Page 10 of Sisters Making Mischief
‘Actually Joy, Bunny and Jasmine have never believed in Father Christmas,’ Vanessa said earnestly. ‘We told them years ago that it was just a product of advertising and Victorian sentiment. And Coca-Cola.’
‘God, you’re such a spoilsport,’ Sara slurred.
‘Well no, I disagree. I think it’s important to tell them the truth, right from the start,’ Vanessa said testily.
I stood up, cleared some of the empty glasses and bowls onto a tray and left them to their argument.
Out in the hall I thought I could still hear the dull thud of music coming from the girls’ room, which meant non-existent Santa couldn’t arrive at the end of their beds with their despised Christmas stockings any time soon. For a moment I could almost feel my blood pressure spiking.
Never mind. Push it away. I was determined to look on the positive side.
Everyone was safely here, there was plenty of food in the pantry and lots of heating oil thanks to a recent delivery. I’d remembered to buy three sorts of batteries for any toys that turned up, I’d stocked up with spare toothbrushes, hair bobbles and there were organic, vegan, hypoallergenic toiletries in the bathrooms. I’d bought luxury crackers, too, with proper gifts inside, not just horrible plastic tat and paper hats that didn’t fit anyone.
Surely tomorrow would be different. Everyone would have had time to get used to being here, each other and of course theprospect of Sara regularly having a bit too much of the wrong sort of Yuletide spirit.
And then there was John’s news about moving his family three thousand miles away. My heart did a plunge of disappointment at the prospect. I would miss him terribly. And he would be going soon, too, the middle of January he thought. He would be gone so soon, the idea that I wouldn’t be able to just pop over and see them was awful.
But that was weeks away; for now I would make an extra effort to cheer everyone up, to make their stay really special.
In the morning there would be hot chocolate and croissants for breakfast, a delicious, traditional Christmas feast after the King’s speech and a day filled with laughter, perhaps a jigsaw and some board games in the evening. This was a strange image really because no one in the family was any good at jigsaws, and Monopoly had been banned for years because of the arguments and cheating.
I’d always wanted to believe there was a special magic about Christmas, something that united people, when all the shops had shut, and I loved the idea that a lot of families were all doing much the same thing as we were.
I seemed to remember John saying something about all of them staying until the New Year, which in itself was unusual. Now that I knew that next Christmas he would be on the other side of the Atlantic, it all made sense.
If I was honest, it was all going terribly wrong, and we hadn’t even got to Christmas Day yet.
I got back to the sanctuary of my bedroom after midnight, first tidying away all the shoes and handbags on the stairs and picking up the coats from the floor and hanging them on the coat stand.
I caught sight of myself in my dressing table mirror. I looked old and tired. Well, I supposed I was actually both of those things.
I pulled a face at my reflection.
‘Merry Christmas, you filthy animal,’ I murmured.
I looked out of the window at the dark, rain-battered night and sighed. I began to wonder if I had been totally unrealistic about how this visit would go. An unexpected and unwanted question came into my head;whenwere theyleaving?
4
When Sara and John were children, Christmas Day usually started early. Any time after five o’clock and they would come cannoning into our room, shouting with glee. ‘He’s been! He’s been!’That Christmas was different.
I woke just after six thirty and lay for a moment wondering if there was any noise from my family, if I had missed out on any of the fun. It seemed not.
I dressed quickly in jeans and a lurid Christmas sweater that had been a present from the twins last year and went downstairs. The curtains in the sitting room were still closed, the Christmas tree lights were still on and so were the battery-operated candles, which were flickering less brightly than they had been. There were also several dirty glasses, some empty beer bottles, and the remains of a pizza in a battered cardboard box on the coffee table. For a moment I was catapulted back twenty years, to a time when I routinely came down to find similar debris from which my children had simply walked away. There were probably wet towels on the bathroom floor and empty juice cartons in the fridge too.
I wondered what time they had stayed up until, and whether they had been just talking, reminiscing over their marvellous childhood, or arguing. For a moment I was about to be rather annoyed, that even now in their mid-thirties they were capable of reverting to juvenile behaviour the minute they came through the front door.
I bet Vanessa wouldn’t put up with John leaving his shoes under the sofa and Marty would be more likely to eat one of his silk ties than order in a pizza that had probably arrived in a heated bag on the back of a moped.
Anyway. There was a lot to do, even with all the Mary Berry ‘getting ahead’business, so I tied on a clean apron and decided to cheer myself up, open the oven and gloat over the brined, juicy bird within. It was then that I realised that the kitchen was not filled with the lovely, Christmas scent of a roasting turkey. In fact, they had ignored my requests to turn off the Christmas lights and candles, but someonehadturned the oven off and the blasted thing was still raw.
Instead of the beautifully golden exterior I had been expecting, it was still pink and pallid and really rather distasteful.
Right, I whacked the oven up to full power and consulted Mary Berry for advice. It would take about four hours, so all was not lost, but it was just one more thing to worry about. That’s the thing about Christmas dinner, I knew some people thought it was only a glorified Sunday lunch but there were so many pans and bowls and plates to spin, not to mention limited oven and worktop space. I took a deep, calming breath and made some coffee. It would be fine. Perhaps I should write out a timetable.
Having done that and realising that I would now not have a sacred hour mid-morning when I could join in the seasonal excitement, I decided to abandon breakfast in the kitchen and instead laid the dining table with some festive plates andgot out the juices and jams. And yes, there was one empty carton of cranberry juice carefully put back in the fridge door and a seriously depleted bottle of Cointreau on the worktop next to some squished-out limes, so I guessed the late-night shenanigans had included several Cosmopolitan cocktails.
I must have got my daily ten thousand steps in before anyone else came downstairs, and then I did the rest of the vegetable preparation, not sure if anyone other than John liked parsnips, and wondering whether the girls – even if some of them rejected the happy, bronze, organic turkey – would still want to eat pigs in blankets? And if so, how many?
