Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

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:

Happy Christmas, Holly! I know what you’re like once you’ve made your mind up so, since I’m calling it a day after number four, I’m handing this on. But I can’t help hoping that you might just be snowed up with a nice man — that George sounded as if he had possibilities — and change your mind about going it alone!

Love, Laura

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.

‘Yours was my first experiment, Horlicks, and it’s a bit wonky so I thought you might as well have it,’ Jess said. ‘I just had time to make one for Holly, or she would have got it instead.’

Becca, Tilda and I had lovely necklaces, too.

‘They’re all gorgeous,’ I said admiringly. ‘You are clever, it must be very fiddly making the little paper beads.’

‘It is, a bit, but I’m really good at it now,’ she said modestly. ‘I get orders for them at school, I’ve got quite a good thing going. I’m going to branch out into earrings, too.’

‘And mine is dark red, just like my dress — how amazing a coincidence is that?’ I said, putting it round my neck and squinting down at it.

‘It’s not: I looked in your wardrobe and there was only one dress in there, so I made it to match.’

‘Jess, you really shouldn’t snoop in people’s bedrooms, we’ve told you before,’ Becca said severely.

‘I didn’t, I just looked. There was a pile of notebooks on the chest of drawers and I accidentally knocked them off. .’ she added innocently, looking at me through her thick black fringe. ‘One fell open and it looked like a sort of diary?’

‘Yes it is, but not mine, just a journal my gran kept, a very interesting one about nursing during the war. I found it in a box of her papers I’m sorting out.’

Jess lost interest immediately and changed tack. ‘Uncle Jude, Holly looks pretty in dark red, doesn’t she?’

‘Holly looks lovely in everything,’ Guy said, with one of his charming smiles, ‘Anyone with her looks who can also cook deserves my total adoration.’

‘Oh, don’t be so daft,’ I said uncomfortably, unused to this sort of teasing, though I noticed that Jude hadn’t said anything one way or the other this time, even out of politeness — in fact, he seemed to be back to the suspicious stare again. ‘I know I’m nothing to write home about.’

‘Get on with you, m’dear!’ said Noël gallantly.

‘Has anyone ever told you you look like that head of Nefertiti?’ asked Guy with an air of originality.

‘Yes — my best friend’s cousin Sam did, though I couldn’t see it myself.’

‘Who’s Nefertiti?’ asked Jess.

‘An ancient queen of Egypt, noted for her beauty,’ Noël said. ‘There’s a photo in one of the books in the library, I will fetch it later and show you. And speaking of photographs. .’

He whipped out a little camera and his family all groaned in a resigned sort of way.

‘Another Martland Christmas must be recorded for posterity!’

Noël insisted on taking several pictures for the family album although, as Michael pointed out, some of those present were not actually family.

‘But all friends,’ he said merrily. I’d already noticed that he, Tilda and Becca could put away a tidy amount of sherry between them, but Christmas Day seemed to have given them licence to start on it right after breakfast.

‘I was in last year’s photographs,’ Coco said sulkily, ‘and look where it got me!’

‘That was because you dumped Jude and went off with Guy instead,’ Tilda said acidly. ‘So if you have in turn been dumped by Guy, it serves you right.’

‘Yes. . well, that’s all water under the bridge now, m’dear, isn’t it?’ Noël said hastily and then marshalled us all into various groupings, whether we liked it or not. Coco automatically fell into languid model poses at the click of a camera. She was wearing a tunic like a gold satin flour bag over mustard leggings and clumpy shoe-boots, but it looked quite good on her.

‘There, that will do until we can get one with Old Nan and Richard in, too,’ Noël said finally. Then he smiled at me and added, ‘Now you will be in the family albums for posterity, too!’

‘Did she want to be?’ asked Jude, eyeing me narrowly again.

‘We’ve been looking at the old albums, especially the pictures of past Revels,’ Noël explained. ‘And very fascinated you were too, m’dear, weren’t you?’

