Trisha Ashley - The Magic of Christmas

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.