Chapter 3

3

EIGHT DAYS UNTIL CHRISTMAS

‘So, are you all ready for the big day?’ the bartender asks. Shelley looks round at Lena and Pearl and the three women laugh. ‘What?’ He grins. ‘What did I say?’

‘Three champagne cocktails please,’ Shelley announces.

‘Oh, like that, is it?’

‘D’you do pints?’ Lena asks, leaning forward over the bar. ‘ Pints of champagne?’

‘Tense time of year then,’ the neatly bearded young man remarks with a smile. They perch on stools as he makes their cocktails, taking in the glamour and opulence of the Rivoli Bar at The Ritz.

It’s an annual tradition, coming here. Just one cocktail each; it’s all they can afford. But they soak it all in: the polished walnut and glistening chandeliers and Christmas trees decorated in silver and gold.

From there, they stroll happily onwards to Soho where they squeeze their way into their favourite pub. It’s noisy and scruffy, its gloss-painted walls deeply nicotine stained and hung with ancient tattered theatre posters. It has terrible loos and the burgundy patterned carpet is rather sticky. However, although the cocktails are always fun to kick off their Christmas night, here is where the friends really feel at home. Miraculously, as Shelley is served, a tiny table in the corner becomes free, and Lena bags it.

Soho has changed a lot since Shelley, Pearl and Lena worked together just a short hop away on a women’s magazine in the mid-nineties. Chain coffee shops have proliferated, squeezing out the celebrated greasy spoon where they often converged for hungover lunches. Madam Jojo’s has gone, and the piano bar next door, where they’d perched on stools at the piano and laughed away many a night. It hardly seems possible that thirty years have whipped by since they met in that cheerful buzzy office, filled with music and chatter and clouds of Shockwaves hairspray.

Lena was features writer and Shelley the editor’s PA. Shelley had met Joel there. Joel the art director, loud and brash and wildly flirtatious with his risqué banter and bleached quiff. He’d slept with half the office before he and Shelley had got together. But he’d grown up by then, she decided. Got it all out of his system, she’d told Pearl and Lena, as if to convince herself as much as her friends.

Pearl was the magazine’s beauty editor and never 100 per cent sure about Joel. However, she too had met her future husband on the magazine, soon after landing in London from the sleepy Cheshire village where she’d grown up. Shy, lovely, handsome Dean, who everyone had adored. They’d been mates at first, as everyone was on the magazine: a riotous gang. Dean had been a designer, laying out pages and always taking extra care when working on Pearl’s beauty features. Dean always worked away quietly, in contrast to Joel, his boss, who liked to perform at work, showing off, making everyone laugh.

Pearl had always liked Dean, and it wasn’t just Lena and Shelley who’d teased her about what was obviously a mutual attraction. Pearl and Dean. It had been the office joke: the perfect coupling that had yet to happen; that unmistakeable music blasted out frequently, long after the joke had worn thin. It didn’t matter that Dean was three years younger than Pearl. They had fallen in love, and two years on they were married – Pearl in a vintage silk dress and Dean looking as if he’d raided his dad’s wardrobe for a suit. The whole magazine staff had attended, and Joel had created a celebratory mock magazine cover depicting Pearl and Dean smiling broadly, cheeks pressed together, to mark the day. Beautifully framed, it was presented to them on their big day.

Pearl + Dean Special Wedding Issue!

Pearl was thirty-two when their baby, Brandon, was born. They wanted more children but a year or so later, Dean became ill. There was a year of hell, through all the chemo and radiotherapy. And it seemed hopeful for a while, but then the cancer came back, and Pearl’s beautiful man faded and then died on his fortieth birthday. She’d lost the love of her life and Brandon, aged ten, had lost his much adored dad.

The years have spun by and finally, last year, Pearl started dating again, crumbling under pressure from Shelley and Lena to at least give it a go. After all, it had been over a decade. And three months ago, on Hinge, she met a handsome Belgian man named Elias.

‘So he keeps hinting that he’s planning this amazing present for me,’ she announces now.

‘What is it?’ Lena exclaims.

