Chapter 22
I found Catherine surprisingly calm the next morning.
‘I haven’t got time to fuss,’ she told me. ‘And besides, Angus is absolutely fine, thanks to your speedy actions.’
I stole a glance at Jamie, but he still wasn’t having it that my actions had been anything other than stupid and sat mulishly in the corner, brooding over a mug of coffee.
‘And I’m hopeful this bump on the head will have taught him a lesson.’
My eyes swivelled back in Catherine’s direction.
‘Oh, who am I kidding?’ she sighed. ‘He’ll never learn, will he?’
‘Probably not,’ I sympathised. ‘When will he be coming home?’
‘Tomorrow,’ she said, ‘hopefully, as long as he promises to take things easy, of course. So in reality I would imagine it will be Monday.’
‘So he isn’t going to be here to see everyone arrive tonight?’ I groaned. ‘He must be devastated.’
I knew that he would be more disappointed that he was going to miss out on the chance to be at the door to welcome everyone home than he was about having failed to get the lights up.
‘Had he not been such a fool about these bloody decorations he could have been here,’ said Jamie. ‘He should have asked for help.’
‘And what would you have said?’ asked Catherine.
‘I would have told him it was a ridiculous idea and that this is a listed building, not a sprawling American suburb in a cheesy Christmas film.’
‘Exactly,’ said Catherine, ‘and then he would have gone off and done it on his own anyway.’
I hadn’t mentioned my suspicions about the lights to anyone, but Mick had spotted the cabling when he was tidying up early that morning and thought it best to spill the beans.
‘And how are you bearing up?’ Jamie asked me. ‘You’re supposed to be going with Dorothy to the wreath-making in town today, aren’t you? Will you need me to drive you in?’
This was the first time he had said anything even remotely caring since The Incident (as it had been named), and I was grateful that the ice in his tone was beginning to thaw, even if it was only a little. I already had enough on my plate trying to keep my nerves about meeting the rest of the family in check. I didn’t need to be worrying about winning back the friends I thought I had already made.
‘What’s all this about a hot date?’
I looked from Jamie to the kitchen door as Hayley bustled in, rosy-cheeked and full of mischief. She didn’t usually work on Saturdays but was making up for being ill and had insisted she would pop in for the morning, just to check the bedrooms were ready so that no one would be able to find fault with her hard work. That was hardly likely. From what I’d seen she’d managed to primp and polish every last corner of the ginormous hall and, although an incorrigible gossip, her work ethic really was second to none. Not that I would have told her that as she marched in and stamped all over the tiny glimmer of goodwill Jamie had just shown me. Considering she went home sick the evening before she was looking remarkably recovered.
‘Aren’t you more concerned about Angus?’ I asked, pointedly trying to shame her into changing the subject.
‘Angus is fine,’ she said, shrugging off her coat. ‘I’ve just been to see him.’
‘At this time?’ frowned Catherine, looking up at the clock. ‘How on earth did you get in?’
‘My neighbour is a nurse,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘This week she’s working the graveyard shift.’
What an unfortunate turn of phrase she so often adopted.
‘She sneaked me in.’
‘Well I never,’ tutted Dorothy.
‘And he seemed fine to me,’ Hayley went on. ‘Although a bit surprised to see me of course. I’ll wind him up about that when he comes home. Tell him he must have been hallucinating or something.’
‘But he was all right?’ Catherine questioned, choosing to ignore Hayley’s wicked sense of humour.
‘Right as rain,’ she shrugged. ‘Although I did give him a bit of an ear-bashing about what a silly selfish sod he was.’
I bet he, and the rest of the patients, loved that.
‘But how did you know?’ I asked.
‘We all know he’s a silly sod,’ she said, shaking her head.
‘No, not that,’ I said. ‘How did you know he was in the hospital?’
‘Your hot date,’ she grinned. ‘My dad saw him in the pub last night. Dad loves a bit of gossip about this place.’ Her smile faltered for a moment and I wondered if her dad gave her a hard time about working at the hall, given everything that had happened. ‘Apparently,’ she went on, ‘he was telling everyone what had gone on here.’
I could have slapped myself for asking. My curiosity about her ability to winkle out gossip had put her right back on to me and Charlie the fireman.
‘I was at school the same time as your Charlie,’ she said, making me cringe.
‘He isn’t my Charlie,’ I said, looking across at Jamie. ‘He just happened to be one of the chaps who turned up to help last night.’
‘Well, whatever he is,’ she went on, ‘by all accounts, he’s quite taken with you.’
‘Oh Anna,’ smiled Dorothy, ‘you’ve got yourself another admirer.’
