Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

I put in the garnet earrings that were Alan’s last present (I found them hidden, gift-wrapped, weeks after his death), with feelings of sadness and regret, rather than my usual mixture of grief and anger. And I suddenly realised, with a pang of loss, that since I had arrived at Old Place I no longer had the comforting sense that he was walking beside me. I suspected he had gone for good, leaving me to go on entirely alone. .

It was just as well my eyeliner was waterproof. I dabbed my eyes with a tissue and then ran down to the kitchen and wrapped a big white apron from the drawer over my dress. I cooked lots of bacon and eggs, which I’d just put on a hot, covered dish ready for the next Holly Muffins, when Jude finally arrived, his dark hair still wet and curling slightly from the shower. He was wearing a loose blue chambray shirt with a T-shirt under it and jeans, which was a lot more than he’d been wearing the night before. . I felt my face going hot, but hoped he didn’t notice.

‘Sorry I’m so late, but I fell asleep again after Jess woke me up and—’ He broke off and examined me critically. ‘Have you been crying?’

‘No, chopping onions — I wept buckets.’

‘Right,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I meant to be down early to see to the fire and get more wood up from the cellar, as well as do the horses so you and Becca didn’t have to, but I’m afraid I dozed off again.’

‘I expect you’re still jet lagged, but I’d be grateful if you fetched more wood up because I haven’t got round to that yet and the log basket’s almost empty. Becca and Jess are doing the horses now, so they should be in soon — we’ve already had our breakfast.’

‘I think the smell of the bacon is what finally woke me up and got me down here,’ he confessed.

‘I’m doing bacon and egg muffins, and toast too if anyone wants it, but they’ll have to eat it in the sitting room, because I don’t want you all under my feet while I’m cooking the Christmas dinner.’ I stood poised over the cooker, spatula and warm plate in hand. ‘Do you want one muffin or two?’

‘Two, at least. Do you want me from under your feet as well? Only you might want some help, even unskilled labour.’

‘I have it pretty well in hand, thanks — I’m very organised, you know.’

‘Yes, I’d noticed that,’ he said gravely, with a glance at the menu charts and timed to-do lists I’d pinned to the kitchen corkboard.

‘Michael’s also offered his help as skivvy and he’s very handy around the kitchen.’

‘I’m also handy. . even if I don’t know much about cooking. I’d like to learn some time.’

‘What, you’d like to learn to cook?’

‘A man gets tired of ready meals,’ he admitted.

‘Well. . I suppose you could help a bit.’

As the rest of the party straggled down, I ushered them firmly back out of the kitchen while Jude ferried tea, coffee and muffins to the sitting room.

‘Noël’s the last,’ he said, coming back in with a tray, ‘he said he just wanted one.’

‘Just as well, we’re on to the very last muffin after that. I don’t suppose Coco ate one?’

He grinned. ‘She did, actually, but then she dashed out to the downstairs cloakroom, so I hope she isn’t sicking the whole thing back again.’

‘I think she uses alternative methods to control her weight,’ I said and he looked slightly baffled.

‘Laxatives — I don’t suppose the muffin will even touch the sides going down. What a waste of good food!’

He looked startled. ‘Really? I’d no idea, I just thought she didn’t eat enough.’

‘She’s so painfully thin that maybe we should lock her in the dining room after lunch without her handbag, until she’s digested something?’ I suggested.

‘Is that where she keeps them?’

‘It is, according to Jess.’ I swiftly assembled the last muffin and put it on a tray with a little pot of tea. ‘Could you take Tilda’s tray up? Then I expect she’ll come down. She’d better, because I can hear Jess and Becca coming back in, and Jess is so desperate to open her presents she’ll probably explode if she has to wait much longer!’

‘She was really excited about that stocking you did,’ he said and looked thoughtfully at me. ‘She thought her mother had asked Tilda to do it — it was really kind of you to think of it.’

‘It was Mrs Comfort’s idea really — and don’t tell Jess it wasn’t her mother,’ I warned, just as Jess burst through the door.

‘Uncle Jude, Uncle Jude, can I open all my presents now?’ she yelled, flinging herself at him.

‘By the time you’ve washed your hands and changed, you’ll be able to, because your granny will be down,’ I said. ‘I’ve put my dress on, so you need to keep your end of the bargain.’

