Mistletoe Marriage

Perhaps he had been too worried about Sophie to think too much about his own feelings. Bram didn’t know how she had held herself together through the wedding. She had smiled and chatted, and Bram had wondered if he was only one who could see the agony in her eyes, the only one who knew how much it had cost her to play her part, the only one who appreciated how brave she was.

Sophie had waved her sister off on her honeymoon with the man she herself loved, and gone back to London. She hadn’t seen them since, and only came home to the moors when she knew they were away. She made excuses to her parents, but Bram knew it was because of Nick.

Tucking her hand into his arm, Sophie brought him back to the raw November present, and as she leant companionably against his shoulder Bram was conscious of being aware of her in a way that he hadn’t noticed before. He’d never realised how soft she felt, or how well she fitted into the curve of his body.

She was just the right height, too. He’d never noticed that before either. Her tousled curls tickled his chin softly. They smelt clean and fresh, with the coconutty whiff of gorse flowers.

Of course the shampoo might have been meant to smell of coconuts themselves, Bram acknowledged, in an attempt to distract himself from the feel of Sophie’s body pressed into him, but he was more of a gorse man himself. He had never lain on a tropical beach under a leaning coconut palm and he didn’t want to. Give him a hillside and a gorse bush in bloom any day. The bright, brave yellow flowers, with their slightly exotic fragrance, and the sturdy spikiness of the gorse reminded him of Sophie.

‘It’s been over a year,’ she was saying, unaware of his uneasy distraction. ‘I thought I would be starting to forget Nick now, but I think I still love him just as much as I did when we were engaged. I’ve never felt like that about anyone before, and I can’t imagine ever loving anyone else in the same way. I just don’t see how I’ll ever get over him.’

‘Was he so perfect?’ Bram asked. He had met Nick briefly at the wedding, and he hadn’t been that impressed. Melissa’s husband had struck him as patronising and more than a little smug—but then he would probably have felt smug if he’d won Melissa, Bram had to acknowledge.

‘No, Nick’s not perfect,’ said Sophie. ‘He can be arrogant sometimes, and I think he’s a bit self-centred, but there was just something so exciting about him…I don’t know. It’s chemistry, I suppose. I can’t really explain how he made me feel. And now I can’t bear the thought of another man touching me.’

Bram wasn’t quite sure how he felt about hearing that, especially when her soft warmth was leaning against him and he was wondering, bizarrely, what it would feel like to put his arm round her and pull her closer.

‘I’ve tried to meet other men,’ Sophie continued, ‘but I just end up remembering how it was with Nick. I tell myself that it would be different if I actually came face to face with him again, but I’m afraid. What if it isn’t different? What if it’s exactly the same? Melissa would see that I still loved him, and that would just make things worse for her.’

‘Is that why you stay in London?’

She nodded. ‘I don’t like it there, and I’m desperately homesick, but if I came home I’d have to see Nick all the time, and I don’t know how I’d bear that. Melissa feels terrible about it all. She rings me sometimes and begs me to come up and see them, but I can’t face it, and then I feel awful for upsetting her.

‘It might be different if I had a boyfriend, someone to make Melissa—and Nick, I suppose—think that I was over it and had moved on, but I can’t produce a man out of nowhere! My mother thinks it’s all my fault. She’s dying to get me married.’

‘Why?’ asked Bram, baffled.

‘Oh, because she loved Melissa’s wedding and can’t wait to organise another one. She was very put out when Susan Jackson got married last summer. You know what rivals she is with Maggie Jackson! Mum was really cross that Maggie had managed to marry off no less than three daughters, and all with what Mum calls “proper weddings”, in a church, with long white dresses and a marquee in the garden!’

Sophie shook her head ruefully. ‘I get the definite feeling that I’m letting the side down. Mum’s got this idea that if I’d only make the effort to lose some weight and smarten myself up a bit I’d be able to snaffle up a husband in no time! She’s always asking me if I’ve met anyone nice.’

‘What do you say?’

‘I suppose I play along with it a bit, just for a quiet life,’ said Sophie a little uncomfortably. ‘If I’m seeing someone I let Mum think that it’s more serious than it is. I went out with a guy called Rob for a while, and she got very excited about him. He’s a teacher, and she thought he sounded very suitable, but I had to tell her today that I’m not seeing him any more. That didn’t go down very well.’

