It was mine too, all my life, but once Mum and Dad left for Spain it lost so much of its magic, and then Don shipped in and shipped straight back out again, playing the man of the house for all of twelve months. The place just doesn’t feel like home any more. Izz, for one, will be devastated. It’s harder to know what Patrick will feel. Maybe he won’t mind. It can’t be fun for him, hanging out with us all Advent, then being forced to play Santa Claus when he could be having a normal Christmas with his own family, whoever they are, or going out on some festive dates, maybe. He’s not even fifty yet. Why bother with us and all our gingerbread nonsense? I just don’t know what we did to deserve his help. I really don’t.
He’s towering over me. I find I can’t risk looking up at him from this angle in case he notices me goggling. I have, however, already clocked how nicely dressed he is. Dark khaki pants rolled a little at the ankle – a reminder if it was needed that he’s still in his forties and dresses like it – and brown boots with a dark jumper I’ve never seen him in before.
‘Been shopping?’ I ask as I rise to my feet too.
‘Hmm?’ He tips his head.
‘This is new.’ I gesture at his sleeve, which he immediately pushes up, I’m guessing in an unconscious response, to reveal a leather watch strap and some forearm that makes me want to bite my lip and scold myself for being like this.
‘Oh, uh, yeah,’ he remarks, and leaves it at that.
Oh no, is he scowling or… blushing?
Suddenly, I’m not sure what’s going on, but I’m aware he’s just standing there looking at me like he’s trying to figure out what I’m thinking, or maybe he’s unsure what else to say.
Izz’s smirking face rises from around his shoulder. ‘If you two are finished with the scintillating chat, how about we get our pins out? Hmm?’ And she leads the way to the kitchen again. ‘Meeting adjourned on account of there being tons to be getting on with.’ As she glides by, she replaces the imaginary pencil in her hair.
‘After you,’ Patrick tells me, sweeping a hand in front.
‘Right!’ I yelp as I follow Izz, bringing my hands together in a decisive clap. ‘Ovens on, let’s get rolling.’ I try not to think about Patrick following behind me, eyes on my back.Hopefully, they’re only on my back.
The three of us huddle around the table ready to bake into the night, the last people in England who give two fruit cakes about the Gingerbread Christmas Village and, since I’m the only one amongst us who knows this year will be the very last of its kind, I’m secretly determined that we’ll go out with a big festive bang.
Chapter Three
Saturday, early: Don
Four a.m. is the worst time to be single and sixty-five. However, my brain chemistry decided months ago that this was absolutely the best time to wake me up. Its favourite ways for startling me awake include: phantom wee (an urgent bladder that turns out to be a false alarm, but by the time I know this, I’m face to face with myself in the bathroom mirror), a good old-fashioned creak at the windows or rafters (in a 400-year-old cottage there’s nothing but creaks all day long but at night my brain interprets every one as an intruder set on murdering me in my bed), or – and this is its favourite method by a long way – a horribly twisted dream. And that’s what my grey matter served up for me tonight, a sort of nightmare mixed in with real memories in all their glorious technicolour realism. So here I am again, wide awake in the dark, counting the minutes until morning, and an article Izz read to me inPrimapromised this will only get worse the older I get. Sleeplessness, just one of ageing’s many bountiful gifts!
This time, though, my clever old brain got so many of the details right, replaying the scene for me like an old cine film, and I got to watch the whole thing over again, exactly as it had unfolded that night in The Salutation.
It had all started out so promising too. Two Christmas Eves ago, after the grotto closed for the season. Everyone had a drink inside them, and people do things they regret when they’re well into a bottle of Tia Maria, not that that’s any excuse for my behaviour. The whole village was in, it seemed, standing room only, and we’d burst through the doors, flushed with (moderate) success and the relief of shutting up the exhibit for the year.
We’d raised about three thousand pounds, not bad at all, a slight increase on previous years, but that increase had been absorbed by Patrick’s new Father Christmas costume. The old one had been moth-eaten, and one of the grotto’s predecessor Santas had left a humbug in the trousers sometime in 1990, and it had melted and glued the pocket shut ever since, so it was beyond time to replace it. Patrick was still wearing it, the suit, and I remember thinking he looked handsome in his scarlet velvet breeches and with the matching jacket all undone and those black boots and the big leather belt.
What my dream-mare helpfully filled in for me tonight was how rosy his cheeks had been and how his eyes were shining while he twirled me on the pub’s dance floor. I’m still not sure if those are things I actually saw and must have packed away in my unconscious only for them to come back out in my vulnerable alone-in-bed state, or whether my brain enjoys embellishing these things out of a sick preoccupation with paining me.
Either way, I got to experience it all over again, dancing under the pub’s party lights while Lolla the landlady (exhaling enough apple-scented vapour to give any smoke machine a run for its atmosphere-making money) kept the drinks coming.
There was a definite moment where we stopped under the big ball of mistletoe one of the farmers had hung from the rafters over the dance floor. Cerys Matthews and Tom Jones were crooning about it being cold outside, and I was laughing and feeling my absolute happiest in that moment.
Dream Patrick told me he liked me in a dress. I had worn a dress that night (berry-red and short); the first time I’d bared my legs in public in years, actually. I can’t remember if he really did say it in real life or not. The music had been too loud for chatting, so I doubt it somehow. Maybe he said it right in my ear. Was that what set off the electrified feeling inside me? Thanks, brain, for capturing all of that so accurately in the rerun.
That night, Patrick had ditched the beard and the glasses, and everyone was buying him drinks and toasting the village’s own Father Christmas, the man of the hour, and he was playing along, saying how he’d better be setting off in his sleigh soon, what with it being Christmas Eve.
He definitely asked me what I wanted for Christmas as we danced – my brain’s got that spot on – and I know I laughed, and his palm, I distinctly recall, spread across the small of my back in a way that made my nervous system malfunction completely.
Then, and this is where my dream took liberties because this categorically did not happen, I rested my cheek against his, and we slowed in our dancing while he said things in a voice sunk to a hazy, gruff kind of rasp that I hadn’t imagined coming from Patrick before tonight – again, thank you, brain. He was saying things about liking me, how he couldn’t hold back any longer. I won’t go into detail. It never happened, of course. It’s just four a.m. me getting lost in a silly fantasy. But what happened next, I will never forget. This bit was one hundred per cent accurate in all its awful detail in the replay.
Patrick had suddenly stopped dancing, and I was sort of blinking in his face, wondering why the pub lights had come up, and he pulled away looking kind of cross, frustrated maybe, and it’s possible Real Patrickhadbeen saying something along the lines of ‘I know things are getting serious with Don, but—’ when everything else got lost in the sudden commotion in the pub, and people were cheering and whooping and Lolla cut the music for some reason.
I hadn’t remembered until tonight, but I think Patrick’s face kind of froze, and he stepped away backwards, disappearing into the crowd of laughing, tipsy locals in Christmas jumpers who were all looking at me for some reason, and Patrick was just… gone.
I turned around, wondering what the hell everyone was shouting at, and there, kneeling on the floor at my feet, was Don holding up a ring box, and he was smiling his most winning smile, and that’s when I jolted awake tonight, at the part that is supposed to be every woman’s dream: a big, romantic proposal.
That’s it. I’m getting up and putting the kettle on.
The bedroom floorboards are cold under my feet, but the kitchen flagstones are downright freezing, enough to banish the very last hazy clouds of my dream state.
