Highland Fling (36 page)

‘You are joking, aren’t you?’

He shook his head. ‘There’s one in the attic. All I
have to do is persuade Mama to sell it. I thought perhaps Henry might help.’

‘Doing what? Selling it? Or persuading your mother?’

‘Well, both. The house is grossly overfurnished.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘The house is grossly overfurnished.’

It wasn’t really funny, but they both laughed and laughed.

Jenny wiped her eyes, feeling much better. I’m so looking forward to going home for Christmas. I can’t believe it’s only the day after tomorrow. I must organise a train ticket, or something. Or I could fly from Inverness, couldn’t I?’

‘You could, at any other time of the year,’ said Philip, correcting a skid with the ease of one brought up to drive in snow. ‘But every seat on every train and plane will be booked. And you’re not going to be able to get your car out for a while.’

Jenny wanted to cry. She’d been so strong, so full of fight and courage, suddenly the thought of not spending Christmas with her mother turned her into a little girl again. It was utterly pathetic. ‘Oh. I don’t like to think of my mother spending it alone.’

‘I’m sure that won’t happen. People will queue up to invite her.’

They already had. Fay Porter had accepted a last-minute invitation to spend Christmas on a luxury cruise, someone having broken their leg. ‘You’ll be all right up there, won’t you?’ she asked, when she’d finished telling Jenny all the details.

‘Me? Oh yes, I’ll be fine. It’ll be brilliant to have a white Christmas. I can’t remember the last one.’

‘And you’ll have Henry with you.’

‘Yes. Actually, Ma, sorry to cut you short, but I must go–’

‘So should I; I’ve still got packing to do. If 11 be such fun, dressing for dinner every night. Still, I won’t keep you. Bye, love. I’ll give you a ring tomorrow, before I go. Will you be at Dalmain House?’

‘For the foreseeable future,’ she muttered. ‘No, only joking! Yes, I’ll be here.’

Jenny sneezed loudly. She felt supremely sorry for herself, wanted to howl and bite the pillow. But Philip was still with his mother, and she wanted to be available in case he needed her support, so she went downstairs, after the briefest sob and not even a nip at the lumpen mass she rested her head on every night.

She found Henry and Felicity in the sitting room. Henry was reading and Felicity was finishing a cushion. The atmosphere was that of a dentisf s waiting room.

‘Philip’s with Mama in her study,’ said Felicity. ‘I know she’ll give him the money he needs, and I know that, if it were me, she wouldn’t let me have a penny.’

‘Where’s Lachlan?’

‘He dug out his Land Rover and went home. He did want to get back to his llamas, but I think he also found the atmosphere here a bit stultifying.’

‘I expect we all feel a bit flat after the party,’ said Jenny, remembering it only because the furniture wasn’t all back, and the room looked bigger. ‘I know, why don’t we decorate the house? For Christmas?’

‘We never do,’ said Felicity.

‘Jenny’s addicted to fairy lights,’ said Henry, indulgently. ‘She has to buy a new set every year, and find somewhere else to put them.’

‘I don’t think we’ve got any fairy lights, or any decorations. If we have, I’ve no idea where.’ Felicity made it clear she was not about to go rummaging in attics to find ancient treasures to decorate a tree.

‘Well, we could pick greenery, boughs of holly, that sort of thing. Goodness me, the place is surrounded by conifers. Lef s go and cut some and bring them in!’

‘I’m not sure Mama would like it,’ said Felicity. ‘She doesn’t really approve of Christmas. Hogmanay is more her thing. She only sends cards to very old friends.’

Now she looked, Jenny noticed that there were surprisingly few Christmas cards tucked around the dead birds and animals. ‘Well, what about you?’

‘I don’t get many.’

‘Do you send many?’

‘No, none at all.’

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Well – because I’ve been ill.’ Felicity seemed affronted at the suggestion that she might indulge in an activity most of the rest of the world did as a matter of course.

