The Magic of Christmas (2 page)

‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ I agreed. ‘And it doesn’t matter that it’s midsummer either, because I still get a tingle down my spine at the thought that we’ve started counting down to Christmas.’

‘I suppose we are in a way, but it’s more advance planning, isn’t it?’ Faye said.

‘Yes, and we’d better get on with it,’ Marian said, flicking open a notebook and writing in the date, for she organises the CPC just as she, together with her husband Clive, run most of the events around Middlemoss. As usual, she was bristling with energy right down to the roots of her spiky silver hair. ‘First up, are there any changes to the list of ingredients for Miss Pym to order?’

‘I still have last year’s list on my computer, so it will be easy to tweak it before I email it off,’ Miss Pym said, helping herself to more lemonade. An ice-cube cracked with a noise like a miniature iceberg calving from a glacier.

But there was not much to tweak, for of course we mostly make the same things every year: mince pies, Christmas cakes and puddings. We need large quantities too, for as well as baking for our own families, we also make lots of small cakes for the local Senior Citizens Christmas Hampers, which are annually distributed by Marian and the rest of the Mosses Women’s Institute.

‘Who has got the six small cake tins for the hamper Christmas cakes?’ asked Annie.

‘Me,’ I said.

‘I’ll put you down to bake the first batch then,’ Marian said, scribbling that down, then she handed out the CPC meetings rota. We’re supposed to take it in turns to host it in our homes but I don’t know why she bothers, because after the first one it always goes completely haywire for one reason or another.

The important business of the meeting concluded, I got out some coffee granita I’d made. It never tastes quite as perfect as I hope it will, but they were all very kind about it. Then the conversation turned to frozen desserts in general and we discussed the possibility of concocting a brandy butter ice cream to go with Christmas pudding. I think Faye started that one: she makes a lot of ice cream for her farm shop.

Writing the CPC meeting up later for the
Chronicles
, I added a note to include the recipe for the brandy butter ice cream to that chapter if one of us came up with something good, and then laid my pen down on the kitchen table with a sigh, thinking that it was just as well I had the Christmas Pudding Circle to write about.

Although my readers loved the mix of domestic disaster, horticultural endeavour and recipes in my
Perseverance Chronicle
books, I could hardly include bulletins on the way the last, frayed knots of my failed marriage were so speedily unravelling, which was the subject most on my mind of late. I had become not so much a wife, as landlady to a surly, sarcastic and antisocial lodger.

The first
Perseverance Chronicle
was written in a desperate bid to make some money soon after we were married, influenced by all the old cosy, self-sufficiency-in-a-Cornish-cottage books that I had loved before the reality set in. Mine were a little darker, including such unromantic elements as the joys of outside toilets when heavily pregnant in winter and having an Inconstant Gardener for a husband.

It was accepted by a publisher and when we moved back to Lancashire I simply renamed the new cottage after the old and carried on — and so, luckily, did those readers who had bought the first book.

My self-imposed quota of four daily handwritten pages completed (which Jasper would type up later on the laptop computer Unks bought him, for extra pocket money), I closed the fat A4 writing pad and turned to my postcard album, as to an old friend. This was an impressively weighty tome containing all the cards sent to me over the years by Nick stuck in picture-side down, since interesting recipes were scribbled onto every bit of space on the back in tiny, spiky handwriting.

He still sent them, though I hadn’t seen very much of him in person, other than the occasional Sunday lunch up at Pharamond Hall, since the time Jasper was ill in hospital. And actually I was
profoundly
grateful about that, what with having poured my heart out to him in that embarrassing way, not to mention Tom suddenly getting the wrong idea when he arrived and found Nick comforting me …

And speak of the devil, just as I found the card I wanted, a dark shape suddenly blocked the open doorway to the yard and Tom’s voice said, ‘Reading your love letters?’

He was quite mad — that or the demon weed and too much alcohol had pickled his brain over the years! The album was always on the kitchen bookshelf for anyone to read, so he knew there was nothing personal about the cards — unless he thought that addressing them to ‘The Queen of Puddings’ was lover-like, rather than a sarcastic reference to one of my major preoccupations.

