My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories (5 page)

“Like the fox,” he says.

“Like your fox,” Miranda says. She’s horrified to find that her eyes are watering. Is she crying? It isn’t even a real fox. She doesn’t want to look at the man in the coat,
Fenny,
to see if he’s noticed, so she jumps down off the wall and begins to walk back toward the house.

When she’s halfway to the Hall, the drifting snow stops. She looks back; no one sits on the wall.

*   *   *

The snow stops and starts, on and off all day long. When dinner is finished, Honeywells groaning, clutching their bellies, Elspeth has something for Miranda.

Elspeth says, wagging the present between two fingers like it’s a special treat, Miranda some stray puppy, “Someone left it on the doorstep for you, Miranda. I wonder who.”

The wrapping is a sheet of plain white stationery, tied with a bit of green thread. Her name in a scratchy hand.
Miranda.
Inside is a scrap of rose damask, the embroidered fox, snarling; the mangled leg, the bloodied trap.

“Let me see, sweet,” Elspeth says, and takes the rose damask from her. “What a strange present! A joke?”

“I don’t know,” Miranda says. “Maybe.”

It’s eight o’clock. Honeywell Hall, up on its hill, must shine like a torch. Miranda puts on her coat and walks around the house three times. The snow has all melted. Daniel intercepts her on the final circuit. He’s pimply, knobbly at present, and his nose is too big for his face. She loves him dearly, just like she loves Elspeth. They are always kind to her. “Here,” he says, handing her the bit of damask. “Secret Santa? Secret admirer? Secret code?”

“Oh, you know,” Miranda says. “Long story. Saving it for my memoirs.”

“Meanwhile back in there everyone’s pretending it’s 1970 and they’re all sweet sixteen again. Playing Sardines and drinking. It’ll be orgies in all the cupboards, dramatic confessions and attempted murders in the pantry, under the stairs, in the beds and under them all night long. So I took this and snuck out.” Daniel shows her the bottle of Strongbow in his coat pocket. “Let’s go and sit in the Tiger. You can tell me all about school and the agony aunt, I’ll tell you which Tory MP Elspeth’s been seeing on the sly. Then you can sell the story to
The Sun
.”

“And use the proceeds to buy us a cold-water flat in Wolverhampton. We’ll live the life,” Miranda says.

They drink the cider and eat a half-melted Mars bar. They talk and Miranda wonders if Daniel will try to kiss her. If she should try to kiss Daniel. But he doesn’t, she doesn’t—they don’t—and she falls asleep on the mouse-eaten upholstery of the preposterous carcass of the Sunbeam Tiger, her head on Daniel’s shoulder, the trapped fox crumpled in her fist.

*   *   *

Christmas after, Elspeth is in all the papers. The Tory MP’s husband is divorcing her. Elspeth is a correspondent in the divorce. Meanwhile she has a new thing with a footballer twenty years her junior. It’s the best kind of Christmas story. Journalists everywhere. Elspeth, in the Sunbeam Tiger, picks up Miranda at the station in a wide-brimmed black hat, black jumpsuit, black sunglasses, triumphantly disgraced. In her element.

Miranda’s aunt almost didn’t let her come this year. But then, if Miranda had stayed, they would have both been miserable. Her aunt has a new boyfriend. Almost as awful as she is. Someone should tell the tabloids.

“Lovely dress,” Elspeth says, kissing her on the cheek. “You make it?”

Miranda is particularly pleased with the hem. “It’s all right.”

“I want one just like it,” Elspeth says. “In red. Lower the neckline, raise the hem a bit. You could go into business. Ever think of it?”

“I’m only sixteen,” Miranda says. “There’s plenty of room for improvement.”

“Alexander McQueen! Left school when he was sixteen,” Elspeth says. “Went off to apprentice on Savile Row. Used to sew human hair into his linings. A kind of spell, I suppose. I have one of his manta dresses somewhere in the Hall. And your mother, she was barely older than you are now. Hanging around backstage, stitching sequins and crystals on tulle.”

“Where’s Daniel?” Miranda says. She and her mother have been corresponding. Miranda is saving up money. She hasn’t told her aunt yet, but next summer Miranda’s going to Thailand.

“Back at the house. In a mood. Listening to my old records. The Smiths.”

Miranda looks over, studies Elspeth’s face. “That girl broke up with him, didn’t she?”