‘It is a lot of work, but it’s nice to keep in touch. I usually send loads.’ The thought of all her unopened cards at her mother’s house and her own made her feel guiltier than ever for not having got round to sending any this year. Somehow, away from home, she’d lost sight of the approach of Christmas, had assumed she’d be home before now, and so had missed the boat. ‘I expect I’ll be struck off everybody’s list.’

‘You do always go over the top a bit at Christmas,‘ said Henry.

‘Maybe. But I’m going to try and find a bit of holly, or something.’

By the time Philip and his mother emerged from her study, both appearing tired and emotional, Philip clutching an empty whisky bottle, Jenny had found enough greenery to satisfy her. Felicity, taking pity on her, produced some ribbon, and while the decorations weren’t exactly opulent, they had a sort of
Country Living
rusticity.

‘Philip and I are going to run a bookshop,’ announced Lady Dalmain. ‘Such fun. He’s going to man the shop, and I’m going to deal with the antiquarian books, over the Internet.’

If Jenny had been prone to fainting, she’d have done it then.

Chapter Twenty-two

Jenny woke on Christmas morning knowing she was going to hate every minute of the day. She didn’t usually condemn a whole day the moment she opened her eyes, but for this one, she felt she was justified in feeling despondent.

There would be family presents at eleven, and then everyone would process, in as many cars as necessary, to the Malcolms’, for drinks. They would come back here for a snack lunch (smoked salmon and whisky) and after a long period of sleeping or being intensely bored, they would go to the lodge Henry’s parents had rented, for Christmas dinner. Henry’s mother was delighted at the prospect of a real title at her dinner table.

‘Do you not want to see your first grandchild on Christmas Day?’ Jenny had asked, feeling that a quick visit to Meggie and Iain would be a little much-needed relief.

‘No. They’re going to spend the day with her parents.’ The ‘her’ had just enough emphasis to make their social standing clear. ‘We’re having them up here for Boxing Day, remember? And Philip and Gloria, of course. And her sons.’

Jenny pulled the duvet up round her head. Shall I pretend I’m ill? Lie here all day and wallow in my
misery? No, that would be a foolishness too far. She retrieved her mother’s cashmere sweater from the side of the bed, put it on, and got up.

More snow had fallen in the night, but now the clouds had cleared and the sun shone. It was nine o’clock. There were no stockings to open, no last-minute presents to wrap, no presents bought, even, beyond the things she had managed to get at a village shop, after Philip had broken it to her that she wouldn’t get home for Christmas. Boxes of chocolates, a scarf pin for Lady Dalmain, tartan socks for Henry, some soap and a very pretty scarf made from llama fibre (a sample) for Felicity, didn’t take much tartan wrapping paper. Her efforts at decorating the house had been regarded as a strange flight of fancy.

Usually, on Christmas day, when she was still living at home, she’d make tea, and take it into her mother. Then she would get into her mother’s bed, as if she were still a child, and they would open their stockings together, both having done one for the other. Then, when they’d put on all the wearable items, eaten several of the edible ones, and made themselves feel slightly sick, they got up and ate croissants and cherry jam before going for a walk.

Deprived of two of these homely rituals, and even of Henry’s less-enthusiastic, ‘Oh, happy Christmas’ Jenny felt entitled to have the third; she would go for a walk in the snow.

Before she went downstairs to make tea, she logged on to see if her mother had managed to send her a message from her cruise ship. She had. Trying not to let her self-pity show in her reply, she went on about the beauty of the snow, ending,

I’m going to make a snowman later, no matter how much they laugh.

She wasn’t really expecting one, but there was a time when her client Ross Grant-Dempsey might have emailed her a Christmas message. For a ghastly moment she wondered if her laptop, which had been the means of communication between them for so long, before she knew who he was, of course, would always remind her of him. If they weren’t so expensive, she’d consider getting a new one. From somewhere came the thought of Lady Dalmain becoming computer literate, a silver surfer, selling books from the Internet. In spite of feeling so low, she smiled. Philip certainly knew how to manipulate his mother if he persuaded her she wanted to do that!

