I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  And Laura herself was wholly responsible for acquiring Charlie, the half setter, half Lab pup she hadn’t been able to resist when his owners had been looking for homes for the litter two years earlier. Since then, Charlie had shed his adorable puppyish pudginess and was eating everything they gave him and more, but he’d tail-wagged his way into the hearts of the entire household.

  Caesar the pot-bellied pig had been a raffle prize the Christmas before that, and since Laura had insisted on Gavin buying a ticket – the raffle had been organised to fund new Christmas decorations for the village street – there wasn’t much she could say when he’d arrived home with piglet Caesar in the van.

  And when Cheryl and Maddie, the miniature goats, were left ownerless after Morgan O’Rourke from two doors down died last winter, it had seemed like the Christian thing to take them in. Morgan had kept them supplied with goat’s milk for Evie, who couldn’t stomach the regular stuff, and he’d never accepted a penny in return.

  So even if Gavin hadn’t set about developing his very own animal kingdom in their back garden, one was quietly coming into being. Of course, there were returns to be had – eggs, goat’s milk, donkey rides – and between them, George and the goats kept the grass down in the field.

  In fact, Laura used to feel secretly that there was something rather satisfying about a garden full of animals. In a way, it seemed the perfect complement to a house full of children, despite the frequent chaos that both entities could cause. Now there were times when she was tempted to let them all go, animals and children, to the highest bidder.

  ‘Girls napping?’ Gavin enquired – and the words were hardly out of his mouth when they heard the familiar high-pitched babbling from upstairs that heralded the joint awakening of his toddler daughters.

  Laura turned to the boys. ‘You have exactly half an hour,’ she told them. ‘Go upstairs with Dad and help him to get the girls up, then change the sheets on Granny’s bed and put clean towels in her bathroom. When that’s all done, clean your own room. If everything is OK when I check, you can stay up tonight.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’ They sped from the room and thumped up the stairs.

  ‘Take Poppy,’ she said to Gavin. ‘Do whatever you have to do to keep them all out of my way for half an hour. I’ll be wrapping presents.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘And you should have got your hair cut for Christmas,’ she added, unable to resist. ‘I’m surprised your mother didn’t mention how awful it looks.’

  In the small silence that followed, she heard the sharp echo of it, heard how nasty it sounded.

  He bent and gathered Poppy into his arms. ‘Well,’ he said mildly, ‘that’s me told.’

  She opened her mouth to tell him not to mind her, but he was gone, the door closing behind him. He’d get over it.

  She stood on a chair and retrieved the presents, wrapping paper and ribbon she’d hidden in two black bin bags on top of the dresser. She brought everything out to the scullery, which was little more than a passageway from the kitchen to the garden, used mainly as a storage area for egg boxes and juice bottles, and a dumping ground for wellingtons, umbrellas and items waiting to be recycled.

  Out here the storm was even more in evidence, the wail of the wind even louder than in the kitchen. Annie Byrnes’s bones had been right after all: she should never have doubted them.

  So early in the day, not yet three o’clock, the light was already beginning to fade. She peered through the little side window that looked out on their half a dozen apple trees, and saw the wet gleam of the branches as they slapped and whipped about in the wind. She remembered Nell telling her, not long after she and Gavin had moved in, that her grandfather had helped Walter’s father to plant the trees, when both were young men. That must make them … what? Eighty years old, maybe more?

  She thought of the boys clambering up the gnarled branches in the summertime; she imagined the girls in years to come having dolly tea parties in the dappled shade beneath. They were so lucky to have those beautiful trees as part of their playground. She wondered what the life span of an apple tree was: would this lot still be standing when her grandchildren were running around outside? Would the magic tree, as the children called it, still be offering its apples all year round? Amazing how they’d all come to accept that as completely normal, nobody commenting any more on apples that ripened in February or March.

  She made out the shed standing just beyond the trees, where the animals were harbouring for the night. Thank goodness they’d got Damien Kiely to build it after Gavin’s poorly constructed pigsty had finally collapsed last year, nearly flattening poor Caesar: let the wind huff and puff all it wanted, it was hardly likely to blow down a shed made of bricks.

