Summer Daydreams (47 page)

Outside the sky is white and heavy. A few flakes of snow are starting to fall, drifting, drifting down into the car park. The first this year. I smile inside. I love snow. Though I realise that I’m in the minority as everyone else grumbles about how difficult it is to get around. And, it’s fair to say that the country does usually grind to a halt once there’s anything more than a sprinkling on the ground. Me, I’d be happy to be trapped indoors and let it cascade down until it was three feet deep. Holding out my hands, I let the flakes settle. They’re delicate, lacy and land on my upturned palms like filigree butterflies before instantly melting away. I shake it from my short, brown bob and think that I need to remember to wear my hat. It would be lovely if we had a white Christmas this year. A bit of snow makes everything look so much better, so much more festive.

Someone honks their car horn in a bad-tempered manner. I glance up from the joy of snow on my hands. The car park is heaving now and it looks like there’s a dispute over a parking space. One driver winds down his window. Christmas carols blare out. ‘
Peace on earth, goodwill to all men
’.

‘Oi, arsehole,’ he shouts at the other man. ‘I was here first.’

The other driver who has a sticker stating that ‘Santa does it with reindeers’ in his back window, clearly doesn’t agree with his opinion and shouts back. ‘Fuck off. This space is mine.’

I push my heavily laden trolley, which wants to go in the other direction, towards my trusty little Corsa. Heaving out the bags, I load them into the boot.

Both drivers jump out of their cars and shake their fists at each other. One has an aerial with a star and some tinsel on it. The other driver snaps it off and stamps it into the sprinkling of snow.

I sigh to myself. Not everyone, it seems, enjoys Christmas as much as me.

Chapter Two

I pull into the drive of number ten Chadwick Close and kill the engine. What I need now is a restorative cup of tea and perhaps my first mince pie of the season. They’re possibly my most favourite festive food. I know that the shops start selling them in earnest in July now but I like to put off the moment for as long as humanly possible so that I can really savour it. This year I have excelled myself in holding out for so long. I hope it also means that I won’t have to spend as long on a diet after Christmas as I usually do.

My family and I live in a lovely part of Stony Stratford, a pretty market town in the heart of Buckinghamshire, a stone’s throw away from the ever-encroaching city of Milton Keynes. We’ve been here for years and have brought up our two children in this solid 1970s home. I suspect this is where we’ll see out our days.

Rick is up the ladder, busy draping the front of the house with Christmas lights. That’s good. I like to have them up nice and early to make the most of them. The one area where all my husband’s abhorrence of Christmas disappears is when it comes to decorating the house with lights. It’s a job that he relishes. Every year Rick likes to adorn the place until it looks like Santa’s grotto. It’s the one trip of the year that he doesn’t mind taking up to the loft. He disappears in there for hours, searching and sorting, and then he lifts down the lights gently like treasured children.

We currently have LED icicles dangling down from the rafters with changing patterns. We have a string of coloured bulbs across the garage that flash on and off at regular intervals. The front of the house has a sleigh and reindeer in white above the porch. The big cherry blossom in the front garden has its own string of lanterns. On the lawn we have a wire reindeer covered in tiny lights. The rest of our neighbours don’t bother much at all. Though number two do, on alternate years, throw a sparkling net of lights over their cotoneaster bush. We’re the one and only house in the close that attempts to create a Christmassy spectacle. I don’t quite know when or why this started, but I’m glad that Rick enters into the spirit at least in this one small area.

I climb out of the car. Rick comes down the ladder. My husband is one of those men who’s grown more attractive as he’s aged, I think. At least he has to me and I guess that’s all that matters. His long, lean frame is all knees and elbows – always has been. We seem to have so little quality time together now and, somehow, it seems even harder to find time for ourselves once the Christmas frenzy is upon us. Every year I vow that it will be different and every year it isn’t. I smile as he comes towards me, but he seems to be in a hurry and somewhat red in the face.

‘Have you seen that?’ he rages without preamble. A finger shoots out and points in an accusatory fashion at the house opposite.

Chadwick Close is a very staid neighbourhood, quiet. There’s never any excitement to be had. That’s why we like it here. Any scandal that there has been in the past has mostly emanated from the Joyce household anyway.

‘Look,’ he reiterates.

So I look.