Another admirer! I couldn’t believe she’d said that or that Hayley hadn’t picked up on her faux pas. If Dorothy was hoping to push Jamie into making a speedy declaration in front of them all, just one look at his face would have told her that she was going the wrong way about it.
‘And she’s going out with him tonight,’ Hayley rattled on with a knowing nudge and a wink oozing innuendo.
‘Is she now?’ said Jamie, as he thumped his mug down on the table. ‘In that case you better get a move on, Anna. I don’t mind waiting if you want to pick out a nice dress to wear.’
‘I’m fine thanks,’ I said, feeling a little hurt that he had reacted so childishly.
I had had absolutely no intention of meeting Charlie in the pub later that evening. In fact I had been all set to ring the station and leave him a message explaining that I wouldn’t be able to make it, but now, looking at Jamie’s thunderous expression, I was actually going to consider turning up. And I’d make a point of enjoying myself, to boot. I had tried to let Jamie down as gently as I could, and with good reason, but if he couldn’t accept the situation then I wasn’t going to miss out on a bit of fun.
‘And don’t worry about running me about today,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine to drive.’
It felt good being back in the busy town hall, even if driving in had been a somewhat painful experience, owing to my injuries of the night before. This time the air was filled with the scent of fresh-cut greenery, cinnamon sticks and clove-studded apples and oranges, rather than freshly baked cakes.
‘You made it,’ beamed Chris’s wife Marie, when Dorothy and I arrived. ‘I wondered if you’d be able to get away. How’s the patient?’
Clearly she was in the know as to what had happened, and I reminded myself that this was the reality of life in a small town. News always spread like wildfire, especially if there was an element of risk and drama involved.
‘And look at you,’ she said as she watched me hobble towards an empty chair. ‘Let’s get that ankle elevated.’
Driving into town really had been a stupid idea and I knew I was going to suffer for it, but after Jamie’s snarky comments, there was no way I was going to let him chauffeur me about.
‘You should have taken Jamie up on his offer of a lift,’ said Dorothy as she filled out some forms and set about gathering various bits and pieces together for us to work with.
‘I didn’t want to put him out,’ I shrugged. ‘And I’m sure he has enough to contend with today, especially with having to visit his father in hospital on top of everything else.’
Dorothy looked at me for a long moment.
‘I know I tried to make a joke about him falling for you,’ she said, ‘but I really meant it.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Is there already something going on between you two?’ she asked.
‘Me and Angus?’ I joked, avoiding her eye.
She tutted and settled herself on the chair next to mine, but thankfully didn’t probe any further. I honestly wouldn’t have known what to tell her if she had.
‘Are you ladies warm enough?’ asked Lizzie from the Cherry Tree as she leant between us. ‘We’re having some problems with the heating today.’
She was wearing an ivy and mistletoe crown and a pair of feathery wings. I wondered if she was meant to be an angel or a fairy.
‘It is a bit chilly,’ said Dorothy who, I only just noticed, was still wearing her coat. ‘You’ll need to report it if it doesn’t sort itself out.’
‘I know,’ tutted Lizzie. ‘It’s the Fair tomorrow. I can’t imagine the dealers will be very happy if they end up selling their wares in an icebox.’
She wandered off to help Marie, who was fiddling about with the thermostat on the wall next to the kitchen.
‘What’s the Fair?’ I asked Dorothy.
‘It’s an antique sale,’ she explained. ‘Well, not just antiques – all sorts of things really. This new vintage trend plays quite a part now as well. Lots of dealers come here a couple of Sundays before Christmas and it’s a hugely popular event with the locals and a great opportunity to buy some presents that are a little out of the ordinary.’
‘Sounds far more exciting than the usual bath-bombs,’ I agreed.
Dorothy looked confused and I guessed she had no idea what a bath-bomb was.
‘It’s a bit like bubble bath,’ I explained.
‘Oh,’ she said uncertainly, ‘right.’
‘Although I’m sure,’ I laughed, ‘if left to his own devices, Angus would put a very different spin on it.’
‘You’re not wrong,’ she said, passing me a small terracotta pot which was, hopefully, going to form the basis of my table decoration. ‘He’d no doubt blow the bath to kingdom come.’
An hour later, thanks to the dodgy heating, which had now gone into overdrive, the hall was sweltering.
‘I’ve tried to turn it down,’ said Marie, as she peeled off another layer, ‘but nothing’s happening. The engineer is on his way.’
‘Perhaps you’d better open the door for a bit,’ suggested Dorothy as she fanned herself with one of her many shopping lists.
‘What do you think?’ I asked, carefully turning my pot around and trying not to dislodge the candle in the centre, which wouldn’t stand straight no matter how hard I tried to cajole it into behaving.
‘I think you’ve done very well,’ she congratulated me, before adding, ‘for a first attempt.’
