The Magic of Christmas

by Trisha Ashley

  While I was out on pet-sitting duty, Caz dropped a freshly cut Christmas tree off at the cottage, and by the time I returned Jasper had set it up in its stand in the sitting room and was opening the boxes of decorations we’d collected over the years, along with some old family ones I could remember my mother hanging up. Out came the fragile glass violins, trumpets and bells; the bright birds with purple and pink feather tails and the gaudy strings of slightly balding tinsel.

  We don’t have lights because I’m convinced they will set the house on fire. I don’t know why, though perhaps distant memories of the way the bulbs used to pop when my father turned them on might have had something to do with it. I expect that’s where I get my uselessness with electricity from.

  Later, while Jasper finished the decorating, including hanging a stocking for Ginny from the mantelpiece, along with his own, I baked thin, crispy star-shaped spice biscuits to hang on the tree with ribbon, the finishing touch.

  While I did this, the sound of carols on the CD player, the mingled smell of spices and pine … the memory of the cold, crisp air outside — all these seasonal elements combined until the magic of Christmas, as always, had me in its thrall.

  Unfortunately, next morning I found PC Perkins standing on my doorstep, her dark uniform lightly frosted with snowflakes like a rather odd Christmas card. She very politely suggested that we go and look in the outbuilding where I kept my gardening tools, because she’d received an anonymous tip-off.

  She didn’t say a tip-off about what, but I said she was welcome to go and look, and I would follow her over once I’d put my wellies and anorak on.

  When I got there, having waded through an audience of interested hens, she was standing staring up at the wall rack where my tools hung fairly neatly — and there, hooked among them, my blue steel cross-shaped wheel brace.

  ‘Is that the one you used to change your tyre, on the day your husband took your car?’ she enquired.

  ‘It certainly looks like it,’ I began, reaching up for it, but she put her hand on my arm to stop me.

  ‘Please don’t touch it, Mrs Pharamond.’

  I let my hand fall to my side. ‘But … I’m sure it wasn’t there before! I’d have noticed it when I was hanging up the tools, because it doesn’t live there. I always kept it in the car.’

  ‘So when did you last see it?’

  I frowned, trying to remember, though the events of the summer seemed an awfully long time ago now. ‘I’m pretty sure that when I’d finished changing the wheel, I slung it in the footwell behind the driver’s seat,’ I said slowly. ‘Didn’t I already give you a statement about that? But of course Jasper checked the wheel too, while I was in the cottage, and I can’t recall what he said he did with it. He’s gone up to the Hall, but I’ll ask him when he gets home, shall I?’

  ‘If you don’t mind,’ PC Perkins said, unfolding a large plastic envelope and inserting the wheel brace into it. ‘And I’ll just take this and check it for fingerprints, if you have no objection?’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said politely, ‘but you’ll only find mine and Jasper’s, won’t you?’

  ‘Just routine. We like to tie up all the loose ends,’ she said, giving me that ‘I’ll get you yet, you murderess’ smile. After such a long silence, I’d convinced myself that I’d only imagined the police were suspicious of me, but clearly I’d been quite right all along!

  When he came in, Jasper said he thought he might just have propped the wheel brace up against the barn wall when he’d finished tightening the nuts, but he couldn’t be sure. He could equally well have tossed it into the back of the car, where it usually lived.

  ‘But whichever way, someone must have put it with the gardening tools recently and then told the police,’ I said, puzzled, ‘because I’d definitely have noticed it if it had been there all this time, since I’m constantly taking tools out and putting them back — and it was hung on top of my favourite spade. But what’s the point, when finding it won’t tell the police anything they didn’t already know?’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Mum. I expect she really meant it, about tying up loose ends. And you are vague sometimes, so you might have moved it to get at the spade, and not noticed it was there.’

  ‘I’m not that vague. And who tipped them off about it, and why?’

  ‘It’s a mystery, but not one that’s important. I’d forget it,’ he advised. ‘Or you could tell Uncle Nick about it and see what he thinks.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ I said crisply. ‘He’d probably just accuse me of losing my marbles, like you.’