  As she began to wrap Evie’s princess dress, the back door rattled on its hinges in response to a sudden fierce gust, and she felt the accompanying draught at her ankles from the sizeable gap between door and floor that had been there since Walter’s time, and that Gavin had yet to address, despite his frequent promises. Mind you, given his DIY history, he might well make the problem worse.

  Hopefully the storm wouldn’t wreak too much havoc while it was in full swing. It had better not put paid to her party this evening. The closer it got, the more she found she was clinging to the thought of it. A few hours of relaxed company and entertaining conversation, not to mention a couple of glasses of mulled wine. Not a lot, not enough to make tomorrow torturous – hangovers and excited children didn’t belong in the same sentence. Just enough to soften the edges and send her floating off to sleep when everyone had gone home.

  When the last gift was wrapped she stowed everything back in the bin bags and stood them in a corner. Anyone looking would take them for recycling, and ignore them.

  She thought of all she still had to do before her guests arrived. Locate the crib – where on earth had they put it after last Christmas? – mop the kitchen floor, get dinner cooked and eaten, make the turkey stuffing, put the three small ones to bed, give the sitting room a quick run around with the Hoover, change her clothes, prepare the—

  ‘Mum?’

  She hadn’t heard them coming back downstairs. She pushed open the kitchen door – and there among the children stood Gladys, handing her coat to Ben.

  Gladys, back again.

  Gladys, not gone home on the one o’clock ferry after all.

  Laura’s heart plummeted to the floor. She smothered her dismay and did her best to look merely surprised. ‘Gladys – I thought Gavin had put you on the ferry.’

  But one look at him, skulking with Poppy by the dresser, told her he hadn’t done any such thing. He wore the abashed expression of someone caught robbing a neighbour’s bottle of milk from the doorstep.

  ‘I asked him to leave me off in the village,’ Gladys said, sinking into a chair. ‘I wanted to pick up a magazine for the journey. Oh, I’m exhausted. Seamus, you make sure to use a wooden hanger with that coat now.’

  ‘I’m Ben.’

  ‘You should have waited with your mother,’ Laura told Gavin. Keeping the words even, but giving him a look she knew he’d recognise. ‘You should have brought her to the pier and made sure she got safely onto the ferry.’

  ‘I offered to wait, but she said she wanted the walk.’

  Pathetic, truly pathetic. Could he do nothing right?

  ‘Ah, don’t be at him,’ Gladys said, setting Laura’s teeth further on edge. She was the nagging wife now, a new string to her bow. ‘I told him he didn’t have to wait, wasn’t I well able to make my own way to the pier? And I was so full after that breakfast you gave me, I needed to walk it off.’

  The breakfast that Laura had cooked, the sausages and rashers she’d grilled, the egg she’d poached because Gladys didn’t care for it fried – and maybe the yolk could be a tiny bit softer than yesterday’s, dear – in the middle of trying to soothe a peevish Poppy and feed Charlie, who was snuffling hopefully at his empty bowl, and keep the girls from squabbling while Gavin a
nd the boys were out doing his deliveries.

  ‘But then I was delayed in the shop. There were three ahead of me, and that girl with the red hair behind the counter is so slow – is she a bit retarded? And the woman ahead of me took ages to make up her mind between a mint Aero and a Crunchie – it wasn’t as if she needed either of them, the size of her – and to cut a long story short, I ended up missing the ferry by a few minutes. It was just pulling away when I got down. I waved at the man – I know he saw me, it wouldn’t have taken him a minute to come back, but he couldn’t be bothered. So then I tried to ring Gavin, but he didn’t answer his phone.’

  ‘Mam, I told you I had things to do after I left you.’

  ‘Didn’t you see my number coming up?’

  ‘My phone was in my jacket – you know I don’t answer it when I’m on the road.’

  Gladys pinched her lips together. ‘I would have thought you’d have been looking out for a call from me, in case anything went wrong – and it wouldn’t kill you to pull over for a minute. You must have heard it ringing.’