‘Totally,’ I said, seizing the moment to try and find out a little more, ‘especially in that lovely one of you with your brothers and Becca at the Revels, taken just before the war.’

Becca said sadly, ‘Oh, yes, that was the last one when we were all together. Jacob was killed at Dunkirk and Ned died in that accident not long after the war. . and now poor Alex is gone, too.’

‘Well, there’s no need to go all maudlin,’ Tilda said crisply.

‘No, you’re right,’ she agreed. ‘Better to remember how much fun we had — we were all so young in that picture!’

‘Noël said Ned was the black sheep of the family?’ I prodded her.

‘Yes, though he wasn’t really bad, poor fellow, just weak-willed where women were concerned. But he was handsome and charming, very charming. . Poor Ned. Guy is very like him.’

‘Thanks,’ Guy said dryly.

‘You’ve had more girlfriends than I’ve had hot dinners,’ Becca said forthrightly.

‘But at least he never got any of them pregnant,’ Tilda pointed out. ‘Or not that we know of, anyway.’

‘You mean — Ned did?’ I asked, startled but schooling my face to an expression, I hoped, of polite interest.

Noël, looking troubled, nodded. ‘A little mill girl — or at least, I think she was a mill girl, I can’t quite remember after this space of time. He came running back home and told our parents and they were horrified — not just because they thought she was unsuitable, but because he was already engaged to the younger daughter of Lord Lennerton and was about to start working for him. They had hoped he was going to settle down at last.’

‘Well, you can’t say that’s like me,’ Guy said indignantly. ‘I hold down a responsible job and I’ve never got a girl into trouble. I haven’t,’ he said with a darkling look at Coco, ‘even got engaged!’

He’d wandered over to the jigsaw and was now staring down at it. ‘Someone has put the missing edge pieces in that we couldn’t find last night!’

‘That was me early this morning, they just sort of fell into place as I was passing,’ I said apologetically, then hauled the conversation back to where I wanted it: ‘So what happened after Ned came clean to his parents about. . the little mill girl?’

‘Nothing, because he was killed soon after that,’ Becca said.

‘He always drove a little too fast and recklessly,’ Noël explained. ‘He misjudged a bend and that was it. Tragic — very tragic.’

I was just thinking that the whole affair was even more tragic for my grandmother, when Jude suddenly said to me, ‘You’re very interested in the family, and especially in my Uncle Ned?’

‘Not at all, I simply find old family photographs fascinating,’ I said lightly, meeting his dark, suspicious gaze with limpid innocence. ‘I brought a boxful of my gran’s that I’m sifting through at the moment — papers and photographs all mixed up.’

‘Ah, yes, didn’t you tell us that she was the wife of a Baptist minister?’ asked Tilda.

‘Strange Baptist,’ said Jude, and Coco asked predictably, ‘Why, what was strange about them?’

‘Nothing, it was just what they were called,’ I explained patiently. ‘They took their name from a Bible quotation, “Strange are the ways of the Lord”, though someone told me once that that was a mistranslation and it only appeared in one version of the Bible.’

‘And is this the same box of papers where you found your gran’s wartime nursing journal?’ asked Jude acutely.

‘Yes,’ I said shortly, then got up. ‘Excuse me, I need to get back to the kitchen.’

‘Can I do anything to help?’ asked Michael, Guy and Jude almost simultaneously.

‘Yes, lay the dining room table for me. There was a long Christmas runner for down the middle of the table in the linen cupboard — it’s on the sideboard with the box of crackers Tilda and Noël brought. And, Jude, could you sort out the drinks? I don’t drink much, so I’ve no idea what you want with it.’

‘Jess and I are going to help, too,’ announced Tilda, hauling herself upright and inserting her feet into her marabou-edged mules. ‘We’re going to make a hedgehog.’

‘A hedgehog?’ Maybe that’s what had been in those awful pinwheel sandwiches on the day I arrived — roadkill!