by Jules Wake
‘It’s a Fuller’s pub,’ said Nate with a happy grin.
‘London Pride man?’ I asked, sensing a kindred spirit.
‘Yup. You drink bitter?’
‘I love a half every now and then. My dad used to bring me here every year after we’d bought our tree.’ I shrugged, a little embarrassed that it looked as if I’d pressed one of my family traditions upon him and Grace.
‘Can I have a Coca Cola, Viola?’ she asked, her eyes wide and guileless in a way that told me this was forbidden fruit.
‘Are you normally allowed to have it?’ I asked, hiding a grin, keeping my voice firm. Nate had not dived in to say no, but it was important that I backed up the house rules.
Grace huffed. ‘Only on special occasions.’ She scuffed her foot backwards and forwards, her head bowed.
I glanced at Nate and raised my eyebrows.
‘I think this probably qualifies as a special occasion,’ he said gently. ‘How many times do you get to see ninety … how many was it, Viola?’
‘Ninety-seven.’
‘Yes, ninety-seven Christmas trees and twenty thousand lights. I think that’s quite special, don’t you?’
‘Yes, Daddy,’ she said very importantly, in a way that elicited lots of mouth twitching from both Nate and me.
‘We could have lunch here,’ I said. ‘My treat.’ Nate went to demur and I raised a hand. ‘You bought brunch yesterday. It’s only fair. Mind you, they do Thai food here it might not be … suitable.’
I suddenly realised it wasn’t that child-friendly but, to my amazement, Grace piped up, ‘I love Thai food.’
‘You do?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘You people.’ She walked ahead of us like a proud little peacock, completely sure of her welcome, and weaved through the tables towards an empty one near the back.
Nate laughed. ‘She’s rather partial to Nasi goreng rather than anything super spicy, although she doesn’t mind hot food. Elaine didn’t believe in mollycoddling her palate.’
‘Great,’ I said. It was a refreshing change. Tina’s children only ate pizza and pasta, which severely restricted restaurant choices when we went out as a family.
‘What do you want to drink?’ Nate nodded towards the bar as I went to follow Grace.
‘Half of London Pride, of course,’ I said with a teasing wink.
‘Coming up.’ He paused and gave me a warm smile. ‘You’re definitely a girl after my own heart.’ His low intimate tone set my heartbeat tripping. All morning we’d been easy in each other’s company, aware, I guess, of Grace. It had felt completely natural, but here was that delicious little reminder that there was more between us.
We held each other’s gazes for a couple of beats before he said, ‘This is nice. I can’t remember the last time I went to a pub for a pint.’ Sadness touched his eyes. ‘And yet I used to do it a lot with my dad before he moved to Portugal.’ He nodded as if to himself rather than saying anything to me and then, with another warm, intimate smile, turned and strode towards the bar.
Chapter 22
‘Where do you want to put it?’ I asked a few hours later, when the tree, encased in its netting coat, was delivered. We stood in the grand hallway, looking at it.
‘Where do you think?’ asked Nate. ‘It usually goes there.’ He pointed to a spot by the stairs. Grace’s mouth tightened in that familiar mutinous line.
‘I’m going to be radical here,’ I said. ‘I think it should go downstairs, because you and Grace spend the most time in there and it’s lovely to be able to see it, but it’s your tree. I think you and Grace should decide.’ I didn’t want to be seen to be imposing Viola’s perfect Christmas on the two of them. ‘You could put it here or in the lounge.’
‘What do you think, sweetheart?’ Nate crouched down next to her. Their two heads were almost touching and Grace leaned hers on his shoulder, her blonde curls next to his dark straight hair. They couldn’t have looked more different but so much a part of each other at the same time. She put her hand on his face, patting his cheek, her eyes solemn, and whispered in his ear.
I saw him squeeze her to him and had to swallow the sudden lump in my throat. This was their first Christmas on their own; there were things they needed to navigate together. I clasped my hands behind me and took a couple of steps backwards; I think it was some sort of attempt to look neutral.
