Trisha Ashley - The Magic of Christmas

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.

Tom had his back to me when I went in, spray-stencilling some intricate, hand-cut Celtic design onto a surfboard. He was wearing a mask and baggy dungarees over his T-shirt and jeans, and his dark hair curled onto the nape of his neck in a familiar ducktail.

Where his cousin Nick was built on a large and rugged scale, Tom was a slight, wiry man and every slender bone of his body was beautiful. But despite (allegedly) not being a Pharamond other than in name, he did have the unmistakable look of one, so I was convinced that all the rumours about his mother were true.

I stood there for a minute, thrown by that familiar curl of hair, shaken by the stirring of a tenderness I had thought long dead. Then he must have felt my presence, for he turned cold grey stranger’s eyes on me, pushing down the mask. The CD came to an end and there was silence.

His eyes flicked to the fading bruise on my cheek and away again. ‘You’re still here, then? Thought you might have cleared off.’

‘Like where?’ I demanded. ‘And Jasper? The animals? Did you think I had an ark ready and waiting somewhere?’

‘Ah, yes, I forgot: my great-uncle by marriage, my cottage. Poor little orphan Lizzy has nowhere to go, has she?’

‘Don’t think I intend staying with you any longer than I have to,’ I told him coldly. ‘The minute Jasper’s off to university, that’s it. And if you’re interested, his results came and he got into Liverpool.’

‘It’s always Jasper , isn’t it?’ he said pettishly.

‘You should be pleased because he’s your son too, whatever mad ideas you’ve got in your head. But I’m not playing your games any more, Tom — you can believe what you like.’

‘Oh, come on, Jasper’s the spitting image of Nick, my dear old no-blood-relation cousin — and don’t forget I caught you in each other’s arms at the hospital when Jasper was ill.’

‘I’ve told you repeatedly that he was just comforting me — and you could have been doing that, if I’d been able to get hold of you! But I conceived Jasper practically as soon as we’d got married and I never even looked at Nick in that way — or any other man! No, there’s another obvious reason why both you and Jasper look like Pharamonds, only you’d rather believe ill of me than your mother!’

‘We’ll leave my mother out of this,’ he said, that ugly look in his eyes. ‘But the sooner you clear out, the better.’ Turning back towards his board he said dismissively, ‘Fetch me a beer out will you? There’s some in the fridge.’

‘Fetch it yourself. I didn’t come out here to wait on you. Oh, and here’s a restaurant bill from Leila. I only hope the meal was worth it!’

‘What?’ He swung round and snatched it from me, glanced at it and then looked up suspiciously. ‘Where did you get this?’

‘Nick called by early this morning. You left Leila’s without paying the bill, and she wants her money.’

‘Oh, I don’t think this is Leila’s idea,’ he said, crumpling the bill into a ball and tossing it into a corner. ‘I’ve already paid her — in kind. Bed and board. So now you know, and presumably Nick also knows.’

‘Suspects, perhaps … but … Leila can’t possibly be “Dark Heart”!’ I blurted.

He took a menacing step towards me. ‘What do you know about Dark Heart?’

‘I found a bit of a note in your pocket when I was sorting the washing, but it didn’t sound like Leila,’ I said, standing my ground.

‘It isn’t,’ he said shortly. ‘It’s someone else … someone more conveniently local, who’s prepared to please me in ways you wouldn’t have, even if I’d asked , dearest wife.’

‘Is it someone I know, Tom? And Leila — was that a one-off? She isn’t the woman you’ve been having an affair with since before Jasper was ill, is she?’

He didn’t reply, just smiled rather unpleasantly. I hoped he hadn’t been running two of them in tandem even then. But someone local … who could it be?

Oh God, he hadn’t got drunk and started an affair with that drippy girl who played the electric violin and sang in the Mummers, had he? I’d noticed she hadn’t been able to look me in the eye for months, but thought she’d maybe been one of his one-night flings. Evidently, he wasn’t going to tell me anyway.

I thought of something else. ‘Where’s your van?’

‘It broke down in a lay-by about twenty miles away. I had to get the garage to bring it in — think the gearbox’s had it. Now, any more questions? Only I need to finish this board because I’m off down to Cornwall at the weekend to deliver it, assuming the van’s fixed by then.’

I stared at him, thinking how normal a monster could look.

‘If you aren’t leaving immediately, you could make yourself useful and fetch that beer,’ he suggested.

‘Fetch it yourself! I’m going for a walk in the woods to think all this over, and then later I’ve got a Mystery Play Committee meeting, the first of the year,’ I said, and saw a flash of anger in his eyes.

As I left I heard the music restart, and the hissing of the spray.

Outside I practically fell over Polly Darke, our local purveyor of stirring Regency romances — and I use the term ‘Regency’ very loosely, since she never let historical facts come between her and the story. She gave me one of them once and I noticed the words ‘feisty’ and ‘lusty’ appeared on practically every page to describe the heroine and hero.

And now I came to think of it, she never let facts come between her and a modern story either, since she was always snooping about under one pretext or another, and twisting things she saw and heard into malicious gossip. Divorced, she had lived in her hacienda-style bungalow between Middlemoss and Mossedge for several years, and I’m sure was convinced that she was accepted everywhere as a local.

While I didn’t suppose she could have heard anything much through a wooden door, that wouldn’t prevent her from spreading lurid rumours about me and Tom around the three villages by sundown.

She was looking her usual strange self, in a severely truncated purple Regency-style dress, and with her hair cropped and dyed a dense, dead black. She clutched a small blue plastic basket of field mushrooms to her artificially inflated bosom, which might or might not be a fashion statement — are plastic baskets currently a must-have accessory?