Trisha Ashley - Twelve Days of Christmas

‘No, m’dear, because normally, as Jess said, we move into Old Place for Christmas and New Year. My sister Becca also stays from Christmas Eve until Boxing Day, too — you probably passed her house on the way here, New Place? Big wrought-iron gates, just the other end of the village.’

‘Of course she passed the damned house,’ snapped Tilda, ‘did you think she was parachuted in?’

‘Turn of speech,’ he said apologetically, but twinkled at me.

I suddenly wondered if Alan and I would have ended up like this, with me bossing him about and him good-naturedly suffering it? There was no denying that I was bossy and organising. But then, he had had a stubborn streak, too. .

‘Still, it would have been a bit difficult this year, what with my poor brother passing away last January and then Jude falling out with Guy,’ Noël sighed.

‘It wasn’t Guy’s fault, really,’ Tilda said dispassionately, ‘that girl just got her hooks into him.’

I didn’t ask who Guy was because, to be honest, I wasn’t terribly interested in people I was never going to meet. I finished my coffee and put down my cup and plate. ‘Well, that was unexpected but delicious: thank you so much! And now I’d better get up to the house and settle in.’

‘Sharon, the cleaner, should still be there, so get her to show you round before she goes. It might be the most useful thing she’s done all year,’ Tilda suggested.

‘I expect she does her best: it is a large house for one person to clean,’ Noël said mildly. ‘Not that Jude can make much of a mess, because when he is home he seems to spend most of his time down at the mill, working on his sculptures, or in his little study next to the library.’

‘Oh yes, I heard he was a sculptor.’

‘He’s very famous,’ Jess said, ‘and very bad tempered. He only cancelled Christmas because he saw that engagement announcement and I think he’s mean. I bet he didn’t even remember that Mum and Dad wouldn’t be able to be here this year and I’d be coming on my own.’

‘Jess, that will do!’ commanded Tilda, and she lapsed into sulky silence.

I got up. ‘Well, I think I’d better go up to the house while it’s still light and settle in.’

Noël also got up and found me a vast bunch of keys, pointing out the largest. ‘That’s the front door. I expect you will work the rest out for yourself.’

‘I could come and show you,’ Jess offered quickly.

‘Now, Jess, you know you’ve promised Old Nan you will visit her this afternoon: you’d better go and get ready, you can’t disappoint her,’ Tilda said. ‘She’ll have made you a special tea.’

‘More nursery food!’ Jess said disgustedly.

‘And change into something that isn’t black.’

Jess groaned and stomped off upstairs.

‘She’s so disappointed not to have Christmas atOld Place,’ confided Noël in a whisper, as though he thought we could be overheard from above, ‘and whatever she says, she adores Jude. It will be very quiet here for her, I’m afraid. Mo and Jim kindly invited us to share their Christmas dinner and that would have been something.’ He sighed again. ‘I am an expert on Christmas, you know — I’ve written a book on its history and traditions, so I do like to celebrate properly.’

‘And so we will! I have a plump little chicken that will do very well for the three of us,’ Tilda said stoically.

I suddenly wondered if they were expecting me to offer to cook Christmas dinner instead of the Chirks, even though I hadn’t even arrived at Old Place yet, so I said quickly, ‘I don’t celebrate Christmas.’

‘Not celebrate Christmas?’ Noël looked as stunned as if I had admitted to some abhorrent crime.

‘No, I was brought up as a Strange Baptist.’

‘Oh — right,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I think I’ve heard of those. . And the lady who runs the Homebodies agency — Ellen, is it? — mentioned that you have not long since lost your grandmother, so I don’t expect you feel particularly festive this year?’

‘No, not at all. . or any year, in fact.’

‘My dear, I am so sorry,’ Tilda said and added, graciously, ‘We quite understand — and if you feel at all in need of company at any time, you are always welcome to call on us.’

‘But surely — with a name like Holly — you must have a birthday to celebrate during Christmas?’ Noël asked suddenly.

‘It’s Christmas Day, actually, but I don’t celebrate that, either.’

‘So is mine and I feel just the same,’ he said understandingly. ‘It would simply be too presumptuous to share the Lord’s birthday, wouldn’t it?’

Safely back in the car I tried to decide what had been in the pinwheel sandwiches. Whatever it was had tasted like decayed fish paste, but looked like black olive pâté. It was a complete mystery to me and I might have to ask Tilda for the recipe, out of sheer curiosity.

The drive went up one side of a steeply-banked stream through the pine wood and then turned away, opening up onto a vista of sheep-nibbled grass across which, beyond a ha-ha, I could see a long, low, Jacobean building. It was rather larger than I had expected, though I suppose the size of the lodge should have given me some idea. The low-slung wintry sun sparkled off the mullioned windows, but there was no sign of life: not even a wisp of smoke from one of the line of four tall chimneys.

I drove over a cattle grid and pulled up on the gravel next to a battered red Ford Fiesta, noting as I did so that the flowerbeds that flanked the substantial front door inside an open porch looked neglected and the doorknocker, in the shape of a Green Man with frondy foliage forming his hair and beard, had not been cleaned for months.

I longed to have a go at it with Brasso. It’s not that I love cleaning, because I don’t, just that I like things neat, clean and orderly. I really have to fight the urge sometimes in other people’s houses; you’d be surprised what a mess they can leave them in.

