvying a lumpen teenager but she wasn’t going to apologize for that.

  ‘Oh. OK then. Sorry – have I been lazy? Suki always thought I was. She said it was my mum’s fault for doing everything for me. But now Suki does everything for our kids. You can’t win.’

  He looked even more gloomy, which made Anna want to slap his wrists. There could be no surer sign, if any more were needed, that they were no longer possible as a relationship. He wasn’t that much younger than she was, only about fifteen years, she wasn’t quite sure, but today he seemed like a young sullen lad in need of coaxing into cheerfulness. She’d done all that and had no wish to start again.

  ‘Look, this weather can’t last much longer. You’ll be out of here soon enough,’ she told him, crossing her fingers and hoping she was right. She was as fed up with being incarcerated as any of them but she and Thea seemed to be the only ones making the best of it – apart from Milly and Alfie, who loved it – and trying to gee the others up. ‘You’ll be on the train home in a day or two.’

  ‘Mum wants me to pick her up in Southampton on Thursday. She doesn’t believe I might not make it.’

  ‘What happened to her cruise?’ The fire was reluctantly spitting into life and Anna went and prodded it a bit more, moving logs to let air through.

  ‘Norovirus,’ he said. ‘Went right through the ship, crew and passengers, she says. They’re docked in the Solent and they’ve got to stay there till Thursday, even the well ones, till the health people clear them. Mum hasn’t got it, which is lucky, or it might kill her off.’

  ‘So you heard quite a bit from her then?’ Anna pictured Muriel on board, sweeping through the ship’s smartest dining room in one of her voluminous butterfly-sleeved ensembles, obliviously swishing glasses and cutlery from the tables of those she passed. She wouldn’t give house room to a nasty intruder like norovirus. Her immune system would trip it up on a heap of defending bacteria.

  ‘Email. I told her I was staying with you and she said what a coincidence that you knew me; she assumed I was a friend of one of your children.’ They smiled at each other for a moment and she knew that he knew that whatever it was they’d had was now over.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, leaning down to kiss his cheek.

  ‘What, no mistletoe?’ he said, looking a bit flustered.

  ‘No. No need for it now, is there?’

  ‘I suppose not. But thanks for what?’

  ‘For a very good time I never expected to have. Don’t ever think I didn’t enjoy it. But …’

  ‘I know. I was sure there’d be a “but”.’

  ‘She’s right, your mother.’

  ‘She didn’t say anything.’

  ‘She did, you know. That thing she said about my children. It was just a nudge – something we do. I’d probably do the same if it were my children, even when they’re pushing fifty, like you are.’

  There was a rustle and a bustle and Charlotte whirled in wearing a sleeveless taffeta dress studded with diamanté around the low neckline. The skirt was a tulip shape, although Anna, if she were being as catty as she was ashamed to be feeling, would say it was a tulip in very full bloom rather than one demurely half-open.

  ‘Shall I wear this?’ Charlotte said. ‘Not too much, is it?’

  Anna took a sly look at Alec; his face had livened up at the sight of Charlotte and several pounds of on-show flesh. Well, it was good, she thought, that at last something had cheered him up.

  ‘For a barbecue on the beach?’ Anna said. �
��Well, it’s very nice and you do look lovely in it, but could I suggest a warm cardie?’

  ‘Aw, aren’t they sweet? They’re holding hands.’ Sean, sitting beside Thea close to the fire they’d made at the foot of the sandy hill, was looking at Sam and Emily standing close together by the barbecue. Mike and Alec were poking sausages around the flames with spatulas, and Charlotte – now wearing trousers and a huge baggy jumper – was squidging ketchup onto Milly’s hot dog.

  ‘She’s pregnant,’ Thea murmured, hardly knowing where the words had come from.

  ‘Is she? The hand-holding one? Is she the one who’s got the two little children?’

  ‘Yes, that’s Emily.’ Thea felt a bit choked. She didn’t even know for sure if she was right, but the statement had come from somewhere almost primeval. There was a softness to Emily today. There’d been a jumpy, cold worriedness to her till now.

  ‘I could be wrong,’ she backtracked, ‘but I don’t think I am.’

