I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day Read online

  ‘Yes, I can come over to Japan instead, do you have some dates… May? Is Mr Chikafuji not free before then?… Oh I see, he’s very busy is he?…’

  Jack ended the call on his mobile with as much annoyance as it was possible to execute with one finger. It was an end to a call better suited to a heavy desk phone with a receiver that could be crashed down onto its cradle.

  ‘Would you believe it,’ said Jack. ‘Chikafuji’s plane has been cancelled from Brussels, so he’s going back to Japan instead and he hasn’t got space in his diary for a head-to-head until May. We might as well turn back. Ha.’ The note of laughter was anything but one of amusement.

  Mary didn’t suggest that they should have had a video call. She had learned over the years that Jack needed the whole meet and greet experience, to make that initial face to face connection with a potential client, in order to absorb their essence, especially one of Mr Chikafuji’s calibre, and he was adamant that he couldn’t do that via a screen. Mary thought he could have made an exception in this case, seeing as Mr Chikafuji was so hard to get hold of in person, but she kept quiet so as not to exacerbate his mood. Jack scared some people, she knew. He was physically imposing, tall, with broad shoulders, a man who looked after himself and spoke with an impeccable private-school accent that had a tendency to make those with a dent in their confidence feel inferior. He was a hard-nosed, hard-working businessman who believed in his product and gave off an air of self-assurance like expensive cologne. His face had a default serious set; Mary had heard a few people say that it would shatter like stressed glass if he smiled, but she didn’t think that was true and how she wished she could be the one who made him smile. He didn’t scare her in the slightest either, because she could read him like a favourite book and she knew under that stiff, polished veneer was someone lonely, vulnerable, sad, mixed up.

  Mary dabbed her foot gently on the brake, felt the Maserati skid slightly as it tried to hold traction. There were no other cars in sight but she wasn’t sure any more how much was road and how much was ditch. She made a measured five-point turn, set off back down the road they had just travelled, their freshly made tracks half-filled with snow already. She tried to keep her focus on driving and not on lamenting that her big chance to make Jack see her as something other than the PA who brought him coffee, fielded his calls and organised his diary and his dry-cleaning was now gone.

  She’d bought a stunning red dress especially for the dinner they’d have had together in the hotel restaurant. She’d chosen it with care to make the best of her slender frame, to colour-contrast with her long, pale-blond hair and make her large, green-blue eyes pop. She’d bought red suede boots with heels that elevated her five-foot-three height without reducing her ability to walk in them. She’d blown almost the equivalent of her month’s wages on clothes for this one night, a stupid gamble. Thank goodness they were still in the bags with the tags and stickers on them so she could get a refund. But she didn’t want a refund, she wanted to wear them and have her night in the Tynehall Country Hotel ripping the scales from Jack’s eyes.

  She had known it was ‘now or never’, and so it seemed that it was going to be never, thanks to the double whammy of the ever-unreliable Mr Chikafuji and the damned weather. She had known it was too good to be true: an all-expenses-paid night in a swanky hotel, Jack all to herself for a full twenty-four hours. One of her dad’s many sayings was that if a thing looked too good to be true, then that’s because it probably was and once again he was right. Mary sighed audibly then quickly checked the mirror to see if Jack had heard her, but he was too busy hunting for something in his briefcase to have noticed.

  Mary carried on down the road, steadily. Her dad had taught her and her siblings to drive when they were fifteen on a patch of nearby farmland. By the age of sixteen, she could throw cars around corners and handle any motor with the skill of a copper chasing a drug dealer up the wrong side of the motorway. She drove much better than Fred did, who tended to press down on the pedals as if he was stamping on a cockroach with a lead boot. He’d been Jack’s father’s chauffeur, employed more for being on the old boys’ network rather than for his abilities, which was par for the course with Reg Butterly. Mary’s eyes flicked towards the satnav when it gave her an instruction to leave the motorway at the next junction and follow the A379 to Exeter. On the screen was a map of the south-west. Even brand-new Maseratis had their glitches, she thought. Luckily she knew she was heading in roughly the right direction, back to South Yorkshire, not Devon. Sadly.

