‘I don’t want to police you . . .’ Peter looked horrified.
‘It’s not about that. It’s about me saying to you that you will never, ever have a reason to doubt me again.’ Louise stretched out her hands across the table, her eyes brimming with tears. She knew this was her last chance; their marriage, their lives together would turn left or right after this moment. ‘I’ve been so stupid, but I’ve never been more sure of how much I love you, Peter. You are the man I want to grow old with. If I lose you, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. Please, can you try to forgive me?’
Peter pushed his chair back, and for a sickening moment, Louise thought he was about to storm out. He stared at her across the table, almost unrecognisable as the awkward but quirky man she’d known in the early days, and her heart flickered with a nearly forgotten desire for his long, rangy body. She never wanted to see him so distracted and angry again, but part of her thrilled at the newness of a side she hadn’t seen before.
Maybe she didn’t know him inside out. Maybe there was hidden terrain to explore over the next forty years.
‘You’re not the only one who’s been stupid,’ he said gruffly. ‘I didn’t realise you were struggling. I thought just because you’d got everything under control you didn’t need my help. I felt like I was in the way.’
‘How could you feel that?’ Louise nearly yelped. ‘The more stressed I am, the more organised I get! Haven’t you realised that? In all these years?’
‘I stopped looking,’ he said. ‘I stopped asking.’
He stood up, and Louise held her breath, terrified he was about to walk out. It sounded like an exit line.
But it wasn’t. Peter reached over to where she sat and pulled her to her feet, wrapping his arms around her so their faces were close.
‘I don’t want to lose you,’ he said with a fierceness that surprised her. ‘And I never want to see you beg like that again.’
Louise had no good line. She hadn’t dared plan that far. Instead she kissed him with a hunger that neither of them had felt since their very early days, and the good dinner burned to a crisp, unattended, in the oven.
Chapter 27
Juliet didn’t subscribe to the popular whinge that Christmas started earlier and earlier every year, because for her, Christmas generally began in September, when she and Kim made their first round of corporate mini Christmas cakes.
But this year, without the cake reminder, Christmas had ambushed her as far back as October. The requests for holiday pet-sitting started to come in thick and fast, but she turned them all down, bar Hector – Mrs Taylor was off on a cruise with Albert, her fancy man – and some feeding of Boris and Bianca for Mrs Cox. Mrs Cox was off on holiday too, to visit one set of grandchildren in Florida for Christmas, then on to another set in Tuscany for New Year.
‘That’s the joy of three husbands, my dear,’ she said, pressing ‘a little something’ into Juliet’s hand as a seasonal tip. ‘One lot of children of my own, then two sets of stepchildren make a nice clutch of grandchildren to take care of their old granny’s holiday requirements.’
‘Three!’ Juliet couldn’t stop herself. She’d noticed the plethora of family photos, but not three wedding ones.
‘All before I was sixty, too.’ Mrs Cox sighed and put her hand on her chest, her wedding-ring hand with the single diamond solitaire. ‘Bob died on active service when I was just twenty-seven, God bless him, then Lionel was in a car crash, and poor Walter had a blood clot. Life’s not one long poem, Juliet. It’s a book with a series of chapters. You’re sad for a while; then you turn the page and see what happens next.’
Juliet smiled and made a mental note to tell Louise. She’d never believe that nice, white-haired Mrs Cox was a thrice-married siren. How had she never asked about that? The things you learned when you looked after people’s pets.
She did wonder, as she was strolling back down the road with Minton, whether Mrs Cox had been offering her some gentle advice, but the idea of her old piano teacher advising her about love was slightly harder to get her head around than Mrs Cox’s wedding-ring collection.
Juliet spent whatever spare time she had in the afternoons listening to cheesy Christmas albums and making enormous pans of chocolate fudge, marshmallows and honeycomb. Now her baking magic was back, she couldn’t stop, and had got her jam thermometer out to tackle her Christmas-present list.
Her dad always asked for fudge at Christmas, and both sets of aunties loved Juliet’s shortbread, which she baked and packed in pretty tins. Louise pretended she didn’t eat refined sugar, but she could go through a pan of marshmallow in the course of
Mary Poppins
or two festive episodes
of
Coronation Street
. Juliet didn’t have a lot of money spare to spend on gifts, but she wanted to do something to make up for the gloom she’d cast over everyone’s day the previous year. This year, she thought, I can sweeten it up.
