The Magic of Christmas. Trisha Ashley

… and nothing much has changed, has it?’ Lizzy asked bitterly.

      ‘Perhaps not, but at least two good things came out of your marriage,’ Annie pointed out, being a resolutely glass-half-full person: ‘Jasper and your books about life in Perseverance Cottage.’

      ‘True, and it was thanks to your telling Roly how cold and damp the cottage was, after you visited us, that he offered us a house on the estate rent free, so that actually makes three good things.’

      ‘Oh, yes – and it was marvellous when you came back to Middlemoss to live,’ Annie agreed fervently. ‘I’d missed you so much!’

      Her voice had risen slightly and Jasper woke up and grumpily demanded why they were muttering over him like two witches. Then he complained that the dim light hurt his eyes, and a nurse appeared and firmly ushered them out of the room for a while.

      The following morning it was clear that the antibiotics were working. Great-uncle Roly visited Jasper in the afternoon and by evening he was so obviously on the mend that Lizzy managed to persuade Annie, who’d brought sandwiches and a flask of soup ready to share a second night’s vigil with her, to go home instead and get some sleep.

      Lizzy herself intended spending a second night there, of course: by Jasper’s bedside when allowed, or in the stark waiting room, with its grey plastic-covered chairs and stained brown cord carpet.

      It was in the latter room that Tom’s cousin Nick Pharamond found her, having driven non-stop halfway across Europe since Roly had given him the news about Jasper. His brow was furrowed with added frown lines from tiredness, and the dark stubble and rumpled black hair didn’t do much to lighten his usual taciturn expression. Lizzy always imagined that Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester would have been exactly like Nick, but she was still both delighted and relieved to see him because, unlike Tom, you could always rely on him to turn up in an emergency.

      Although she wasn’t normally a weepy sort of person, she instantly burst into tears all over his broad chest, while he patted her back in a strangely soothing way. Then he made her drink the hot soup Annie had left and eat a sandwich she didn’t want: he was forceful as well as reliable.

      The only downside to his presence during the rest of that long night was that Lizzy became so spaced out with shock and exhaustion that something unstoppable took over her mouth. She could hear her own voice droning on and on for hours, telling Nick a whole lot of really personal stuff about the last few years that she’d only previously confided to Annie, like how bad relations had become between her and Tom, especially since she found out about his latest affair.

      ‘I don’t know who this one is, but she’s been having a really bad influence on him. He’s played away before, of course, but it was never serious. He says it’s my fault anyway, for being so wrapped up in the cottage, the garden and Jasper – and perhaps it is.’

      ‘That’s totally ridiculous, Lizzy: of course it isn’t your fault!’ Nick said. ‘He should grow up!’

      Filled with gratitude at his understanding, she’d fished out a petrol receipt from the bottom of her handbag and on the back of it feverishly scribbled down her cherished recipe for mashed potato fudge, a creation she’d first invented while trying to cook up some comfort from limited ingredients down in Cornwall (and which was much later to be christened Spudge by Jasper).

      In return Nick, who was normally pretty tight-lipped on anything personal, divulged that Leila (his wife) refused all his suggestions that they both cut down their working hours to spend more time together, so they seemed to be seeing less and less of each other. This was really letting his guard down, so the night-watch effect must have been getting to him, too.

      ‘Do you think everything will be all right with me and Tom once Jasper’s off to university in a few years and I’m not so tied to Middlemoss and the school run?’ she asked Nick, optimistically. ‘I could even go with him on some of his business trips to Cornwall.’

      ‘I honestly don’t know, Lizzy, but it won’t be your fault if it isn’t,’ Nick said, and gave her a big, wonderfully comforting hug.

      Then something made her look up and over his shoulder she caught sight of Tom standing in the doorway staring at them.

      ‘Oh, Tom, where have you been?’ she cried, releasing herself from Nick’s arms. ‘Still, never mind – you’re here now, that’s the main thing.’

      Tom ignored her, instead demanding suspiciously of Nick, ‘What are you doing here, that’s what I want to know?’

      He was still looking from one to the other of them as if he’d had an extremely odd idea, which it emerged later he had – one that would finally turn what had already become a very sour-sweet cocktail of a marriage into a poisoned chalice.

      But at the time, all Lizzy registered was that his first words were not an urgent enquiry about his only child and, in one split second, not only did the last vestiges of her love for Tom entirely vanish, but they took even the exasperated tolerance of the previous years with them, so there was absolutely no hope of resuscitating their marriage.

      If Tom had ever possessed the core of feckless sweetness she’d believed in, then some wicked Snow Queen had blown on his heart and frozen it to solid ice.

      Chapter 1: Old Prune

      Here in Middlemoss Christmas preparations start very early – in mid-August, in fact, when the five members of the Christmas Pudding Circle bulk-order the ingredients for mincemeat and cakes from a nearby wholefood cooperative. Once that has arrived and been divided up between us, things slowly start to rev up again. It always reminds me of a bobsleigh race: one minute we’re all pushing ideas to and fro to loosen the runners and then the next we’ve jumped on board and are hurtling, faster and faster, towards Christmas!

      The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes

      The members of the Christmas Pudding Circle were sitting round my long, scrubbed-pine kitchen table for the first meeting of the year. It was a hot, mid-August morning, so the door was open onto the sunlit cobbled courtyard in order to let some cooling air (and the occasional brazen hen) into the room.

      I poured iced home-made lemonade into tumblers, then passed round the dish of macaroons, thinking how lovely it was to have all my friends together again. Apart from my very best friend Annie Vane, there was Marian Potter who ran the Middlemoss Post Office, Faye Sykes from Old Barn Farm and Miss Pym, the infants’ schoolteacher. The latter is a tall, upright woman with iron-grey hair in a neat chignon, who commands such respect that she’s never addressed by her Christian name of Geraldine, even by her friends.

      ‘Oh, I do miss our CPC meetings after Christmas each year,’ Annie said, beaming, her round freckled face framed in an unbecoming pudding-bowl bob of coppery hair. ‘I know we see each other all the time, but it isn’t the same.’

      ‘I was just thinking the same thing,’ I agreed. ‘And it doesn’t matter that it’s midsummer either, because I still get a tingle down my spine at the thought that we’ve started counting down to Christmas.’

      ‘I suppose we are in a way, but it’s more advance planning, isn’t it?’ Faye said.

      ‘Yes, and we’d better get on with it,’ Marian said, flicking open a notebook and writing in the date, for she organises the CPC just as she, together with her husband Clive, run most of the events around Middlemoss. As usual, she was bristling with energy right down to the roots of her spiky silver hair. ‘First up, are there any changes to the list of ingredients for Miss Pym to order?’

      ‘I still have last year’s list on my computer, so it will be easy to tweak it before I email it off,’ Miss Pym said, helping herself to more lemonade. An ice-cube cracked with a noise like a miniature iceberg calving from a glacier.

      But there was not much to tweak, for of course we mostly make the same things every year: mince pies, Christmas cakes and puddings. We need large quantities too, for as well as baking for our own families, we also make lots of small cakes for the local