The Present: The must-read Christmas romance of the year!. Charlotte Phillips

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СКАЧАТЬ flying now, she scooped one of the packages out with her fingertips. The paper wrapping was tissue thin, perhaps ivory at one point, but now a little yellowed with age. She unpeeled the layers carefully and stared. Lying in her palm was a tiny, elaborately decorated pale green glass ball with two tiny painted birds perched on the top. She could tell just from the smoky opaqueness of the glass and the muted tones of the paint that it was old. A loop of thin, faded gold ribbon was attached to the top. The holly inlay on the lid made sudden sense.

      ‘It’s a Christmas decoration,’ she said, glancing up at Jack. ‘For the tree. At least I think that’s what it is. I’ve never seen this box before. I mean, I’ve spent probably twenty out of thirty Christmases in this house, and I’ve never once seen it. It’s beautiful. Why on earth was it shoved away up in the attic?’

      She turned the box around to show him.

      ‘What’s this?’ He pulled a slip of paper from the pile of tissue wrapping. It had the same faded black slanted handwriting. He gave it to her.

      ‘It’s a note,’ she said, putting the glass ball down very carefully on the table and smoothing the piece of paper out flat. ‘“Olive. Remember that sunrise when the new day was ours, how we listened to the birdsong. We are stronger than any time or distance.” That’s gorgeous. What do you think it means?’

      ‘There’s a date there,’ he said, pointing to the corner of the paper.

      She followed his gaze. ‘Twenty-fourth December 1944,’ she read, and looked up at Jack, her mind working. ‘During the war.’ She flapped a hand at him and kicked the chair out opposite her. ‘Come and help me. Unwrap another.’ House clearance and cut leg were completely forgotten in her curiosity. That all-encompassing determination to investigate the living daylights out of this that she rarely felt these days, because working on a local paper meant she didn’t often get to cover anything more interesting than duck races and local fetes.

      She lifted another package from the box, and peeled back the paper layers. Jack sat down at the table and did the same. This time a tiny wooden drum sat in the palm of her hand, its faded paint red, gold, and green.

      ‘This one’s from December the thirteenth, 1944,’ she said, checking the date. She could hear the excitement in her voice. ‘Listen to this, “On this first day of Christmas, do not settle for what is within reach, my Olive. I carry you with me in my heart on this day and every day, no matter how far away I am. I will return. Believe in me.”’

      Her heart twisted in her chest. Oh, the bloody delicious romance of it.

      ‘Look at this one.’

      Jack held up a delicate green glass pear, perfect in every way, right down to the tiny painted leaf and stalk on the top. She took it from him and held it up to the light. It twisted this way and that, suspended from the ribbon. The glass was thin and flawless.

      He picked up the drum and turned it in his fingers.

      ‘The carving on this is really perfect,’ he said, frowning. ‘“This first day of Christmas”. These are based on the song, aren’t they? That’s what the letter is talking about. That song where you count down to the pear tree at the end. That must be the pear. And there was some line or other about drummers drumming, right?’

      She searched her mind and realised she could only remember bits and pieces of the song, although she definitely had memories of Gran playing it on the piano. The rickety old piano at the side of the sitting room just down the hall. She was all thumbs in her eagerness to unwrap the rest. There was a gold painted glass egg, an ornate swan. A black-and-white painted cow, perfect in every detail right down to its tiny horns. Each decoration came with its own love note, each one more heart-melting than the last.

      ‘I need to do a web search on the song,’ she said, picking up her smartphone. ‘Maybe the egg is for the geese-a-laying, and I definitely remember there being swans in there somewhere. Not sure about the cow, to be perfectly honest …’ She waved the phone high above her head. ‘No bloody Wi-Fi, is there,’ she said, to his questioning expression. ‘And the signal’s really patchy around here … right, here we go. Twelve drummers drumming, eleven pipers piping …’ He held up tiny carved panpipes. ‘Maids a-milking!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s the cow. Thank goodness, it was going to drive me mad.’

      ‘So some of them are a bit cryptic …’ He held up four entwined carved feathers ‘… I mean, I’m guessing this is four calling birds, right? But it definitely fits. It’s a set of Christmas decorations, based on the song. The twelve days of Christmas. They must be very old, and I’d say pre-1939, because it would have been impossible to pick up something like this during the war.’

      ‘Then there should be twelve, shouldn’t there?’ she said, looking at the empty slot in the middle of the box. There’s one missing.’ She ran her gaze quickly over the collection, holding her phone screen next to her, ticking lines from the song off in her head. ‘Five gold rings. That’s the missing one. What a shame. I wonder if it’s up in the attic somewhere in that mess of stuff. I’ll have to keep looking.’

      ‘Not right now you won’t, not until I’ve made sure the floor is safe,’ he said immediately.

      ‘And I’ll have to try and ask Gran about them when I visit,’ she said. ‘If she’s awake this time, that is.’ She hadn’t been conscious much at all yet. In many ways it had been the hardest thing to cope with, seeing Gran robbed of all her vivacity, so impossibly frail and unresponsive. ‘They’re obviously hers, her name is Olive. But she’s never mentioned them to me. I’ve definitely never seen them before: I would have remembered. And you saw them, they were just shoved in a corner up in the attic, covered in dust. No one’s opened this box in years. They were obviously just forgotten about.’

      She looked down at the collection of beautiful love notes. How could anyone forget them?

      Jack shrugged.

      ‘It’s been over seventy years, to be fair,’ he said. ‘Do you think they are from your grandad? Maybe they were a present from him to your gran.’

      She looked down at the collection on the table and frowned. She simply could not imagine the openness of feeling in those notes coming from her stoic and straight-down-the-line grandfather.

      ‘I do know Gran and Grandad met before the war, even though they didn’t marry until much later. Gran was quite old by the standards of the time when she had my mum. But even so, I’m just not sure he was that kind of man,’ she said. ‘He didn’t do romantic gestures, not that I know of. He was a very ordered kind of person, very straightforward, play by the rules. Never late, always thought decisions through before making them, not impulsive. It’s one of things I liked best about him. You always know where you are with someone like that.’

      He might not have been given to shows of affection, but if you wanted steadiness and absolute reliability, he was your man. He had been the perfect foil for a child whose mother was given to disappearing at the drop of a hat.

      ‘I want to ask Gran about them,’ she said, ‘but she’s only awake for moments at a time. She’s really not well. I don’t want to push a shedload of questions on her.’

      ‘It’s okay, you can ask her when she’s better,’ Jack said. ‘I’m sure she’ll pull round, just give it a bit of time.’

      She toyed with the tiny drum decoration. СКАЧАТЬ