Trisha Ashley: The Magic of Christmas

The Magic of Christmas is loosely based on one of my earlier novels, Sweet Nothings , with the addition of a lot of new material. I felt there was so much more to say about the village of Middlemoss and all the characters who live there, especially Lizzy and her friends in the Christmas Pudding Circle, the annual Boxing Day Mystery Play and the vanishing squirrels!

The venue for the last Middlemoss Christmas Pudding Circle meeting of the year (which was usually more of an excuse for a party) had been switched to Perseverance Cottage because Lizzy’s thirteen-year-old son had come down with what she’d thought was flu and she wanted to keep an eye on him.

Later, looking back on the events of that day, it seemed to Lizzy that one minute she’d been sitting at the big pine table in her kitchen, wearing a paper hat and happily debating the rival merits of fondant icing over royal with the other four members of the CPC, and the next she was frantically snatching at the card listing the symptoms of meningitis, which she kept pinned to her notice board, and shouting to Annie, her best friend, to ring for an ambulance.

At the hospital, Jasper changed frighteningly fast from a big, gruff teenager to a pale, sick child, and Lizzy tried urgently to contact her husband, Tom, who was away on one of his alleged business trips. But as usual he didn’t answer his mobile and was nowhere to be found, so all she could do was leave messages in the usual places … and several unusual ones.

The hospital radio was softly warbling on about decking the halls with boughs of holly, but Lizzy, filled with a volatile mixture of desperate maternal fear and anger, wanted to deck her selfish, unreliable husband.

It was just as well that Annie was such a tower of strength in an emergency! During that first long day while Lizzy anxiously waited for the antibiotics to kick in, her friend popped in and out between jobs for the pet-sitting agency she ran, visited Perseverance Cottage to feed the poultry and let out Lizzy’s dog, and reassured Tom’s elderly relatives up at the Hall that she would keep them updated with every change in Jasper’s condition.

Then in the evening she returned to the hospital and she and Lizzy spent the long night watches sitting together while Jasper slept, reminiscing in hushed voices about when they first met and became best friends at boarding school. Lizzy had begun spending the holidays with Annie’s family in the vicarage at Middlemoss, where she was quickly absorbed into the Vane household, much to the relief of the elderly bachelor uncle who was her guardian — and it was also in Middlemoss that she’d met Tom and Nick Pharamond, cousins who were often farmed out with relatives up at the Hall in the school holidays.

Nick was the eldest: quiet, serious and appearing to prefer the company of the cook at Pharamond Hall to anyone else’s. Tom, who was really only nominally a Pharamond, his mother having married into the family, was the opposite: mercurial, charming and gregarious, though he’d had a quick temper and a sharp tongue, even then …

Nick was the first to fly the nest. Having inherited the Pharamond cooking gene in spades, it wasn’t a huge surprise to anyone except his staid stockbroker father when he took off around the world at eighteen, tastebuds and recipe notebook at the ready. Now he was chief cookery writer for a leading Sunday newspaper and author of numerous books and articles, while Tom, in contrast, had dropped out of university and gravitated down to the part of Cornwall where many of his more useless friends had also ended up.

When he set eyes on Lizzy again after a long interval, it was across a buffet table at a large party in London, where he was a guest, and where she and Annie, who’d done a French cookery course after school, were helping with the catering. He fell suddenly in love with her, a passion that also embraced her rose-tinted dreams of a self-sufficient existence in the country.

Somehow she’d forgotten about his dark good looks, his overwhelming charm and his quirky sense of humour … Before she’d had time to think — or to remember his quick temper, occasional sarcasms and how short-lived his enthusiasms had been in the past — he’d swept her off her feet, into a registry office and down to the isolated hovel he was renting in Cornwall.

‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure,’ she said to Annie, as Jasper stirred restlessly in his hospital bed. ‘You tried your best to warn me not to rush into it.’

‘You fell in love and so did Tom: there was no stopping you,’ Annie said. ‘Besides, you were addicted to all those books about living in Cornish cottages, with donkeys and daffodils and stuff.’

‘True,’ Lizzy agreed wryly, ‘and it was blissful that first summer — until the reality of living in a dank, dilapidated cottage in winter with a newborn baby set in, especially after Tom started vanishing for days on end without telling me when and where he was going.’

‘He was worse after Jasper was born, wasn’t he? I think he resented not being the centre of attention,’ Annie said.

‘He still does, though how you can be jealous of your own son, goodness knows! Anyway, it was like living with a handsome but unreliable tomcat … and nothing much has changed, has it?’ Lizzy asked bitterly.

‘Perhaps not, but at least two good things came out of your marriage,’ Annie pointed out, being a resolutely glass-half-full person: ‘Jasper and your books about life in Perseverance Cottage.’

‘True, and it was thanks to your telling Roly how cold and damp the cottage was, after you visited us, that he offered us a house on the estate rent free, so that actually makes three good things.’

‘Oh, yes — and it was marvellous when you came back to Middlemoss to live,’ Annie agreed fervently. ‘I’d missed you so much!’

Her voice had risen slightly and Jasper woke up and grumpily demanded why they were muttering over him like two witches. Then he complained that the dim light hurt his eyes, and a nurse appeared and firmly ushered them out of the room for a while.

The following morning it was clear that the antibiotics were working. Great-uncle Roly visited Jasper in the afternoon and by evening he was so obviously on the mend that Lizzy managed to persuade Annie, who’d brought sandwiches and a flask of soup ready to share a second night’s vigil with her, to go home instead and get some sleep.

Lizzy herself intended spending a second night there, of course: by Jasper’s bedside when allowed, or in the stark waiting room, with its grey plastic-covered chairs and stained brown cord carpet.

It was in the latter room that Tom’s cousin Nick Pharamond found her, having driven non-stop halfway across Europe since Roly had given him the news about Jasper. His brow was furrowed with added frown lines from tiredness, and the dark stubble and rumpled black hair didn’t do much to lighten his usual taciturn expression. Lizzy always imagined that Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester would have been exactly like Nick, but she was still both delighted and relieved to see him because, unlike Tom, you could always rely on him to turn up in an emergency.

Although she wasn’t normally a weepy sort of person, she instantly burst into tears all over his broad chest, while he patted her back in a strangely soothing way. Then he made her drink the hot soup Annie had left and eat a sandwich she didn’t want: he was forceful as well as reliable.