'Oh, jolly good! Is it a big one? That always goes in the corner over there by the stairs.'

'It's huge,' I said with resignation. It looked as if I was in for a traditional Christmas whether I wanted one or not, so I might as well just give in right now and go with the flow!

After tea and mince pies or whisky and mince pies in Noel's case Tilda went upstairs to lie down, using the stairlift under protest, though she was obviously still shaky. When I took her a hot water bottle presently, I found her half-asleep already under the flowered satin eiderdown, though that was probably the exhaustion of directing Jess with the unpacking of the suitcases.

Noel stretched out on the sofa for a nap while Jess and I went into the kitchen and had a fun, if messy, time marzipanning and icing the cake and sticking a lot of old decorations on it that we found in a Bluebird Toffee tin in one of the cupboards. There was a complete set of little plaster Eskimos, sledging, skiing or throwing s...o...b..a.l.l.s, and an igloo.

'Didn't you even have a Christmas cake when you were little?' asked Jess, positioning a polar bear menacingly near one of the Eskimos.

'No. My gran often made lovely fruit cakes, but she didn't set out to make a Christmas cake as such.'

'I think it's really sad that you never had a tree, or presents or crackers or anything, until you were grown up.'

'I thought so too, when I was at school,' I said ruefully. 'I so envied all my friends! I expect that's why I went overboard with the whole seasonal gifts, food and decorations thing when I got married. But that isn't really what Christmas should be about, is it?'

'But it's fun!' she protested. 'I love everything about Christmas but not as much as Grandpa. He's an expert, you know, he's written a book about it.'

'Oh yes, I think he mentioned that.'

'It's called Auld Christmas, like the pub name, and it's about ancient traditions being absorbed into new ones and stuff like that, and how the Twelfth Night Revels celebrate the rebirth of the new year and goes back way before Christianity.'

'Does it? It sounds like you're an expert too,' I said, impressed.

'Oh, Grandpa's forever going on about it, and my parents have always brought me to Old Place for Christmas, so it's just sort of seeped in.' She looked a bit forlorn suddenly. 'I wish they could be here this time, too, but I do understand. They could hardly fly back from Antarctica just for the Christmas holidays, could they?'

'No, but they must be missing you an awful lot.'

'Oh, they'll be so into what they're doing they won't even remember I exist until they get back!' She sounded tolerant rather than aggrieved by this. 'But they did record a DVD wishing me Happy Christmas before they went, a bit like the Queen's message, though Granny says I can't have it until Christmas Day.'

'That's something to look forward to.'

'Yes, and I don't mind them not being here so much now we're staying with you. Christmas is going to be much more fun! You don't really mind if we have a proper one, do you?'

'I suppose not, and it's starting to sound as if I'll have enough of Christmas this year to make up for all the ones I've missed.'

'And presents, too. I make all mine and I've got a wonky one I practised on you can have,' she said generously.

I couldn't imagine what she'd made, but I thanked her anyway. 'I wasn't expecting anything I wasn't even expecting Christmas, come to that! Mind you, I do have one present already, from my best friend.'

'What's she like?'

'She's my husband's younger sister and my opposite in every way: tiny, fair and blue-eyed like he was . . . but she doesn't look like him otherwise.'

'Was your husband short, then? Uncle Jude is a giant.'

'He was exactly the same height as me six foot.'

'That's tall enough to be a model, except they're all skinny.'

'Well, you know what they say: never trust a skinny cook.'

'Do they?' She frowned. 'Oh, I see: it means you don't love food.'

'And won't eat your own cooking!'

When we'd finished and I'd fixed a paper frill (also from the toffee tin) around the cake, I covered it with a large gla.s.s dome I'd spotted in one of the old glazed-fronted cupboards that lined one wall of the huge kitchen, then put it in the larder.

'Now, perhaps we'd better make some more tea and you could take it through while I start dinner. Could you pop up and see if your Granny's awake and would like some?'

I'd taken some beef mince out of the freezer as soon as I'd got back earlier and now quickly made a large cottage pie and put it in the oven, then cored baking apples to stuff with dried fruit, brown sugar and cinnamon. There was long-life cream, ice cream and a half-used aerosol can of squirty cream that had come from the lodge with the other perishable food . . . and when I counted, there were a total of four and a half aerosol tins of sweetened cream, so it must play a large part in their diet!

