The Magic of Christmas

Nick got out. He was wearing dark trousers and an open-necked soft white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the glossy, thick black plumage of his hair spikily feathering his head. His strong face, with its impressively bumpy nose, can look very attractive when he smiles, though the last time he’d wasted any of his charm on me was in the hospital when Jasper had meningitis. And after the way I’d bared my soul to him in the night hours, I could only feel profoundly grateful that I hadn’t seen much of him since then.

I distinctly remember telling him how I hoped that once Jasper was at university, things would get better between me and Tom – and instead, from that very moment they’d rapidly got worse and worse …

I became aware that Nick was waving his hands slowly in front of my face, like a baffled stage hypnotist.

‘Planet Earth to Lizzy: are you receiving me?’

‘Oh, hi, Nick – long time, no recipe,’ I said, wiping my filthy hands up the sides of my jeans – they were work ones, so it wasn’t going to make a lot of difference. I only hoped I hadn’t run them through my hair first, though since I didn’t remember brushing it this morning, a bit of grease would at least hold the tangles down.

He frowned down at me. ‘I sent you a card from Jamaica.’

‘That was ages ago, and a recipe for conch fritters isn’t exactly the most useful thing to have in the middle of Lancashire – the fishmongers don’t stock them. Anyway, what are you doing here at this time of the morning? Have you driven straight up from London?’

‘Yes, I’m looking for Tom,’ he said shortly, checking me over with eyes the dark grey-purple of wet Welsh slate, as though he wasn’t sure quite what species I was, or what sauce to serve me with. ‘What have you done to your face?’

I flushed and touched the bruise on my cheek with the tips of my fingers. ‘This? Oh, a plate got dropped and one of the pieces bounced up and hit me,’ I said lamely; it was almost the truth.

His brows knitted into a thick, black bar as he tried to imagine a plate that explosive.

‘It looks worse than it is, now it’s gone all blue and yellow – it’ll have vanished in a day or two. And Tom’s away,’ I added. Thank goodness!

From the way Nick was looking at me I thought I’d said that aloud for a minute, but finally he asked, ‘Oh? Any idea when he’ll be back?’

‘No, but he’s been gone since Monday, so I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t turn up today.’

He raised one dark eyebrow. ‘And do you know where he’s gone?’

‘He didn’t say and there is no point in ringing his mobile because he never answers or gets back to me.’ I shrugged, casually. ‘You know what he’s like. He might be off delivering a surfboard. I’m pretty sure he’s not doing a gig with the Mummers, they don’t usually go that far from home.’

‘A gig – with the what?’

‘The Mummers of Invention: you know, that sort of folk-rock group he started with three local friends?’

‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘I’m glad to say I don’t.’

‘You must do because one of them’s that drippy female Unks rents an estate cottage to – she sells handmade smocks at historical re-enactment fairs. And if you ever came up for the Mystery Play any more, you would have seen them – they provide the musical interludes. Tom played Lazarus as well, last year. He stepped in at the last minute and the parish magazine review said he brought a whole new meaning to the role.’

‘I can imagine – and I do intend being here for the next performance.’

‘I thought Leila couldn’t leave her restaurant over Christmas?’

‘She can’t; I can,’ he snapped, and I wondered if their marriage was finally dragging its sorry carcass to the parting of the ways, like mine. ‘So, you’ve no idea where Tom is, or when he’ll be back?’

‘Probably Cornwall, that’s where he mostly ends up, and if so, he’s likely to be staying with that friend of his Tom Collinge, the weird one who runs a wife and harem in one cottage.’

‘I suppose he may be there by now, but he was in London on Monday night, Lizzy. I ran into him at Leila’s restaurant, but he left in a hurry – without paying the bill.’

‘He did?’ I frowned. ‘That’s odd. I wonder what he was doing in London?’

‘Well, it evidently wasn’t me he’d gone to see, since he bolted as soon as I arrived.’ He looked at me intently, as though he’d asked me a question.

‘Oh?’ I said slowly, trying to remember whether Tom had actually ever said which of his friends he stayed with when he was in London.

‘Still, you know Tom,’ I tried to laugh. ‘He probably just found himself near the restaurant and dropped in.’