Nate was nodding. ‘I think that’s an excellent idea.’
They both looked over towards me, identical expressions of mischief on their faces.
‘We’re going to have it in the kitchen, in the corner of the snug,’ said Nate, rising to his feet holding his daughter’s hand.
With the tree slung over his shoulder and Grace and I bringing up the rear, the three of us trooped down the stairs and then Grace ducked under the tree and weaved around Nate to take the lead, going over to the corner.
‘Here, Daddy.’ She pointed rather precisely to the spot. ‘There’s a plug for the lights and you can see them in the windows. So it will be pretty.’ She meant the reflections but she had a good point; it would be pretty.
‘OK. Here it is,’ said Nate.
He fed the planed trunk of the tree into the stand and then lay on the floor with his head under the branches as he tightened up the four nuts on each of the sides while I held onto the prickly stem, trying to hold it straight, pine needle fronds in my face and tickling my nose as the fresh resin scent made me think of forests and the great outdoors.
‘What do you think, Grace?’
She tilted her head, wandering around, stepping over the collection of decorations we’d bought and the box I’d retrieved from Mum’s. ‘It needs to go that way a bit.’
‘Which way? Left?’
‘Yes. Towards the table.’
I tilted the tree. ‘Better?’
‘No, that’s really wonky. The other left.’
‘Ladies.’ There was a touch of impatience in his muffled voice. ‘A decision, please.’
I pulled the tree towards me, not convinced that Grace’s view was terribly accurate. And then I realised that she was seven and what did it matter?
‘That’s it,’ she squeaked, clapping her hands and jumping up and down.
‘And we have lift-off,’ I said.
‘Thank God for that,’ muttered Nate from underneath the tree, carefully sliding his way out.
Grace already had the big sparkly piece of tinsel in her hand and was approaching the tree.
‘It’s best if we get the lights on first,’ I said.
‘Oh.’ Her mouth clamped shut, the excited light in her face dimming, and I was conscious that she was used to things being rather prescriptive.
I gave her a big bright smile. ‘Then you can put your tinsel on. And you can put it anywhere you like.’
Mollified, she stepped back, stroking the frothy tinsel as if it were a cat.
Together, Nate and I wound the lights around the branches with Grace, still holding her beloved tinsel, bobbing between us with helpful comments and suggestions like, ‘Up a bit’, ‘No, higher’, ‘In the wiggly bit’.
Nate kept sending me conspiratorial glances, his warm brown eyes full of mischief. For all his grumbles, he was enjoying himself and Grace’s excitement and enthusiasm was contagious.
Once the lights were threaded around the tree, which at seven foot filled the corner of the room perfectly, we had the big switch-on. The lights exploded into colour, flashing with an eye-popping sequence that would put any disco to shame.
‘They have colours,’ squealed Grace with sudden joy.
‘Wow, I’m not sure I can live with that,’ said Nate. ‘I’ll have to get my John Travolta suit out.’ He winked at me.
‘You own a John Travolta suit?’ I giggled.
‘Who’s John Revolter?’ Grace was mesmerised by the lights. She touched one of the flashing bulbs with near reverence.
‘Here, you can choose how the lights flash.’ I showed Grace the little green box. It took a
nother ten minutes before Nate and I were able to persuade her that the fade in and out of the blue and green to red and orange was more restful, with the suggestion that she could always change the lights at different times of the day. I had a strong suspicion that Nate would be eating his Weetabix to quite a light show each morning.
‘I almost miss the old days,’ said Nate. ‘That moment before switch-on, when you held your breath hoping they’d work. These new LEDs take away the anticipation. Then you’d have to test each bulb until you found the duff one.’
‘No, you don’t,’ I scolded. ‘LEDs forever. Much less faff.’ I rolled my eyes at the memory of sitting, fingers crossed that Dad would find the dead bulb. ‘I remember my dad always, always gave me the same physics lecture about how electric circuits work.’
‘And do you still know how electric circuits work?’
‘Yes, it’s imprinted on my brain for ever.’
He grinned at me. ‘Did the trick then.’