  In the accusatory silence that followed, Poppy passed one of her famously loud blasts of wind, which caused the assembled children to erupt into merriment, and brought a small grin even to Gavin’s face.

  ‘Well,’ Gladys said, shifting indignantly in her chair. ‘I’m glad you all find my troubles so amusing.’

  ‘Mam, we’re not—’

  ‘So then I thought all I had to do was wait for the two o’clock ferry, so I went back to the village and into that little café beside the post office, whatever the name of it is …’

  Laura had stopped listening. Her mind had snagged on the fact that he’d dropped his mother in the village. He hadn’t offered to run into the shop and get her damn magazine. He hadn’t waited to make sure they got rid of her. He’d dropped her and then gone on his merry way.

  Wait till she got him on his own.

  ‘… and the scone was as hard as a rock, it really was. I said it to the proprietor, and she was quite sniffy. Someone should tell her the customer is always right. Of course I insisted on a replacement, which I was perfectly entitled to do …’

  Lelia. She was criticising Lelia’s scones, which were fêted throughout Roone. The woman was unbelievable.

  ‘… and then, after all that, when I got down to the pier I found the two o’clock ferry had been cancelled, without a blind bit of notice, just because it was windy. What kind of a service is that?’

  ‘Mam, Leo has to use his—’

  ‘And then I tried your phone again, and still got nowhere—’

  ‘I was probably—’

  ‘And so I had to double back to the village yet again and at this stage I was being blown out of it, and so cold, nearly frozen solid …’

  Frozen solid, in her cashmere and wool coat.

  ‘… that I headed into the hotel and ordered myself a little hot port, which will tell you how bad I was, because as you know I hardly ever …’

  A little hot port. While Laura was imagining her halfway back to Dublin she’d been swigging port half a mile down the road.

  ‘… and then I got them to ring me a taxi, which took forever to arrive – it must be nearly three o’clock now, is it? I can’t believe there’s only one taxi on the whole of the island – you really need to do something about that.’

  Silence.

  ‘And now it looks like you’re stuck with me for Christmas.’

  More silence.

  ‘Well,’ she said tartly, ‘it’s nice to know I’ll be welcome anyway.’

  ‘Of course you will,’ Gavin said hastily. ‘We’re delighted to have you.’ Looking beseechingly at Laura, who ignored him. ‘We’re just surprised, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s terribly awkward, it’s throwing out all my plans. Joyce is expecting me back – we were to have Christmas dinner together, it was all arranged. I’ll have to ring her when I’ve recovered. She’ll be very disappointed.’

  Or delighted. One or the other.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ she went on, looking mournfully at Laura, ‘there’s any hope of a cup of tea?’

  ‘Gavin will make it,’ Laura replied, whisking Poppy from his arms. ‘This little lady needs her nappy changed.’ She was damned if she was going to be waiting hand and foot on the Duchess of Dublin over Christmas.

  He followed her out to the hall. ‘Laura, hang on—’

  She rounded on him. ‘How could you?’ she hissed. ‘How could you do this to me?’

  ‘I’m sorry – she was in plenty of time to get the ferry.’

  ‘Clearly, she wasn’t, or she wouldn’t be here now.’

  ‘I would have waited, but she insisted—’

  ‘For God’s sake – one thing you had to do, and you messed it up. You’re useless.’

  ‘Look, I don’t know what you want me to say—’

  ‘Nothing,’ she shot back. ‘Say nothing to me, unless you have to.’

  She started up the stairs with Poppy. On the landing she heard the kitchen door open and close. Back to mother, who thought the sun shone out of him.

  In the bedroom she changed Poppy’s nappy, which didn’t need changing. What a calamity. Gladys not gone, and the party only hours away, no choice now but to make her part of it. And Lelia was coming, Lelia whose scone had been rejected by Gladys earlier. A fine Christmas Eve this was turning out to be.

  She imagined tomorrow’s dinner. Gladys would be full of criticism: the turkey would be on the dry side, the stuffing would be better with a little sausage-meat or chestnuts or something added to it. The children would drive her mad: she’d wonder if Laura could ask them to be a little quieter. The pudding, Betty Buckley’s finest, would undoubtedly give her heartburn. The crackers would bring on a migraine.