‘Then just took it into his head to shoot off without paying when I turned up unexpectedly? Leila said she didn’t want to charge him for the meal anyway, since he’s a sort of relative.’

‘That’s kind of her,’ I said, amazed, because it wouldn’t surprise me if she gives even Nick a bill when he eats there!

‘Yes, wasn’t it just?’ he said drily. ‘And one of the staff let slip that he’d stayed in her apartment the previous night, too – the staff seemed to know him pretty well. But I told Leila, business is business and she’d never let sentiment of any kind come before making money before, so I would just drop the bill in on my way up to the Hall. Here it is.’

I looked at his closed, dark face again and suddenly wondered if he suspected that Tom and Leila had something going on. Surely not. It would be totally ridiculous! I knew that Tom had been having a serious affair for the last few years, of course, but not who it was with, although I assumed it was someone down in Cornwall where he spent so much time. It couldn’t be Leila … could it?

My mind working furiously, I took the offered bill and glanced down at it, then gasped, distracted by the staggering sum. ‘You must be absolutely rolling in it, charging these prices!’

‘Not me – Leila. And the prices aren’t anything out of the ordinary for a restaurant of that standard. She’s just got a Michelin star.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said absently, staring at the bill, the total of which would have fed the average family of four for about a year. More, if they grew most of their food themselves, like I do. ‘But I’m sorry, I don’t have that kind of money on the proceeds of my produce sales – and in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve scaled that side of things down drastically in the last eighteen months.’

‘Come on, you must get good advances for your “how I tried to be self-sufficient and failed dismally” books. You can’t plead poverty,’ he looked distastefully down at the mess he was standing in, ‘whatever it looks like here!’

‘You should have looked before you got out of the car,’ I said coldly. ‘The ducks have been up. And one small book every two or three years doesn’t exactly rake in the cash. I only get a couple of thousand for them. I’m lucky to still have a publisher! My agent says it’s only because my faithful band of readers can’t wait to see what else goes pear-shaped every time. And they like all the recipes.’

‘Ah yes, the Queen of Puddings!’ He wrinkled his nose slightly.

‘What?’ I said indignantly. ‘Just because it’s wholesome, everyday stuff, it doesn’t mean it isn’t good food! At least my recipes don’t need ninety-six exotic ingredients, four servile minions and a catering-sized oven to produce.’

He grinned, as though glad to have got a rise out of me, and I began to remember why our boy-girl romance never got off the ground: an interest in food is the only thing we’ve ever had in common, whatever Annie says, and he never tires of reminding me that mine is not gourmet, and it’s largely focused on sweets and desserts.

‘And this is not my bill, so you’ll have to come back and speak to Tom about it later,’ I added, sincerely hoping that that was all he wanted to talk to Tom about. Clearly he was harbouring suspicions … But no, whoever Tom was having an affair with, it couldn’t be Leila, his own cousin’s brittle little acid drop of a wife, however strange the circumstances might look!

‘If I can catch him,’ Nick said, the grin vanishing. He abruptly changed the subject. ‘Jasper had his results yet?’

‘Oh, yes!’ I said, happily diverted. ‘Yesterday and they were just what he needed for Liverpool University, to read Archaeology and History. He’s having breakfast at the moment – why don’t you come in and talk to him? He hasn’t thanked you for that Roman cookery book you sent him, yet.’

Jasper’s keenly interested in food and drink too, but only from a purely historical perspective. Delving about in medieval cesspits and middens, which was what he seemed to be spending his days doing at the dig, suited him down to the ground.

Nick looked at his watch. ‘I haven’t time today, so congratulate him for me, won’t you? I’d better be off. I’m doing some articles on eating out in the North-West – out-of-the-way restaurants and hotels – so I need to drop my stuff off up at the Hall and get on with it. Breakfast awaits, then lunch and dinner …’

‘Lucky you,’ I said politely, though sitting in restaurants isn’t my favourite thing. I’d rather pig out at home than eat prettily arranged tiny portions consisting of a splat, a dribble and a leaf, in public.

He was frowning down at me again. ‘You know, Lizzy, two thousand is peanuts compared to what I get for my books. No wonder you’re living in a hovel – especially with Tom spending his earnings as fast as he makes them.’ He gestured at the giant satellite dish, incongruously attached to the side of the cottage.

