The Magic of Christmas. Trisha Ashley

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      ‘Looks like he’s gone away again,’ I said gratefully. ‘Thank goodness for that.’

      Of course he hadn’t thought to feed the hens, who had put themselves to bed in disgust, or the quail, so Annie helped me to shut everything up safely for the night.

      As we walked back to the cottage Uncle Roly Pharamond’s gamekeeper, Caz Naylor, sidled out of a small outbuilding and, with a brief salute, flitted away through the shadows towards the woods behind the cottage.

      He’s a foxy-looking young man, with dark auburn hair, evasive amber eyes and a tendency to address me, on the rare occasions when he speaks, as ‘our Lizzy’, thus acknowledging a distant relationship that all the Naylors in the area seemed to know about from the minute I set foot in the place for the first time at the age of eleven.

      Annie looked startled: ‘Wasn’t that Caz? What’s he doing here?’

      ‘I let him have the use of the old chest freezer in there. Since I cut down on the amount of stuff I grow, I don’t need it,’ I said, for I’d been slowly running things down ready for the moment that I knew was fast approaching, when I must leave Perseverance Cottage. ‘He comes and goes as he pleases.’

      She shook her head. ‘All the Naylors are strange …’

      ‘But some are stranger than others? My mother was a Naylor too, don’t forget! Descendant of some distant ancestor who made good in Liverpool, in the cargo shipping line – which at least explains why I’m such a daughter of the soil and feel so firmly rooted here.’

      She smiled. ‘I expect Roly told him to keep an eye on things after that animal rights group started targeting you.’

      ‘More likely he’s keeping an eye on his freezer,’ I said, though it was true that the only evidence of ARG (as they are known locally) I’d spotted around the place lately were the occasional bits of gaffer tape where a banner had been ripped off my car or the barn. ‘Perhaps they just aren’t bothering with me that much. I mean, I can see why they might target Unks and Caz, especially since no one knows what Caz does with all those grey squirrels he traps, but why me? I’m not battery farming anything.’

      All my fowl lived long, happy and mainly useless lives, except for an excess of male quail and the occasional unwanted cockerel, which Caz dispatched for me with expert efficiency.

      ‘I expect they just include you in with the Pharamond estate, since your cottage is part of it,’ she agreed. ‘It’s not personal.’

      We cleaned up the mess in the kitchen as well as we could and then Annie left, since it was clear enough that Tom wasn’t coming back that night, at least – and I thanked heaven for small mercies.

      ‘What happened to your face, Mum?’ Jasper asked, getting his first good look at me in the light of the kitchen, when a friend dropped him home later. ‘That looks like a bruise coming up. And why are you wearing one of Auntie Annie’s horrible cardigans?’

      ‘Your father dropped a plate and a piece hit me,’ I explained. ‘Annie loaned me the cardigan to cover up the gravy stains on my T-shirt and I forgot to give it back when she went home.’

      He looked at the dent and new marks on the plastered kitchen wall and said, ‘He dropped a plate horizontally?’ in that smart-lipped way teenage boys have.

      ‘Yes, he was practising discus throwing,’ I said, and he gave me a look but let the subject drop.

      He didn’t ask where his father was. But then, at that time, he never did.

      Chapter 2: All Fudge

      We are in the middle of a hot spell and the air is fragrant with sweet peas and roses and full of the dull, drowsy drone of bees drunk on nectar. Yesterday I divided up the bigger clumps of chives and began drying herbs for winter, crumbling them up as soon as they were cool and storing them in cork-topped containers, though the bay leaves have simply been left in bunches hanging from the wooden rack in the kitchen. But soon they, too, will be packed in jars and put away in the cupboard until needed.

      As I used up the final jar of last year’s mincemeat for brownies, I wondered if mincemeat would also work as an ingredient in fudge – maybe even in Spudge, the mashed potato fudge I invented while we were living in Cornwall …

      The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

      Tom had been gone a couple of days when Jasper pointedly enquired after dinner one night if there was anything I wanted to discuss, but I just said we would have a little chat before he went to university and he gave me one of his looks.

      I knew he was now an adult, and at some point I’d have to explain to him that I was going to leave his father and the cottage as soon as he’d gone off to university, but at that moment he was so happy that he’d got the exam grades he needed for his first choice, I didn’t want to rain on his parade.

      Next day, when I let out the hens, I found it was one of those delicious late summer mornings that reminded me of the early honeymoon weeks of our marriage in Cornwall: dreamy swirls of mist with the warm sun tinting the edges golden, like pale yellow candyfloss wisps. You could easily imagine King Arthur and Queen Guinevere riding out of it in glorious Technicolor, all jingling bridles and hooded hawks, though if they had they would probably have been surprised to find themselves transported from the land of legend into a Lancashire backwater like Middlemoss.

      The last remaining acres of darkly watchful ancient woodland that crowded up to the back of Perseverance Cottage would have looked normal enough to them, I suppose – apart from Caz Naylor, who as usual was camouflaged from headband to boots, Rambo-style. I spotted him flitting in and out of the trees only by the white glint of his eyeballs and the sweat glistening between the green and brown streaks on his naked chest. A blink and he was gone, back to wage war on the dangerous alien life form known to the uninitiated as the grey squirrel.

      Still, even in Arthurian times they would probably have had some kind of shamanistic Green Man and so would be used to such goings-on, and the duckpond, chickens and vegetable patch out front would look reassuringly normal to them. But what would they have made of the huge, tumble-down old greenhouse, the remains of a previous tenant’s abortive attempt at market gardening? Or my battered, once-white Citroën 2CV? A 2CV that, I now noticed, had its hood down, so the seats would be soaked with dew and very likely lightly spattered with hen crap. Or even, which was much, much worse, duck gloop.

      It was also listing drunkenly on one seriously flat tyre.

      Tossing the last of the feed to the hens, I stuck my head inside the cottage door.

      ‘Jasper?’ I called loudly up the steep stairs, expecting him to be still asleep. By nature, teenagers are intended to be nocturnal, so it felt cruel to have to drag him out of his lair under the eaves each morning.

      Instead, he loomed out of the doorway next to me, making me jump. ‘I’m here, Mum. What’s up?’

      ‘Flat tyre. You have your breakfast and get ready while I change it. I hope it’s a mendable puncture – the spare’s not that brilliant and if I have to buy a new one it’ll be worth more than the rest of the car put together.’

      One of the Leghorns had followed me into the flagged hallway (a Myrtle: all the white hens are called that; and the browns, Honey) and I shooed it out again. СКАЧАТЬ