A Willy Wonka gift box solved the problem of what to give the Kellys for Christmas. They weren’t exactly a hard family to buy for – Roisin had made her need for a saxophone very clear for a while, and Spike wanted ‘a black-and-white pig’ – but Juliet wasn’t sure where their friendship had reached, in present terms. She also got the feeling that Emer’s modest house (chosen, she now knew, for its proximity to Alec’s parents, who had promptly moved to Dundee two months after the Kellys moved in) belied a sizeable income, if the constant deliveries from Net-à-Porter were anything to go by. On her current tight budget, she didn’t want to embarrass herself by handing over a Body Shop gift set only to unwrap a Mulberry handbag or similar.
The good thing about being a cook was knowing that generous jars of sweets always went down well, and it answered the other dilemma: what to give Lorcan. Juliet planned to make him an extra tin of biscuits, with different layers of the favourites he’d eaten over the last few weeks. She thought about putting a little note in saying, ‘Each “mmm” from you was a step on the road to kitchen recovery for me,’ but though it was true, she couldn’t find a way of putting it that didn’t make it sound horrendously cheesy.
She was whisking rosewater and lilac food colouring into her third batch of marshmallows, listening to
Now That’s What I Call Xmas
when there was a knock at the back door, and Roisin and Florrie trooped in, closely followed by Lorcan.
‘Are you cooking?’ asked Roisin, her eyes widening at the sight of Juliet’s pink K-Mix.
‘I am confecting. Florrie, please can you keep any livestock in your pockets,’ Juliet instructed. ‘This is a nuclear sugar area.’
‘We’ve just come to deliver this,’ said Lorcan. ‘We’re not stopping.’
He nudged Roisin, who swept an envelope out of her pocket and presented it to her with a deep bow.
‘What’s this?’ Juliet turned over the envelope and saw that it was from Florrie & Roisin Kelly, Laburnum Villa, the Grange, Rosehill, Near Longhampton, Worcestershire, the World, the Universe.
‘It’s a special invitation,’ said Florrie, solemnly.
‘To my debut,’ said Roisin, with a dramatic flourish. ‘I’m the angel!’
Lorcan rolled his eyes. ‘Remember what we talked about, Roisin. You’re
an
angel. Not
the
angel. And it’s bad form to sing louder than the Virgin Mary just because you can.’
‘Salvador’s in it too,’ said Florrie. ‘He’s playing his bass in the band.’
‘The baby Jesus has a rock band now? That’s very modern,’ said Juliet. ‘Are the Three Wise Men his backing group?’
‘It’s the school Christmas event,’ Lorcan explained as she opened the flap and pulled out the card. ‘Emer’s allowed two parent places, plus a grandparent place – obviously we’re a bit short on grannies next door, so she wondered if you’d like to come with us.’
‘You can hold the video camera,’ said Roisin graciously. ‘And be in the
entourage
.’
‘I’d be honoured!’ Juliet wanted to laugh, but she felt a lump in her throat as she read the painstakingly printed card, inviting ‘Dear Juliet and Minton’ to a ‘night of Christmas cheer at St Winifred’s School’. Roisin and Florrie had drawn angels in glitter, and, incongruously, giant plum puddings, plus a dog that looked like Minton with reindeer antlers.
‘I don’t think Minton can make it, though,’ she apologised to Florrie. ‘He has a very full social calendar this time of year.’
‘Say if you have too,’ Lorcan added. ‘It’s not compulsory.’
‘What do you think I’d be doing?’ she asked, amused by the idea that she’d be anywhere other than in her armchair.
‘I dunno. But I don’t want you to think
we
think you’re short of dates coming up to Christmas.’ Lorcan stumbled over his words, trying to sound casual. ‘You might want to be out at parties, not hanging around schools with these attention-seeking eejits. And me.’
‘Lorcan, I’d only be hanging out with you anyway – here, with a paintbrush and the skirting boards. I might as well be at the school, listening to DJ Jesus and his angelz.’ Juliet pulled an excited face at the girls, who were waiting for her reaction. ‘It’s years since I’ve been to a nativity play. I can’t wait. It’s going to be
mega
!’ she added, in a bad impersonation of Roisin.
‘I don’t sound like that,’ howled Roisin, delighted.
Lorcan stopped fidgeting with his tape measure and grinned up at her from under his dark lashes. He had quite a shy private smile, not the broad confident one he flashed in public, and Juliet felt a flipping sensation in her chest that reminded her so clearly of being at school that she could almost feel the braces on her teeth.