She pushed the hair out of her eyes and managed a smile. ‘Mum thinks I’m “just not trying”!’

Bram could practically hear Harriet Beckwith saying it.

‘The thing is, Rob’s a nice guy, but…’

‘But he’s not Nick?’

‘No,’ she acknowledged with a sigh. ‘No, he isn’t. The trouble is that nobody is ever going to be Nick, but I can’t tell Mum that. She got all upset because she was hoping I’d bring Rob home for Christmas, and of course now she wants to know why it’s all over.’

‘What did you tell her?’

Sophie grimaced, remembering. ‘Well, I didn’t know what to say, so I said I’d fallen in love with someone else but it was all very new and I didn’t really want to talk about it yet. It was the best I could think of on the spur of the moment,’ she added defensively, as if Bram had poured scorn on her idea.

‘But of course now Mum’s in full interrogation mode. She keeps accusing me of being secretive and difficult. Why can’t I be sweet and nice like Melissa, who keeps in touch and goes to see them all the time? We ended up having a full-scale row, and I stormed out. It was just like being a teenager again.’ She sighed.

And, just like then, she had sought refuge at Haw Gill Farm. Straightening from the comfort of his warm bulk, Sophie looked at Bram and wondered if he had any idea how much he meant to her. He was such a dear friend, so level-headed, so down to earth, so reassuringly solid. The mere sight of him was enough to make her feel safer and steadier.

‘All I could think of was coming to see you,’ she said simply.

CHAPTER TWO

BRAM’S side felt cold where Sophie had been leaning against him, and part of him wished that she would come back, instead of turning up her collar against the cold and thrusting her hands into her pockets like that. The other part of him was glad that she had moved away. For some reason her nearness was making him feel strange today.

So strange that when Bess, snuffling along the hedgerow, put up a pheasant, he actually jumped as it exploded out of its hiding place, squawking with indignation.

It made Sophie start, too, and she looked guiltily at the bales still waiting to be unloaded in the fading light of the winter afternoon.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve held you up. You’ve got better things to do than listen to me moaning on.’

‘You know I always enjoy listening to you moan,’ said Bram lightly, ‘but I should finish moving those bales.’ He glanced down at Sophie. ‘It won’t take long. Why don’t you go and put the kettle on? You know what Mum used to say…’

‘It’ll all feel better after a nice cup of tea!’ she chanted obediently.

Molly Thoresby had been a great believer in the power of tea. How many times had Sophie heard her say that? She smiled at the memory as she walked back to the farmhouse. She could see Molly now, lifting the lid on the old kitchen range, setting the kettle firmly on the stove, while Sophie sat at the table and poured out her problems.

Sophie loved her own mother, of course she did, but she had loved Bram’s almost as much. Harriet Beckwith was smart and well-groomed, while Molly had been warm and comfortable and wise. Molly had never pushed or criticised or complained the way Harriet did. She’d just listened and made tea, and funnily enough things almost always had felt better afterwards. When Molly had died suddenly, a couple of months ago, Sophie had felt nearly as bereft as Bram.

The big farmhouse kitchen looked exactly the same as it had always done, with its sturdy pine table set in the window, its cluttered dresser and the two shabby armchairs drawn up in front of a wood-burning stove, but it was empty without Molly.

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked into the silence. Sophie filled the kettle and set it to boil on the range, just the way Molly had used to do. She had always loved this shabby, comfortable kitchen. Her mother’s was immaculate, full of modern appliances and spacious work surfaces, but it wasn’t a place you wanted to linger.

Outside, the sky was streaked with pink over the moors, and it was getting darker by the minute. Sophie liked the short winter afternoons, and the way switching on a lamp could make the darkness beyond the windows intensify. She put on the lights in the kitchen so that Bram could see their inviting yellow glow as he came home. It must be awful for him coming back to a dark house each evening now that Molly had gone.

She stood in the big bay window and watched the light fade over the moors. Her mind drifted to thoughts of Nick, the way it always did at quiet times like this. She thought about his heart-shaking smile, about the shiver of pleasure that went through her at the merest brush of his fingers, about the thrill of being near him.

