Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

She said Ellen had called her, complaining that she couldn’t get hold of me to tell me about the wonderful job she had lined up for me, starting the weekend after Twelfth Night, and how she was sure I wouldn’t mind cooking for a Middle Eastern client’s huge house-party at a swish London address, now I’d had a nice rest from it.

‘I hope you put her right!’ I said indignantly. ‘I’ve done nothing but prepare and cook meals since I got here. And she knows I only do home-sitting until Easter.’

‘I wound her up by telling her you’d settled in so well that they’d probably pay you a fabulous sum to keep you as permanent cook.’

‘Funnily enough, Jude said much the same. . and I said he couldn’t afford me. But apparently he really is quite well off, you were right.’

‘Of course he is, dimwit! His sculptures go for megabucks, I Googled him!’

‘Well, I’m not going to take a permanent position here anyway. I’ll just slip quietly out of their lives as soon as it thaws. And providing Jude has stopped needing me to hang around being a muse, too.’

‘I think you quite like it!’

‘It is sort of thrilling watching him with the torch thing welding metal together,’ I admitted. ‘He seems to like to have me there, though he’s so absorbed he forgets he isn’t alone for long stretches. Then he sort of comes to and spots me and smiles and says something.’

‘Like what?’

‘Oh, all kinds of things: sometimes he asks me about myself, but usually it’s whatever’s going through his head right at that moment. He likes his food, too, and I take him lunch down in the early afternoon, after we’ve had ours up at the house.’

‘This all sounds as if it’s becoming very intimate and cosy!’ she teased me. ‘Weren’t a lot of artists’ muses also their mistresses?’

‘Maybe, but I’m hardly likely to go that route after Gran’s example and with a member of the same family who let her down, am I?’ I reminded her. ‘I mean, even if I found big, bossy, taciturn men attractive, Jude is almost certainly my cousin.’

‘But not even a first cousin.’

‘No, his father was my grandfather’s brother. . I think,’ I said, trying to work it out.

‘That’s not terribly close,’ she said encouragingly. ‘They can’t touch you for it.’

‘Oh, Laura! You’re as bad as Jess.’

‘The little girl? Is she matchmaking?’

‘She’s not actually that little — she’s nearly thirteen and she’s going to be another tall Martland. But yes, she’s trying to push me and Jude together at every opportunity. She adores Jude and we seem to have been cast in the role of surrogate parents, since her parents have to be away. I think she’d like it to be a permanent arrangement, but I’ve told her it ain’t gonna happen!’

‘Famous last words,’ she said, and I told her she was a hopeless romantic but in this case she might as well give up.

Over at the pub I found Coco drinking vodka and soda and Guy and Michael with pints of beer, talking about football, which is not something I find of any interest. So I had coffee and chatted to Nancy instead, until eventually I had to chivvy the others out, or there would have been no lunch on the table that day.

This made it much later than usual when I took Jude’s lunch down to the studio and he was inclined to be a bit narky when I told him why, but I expect hunger pains had stopped the flow of his inspiration, or something.

However, he cheered up once he’d eaten, and while he was working we had quite a few exchanges of companionable conversation — and also several equally companionable silences. I am finding the time spent in the studio strangely relaxing. .

Jude’s good mood lasted for the rest of the day, until just after our next totally unnecessary play rehearsal, when he went all morose and Neanderthal again. I think it was because he came into the kitchen when Michael and I were having a slightly cruel giggle about Coco’s acting.

I’d just spoken Olivia’s line, in a simpering falsetto, ‘“Nay come, I prithee: would’st be ruled by me?”’ and Michael, as Sebastian, snatched me into his arms, crying passionately, ‘“Madam, I will!”’

‘Excuse me!’ Jude said and then dropped the tray of glasses down on the table so that one fell over and broke, before going back out and slamming the kitchen door, for good measure.

Michael gave me a knowing look, and I threw the oven glove at him. Okay, I now admit Jude’s jealous: but that still doesn’t mean he intends making any move on me which — now I’m pretty sure he’s my cousin — is just as well!

When I was cosily tucked up in bed that night and flicking through Gran’s last journal to find my place, a tiny black and white photo fluttered out onto the duvet.

It was unmistakably Ned Martland — I knew those features so well now, from the family album. But he looked very young and handsome, standing by a prewar motorbike. On the back he’d written, ‘All my love, your Ned.’

Obviously, he hadn’t seen fit to mention that she’d only had all his love on a temporary basis.

I propped the picture up against my alarm clock so I could study it better, trying to puzzle out his character from his features. And that’s how I fell asleep — and plummeted right into a tangle of dreams in which Jude was welding bits of old motorbike together, wearing little more than his protective visor. .

It was pretty disturbing stuff, I can tell you. I woke up in a muck sweat.

Jude came down early again next day, still in a deeply morose and taciturn mood, which probably wasn’t helped by my inability to look him straight in the eye after last night’s red-hot dreams.

Then he vanished back upstairs as soon as he’d seen to the horses with Becca, so there was no-one to ply me with tea while I worked, or help cook the breakfast while passing the odd, quiet remark. . and somehow, I missed the companionable silences, too. It’s strange how quickly you get used to something. . or someone.

Becca asked me on her way through the kitchen if we’d had a falling out. ‘I don’t know what’s got into the boy this morning!’