  Jasper had now become even more antagonistic towards poor Ritch, if that were possible, and warned me that if he became his stepfather he would leave home! I assured him that even if I had been tempted to remarry, which was the last thing on my mind, I would certainly not replace one chronic philanderer with another.

  I expected it was all because he overheard Ritch jokingly asking me to marry him again, when he caught us having a Christmas kiss under the mistletoe I’d suspended from the drying rack. (I hang mistletoe up every year, but that was the first time I’d struck lucky.)

  Ritch and I had already exchanged presents. He gave me a delightful little sparkly crystal snowman brooch and I gave him a box of home-made Turkish Delight (from the postcard recipe sent to me by Nick) and a large rawhide bone for poor old Flo, about to be immured in kennels while her master flew off to stay with friends in the Caribbean over Christmas.

  I might have felt compelled to offer to have Flo myself if it hadn’t been for Ginny: one snap of Flo’s powerful jaws and Ginny would be only a lingering memory. However, Flo was booked into the local luxury Dogtel, with heated beds and her own run, so I didn’t suppose she’d find it too traumatic.

  Jasper didn’t, however, extend his antagonism towards all my male visitors, even on one occasion helpfully pointing out the mistletoe to Nick before he went out, though luckily I don’t think he heard him.

  But at least Nick now seemed to have finally accepted that I simply wanted to forget what happened on the night of the bonfire and continue as we were before, so we were back on our old, slightly argumentative but fairly amicable terms, and he was helping me with recipes for Just Desserts.

  He began bringing down bundles of his old notebooks for me to copy things out of, though his idea of what was suitable and what wasn’t didn’t exactly coincide with mine.

  It was no wonder I was putting on weight, because I’d adjusted my chocolate intake to compensate for … well, I didn’t really know what for, but it was very comforting. Have you ever tried hot chocolate custard?

  Jasper and I went up to the Hall for Sunday lunch and Roly had the newspaper magazine with the Christmas photoshoot article in it. And actually, it all looked really magical, lush and quite swish, in a slightly medieval sort of way, not fake at all.

  Mimi said she thought Juno looked just like Edith Sitwell, but luckily Juno mixed her up with Edith Cavell and was vaguely flattered, saying she knew she was a heroine putting up with Mimi but that might be going a bit too far.

  I’d taken up a box of the spice biscuits, all ready threaded with ribbon for hanging, and we decorated their big Christmas tree in the hallway after lunch, with Nick leaning over the banister to place a porcelain-faced angel on the very top.

  I was convinced that their Christmas tree lights were made of Bakelite! I only hoped they’d had an electrician check them in the last fifty years.

  I was so glad I’d got a Land Rover, because I used to be very nervous about driving on snowy roads and now I wasn’t in the least. We had another light snowfall on top of the last lot, which had half-thawed on the roads and then refrozen, making it pretty treacherous, but I made it easily down to the village hall to help with the hampers.

  Each recipient had ticked boxes on a form giving their likes, dislikes and preferences (Marian was nothing if not organised) so we just had to select from the list and assemble each box, which were the cardboard sort printed with a
green holly pattern, with pop-up handles.

  Several of the WI members had four-wheel-drive vehicles, so were going to deliver the hampers that afternoon, when the roads had been gritted.

  ‘Another job done,’ Marian announced with satisfaction as the last of them drove away. ‘There’s just the final Mystery Play dress rehearsal tomorrow, and then we can all relax and just enjoy ourselves over Christmas.’

  ‘Except we actually have to do the play on Boxing Day,’ I pointed out, and the thought of shivering in the snow in my new Eve outfit was not an enticing prospect.

  ‘But that’s the fun bit,’ Annie said, then sighed. ‘I will miss our CPC meetings until we start again in summer, though.’

  ‘This year I think we need to start again right after Christmas,’ I said, ‘only as Wedding Organisers instead!’

  Chapter 30: Unscheduled Appearances

  The snow lingers and, though the local farmers have kept the roads around the village open, more is forecast. It won’t stop the Mystery Play, though — nothing has ever done that, not even Cromwell!