Across the close, directly opposite our house is the sight that’s offending him so much. Our good friend, Stacey Lovejoy, used to live at number five but last summer she moved out. Now she’s in Gran Canaria living the high-life with Rick’s old boss, Hal, and they’re both having a lovely time according to the intermittent email updates she sends. The new people weren’t here last Christmas, so Rick would hardly have expected to see this.

Our new neighbours, it seems, also like Christmas lights on their house. There’s no one in sight, but it’s clear that, like Rick, Neil Harrison has been very busy this morning. They have a display that far outshines ours.

‘How nice,’ I say. ‘It’s lovely.’

‘
Lovely
?’ Rick has gone quite purple in the face now.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘
We’re
the house that has lights up,’ he points out.

I shrug. ‘Now we’re
one
of the houses that has lights up. I think it’s looks pretty.’

‘Typical female response,’ he snorts. Rick runs a hand through his hair mussing it into his customary Stan Laurel hairdo. He’s never been able to tame his hair and now it’s sticking out all over the place. I know that’s the fashion for seventeen-year-old boys, but in a gentleman of a certain age it just looks like mad hair.

‘I don’t think you should view it as a challenge to your supremacy.’ Clearly Rick thinks that this is Neil banging his chest and roaring in his face. ‘Maybe Neil just likes Christmas lights.’

Further snorting from Rick. ‘I’ll have to get some more,’ he mutters. ‘I want ours to be the
best
house.’ He casts an envious glance at the giant-sized blow-up Santa complete with his own chimney that’s fixed to Neil’s roof.

‘Ours look great, Rick. Especially with a little bit of snow on them. Very festive. Already I feel quite in the Christmas mood.’

My husband tuts. I’m disappointed that all this pointless willy-waving has soured his mood.

‘Come on,’ I say. ‘Help me in with the shopping and I’ll make you a cuppa and you can have a mince pie with it.’

With an exaggerated sigh, Rick puts down his screwdriver. I flick open the boot.

‘Good God, woman!’ He recoils in horror. ‘What the hell have you got in here? It’s not the feeding of the five thousand, you know.’

‘It’s Christmas,’ I say. ‘We have to have a little bit extra in. Just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’ Rick looks perplexed. ‘You’ve got enough for the Joyce clan to survive a nuclear holocaust. The shops barely shut for ten minutes these days. We can always run out and get a loaf if we’re stuck.’

‘Oh, Rick,’ I chide. ‘You know that you always enjoy it.’

‘You know that I always want to go away to the Bahamas, just the two of us, and ignore the whole bloody thing.’ He heaves two carrier bags out of the boot, making a big show of how heavy they are. ‘Instead we’ll stay at home, suffer your mother, the Queen’s speech and eat too much and drink nowhere near enough to ease the pain.’

‘It’s not that bad.’

Again he casts a dark glance at our neighbour’s festive display. ‘Putting up the lights was the only pleasure I had,’ he complains. ‘Now even that’s been taken away from me.’

‘You could go down to Homebase and buy a few more bits if you want to,’ I suggest. ‘They’ve got some very pretty things in.’

Rick rubs his chin. ‘I need something with more impact,’ he says under his breath. ‘Much more impact.’

With that, he brightens up considerably.

Chapter Three

My mother, Rita Britten, is sitting in the kitchen when Rick and I struggle in with the shopping. She’s wearing a cardigan that’s buttoned up all wrong, and it doesn’t look as if she’s combed her hair since getting up.

‘Get the kettle on, Rita, love,’ Ricks says.

She looks at him, perplexed. ‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘We’ll all have a cup of tea, Mum.’

‘Oh.’

‘Here, you’re done up all higgledy-piggledy.’ I go to her and she tries to stare me down while I rebutton her cardigan.

‘You do
fuss
, Juliet.’

‘That’s better.’ I resist the urge to untangle her hair.

Rick rolls his eyes at me and I shrug back. My mum’s not herself. I blame her trip to Australia. She’s never been quite the same since. When she turned seventy, she dumped my true and faithful father, who had stood by her stoically despite her being a fairly miserable and demanding wife. She moved in with me and Rick, uninvited. My husband was not impressed, but what could I do? She had to live somewhere and no matter how we tried to cajole her, she wouldn’t go home to Dad. Then, to make matters worse, she took up with a pensioner toy boy, Arnold. We had to endure weeks of them ‘doing it’ in our back bedroom, which our daughter had been required to vacate to accommodate her. It was horrendous. The only way I could get any sleep was to clamp a pillow over my head. They’d only been together for five minutes when she and Arnold decided that they wanted to see the world. At the age of seventy, I ask you. Before you could say hip replacement they went out, booked two tickets to Australia, rented a camper van and set off touring in the outback.