  Less than a mile along the way, Mary could see there was a problem in the shape of a rockfall ahead. The weight of snow on the hillside must have dislodged stones and boulders at the inconvenient point where the road narrowed to a single track. There was no way around the obstruction, she could tell that even from a long distance away. Jack’s attention was dragged to the scene framed by the windscreen when he felt the car slowing.

  ‘Oh, please tell me this isn’t happening,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll have to turn back,’ said Mary, stating the obvious. What else could they do? The road was completely blocked.

  ‘Goodness, the snow really is bad isn’t it,’ said Jack. He’d raised his head at various points and glanced at the weather but his mind was more on the presentation to Chikafuji; now he was seeing the white-out. ‘I think it would be sensible to pull in at the first place we can, Mary.’

  Mary did another about-turn and headed for Tynehall yet again, even though they had no chance of making it that far. There had to be somewhere nearby. They were in Yorkshire, not an Arctic tundra, even if it did look like it. Then, in the midst of all the white in front of her, she spotted a wooden arrow-shaped sign coming up on the left, pointing across to a turning that wasn’t showing up on the satnav, with crude black lettering: Figgy Hollow 3/4 mile. She couldn’t remember seeing it on either of the two times she’d passed this spot before, but she hadn’t been looking for shelter then.

  She hadn’t a clue what Figgy Hollow was: a local beauty spot, a farm; a hamlet with a welcoming hotel and a cosy log fire, she hoped, but in case there was nothing else around for miles, she took the risk and swung a right. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Another gem from her father’s book of sayings.

  Chapter 3

  Luke Palfreyman wished he was travelling in his trusty four-by-four instead of his boy-toy vintage DB5 Aston Martin, which didn’t perform at its best in snow, especially super-freak snow like this, which seemed to be heralding the birth of a new Ice Age. He, alas, was no James Bond, so the car didn’t suddenly project wings – or better still skis – to get him smoothly to his destination; instead he was stuck with driving it manually and praying it got him safely to where he needed to be. He’d spent the last couple of years trying to acquire the art of being reasonable and sensible – give or take buying a 1960s dream car – only to agree to head for a place in the arse end of nowhere just because his wife clicked her fingers. Or soon to be ex-wife, to give her the proper title. It wouldn’t be beyond credibility that Bridge had engineered this weather to inconvenience him further. Few things had ever run well for him where she was concerned; she was a walking jinx, quite the opposite to his present fiancée. Everything was so easy with Carmen, everything flowed, like a peaceful river, whereas Bridge was a whirlpool full of piranhas.

  He could have replied to Bridge’s shouty text (STOP PRESS, DIVERT TO FIGGY HOLLOW INN. OFF THE A7501, SW OF WHITBY. ASK SIRI IF SATNAV CAN’T FIND IT) that they do this at another time, i.e. one less treacherous and more sensible, but he knew it meant a lot to Carmen to start off the new year with things moving forwards out of what had felt like an eternal impasse. As Bridge had foreseen, his TomTom hadn’t recognised the name Figgy Hollow, which was just plain weird and if Siri hadn’t helped him out, he would have put his substantial personal fortune on all this being Bridge playing more stupid games. She always could get under his skin more than anyone else ever could; like a sharp, thin splinter that managed to wiggle far
enough in so that using tweezers to hoick it out was ineffectual and a serious incision was needed. He could feel his default setting these days of cool slipping by the second and, despite himself, he laughed aloud. There really was no one like Bridge on the planet. He looked up at the thick grey clouds through the windscreen, expecting to find her on a broomstick circling above like a malicious crow.

