The Ghost of Christmas Past

Even though it was barely December, the hospital ward had been decked out with a tiny tree and moulded plastic wall decorations depicting a fat Santa, with bunchy bright scarlet cheeks and dark, almond-shaped eyes. He was offering what looked like a stick of dynamite to Rudolf the very red-nosed reindeer, but I expect you need explosive power to deliver all those presents in one single night.

My defence strategy for the last few years has been to ignore Christmas, shutting the door on memories too painful to deal with; but now, sitting day after day by the bed in which Gran dwindled like snow in summer, there seemed to be no escape.

Gran, who brought me up, would not have approved of all these festive trappings. Not only was she born a Strange Baptist, but had also married a minister in that particularly austere (and now almost extinct) offshoot of the faith. They didn’t do Christmas in the way everyone else did — with gifts, gluttony and excess, so as a child, I was always secretly envious of my schoolfriends.

But then I got married and went overboard on the whole idea. Alan egged me on — he never lost touch with his inner child, which is probably why he was such a brilliant primary school teacher. Anyway, he loved the whole thing, excess, gluttony and all.

So I baked and iced spiced gingerbread stars to hang on the tree, which was always the biggest one we could drag home from the garden centre, together with gay red and white striped candy canes, tiny foil crackers and twinkling fairy lights. Together we constructed miles of paper chains to festoon the ceilings, hung mistletoe (though we never needed an excuse to kiss) and made each other stockings full of odd surprises.

After the first year we decided to forgo a full traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings in favour of roast duck with home-made bottled Morello cherry sauce, which was to become my signature dish. (I was sous-chef in a local restaurant at the time.) We made our own traditions, blending the old with the new, as I suppose most families do. .

And we were so nearly a family: about to move to a tiny hamlet just outside Merchester, a perfect country setting for the two children (or maybe three, if Alan got his way) that would arrive at neatly-spaced intervals. .

At this juncture in my thoughts, a trolley rattled sharply somewhere behind the flowered curtains that enclosed the bed, jerking me back to the here and now: I could even hear a faint, tinny rendering of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ seeming to seep like a seasonal miasma from the walls.

Perhaps Gran could too, for suddenly her clear, light grey eyes, so like my own, opened wide with an expression of delighted surprise that had nothing to do with either my presence or the home-made pot custard I’d brought to tempt her appetite, the nutmeg-sprinkled top browned just the way she liked it.

‘Ned? Ned Martland?’ she whispered, staring at someone only she could see.

I’d never seen her look so lit-up and alive as she did at that moment, which was ironic considering those were her last words — and the words themselves were a bit of a puzzle, since my grandfather’s name had been Joseph Bowman!

So who the hell was Ned Martland? If it had been Martland, of course, and not Cartland, Hartland, or something similar. But no, I was pretty sure it was Martland — and he’d obviously meant a lot to her at some time. This was fairly amazing: had my grave and deeply reserved grandmother, who had been not so much buttoned up as zipped tightly shut and with a padlock thrust through the fastener for good measure, been keeping a romantic secret all these years? Had she lived her life without the man she truly loved by her side, just as I was living mine?

Perhaps there’s a family curse, which would account for why, after Alan’s death, she kept going on about the sins of the fathers being visited on the next generations — though actually, as I pointed out to her, that would have meant me rather than my husband. But if there is a family curse it looks set to end with me, because I’m the end of the line, the wrong side of thirty-five, and with my fruit in imminent danger of withering on the vine.

I’ve had too much time to think about that lately, too.

I’ve no idea what Alan’s last words were, if any, because I was still asleep when he went for his early morning jog round the local park before work. When I woke up and went downstairs there was no sign of him and it was all worryingly Marie Celeste. The radio was spilling out some inane Christmas pop song to the empty kitchen and his bag, with its burden of marked exercise books, was on the floor by the door. A used mug and plate and a Tupperware box of sandwiches lay on the table and the kettle was barely warm.

