Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

‘He forgets to eat and I’m sure he hardly ever cooks,’ Jess explained, leading the way to the third and final door. ‘He does have something hot in the pub occasionally, though, if Henry calls for him on the way there.’

‘Speak of the devil,’ I muttered, because the old gardener had presumably heard the knocking next door and come out from curiosity already.

‘Afternoon,’ he said to me and then added to Jess, ‘if those are more of Tilda’s blasted burnt offerings, then you can keep them!’

‘These aren’t burnt,’ Jess said. ‘And if you don’t want them, just give them to Richard, he seems keen on them. Oh, and remind him about the Senior Citizens lunch tomorrow and don’t let the minibus go without him.’ She thrust the package at him. ‘Right, now we’ve got other things to do. Bye, Henry.’

‘Women!’ Henry muttered, closing the door.

We passed the little church in its neat graveyard. Next to it was a dark-green painted corrugated iron building, little more than a shed, that according to a sign was the parish hall, but the rest of the village was across a small stone bridge over the stream, where we were nearly flattened by a big, glossy four-wheel-drive vehicle taking it too fast.

It stopped and reversed, nearly getting us again, and the side window slid down to reveal a pair of annoyed, puzzled faces.

‘Where’s the Great Mumming road?’ demanded the driver, who was shaven-headed and seemed to have been designed without a neck, since his chin just ran away into his chest. ‘The SatNav says we can turn down to the motorway from there.’

‘This little lane can’t be it, can it?’ said the woman next to him, resting a handful of blue talons along the window. ‘We must have missed the turn.’

‘No, this is the road to Great Mumming — but only if you’re a sheep,’ Jess said. ‘That’s why people keep following their SatNavs.’

‘Are you being cheeky?’ the man said belligerently.

‘No, she’s simply being truthful,’ I said quickly. ‘Apparently it isn’t much more than a track so the SatNav has an error. You’d be better off turning round and going back down the way you came.’

‘Left at the bottom of the hill and you’ll get to Great Mumming,’ Jess put in.

‘Oh, bollocks, what a total waste of time!’ he said.

Without a word of thanks the window slid up, the car shot forward, turned noisily in front of the church, and then streaked past us going the other way again. But we were ready for it and had run across the bridge and onto the pavement.

‘Charming,’ I said.

‘People following the SatNavs are just like sheep,’ Jess said. ‘At least most of the lorry drivers take one look at the lane down by the junction and realise there’s a mistake, though once one did turn into it and got stuck on the first bend. They had an awful job getting it out, Grandpa says, and had to rebuild a bit of the dry-stone wall.’

The small shop next to the shuttered Merry Kettle café had overflowed onto the pavement with a stand of fruit and vegetables, bags of potatoes and carrots and netting bags of firewood.

‘I love this shop! Mrs Comfort’s got everything.’

‘It certainly looks like it,’ I agreed. ‘What shall I do with Merlin?’

‘There’s a hook in the wall to tie him to and a bowl of water,’ she pointed out. ‘There, under the table.’

There was, too, and Merlin, tethered, sat down on a piece of flattened cardboard with a look of patient resignation. I think he’d been there before.

Inside, the shop proved to be a Tardis, since it went back quite a way into what had probably originally been the second room of the cottage. In America I think they call this sort of shop a Variety Store and there was certainly an infinite variety of stuff crammed into this one.

Mrs Comfort was plump, with a round face and high cheekbones that turned her eyes to slits when she smiled — rather attractive, in a Persian cat sort of way. Her straight mouse-brown hair was pulled back tightly and clamped to her head with a large, crystal-studded plastic comb.

‘Hi, Mrs Comfort, this is Holly, who’s minding Old Place for Uncle Jude over Christmas.’

‘I thought that couple were back again, that have been before?’ she said, looking at me curiously as I ducked my head to avoid the wellingtons hanging by strings from the beams.

‘They had to leave because their daughter had her baby much too early,’ I explained.

‘Shame — hope the poor little mite is all right?’

‘I don’t know, they haven’t told us.’

‘Well now, what can I get you?’ she asked, a hopeful glint in her eye.

‘Do you have newspapers?’