Being with Nick had never felt safe—not in the way being with Bram did, for instance. There had always been an element of risk in their relationship. Sophie could see that now. She had never been able to relax completely with Nick for fear that she would lose him. Even when she had been at her happiest it had felt as if she were on point of exploding with the sheer intensity of it all. It had been a dangerous feeling, but a wonderful one too. Loving Nick had made her feel electric, alive.

Would she ever feel that way again? Sophie wondered. It didn’t seem possible. There was only one Nick, and he belonged to her sister now.

The sound of the back door opening jerked Sophie out of her thoughts.

‘In your kennel, Bess,’ she heard Bram say. ‘Stay!’

Poor old Bess was a softie amongst sheepdogs. Sophie was sure that she secretly yearned to be a pet, so that she could come inside and sit by the fire. Every day she sat hopefully at the door while Bram took his boots off, before being ordered off to her warm, clean kennel.

‘You’re a working dog,’ Bram would tell her sternly. ‘You can come in when you retire.’

‘That dog is hopeless,’ he said as he came into the kitchen wearing thick grey socks on his feet. His brown hair was ruffled by the wind, and his eyes looked so blue in his square, brown face that for a startled moment Sophie felt as if she were looking at a stranger.

‘She’s not that bad,’ said Sophie as she warmed the teapot.

‘She is. She’s useless. I’m never going have a starring role on One Man and His Dog with Bess.’ Bram pretended to complain. ‘Sometimes I think it would be easier to run around after the sheep myself and let Bess have the whistle!’

Sophie laughed. ‘At least she tries. And she adores you.’

‘I wish she’d adore me by doing what I told her,’ sighed Bram.

‘I’m afraid that’s not how adoring works,’ said Sophie sadly, and he glanced at her, compassion in his blue eyes.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I know.’

Sophie kept swirling the hot water around in the teapot.

‘Does it ever get any better, Bram?’ she asked.

He didn’t pretend not to understand her. ‘Yes, it does,’ he said. ‘Eventually.’

‘It doesn’t seem to have got better with you,’ she pointed out. ‘How long is it since you were engaged to Melissa?’

‘More than ten years,’ he admitted.

‘And you’re still not totally over her, are you?’

Bram didn’t answer immediately. He warmed his hands by the wood-burning stove and thought about Melissa, with her hair like spun gold and her violet eyes and that smile that made the sun come out.

‘I am over her,’ he said, although he didn’t sound that convincing even to himself. ‘I don’t hurt the way I used to. It’s true that I think about her sometimes, though. I think about what it would have been like if she hadn’t broken our engagement, but it’s hard to imagine now. Would Melissa have been a good farmer’s wife?’

Probably not, Sophie thought. In spite of growing up on a farm, Melissa had never been a great one for getting her hands dirty. She had never needed to. She’d always seemed so helpless and fragile that there had always been someone to do the dirty jobs for her.

Sophie had long ago accepted that she would have to get on and do things that Melissa would never have to contemplate, but she didn’t feel resentful about it. She loved her sister, and was proud of her beauty. When they were younger she had used to roll her eyes and call Melissa the sister from hell, but she hadn’t really minded.

Until Nick.

‘I do still love Melissa,’ said Bram. ‘Part of me always will. But I don’t feel raw, the way you do at the moment, Sophie. I know it’s a terrible cliché, but time really does heal.’

The pot was as warm as it was ever going to be. Sophie threw the water away, dropped in a couple of teabags and poured in boiling water from the kettle.

‘Is Melissa the reason you’ve never married?’ she asked, setting the pot on the table.

Bram pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘Partly,’ he conceded. ‘But it’s not as if I’m still waiting for her or anything. I’m ready to find someone else.’

‘I thought Rachel was good for you,’ volunteered Sophie. ‘I really liked her.’

If anyone could have helped him get over Melissa, Sophie would have thought it would be Rachel. She was a solicitor in Helmsley, warm and funny and intelligent and stylish. And practical. Bram needed someone practical.

‘I liked her too,’ said Bram. ‘She was great. I thought we might be able to make a go of it, but it turned out that we wanted very different things. Rachel wasn’t cut out to be a farmer’s wife. She told me quite frankly that she didn’t think she could stick the isolation, and the moors frightened her in the dark. She wanted to move to York, where she could go out in the evenings, meet friends for a drink, watch a film…and I couldn’t stick living in the city.’