‘He won’t say! He won’t even give me a hint. He’s going home to Brussels for Christmas and he’s back on the twenty-seventh and says I need to pack a bag.’

‘A bag!’ Shelley grins. ‘I wonder where you’re going?’

‘I don’t know!’ Pearl beams at them, cheeks flushed in the overheated pub. ‘What d’you think Joel’s getting you, Shell?’

‘Oh, you know what he’s like. Says it’s all a load of commercial nonsense.’ Her tone is breezy, accompanied by a shrug. ‘Made such a fuss about shopping on Saturday, and then on Sunday he had his mates round for table football and he was laughing about the tree in front of them all?—’

‘What, your Christmas tree?’ Pearl frowns.

‘Yeah! I wouldn’t have minded but I’d gone out and bought it and dragged it home myself, and stuffed it in a pot, and he reckoned it was wonky—’ She breaks off, feeling unexpectedly emotional at sharing this.

‘Christmas trees are meant to be wonky,’ Lena says firmly.

‘And he keeps saying why do I make such a fuss about Christmas?’ Shelley continues. ‘And why not get everyone one of those charity presents? A goat or a donkey or a donation to a sewage system?—’

‘Joel wants a sewage system?’ Pearl’s eyes widen.

‘God, no. He wants a guitar amp. A massive black box thing to keep up in his lair?—’

Lena splutters. ‘Maybe he could come over and do a performance for Tommy’s parents on Christmas Day? Distract them from grilling me about where I’m “from”?’

‘I can’t believe they’re coming to you.’ Shelley shakes her head.

‘I know. Rain water’s pouring into the kitchen, apparently. Annabelle can’t possibly cook Christmas dinner in there.’

‘Couldn’t they microwave a couple of jacket potatoes?’ Pearl suggests.

‘And what about their other sons?’ Shelley asks. ‘I thought there was a whole gang?—’

‘Team,’ Lena corrects her. ‘It’s “Team Huntley”, remember? And no, they can’t go to any of the others because they’re all off to some massive chalet in the French Alps for the whole of Christmas…’

‘Well, couldn’t they join them there?’ Pearl looks confused.

‘ Oh no. They wouldn’t want to intrude on the holiday, not when they’ve all worked so hard all year being Chancellor of the Exchequer and boss of the Bank of England and Mayor of bloody Berkshire.’ She is exaggerating, but only slightly; in fact, Lena can never remember what any of them do. Only that they are terribly important and that all they ever seem to talk about is ‘managing wealth’. When magazines started closing, Lena swapped careers from features writing to creating content for several linked charities. She loves her work, and the flexibility of freelancing, but she is definitely not in the managing wealth bracket. On occasion it’s been more like managing the loose change she’s managed to scrabble together from under the sofa cushions.

She pushes her short, choppy dark hair behind her ears. ‘I actually feel like running away,’ she admits.

‘If you’re going, I’m coming too,’ Shelley announces. ‘Joel wouldn’t even get the decorations down from the attic. He said, “Why don’t you just get some new ones?” And I said I wanted my grandma’s baubles like we have every year. I ended up clambering up there myself, with Martha resenting holding the ladder for ten minutes, asking if I was nearly done yet because she was going out…’ She laughs dryly, trying to make light of it. She didn’t plan to pour out her woes on a night that kicked off with cocktails at The Ritz, and which they’d looked forward to for weeks. But still, her heart quickens in anger. Her grandma’s baubles. Why couldn’t Joel understand?

‘You know,’ Pearl says, ‘we could go away. My cousin’s always inviting me up to his place…’

‘Oh, who’s this?’ Lena asks.

‘Michael in the Highlands,’ Pearl replies. ‘I haven’t seen him in years – decades actually. And he’s not even a real cousin. He’s my second cousin, I think – or once removed? Our mums were cousins, or second cousins. I was never quite sure. And he’s quite a bit younger – five or six years or something like that. I used to babysit him occasionally.’

‘You went up to the Highlands to do that?’ Lena asks in surprise.

‘No, they lived in Cheshire, like us, but in a much posher area. Michael went to private school. But he was nice, y’know? A sweet kid. We always got along well.’