I tutted at him.
During our conversation, Grace had been trying to work out where to put her special piece of tinsel, which she’d finally decided should go in the middle of the tree.
Sitting on the floor, I pulled the battered box, retrieved from Mum, towards me and the bag of newly purchased baubles and my handbag.
‘OK, decoration time.’ I glanced quickly at my watch. I had a couple of hours before I had to get changed and ready for work. Nate was on dinner duty today with a lazy menu of leftover chicken and oven chips.
‘I’ll make drinks. Hot chocolate all round. And I have special biscuits.’ With a ta-da wave of his wrist, he produced a packet of Marks & Spencer’s Extremely Chocolatey biscuits. ‘Client sent a rather fancy hamper to the office.’
‘With squirty cream!’ begged Grace.
While he busied himself in the kitchen, I opened the box, full of carefully wrapped decorations, and Grace leaned into the box and touched the little packages, one by one, with the tips of her finger as if it were a box of chocolates and she couldn’t decide which to pick up first.
‘Here you go.’ I handed her the first tissue-wrapped parcel, watching as she peeled away the layer to reveal a scarlet teardrop-shaped bauble with a hollowed-out front painted in silver. It was a very old one and in some places the silver paint had chipped off, but it featured in some of my earliest childhood memories.
‘Pretty. Can I put it on the tree?’ Hope filled her small elfin face.
‘You can put anything you like on the tree and anything you don’t like can stay in the box.’
We worked our way through the box. The little wooden Scandinavian doll decorations all got the seal of approval, which I was pleased about, even the little man on his sledge with only one foot. In fact there was very little that Grace rejected. A plain silver bauble because it was dull but then reinstated because the back of the tree was ‘lonely’.
Halfway through, when I had to lift Grace up to put some of the decorations on the higher branches, I pulled my handbag towards me and took out the blue bauble in its brown paper bag.
‘And this is for you. This is one of your decorations for ever.’
She carefully unwrapped the blue glass ball and placed it in front of her on the floor, reaching out with a single finger and touching it before looking up at me with sheer wonderment in her eyes.
‘Thank you, Viola,’ she whispered, then got to her feet and put her arms around my neck and squeezed really hard, crushing my collarbone, but I didn’t care.
‘It’s the best bauble ever, to the moon and back,’ she whispered fiercely, hugging me even tighter. I closed my eyes, squeezing them shut to stop them welling up, and hugged her back.
By the time the tree was finished, it was a gaudy explosion of colour and mismatched decorations and Grace insisted on putting one of the blingier light sequences on just to celebrate completion.
‘Take a picture, Daddy,’ said Grace, holding out his phone and posing with one hand on her hip in front of the tree. ‘It’s the best tree ever.’ She tugged at the silver piece of tinsel again. ‘And this is my favourite, well, after the one you gave me, Viola, and the reindeer.’
That flipping reindeer had been a bone of contention with my mother for years. It was made from some sort of very dense plastic material and had a rather creepy, goofy grin, odd cross-eyes and was far too heavy because it always weighed the branches down too much. But, no matter how far Mum buried it at the bottom of the box or wherever she hid it, Dad and I would always remember it and would campaign for its inclusion on the tree. Now I kind of understood where Mum was coming from; it was hideous and I too had tried to push it back into the discarded tissue wrapping but the minute Grace had spotted its ugly little face she too had insisted it went on the tree.
‘Will Father Christmas put presents under this tree? Real ones. Not the pretend ones.’
‘I think he might,’ said Nate.
‘Can I write a letter to him?’ Grace had been rather taken with the letterbox at The Churchill Arms where children could post letters to Santa. ‘And can we go back to the pub to post it?’
‘Definitely write to him. That’s a good idea and then I can take it and pop it in the postbox on my way to work one day,’ said Nate.
‘On Monday,’ said Grace urgently.
‘On Monday,’ agreed Nate and she immediately jumped up and retrieved her colouring pens and books from the kitchen drawer.