He shrugged. ‘So we decided to call it a day.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sophie, wondering if Rachel might not have realised that a big part of Bram’s heart would always be Melissa’s. Even if she had never met Nick, she didn’t think that she would have wanted to marry someone who was still in love with another woman.

From sheer force of habit she went over to the dresser, where Molly had always kept a battered tin commemorating the Queen’s wedding. Inside there would be a mouth-watering selection of homemade biscuits—things like flapjacks or rock cakes or coconut slices. But when Sophie pulled off the lid it was empty.

Of course it was. Stupid, she chided herself. When would Bram have had time to do any baking?

Nothing could have brought home more clearly that Molly was gone. Sophie bit her lip and replaced the lid carefully.

‘I miss your mum,’ she said.

‘I know. I miss her too.’ Bram got up and found a packet of biscuits in the larder. ‘We’d better put them on her special plate,’ he said, taking it down from the dresser. ‘She wouldn’t like the way standards have slipped around here!’

Sophie had made Molly the plate for Christmas, the first year that she had discovered the pleasure of clay between her hands. She had fired it and then painted it herself with some rather wobbly sheep. Compared to her later work the plate was laughably crude, but Molly had been delighted, and had insisted on using it every time they had tea.

Bram shook the biscuits onto the plate and put it on the table. Then he sat down again opposite Sophie and watched her pour tea into two mugs.

‘It was funny coming back to the house tonight,’ he said. ‘The lights were on, and I could hear the kettle whistling…it was almost as if Mum was still here. This is when I miss her most, when I come in at night to an empty house. She was always here…cooking, listening to the radio, drinking tea…It’s as if she’s just popped out to feed the chickens or get something from larder. I keep thinking that she’ll walk back in any minute.’

Sophie’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Bram, I’m so sorry. I go on and on about my own problems, but losing Molly was much, much worse than anything I’ve had to deal with. How are you coping?’

‘Oh, I’m fine,’ said Bram easily, as she had known that he would. ‘It’s only now that I understand how much Mum did for me, though. When she was around I didn’t really have to think about cooking or shopping or washing. I guess I was spoilt.’

‘Are you eating properly?’ Sophie asked, knowing that Molly would have wanted her to check.

He nodded. ‘I can’t manage anything very posh, and I’m always forgetting to go to the shops, but I won’t starve. It’s not that I can’t look after myself, but there seem to be so many household chores I never knew about before, and it all takes so much time when I get in at night.’

‘Welcome to the world of women,’ said Sophie dryly, taking a biscuit and pushing the plate towards him.

‘Sorry.’ Bram grimaced an apology. ‘That sounded as if I was looking for a replacement servant, didn’t it? It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I just wish I had known how hard Mum worked when she was alive. I wish I hadn’t taken it all for granted, and that I could have told her how much I appreciated everything that she did for me.’

Sophie’s heart ached for him. ‘Molly loved you,’ she told him. ‘And she knew you loved her. You didn’t need to tell her anything.’

Bram helped himself to sugar and sat stirring his tea abstractedly. ‘I don’t know how I’m going to manage when it comes to lambing,’ he confessed. ‘You need at least two of you then.’

Lambing time would be the hardest. Sophie had grown up on a farm and she knew how carefully the farmers watched their sheep, all day and all night, desperate to ensure that as many lambs as possible survived.

She always quite liked helping with the lambing herself. She loved the smell of hay and the bleating sheep and the way the tiniest of lambs staggered to their feet to find their mothers. But she only did it for the occasional night. She didn’t have to spend three weeks or more with barely a chance of sleep. There were plenty of other times, too, when a farmer like Bram really did need help.

‘It’s hard running a farm on your own,’ she said, and he sighed at little.

‘I see now why Mum was so keen for me to get married.’ He stirred his tea some more. ‘I’ve been thinking about it a lot since she died,’ he admitted after a while. ‘As long as Mum was alive I didn’t need to face up to the fact that I’d lost Melissa.’ He paused, listening to his own words, and frowned. ‘Does that make sense?’ he asked Sophie.

‘You mean it was easy to use Melissa as an excuse for why it never quite worked out with anyone else?’