  ‘Oh. OK. Well, that’s good, isn’t it?’ Sean asked. ‘Tell you what, shall we go and look at the rock pools over there? I want to see what’s survived the cold.’

  He was being tactful, well able to tell that she was getting emotional.

  ‘Yes. I’m up for that, so long as the warmth from the fire that we’ve got on us doesn’t disappear too quickly. I’m liking being here and being able to look at the sea while not completely freezing.’

  He got up, then reached for her hand and pulled her up, and as they walked away from the others, he didn’t let go of it. She wondered what the others – if they saw – would make of that.

  ‘Can we come?’ Milly and Alfie rushed up beside them. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To look at a rock pool over there,’ Sean said. ‘And yes, of course you can come.’

  Milly, still clutching her hot dog, took a big bite of it and ran ahead of them and Alfie followed.

  ‘They are cute, aren’t they?’ Sean said.

  ‘Very. I love being their auntie.’

  ‘The maiden aunt,’ he said, laughing at her, then he looked serious. ‘But something you said, the other night …’

  ‘I know. I said I was supposed to be having a baby. It would have, or more likely could have been born on Christmas Day.’

  ‘My sister had IVF.’

  ‘Did she? Did it work?’

  ‘Yes, eventually. She’s got twins.’

  ‘Wow, hard work.’

  ‘Where did you get yours from?’

  ‘My what?’ She felt puzzled.

  ‘Was it a clinic? Or … Sorry, forget I asked!’ He laughed. ‘I just like to know stuff. I’ll have to learn not to intrude on the house-guests. Curiosity and cats, all that. None of my business.’

  ‘Sean, did your mummy never tell you how babies are made?’ She stopped walking and faced him.

  ‘Eh? Well, of course she did. Actually, scrub that – no, she didn’t. I found out the usual way, from the school playground and mucky books. Sorry, I just thought—’

  ‘That I might have gone the IVF route? No, I went the person-I-live-with route. Sorry, lived. Definitely in the past.’

  ‘Oh. A man.’

  ‘Yes, a man – you know, like lots of people do.’

  ‘Come on!’ Milly shouted. ‘Are we there yet?’ She was standing on the edge of where the rocks began. The sea had washed them clean and Thea, fed up with the endless snow, loved how the subtle stripes and whorls of the rock formation gleamed.

  ‘Look at the patterns,’ she said to Sean, as they caught up with the children. She was stroking the rock’s rough surface through her gloves.

  ‘If it wasn’t for the contrast with all that snow we’d probably just see these as “brown” and nothing else,’ he said, tracing his finger along a grey faultline.

  Sean found the rock pool and showed the children the tiny, near-transparent shrimps swimming about. ‘I was hoping for a starfish to show you but there aren’t any in here just now, just lots of shells,’ he told them. ‘Look carefully.’ He pulled one shell out and prodded it gently, and a tiny crab came out.

  Milly squealed. ‘It’s living in there!’

  ‘It is. Lots of things live in shells, not just the owners of the shells. It’s like having visitors.’

  ‘Visitors like we are?’ she asked him.

  ‘Like you are.’

  ‘Can I take the shell and show Mummy?’ Alfie asked.

  ‘Yes, but we must put the crab back in the water so he can find somewhere else to hide. He won’t like being out in the open.’

  ‘Will he get cold?’ Alfie asked, looking worried.

  ‘In the air, yes, but look.’ Sean bent down and dabbled his hand in the pool. ‘Feel this – it’s warmer than out here, isn’t it?’

  The children took off their gloves and splashed about for a second and then Sean let them dry their hands on his jacket. Then they took a few shells each and ran off.

  ‘You’re very good with them,’ Thea told him.

  ‘I come from a big family,’ he said. ‘And I’d like some kids myself too.’ He looked a bit embarrassed as if this was a tricky revelation. Perhaps it was, she thought. How much harder must it be for a gay man of possibly limited means to become a father than it was for a gay woman? The goodwill of even the most generous of surrogates must be hard to rely on.

  ‘Perhaps you will, somehow,’ she said, feeling it was a rather lame comment.

  ‘The man you spoke of,’ Sean said. ‘Was he just a … donor?’

