Page 23 of The Christmas Retreat
‘It won’t be so bad, because you’ve already met me and Daddy – and probably Nerys, too?’
I nodded and attempted a smile. ‘I’m just being stupid. Come on, let’s beard the lions in their den.’
‘Or the Gorgons in their cave,’ suggested Cariad.
Flinging open the door with a flourish, she announced loudly, as if we were the main attraction everyone had been waiting for: ‘Here we are at last!’
7
Clash of the Titans
The large room seemed to be entirely full of people, all of whose faces had swivelled in our direction, although panic made them blurred to me.
‘Cariad, darling child,’ said a small, elderly man, with silvery hair and a beard. ‘If you become an archaeologist, you’ll be a huge loss to the stage!’
‘Hello, Uncle Noel!’ Cariad said, pulling me further into the room. ‘This is Ginny, and she’snota Gorgon.’
She let go of my hand and made a beeline for a tray of canapés on the coffee table before a glowing and very realistic fake log fire.
‘I never thought she was,’ Nerys said. She was sitting at one end of a long, squishy blue velvet sofa and now patted the seat next to her invitingly.
‘Do come and sit down, Ginny. Most of our guests met briefly earlier, over tea and coffee in the refectory, but I thought we’d wait for you and do a proper round robin, with everyone introducing themselves.’
I sank down gratefully next to her and, now that my panichad subsided slightly, took in the room and the other people there – half a dozen or so men and women – including my mother, seated comfortably before the fire with her feet up on a pouffe and a glass of an amber liquid in her hand.
She gave me her somewhat crocodilian smile. She was clad in a slinky pleated jersey top and trousers in an odd pinkish-lilac shade that matched her short spiky hair. I was so glad she had given up the shrieking bubblegum shade it had been the last time I saw her.
The rest of the party were grouped sitting or standing around the fire, as if posing for a bizarre contemporary uptake onThe Night Watch. But they only occupied one end of the room, which must extend right to the back of the house, with a great, curtained bay, with cushioned seats around a table, at the far end.
Tall, well-filled bookshelves lined the walls and, as always in other people’s houses, I would much rather have looked at the books than the people, but Cariad’s voice recalled my attention.
‘Daddy isn’t here yet,’ she objected, through a mouthful of cheese straws, and I saw a large, lumpy middle-aged woman with a heavy face under tightly curled grey hair that resembled nothing so much as a metal pan scourer cast her a look of undisguised disapproval.
‘Oh, we won’t wait for Rhys. He won’t mind if we begin without him,’ Nerys said. ‘Timon, give Ginny a drink and then I’ll start our round robin off. We might as well get the family out of the way first.’
I accepted a glass of sherry from a tall, thin, bespectacled man with sandy hair. It wasn’t something I’d ever drunk before, but all the alternatives seemed to be spirits, which I don’t really like.
When I took a cautious sip, it reminded me of fruit cake somehow, and I quite liked it.
‘You all know who I am – Nerys Matthews,’ Nerys began. ‘This has been the family home of the Caradocs for generations and I am the direct descendant of the painter Cosmo Caradoc, who lived and worked here until his early death just after the First World War – late in 1919, to be exact.’
I cast a startled look at Evie. Caradoc’s death being around the crucial time she was researching was something that I, at least, hadn’t known. But she was regarding Nerys enigmatically over her glass.
‘I am also a painter,’ continued Nerys. ‘It seems to run in the family. My parents were not themselves artists of any kind; theywerekeenly interested in all the arts and began the Retreats. Now there are several over the year, although, of course, we have only recently been able to start them again.’
She looked at the wiry, sandy-haired man who had given me my drink and said: ‘Over to you, Timon.’
‘As you will have gathered, I’m Timon Matthews, Nerys’s husband. I’m a ceramic artist and I also run the Triskelion Pottery in what was once the old stables and coach house. Originally called Triskelion Art Porcelain, it was set up to produce porcelain figurines by Hugh Caradoc-Jones, who married Cosmo Caradoc’s daughter and added her name to his own. We changed the name of the business to Triskelion Pottery, since that is what everyone called it, and branched out a little more in our range.’ He beamed round at us all. ‘I can give any of you interested a tour of the pottery and there’s also an attached gallery and cafe.’
‘I think you’d better get off your hobby horse, Timon, and pass the baton to Uncle Noel,’ Nerys suggested with a smile.
‘Youintroduce me, dear boy. I’m going to be talking enough later,’ said the silver-haired man to Timon.
I noticed that he bore such a strong resemblance to one of a pair of tall porcelain figurines on the mantelpiece behind him, a strange white-robed man wearing a wreath of twigs, that he must have sat for it. And now I came to look at the other, a traditional Father Christmas, he looked remarkably like Tudor!
‘OK,’ Timon agreed. ‘This is Noel Piper, a relation of Nerys, and so Uncle Noel to us all! He owns the bookshop in the village, A Winter’s Tale, specializing in antiquarian and new books on Welsh mythology, history and legends, and also anything winter or Christmas related. He is also an expert on local history and will be giving us an after-dinner talk tonight on the annual Seren Bach Winter Solstice ceremony, which takes place tomorrow night.’
‘Succinctly put, dear boy,’ said Noel.
