The Twelve Dates of Christmas Read online

  The robin took off suddenly, splatting droppings on the concrete slab around the bench. Kate looked at it and nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “My sentiments exactly.”

  The bird landed on the holly tree near the entrance to Potters Copse. Its red breast glowed against the dark spiky leaves. Kate slipped her phone out of her pocket and took a photo of it. Her brain whirred into action: stiff cotton, the voluptuous curve of a feather-down chest, the bottle-green leaves arching outward, taut and shiny, needle sharp. Kate’s fingers twitched for the feeling of her paintbrush between them.

  At eighteen, Kate had been so desperate to escape the quiet village that she’d forgotten how beautiful the changing seasons of the countryside were. When she moved back—travel savvy and city hardened—she found fresh inspiration in everything around her, and her fabric designs reflected a new style and confidence that delighted her managers and earned her a promotion.

  Slowly her father recovered, and when he was well enough he rented a smaller cottage by the green. He wanted a fresh start and Kate needed a place to live, so she took over the mortgage on the old family home and they both rubbed along quite happily.

  The line of cars wending their way through the village had dwindled. Most people would have taken the faster A-roads to the manor, rather than the bumpy Blexford road, with grass growing along its middle like a Mohawk haircut.

  Kate checked her watch. It was ten to four. She’d been waiting for twenty minutes. They’d have to get a stride on if they were going to make it to the manor for four p.m. afternoon tea. Her stomach growled. Lightning Strikes didn’t display their clients’ phone numbers on their profiles, so Kate couldn’t even call Richard to see if he was lost. She thought about the roaring fires in the gigantic stone fireplaces at the manor and shivered, tucking her hands under the blanket.

  Blexford Manor was built in the seventeenth century, and Blexford Village had grown up around it. The estate had been passed down through the Blexford family and once upon a time was the chief employer in the area.

  As with most stately homes of that ilk, social and economic changes brought about by the world wars led to a scaling down of both staff and finances. The big high-society parties dwindled, and the balls that had once been the talk of the county became a mere memory.

  By the mid-1970s the manor could no longer survive on revenue brought in solely from its farmland, and it was decided that Blexford Manor would be opened to the public. These days Lord and Lady Blexford lived mostly in the east wing of the manor and shared their home with tourists and wedding parties, and, for the next month, groups of hopeful singles on a quest to find love.

  The light was already beginning to fade. The sky toned down as though on a dimmer switch, from brilliant blue to washed-out denim to cold gray. Windows festooned with Christmas lights flickered into life as the sky darkened and parents and children returned home from the school run. The branches of the old fir creaked as the wind began to pick up. Kate pulled the blanket tighter around her and wished she’d worn an extra pair of socks inside her boots.

  A hand rested gently on her shoulder and she jumped, turning expectantly. It was only Matt. He held out a lidded paper cup.

  “Hot chocolate,” he said. “You must be freezing.”

  “Thanks,” said Kate. “I am. I think I’ve been stood up.”

  “Maybe he got lost? Or had a medical emergency?”

  “Or maybe he just didn’t like the look of me,” Kate said flatly.

  “Well, then he must be blind,” said Matt. “Or an idiot. Or both.”

  Kate smiled sadly. She clasped her hands around the cup to warm them.

  “Why don’t you come inside?” Matt suggested. “There’s this woman that supplies me with great caramel brownies. You can have one. On the house.”

  “I’ll just give him ten more minutes,” said Kate.

  “You’re not going to go all Miss Haversham on me, are you?” Matt wrapped his arms around himself against the cold. He’d come out without a coat, and his flannel plaid shirt wasn’t doing much to keep the chill out. The blond hairs on his freckly arms stood to attention.

  Kate laughed. “Not just yet,” she said. “But if all twelve stand me up, I might start to get a complex.”

  Carla called across the green. “Matt! Phone for you, something about duck eggs!”

  “Coming!” shouted Matt. “I’d better go. Don’t be out here too long. I don’t want to have to chip you off the bench in the morning.”