‘Perhaps this one can stand on a windowsill out of the way somewhere,’ I said. ‘We won’t light the candle; just draw the curtains in front of it.’
‘It isn’t that bad,’ Marie chuckled. ‘Here, try wedging another bit of holly in at the back.’
Her suggestion helped and by the time I had finished titivating, my pot was just about passable. Predictably, however, Dorothy had made half a dozen to my one, but it didn’t matter. I’d had a lovely morning.
‘These always sit down the middle of the dining table,’ she proudly explained as she began to pack her completed pots into a sturdy cardboard box. ‘Catherine is very fond of them and I’m going to make some orange pomanders for the fruit bowl. They always smell lovely. Do you want to help with those?’
I looked at her doubtfully.
‘They’re really easy,’ she said encouragingly. ‘Impossible to get wrong.’
The pomanders were easier to make than the table decoration and I was almost able to keep up with her output. By the time we were halfway through I smelt like a Christmas pudding and my mind, left to its own devices, had wandered back to the hall and the family.
‘Exactly how long have you been living at the hall?’ I asked Dorothy, when she came back with two more cups of tea and some mince pies courtesy of the WI ladies who were manning the kitchen.
I had offered to go but Dorothy was insistent that I kept the weight off my ankle for as long as possible. She sat down with a groan and scrutinised the quality of the pies before passing a couple to me.
‘Decades now,’ she said. ‘And Mick’s been around almost as long, although he still has a couple of years to serve before he catches up with me.’
She sounded very proud to be the longest-serving member of the Wynthorpe Hall staff.
‘I came one Christmas,’ she went on wistfully, ‘when the boys were small, and I just never left.’
Suddenly I remembered something someone had said not that long after I had arrived.
‘That seems to be a bit of a theme at the hall, doesn’t it?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Turning up at Christmas,’ I said. ‘And then not moving on.’
‘Um,’ she said, ‘Mick was a festive arrival as well. He came to us fresh from the Army.’
From what he’d told me, he wasn’t quite as ‘fresh’ as he would have liked to be, but I wasn’t going to let on to Dorothy that he had already told me about his drinking and his wife’s betrayal. Both he and Hayley had talked to me in confidence and until they each mentioned it in front of one another, I was keeping quiet. I had been the victim of gossip myself in the past and would never repeat anything unless I had been expressly told I could do so.
‘And what about you?’ Dorothy asked. ‘Are you really going to be packing up and leaving us in the New Year?’
Part of me thought it would be a shame to break the tradition, but if I did decide to stay there was still an awful lot to think about and sort out first. Not least, what exactly my relationship with Jamie was going to be.
‘I don’t know,’ I sighed. ‘Before the charity idea, I thought it would be easy to go because Catherine would be better – not that there’s anything really wrong with her now – and I didn’t think there would be a job for me to stay and do.’
‘And now?’ Dorothy asked gently.
‘Now I really don’t know,’ I said, trying to focus on the charity rather than Jamie and the hayloft. ‘Have you always been the cook?’ I asked, switching the emphasis of the conversation back to her.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I was a jack of all trades once upon a time. I always helped out in the kitchen, but I was nanny to the boys first.’
‘Do you have any children of your own?’
‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘No kids.’
‘Were you ever married?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘a long time ago. He wasn’t a nice man. I thought he was in the beginning but he wasn’t. He liked a drink and he liked to throw his weight around when he’d had a few. Sometimes I wonder where I found the strength to leave him.’
Unfortunately I understood exactly what she meant.
‘My dad turned to drink after we lost Mum,’ I said quietly, thinking that the lure of alcohol had a lot to answer for when it found its way into susceptible hands. ‘It made everything we were going through so much worse.’
I’d never told anyone that. Dorothy nodded and I knew she understood.
‘He never married again then?’
‘He almost did,’ I told her. ‘But it didn’t work out.’
I wished with all my heart that it had. She hadn’t arrived until I was in my teens but Sarah Goodall was the one person in my life I came to trust after Mum had gone. She was the only woman Dad took up with who could keep him off the bottle and she had guided me through my final two years at high school. She wasn’t my mum but she didn’t try to be, and I loved her all the more for that. She was a good woman but there was only so much she could take and the Christmas I turned seventeen, Dad’s return to the bottom of a bottle proved too much and she left. She wanted to take me with her but had no claim on me. I should have just gone, or at least kept in touch.
I sipped my tea in silence and spotted Dorothy looking at me.
‘If it’s safety and security you’re looking for, Anna,’ she said, her eyes surprisingly bright with tears, ‘then you won’t find anywhere better on the planet than our Wynthorpe Hall.’
I nodded and squeezed her hand as a little voice in the back of my mind piped up, ‘But what about love?’