“If you mean the one with the ferrets and the unfortunate ankles,” Elspeth says, “yes. What’s her name. It’s a mystery. Not her name, the breakup. He grows three inches in two months, his skin clears up, honestly, Miranda, he’s even better looking than I expected he’d turn out. Heart of gold, that boy, a good brain, too. I can’t think what she was thinking.”

“Preemptive strike, perhaps,” Miranda says.

“I wouldn’t know about the breakup except for accidentally overhearing a conversation.
Somewhat
accidentally,” Elspeth says. “Well, that and the Smiths. He doesn’t talk to me about his love life.”

“Do you
want
him to talk to you about his love life?”

“No,” Elspeth says. “Yes. Maybe? Probably not. Anyway, how about you, Miranda? Do you have one of those, yet? A love life?”

“I don’t even have ferrets,” Miranda says.

*   *   *

On Christmas Eve, while all the visiting Honeywells and cousins and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends and their accountants are out caroling in the village, Elspeth takes Miranda and Daniel aside. She gives them each a joint.

“It’s not as if I don’t know you’ve been raiding my supply,
Daniel,
” Elspeth says. “At least this way, I know what you’re up to. If you’re going to break the law, you might as well learn to break it responsibly. Under adult supervision.”

Daniel rolls his eyes, looks at Miranda. Whatever he sees in her face makes him snort. It’s annoying but true: he really has become quite spectacular looking. Well, it was inevitable. Apparently they drown all the ugly Honeywells at birth.

“It’s okay, Mi
randy,
” he says. “I’ll have yours if you don’t want it.”

Miranda sticks the joint in her bra. “Thanks, but I’ll hang on to it.”

“Anyway I’m sure the two of you have lots of catching up to do,” Elspeth says. “I’m off to the pub to kiss the barmaids and make the journos cry.”

When she’s out the door, Daniel says, “She’s matchmaking, isn’t she?”

Miranda says, “Or else it’s reverse psychology?”

Their eyes meet.
Courage, Miranda.
Daniel tilts his head, looks gleeful.

“In which case, I should do this,” he says. He leans forward, puts his hand on Miranda’s chin, tilts it up. “We should do this.”

He kisses her. His lips are soft and dry. Miranda sucks on the bottom one experimentally. She arranges her arms around his neck, and his hands go down, cup her bum. He opens his mouth and does things with his tongue until she opens her mouth, too. He seems to know how this goes; he and the girl with the ferrets probably did this a lot.

Miranda wonders if the ferrets were in the cage at the time, or out. How unsettling is it, she wonders, to fool around with ferrets watching you? Their beady button eyes.

She can feel Daniel’s erection. Oh, God. How embarrassing. She pushes him away. “Sorry,” she groans. “Sorry! Yeah, no, I don’t think we should be doing this. Any of this!”

“Probably not,” Daniel says. “Probably definitely not. It’s weird, right?”

“It’s weird,” Miranda says.

“But perhaps it wouldn’t be so weird if we smoked a joint first,” Daniel says. His hair is messy. Apparently she did that.

“Or,” Miranda says, “maybe we could just smoke a joint. And, you know, not complicate things.”

Halfway through the joint, Daniel says, “It wouldn’t have to complicate everything.” His head is in her lap. She’s curling pieces of his hair around her finger.

“Yes, it would,” Miranda says. “It
really, really
would.”

Later on she says, “I wish it would snow. That would be nice. If it snowed. I thought that’s why you lot came here at Christmas. The whole white Christmas thing.”

“Awful stuff,” Daniel says. “Cold. Slippy. Makes you feel like you’re supposed to be singing or something. In a movie.”

“Or in a snow globe.”

“Stuck,” Miranda says. “Trapped.”

“Stuck,” Daniel says.

They’re lying, tangled together, on a sofa across from the Christmas tree. Occasionally Miranda has to remove Daniel’s hand from somewhere it shouldn’t be. She doesn’t think he’s doing it intentionally. She kisses him behind the ear now and then. “That’s nice,” he says. Pats her bum. She wriggles out from under his hand. Kisses him again. There’s a movie on television, lots of explosions. Zombies. Cameron Diaz unloading groceries in a cottage, all by herself.

No, that’s another movie entirely, Miranda thinks. Apparently she’s been asleep. Daniel is still sleeping. Why does he have to be so irritatingly good-looking, even in his sleep? Miranda hates to think what she looks like asleep. No wonder the ferret girl dumped him.

Elspeth must have come back from the pub, because there’s a heap of blankets over the both of them.

Outside, it’s snowing.