  The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

  On Tuesday afternoon I walked up to the Hall after lunch for the second of the Mystery Play dress rehearsals. I left Jasper typing up some of my latest Chronicle onto my new laptop. He was much faster than me, so that was a big help.

  He said Unks wanted him to go up to the house later in the afternoon, so he would see me there.

  The cobbled courtyard of Pharamond Hall where the audience stand to watch is bound on one side by the kitchen wing and on the others by stables and outbuildings, making it very sheltered. The entrance is through a large arched gateway with, directly facing it, a second arched doorway to the coach house, which forms the stage for the performance.

  Marian, Clive and most of the cast for the rehearsal scenes were already there, milling about, while the Mummers of Invention (minus Ritch, of course, who was on his way to the Caribbean) stood in one corner, running through the song for the first interval. Ophelia was wearing a knitted poncho in three shades of mud brown and it was stretched to the limit over her now enormous baby bump. Various bits of scenery and old props had been dragged out of storage and the loose boxes on either side set up as changing rooms. I knew Joe Gumball had already hung up the stiff, heavy canvas curtains in the entrance to the coach house, because Jasper and Nick had helped him, and now he was checking that the star lantern slid easily across the wire behind it.

  There was a chilly wind blowing, and since the courtyard was not warmed by braziers and a massed audience, as it would be on the night, we ran through our scenes pretty briskly. Clive was reading the Voice of God today and started with Lucifer being cast out of Heaven. The silent angels, with their freshly flighted wings, trooped on and off on cue, but when Moses did his scene he interjected more than a little acerbity into his lines: his rheumatism was clearly still playing him up.

  I was on next, but luckily, due to the extreme cold, Clive kindly excused Adam and Eve from having to change into costume, which was a relief. I didn’t know about Nick, but I was having serious doubts about the decency of my new Spandex outfit. Still, at least we were back on reasonably good terms again and from the tone of our voices you would have thought we were discussing the price of fish, not contemplating any kind of temptation.

  After that, Miss Pym and some of the parents brought the infants up from school in an orderly but excited crocodile, carrying their animal masks, to practise the Ark scene.

  ‘And all the animals came into t’ark out of the rain, and, by heck, it were pouring down,’ Noah said, standing next to Mrs Noah, who was seated on a bucket. The children started to march past two by two, growling, roaring, hissing and generally sounding like a zoo at feeding time. Last of all came a solitary unicorn.

  ‘There’s two of every darn thing — except t’unicorn. Yon’s not going to breed on its own, Wife.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Noah, reluctantly looking up from her knitting, which was presumably a late Christmas present she was keen to finish, ‘there’s no more of ’em. Reckon that’s the end o’ the line for t’poor little beast. I never did see much use for it, though it’s proper bonny.’

  ‘It attracts virgins, so they say,’ said Noah.

  ‘Well, it’s just thee and me now, chuck, so I reckon them have died out an’ all,’ said Mrs Noah. ‘Knit one, purl two!’

  After the Ark scene we always have a break before the Nativity, so all the little animals can see Father Christmas before going home. By now Annie and Gareth had arrived together and helped Miss Pym shepherd the excited children through the arched gateway to be lined up again, sans masks, outside the front door of Pharamond Hall.

  The rest of us went through the kitchens the back way to the cavernous hallway, where a log fire roared and the fairy lights flickered on the huge tree like so many weak fireflies (and I am sure they are not supposed to do that). Roly was sitting in an ancient carved chair next to it, dressed in the red, fur-edged hooded suit and black boots traditional on these occasions, and puffing at a cheroot, which was not. Over the years his wig and beard had yellowed with nicotine, so that I’m sure the scent of tobacco would forever remind successive generations of local children of Christmas.

  In the shadows just behind the chair lurked Caz Naylor, the largest elf you ever saw, wearing pointed Spock ears and with his hat jammed down hard over his eyebrows, waiting to hand the presents to Father Christmas. What always surprised me was the way he could move so silently when his outfit was entirely covered in little bells. Perhaps he’d stuffed them with something?

