Charlotte Phillips - The Present - The must-read Christmas romance of the year!

‘We haven’t put it on the market yet,’ she said. ‘How did you know?’

He crossed the kitchen and filled the kettle. Grabbed a couple of cups from the hooks above the sink.

‘Got a list of jobs sent my way last week from someone called Rod,’ he said. ‘Getting the place to look “shipshape for sale”, I think was how he put it.’

He caught her closing her eyes briefly.

‘Rod’s my partner,’ she said. ‘I’ve decided to move Gran in with us.’

He noticed that Rod, whoever he was, apparently wasn’t included in that decision.

‘Obviously care services don’t come cheap, and we’ve had to talk through all the options, but …’ She glanced around the room and out of the window at the frost-covered walled garden, and didn’t finish. He followed her gaze. The house was a beautiful 1930’s detached place in Canterbury. The kind of place they didn’t build any more. Rambling, full of memories and character, with big bay windows, and a mature garden that had been loved for years.

‘But selling it doesn’t come easy?’ he finished for her.

She nodded.

‘I spent a lot of my childhood here,’ she said. ‘I lived with Gran and Grandad on and off right through my teens, only moved out properly about five years ago.’ She nodded towards the kitchen door, held open by a wooden doorstop. ‘On that doorframe over there, my grandad marked my height every year until I stopped growing.’

‘I know. It’s on my maintenance list to paint over it.’

She fell silent at that, and he immediately regretted telling her.

‘There must be other options to selling,’ he said, trying to take a positive spin instead. ‘I mean, I know Olive is getting a bit frail, but her mind isn’t, if you know what I mean.’

‘I know exactly what you mean.’

‘I got the impression she intended only to leave this place in a box. Her words, actually.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Leg-dressing finished, she put her foot down on the floor and leaned forward to pick up a sheaf of leaflets from the corner of the table. ‘She’s been putting up a fight for months. She had a couple of minor falls a while ago, just cuts and bruises, you know.’ She held the leaflets up. ‘This was her latest attempt to fob me off. Stairlifts. Like a stairlift is the bloody elixir of life. The stairs are the least of her problems. She needs to be able to get around everywhere else, never mind the stairs. There’s the outdoor steps. The uneven floors. The tiles in the bathroom are a slip hazard. This whole place is an accident waiting to happen.’ She paused. ‘Except that it already has.’

She looked strained, and he felt a pang of sympathy. The email had mentioned that Olive had fallen and was in hospital, but that was the limit of it. He put a cup of tea in front of her and grabbed the milk from the fridge.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

He nodded.

‘How is she?’

She added a spoonful of sugar to her teacup and stirred.

‘Well, she fell in the hallway onto her right side and broke her arm and a couple of fingers. She’s really badly bruised.’ She bit her lip. ‘They thought she might have broken a hip, but thank goodness she hadn’t. The worst part of all is that she hit her head. She’s not been able to talk very much yet. She’s just so tired and frail.’

‘That’s awful.’

She took a deep decisive breath.

‘The house sale is the right thing. My stupid sentimentality about some bloody doorframe does not affect that decision. She’s going to need someone on hand 24-7. Plus there’s the massive garden, and the house needs tons of upkeep.’

‘What I’m here for,’ he remarked. Admittedly he had to factor his other life into that statement, but with pretty regular trips away he was careful to schedule his work around his travels, and he had a local kid who covered basic garden upkeep if he was away for longer than a few days at a time. ‘And I’ve been keeping tabs on Olive over the last few months. My place is only five minutes away, and I programmed my number into her speed dial.’

She laughed.

‘I’m not sure Gran knows what speed dial even is.’

He grinned at her over the rim of his coffee cup. In that moment of laughter, the stress had disappeared from her face. She was very pretty, he decided, in an unkempt kind of a way, with her messy waves of dark blonde hair, and wide brown eyes. A thin film of grey plaster dust clung to her skin, and, as he watched, she unknowingly rubbed her forehead and smudged it.

‘She does now,’ he said. ‘I put your number in too. And her hairdresser, she asked specifically for that one.’

She was staring at him as if he was some new and interesting life form.

‘Seriously?’

He nodded.

‘Of course, she’s only ever used it to ring me up when I’m feet away in the garden to tell me to come in and eat my bodyweight in cake. She falls in the hallway and I don’t hear a bloody thing from her.’

‘That’s because I was here, thank goodness. It was pure luck; I’d only happened to call in because I had an interview just down the road. Otherwise she could have been there for hours.’ She ran a hand distractedly through her dusty hair. ‘I can’t even go there in my head. What could have happened.’ She smiled at him gratefully. ‘That’s a really kind thing to have done though. Thank you.’

He raised his coffee cup in acknowledgment, feeling mildly awkward.

‘You’re welcome. Anything else I can do, just shout. Only like, maybe not loud enough to wake the dead next time.’

She smiled.

‘You’re a writer, aren’t you? On a newspaper. Olive told me.’

‘Local press,’ she said, in between fast sips of tea. Everything she did had an urgency about it, as if she didn’t have a moment to waste.

‘What’s the rush?’ he said. ‘The place isn’t even on the market yet. I mean, I might be missing the point, but if she’s moving in with you when she comes out of hospital, does it really matter if it takes a few months to sort this place out?

‘Rod wants to get it on the market as soon as possible,’ she said. ‘Once Gran comes out of hospital, which I really hope is in time for Christmas, she’s going to need me a lot, and I won’t have time to sort through all this stuff. There are people you can pay to come in and do it all for you, house clearance, it’s called. Rod suggested it, but I don’t want just anyone going through her things. I mean, don’t get me wrong, probably 90 per cent of the stuff up in that attic is just fit for the tip, but there might be things that are important to her, that she will want to keep.’ She paused. ‘That I will want to keep.’

That one sentence made it clear that sorting through this place was as much about her coming to terms with letting Gran go as it was about the house, and he could understand that need well enough. Before he knew what he was doing he was offering.

‘I can help you with anything you want over the next day or so. I know I’ve got this to-do list anyway, but that’s mainly painting, sorting out any wood that’s rotten or needs replacing, that kind of thing. I’m going to be around. I can help you bring stuff down from the loft if you like, help sort through the shed—’

‘Oh, bloody hell, I’d forgotten the shed!’ she said, clapping a hand against her forehead. ‘I bet that’s full of stuff too. Grandad’s been gone ten years, and it was his hangout. I don’t think I’ve ever known Gran go in there since.’

‘It’s not too bad,’ he lied, knowing perfectly well it was stacked with boxes of tools, gardening rubbish, and old golf clubs that dated back years, but not wanting to add to the stress. He brought his own tools and equipment on the van, so rarely needed to venture in there.