Page 5 of The Twelve Dates of Christmas
“I’ll just give him ten more minutes,” said Kate.
“You’re not going to go all Miss Haversham on me, are you?” Matt wrapped his arms around himself against the cold. He’d come outwithout a coat, and his flannel plaid shirt wasn’t doing much to keep the chill out. The blond hairs on his freckly arms stood to attention.
Kate laughed. “Not just yet,” she said. “But if all twelve stand me up, I might start to get a complex.”
Carla called across the green. “Matt! Phone for you, something about duck eggs!”
“Coming!” shouted Matt. “I’d better go. Don’t be out here too long. I don’t want to have to chip you off the bench in the morning.”
Kate promised. “Thanks for the hot chocolate!” she called after him. He waved but didn’t turn back.
Matt had inherited the Pear Tree from his mother. For twenty years she ran it as a bakery and tea rooms until she was killed one night, along with Matt’s older sister, Corinna, in a car accident on their way back from the wholesalers. Matt was just seventeen.
Mac had helped with a lot of the practicalities when Matt’s mum and Corinna were killed. He ferried Matt back and forth to the funeral directors, and he and Evelyn, who’d been Matt’s mum’s best friend, took on the lion’s share of dealing with solicitors and banks. Kate recalled her mum being annoyed at the amount of time Mac and Evelyn were spending together.
Their deaths changed Matt. How could they not? There was overwhelming grief and behind that, an anger that seemed to bubble beneath his skin. And behind that, silently festering, a kind of insolence, a sense that he was owed happiness, that life owed him. At least that was how it had felt to Kate at the time. It was to be a death knell to their friendship; there is only a hairsbreadth between adoration and animosity and when the gap closes, it is rarely pretty.
Evelyn took Matt under her wing and into her home. She guarded his interests—business, pastoral, and educational—like a lioness. Evelyn ensured that his family home was taken care of, until such time ashe was ready to live there again. And she rented the bakery to an older couple, the Harrisons, who ran it until they retired.
By that time Matt was working in Manchester for a large accountancy firm with even larger prospects—he took the financial reins back from Evelyn and rented the shop out to another family. Unfortunately, they ran the business into the ground and left one night, having stripped the shop of anything of worth and leaving a string of debts behind them.
Matt didn’t come back to Blexford to rescue the business—he was too busy with his whirlwind bride and high-flying career—nor did he try to rent it out again. Instead, he paid the debtors, closed the place up, and left it. A shell, or a shrine. The Pear Tree Bakery was a forgotten story, like an old book that would never be read again but equally couldn’t be parted with.
Kate’s mother—who even then, it seemed, had a keen interest in real estate—had tried to get Evelyn to encourage Matt to sell the building and recoup some of his losses. Evelyn, however, felt quite certain, despite all indications to the contrary, that Matt would find his way back to Blexford one day.
The Pear Tree lay empty for a few years. The windows were boarded up, the garden became a wilderness, and what little remained inside the shop was left to fall into ruin.
Kate would sneak over the back wall sometimes when she came to Blexford to visit her parents. She’d wade through the long grass and peep in through gaps in the shuttered windows.
Kate had wanted to capture some spark of the happiness she’d felt in that place, her childhood playground. As if memories were tangible things that could be plucked like dandelion clocks to turn back time. But she could never quite reach them.
After his divorce, Matt returned to Blexford and his familyhome—just as Evelyn had predicted: it turned out he wasn’t the city slicker he’d imagined himself to be—and spent the next year completely renovating the Pear Tree and finally reopening it as the Pear TreeCafé.
He’d asked Mac to help him with the renovations, and Mac was only too pleased to help. Despite Kate and Matt’s falling-out, her dad had always had a soft spot for Matt. And Kate was far enough away for it not to bother her too much; she was busy forging her career in London and her relationship with Dan, and she rarely came back to Blexford.
When Kate came back to nurse her father, the Pear Tree Café was a thriving business, firmly rooted in the hearts of Blexford’s residents.
Matt rented out the newly refurbished kitchen to Carla and her mother to use in the evenings for their ready-meal business and offered discounts on drinks to book clubs and committee meetings. In such a small, close-knit community, the café had become a hub around which the village revolved.
Kate used to avoid the café like a turd sandwich. She’d drive down into Great Blexley when she needed a coffee fix and cross roads or dive into bushes if she saw Matt coming her way. Kate spent a lot of time hiding in bushes those first few months. A small fortune spent on a swanky coffee machine for her house fixed the caffeine cravings; finding ways to avoid Matt in such a small village was not such an easy problem to solve.
•••••
Kate shivered. Another ten minutes had passed and the daylight had all but gone. Ice crystals glistened on car roofs and the stars were already diamond points in the sky. There were no clouds. It was going to get very cold.
Her phone blipped:
Where are you?
It was a text from Laura.
With numb fingers, Kate texted back:
Been stood up! Am sitting on the bench on the green, freezing my tits off. Think my bum has frozen to the wood. May need to be surgically removed.
Laura replied immediately:
What a dick! He doesn’t know what he’s missing. Would you like me to hire a hit man?