  Kate promised. “Thanks for the hot chocolate!” she called after him. He waved but didn’t turn back.

  Matt had inherited the Pear Tree from his mother. For twenty years she ran it as a bakery and tea rooms until she was killed one night, along with Matt’s older sister, Corinna, in a car accident on their way back from the wholesalers. Matt was just seventeen.

  Mac had helped with a lot of the practicalities when Matt’s mum and Corinna were killed. He ferried Matt back and forth to the funeral directors, and he and Evelyn, who’d been Matt’s mum’s best friend, took on the lion’s share of dealing with solicitors and banks. Kate recalled her mum being annoyed at the amount of time Mac and Evelyn were spending together.

  Their deaths changed Matt. How could they not? There was overwhelming grief and behind that, an anger that seemed to bubble beneath his skin. And behind that, silently festering, a kind of insolence, a sense that he was owed happiness, that life owed him. At least that was how it had felt to Kate at the time. It was to be a death knell to their friendship; there is only a hairsbreadth between adoration and animosity and when the gap closes, it is rarely pretty.

  Evelyn took Matt under her wing and into her home. She guarded his interests—business, pastoral, and educational—like a lioness. Evelyn ensured that his family home was taken care of, until such time as he was ready to live there again. And she rented the bakery to an older couple, the Harrisons, who ran it until they retired.

  By that time Matt was working in Manchester for a large accountancy firm with even larger prospects—he took the financial reins back from Evelyn and rented the shop out to another family. Unfortunately, they ran the business into the ground and left one night, having stripped the shop of anything of worth and leaving a string of debts behind them.

  Matt didn’t come back to Blexford to rescue the business—he was too busy with his whirlwind bride and high-flying career—nor did he try to rent it out again. Instead, he paid the debtors, closed the place up, and left it. A shell, or a shrine. The Pear Tree Bakery was a forgotten story, like an old book that would never be read again but equally couldn’t be parted with.

  Kate’s mother—who even then, it seemed, had a keen interest in real estate—had tried to get Evelyn to encourage Matt to sell the building and recoup some of his losses. Evelyn, however, felt quite certain, despite all indications to the contrary, that Matt would find his way back to Blexford one day.

  The Pear Tree lay empty for a few years. The windows were boarded up, the garden became a wilderness, and what little remained inside the shop was left to fall into ruin.

  Kate would sneak over the back wall sometimes when she came to Blexford to visit her parents. She’d wade through the long grass and peep in through gaps in the shuttered windows.

  Kate had wanted to capture some spark of the happiness she’d felt in that place, her childhood playground. As if memories were tangible things that could be plucked like dandelion clocks to turn back time. But she could never quite reach them.

  After his divorce, Matt returned to Blexford and his family home—just as Evelyn had predicted: it turned out he wasn’t the city slicker he’d imagined himself to be—and spent the next year completely renovating the Pear Tree and finally reopening it as the Pear Tree Café.

  He’d asked Mac to help him with the renovations, and Mac was only too pleased to help. Despite Kate and Matt’s fall
ing-out, her dad had always had a soft spot for Matt. And Kate was far enough away for it not to bother her too much; she was busy forging her career in London and her relationship with Dan, and she rarely came back to Blexford.

  When Kate came back to nurse her father, the Pear Tree Café was a thriving business, firmly rooted in the hearts of Blexford’s residents.

  Matt rented out the newly refurbished kitchen to Carla and her mother to use in the evenings for their ready-meal business and offered discounts on drinks to book clubs and committee meetings. In such a small, close-knit community, the café had become a hub around which the village revolved.

  Kate used to avoid the café like a turd sandwich. She’d drive down into Great Blexley when she needed a coffee fix and cross roads or dive into bushes if she saw Matt coming her way. Kate spent a lot of time hiding in bushes those first few months. A small fortune spent on a swanky coffee machine for her house fixed the caffeine cravings; finding ways to avoid Matt in such a small village was not such an easy problem to solve.