‘Not that I know of, though he’s hardly spoken to me since last night,’ I told her, though I didn’t add that I thought he might have misinterpreted finding me in Michael’s arms again, since that might lead to a whole lot of other questions I didn’t even want to think about.

He didn’t come back down until Jess and everyone else apart from Tilda were eating breakfast, and even then he didn’t sit down, just made himself a thick bacon sandwich and wrapped it in foil to take with him.

‘I won’t need you today,’ he said to me curtly.

‘Can I come then, Uncle Jude?’ asked Jess eagerly.

‘No,’ he said and went out and Merlin, for once, followed him — though with a troubled look back at me. Perhaps he was reattaching himself to his master?

‘I hate Uncle Jude!’ Jess said bitterly.

‘I thought it was me you hated, Mini-Morticia?’ Guy said.

‘Only when you call me Mini-Morticia, Uncle Guy,’ she said and he winced.

‘Never mind Jude, he seems a bit grumpy today for some reason,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose he was thinking what he was saying. Why don’t you start making a snowman out at the front now the thaw seems to be starting, while there’s still lots of snow? Then, when I’ve cleared breakfast away, I’ll come and help.’

‘I suppose I could,’ she said sulkily. I hoped some of the others might offer to go with her, but Michael had decided to walk up the track and phone his ex-wife, in the hope she might have relented about letting him speak to his daughter, and no-one else seemed to be terribly keen, though Noël said he would look out later, to see how the snowman was coming along.

But when I went out after about twenty minutes, Jess was nowhere to be seen, and there was no sign of activity other than a shovel stuck upright in a patch of virgin snow and a trail of footprints leading off towards the drive.

Her wellingtons and coat were missing, so I checked the yard and paddock first, and then the house, without result. Michael had come back and he and Guy were playing snooker in the library, but when I asked they said they hadn’t seen her.

‘I entirely forgot to go and see how the snowman was doing,’ Noël confessed guiltily when I went back to the sitting room to report her disappearance.

‘I bet she’s gone down to the studio to plague Jude into letting her mess about with the modelling clay, or something,’ Becca suggested.

‘Oh yes, that will be it,’ Noël said, ‘though of course she should have told one of us where she was going first.’

‘But then we would have stopped her from disturbing Jude,’ Tilda pointed out. ‘You know he can be such a bear when an idea strikes him.’

‘He can be a bear anyway,’ Coco said. She was sitting by the jigsaw puzzle, so I expect she’d rammed a few more pieces into the wrong places. Then she drifted out, probably to feast on the last fluff-covered Fruity-Go from the bottom of her handbag, or to have an illicit cigarette in her room with the window open.

‘That girl’s a waste of space,’ Becca said, then added that someone should go down to the studio and bring Jess back. ‘But don’t look at me, I think I ate too much breakfast and I want to have a doze in front of the telly. White Christmas is on again.’

‘Oh, is it? I might join you,’ Noël said.

‘And I will too, if Holly doesn’t need me,’ Tilda agreed, though I wasn’t about to suggest she trekked off down the drive in her high-heeled marabou and velvet slippers to look for Jess.

‘I’ll walk down and bring her back with me. I can give my friend another ring while I’m down there.’

‘Oh, good! Tell Jess she’s very naughty and bring her straight back,’ Tilda said.

I set off down the snow at the edge of the drive, which was definitely not as crisp as it was yesterday. It didn’t seem quite as deep, either, so perhaps was starting to subside from underneath in the way drifts sometimes do, leaving a crystal shell of harder snow on top.

It was more than possible that Jude had sent Jess straight home again, so at any minute I expected to find her dejectedly trudging towards me. And I decided I didn’t really need to call Laura again either, since nothing much had happened to report since yesterday, apart from Jude’s suspiciously jealous-looking hissy fit.

It occurred to me that there was no-one else in the whole world except Laura who genuinely cared about me any more: no family or other friends close enough. Yes, there was a circle of people I’d known from school who all met up occasionally, including Laura and my erstwhile Homebodies boss, Ellen, but that was not the same at all. .

Laura’s family were always kind, but I had distanced myself too much after Alan died and now the breach is unbridgeable. We grieved in different ways — they celebrated his life and I pretended it had never happened. But I’d changed so much in the last couple of weeks. .

And here at Old Place I was suddenly surrounded by long-lost relatives, even though none of them realised the connection and would probably be highly embarrassed if they did ever know! Jude would immediately believe the worst, that I was out for what I could get, and think he’d been right to be suspicious all along!

Still, since I wasn’t going to tell them, it didn’t matter.

There was still no sign of Jess when I turned off the drive up the track through the dark pine trees, so I thought Jude must have relented and let her stay. But then, as the trees opened out onto the banks of the stream below the studio, I suddenly spotted her black-clad figure — right in the middle of the frozen mill pond, testing the ice by stamping on it with one booted foot.

It made an odd, high-pitched, singing sound and my blood ran cold: I raced for the bank, calling urgently, ‘Jess! Jess! Stop that and come back here this minute!’

She half-turned, startled by my voice — and then there was a horribly loud cracking noise like a small explosion and down she plummeted with a scream and a splash. For a heart-stopping moment she vanished completely. . and then her head popped up and she was floundering among bobbing shards of ice in the bitterly cold black water.