Tilda had a tray in bed and the rest of us ate around the big pine table in the kitchen. By the time I'd cleared this away and then gone out for one last check on Lady and to give Merlin a run, I was exhausted.

But I still felt on edge, as if waiting for something and I realised it was Jude's daily call! In a peculiar way, I sort of missed the adrenaline rush of crossing swords with him, even if he had managed to provoke me into losing my temper on more than one occasion.

Noel had gone to bed and Jess was in the morning room watching something fuzzy and probably highly unsuitable on the TV, half-glazed with sleep. I sent her upstairs, but she made me promise to come and put her light out on my way up in a few minutes. The child in her was only just beneath the surface: I ended up reading her a bit of The Water Babies from a book we found on one of the shelves, before tucking her up with her teddy bear and saying good night.

Tonight I could only focus on the journal entries for long enough to discover that Gran's first meeting outside the hospital with N seemed set to become the first of many.

Then my eyes started to close as if weighted with lead and I switched out the light and sank back on the pillows only to start awake again a moment later, my heart racing, filled with shocked guilt because for the first time in eight years, I had forgotten the anniversary of Alan's death!

I climbed out of bed and fetched his photograph in its travelling frame from the top of the washstand: and that's how I fell asleep, holding onto my lost love, my face wet with tears.

Chapter 14.

Toast and Treacle

I met N again and this time he had borrowed his brother's car, though I am sure he should not yet be using his injured leg so much. When I told him so he laughed and said that he was fine, and would soon be getting his motorbike out of storage, though he needn't think I will get on it!

February, 1945 I was up much earlier than everyone else, seeing to Merlin and double-rugging Lady, as Becca had suggested doing if it got really cold, before letting her and Billy out into the snowy paddock.

It was bitterly icy out there and the wind felt as if it was coming straight off the tundra so, after hanging the haynet on the fence and breaking the ice in the water trough, I was glad to go back in and thaw out. Mucking out would have to wait for later.

By now I'd found a note about the care of Billy, which had come adrift from its place in the file and been pushed into the pocket at the back. However, apart from feeding him some of the goat biscuit things every day, which I had been doing anyway, he seemed to eat much the same as Lady. At the bottom of the typed page, Jude had written: If Billy gets ill and goes off his food, tempt him with toast and treacle.

Was he serious?

I got the defrosted ham out of the larder and boiled it, pouring away the water. Then I smeared it with honey and mustard, stuck it with cloves, and put it in to bake.

By the time I'd followed this up by making a blancmange and a quick chocolate cake from a favourite recipe, Noel and Jess had appeared. Tilda was, as I expected, still shaken, bruised and stiff, though she'd apparently announced her intention of coming down later.

When I asked them what they would like for breakfast, Jess said, 'A bacon and egg Mcm.u.f.fin, if you really want to know.'

'There are m.u.f.fins in the freezer, you could have a Holly m.u.f.fin instead, if that would do?'

In fact, we all had bacon and egg-filled m.u.f.fins, including Tilda, though Jess took hers up on a tray along with toast, marmalade, b.u.t.ter and a little fat pot of tea.

Apparently she usually eats a hearty breakfast, though if she got through that lot, then she must eat her own body weight every day, since she's the size of a sparrow!

Fortified by that, Noel and Jess were all set for an expedition to the attic to fetch down the Christmas decorations.

'There are only two days to go before Christmas, so there's no time to waste,' Noel said. They wanted me to go with them, which in my new spirit of drifting with the seasonal flow I agreed to do, just as soon as I'd cleared the breakfast things.

Jess was dispatched to collect her granny's breakfast tray and tell her where we were going to be, in case she thought we'd deserted her. I was just checking the ham when there was a hammering at the back door.

George must have snowploughed up the drive again, for the tractor with the heavy blade on the front was on the other side of the gate and, to judge from the footsteps across the snowy cobbles, he'd already made a couple of trips to and fro. There was a large holdall and a suitcase at his feet, and he was holding an a.s.sortment of other stuff, including a lot of greenery.

He gave me his attractive grin over the top of it, his healthy pink face glowing under its shock of white-gold hair and his sky-blue eyes bright.