  * * *

  • • • • •

  Kate shivered. Another ten minutes had passed and the daylight had all but gone. Ice crystals glistened on car roofs and the stars were already diamond points in the sky. There were no clouds. It was going to get very cold.

  Her phone blipped:

  Where are you?

  It was a text from Laura.

  With numb fingers, Kate texted back:

  Been stood up! Am sitting on the bench on the green, freezing my tits off. Think my bum has frozen to the wood. May need to be surgically removed.

  Laura replied immediately:

  What a dick! He doesn’t know what he’s missing. Would you like me to hire a hit man?

  Kate chuckled to herself and sighed.

  Richard wasn’t coming. Brilliant, she thought. I can’t even get a date when I pay for one. Kate was disappointed but not, she decided, as disappointed as she was to have missed out on the tiny patisserie cakes that would have been served at the afternoon tea; she texted Laura to ask for a doggy bag.

  Come up here and get it! Laura texted. You never know, you might cop off with someone else’s date, hee hee

  Can’t, Kate texted back. Too cold. Frostbite setting in. Need care package containing many many small cakes to aid recovery.

  Roger that! xxx, texted Laura.

  Kate stood up mechanically, her feet and hands stiff with cold; she couldn’t feel her toes at all. She folded the blanket and laid it on top of the wood basket outside the café door, where Matt would find it. She wasn’t really in the mood to be gloated at, even if it was meant lightheartedly. She kept hold of the cup to recycle back at home and started walking.

  Someone in the Duke’s Head was playing the old beat-up piano. The tinkling melody wafted around the square and mixed with the wind chimes outside Evelyn’s shop; it reminded Kate of Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” The grass was turning silver under the glimmer of the streetlamps. Blackbirds chattered as they settled down to roost in the holly bushes that ran along the farthest end of the village square by Potters Copse.

  The heat would be on and Kate determined to get the wood burner going in the kitchen and light the fire in the lounge as well. She warmed herself with these thoughts as she hurried home.

  She had one of Carla’s lasagnas in the fridge, half a bottle of good red wine by the stove, and a healthy stash of chocolate in a tin above the coffee machine. She smiled to herself, her cold breath clouding out before her; she didn’t get the guy but she had a veritable feast and the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice waiting for her at home. And it didn’t get much better than that.

  * * *

  • • • • •

  Kate shivered as the warm air washed over her. She pushed her front door closed behind her and shut out the frozen evening. The answering machine on the hall table blinked a red number 3 at her. Kate pressed play and went to get the fire going in the lounge. A loud disembodied voice boomed out from the machine.

  “Hello? Hello? Katy-Boo, are you there?”

  It was Kate’s mum. The message clicked off and another began.

  “Katy-Boo, it’s Mum. I picked up the parcels at the weekend. Nothing for Gerry, I noticed. I do wish you’d try to make an effort, darling.”

  Kate frowned as she scrunched newspaper up and tucked it underneath the kindling. Make an effort! She snorted to herself, striking a match and dropping it into the paper nest. He’s lucky I wrote his name in the card.

  Gerry wasn’t so bad, Kate supposed. He always made an effort when they visited—which wasn’t very often. They had a studio flat in Chiswick, where they would hold court when in England—and Kate was always perfectly amiable toward him. But she wasn’t quite ready to buy him Christmas gifts yet.

  She’d sent a Christmas package to her mother three weeks ago to make sure it reached her in time. In it she had wrapped the latest release by her mum’s favorite author, some perfumed body lotion from Elizabeth Arden that her mum had been dropping hints about since October, and a pair of slouchy knitted bed socks and matching scarf—she’d commissioned Petula to knit them for her—in purple and mint-green stripes. Even Spain got chilly in December, she had reasoned. And at the last moment, she’d bought a voucher for a slap-up meal for two in one of the restaurants on the marina, as a nod in Gerry’s direction.

  The little flames began to catch, spitting and popping as they grew in confidence. The machine beeped the end of the message and another one began.

  “Kate Amelia Turner, call me! I have news! You’ll never guess it! Call me on my mobile.”