‘So what happened?’ Pearl asks. ‘Did you just lose touch?’

‘Yeah, you know how it is. Our lives just veered off in different directions. I moved to London, and from what I heard he met this girl, and they got married and had this dream of living the rural idyll up in Scotland. They found this ramshackle place and did it all up and now it’s a B&B.’

‘Wow,’ Lena murmurs. ‘So did it work out for them?’

‘The B&B has, as far as I know. The website’s still up and running and his address is the same as it always was. But not the marriage, I don’t think. At least, I assume they’ve split because the Christmas cards stopped coming from Michael and Rona. These past few years they’ve just been from Michael.’

The girls order more drinks, filled with excitement now about this new information. ‘A single man, stuck way up there on his own,’ Shelley muses. ‘I’m impressed he gets it together to send Christmas cards at all.’

Pearl chuckles. ‘I thought you were going to delegate this year, Shell? Get Joel to do them?’

She snorts. ‘I gave him the box of the cards and the list of addresses and he wrote one, illegibly?—’

‘And he’s meant to be the typography expert?’

‘Allegedly. I had to take them off him?—’

‘You know what that’s called?’ Lena cuts in. ‘Doing a job deliberately badly so you can get out of doing it? Weaponised incompetence.’

Shelley laughs and shakes her head quickly, as if wanting to dispel any thoughts of her husband right now. ‘So can we see pictures of Michael’s place?’ she asks, and Pearl nods eagerly and pulls up the B&B’s website on her phone. The three crane forward, taking in the heather-strewn landscape and the powder blue cottage nestling between purplish hills.

‘Wow,’ Lena murmurs. ‘Imagine living way up there. So beautiful.’

Pearl nods, bringing up interior pictures of the B&B rooms. With whitewashed bare stone walls, they are flooded with daylight and furnished simply. Beds and easy chairs are strewn with woollen throws in deep violets and mossy greens. Bare floorboards are dotted with sheepskin rugs. The effect is at once stylish and modern, yet cosy too. Shelley peers at a double bed generously made up with fluffy throws and heather-coloured pillows and has a sudden yearning to spirit herself into it. She spots several pairs of green wellies, lined up neatly by the cottage’s front door, and thinks of Joel’s trainers: whacking great objects, like hovercrafts, kicked off in their hallway at home.

‘It looks amazing,’ she marvels. ‘I’d love the three of us to go up and stay sometime.’

‘Yeah, we’d pay of course,’ Lena adds quickly. ‘I mean, it’s his business, isn’t it? We wouldn’t expect to stay for free.’

Shelley takes a big swig of wine. ‘I want to be there right now, Pearl. Beam us up there. Call him now!’

Pearl laughs, and her auburn curls bounce around her cheeks. ‘I’ll message him sometime, see what he says. I haven’t seen him since, God – he must’ve been about twenty. But he’s never forgotten Brandon’s birthday, even though they’ve never met. He still sends a card, even now. And he was so kind and thoughtful after Dean died.’

‘He sounds lovely ,’ Shelley announces.

‘I was just so impressed,’ Pearl adds. ‘Michael didn’t know us as a family and he doesn’t have kids. But when he heard about Dean he was on the phone right away. And then a few weeks later he called again and asked if he could talk to Brandon. He chatted away to this bereaved ten-year-old kid about what he was into and stuff. And that Christmas he sent him a Lego robot.’

Shelley’s blue eyes glitter as she squeezes Pearl’s hand. ‘I really think we should go. How about early spring?’

‘Count me in,’ Lena enthuses. ‘I can think about that little blue house while Tommy’s mum’s saying, “Oh, I didn’t think you people celebrated Christmas?”’

‘And I can picture myself thrashing through the heather with a bottle of Scotch when I’ve peeled the seventy-fifth potato and Joel’s asleep on the sofa with his mouth open.’ Shelley laughs. ‘We need this to get us through Christmas.’

‘We absolutely do,’ Pearl says firmly. ‘Leave it with me, girls. I’ll sort it.’