Last Christmas. Julia Williams

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      Furtively looking each way up the shop, Catherine pushed her trolley to the side of an aisle and, feeling rather as she had done aged fourteen when she used to bunk off to smoke behind the bike sheds, she abandoned it. They could manage without brandy butter for once. And no one liked Christmas puddings anyway.

      As she fled the supermarket, ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ was still pumping out. Bah humbug, she thought to herself.

      Gabriel sat in the lounge, head in his hands. The fire had long gone out and, as the wintry evening drew in, dark shadows were springing from every corner of the normally cosy room. He should make up the fire again. Warm up the place before he went to pick up Stephen. Never had his family home felt so cold and barren.

       Stephen.

      Oh God. What was he going to tell Stephen? Thank goodness he’d been at the rehearsal for the Village Nativity all afternoon. Thank goodness he hadn’t witnessed the latest painful scene between his parents. Gabriel had tried to protect Stephen from the truth about his mother for the best part of seven years, but even he would have had difficulty today.

      ‘You don’t understand. You’ve never understood,’ Eve had said, her eyes hard and brittle with unshed tears, her face contorted with pain. It was true. He didn’t understand. How could he understand the pain she went through every day, the mental anguish of feeling forever out of sorts with the world and unable to deal with the reality of it?

      It was her very fragility that had drawn him to her in the first place. Eve had always seemed to Gabriel like a wounded bird, and from the moment he’d met her all he wanted to do was to care and protect her. It had taken him years to see that, whatever he did, he couldn’t protect her from herself. Or from the painful places her mind journeyed to.

      ‘Please let me try,’ Gabriel had pleaded. ‘If you always shut me out, how can I help you?’

      Eve had stood in the house that she had always hated with her bags packed and ready—she’d have been gone without a scene if he hadn’t popped back because he’d forgotten to tell her that he was taking Stephen round to his cousins’ house after the rehearsal for the Village Nativity, to help decorate their tree—and looked at him blankly.

      ‘You can’t,’ she said simply. She went up to him and lightly stroked his cheek. ‘You’ve never got that, have you? All this,’ she gestured to her home, ‘and you. And Stephen. It isn’t enough for me. And I can’t go on pretending it is. I’m sorry.’

      Tears had pricked his own eyes then. He knew she was right, but he wanted her to be wrong. For Stephen’s sake as well as his own. Gabriel had spent so many years trying to reach Eve, it was a default way of being. He hadn’t wanted to face the truth. There were no more excuses. He was never going to be able to give Eve what she needed. She was a world away from him, and always had been.

      ‘What should I tell Stephen?’

      Eve stifled something that sounded like a sob.

      ‘You’re a good man, Gabe,’ she said. ‘Too good for me. You deserve better.’

      She kissed him on the cheek, and fled the house towards the waiting taxi, while Gabriel stood in stunned silence. He’d known this moment had been coming from the minute he took her under his wing. She was a wild bird, and he’d always felt that eventually she would fly away and leave him. But not like this. Not now. Not just before Christmas.

      Gabriel had lost track of the time while he sat alone in the gathering gloom. It was only now that he was beginning to notice how cold it had suddenly got. How cold it was always going to be now that Eve had gone. He wondered what he was going to do. Whether he’d ever see her again. And what the hell he was going to say to their son…

      Noel Tinsall stood nursing a pint at the bar in the tacky nightclub the firm had booked for this year’s Christmas party, listening to Paul McCartney blasting out what a wonderful Christmas time he was having. Noel was glad someone was. He wondered idly when it would be decent to leave. Probably not wise to go before Gerry Cowley, the CEO, who was strutting his deeply unfunky stuff on the dance floor, leering at all the secretaries. It was only eight o’clock. The party was barely started yet, and already he could see some of the junior staff had drunk more than was good for them. He wouldn’t be surprised to find a variety of embarrassing photos doing the rounds on the Internet in the next few days. What was it about the office Christmas party that made people behave so idiotically? Bacchanalian excess was all very well when you didn’t have to face your demons at the water cooler the next day.

      ‘Hey, Noel, you sexy beast, come on and dance.’ It was his secretary, Julie. Or rather, not his secretary anymore. Not since that jumped-up toerag Matt Duncan had got his promotion. Now Noel had to share a secretary. A further subtle means of making him feel his previous high standing in the office was being eroded. Time was, when people jumped to his beat. Now they jumped to Matt’s. Perhaps it was time to get a new job.

      Noel hated dancing, but also found it nearly impossible to be rude to people, so before long he found himself in the middle of the dance floor, surrounded by sweaty, writhing bodies, and unable to escape the feeling that everyone was laughing at him.

      ‘You’re dead sexy, you know,’ Julie was shimmying up to him, and grabbing his tie. ‘Much more than that silly tosser Matt.’

      No, no, no! They had always had such a professional relationship, but she was clearly pissed and coming on to him. Not that she wasn’t incredibly attractive or anything. And not that Noel wasn’t sorely tempted for a moment. Would Cat even know or care if he were unfaithful? Sometimes he didn’t think so. Julie was lovely, uncomplicated and she was available. It would be so easy…

      What on earth was he thinking? Noel shook his head. Definitely time to go.

      ‘Sorry, Julie, I’ve got to get back,’ Noel said. ‘Catherine needs me. Kids. You know how it is.’ Catherine probably wouldn’t care if he were there or not, judging by the notice she took of him these days, but Julie didn’t need to know that.

      Ducking her alcohol-fumed kiss, Noel made his way out of the club, and into the welcome crisp air of a London December evening. It was still early enough for the third cab he hailed to be miraculously free, and before long he was speeding his way towards Clapton, secure in the knowledge that, despite the amount he’d imbibed, he’d got away without making an idiot of himself.

      The cab drew up outside his house, an imposing Edwardian semi down a surprisingly leafy street. The Christmas lights he’d put up with the kids the previous evening flickered maniacally. One of them had no doubt changed the settings again. He bounded up the steps and let himself in to a scene of chaos.

      ‘I hate you.’ Melanie, his eldest daughter, came blasting past him and flung herself up the stairs in floods of tears, followed swiftly by his son, James, who shouted, ‘I so hate you too!’

      ‘Nobody hates anyone round here, I hope,’ he said, but he was ignored and the house rang to the sound of two slamming doors.

      ‘Don’t want to go to bed. Don’t WANT to!’ his youngest daughter Ruby was wailing as Magda, their latest inefficient au pair, tried to cajole her off the floor of the playroom where she lay kicking and screaming. Noel noted with a sigh that the bookshelf had fallen down again. He wasn’t quite sure he was up to dealing with that, so he poked his head in the lounge and found Paige, his middle daughter, surreptitiously scoffing chocolate decorations from СКАЧАТЬ