Wish Upon a Star. Trisha Ashley

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СКАЧАТЬ wasn’t much of a churchgoer, except to admire the architecture, monuments and windows, but she’d attended every Midnight Carol Service at All Angels since moving back to the village. I think it was the music: her tastes were very eclectic and she often said that Mr Lees, who was the organist there, had to be heard to be believed.

      And actually, I had heard him, because he often played the organ at the strangest times, and a fugue distantly haunting you in the dead of night when the wind was in the right direction certainly got the hairs standing up on the back of your neck.

      I’d never been to the services with her, because taking Stella out in the freezing cold night hadn’t seemed like a good idea, so that evening Ma went off with Hal, who called for her. While she fetched her voluminous black cape, which made her look like a smaller and more rotund version of the woman in that Scottish Widows advertisement, I asked Hal why he didn’t fly out to New Zealand and spend Christmas with his daughter and her family and he said he wouldn’t go in an aeroplane ever again for love nor money, but he’d be off up to his sister’s in Scotland for Hogmanay instead.

      ‘I couldn’t miss the Winter’s End Christmas party,’ he added. ‘I’m the Lord of Misrule and we have a grand time.’

      ‘I don’t know about Lord of Misrule, but you’re an old fool, getting dressed up and prancing about at your time of life,’ Ma said, reappearing.

      ‘There’s nowt about my time of life to stop me prancing, and anyway, you never come to the party so you don’t know what goes on.’

      ‘I’ve heard things, though.’

      ‘I’d love to go, and Ottie invited us, but it would be a bit much for Stella,’ I said.

      Stella was already overexcited by the thought of Father Christmas arriving during the night and it had taken me ages to get her settled down that evening. Still, finally she’d gone to sleep and later I’d tiptoed in and hung her stocking on the bedpost, then arranged the presents beneath the little pine tree, before eating the gingerbread and carrot left out for the great man and his trusty reindeer.

      Ma had already put her presents under the tree, roughly wrapped in brown paper and tied up with green garden twine, so they looked strangely trendy.

      When she came back from the service she looked cold and the tip of her nose was scarlet. Once she’d divested herself of her woolly cape, I handed her a warm mince pie and a glass of Laphroaig, her favourite whisky.

      ‘How was the service?’

      ‘Very good – all the old favourite carols and hymns, sung to the right tunes, although Mr Lees played us out with “Nearer, My God, to Thee”, which was a slightly odd choice. It was worth going, just for that.’

      She put her feet up on a red Moroccan leather pouffe, sipped her whisky and said, ‘Well, our Cally, I had a good think about things while Raffy was doing his sermon, all about the Nativity. And, of course, there’s always room at this inn.’

      ‘You mean … we can come and stay, if I have to sell the flat?’

      ‘Of course you can, you daft lump. I was hardly going to turn you down, was I?’

      I got up and went to give her a hug. ‘If it happens, I promise we’ll keep out of your hair as much as we can, and then as soon as Stella’s well again, leave you in peace.’

      ‘You can have too much peace,’ she said surprisingly.

      Ma’s reply was not unexpected but it was a weight off my mind.

      Of course, part of me still hoped for a miracle to happen before the operation became necessary – or at least that some new treatment would become available over here. But logically, I knew that it was unlikely that the cavalry would come riding to my rescue over the brow of the hill, and the most I could hope for was that Stella’s condition didn’t worsen over the coming year.

      Since she was born I’d learned to live in the present, but nothing could stop me dreaming of a future.

       Chapter 6: Hasty Pudding

      After a magical Christmas, when Stella seemed to be eating well and growing stronger, as she always did in Sticklepond, it had been quite a shock when she became ill with breathing difficulties and a rocketing temperature right after we got home, and was rushed into hospital.

      What would be a minor sniffle cured by a dose of Calpol in a normal child became a near-miss with pneumonia for Stella, and though luckily they quickly got her stabilised and her temperature down, it was a week before she could come home, clingy, pale and exhausted by the least exertion.

      It was another setback but – more than that – I’d seen the writing on the wall. Even before the consultant suggested contacting Dr Rufford Beems in Boston about bringing forward the date of the operation, I’d told Ma I was putting the flat on the market.

      The operation had been booked for the coming autumn. All I had to do was raise a vast amount of money, and keep my darling child from catching any more infections between now and October, when we were to leave …

      To say I was stressed out was an understatement, and after comfort-eating four microwave-in-a-mug chocolate cakes in quick succession, when it got to the fifth I started thinking of ways to jazz them up a bit and came up with Black Forest gateau variation.

      I sent the recipe off to Sweet Home magazine with some others I’d stockpiled, and the editor liked it so much she slipped it into the April edition (which of course, as is the way with magazines, came out in March) instead of a raisin roll one.

      In the same April issue, Celia was showing the readers how to create friendship bracelets from old buttons, and Will had an article about making found-object pictures using an old frame he found in a skip, bits of driftwood, sea-washed fragments of glass, and shells.

      A lot of the stuff you find these days washed up on beaches after high tide you wouldn’t want to stick in a picture, but Celia and Will never seem to notice anything ugly, only what is good and beautiful.

      You know, before we met him, when Will had only just started sending articles about his driftwood sculptures into the magazine, we used to jokingly call him Wooden Willie. But once we’d met him we liked him so much we never did again.

      When Celia went to live in Southport with him I really missed her, so at least once the flat’s sold and we’ve moved in with Ma I’ll be living near her and I can file my Sweet Home articles from Lancashire like they do. Stella always seemed both happier and healthier in Sticklepond, too.

      I was pretty sure Ma was dreading it even more than I was, so it was with mixed feelings that I picked up the phone on the same brisk March day that the Sweet Home magazine came out, to tell her I’d had offers on the flat at full asking price – luckily two people had wanted it – and accepted the one who could complete quickest.

      ‘I’m flabbergasted you’ve sold it so fast,’ she said. ‘Fancy someone paying all that money for a space no bigger than a shoebox, and down a hole, too.’

      Ma had never been a big fan of basement living … and come to think of it, neither СКАЧАТЬ