By the end of the day the town hall was awash with all manner of seasonal sprigs and it seemed to take as long to clear away as it had to make the decorations everyone was so proud to show off. Dorothy had gone on to arrange gargantuan wreaths for both the back and front doors of the hall, and eyeing them on the table I hoped my little Fiat would be able to fit them in along with all the other bits and pieces.
‘Don’t worry about not having enough room in your car to get this lot home,’ said Dorothy when she came back from her stint of washing dishes, ‘and don’t be cross.’
‘Why would I be?’
She nodded over my shoulder and I turned to see Jamie standing in the doorway talking to Lizzie, who was still wearing her wings and crown.
‘Did you ring him?’ I asked Dorothy.
‘She did,’ said Jamie, walking over. ‘And as I had just left Dad at the hospital we thought it would be easier for me to take all this,’ he said, pointing to the boxes and wreaths, ‘as well as Dorothy, back in the Land Rover and leave you and your date in peace.’
‘How is your dad?’ I asked, choosing to ignore the comment about my meeting in the pub and knowing I should have been more grateful that I was being spared the extra journey.
‘He’s fine,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Bloody grateful to you, of course.’
At least someone was.
‘And keen to see you.’
‘Perhaps I should pop in this evening?’ I suggested, trying to meet him halfway.
‘What,’ he teased, ‘and miss out on the opportunity to hear tall tales from your handsome hero?’
‘That’s a good point,’ I said, turning my back on him and feeling annoyed that I had let my guard down. ‘I suppose your dad can wait.’
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ Dorothy scolded, ‘you two are worse than a pair of kids. If you’re so bothered about her seeing this chap, Jamie, then why don’t you ask her not to?’
I held my breath, waiting to see how he would react to such a blatant suggestion, but he was still determined to stamp his feet and have his toddler moment.
‘I’m not bothered what she does,’ he pouted. ‘And anyway, why is it so hot in here? Have you been fiddling with the radiators, Anna? Trying to set the alarms off and make your young man come running with his hose?’
He was obviously enjoying behaving like a spoilt brat, but I had no desire to take the bait and give him the argument he so clearly desired, especially in such a public arena. It hadn’t even crossed my mind at that point that he was probably feeling jittery about seeing his brothers and explaining to them that he would be the one taking over at the hall, not Archie.
All I could think about was that he was still aiming his annoyance at me and I hadn’t worked out why. However, had I stopped to think about him heading to the pub with a hot lady firefighter then I would have understood part of the reason for his foul mood far sooner. Just hours ago he had told me how he felt about me and now here I was, having shrugged him off, getting ready for a date with another guy. I really needed to find a way to convince him that I wasn’t bothered whether I saw Charlie again or not.
I turned back to try and explain but he had already picked up one of the boxes and made his way to the door, almost colliding with the heating engineer, who had finally decided to put in an appearance, but not in time to save the day.
‘You all right?’ asked Dorothy.
‘I’m fine,’ I told her. ‘I’m not planning on being long. I’ll be back in plenty of time to help get supper ready for when everyone arrives.’
‘You don’t have to rush,’ she said. ‘If you’re having a nice time, then stay.’
‘I’m only going because I haven’t had a chance to let him know I can’t make it,’ I explained to her instead. ‘I’m really looking forward to meeting the family and I don’t want anything to get in the way of that.’
‘All right,’ she said.
I couldn’t help thinking she sounded relieved.
‘We’ll see you later.’
Fortunately my ankle felt far better than it had earlier in the day and the short distance between the town hall and the pub was easy to manage. En route I tried to think of what I could say that wouldn’t make my super-speedy desertion look quite so obvious, or make Charlie feel abandoned, and decided that the arrival of the family, and my need to help at the hall, was the ideal – and actually genuine excuse. However, as it turned out, I needn’t have worried about coming up with one.
‘So,’ said Charlie, after we had awkwardly exchanged smiles and greetings. ‘What can I get you to drink?’
‘Just a Coke, please. I’m driving.’
‘Lemon?’
‘Yes please,’ I said, ‘and plenty of ice.’
‘So,’ said Charlie again. He looked and sounded far less confident out of uniform, although the pale blue shirt and dark jeans did nothing to diminish his broad chest and blue eyes. ‘What have you been up to today?’
I didn’t get a chance to explain about the wonky candle creation, or the exotic temperature of the town hall, as his pager burst into life along with another guy’s further along the bar.
‘Shit,’ they both groaned simultaneously.
‘Sorry,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m on call and the other engine is already out. I have to go.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said.
‘We’ll do it another time.’
‘Sure,’ I said, knowing it would never happen and feeling lucky to have been let off the hook so easily. ‘Another time.’