  The room was dim, twilight taking a firmer hold now, leaching the colour from everything. The patch of sky she could see through the window was a peculiar greyish-mustard shade, lending a vaguely sinister air to the storm. What was that song about the bleak midwinter? They’d sung it at the carol service in the church last week. Winter was bleak, and no mistake. Winter needed parties, lots of them.

  She looked down and met her youngest daughter’s eyes. ‘What’s your opinion on the whole thing?’ she asked. ‘Are you as fed up as me?’

  Poppy met her gaze solemnly. ‘Gah,’ she told her mother. ‘Mmff,’ she added, grabbing onto the thumb Laura offered, encircling it with her tiny hand and holding on tight. The world got a small bit brighter.

  Nobody had died. They’d all survive a few more days. And Gladys or no Gladys, Laura was going to enjoy the evening ahead. She was going to eat and drink – maybe more than a couple of glasses – and keep as far from her husband as she could, and maybe Lelia would oblige by throttling Gladys with a string of tinsel before the night was out.

  ’Twas the season to be jolly. She’d be jolly if it killed her.

  ‘Just missed it,’ Paddy said placidly, as if missing a ferry happened to him every other day, and wasn’t anything at all to get bothered about. Tilly didn’t imagine Paddy O’Carroll got bothered about very much, which she supposed was a good way to be.

  She watched the Roone ferry pulling away from the little pier. So close and yet so far: three minutes earlier and she’d have made it. But there it went, leaving a wide trail of white foam in its wake. Nothing to do but bide her time until the next one.

  And look at the sea, look at the Atlantic Ocean washing up not twenty feet from the car. Her first time to set eyes on it, her first glimpse of the sea that would soon be surrounding her. Listen to it, the pounding of waves against stone loud even with the car windows rolled up. Despite her disappointment, the sight of it, so majestic and wild, lifted her heart. She longed to get out: she was greedy for the scent of it, for the wet feel of it on her face.

  ‘The half one, that was,’ Paddy said. ‘Be another one along at half two, if the wind don’t get any worse.’

  But the wind had been getting steadily strong
er since they’d left Dingle half an hour ago, later than planned because Joan from next door had called in just before noon, the same Joan who looked after Breda and Paddy’s two enormously hairy tabby cats anytime they were left unattended.

  I heard you had a visitor, she’d said, setting something wrapped in tinfoil on Breda’s table, pulling off her purple bobble hat, taking in every bit of Tilly with her red-rimmed, watery blue eyes. Where’s this you’re from again? she’d asked, shrugging her arms out of her olive-green waxed coat, pushing a cat off a chair to plonk down next to Tilly. America, is it?

  And by the time Breda had made and poured her third pot of tea of the morning, and they’d cut the still-warm apple tart Joan had brought, and Tilly had answered every one of her many, many questions, it was coming up to one o’clock, and Breda was ushering Tilly out the door and telling Paddy to be sure and get her to the pier by half one, the day wasn’t looking good.

  But they hadn’t quite made it by half one, although Tilly’s knuckles had been white from gripping the side of her seat as they’d hurtled along roads that didn’t look wide enough for one car, let alone two. Paddy, his seatbelt left untouched, bounced over potholes and overtook anything slower than him with terrifying abandon, and whizzed by all oncoming vehicles – cars, vans, tractors – with equal nonchalance, whistling gently through his teeth the whole time, seemingly unaware of the extreme trepidation of his passenger.

  There was a strong whiff of cat in the car: clearly he and Breda didn’t always leave them at home when they travelled. The back seat was piled high with a jumble of books and magazines and what looked like plastic fertiliser bags and assorted items of clothing, wellingtons and hats.

  The night before, when he’d collected them from the bus station, the clutter had merely been shoved aside to make room for Tilly. The boot was equally full – a set of golf clubs, a camping gas stove, what looked like a rolled-up tent and several other plastic bags. We’ll make it fit, Paddy had said equably, hefting Tilly’s case, and he’d somehow squeezed it in, along with his wife’s bulging shopping bags.