As I got out of the car, a youngish woman came out, a half-smoked cigarette in one hand. Her magenta hair was scraped back into a ponytail, apart from one long, limp strand that hung over her face like wet seaweed, and she was wearing a salmon-pink velour tracksuit that left a goose-pimpled muffin top of flesh exposed.

‘Hello,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘You must be the cleaner, Sharon? I’m glad you’re still here, I’m late and I thought you might have gone by now.’

‘I was just about to when I heard your car,’ she said, taking my hand as if she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it and then letting it go immediately. ‘Call me Shar — and I’m not really a cleaner, I’ve just been helping Jude out for a bit of extra cash since my Kevin’s been laid off. Not that he pays me the going rate, he’s too mean.’

‘Isn’t that illegal?’

‘Cash in hand, innit? He’s got me over a barrel. You’d better watch out you get your money.’

‘Oh, that’s okay, the agency pays me.’

‘You won’t see me no more after today, because I’m starting behind the bar in the pub in Great Mumming after Christmas, a regular job. So Jude Martland can stick his miserly money and his smart-arse comments where the sun don’t shine.’

‘Right,’ I said noncommittally, reeling slightly under this information overload. ‘So. . Mr Martland knows you’re leaving?’

‘I told him I wasn’t doing Christmas and no-one works over New Year,’ she said sulkily, ‘especially if they don’t get a bonus. Then he said since he could never tell whether I’d been in to clean or not, I didn’t even deserve what he paid me, let alone any extra. He’s such a sarky bugger!’

‘I see.’

‘So if I’ve took another job, it’s his own fault, innit? I’m not bothered.’

‘I expect it is.’

‘If he rings, you can tell him I’ve had a better offer.’

‘If he should ring, I’ll certainly tell him you’ve resigned from your job,’ I agreed. ‘Now, before you go, do you have time to quickly show me over the house and where everything is?’

‘I don’t know where everything is, do I? I only vacuum and dust, and that’s too much for one person. An old couple used to do the cooking and see to the house and generator, but they retired after the old gent, Jude’s dad, died. January, that was.’

‘So I’ve heard. . and did you say there was a generator? I thought the house had mains services.’

‘It does, but the electric’s always cutting out and the phone line is forever coming down between here and the village because the poles need replacing. The TV doesn’t work very well either, because there’s no Sky dish, though they’ve got one at the lodge. It’s a complete hole, I don’t know what you’re going to do with yourself.’

‘That’s all right, I’m not bothered about TV. I’ve brought my radio with me and lots to read.’

Sharon looked at me as if I was a strange and alien species with three heads. ‘There’s no mobile phone reception either, unless you walk halfway up Snowehill, or down past the lodge,’ she informed me as a clincher.

‘Well then, if the phone line goes dead, the exercise will do me good,’ I said pleasantly. I have worked in remote places before — the house I should have been minding in Scotland was much more isolated than this — though I had not, admittedly, previously had to cope with a generator. I only hoped the electricity didn’t cut out before I found the instructions on how to operate the thing!

I smiled encouragingly at her. ‘Now, I’d really appreciate it if you could quickly show me round? Normally we try and visit a property beforehand to meet the owners and get the lay of the land, as it were, but obviously in this case it wasn’t possible.’

Sharon sullenly and reluctantly agreed and stood back to let me past her into a long stone entrance chamber. It had a row of heavily-burdened coat hooks, a brass stand full of walking sticks and umbrellas, and a battered wooden bench, under which was a miscellaneous collection of wellingtons and walking boots.

‘Go through the door at the end,’ she directed and I found myself standing in a huge, high-ceilinged sitting room the size of a small barn with an open fireplace practically big enough to roast an ox in. A worn carpet in mellow, warm colours covered most of the stone floor and an assortment of occasional tables, velvet-covered sofas and chairs was grouped on it. A dogleg staircase rose from one corner to a balustraded gallery above, that ran around three sides.

‘What a lovely room! It looks as if it started out as a great hall in a much older building?’

‘They say this is the really old bit in the middle, the rest was added on later,’ she said indifferently. ‘There’s two wings — the kitchen one is set back, you go through a door behind that wooden screen over there. This other side is bigger, with the family rooms and another staircase. Come on, I’ll show you.’

She ushered me briskly through a series of dark-oak-panelled rooms with polished wooden floors. Some had elaborate white-stuccoed ceilings, but they all looked dusty, dull and neglected. There was a small morning room with a TV, a long dining room sporting a spectacular, if incongruous, Venetian mirror over the hearth, and a well-stocked library with a snooker table in the middle of it.

She paused at the door next to it. ‘Jude uses this room to work in and he locks it when he’s away.’ She sniffed. ‘You’d think he didn’t trust me.’

He probably didn’t, though actually I’d found that there were quite often one or two mysterious locked rooms in houses I was looking after: Bluebeard’s chambers, as Laura had suggested, though their secrets were probably only of the mundane kind.

But this room revealed its secrets, for the top of the door was glazed — perhaps it had been the land agent’s office, or something like that. It held a tilting draughtsman’s table, a large wooden easel and several tables bearing a silting of objects, including jars of pencils, brushes and lots of small models, presumably of sculptures. It was hard to make out what they were from that distance. There was also what looked like one of those hideaway computer workstations — but if so, then it must be dial-up, because there was no broadband here and, given the apparent unreliability of the phone lines, being able to connect with the internet must be a matter of luck. But that was okay — Ellen was the only person who ever emailed me much, with details of jobs.