  The fire glowed in the huge hearth, and the candle bulbs in the cartwheel of evergreen foliage that was suspended from the ceiling were dimmed. The house smelled of cinnamon and burning fir cones, hot mince pies and spiced punch from the bowl on the trestle table laid out ready.

  From beyond the great oak front doors came the sound of a lot of reedy young voices belting out ‘Good King Wenceslas’ at the top of their lungs: distillation of pure Christmas magic, again.

  ‘Here we go,’ Unks said, regretfully removing the stub of cheroot from his mouth and tossing it accurately into the fire. ‘Let the little blighters in.’

  Nick swung the door open and a tide of children rushed forward, only to be halted in their tracks by Miss Pym, who has a presence and voice that could command armies.

  ‘Stop!’ she commanded.

  ‘Ho, ho, ho,’ Unks said benevolently. ‘Come in, one and all!’

  Joe Gumball activated the CD player and ‘White Christmas’ began to chirrup merrily in the background.

  There was a gift for every child, and while Miss Pym orchestrated the queue, the adults fell on the food and drink. A few older children appeared as parents began to turn up to collect their offspring, but there was a bag of extra gifts for this contingency, so no one went away empty-handed.

  By now Jasper had arrived too, and was talking very seriously to the vicar in the corner. At a rough guess, I’d say they were discussing the eating habits of Biblical folk or something like that, unless Gareth had a personal hobby horse and a stronger will than Jasper’s. Annie had gravitated across to join them, and Trinny, wearing a collar of tinsel, was circling Ginny in a vaguely menacing manner, probably trying to decide which end was which.

  Jasper picked Ginny up and Trinny immediately lost interest and wandered off under the table, where there were rich pickings in crumbs and discarded pastry. Mrs Gumball’s idea of children’s party food ran to miniature pork pies, tiny triangular sandwiches, and little jellies in paper cases with a blob of cream and a diamond of angelica on top of each. The hot mince pies and punch were strictly for the adults.

  Eventually Santa announced that the reindeer were getting restless and he had to leave, which was the cue for the last of the tired but happy children to be taken home. As the final car vanished down the drive, Clive Potter firmly rounded the cast up for the final part of today’s rehearsal: the Nativity, and an
other song or two from the Mummers.

  Jasper had already gone home and Nick was helping Roly out of his robe, boots and wig, but the rest of us trooped out again into the growing dusk, warm, full and a bit reluctant. Marian and Kylie made for the loose box changing room to adjust her Mary costume, while our Joseph, Dave Naylor, leaned against a wall in his striped robe, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘Where’s Ophelia?’ Jojo asked, looking around him vaguely. ‘We’re supposed to be playing “While Shepherds Watched” before the next scene starts.’

  ‘Dunno. Haven’t seen her for ages,’ Mick said, then cupped his hands round his mouth and bellowed, ‘Ophelia!’

  ‘That’s funny,’ I said. ‘Now I come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing her in the Hall, either. Has she gone home? I hope she’s feeling all right.’

  Caz appeared, without his elf ears.

  ‘Caz,’ I called, ‘do you know where Ophelia is? Only no one seems to have see—’

  I faltered as a piercing howl of anguish echoed from the stables we used as dressing rooms. Then Marian Potter’s cropped, silvery head appeared over the half-door and she cried wildly, ‘Help! Is there a doctor in the house?’ before bobbing down again, more Punch and Judy than Mystery Play.

  Unfortunately Dr Patel had rehearsed his scenes the previous week so he wasn’t present. There was a second’s breathless hush, then we all rushed across the yard. Caz beat Annie and me to it, but it was a close-run thing and the others crowded up behind.

  Inside the dimly lit stable, with no more ado than a couple of pangs and an animal urge to be alone, Ophelia had chosen to give birth, if not in the manger, certainly right next to it.

  She lay pale, spent and panting slightly on the straw, her big eyelids closed, while Kylie, clearly revolted, was holding a messy and screaming baby at arm’s length.

  It was amazing! I’d never seen an infant that so closely resembled a fox cub, and there could be absolutely no doubt that it was Caz’s.