Bram looked rueful. ‘It doesn’t sound very good when you put it like that, does it? But I think that’s what I did, in a way. None of my other girlfriends ever made me feel the way Melissa did, and I suppose I didn’t need to try while Mum was here and everything carried on as normal.

‘Now she’s dead…’ He trailed off for a moment, trying to explain. ‘I get lonely sometimes,’ he admitted at last. ‘I sit here in the evenings and think about what my life is going to be like if I don’t get married, and I don’t like it. I think it’s time I put Melissa behind me for good. I’ve got to stop comparing every woman I meet to her and move on properly.’

‘Moving on is easier said than done,’ Sophie pointed out, thinking of Nick, and Bram smiled in rueful agreement.

‘Especially when you live up on the moors and spend whole days when you only get to meet sheep and talk to Bess. It’s not that easy to find a girl you want to marry at the best of times, and it seems to me that the older you get, the harder it is.’

Sophie thought about it. For the first time it occurred to her that there weren’t a lot of opportunities to meet people up here. There was the pub in the village, of course, but the community was small and it wasn’t often that newcomers moved into the area. Those who did tended to like the idea of country life without actually wanting to live it twenty-four hours a day. Most used their cottages as weekend retreats, or commuted into town.

Maybe it wasn’t that easy for Bram. You would think it would be easy for a single, solvent, steady man in his early thirties to find a girlfriend, thought Sophie, remembering the complaints of her single friends in London. They were always moaning that all the decent men were already married. Bram might not be classically handsome, but he was kind and decent and utterly reliable. He would make someone a very good husband.

‘You should come to London,’ she said. ‘You’d be snapped up.’

‘Not much point if the woman doing the snapping doesn’t fancy the idea of life on an isolated farm,’ said Bram. ‘A girl who’s squeamish and hates cold mornings and mud is no good to me. That’s obviously where I’ve been going wrong all these years. When I think about it, since Melissa all my girlfriends have been town girls at heart, which means that I’ve been looking in the wrong place. What I need is a country girl.’

Sophie looked at him affectionately. Yes, a nice country girl was exactly what Bram needed. Surely there was someone out there who would be glad to make a life with Bram? She would have this lovely kitchen to cook in, and on winter nights she could draw the thick, faded red curtains in the sitting room against the wind and the rain and sit with Bram in front of the fire, listening to it spit and crackle.

‘I wish I could marry you,’ she said with a wistful smile.

Bram put down his mug. His mother’s clock ticked into the sudden silence.

‘Why don’t you?’ he said.

Sophie smiled a little uncertainly. He was joking, wasn’t he? ‘Why don’t I marry you?’ she echoed doubtfully, just to check.

‘You just said that you wished you could,’ Bram reminded her.

‘I know I said that, but I meant…’ Sophie was so thrown by the apparent seriousness in his face that she couldn’t now remember what she had meant. ‘I didn’t mean that we should actually get married,’ she tried to explain.

‘Why not?’

Her wary look deepened. What was going on? ‘Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ she said, puzzled. ‘We don’t love each other.’

‘I love you,’ said Bram, calmly drinking his tea.

‘And I love you,’ she hastened to reassure him. ‘But it’s not the same.’ She struggled to find the right words. ‘It’s not the way you should love someone when you get married.’

‘You mean you don’t love me the way you love Nick?’

Sophie flushed slightly. ‘Yes. Or the way you love Melissa. It’s different; you know it is. We’re friends, not lovers.’

‘That’s why it could work,’ said Bram. ‘We’re both in the same position, so we understand how each other feels.’

He paused, trying to work it out in his mind. It had never occurred to him even to think about marrying Sophie before, but now that it had the idea seemed obvious. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

‘If neither of us can have the person we really want, we could at least have each other.’ He tried to convince her. ‘It wouldn’t be like taking a risk on a stranger. We’ve known each other all our lives. You know what I’m like, and I know you. I’m not going to run away appalled when I discover all your irritating habits the way a stranger might do.’

Sophie paused in the middle of dunking a biscuit in her tea. ‘What irritating habits?’ she demanded.

‘Irritating was the wrong word,’ Bram corrected himself, perceiving that he was straying onto dangerous ground. ‘I should have said that I know your…quirks.’