‘We don’t need a huge amount of money and Perseverance Cottage is not a hovel,’ I began crossly. ‘Uncle Roly had all the mod cons installed before we moved in, and it’s exactly how I like it. I’ve got everything I want.’

‘Have you? Or perhaps you’ve got more than you bargained for,’ he said drily, his eyes again resting speculatively on my bruised cheek.

I hoped he didn’t think Tom had taken to physical violence – or that I would have stayed to be a punchbag if he had! I was just about to disabuse his mind of any suspicions in that quarter when he turned round to survey my domain and remarked suavely: ‘I wouldn’t say the family have come a long way from the heady days of Pharamond’s Butterflake Biscuits, but they have certainly diverged in their interests.’

Then, before I could point out that he at least was still vaguely in the bakery line, he got back into his car and reversed away in a cloud of dust. A lot of gritted chickens shot out from under it.

‘Wasn’t that Uncle Nick?’ Jasper asked, coming out ready for the off.

‘Yes, but he couldn’t stay. He had an urgent appointment with breakfast, though he did send you his congratulations on the exam results. Get in. I’ll just wash my hands and we’ll go.’

‘Can I drive?’ he asked hopefully. He’d recently passed his test, lessons courtesy of a lucky win on the gees at Haydock by Great-uncle Roly.

‘OK. Turn it round while I get ready.’

He’d left the cottage door open, and one of the hens had made a small deposit on the rag rug.

Chapter 3: Bittersweet

We are more than halfway through August, the time of year for eating fruits and salads as they come into season; but all too soon we will be bottling, brewing, jamming and preserving as if our lives depended on it and famine was sure to follow glut. And the minute the Christmas Pudding Circle receive their bulk order of dried fruits, peel, nuts and other ingredients, we will all be making our mincemeat too, for we use a marvellous Delia Smith recipe that keeps for ever.

The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

All the way to the dig, while the loud music chosen by Jasper drowned out even the possibility of conversation, I wondered whether it could possibly be Leila that Tom had been having an affair with for the last couple of years – or the main one, because I’m sure he still scattered his favours pretty widely.

Was Nick really hinting that he suspected that, or had I imagined it? But things certainly didn’t sound too friendly between him and Leila, even by their semidetached, sweet-and-sour standards!

And what would I say to Tom when he returned? While saying nothing would probably be the most sensible option until my plans to leave were in place, I couldn’t let what he’d done pass, even if I didn’t really think he was trying to hurt me physically.

Maybe I should have left before, even if it did mean disrupting Jasper’s schooling? The situation had certainly been affecting him – he seemed practically to have given up going out with his friends in the evening when Tom was home. Instead, he lurked in his room with the laptop Unks bought him, only suddenly looming silently up between us whenever voices were raised.

So now was probably the moment to clear the air and tell Tom straight that I was not prepared to put up with his behaviour any more, so I was leaving him. I was convinced this was what he’d been angling for, so he could play the hurt innocent party to everyone and, perhaps, install someone else here in my place …

I found that a particularly horrid thought, but Perseverance Cottage belonged to his uncle Roly, so obviously if anyone were moving out it would have to be me. And I simply wouldn’t ask Roly to help me, for not only did I not want to disillusion him about Tom, whom he had treated like another grandson, but he’d already been so kind and generous to us all these years by letting us have the cottage rent free.

I expected I could find new homes for the hens and quail, but finding a new home for me would be the major problem. While the recent influx of newcomers into the area (especially the Cotton Common crowd) might mean that Annie’s Posh Pet-sitters could expand enough to employ me part-time, on the downside, it also meant property rentals had soared out of my reach.

It was all depressingly difficult! Oh, why couldn’t Tom just vanish into thin air, never to be seen again, like those mysterious disappearances you read about in the newspapers?

In need of comfort, I stopped off at Annie’s cottage on the way home from dropping Jasper at the dig. It was still early, but she’d already made a chicken casserole and popped it in the slow cooker for later.

She seemed to have learned a lot more practical stuff than I ever did on that French cookery course we did in London after we left school, where volatile Madame Fresnet screamed at us all day long in French, the language in which we were supposed to learn to cook, thus killing two birds with one stone. At the end of the six months we all emerged with shattered eardrums, shattered French and the ability to whip up tartelettes au fromage at the drop of a whisk.