  The snow had come from nowhere, impossible as that might have seemed in this day and age; yet it had happened. Luke had been half an hour into his journey when it started, drops of sleet falling onto his windscreen, smudging his vision. Within five minutes they’d turned to snow, within ten that snow was settling on the country’s grid of ungritted roads. He’d presumed, like everyone else had, it was only a few flurries that would quickly melt away, but those flakes kept on dropping, thicker and heavier and the traffic got slower and slower. It would have been the only sensible thing to do to rearrange the meeting, but he had to get this divorce properly underway. He didn’t want to go into a new year with this hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles, not when he planned to be remarried by late summer. He needed to pack up his old life with the old year and he had to see Bridge in person in order to do that and on both counts he was determined that nothing would stop him. Nothing.

  * * *

  Bridge lifted her glass to the optic, pressed upwards and stood until a double brandy had been delivered. There was definitely no one in the inn, she’d shouted loud ‘hello hello’s up the stairs and into the area behind the bar. She’d even stood at the top of the cellar steps and shouted down into the black silence and not even an echo of her voice had come back at her.

  Someone must have been there recently though because the bar area was spick and span, the tabletops were gleaming and a faint smell of polish still hung in the air. There was an enormous fireplace, logs banked up on it ready to light, for the Christmas Day diners, no doubt. A large Christmas tree occupied one far corner of the room, thick green branches ready for their drape of tinsel; baubles and lights sat patiently in a cardboard box tucked underneath it, with packets of paper-chain strips, waiting to be constructed and tacked with drawing pins onto the picture rail. They were the sort Bridge remembered making at school, with a gum line at one end that tasted awful. Another memory flashed in her head: sitting on the floor putting such a chain together, in front of a fire fuelled with wood that they’d gathered illegally from the nearby park because they were too skint to buy it. She and Luke. He leaning over towards her, crushing the chain as they started kissing, tearing off each other’s clothes, then making love, which had given her bum major carpet burns. She shook her head to disengage those images, stamped the mini-film of chain-making in Joseph Street junior school back over them, sitting next to Michael Butler who used to pick his nose and wipe it on any available surface other than a handkerchief.

  She sat down at a bar table next to the middle of three windows and took a swig of brandy before picking her phone out of her handbag to find she’d had two missed calls from Ben. She rang him, it didn’t connect the first time. She tried again.

  ‘Are you okay? Thank goodness,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I couldn’t get to where I was heading, so I’ve had to make a diversion. I’m in a pub, I’m safe, no need to worry.’

  ‘Is Luke there with you?’

  ‘Not yet. He’s on his way—’

  ‘What did you say? You cut out.’

  ‘HE’S ON HIS WAY I SHOULD IMAGINE.’

  Luke would be here, she had absolutely no doubt about that. He was nothing if not reliable. Well, at least he was these days, by all accounts. Plus, she knew how much he wanted this divorce to go ahead. He’d drive through fire for it, never mind the new Siberia.

  ‘I wish you’d just come straight home.’ The weight of concern in Ben’s voice brought a smile to Bridge’s lips.

  ‘I might have done if I’d known this was going to happen.’ She said it but she wasn’t sure if it was strictly true.

  ‘You must not even think about trying to drive back in this tonight,’ Ben warned her, having to repeat it twice because his voice kept dissolving into crackles and silence.

  ‘I promise you, I won’t,’ Bridge replied. ‘I’m on the sensible side of mad.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said I won’t. Line’s awful.’

  ‘But you’re all right?’

  ‘Yes, I’m dry and safe.’

  ‘Good.’ She could feel his sigh of relief whisper into her ear.

  ‘I’ll ring you later to let you know how our meeting goes.’

  ‘Can’t hear you, Bridge. Hello? Hel—’

  The line died. Modern technology was great until it wasn’t. She tried to reconnect the call, but no luck. She sent a text but the message wouldn’t deliver. She noticed an old-fashioned rotary dial phone on the bar in a stunning shade of mustard. She lifted the receiver to hear absolutely nothing; the landline was also deceased, it seemed.