‘I’m going to do it now.’ She wriggled her way up into one of the bar stools. Nate and I smiled as she sat for a minute or two, her chin propped in her hand, clearly putting a great deal of thought into the letter.
‘Do you think it should be Dear Santa or Dear Father Christmas?’
Nate widened his eyes as he looked at me and mouthed, ‘No idea.’
‘Dear Father Christmas,’ I said, mouthing, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ back at him. I preferred the formality of it.
Grace bent her head and began to write.
I began to tidy up the discarded boxes and tissue paper. ‘I’ll take these up to the attic and I’m going to get ready for work. Would you mind if I had a bath?’ Since I’d seen the double-ended bath in the family bathroom I’d been longing to try it out and my shoulder was still aching a little. I’d managed an hour’s practise first thing this morning before Nate or Grace had been up, secreting myself in Nate’s study again.
‘What time will you be back? I need to give you a key.’
‘Probably just after eleven-thirty.’
‘For some reason I thought it would be later.’
‘You’re joking. If we play for more than three hours, management get very twitchy. They hate having to pay us overtime. There are quite strict rules about how long we play, how long before we have a break and how long the breaks are for. Didn’t you know, the intervals are for the musicians not the audience?’ I joked.
Nate opened the door of a little key box. In my house spare keys, if you were lucky enough to find one, were buried under the junk in the kitchen drawer, the one filled with matches, loose change and the little packs of screwdrivers that you get in crackers.
‘Here you go. Will you be OK coming back from the tube station on your own?’
‘Nate, I’ve been doing it for years. And I quite often travel back with a couple of stage crew friends.’ In fact I knew Tilly was on tonight; I was hoping to grab her and talk make-up.
He glanced at Grace, happily absorbed in her task. ‘I’ll give you a hand with those boxes.’
At the top of the stairs, Nate said, ‘Actually, do you mind taking the boxes up to the attic? I need to do something.’
Before I could answer, he piled another box on top of mine and put a hand in the small of my back to push me along. Charming.
Feeling a bit miffed, I took my time on the stairs, wending my way up the next flight, passing the door to the nanny suite onto the odd-shaped attic room at the back of the house. I cleared a space on the shelf next to Elaine’s carefully dated boxes of d
ecorations, thinking the tatty box looked decidedly out of place, but then I took a second satisfied look, thinking that the box which had seen thirty years’ service was more than able to hold its own.
Nate greeted me at the bottom of the stairs and took both my hands, drawing me down the corridor before pulling me into the bathroom.
Perfume scented the air, the beautiful Diptyque candles on the shelf behind the bath had been lit and water was bubbling into a rich foam in the bath.
‘I thought I’d run you a bath as a thank you for looking after us. Take your time and I’ll rustle something up for dinner.’
I raised an eyebrow.
‘Fish finger sandwich?’ he asked. ‘We’ve got some very nice tartare sauce in the fridge.’
I laughed. ‘That would be lovely.’
‘You’re lovely,’ he suddenly said in a low voice.
I looked up into his eyes to see an expression of longing filling them.
When he stepped forward, a hand rising to my face, his fingers feathering along my cheekbone, I froze, unable to look away.
‘I shouldn’t … but I can’t …’ His hand stilled on my skin. I held my breath. His other hand slid around my waist and gently pulled me to him. ‘I want to …’ When his eyes dropped to my mouth I felt a surge of wistful hope.
‘It’s no good.’ With a rueful smile he dipped his head towards mine and gently kissed my lips, tightening his hold. Warm breath teased my mouth and I sank into the kiss, grateful for his arms supporting me. My legs had suddenly become decidedly wobbly.
As his mouth roved over mine, flickers of electricity sparked all over my skin and I lifted my arms to loop around his neck, feeling the softness of his hair beneath my fingers. Under his lips my mouth opened and at the tentative touch of his tongue I felt a small explosion in my chest.
‘God, Viola.’ He groaned and deepened the kiss, our breathing loud over the running water. ‘I’m sorry.’ He pulled back and rested his forehead against mine. ‘I can’t seem to …’