Immediately, she felt herself pull back as if she’d touched the sugar pan. Hadn’t she learned her lesson with Michael? It was too soon. And now she knew it wasn’t just her with issues to get over, there was even more reason to keep their friendship as it was – a lovely, supportive warmth in her life.
Paint fumes, she told herself. It was paint fumes and the holly-and-mistletoe effect of winter messing with her head.
‘Well, prepare to be blown away,’ he said. ‘Emer’s done the costumes. And she’s had Alec send all the spare material from Spiderweb’s last tours so they’re not short of spangles in Bethlehem this year. Oh, no. The shepherds just have to follow the crackle of Lurex to the stable. I just hope they don’t have candles.’
‘I have a light-up halo,’ said Roisin proudly. ‘Although Mrs Barker doesn’t know that yet!’
At four o’clock on the day of the nativity play, it started to snow.
It snowed so thickly that Juliet had to wonder if Alec had hired some stage-effects company to arrange it for the kids as part of their Christmas present. She’d got back from walking Damson in the park, where the bandstand was festooned with coloured lights just beginning to glow in the dark, when the first flakes began to flurry around in the air, settling first on car roofs and postboxes, and the edges of the kerbs, quickly turning the pavements dusty white, then more dense white and, within an hour, a matte blanket of crunchy softness over the whole street.
Lorcan knocked for her at six, while she was still deciding what to wear.
‘You’re not meant to be here for another half-hour!’ she yelled down the stairs as he let himself in with a ‘Hello?’
‘I had to come. Emer’s driving me mad, trying to decide what to wear. I mean, how hard it is to get dressed for a nativity play in a blizzard? You just wear everything you’ve got, right?’
Juliet thought it was quite endearing how little Lorcan understood about women, despite living surrounded by them.
She took a final look at her reflection and decided that she’d better go in the outfit she’d got on: a denim skirt, thick tights and a soft green cashmere jumper Louise had given her, for no apparent reason. She thought it might have been a man’s jumper by the way it fell off her shoulder, and it made her feel both small and warm, which was no mean feat.
It was nice to have her generous sister back, she thought. The big sister who’d tell you what suited you, and then buy it for you too.
‘Pleeeease, are you ready to go?’ Lorcan yelled up the stairs. ‘We’ve got a car coming in ten minutes. Emer wants the kids to arrive in style.’
‘Ooh, a limo?’ Juliet ran down the stairs. ‘Rock ’n’ roll!’
‘We’ll be arriving on a snow plough if she doesn’t get a move on. Oh!’ Lorcan turned round from inspecting the last coat of paint on the radiator and did a double-take. ‘You look nice.’
‘In this?’ Juliet wasn’t expecting compliments, not in that outfit, but she took them happily. ‘Thanks.’
She grinned; Lorcan grinned.
Juliet felt her face redden, and wondered if he was getting a bit of the old butterflies too. He was certainly looking at her in an appreciative way. He didn’t look so bad himself, in a beaten-up leather jacket with a hoody underneath.
Then Minton and Hector bustled up for a fuss and the moment was broken.
‘I was going to take them to my mum’s tonight, but I guess they’ll be fine here,’ she said, pulling on her snow boots. ‘Minton’s not a chewer, and I’ve got everything out of Hector’s reach.’ She gave the dachshund the beady eye. ‘I hope.’
‘We thought we’d head out for a pizza afterwards,’ said Lorcan. ‘Are you up for that?’
‘Yes, please,’ said Juliet. ‘Lead on!’
It was strange how a night out at the primary school with next door was giving her more butterflies than an actual date.
The car that arrived to take the Kellys to the school wasn’t the standard-issue Longhampton taxi. It was a huge black limo, with blacked-out windows, snow chains and a driver in shades.
Emer was also in shades, and the most outrageously rock-chick outfit Juliet had ever seen her in. She teetered confidently out of the house in high-heeled Vivienne Westwood boots, a tight bandage dress, lots of scarves and a full-length shearling coat that swept around the snow like something from Narnia.
Juliet’s warm glow dimmed somewhat. She stared mortified at her worn snow boots, until Emer leaned across the seat and said, in a nervous undertone Juliet hadn’t heard before, ‘Do I look OK?’
‘You? You look amazing,’ said Juliet. ‘If I didn’t already know you, I’d want to make friends with you at once.’