Once Upon A Christmas. Jennifer Joyce

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ as a study.

      She began over to one side and gradually cleared the worst of the clutter. The floor was littered with boxes, books, piles of paper and files. There were even pieces of metal and models that she, as an engineer, recognised as pumps. It was when she had just about reached the far side of the room, her hands dusty and her fingernails black, that she made an amazing discovery.

      It was an ordinary-looking cardboard box. She picked it up, wondering whether the contents should be binned or kept. Setting it on the desk, she sat down and started sifting through it. Within a very short space of time she realised she had stumbled across something incredible.

      The box was full of letters, each meticulously folded and sealed into an individual envelope. There must have been hundreds of letters in there. And all of them had been written by her father to her.

      It didn’t take long to work out that there was one letter every month, from the time he and her mother had separated, until just before his death. Most poignant of all was the fact that the first hundred or so were all in stamped envelopes that had been sent all the way from Australia to her mother’s home address; the same house where Holly had grown up. Each envelope was unopened and still sealed, and Holly recognised the firm handwriting of her mother across the front of each one: Return to Sender.

      She counted them up. In all, there were a hundred and twenty-two sealed, stamped envelopes. He had written a letter to her every month from the day he left until her eighteenth birthday. From then on, the monthly letters continued all through her life, but in plain envelopes, unstamped and unsent, marked only with her name, Miss Holly Brice. There were tears in her eyes as she picked up the box and carried it down the stairs. She set it on the coffee table in the lounge and made herself a cup of tea. Then she sat down and started on the first one, dated 1^st June 1989.

      Every one began with the same words: My dearest Holly. As she read her way into the letters, she began to get a real insight into the true nature of her father. At first the letters were simplistic and entertaining. After all, she reminded herself, her father had been writing to a seven-year-old girl. But one phrase cropped up time and time again. After I had to leave you. It made it sound as if he had been forced to leave, rather than choosing to go off with another woman, as Holly had always been led to believe by her mother. There was no attempt at an explanation but, of course, how could he explain such things to a little girl? She read for several hours, but she was no nearer to discovering exactly what had transpired to cause the separation. But she now knew, if she hadn’t known it before, just how much her father had loved her.

      By the time she was too drained to continue reading, his letters had almost reached her eighteenth birthday. He had left Britain almost immediately after leaving her mother and had been living in Australia all that time. She folded the last letter and slipped it back into its stamped envelope, as ever scrawled on by her mother. She glanced at the next ones in the box. There were a couple more with stamps, but from then on, the letters had not been posted. Presumably he had accepted the fact that a distance between them of ten thousand miles, and an implacable ex-wife, now meant he no longer stood any chance of ever contacting the girl he still addressed as his Dearest Holly.

      Holly felt emotionally drained. She did a quick calculation. She was thirty-three, so, at a rate of one a month, there had to be well in excess of a hundred and fifty letters still to be read. She closed the box and slumped back on the sofa. Now, as she relaxed, the tears began to flow for the father she had never really known. She pulled out a tissue and wiped her eyes, but to no avail. She found herself sobbing her heart out. There was a movement at her feet and she felt the sofa sway. Next thing she knew, the Labrador had climbed up and sprawled himself across her, his nose against her chest, his big, brown eyes staring up at hers with grave concern.

      She looked down at him, knowing she should throw him off the sofa, but in the end settling for taking the big hairy head in her arms and hugging him tightly. They stayed like that for some minutes before the weight of the dog on her lap made her decide to make a move.

      ‘Right, Stirling, you know you should be on the floor, don’t you?’

      Clearly he didn’t. In the end she had to manhandle him off her lap and slide him onto the floor. He sat there and surveyed her solemnly. She caught his eye.

      ‘I know, Stirling. You’re a very good dog and I love you dearly, but your job’s done now. I’m all right.’ She stood up, blew her nose and headed for the kitchen once more.

Day Four

      Monday

      The drive up to north Devon in Jack’s old Land Rover was seriously different from Holly’s ride in Justin’s Range Rover the previous day. The word utilitarian didn’t fully describe the spartan conditions in the car. Gone was the luxurious white leather, gone was the burr walnut fascia, and gone was the purring engine and the air conditioning. Instead, there was a battered bench seat with some rips, mends and sinister stains in the vinyl, windows that didn’t close properly and a deafening combination of engine noise and assorted squeaks, clunks and crashes every time Jack changed gear, but, even so, Holly loved every bit of it.

      By the time they got to Croyde Bay, she had compiled a mental list of mechanical items that needed checking and, most probably, replacing. Nevertheless, the old girl got them there in just over an hour, with Stirling dozing in the back and Jack’s surfboard strapped to the roof. They chatted a bit on the way up, but conversation was difficult at anything over forty miles an hour as the mechanical noise, along with a plaintive howl from the wind running over the surfboard on the roof bars, blotted out most normal chat.

      It was a stunning day – crisp, clear and with just a light offshore breeze. The sea first came into view in the distance beyond the broad expanse of sand dunes and beach that constituted Saunton Sands. The road then curled gently round the coast, offering magnificent views across the open cliff tops to the rocks and waves below. Visibility was so good, Jack was able to point out Lundy Island, lying twelve miles out in the Bristol Channel. Beyond that there was nothing until you reached southern Ireland and, from then on just the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the USA.

      The sea looked like a sheet of corrugated iron as it neared the shore, with row after row of waves rolling in. They came into the village of Croyde itself and Holly started seeing signs for surf schools, surf shops and even a campsite called Surfers’ Paradise. Malibu it might not be, but Croyde was clearly a British surfing Mecca, even on a day like today when the outside temperature was in single figures. As they drove down the narrow access road to the car park, they could both see majestic waves rolling into the bay between the rocky outcrops either side. Jack parked at the far side of the car park among a vast collection of old VW campers, clearly the vehicle of choice for the surfing community, and turned off the engine. The engine noise was immediately replaced by the raucous cries of seagulls and the regular crunch of waves hitting the beach a hundred yards below them. From where they were parked, they were able to look down between sand dunes and a café directly onto the beach.

      ‘Look at those waves! Magic Seaweed said it would be a five star day and, boy, were they right!’ He sounded like a little boy on his birthday.

      ‘Magic Seaweed?’ She smiled at him, happy to see his obvious excitement.

      ‘The fount of all wisdom for surf dudes.’

      ‘So you’re a surf dude?’

      ‘I suppose I should really have a VW camper for true street cred, but the old Land Rover’s pretty close. And, of course, that’s an Al Merrick custom board tied to my roof. That’s worth loads of bonus points.’ He grinned at her. ‘Yeah, I’m a dude, СКАЧАТЬ