‘There’s a Mail left, but that’s the last. I’ve had three lots of lost drivers in already, and they’ve all bought one. That SatNav’s good for trade!’

‘We just saw another one,’ Jess told her, ‘but they didn’t hang about after we told them they’d gone wrong.’

‘I expect there’s more of them in the pub — I sometimes think the Daggers must have paid the SatNav people to send cars up here, they do a much better winter trade in coffees and lunches now than they used to.’

‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’ I said and she agreed fervently.

She had most of the things on my list, including dried fruit so I could bake another cake to replace the one that had vanished. I bought more flour too, because if I was getting daily visitors, I might as well offer them a seasonal mince pie or two, and the Chirks had left several enormous jars of mincemeat.

While I was buying all this Jess had expended much time and thought over the line of sweet jars and now purchased a supply of Fairy Satins, triangular humbug-shaped sweets in alarmingly bright colours, and a large bag of wine gums.

‘And can I see proof that you’re over twenty-one, young lady?’ asked Mrs Comfort.

‘Ha, ha, very funny,’ said Jess. ‘You know there isn’t a drop of alcohol in them.’

‘How’s the book coming along, dear?’ asked Mrs Comfort, weighing out Satins on the scales and tipping them into a paper bag, which she twisted at the corners.

‘I’m on Chapter Six now and the vampires are having a midnight feast.’

‘That sounds like fun.’

‘Not for the girls they’re feasting on — but they deserve it,’ Jess said.

‘Mrs Comfort is a poet,’ she confided to me as we left the shop and collected Merlin. ‘There are lots of writers here: me, Mrs Comfort, Grandpa with his Christmas book and Granny’s cookery books. Richard has written a couple of pamphlets too, on the Revels and the red horse.’

‘Little Mumming is clearly a hive of literary activity!’ I said, impressed.

The Auld Christmas was a smallish hostelry with a large barn behind it and a cobbled forecourt on which a few vehicles were parked. Now I was closer I could see that the old man on the sign seemed to be wearing a mistletoe and oak-leaf crown and carrying a club, but it was hard to tell, because the coats of varnish protecting it had turned it the colour of Brown Windsor soup.

‘Are you sure about the dog?’ I asked as we went in.

‘Yes, come on,’ Jess urged me, pushing open an inner door to the left of the passage.

We stepped down into a dark cavern, lit at one end by a roaring open fire and at the other by the dull glow of a fruit machine. Behind the counter was a buxom, red-haired woman of about forty-five and a couple of obvious locals were sitting near the fire, eating bread and cheese. An even more obvious pair of strangers were eating at a table nearby and they looked at Merlin with acute disapproval.

‘Do you mind the dog?’ I asked the woman behind the bar. ‘Only Mr Martland said—’

‘Oh, we know Merlin, Jude brings him down here all the time and he’s better behaved than most of our customers,’ she said, then shot a look at the muttering strangers and added loudly, ‘and them that don’t like it can go in the public bar next door or take themselves off.’

The complaining voices abruptly ceased.

The woman wiped her hand on a pink-spotted, duck-egg blue apron and held it out to me: ‘Nancy Dagger. My husband Will’s down the cellar, changing kegs and that’s his old dad over there near the fire.’

A tiny man with a long, snowy beard suddenly leaned forward out of a hooded chair, the like of which I had never seen before, and said in a high, piping voice, ‘That’s right — I’m Auld Man Christmas, I am!’ Then he laughed wheezily, like a pair of small musical bellows. ‘Heh, heh, heh!’

‘Take no notice,’ Nancy said. ‘We know you’re looking after Old Place instead of those Chirks what have been here before, Henry told us all about it last night. But I’ve never known Martlands to be away from Old Place at Christmas before!’ And she shook her head. Then she gave me a sharp look and added, ‘But then, I suppose you’re family?’

‘Not at all, I just work for the same agency as Jim and Mo.’

‘I thought you had the look of a Martland, being tall and dark and all,’ she insisted, eyeing me closely — but then, it was gloomy in there.

‘No, I’m not related to them — and Mr Martland will definitely be back for Twelfth Night, because I’m due to leave that morning.’

‘He should be here now, that’s how it’s always been,’ she said. ‘People round here don’t much like change.’