The Present: The must-read Christmas romance of the year!

‘I spend all year cooking. Christmas is my day off. I won’t be so much as picking up a wooden spoon.’

‘Gran used to cook when we had Christmas day at her house.’ She thought back to previous years, the house full of decorations, friends dropping in, cooking with Gran in the kitchen. Her throat tightened a little. How different it would be this year. ‘Whereas this year, Christmas is entirely down to me.’

And it had to be perfect. It had to be. It might be Gran’s last. She pushed that hideous thought away before it could take hold.

‘So, can you help me out or what? No pressure.’

Amy grinned.

‘With the corner cutting? Hell yeah, I’ll throw something together. That doesn’t exactly help with the rest of the stuff on that list though, does it? When exactly are you supposed to fit having a good time into this? Christmas is meant to be about having fun, not driving yourself into the ground. Rod needs to lighten up a bit, honey. I mean, is it any surprise you’ve ended up looking to hot gardeners and old tat for diversion?’

‘I am not looking at the hot gardener,’ she said, exasperated. ‘I am perfectly happy with Rod. I’m not some downtrodden girlfriend, you know. In actual fact, he’s been dropping hints about making it official. I actually like the life I have, the prospects, the plans. Just because you’re happy to cruise rudderless through life doesn’t mean we all have to.’

Unfortunately her phone pinged into life on the table between them at the moment, and Rod’s text asking if she’d remembered the dry-cleaning was perfectly readable upside down.

Amy patted her hand, grinning.

‘I’ll take rudderless, honey,’ she said, nodding at the phone sympathetically.

Gravel crunched under Lucy’s feet as she stood in Gran’s driveway in the mid-afternoon gloom and watched a truck manoeuvre its way back to deposit an empty skip as close to the house as it could get. Even bundled up in her parka with the hood up, the cold bit sharply against her cheeks and nose. The sky was white, with the heavy stillness that sometimes comes in the winter, as if it was full of snow waiting to fall. After a run of wet, rainy Christmases, the TV forecasters were falling over themselves with excitement at the prospect of the first white Christmas in years. She turned at the sound of the side door slamming shut, and watched Jack trudge across the gravel in a shirt and jeans. He didn’t so much as shiver as he came to stand next to her.

‘Do you not feel the cold?’ she said, stamping her feet to try to stop her toes going numb.

‘You forget, I’m superhuman,’ he said. ‘And I finished the ceiling. So if you need to get the estate agent in there’s no danger of them disappearing through the floor when they measure up the attic.’

‘Very funny.’

He looked at her watching the truck driver disconnect the chains from the skip. There was something that felt very wrong about putting an attic full of history into one of those things without a moment’s thought.

‘You’re going ahead then, are you?’ he said. ‘With the clearance?’

She wrapped her arms tightly across her body and held her elbows with her gloved hands.

‘I’m thinking more along the lines of bunging a few things in the skip as I go along with my investigation. I can multitask a perfect family Christmas at home, and do a bit of nosing around on the side.’

‘Investigation?’

‘Into the Christmas decorations we found. I showed them to Gran, and honestly, Jack, you should have seen her. She’s been so weak and frail, it’s all I’ve been able to do to get her to say hello, or say my name. She was so animated when she saw them.’

She was looking up at him now, full of excitement, her eyes shining, her nose and cheeks pink from the cold, He found it hard to look away from her face.

‘Did you ask her about them?’

‘She can’t really talk much at all yet. She did give me a place name, I looked it up. It was a hostel for Land Girls during the war.’

‘The bossing about in the garden definitely makes a lot more sense now I know she was a Land Girl,’ Jack said, nodding at the lorry driver as he approached. ‘She once tried to tell me a better way to mend a fence. I was like, who’s the carpenter in this scenario?’

Lucy smiled sideways at him, and he waited while she signed off the skip paperwork, then walked with her back to the house.

‘Also, whoever sent the decorations, it definitely wasn’t Grandad,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine if I could find out some more about them and be able to tell her about it? It might really help her recovery pick up. What if the person who sent them is still alive? I could track him down.’

‘You’re thinking you could track down and reunite your gran and her wartime friend in three weeks flat, like something off Long Lost Family, while you simultaneously get this house straight, and do all your Christmas stuff?’ he said. ‘You don’t actually think this might actually be a bit of a massive ask?’

‘I can channel Davina McCall if I want to,’ she protested. ‘I do investigate for a living.’ She paused. ‘Well, at least I ask people questions a lot, and attend lots of community events and stuff. It’s not exactly Fleet Street. But I know how to track a story down. And I’m not looking that far ahead, to be honest, I just want to try to find out a bit more, that’s all.’ She closed the side door behind them with a grateful sigh. ‘Wow, standing outside for twenty minutes makes the crappy heating in here seem tropical.’

She pushed the hood down on her parka and unzipped it. Her hair was messed up underneath, and she ran a hand through it, which actually made it worse.

‘I know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘It just seemed really important to Gran, and whatever I might tell myself, I do know she isn’t going to be around for ever. I feel like I’ve been given a chance to get to know her in a whole new way. I’m not going to pass that up because my back’s against the wall over a few Christmas plans.’

‘Want some help?’

Even as he said the words, he couldn’t quite believe that he was making the offer. What was he thinking? It was the chance thing, of course. The thought of having a chance to find a piece of someone to treasure that you could keep, even after they were gone.

‘I thought you were only around for a day or two? Don’t you have to be sledging down a mountain or something?’ she said.

‘Not for a few more days yet. I’ve got a bit of time on my hands.’

It was true. He did. He couldn’t fathom why heaving tat into a skip held any appeal for him, except that she had looked so grimly determined, standing outside in the freezing cold with her lips almost blue, to run herself into the ground by Christmas all in the interests of hanging on to the past. He could relate to the need to do that better than anyone else.

‘You must have something better to do if you’ve got some time free. I mean, it is Christmas.’

His parents flashed into his mind, the guilt-trip family Christmas visit that he had been telling himself, along with them, he simply couldn’t fit in.

‘I really don’t,’ he said. ‘I can bring stuff down from the attic for you. It will take you for ever on your own, and you’re basically an accident waiting to happen when you’re left to your own devices. I don’t want that on my conscience, and I’m pretty sure Olive would want you to make it out of the house sale alive. Take it or leave it.’

She smiled up at him.

‘Go on, then. I should probably tell you to go and crack on with your Christmas, but I need all the help I can get.’

In the space of a day, the kitchen and hallway ended up looking like the attic. She had succeeded in executing the opposite of house clearance. But there was the odd discovery that was really worth waiting for during the endless trawl through inconsequential receipts and old cracked ornaments, and the buzz of finding even the tiniest thing was becoming a bit addictive.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

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