No one was about downstairs. Lachlan had trekked back over the previous night and driven Lady Dalmain to see a neighbour. Henry wouldn’t wake for hours. Jenny let the dogs out and watched them scamper over the snow. Like the rest of Scotland, which had not welcomed her at first, she was now used to their hairy exuberance. She didn’t intend to take them with her for her walk, though.

When she opened the front door a little later, she was dressed as appropriately as she could be. She had put on thick socks and her newly acquired walking boots. Underneath she had on thick tights, her tartan trews, and many other layers of clothing, including the dress-length cashmere jumper. She slung a small bag over her shoulder into which she put a bottle of water, a bar of chocolate she had intended to put in someone’s stocking, before she realised that no one did stockings
in Dalmain House, a couple of Clementines, and a packet of bought shortbread she had had to keep hidden from Kirsty.

She had left a note, giving her time of departure and expected arrival home too. It seemed rather dramatic, given she was only going to flounder through the snow for a few hundred yards, but with Ross’s harrowing story about being rescued from Snowdon, she was determined to do everything right. She would probably be back before the others were up anyway.

She was tempted to just walk straight up the hill behind Dalmain House, but knew the snow would be too thick for easy walking, and that it would be better if she found the path she knew to be a little way to the left. Even just getting to the path made her hot, and wish she’d put on slightly fewer layers.

The way to the top of the hill was marked by stones splashed with paint, now two feet under the snow, but Jenny was fairly confident of finding her way. There were no hidden gullies that she knew of, it was early in the day, and the walk only took an hour, or so Philip had told her as they’d driven back together the other day. She had been complaining that she still hadn’t had an opportunity to climb the local mountain.

‘All those walkers telling me about it at The Homely Haggis, me living so close, and no time to climb it myself.’

‘I’m not sure it qualifies as a mountain, but it’s a nice walk on a good day. You can see the whole next mountain range from the top. Now they really are spectacular. They are for real climbers, not just hill scramblers.’

Conveniently forgetting his rider that it would be
best to wait until the snow had thawed a bit before she tried it, Jenny set off with confidence. She should be at the summit and back before the rest of the household even stirred from their beds. And if she didn’t make the summit, at least she’d have a good walk, and feel better for it.

She seemed to make very slow progress. Of course, walking through snow is slow, but however far she walked, every time she looked up or back, she seemed to be in the same place.

At half-past eleven she wondered if she should go back. All those social engagements she would be missing. Still, she’d missed going to the Malcolms’ now, anyway. And they weren’t really her social engagements, she was only invited because she was part of the household and so had to be.

Eventually, she reached what would pass for a summit. She sat on a rock that was only lightly dusted with snow, and looked at how far she’d come. Her path was clear, disappearing from time to time, revealing when she had come to a summit, only to find another one ahead of her.

She was tired now, and realised that she should have set herself a shorter target, knowing that she was totally unfit. But it was Christmas, and this walk, this time alone, was her present to herself. She ate the bar of chocolate, hoping it would give her the energy for the homeward trudge.

‘It should be much quicker going down,’ she said out loud.

Now, the prospect of Christmas with Henry’s parents, going through the pretence of she and Henry still being a couple, seemed a lot more attractive.
Henry’s mother was a good cook, and although she would expect Jenny to help, helping was a lot easier than running the show.

The sun had gone, its absence reminding Jenny that there were very few hours of daylight left. But still, she reckoned, it should only take her just over an hour to get down. She’d be back, lighting the fire, if no one had already, by four. She thought hungrily of the mince pies she’d made. She didn’t really like mince pies, but now a mince pie and a cup of tea sounded like heaven. A few sips of water quenched her thirst, but didn’t satisfy her like a cup of tea would have done.