  No, she would definitely not be driving back tonight if the snow carried on falling, but at least she had been able to tell Ben that and stop him fretting, because he would worry, bless him. He was a sweet, caring person and she was lucky to have him in her life. Luckier than he was, because she was all too aware that she’d taken her phone out of her bag primarily to check if Luke had been in contact and not to tell Ben she was okay. Once again he was at the top of the important! list in her head and she hated that he was. The sooner they did what they had to do and could conclude their business, the better.

  If she had to stay here tonight, then so be it. With any luck there would be an overnight thaw and she’d excuse the mild inconvenience and look forward to being in her own bed before midnight tomorrow so that Santa wouldn’t pass by her house. She laughed to herself at that thought. She’d always been in bed before midnight on Christmas Eve as a child but it seemed Santa’s sack was empty by the time he got to her chimney. Year after year her hope in his existence dwindled a little more until she lost it altogether at nine. And one day she met Luke Palfreyman and then all her lost Christmases landed in her lap in one sparkly, candy-cane-flavoured, tinsel-wrapped lump.

  She took another sip of brandy, listening for the slightest sound in the muted silence. There had to be someone around in this godforsaken hole. She put down her glass, deciding to undertake a more detailed search of the premises, starting with the area behind the bar where she found a small galley kitchen and what was probably a pantry off it. No human in there, though. The ladies’ and gents’ toilets were identical, apart from their walls, which were pink in one case, blue in the other. They each contained a single cubicle, one sink, a bowl of spicy potpourri gently scenting the area. Bridge caught sight of herself in the mirror to find her straightened hairstyle hadn’t held firm after her outdoor exploration and had reverted to its natural kinks, making her appear less serious, more casual, a look she didn’t want today. She left the cloakroom and went up the narrow, steep staircase, which creaked and groaned as if protesting at the weight of her, all eight and a half stone of it.

  Still calling ‘hello’, she pushed open the doors and checked each of the three bedrooms up there: two with twin beds, the other a double, all unmade; each room had an en-suite with shower. The décor was chintz city: dusky pink carpets, flowery walls and curtains; crocheted dolls in crinolines sat on top of each loo hiding a toilet roll, with more of that Christmas-spicy potpourri in bowls dotted around, but the effect was charming rather than vomit-inducing. The owner had taken care to provide his guests with comfort, as each room had a velvet-upholstered chair next to a table with a fan of well-read books on it, a box of pastel-coloured tissues on the dressing table with a tray of complimentary single-use toiletries, a thin notepad and pen on every bedside cabinet all bearing a line drawing of the Figgy Hollow Inn. A fourth smaller room opposite the end bedroom was filled with stocks of duvets, pillows, sheets, towels, more of those tiny soaps and bottles of shower gel and shampoo, individually-wrapped too
thbrushes with a minuscule tube of toothpaste, pads, pens, notepaper, envelopes, boxes of those coloured tissues and a motherlode of toilet rolls. There might not have been anyone around, but, on the positive side, there were enough toiletries to see her through until May if things got really bad.

  Bridge went back downstairs, noticing things she hadn’t seen now her brain had started to switch to full-on observant survival mode: the lights on the wall, fashioned to resemble old oil lamps, the seasoned timber beams, which were probably original, given that the ceiling was bowed in places and the walls hadn’t been built by anyone with a plumb bob. She hated that Victorian colour palette usually, of chestnuts, maroons, heavy oppressive shades, but the deep red paint on the walls worked well here with the bright white-glossed picture rails and skirting boards, maybe because it had been expertly applied and not just slapped on by an old bloke down the road who got paid in pints. The bar area wasn’t that large: twelve dark wooden square tables to serve customers seated on the motley selection of wooden chairs, upholstered benches or leather-studded wing-back armchairs. The dark brown and red carpet had seen better days but it sat quietly underfoot without drawing attention to itself, letting other features take the glory, none more so than the massive inglenook fireplace. If ever there was a fireplace suited to a visit from Santa Claus, it was this one.

  There was an old stack system stereo near the Christmas tree with a cassette tape deck and a radio. She plugged it in, switched it on, twiddled a knob trying to tune it to a station that would give her some news.