Four Christmas Treats. Jessica Hart

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СКАЧАТЬ not? You look gorgeous.’

      ‘Just look at me. I’m spilling out of it everywhere. I look like a…a hooker,’ Tilly said through gritted teeth.

      ‘Sorry to interrupt you both, but Art sent me up to find out where you are. He said to tell you that his stomach thinks his throat’s been cut.

      ‘Silas.’Annabelle beamed. ‘You’re just the person we need. Come and tell Tilly to stop being so silly. She looks gorgeous in this dress, but she says it makes her look like a hooker.’

      Tilly’s face burned as Silas stepped into view and stood studying her in silence. He had changed into a dinner suit, and her heart did its pancake trick again. How unfair it was that men should look so wonderful in their evening clothes.

      ‘Tilly’s quite right,’ he announced uncompromisingly, adding softly, as her face burned with chagrin, ‘and yet totally wrong. She looks like a classy, very expensive kept woman—or an equally classy and very expensive rich man’s wife.’ He crooked his arm. ‘May I have the pleasure of escorting you both down to dinner? Because if I don’t I’d better warn you that Art is going to be on his way up here, and his mood isn’t good.’

      Silas was smiling, but it shocked Tilly to see how apprehensive her mother suddenly looked. If they’d been on their own she would have asked her outright if she was as afraid of Art as she looked—as well as insisting that her mother loan her something else to wear. Right now, though, her concern for her mother disturbed her far more than her own self-conscious discomfort at wearing a dress that was way too revealing for her own personal taste.

      Her disquiet was still with her five minutes later, when she watched Annabelle hurry over to where Art was waiting impatiently for them by the drawing room door, apologise prettily to her fiancé and reach up to kiss his cheek—or rather his jowl, Tilly thought grimly, as she tried to control her own growing unease about her mother’s marriage plans.

      Tilly tried to look discreetly at her watch, heaving a small sigh of relief when she saw that it was almost midnight. Tonight had to have been the worst evening of her life. How could her mother even think about joining a family so appallingly dysfunctional and so arrogantly oblivious to it?

      Art’s daughters, Susan-Jane and Cissie-Rose, were stick-thin and must, Tilly imagined, take after their mother. There was nothing of their father’s heavy squareness about them. Their husbands, though, were both unpleasantly overweight. Art’s daughters were, according to Tilly’s mother, ‘Southern Belles.’ If so, they were certainly Southern Belles who had been left out in the sun so long that all humanity had been burned out of them, Tilly decided, as she listened to them deliberately and cruelly trying to destroy her mother with their innuendos and subtle put-downs.

      At one point during the evening, when she had been obliged to listen politely yet again to Cissie-Rose praising herself to the skies for the high quality of her hands-on mothering, and complaining about the children’s nanny daring to ask for time off over Christmas so that she could visit her own family, Tilly had longed to turn round and tell her what she thought of her. But of course she hadn’t, knowing how horrified her mother would have been.

      For such an apparently clean-living family, they seemed to consume an incredible amount of alcohol. Although very little food had passed what Tilly suspected were the artificially inflated and certainly perfectly glossed lips of Art’s ‘girls’, as he referred to them. Predictably, they had expressed horror and then sympathy when Tilly had tucked into her own meal with gusto, shuddering with distaste at her appetite.

      ‘Dwight would probably take a stick to me if I put on so much as an ounce—wouldn’t you honey?’ Cissie-Rose had observed.

      ‘No guy likes an overweight gal. Ain’t that the truth, Silas?’ Dwight had drunkenly roped Silas into the conversation.

      ‘Oh, you mustn’t tease Silas, Dwighty,’ Cissie-Rose had told her husband in her soft baby whisper of a voice. ‘He and Tilly are newly engaged, and of course right now he thinks she’s wonderful. I can remember how romantic it was when we first got engaged. Although I must say, Tilly, I was shocked when Daddy told us about the way you and Silas were carryin’ on earlier.’

      ‘T’ain’t right, doing that kind of thing in a house where there’s young ’uns around,’ Dwight had put in.

      ‘Which begs the point that presumably young ’un number one was sent away somewhere when young ’un number two was conceived?’ Silas had murmured indiscreetly to Tilly, on the pretext of filling her wine glass.

      She had desperately wanted to laugh, only too glad of the light relief his dry comment had provided, but she hadn’t allowed herself. He had no business linking the two of them together in private intimate conversation of the kind only good friends or lovers exchanged.

      Tilly didn’t think she’d ever seen two men drink as much as Art and Dwight. Art’s other son-in-law—Susan-Jane’s husband, Bill, a quiet man with a warm smile, hadn’t drunk as much as the other two—although Tilly suspected from the amount of attention he was paying her that either he and Susan-Jane had had a quarrel before coming down for dinner, or he was a serial flirt who didn’t care how much he humiliated his wife by paying attention to another woman.

      Tilly tried not to show what she was feeling when she watched Art down yet another whiskey sour, but she was relieved to see that Silas wasn’t joining the other men in what seemed to be some sort of contest to see who could mix the strongest drink.

      In truth, the only good thing about being downstairs was the warmth—and the excellent food. Had her room been more comfortable, and had she had it to herself, she would have escaped to it long ago, Tilly admitted as she tried and failed to smother a yawn.

      ‘Darling, you look worn out,’ Annabelle exclaimed with maternal concern. ‘Art, I think we should call it a night…’

      ‘You can call it what the hell you like, honey, but me and the boys are callin’ for another jug of liquor—ain’t that right, boys?’

      Tilly’s heart ached for her mother when she saw her anguished look.

      ‘The staff must have had a long day, with everyone arriving. It would be considerate, perhaps, to let them clear away and get to bed?’ Silas spoke quietly, but with such firm authority that everyone turned to look at him.

      ‘Who the hell needs to be considerate to the staff? They’re paid to look after us.’ Dwight’s face was red with resentment as he glared at Silas.

      Tilly discovered that she was holding her breath, and her stomach muscles were cramped with tension. But Silas had the advantage, since he had already stood up and was moving to her chair to pull it out for her.

      ‘You’re right. I apologise if I overstepped the mark.’ Silas ignored Dwight to address his apology direct to Art. ‘It was only a thought.’

      ‘And a good one Silas,’Tilly heard her mother saying heroically. ‘I’m tired myself, Artie, do let’s all go to bed.’

      Tilly wasn’t at all sure that Art would have complied if a flustered young girl hadn’t come hurrying in to the room to tell Cissie-Rose that one of her children had been sick and was asking for her.

      ‘Oh, my poor baby!’ Cissie-Rose exclaimed theatrically. ‘I knew coming here was gonna make her sick. I told you—you know that I did.’

      ‘Come СКАЧАТЬ