Trinity skipped up to greet me, and Susannah, Annie’s deaf white cat, regarded me with self-satisfied disinterest from the top of the Rayburn.

‘All right?’ Annie asked anxiously, scrutinising my face.

‘Fine. Tom’s not back yet and Jasper’s at the dig – I just dropped him.’

‘It’s great he got his first choice university, isn’t it?’ she said, getting down another mug from the rack and pouring me some coffee. ‘Do you want a chocolate croissant? They’re hot from the oven and I don’t think I can eat the last one, I’ve had two already.’

‘Your eyes are bigger than your belly,’ I said vulgarly, accepting the plate, and sat down at the kitchen table, keeping my eyes firmly away from Trinny’s pleading dark ones, because the last thing a dog with three legs needs is to be overweight.

‘I saw Nick this morning,’ I told her, dunking the croissant into my coffee so the bittersweet dark chocolate began to melt into it. This makes a change, because I usually do it the other way round and dip my food into melted chocolate, especially strawberries. It’s amazing what you can coat in chocolate – and I’m not talking about that revolting body paint, because I prefer to keep the two greatest pleasures life can hold completely and unmessily separate … or at any rate, I did. I think I have forgotten how to do one of them.

‘That’s really what I came to tell you about, Annie. He called in early on his way up to the Hall, and he said Tom was in London on Monday.’

I described my conversation with Nick. ‘Don’t you think that sounds like he suspects Tom and Leila might be having an affair?’

‘Oh, no, surely not? Not with his own cousin’s wife?’ she exclaimed, looking horrified. Annie is just too nice for her own good, but I suppose being a vicar’s daughter didn’t exactly help to squash her natural inclination to think the best of everybody if she possibly could.

‘I don’t know, but I certainly hope not. I can’t really see him and Leila getting it together, can you? She’s quite scary, in a beady-eyed and elegantly chic way. And I always thought it must be someone local or down in Cornwall, so perhaps Nick has got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘I’m sure he must have,’ she agreed, and then her eye fell on the kitchen clock. ‘Look at the time! I promised I’d put in a couple of hours at the RSPCA kennels. The flu’s hit the staff and volunteers hard. There are no pet-sitting jobs that I can’t handle myself this afternoon, but tomorrow will be busier.’

She looked slightly self-conscious: ‘Ritch Rainford has asked me to go in at lunchtime and walk Flo, because he’ll be at the studios in Manchester all day.’

‘You’d better get off, then, if you’re sure there’s nothing you want me to do. I’ll see you at the Mystery Play committee meeting later, when I’ll finally get to meet the new vicar.’

‘Oh, yes, he’s … he seems nice,’ she said vaguely, but I could see that her mind was still too taken up with the delights of Ritch Rainford to bother with lesser mortals.

‘Oh, before you go, can I borrow that candyfloss maker you bought for the last Cubs and Brownies’ bazaar? Some lusciously lemon morning mist has given me ideas.’

‘Of course. Now, where did I put it?’ She vanished into the pantry and came back with a large cardboard box. ‘The instructions and everything are still in there. Do you need anything else? Sugar?’

‘No, I’m OK for sugar,’ I assured her.

I left her putting Trinny in the back of her car, and then drove down to the other end of the village to drop the punctured tyre off with Dave Naylor at the local garage, Deals on Wheels. (And I know it seems confusing at first that most of the indigent Mosses population who are not Pharamonds are either Naylors or Gumballs, but you quickly get used to it.)

Then I headed for home, passing the entire contingent of the Mosses Senior Citizens’ Circle waiting to board a coach for the annual trip to Southport Flower Show … including Unks’ alarmingly spry octogenarian sister, Mimi Pharamond. I slowed down, staring, and she waved at me gaily, the rainbow-coloured Rastafarian knitted hat Nick brought her back from Jamaica flapping over one eye.

Since Juno Carter, her long-suffering companion, was currently laid up after an accident, letting Mimi loose alone on the flower show seemed a recipe for disaster. I only hoped someone had been delegated to keep an eye on her. And a firm grip.

