The Little Christmas Kitchen: A wonderfully festive, feel-good read. Jenny Oliver

hair. Pull yourself together Ella. This isn’t you.

      She strutted back into the dark coolness of the room and said, ‘I will stay, thanks, I’m only here for a couple of days Maddy so it shouldn’t put you out too much.’ She was the grown-up, she was the guest, she was the mature one, and she was blowed if poor little Maddy wanting her room all to herself was the reason she wasn’t going to stay.

      ‘Lovely.’ Her mum smiled, glancing up from where she was dipping little baby squids in batter. ‘Do you want a glass of something?’ she asked, ‘Red wine? Beer? Retsina?’

      For a moment Ella thought how lovely it would be to just be able to sit down, pour a glass of chilled white wine into a little glass, pick at a plate of plump purple olives and silver anchovies and gossip and laugh and giggle like she remembered her parents and their friends doing. When she would watch from the door and then her mum would catch her and she would be called into the room and she’d think she was in trouble but actually they’d offer her something to eat and she’d perch on a chair in her nightie and they’d ask her questions and tell her jokes before her mum would take her hand, soft and warm, and put her back to bed.

      But instead she said, ‘Do you think I could just go up to the room? I’d really like to get changed, you know I’m here straight from work.’ She could feel her grandfather watching her. Could sense Maddy hanging around by the back door listening. Could see the look of disappointment flash across her mum’s face before she nodded and said cooly, ‘Of course you can. Maddy, sweetheart, can you show Ella upstairs?’

       CHAPTER 8

      MADDY

      Maddy hated seeing her mum upset. Dimitri would always be like, ‘She’s fine, look at her, she’s smiling…’ but Maddy could tell by the tilt of her head or the way she would swallow and look away. Maddy’s emotions were written all over her face but her mum and Ella, they had a way of just hinting at what was brewing underneath and it drove her crazy. Mainly because they were usually the cause of each other’s upset.

      ‘You could have had a drink.’ Maddy said as she sat down on the wooden chair next to the dressing table in the upstairs room.

      ‘I wasn’t thirsty.’ Ella replied without turning round. She’d put her suitcase on the small single bed in the corner that Maddy used as a sofa. ‘I take it this is where I’ll be sleeping?’ She unzipped her case and glanced back at Maddy then looked pointedly at the big double bed in the centre of the room, white gauze curtains hanging either side like a canopy, the material rippling in the breeze from the open French windows that looked out over the sea.

      Maddy bit the inside of her cheek and then said, ‘Ella, if it would make you feel better, you can have my bed.’

      ‘No no, I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Ella turned her back again and Maddy watched as she pulled out piece after piece of the most beautiful clothes. Kaftans that sparkled in the evening light, bikinis that looked dry clean only, a wide-legged silk pantsuit that draped like pouring water. She tried not to be jealous but she couldn’t help it, envy seemed to constrict her throat, making her have to swallow before she could say, ‘Take my bed.’

      ‘Really there’s no need.’

      ‘Honestly, take it.’

      ‘Ok.’ Ella picked up her suitcase, still open, and transferred it over to the double. ‘So…’ she said as she carried on unpacking and arranging, ‘Tell me about London.’

      Maddy didn’t want to tell her. Didn’t want to say it out loud because to Ella it would seem so nothing. A couple of nights singing in a bar. She would look at her as if she was crazy. Little Maddy in the big city attempting to follow a dream. She’d probably tell her not to get caught up in a prostitution ring or agree to any topless modelling. The idea actually made her smile a little – she remembered when the two of them sent off for a modelling competition in Just Seventeen magazine. Taking each other’s pictures and pouting for the camera. Where had they been when they’d taken them? She narrowed her eyes as she tried to picture the photographs. There was a Take That poster on cream wallpaper with gold stars. There were advent calendars that said Joyeux Noel at the top in swirly writing. Her dad’s flat. Her dad’s flat in Battersea. Dinner with Veronica. Maddy had refused to eat anything.

      When she looked up Ella was watching her, a collection of toiletries cradled in her arms. ‘Oh it’s nothing.’ Maddy said, shrugging the question off. ‘I was going to go but I’ve had some cash flow difficulties.’

      After that neither of them said anything for a while. A hundred different things floated in and out of Maddy’s head to say. She wanted to ask how their dad was, whether he was still with Veronica. She wanted to ask why Ella had appeared out the blue without Max, she wanted to know what she’d eaten at Claridge’s, if she’d even gone. Most of all though, looking at all of Ella’s beautiful stuff, she wanted to say, will you lend me the money to go to London. But instead she said, ‘I’ll get you some clean sheets.’

      Dinner was as awkward as Maddy had thought it would be. Her mum had laid the big table in the kitchen – covered it in candles and white china and sprigs of olive in vases. In the centre of the table was a big, bubbling moussaka and a ceramic bowl of Greek salad, the olives from the grove on the hillside, the feta from Dimitri’s goats.

      Ella had changed into a long sleeved blue and white striped top, loafers and skinny white jeans with a thin red belt. Maddy thought she looked like she’d just stepped out of the pages of a J Crew catalogue.

      ‘So how’s work, Eleanor?’ her grandmother asked after they’d all be served and Ella had asked for a much smaller portion so hers had been passed round to her grandfather.

      ‘Great, the company’s not doing quite as well as it could but if we can land this new account we’ll be sorted for the fiscal year. It’s a mobile phone company.’

      Her grandmother made a face as if to show she thought that all sounded very clever and important.

      ‘I’ll work on it while I’m out here.’ Ella added as her phone rang, almost on cue, and she nipped outside to answer it.

      ‘Bloody phones,’ her grandfather muttered.

      ‘You all right, Mum?’ Maddy asked when Ella was out the room. She’d noticed she was just pushing the moussaka around her plate and seemed restless, on high alert trying to do everything to please Ella. The kitchen, Maddy noticed, was spotless. Not that it was usually dirty, but it was gleaming. And on the side board her mum had put out the nativity set they’d had as kids and a tacky plastic angel with fibre optic wings that Maddy hadn’t seen for years twinkled in the low lighting. They always did a kind of haphazard Christmas. Her mum would throw a big party at the taverna on Christmas Eve and do a mix of Greek and English food and all the locals would come, but on Christmas Day it was just their family and they’d have lobsters and fresh fish, and her mum would decorate the place with lights and glass bowls of pomegranates, she’d scatter olive branches and hellebore flowers along the mantle piece and string mussel shells that she’d gilded with gold leaf along the windows and glass hearts, almost too delicate to touch, in front of the mirror.

      The nativity set though, Maddy didn’t even know her mum had kept that. It was only seeing it now that she realised how much their Christmas trimmings had changed. Or perhaps, she thought, watching her mum watch Ella as she talked quietly into her phone outside, her mum had consciously created new traditions.

      ‘Fine, honey.’ her mum said, ‘It’s nice isn’t it? To have all the family around.’ Maddy watched her take a breath in through her nose and almost reset herself before reaching forward and tucking Maddy’s hair behind her ear.

       CHAPTER 9

      ELLA

      What was with all the hair touching?

      Ella was in a foul mood when she walked back into