I was beside myself. She’d never even been abroad before; now she was going to Australia for the foreseeable future with a man she barely knew. I thought it was children who were supposed to give their parents problems! Isn’t that the way it happens? Rick was delighted, as he thought we’d seen the back of her for good. He was sure that in Australia, being the continent with the most venomous and lethal animals, she’d come to some great harm. No such luck. He hadn’t reckoned on my mother’s tenacity. After six months she was back, bronzed and broke, and poor Arnold had disappeared into the wilderness never to be seen again. I am distraught that Arnold, an elderly and rather pleasant gentleman, is missing in a strange land. My mother, however, doesn’t seem too bothered by this turn of events. Rick thinks that the hapless Arnold most likely threw himself to a pack of wild dingos in an attempt to get away from my mother. He has a point. After spending six months in a glorified caravan with her, I’m sure anyone would feel the same.

Rick is rooting through the carrier bags. ‘Panettone?’ he says. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s like a cake or bread. A bit of both. You’ve had it before.’

‘Really? I don’t remember.’

‘We all like it,’ I assure him.

‘I don’t,’ my mum adds helpfully.

‘Dad does.’

‘Your father has gone all foreign,’ she counters.

Which, I have to say, is partly true. Frank Britten was, until my mother abandoned him, the most unadventurous man on the planet. His comfort zone was never more than a foot away from his armchair. My dad, a man who, until he was seventytwo, thought that anything other than a half of bitter was for ‘nancy boys’, decided he’d been gay all along. Then he met Samuel, a charming bookseller who is younger than both myself and Rick, who has made his life infinitely more colourful. No one was more surprised than me when they moved in together. Well, except perhaps for my mother. I’m still not sure that she fully grasps the nature of their relationship. Anyway, now that Dad is a fully paid-up and enthusiastic member of the ‘nancy boys’ club, thanks to Samuel, his tastes have become distinctly more adventurous – and not just in ‘that’ department. He loves foreign food, foreign travel, enjoys good wine, speaks a smattering of several languages, plays chess, knocks up meals from Jamie Oliver and Nigel Slater cookbooks and is generally very lovely to be around. It’s taken him a long time to discover domestic bliss, but I’m so pleased that he has.

‘Your dad phoned to say that he’s coming round later with Samuel,’ Rick says.

‘Oh, that’s nice. There are some bits for them in one of the other carrier bags. They can take them home with them.’

‘I thought they were coming here for Christmas?’

‘They are.’

‘So why are you buying them Christmas food?’

‘Christmas isn’t just one day, Rick.’

‘No,’ he mutters. ‘It’s from bloody August onwards.’ He stamps out to get the other bags.

‘Are we having a cup of tea, or what?’ Mum asks.

I sigh to myself. Now Mum is back for good, she is currently ensconced in Chloe’s bedroom once again, much to the consternation of my daughter. Chloe had moved out when she accidentally fell pregnant with her first child and was renting a flat in the town with her partner, Mitch – the father of baby Jaden and a man she barely knew. Not surprisingly, they’ve now split up and she’s also back at home with Jaden in tow. But I can hardly wag my finger at her as, all those years ago, Rick and I tied the knot rather hastily when I fell pregnant with Chloe.

Chloe won’t ever really say what went wrong in their relationship. I guess it comes from having a baby with someone whose favourite drink, film and holiday destination are a total mystery to you. The pressure on them both was enormous. Right from the start she was coming home every two weeks over some row or other. Rick said we should have turned her round and sent her straight back to deal with it, but I couldn’t. That’s what my mother would have done to me, and I couldn’t watch Chloe suffer. I know she found it hard that Mitch was working long hours and, instead of being out partying, she was sitting at home every night with a baby. Then last month, with no justifiable explanation, she flounced home, supposedly for good. Mitch appeared on the doorstep every night for two weeks begging her to go back to him, but she wouldn’t listen.