I watch the kettle on the gas ring, waiting for it to boil, and it’s still there: the heavy sinking sensation in my chest that I had that night in the seconds that followed Don popping the question. It seemed at the time to last an excruciating hour while I was assaulted by a rush of feelings, most of them happy, excited, dizzy ones, and only some of them anxious, cautious and embarrassed ones telling me not to mind all the people gathered around watching, waiting for my response.
I knew I could walk right out if I wanted to. I don’t know why I didn’t. Don’s smile? His confidence that we were perfect together? The feeling of being really alive and actually desired for once?
The racket that went up when I heard myself saying ‘yes’ kind of blasted everything else that happened that evening into insignificance.
I’m opening the Christmas biscuits, sod it. If I’m going to be sleepless, I’m at least having some lebkuchen to console me. I make my tea extra milky, hoping that will settle me.
A whirlwind. That’s what theWheaton Parish Newsletterannouncement called our engagement. That’s one way to describe it, even though now, with the divorce papers on my computer and everything dissolved between me and Don, I know it was more of a category-five hurricane. Catastrophic damage. Risk to human life. Loss of power. Homes levelled. I should get him a storm warning printed on a T-shirt to scare off the next dizzy woman he plans to sweep off her feet.
Turns out, Don was a serial monogamist, addicted to the thrill of falling in love. When the buzz wore off, he’d ride away. At least, that’s how me and Izz figured it, during the marriage post-mortem. It certainly explains why he had Interflora set as a ‘favourite’ phone contact.
Funny how only after it was all over did I recall him enthusing fondly about old girlfriends and impromptu trips to Paris or Rome that he’d surprised them with. He must have left a trail of romantic destruction in his wake wherever he drifted. I wonder now how many of them he actually married. I can add that to the long list of things I simply don’t know about the man I was fool enough to marry. Stupid woman!
I carry my tea into the den. There’s a special bleakness in an English winter night when you’re alone with your memories and there’s nothing but sixty-watt bulbs buzzing in their shades, too harsh and hurting my tired eyes.
‘I should have got a tree,’ I tell the night, pulling the blanket over me on the sofa where Patrick was sitting only this afternoon.
Izz was right. Being miserable by fairy light has to be better than this glare. Even Scrooge had candles to soften his long night’s reacquaintance with his past mistakes.
But no. I won’t be indulging in decorations this year. There’s too much faffery goes into Christmas as it is, and I’m still remorseful about how I overdosed last December when I thought it’d be a good idea to combine my wedding with the opening night of the gingerbread grotto.
Last year there wasn’t a wall, a gatepost or a hedgerow left un-fairy-lit from my garden path all the way down the lane and on to the high street and past the schoolhouse to the village hall. It took me days to string them up, marking my bridal passage. It’s safe to say my nuptials tipped my love of Christmas décor over into ‘dangerously twee’ territory.
Looking back, I think I was aware of the looks on some of the villagers’ faces as I paraded through town that crisp winter morning in my satin, lace and faux fur, past all my pretty lights and down to the hall where Don was waiting. At the time, I was blissfully unaware, but I should haveheardthose looks. ‘She’s no spring chicken,’ they said. ‘Barely knows the fella.’ ‘Who even is he?’ ‘I give it a year,’ they said. Even behind the locals’ plastered-on smiles. I should have known.
Maybe, deep down, I was intent on proving the world wrong. Youcanget the whole fairy tale in your sixties, course you can. Don and I were going to last, and we’d show them what love in later life looked like. We’d put on a show for all those young ones thinking they invented attraction and held the monopoly on romance. I couldn’t have been more deluded.
Only I didn’t know it until two weeks later when Don slipped from our honeymoon bed right here in my cottage and hopped on his Harley, riding off into the Christmas Eve dawn with as little warning as he’d swept into my life just thirteen months earlier.
I sip my tea and ruminate. Patrick was away for the whole wedding, thankfully, so at least one villager missed my humiliation. He was using up two weeks of his remaining holiday time to visit his parents in Cheltenham. But Mum and Dad were here to help with everything, little knowing they were flying over to give their daughter away (again)andto help pick up the pieces when it all went wrong (again). Dad even filled Patrick’s Santa boots that year and didn’t do a half-bad job of it, though the grotto wasn’t quite the same without him. Yet everyone else in the village was here to witness my hopefulness turn to humiliation. Most people, and especially Patrick, have been kind enough not to mention Don since. We all just pretend he never existed.
I’ve drained my tea, disappeared three biscuits, and am feeling distinctly dozy again when I find myself speculating about Dream Patrick.
Why now? After knowing him for getting on for five years of companionate friendship, why does my brain want to play tricks on me now? Making me dream like that. When there’s almost fifteen years between us, and when he’s become one of the firmest friends of my entire life. Why not back then, when he first moved to the village, taking the job at the school? When I was still in my fifties. Maybe then we could have… no.
No, this isn’t helpful. There’s no use in asking ‘what if?’
If we were going to be ‘something’, it would have happened then, back when I was a different person without a reputation in the village for reckless love matches, when I could be classed as officially still young(ish) and, even if I say it myself, really quite fanciable. Back before he became indispensable to me, a true friend I couldn’t bear to lose.
The dream sensations linger, the feeling of his hand firm at the base of my spine, the insistent thoughts about how nice it would be to be held like that again while his eyes are shining and we’re both laughing and breathless from dancing.
The jolt I receive from the phone ringing in the kitchen makes me almost throw my empty mug across the floor. Its piercing sound cracks open the night.
Four forty-five?Not a good time for a phone call. Not good at all. I sprint for it, dragging the blanket with me.
‘Auntie Margi?’ a small voice trembles and sniffs.
‘Luce? What’s the matter?’ She’s trying not to cry.
‘It’s Craig. He’s gone.’
Ugh, no surprise there. I only met him once, right at the beginning, and I didn’t like him even then. Another flop of a man, and years of my clever, talented, beautiful niece’s precious time wasted.
‘Oh, darling. Where are you?’ I ask, and that’s when I hear the tapping at the cottage door.
Chapter Four
Saturday 2 December: A Pocket Day