Mind you, Tom was not much of a reader, though luckily that meant he had never, to my knowledge, even opened one of my
Perseverance Chronicles
.

‘No, Tom, I’m looking for a particular marzipan
petit four
recipe for the Christmas Pudding Circle to try,’ I said patiently. ‘The only love letters I’ve got are a couple of short notes from you, and they’re so old the ink’s faded.’

‘So you say, but I don’t find you poring over them all the time, like you do over Nick’s precious postcards,’ he said, going to wash his hands at the kitchen sink.

I dished out some of the casserole that was simmering gently on the stove and put it on a tray, together with a chunk of home-made bread, since he now preferred to take all his meals alone in the sitting room in front of his giant TV. Jasper and I had the old set in the kitchen and tended to leave him in sole possession.

He picked up the bowl of stew now and stared into it like a sibylline oracle, but the only message he was likely to read was ‘Eat this or go hungry.’

‘What are these black things, decayed sheep’s eyeballs?’

‘Prunes. It’s Moroccan lamb tagine.’

From his expression you would have thought I’d offered him a dish of lightly seasoned bat entrails.

‘And I suppose
Nick
gave you the recipe. What else has he given you lately?’ he said, with a wealth of unpleasant innuendo. ‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed that your son looks more like him every day!’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t start on that again!’ I snapped, adding recklessly, ‘You know very well why Jasper looks like Nick, just as
you
look like Great-uncle Roly: your mother must have been having an affair with Leo Pharamond while she was still married to her first husband! Why don’t you ask her?’

It was certainly obvious to everyone else, since those slaty purple-grey eyes and raven-black hair marked out all the Pharamonds instantly. But Tom went livid and hissed like a Mafia villain in a bad film, ‘Never
ever
malign my mother’s name again like that — do you hear me?’

Then he followed this up by hurling the plate of hot casserole at the wall with enormous force, shattering it and sending fragments of bowl and spatters of food everywhere. He’d never been physically violent (I wouldn’t have stood for it for one second) so I don’t think he was particularly aiming at
me,
but a substantial chunk of green-glazed Denby pottery hit my cheekbone and fell at my feet.

It was a shock, though, and I stood there transfixed and staring at him, one hand to my face, in a silence broken only by the occasional slither and plop of a descending prune. Suddenly finding myself released from thrall, I turned and walked out of the door, dabbing lamb tagine off my face with the hem of my pale green T-shirt as I went, then headed towards the village.

I must have looked a mess, but luckily it was early evening and few people were about, for the Pied Piper of TV dinners had called them all away, using the theme tune of the popular soap series
Cotton Common
as lure.

I didn’t have far to go for refuge. Annie’s father used to be the vicar here, but now that he and his wife are alleviating the boredom of retirement by doing VSO work in Africa, Annie has a tiny Victorian red-brick terraced cottage in the main street of Middlemoss.

‘Lizzy!’ she exclaimed, looking horrified at discovering me stained and spattered on her doorstep. ‘Is that dried blood on your face and T-shirt? What on earth has happened?’

‘I think it’s only prune juice and gravy, actually,’ I reassured her, touching my cheek cautiously. ‘A bit of plate
did
hit me, but it must have had a round edge.’

‘Plate?’ she repeated blankly, drawing me in and closing the front door.

‘Yes, one of those lovely green Denby soup bowls we had as a wedding present from your parents.’

‘Look, come into the kitchen and I’ll clean you up with warm water and lint while you tell me all about it,’ she said soothingly.

The lint sounded very
Gone With the Wind
— but then, she has all the Girl Guide badges and I don’t suppose the First Aid one has changed for years. So I followed her in and sank down on the nearest rush-bottomed chair, my legs suddenly going wobbly. Trinity (Trinny, for short), Annie’s three-legged mutt, regarded me lambently from her basket, tail thumping.

‘There’s nothing much to tell, really,’ I said. ‘Tom flew into one of his rages and lobbed his dinner at the wall.’

‘Oh, Lizzy!’

‘I said something that made him angry and he just totally lost it this time. I don’t think he was actually aiming at me, though it’s hard to tell since he’s such a rotten shot and — ouch!’ I added, as she dabbed my face with the warm, damp lint.