Miranda puts her hand in the pocket of her dress, feels the piece of damask she has had there all day long. It’s a big pocket. Plenty of room for all kinds of things. Miranda doesn’t want to be one of those designers who only makes pretty things. She wants them to be useful, too. And provoking. She takes the prettiest blanket from the sofa for herself, distributes the other blankets over Daniel so that all of him is covered.

She goes by a mirror, stops to smooth her hair down, collect it into a ponytail. Wraps the blanket around herself like a shawl, goes out into the snow.

He’s there, under the hawthorn tree. She shivers, tells herself it’s because of the cold. There isn’t much snow on the ground yet. She tells herself she hasn’t been asleep too long. He hasn’t been waiting long.

He wears the same coat. His face is the same. He isn’t as old as she thought he was, that first time. Only a few years older than she. Than Daniel. He hasn’t aged. She has. Where is he, when he isn’t here?

“Are you a ghost?” she says.

“No,” he says. “I’m not a ghost.”

“Then you’re a real person? A Honeywell?”

“Fenwick Septimus Honeywell.” He bows. It looks better than it should, probably because of the coat. People don’t really do that sort of thing anymore. No one has names like that. How old is he?

“You only come when it snows,” she says.

“I am only allowed to come when it’s snowing,” he says. “And only on Christmas Day.”

“Right,” she says. “Okay, no. No, I don’t understand. Allowed by whom?”

He shrugs. Doesn’t answer. Maybe it isn’t allowed.

“You gave me something,” Miranda says.

He nods again. She puts out her hand, touches the place on the
justacorps
where he tore away the fox. So he could give it to her.

“Oh,” Miranda said. “The poor old thing. You didn’t even use scissors, did you? Let me fix it.”

She takes the piece of damask out of her pocket, along with her sewing kit, the one she always keeps with her. She’s had exactly the right thread in there for over a year. Just in case.

She shows him the damask. A few months ago she unpicked all of the fox’s leg, all of the trap. The drops of blood. The tail and snarling head. Then she reworked the embroidery to her own design, mimicking as closely as possible the feel of the original. Now the fox is free, tongue lolling, tail aloft, running along the pink plane of the damask. Pink cotton backing, a piece she cut from an old nightgown.

He takes it from her, turns it over in his hand. “You did this?”

“You gave me a present last year. This is my present for you,” she says. “I’ll sew it back in. It will be a little untidy, but at least you won’t have a hole in your lovely coat.”

He says, “I told her I tore it on a branch. It’s fine just as it is.”

“It isn’t fine,” she says. “Let me fix it, please.”

He smiles. It’s a real smile, maybe even a flirtatious smile. He and Daniel could be brothers. They’re that much alike. So why did she stop Daniel from kissing her? Why does she have to bite her tongue, sometimes, when Daniel is being kind to her? At Honeywell Hall, she is only as real as Elspeth and Daniel allow her to be. This isn’t her real life.

It’s ridiculous, of course. Real is real. Daniel is real. Miranda is real when she isn’t here. Whatever Fenwick Septimus Honeywell is, Miranda’s fairly sure it’s complicated.

“
Please
,” she says.

“As you wish it, Miranda,” Fenny says. She helps him out of the coat. Her hand touches his, and she pushes down the inexplicable desire to clutch at it. As if one of them were falling.

“Come inside the Hall,” she says. “Just while I’m working on this. I should do it inside. Better light. You could meet Daniel. Or Elspeth. I could wake her up. I bet Elspeth knows how to deal with this sort of thing.” Whatever this sort of thing is. “Theater people seem like they know how to deal with things like this. Come inside with me.”

“I can’t,” he says regretfully.

Of course. It’s against the rules.

“Okay,” Miranda says, adjusting. “Then we’ll both stay out here. I’ll stay with you. You can tell me all about yourself. Unless that’s against the rules too.” She busies herself with pins. He lifts her hand away, holds it.

“Inside out, if you please,” he says. “The fox on the inside.”

He has lovely hands. No calluses on his fingertips. Manicured nails. Definitely not real. His thumb smooths over her knuckles. Miranda says, a little breathless, “Inside out. So she won’t notice someone’s repaired it?” Whoever
she
is.

“She’ll notice,” he says. “But this way she won’t see that the fox is free.”

“Okay. That’s sensible. I guess.” Miranda lets go of his hand. “Here. We can sit on this.”

She spreads out the blanket. Sits down. Remembers she has a Mars bar in her pocket. She passes that to him. “Sit.”

He examines the Mars bar. Unwraps it.