On every white cloth-draped table our gloriously raggle-taggle gingerbread buildings and the soft, snowy spaces around them are lit subtly by tea lights, the little melted boiled sweet stained-glass windows reflecting their glow.
Above it all, invisibly suspended from the ceiling, hangs a foil paper moon, Lucy’s idea, so simple and so pretty catching the candlelight.
‘It’s perfect,’ I say, my voice croaky.
‘Uh-huh,’ he says, jamming his hands into his pockets, something I’m noticing him doing more and more when he’s around me.
Before they left for the day, the volunteers had helped string metres of white lights on black flex over the drapes hiding the walls, disguising the fact this is a gymnasium, and now each little bulb is gleaming against the black like stars in a winter sky.
‘It doesn’t look a bit like Mum’s exhibit,’ I say. ‘But it feels more like it than any gingerbread village I ever made in the past.’
‘It’s got heart,’ Patrick says.
‘And simplicity,’ I add.
‘Oh, and it’s got a little train,’ Patrick says, remembering, and leaping forward to turn a switch under the engine. The steam train powers along its track, drawing my eye to its own little light in its cabin where a tiny driver traffics open wagons behind him, which Lucy had the bright idea of filling with sweets, turning it into the ‘Candy Express’, as she called it.
‘The kids will love it. All of it,’ I say.
Eventually, after taking it all in, I sit down on the edge of the low stage by the entrance to the grotto where the Santa suit hangs ready for its first outing of the year. Tomorrow the schoolkids will get a sneak preview of the exhibit on their very last day of term.
Leo Bold, the superhead who didn’t believe in nativities, or grottos, or even in Wheaton village, having experienced a Christmas miracle of his own, has offered to wear the suit in the morning for his pupils. The presents are waiting in the grotto for them: the usual chocolate coins – I’d already bought them so they’re having them – and sack loads of teddy bears, donated by Dunham Gravey management at Patrick’s request, every one of them wearing a little green branded fleecy jumper.
‘We should get going,’ says Patrick, but he still sits down beside me, lowering himself slowly. ‘Ooft! It won’t be easy waking for work tomorrow,’ he says.
‘Another epic shift?’ I ask.
‘Yep, the school day then Dunham till midnight,’ he says, and my chest aches at the thought of everything this man sacrifices to help me out.
‘Thank you for doing all of this,’ I say.
‘It’s my pleasure.’
Even with a day’s stubble showing, his skin’s pretty in this light. I hope I look a tenth as pretty.
‘I owe you an apology,’ he says out of nowhere.
‘You do? What for?’
‘For pursuing you when it’s abundantly clear you’re not interested.’
‘That’s not true.’ My sleepy brain is suddenly flooded with adrenalin at the abrupt straying into the danger zone.
He looks at me wordlessly.
‘It’s not that I’m not interested. I’d have to be crazy not to be.’
‘It’s the age thing? Still?’
‘That and other stuff,’ I say, not wanting to go over it all again but realising it’s time Patrick heard it all out loud, so he can grasp it once and for all, the reasons why we shouldn’t be together. ‘You could have a young girlfriend. Someone in their thirties, even,’ I say, and I feel a bit sick and, frankly, jealous of the imaginary thirty-year-old he’s besotted with. ‘I’ve stopped a man from having kids before, you know? John. My first husband. For a long time he kept it hidden, but in the end, the need was too strong in him. He wanted to be a father, and now he has two kids of his own, grown-ups by now, I should think.’
Patrick fixes me with his eyes. ‘I wantyou, though. I don’t need kids.’
I’m not going to insist he’ll change his mind one day when he meets the right person. It always grated when people said it to me.
‘Why do you want me?’ I plead. ‘I really, really don’t get it.’
‘I don’t know,’ he states plainly, and that takes me aback. ‘No, no,’ he adds hurriedly. ‘I just likeeverythingabout you. Your style, your body, your smile, your eyes. The way you fight and fight for the community, even when you’re on the back foot. You never give up. And I just like being with you. Isn’t all that enough?’