  Kate sighed. She hoped her mother hadn’t gotten herself into anything stupid; she had a habit of jumping in with both feet before seeing how deep the water was. Kate pressed her finger to her mum’s phone number. Her mum answered after three rings.

  “Katy-BooBoo, my darling!” Her mum’s voice rang out from the speaker, shrill and excitable; she had a kind of frenetic energy, like a wild pony.

  Kate had often wondered how her parents ever came to be married. Her mum was gregarious. She liked parties and bubbly and had two volumes: loud and louder. By contrast, her dad—Mac, short for Mackenzie, which he hated—was reserved. He liked Sudoku and tea and avoided parties like the plague.

  “How are you, my sweet, sweet girl?” her mum cooed.

  “I’m fine, Mum,” said Kate. “How are you?”

  Her mum laughed loudly. She had the laugh of a 1920s heiress hosting a soiree; it was raucous yet extraordinarily posh.

  “Darling, you won’t believe where I am!” said her mum.

  “Not Spain?” said Kate.

  It occurred to her that they might have come back to England for Christmas. That would make life awkward. Thus far Kate had always been spared the uncomfortable picking a parent to spend Christmas with issue.

  “Not even close!” said her mum. “We’re in Barbados!” Her voice had risen to a screech.

  Kate moved the phone away from her ear.

  “Can you believe it?” her mum went on. “Barbados for Christmas!”

  Kate could believe it. She felt a prickle of guilt at the relief she felt.

  “How did that come about?” Kate asked.

  “Well,” said her mum. “I sold a yacht for a gentleman last week and he said he had another one he’s been thinking of selling, moored out in Barbados. Anyway, he showed me some photographs and I said Barbados was a bit out of our remit. And before I knew what was happening, he’d spoken to Serge—you remember Serge, don’t you, darling? My boss? Took a shine to you when you came over last year. You could do a lot worse than Serge, Katy-Boo, age is just a number, you know, and men can go on producing viable sperm until the day they die . . .”

  “Mum!” said Kate.

  “Hmm? Where was I?” asked her mum.

  “Th
e boatman had spoken to Serge,” Kate prompted.

  “Oh, yes,” said her mum. “So he spoke to Serge and I was personally commissioned to come out here and value it. We’re staying on it to get a feel for it!”

  “Wow,” said Kate. “That’s amazing. I bet Gerry was pleased.”

  “He’s over the moon, darling. A free holiday! He hasn’t worn trousers since we landed.”

  This was more information than Kate needed. She winced as a vision of Gerry in Speedos flashed before her eyes.

  Gerry was in his midsixties, tall with terra-cotta skin and thick gray hair, immaculately styled like Barbie’s plastic boyfriend, Ken. In Gerry it seemed her mother had finally met her match. He was dynamic, he always had a deal on the table, and he’d always spent the commission before it hit the bank.

  Her mum’s affairs had always been with men of Gerry’s ilk, but for one reason or another his predecessors had always come up short; the bubbly was cheap and the fast cars were rentals. Her mum wasn’t stupid; she wasn’t going to throw in all her chips for someone who, beyond the dinner jacket, could only offer her the same life she already had with Mac. As soon as they invited her back to their three-bedroom duplex in Deptford, her ardor chilled quicker than the fake champagne on ice.

  An outsider might assume that her parents’ marriage had been unhappy, but in truth, it wasn’t; unconventional, certainly, but not altogether unhappy.

  Her dad knew about her mum’s dalliances—not the details, of course, it was all very discreet—but somehow he lived with them on the understanding that she would always come home to him at the end of the night.

  And her mum had needed Mac like a compass, or a buoy, to stop her from drifting into danger. His gravitational pull kept her centered and she was always happy to return to the safety of his orbit after a wandering. It was a state of denial that had suited them both, until Gerry cruised into their lives.

  “The nights are so balmy, we’ve been sleeping on the balcony, completely naked!” said her mum. “There’s a salon in the bay and a sweet girl gave me a Brazilian wax. Have you tried it, darling? It’s so much cooler down there!”