There was still no sign of Tom’s van outside the cottage and you couldn’t miss it because it had ‘BOARD RIGID’ in big fluorescent orange letters up the side and the logo of a stickman surfing. The workshop door was closed too, but in the bedroom I found his dirty clothes scattered on the rug as though washed up there by a high tide, so he’d either gone out again, or come back without his van.

Still, clearly he had returned from wherever it was he’d been. I gathered up Tom’s clothes, added some of Jasper’s and mine, and then went down to stuff them in the machine. There was no beating them on a rock for me, even in the first flush of self-sufficiency in Cornwall, though before I bought the washing machine out of my first Perseverance Chronicle sale, I used to do the laundry by trampling up and down on it in the bath. Then I would pass it through an old mangle in the yard, which was not fun in winter.

It hadn’t taken me long to realise that most books on self-sufficiency were written by men in warm, comfortable rooms, while their wives were out there dealing with the raw realities of life. Or that Tom, while initially enthusiastic, soon lost interest and succumbed to the burgeoning surfing culture instead. Once you added a tiny baby into the equation, the offer of a cottage on the Pharamond estate up in Lancashire was one I was determined we wouldn’t refuse.

As I pointed out to Tom at the time, if you have the contacts, you can customise surfboards anywhere, and besides, Middlemoss was as close to a home as I had ever got, and I longed to return there.

Tom’s jeans crackled when I picked them up to stuff into the washer, but then I always had to empty his pockets of a strange assortment of objects, from board wax to fluffy sherbet lemons.

This time the haul was a dark blue paper napkin tastefully printed in the corner with the word ‘Leila’s’ in gold, a teaspoon that probably came from the same place, since it was definitely classier than any of our mismatched assortment, a stub of billiard chalk, a red jelly baby with the head bitten off and a piece of pink paper folded tightly into the shape of a very small rose.

Tom had doodled in origami roses as long as I’d known him, which could be very irritating when it was my shopping list or the top page of a stack of book manuscript; but equally, it used to be rather endearing when it was an apology for forgetting to tell me he was going off somewhere. At least, it was until the novelty wore off, along with my patience.

I flattened this one out and found it was the last part of a letter, abjuring my husband to ‘Tell old Charlie Dimmock you’ve found someone else and give her the push’, and promising, if he did, to tie him up – and maybe even down if he really begged her to. It was signed ‘Your Dark Heart’.

Well, that didn’t sound like Leila, did it? I could imagine she’d give anyone a good basting, but would she have time in her busy schedule for bondage?

A horrible image flashed before my eyes of a naked Tom, trussed and oven-ready, and I found I was sitting on the quarry tiles feeling sick and recalling the last time we made love, which was just before Jasper was taken ill.

I’d accused Tom of having yet another affair, but this time his attempt to sweet-talk me round hadn’t entirely worked and he’d said I was so unresponsive he felt like he was practising necrophilia. And then I’d said that I felt much the same, since he might look like the man I married, but the part of him I’d loved seemed to be quite dead.

This threw him into the first of his really frighteningly violent rages during which he said that living with a cold bitch of a wife who thought food could cure anything was enough to send any man off the rails, and stormed out.

After this I began sleeping in the small boxroom off our bedroom, and things between us went downhill rapidly. He made no attempt to conceal his affairs, though this note was the first hard evidence that any of them were serious …

Feeling suddenly dizzy, I put my head on my knees and closed my eyes, wishing our old lurcher, Harriet, was still around to snuffle sympathetically in my ear.

When the feeling passed off I resolutely got up and washed my face in the kitchen sink with cold water, ate an entire packet of those chocolate mini-flake cake decorations, then went out to the workshop, from where faint strains of Metallica now wafted through the Judas door.

Chapter 4: Mushrooming

I know a lot of people dry mushrooms, or freeze the button ones, but I either eat them freshly gathered from the nearby fields, or not at all.

But I do make marzipan mushrooms sometimes and give them as gifts in the sort of little paper-strip baskets we used to weave at infants’ school for Easter eggs. The mushrooms are very easy: you simply make the cap from marzipan and place it upside down. Then press a disc of more marzipan onto it, coloured brown with a little cocoa powder, and make a ribbed effect with a fork. Add a marzipan stalk, and hey presto! Realer than real.