  Thea took a deep breath so she could say the whole lot in one go. ‘No. He was an actual old-fashioned fiancé. We’d been going to get married. And then I became pregnant and at eleven weeks I lost it and I was really, really upset and sad about it, but then he said that surely it was just as well really as he didn’t want children. And on that horrible, heartless comment I knew that we were absolutely and totally over. And that’s it. See? That’s why I’m now the maiden aunt.’

  ‘And not gay.’

  ‘Gay! Me? No – why?’

  Sean laughed. ‘Oh wow, have I ever got my wires crossed. I just thought …’

  ‘You thought I was gay? But why?’ She felt utterly mystified. And then light dawned. ‘It’s my hair, isn’t it? Oh, for goodness’ sake, you surely don’t think every woman with short spiky hair is a devout reader of Diva magazine, do you?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not exactly. It was just a couple of other things. Sorry. Or not sorry, because it doesn’t matter either way, does it? And yet it does. Yay.’ As they walked back to the others, he kept laughing quietly to himself. Thea didn’t know what to think. Nothing, probably. After all, essentially nothing had changed. She might not be gay, but of course Sean still was.

  Thea was the last one off the beach. She volunteered to make sure the fire died down properly and to cover it with plenty of sand so some twilight surfer wouldn’t come bouncing along and burn themselves on the embers. Sean went off to do some much put-off VAT returns and the others climbed back up the path, most of them heading for a bit of a snooze before the evening at the pub.

  Emily had gone up to the house as soon as she’d eaten. She did look very happy, Thea thought, and was glad that she felt no envy, only the pleasure of looking forward to another niece or nephew. She was good at being an aunt, even if she never did get to be a mother. If she had to, she’d make the good aunt thing be enough.

  There had been a subtle change in the air temperature, she sensed, as she walked back up the path to the house. It felt softer, just that tiny bit warmer. The snow was still there but it was gleaming wet and quieter underfoot now, not so much the treacherous crisp ice that had been there for the last few days. Maybe a thaw really was coming.

  Up at the top of the path she could see a light on in the barn. There was no sound of table tennis being played so she went to see if there was someone there or if the light needed to be switched off.

  There was a slight noise and she walked as silently as she could to the door, scared
she might be about to startle an owl, just as she and Sean had the other night when he’d been up that ladder, but no – this wasn’t an owl. She had a very swift look, then immediately tiptoed away towards the back door of the house. Elmo was in the barn, kissing Daisy, both of them completely oblivious to anything but each other. And on the ping-pong table was a little sprig of mistletoe.

  SEVENTEEN

  Cold turkey. It was a shame the term had such negative connotations. In Mike’s opinion, not a lot could beat it. ‘Cold turkey, chips and peas and the rest of the red cabbage and all the leftover cold bread sauce and last bits of pickles and relishes. Food from the heavens. Even reheated sprouts taste brilliant,’ he declared as they all sat down in the kitchen for an early supper.

  ‘I’ll have a bit more of that Stilton with my chips,’ Charlotte said, heading for the fridge. ‘It’ll make my voice all husky for later.’

  ‘I can do you an omelette, if you like,’ Anna offered. ‘There’s plenty in the fridge to go in it.’

  ‘I could do an omelette myself,’ Charlotte said, looking at Anna with suspicion.

  Anna shrugged. ‘Just being a good host,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t going to spike it with arsenic. Not this time, anyway.’

  Charlotte flew back across the kitchen and hugged Anna, almost crushing her into her ample bust. Anna made a ‘help’ mime from her squashed position and Elmo splorted with laughter.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Anna. That was horribly rude of me. Truth is,’ Charlotte began, ‘truth is, I’m a bit nervous. I always am before facing my public, though you’d think I’d be well over it after all these years. It makes me defensive and bad-tempered.’ She kissed a very surprised Anna loudly and firmly on her cheek, leaving a big scarlet lipstick heart shape. ‘You’ve been a star, you know that? I came in here all mouthy and bad and you took me in. And all I’ve done is take and be greedy.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Anna conceded, escaping to a chair on the far side of the table, out of range of any more demonstrations of affection. ‘You’ve been a dab hand with the potato peeler.’