She pulled a face and rushed out again and off up the backstairs like a herd of clog-dancing baby elephants.

‘You look very nice in your red dress, Holly,’ Jude said, as if the compliment had been drawn out of him with hot pincers, and then took himself off.

Since most of me was covered with a Victorian frilled apron, I expect he was just being polite to make up for nearly scaring me to death last night. . Though come to think of it, he hadn’t seemed terribly repentant at the time.

Men are so weird.

If you’re terribly organised you can easily spare time for other things even while cooking the Christmas dinner, so when I was called into the sitting room for an orgy of present unwrapping everything was fine to be left, though I remembered to take my pinny off first. Merlin, his rawhide chew firmly clenched in his jaws, came with me.

Jess was in charge of ferrying the presents to their recipients and, to my surprise, I ended up with quite a pile, though they included Laura’s, which I’d brought down with me when I changed earlier.

‘There’s another one here for Merlin,’ Jess said.

‘You’d better unwrap that one for him,’ Jude suggested, so I knew the rubber ball inside was from him. Merlin retired under the nearest table with his booty, where the occasional squeak of rubber as he clamped his teeth on his ball, or the squidgy squish of rawhide chewed soft, could be heard during any pause in the conversation.

While Jess ripped the paper off her presents as fast as she could, the rest of us started on ours with a little more restraint. I decided to open Laura’s first, which was a lovely emerald green pashmina scarf wrapped around a well-thumbed book that I immediately recognised: her copy of The Complete Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth. Inside she’d written:

I took a quick look round but no-one seemed to be looking in my direction except Jude, who I hoped was too far away to make out what the book was. I quickly wrapped the scarf around it again.

Jude had already sent presents to Tilda, Noël and Jess when he thought he would be away for Christmas, but on some impulse (probably to fill in time between flights, since he can’t have known that the family party was about to double in size) he seemed to have bought up half an airport gift shop as well. There were giant foil-wrapped chocolate pennies and those chocolate bars that look like gold ingots, small teddy bears dressed as Beefeaters and London bus keyrings. These items seemed to have been labelled randomly, but we all got at least one. I had a penny and a bear. Coco, who was again inclined to be tearful about the Birkin bag that never was, got an ingot and a keyring.

Unlike Michael, who had thoughtfully bought and wrapped a small article of Comfort for each person present (pens and notebooks inscribed with Oriel’s Sunbeams are God’s Thoughts line) Coco only received, she didn’t give — not even thanks.

As well as my booty from Jude’s spending spree and Michael’s gift, Tilda and Noël gave me a copy of Tilda Thompson’s Party Pieces recipe book, printed in 1958, all about the art of the canapé. I was delighted and I kissed them both gratefully.

‘You didn’t kiss me for my presents,’ observed Jude, and since I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not, I did kiss his cheek, though I had to stand on tiptoe to do it, which was a novelty — as was his very unusual, and extremely masculine, aftershave. Then, in the interests of fairness, I kissed Michael, too.

‘Thanks, Michael — I love my Sunbeams pen and notebook!’

‘Hey, what about me?’ asked Guy. ‘Where’s my kiss?’

‘You didn’t give me a present,’ I pointed out. Guy, who like Jude had already sent presents to the lodge, hadn’t felt the need to do anything further.

‘I didn’t give anyone a present,’ Becca said. ‘I never do. Just money to Jess, so she can get what she likes.’

‘You brought us two bottles of very fine sherry, m’dear,’ said Noël.

‘I thought you were going to give me a ring for Christmas, Guy,’ Coco said, with an accusing look. ‘I thought this Christmas was going to be really special!’

‘You thought wrong,’ he said flippantly. ‘But you might find one in your cracker at dinner.’

‘Oh yes, they’re very good crackers — we brought them,’ said Noël. ‘There’s no saying what you might find in them!’

‘Why don’t you open the rest of your presents, Coco?’ I said hastily.

My jars of sweets and chocolates had gone down well, though Coco was unexcited by her homemade bath scrub and Michael’s offering, dropping them onto the sofa next to her, half-unwrapped. But then she opened Jess’s gift and seemed, at last, to be genuinely pleased with the necklace of origami beads on knotted silk cord inside.