‘The skin isn’t cut, but I think you might get a bruise on your cheek,’ she said, wringing the cloth out. ‘I could put some arnica ointment on it.’

‘I don’t think I could live with that smell so close to my nose, Annie,’ I said dubiously, but her next suggestion, that we break out the bottle of Remy Martin, which she keeps in stock because her father always swore by it in times of crisis, met with a better reception.

‘I think you really ought to leave Tom right away, Lizzy,’ Annie suggested worriedly. ‘He’s been so increasingly horrible to you that it’s practically verbal abuse — and now
this
!’

‘I’m just glad Jasper wasn’t there,’ I said, topping my glass up and feeling much better. ‘He’s gone straight from the archaeological dig to a friend’s house, and won’t be back till about ten.’

‘His exam results should be here any time now, shouldn’t they?’

‘Yes, only a couple more days.’ I sipped my brandy and sighed. ‘Even though I’ll miss him, it’ll be such a relief to have him safely off to university in October, because I live in dread that Tom will suddenly tell him to his face that he doesn’t think he’s really his son. That would be even more hurtful than ignoring him, the way he’s been doing the last couple of years.’

‘I don’t know what’s got into Tom,’ Annie said sadly. ‘He always had so much charm … as long as he got his own way.’

‘He still does charm everyone else. I’m sure no one would believe me if I told them what he’s really like at home.’

‘True, but he’s so used to me being around, he’s let the mask slip sometimes, so I’ve seen it for myself,’ Annie said. ‘He was all right with Jasper for the first few years, though, wasn’t he?’

‘Well, he didn’t take a lot of notice of him, but he was OK. But he started to turn colder towards me even before he got this strange idea that I had a fling with Nick, so I think whoever he’s been having an affair with since then has had a really bad effect on his character.’

‘You
did
have a fling with Nick,’ Annie pointed out fairly.

‘Oh, come on, Annie! I was way too young and anyway, it only lasted about a fortnight before he told me he was going abroad for a year because he wasn’t changing his life-plans for
my
sake. I didn’t see him after that until the day I got married to Tom and he turned up then with Leila in tow — do you remember?’

‘Gosh, yes. She was so scarily chic, in a Parisian sort of way, that she made me feel like a country bumpkin — she still does! But I thought it was nice of Nick to make the effort, even though he and Tom had grown apart over the years. They never had a lot in common, did they?’

‘I think the main problem was that Tom always felt jealous of Nick, since Nick was a real Pharamond and Roly’s grandson, whereas
he
was just a Pharamond because his mother had married one. Allegedly,’ I added darkly.

‘It’s odd how things turn out,’ mused Annie, putting away the bowl of water and tossing the lint into the kitchen bin. ‘You always had much more in common with Nick than with Tom.’

‘How on earth can you say that, when we argue all the time?’ I demanded incredulously. ‘The only thing Nick and I have ever had in common is a love of food, even if mine is much less
cordon bleu
.’

Though of course it is true that food has played an important part in both our families. The search for a good meal in the wrong part of a foreign city was the downfall of my diplomat parents and would be the downfall of my figure, too, were I ever to stop moving long enough for the fat to settle.

As to the Pharamonds, the gene for cooking was introduced into the family by a Victorian heir who married the plebeian but wealthy heiress Bessie Martin, only to die of a surfeit of home-cooked love some forty years later, with a fond smile on his lips and a biscuit empire to hand on to his offspring.

‘You and Nick have both got short tempers and you love Middlemoss more than anywhere else on earth,’ Annie said. ‘And of course
I
know that Jasper
is
Tom’s son, but it’s unfortunate that he’s looking more and more like Nick with every passing year.’

‘Well, yes, that’s what Tom said earlier, so I reminded him about the rumours that his mother had an affair with Leo Pharamond before her first husband was killed, and that’s what started the argument off! He always flies into a complete rage if I say anything against his sainted mother.’

‘It’s quite a coincidence that Leo Pharamond and her first husband were both not only racing drivers but killed in car crashes,’ Annie said, ‘though there did seem to be a lot of fatal crashes in the early days.’