As I stood there, puzzled and feeling the first stirring of unease, the police arrived to break the news that there had been an accident and Alan would never be coming home.

‘Don’t be silly,’ I heard my voice telling them crisply, ‘I’m doing duck with some of my bottled Morello cherry sauce for Christmas dinner — it’s his favourite.’

Then, for the first and only time in my life, I fainted.

* * *

Alan had been trying to rescue a dog that had fallen through the ice on the boating lake. How stupid was that? I mean, if a dog fell through, then even a slightly built man like Alan would, too. The dog was evidently not a retriever, for it swam through the broken ice created by Alan’s fall, scrambled out and ran off.

I was so furious with Alan that at the funeral I positively hurled the single red rose someone had handed me into the grave, screaming, ‘What were you thinking of, dimwit?’

And then I slipped on the snowy brink and nearly followed it in, though that was entirely due to the large shot of brandy my friend Laura, who was also Alan’s sister, insisted we both drink before we set out. Luckily her husband, Dan, was on my other side and yanked me back at the last minute and then Gran walked around the grave from where she had been standing among a small cluster of elderly Strange Baptist friends and took a firm grip of my other arm, like a wardress.

But by then I was a spent force: grief, fury and guilt (the guilt because I had refused to take up jogging with him) seemed to blend so seamlessly that I didn’t know where one ended and another began.

He’d left me on my own, closing the door on the future we had all planned out. How could he? I always thought we were yin and yang, two halves of the same person, soulmates destined to stay together forever throughout eternity — if so, I’d have a few choice things to say when I finally caught up with him.

My coping strategy had been to close the door on Alan in return, only allowing my grief full rein on the anniversary of his death in late December and shutting myself away from all reminders of the joyous seasonal festivities he had taught me to love during the all-too-brief years of our marriage.

There’s even less reason to celebrate Christmas now. .

Christmas? Bah, humbug!

Chapter 1

Pregnant Pause

Since Gran had been slipping quietly away from me for years, her death wasn’t that much of a shock, to be honest. That was just as well, because I had to dash straight off to one of my house-sitting jobs right after her austere Strange Baptist funeral, though finding her journals in the small tin trunk in which she kept her treasures just before I left was a very poignant moment. .

When I’d locked up her little sliver of a terraced house in Merchester (not that there was anything in it worth stealing) I’d taken the trunk home with me: the key was on her keyring with the rest. I already had some idea of what was in it from glimpses caught over the years — postcards of Blackpool, where my grandparents spent their Wakes Week holiday every year, my annual school photographs, certificates and that kind of thing — layers going back in time.

I’d only opened it meaning to add her narrow gold wedding band, but then had lifted up a few of the layers to see what was underneath — and right at the bottom was a thin bundle of small, cheap, school exercise books marked ‘Esther Rowan’, bound together with withered elastic bands. Opening the first, I found a kind of spasmodic journal about her nursing experiences starting towards the end of the war, since the first entry was dated October 1944, though it began by looking back at earlier experiences:

I’d started working as a nursing auxiliary at fifteen, which meant that when war broke out at least I wasn’t sent to do hard, dirty work in the munitions factory, like many Merchester girls.

I thought how young they started work back then — and, reading the following entry, how stoical she was:

Tom, my childhood sweetheart, enlisted in the navy straight away, though I begged him to wait until he was called up. Sure enough, he was killed almost immediately, to the great grief of myself and his poor, widowed father. After this, I resolved to put all girlish thoughts of love and marriage behind me and threw myself into my nursing duties. .

That last line struck me as being much like the way I’d moved house and thrown myself into a new job right after Alan died: only somehow in my case it didn’t seem stoical, more a denial of those wonderful years we had together.

I knew Gran had eventually gone on to marry the father of her childhood sweetheart — she had said to me once that they had felt they could be a comfort and support to one another — so where this Ned Martland came in was anyone’s guess! I was starting to think I must have imagined the whole thing. .