'Morning! Met the postie in the village and thought I'd save him the trouble of bringing your mail up, seeing I was coming anyway. I've brought the old folks', too, though theirs mostly looks like Christmas cards.'

'That's kind of you.'

'If you take that?' he suggested and I relieved him of a large bundle held together with red elastic bands, two parcels, a hyacinth in a pot and the bunch of holly and mistletoe.

'Henry sent you the hyacinth, and the holly and bit of mistletoe are from me. I'll cut some more and drop it off in the porch later.'

'Oh how kind of you both,' I said, gingerly holding the p.r.i.c.kly bouquet and trying not to drop anything. 'And the bags . . . ?'

He picked them up and heaved them over the threshold.

'Becca's. I cleared as far as New Place and she called to me and asked if I'd drop them off.'

'She did?'

I supposed it made sense, when I came to think about it, since if it carried on snowing she might have to walk up through the snow on Christmas Day. She did seem to need an awful lot of stuff for one night, though!

'We've just finished breakfast why don't you come in and have a cup of tea?'

'Nay, I haven't time, but I'll carry Becca's bags through for you if you like, one of them's heavy.' He stamped the snow off his boots and came in, shutting the door behind him.

'Is that George?' called Noel from the kitchen. 'Tell him to come through!'

'I can't stop,' George called back, but walked up the pa.s.sage anyway, while I lingered to put the holly and mistletoe in the utility room together with the hyacinth, until I could find it a saucer to stand on.

Despite what he'd said, he was sitting at the kitchen table when I went in and Noel was pouring him a mug of slightly stewed tea.

I put a plate of mince pies in front of him and, sniffing the air as appreciatively as a truffle hound, he said, 'Something smells good in here!'

'That's the ham cooking . . . and maybe the cake I made earlier.'

While he consumed a succession of mince pies he told us what the lane down to the main road was like, which was pretty bad for anything except four-wheel-drive vehicles, especially the last steep, bendy stretch from Weasel Pot Farm.

'Their lad Ben's doing a roaring trade, pulling the SatNav people out of the ditch on the first corner. They get partway up it, then slide down again.'

'You'd think they would take one look and realise the SatNav was wrong,' Noel said.

'More money than sense, buying those things in the first place,' George said.

'But the postman got up it all right?' I asked.

'He's got a Post Office Land Rover and he's used to it,' he explained. 'Did you make these mince pies yourself, flower?'

They were quite small, but even so, I'd never seen anyone put a whole one in their mouth before. I nodded, fascinated.

'They're champion you're a grand cook as well as a strapping la.s.s,' he said with approval.

Jess giggled and he grinned at her. 'And you'll be another strapping la.s.s too, when you've finished growing.'

Jess blushed, but actually I think she was quite pleased.

'The forecast says more snow is likely on higher ground,' Noel said, 'so I suppose we might get cut off.'

'Maybe, though we usually manage to keep the lane to the village open, don't we? But you couldn't get even the tractor over the Snowehill road to Great Mumming, now.' George consumed the last mince pie on the plate as though he was popping Smarties, then got up. 'Well, I'll be going: the dog's on the tractor and it's bitter out there. I'll drop you more greenery off later, Holly, you'll want it for the decorations this first lot's more of a token gesture. And maybe you'll have hung the mistletoe up in the porch when I come back,' he added with unmistakable intent, and it was my turn to blush.

'Oh yes, we must hang up the mistletoe later,' Noel agreed, 'and have lots of green stuff in the sitting room. We were just about to go up into the attic and bring down the decorations when you arrived.'

'Then I'll leave you to it.'

Noel showed him out, while Jess got the giggles. 'George fancies you!'

I carried on sedately stacking the mince pie plate and the mugs in the dishwasher. 'He fancies my cooking, Jess, that's all.'

'Do you think he's nice-looking?'

'Yes, he's very handsome, in a rugged, outdoor kind of way.'

Noel came back in. 'It's bitter out there, isn't it? And what are these two bags he's brought?'

'They're your sister's I suppose she thought she might as well send her overnight things up with George while she had the chance, in case the weather worsens. Jess, you could help me carry them up to her room while we're going in that direction. Take the overnight bag and I'll have the case.'