Page 5 of One More Christmas at the Castle
I sighed. ‘It must be serious then, because even though she’sloaded, she always expects her money’s worth out of us, and more, doesn’t she?’
We did work very hard for our money, though: we cooked, served, tidied, made beds and generally took the stress out of house parties (Henry even did a very grand butler, if the host was out to impress), but it’s surprising how many of our clients seemed to expect us to do all the cleaning and provide twenty-four-hour room service, too.
‘She only told me yesterday, so I suppose I’d better change our availability on the website,’ Henry said. ‘I could try contacting people who enquired about a Christmas booking and were turned away, I suppose. There was that woman quite recently who was very pressing and didn’t want to take no for an answer.’
‘They’ve probably all made alternative arrangements by now,’ I said rather gloomily. Our Christmas booking is so lucrative we don’t have to take another one till Easter.
‘It gets even worse, Dido,’ Henry said. ‘If I’m not away working, Mummy will force me to join the annual family gathering instead, and apart from feeling I’d rather be shut into a small walled town rife with bubonic plague, I simply can’t afford all those presents.’
‘I suppose that’s the drawback with having so many richer relatives,’ I said, and of course,we’dbe much richer if we worked for most of the year, and not just a few selected weeks of it. But we preferred to earn just enough to keep us duringour precious time off, when Henry worked on his increasingly popular blog and I wrote my recipe and reminiscence books.
It was a way of life that had worked well for us both for ten years now.
‘Well, Granny Celia and Dora will still be away and I’ve just seen Dad, so if we don’t get a booking I won’t have anywhere else to go.’
‘You could come to the gathering of the clan with me,’ suggested Henry.
I shuddered, remembering the year I’d tried that, before the business took off. ‘No, thank you. I’m still traumatized by the experience of dancing the Gay Gordons with your cousin Hector.’
‘He’s veryhearty,’ he agreed, which was one way of putting it.
‘We could simply both stay at home over Christmas and pretend we’re away,’ I pointed out, and he brightened slightly.
‘Of course, Mummy would find out eventually, but by then it would be too late. We could overindulge in the eating and drinking, play Scrabble and watch old films back-to-back.’
If those were the Interests he’d listed on that dating site, it wasn’t really surprising he hadn’t had any takers … though it sounded fun to me.
‘There we are then, we have a contingency plan if we don’t get a last-minute booking,’ I said. ‘We could make up some of the shortfall by taking a spring half-term post, as well as our usual Easter booking next year.’
I got up and stretched – economy aeroplane seats are cramped and not designed for any known human form, especially one six foot tall in her bare flippers, and my spine was still kinked into knots.
‘I’d better leave you to it, Henry, and get over to GreatMumming to make sure Granny’s succulents stillaresucculent. I’ll see you later.’
I grew up in Great Mumming, a pleasant small market town in West Lancashire, set where the fertile farmlands start to rise towards the moors. Granny’s cottage was right on the edge of it and built from mellow old bricks. The central part dated back to the early 1800s, though it had seen a lot of changes since then.
When Granny and her husband, Paul, had bought it, soon after their marriage, it had been in need of total renovation and they’d worked hard to turn it into a happy family home, completed by the adoption of my father.
I’m very sure that Granny hadn’t been expecting to have to start all over again with a newborn – me – when she was widowed and in her late fifties. It was lucky that she and her best friend, Dora, also a widow, had by then decided to pool their resources and share the cottage – and, as it turned out, the childcare.
Mrs Frant, Granny’s long-term cleaner, lived in one of a nearby row of terraced houses and kept an eye on the cottage when Granny and Dora were away. Once Dora, who was younger than Granny, had retired from teaching, they could indulge their shared passion for travelling outside the school holidays, so nowadays they seemed to be away more often than they were at home. Luckily they were both well enough off to globetrot – or globecruise – to their hearts’ content.
Mrs Frant had a major fear of burglars learning about their habits, so popped in and out of the cottage several times a day, opening the curtains in the morning, drawing them at night and making sure the switches that caused random lights to go on and off, like a mini version of the Blackpool Illuminations,were still working. She religiously reset the burglar alarm after every visit, too, not just at night.
She refused to let the man who came to do the garden into the house, which was why she was in charge of the row of huge, tree-like succulents in the conservatory, though unfortunately, she didn’t have green fingers.
As soon as I’d got there and turned off the alarm, I checked on them, but they looked fine to me, and the heating was kept on a low setting, so they never got too cold.
Everything in the cottage was dusted and polished immaculately, the air smelling of lavender, beeswax and, indefinably,home: I might always have felt like a giant and inconvenient cuckoo in the nest, but there had been a place for me there.
The mahogany wall clock ticked, the old floorboards creaked and sighed, and, apart from the pile of post on a small gateleg table in the hall, you would have thought the owners had just stepped out for a walk, rather than being afloat on a far-flung ocean, cocktail of the day in hand.
I noticed one of the kitchen taps had begun to drip, so I changed the old-fashioned rubber washer before it became any worse – I’m nothing if not practical – then went through the post, tossing the junk in the recycling bin and putting anything else in the bureau. Granny and Dora preferred not to be bothered while on their travels, unless it was something really urgent. There was nothing else to do, so I’d put my coat back on and headed for the door when, with perfect timing, Mrs Frant arrived and insisted on setting the burglar alarm for me, as if I’d never done it before.
As we walked down the path, I told her our Christmas booking had fallen through so I might be able to come over occasionally if we didn’t manage to get another one, and she said it made no difference to her, she’d be keeping an eye onthe place as usual, Christmas or no Christmas, but to let her know.
‘I will, and I’ll be here again next week anyway, whatever happens,’ I promised. I had her Christmas present from Granny Celia and Dora to leave in the cottage, along with one from me, and all our cards.
We stood at the gate for a few minutes while Mrs Frant filled me in on the local gossip, then she toddled off home, her grey curls bobbing and her long tweedy cape flapping, looking just like Margaret Rutherford in a Miss Marple film.
