The Christmas Surprise Read online

  Rosie’s phone buzzed. It was a text from Moray. He asked her favours from time to time, when the surgery were short-handed with medical staff, and that seemed to be the case now; Can you come to the Hyacinth asap 999, it said.

  Rosie blinked and Stephen turned the car around immediately, wheels skidding in the dirty slush by the side of the road.

  The Hyacinth was a rather ugly, chintzy hotel about ten miles south of Lipton, which served as a venue for special nights out, and was also the HQ of the apparently very good golf club. Rosie and Stephen didn’t go there very often as the food was absolutely dreadful, plus you couldn’t walk home. Out-of-towners stayed there, and it hosted lots of corporate away days, plus there was always a cabal of golfers (usually including Hye) holding court in the bar, which had a fake gas fire and was covered in bad watercolours of stags. It was where the local people held their big dos – Tina and Jake’s wedding was scheduled there for 21 December. It was staffed during the summer by charming but slightly disorientated teenage staff from eastern Europe who came into Lipton to spend their meagre wages and were the reason Rosie had started stocking piernik.

  As they drew closer, they craned their necks. The sirens were still sounding, and they could see a large column of dark grey smoke rising above the forest.

  ‘No way,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Do you think it’s them?’

  ‘I’ll drop you off and take Appy home, I don’t want him breathing in smoke.’

  Rosie nodded, her heart suddenly starting to beat faster. Surely not a fire.

  ‘Shit. Shit.’

  Stephen looked at her. ‘And don’t take any stupid risks, okay? You can’t. You’re a mother now.’

  Rosie shook her head.

  ‘It’s all right, you know me, I’m a totally craven coward.’

  ‘Just let the firemen do their job.’

  Rosie felt her heart beat painfully fast as they sped up the gravel to the Hyacinth’s front door. Sure enough, the back of the hotel was ablaze, near the kitchens. On the front lawn, standing shivering in the cold, were a bank of kitchen staff, their checked trousers and T-shirts testament to the fact that it had been a lot warmer inside than out. Also standing about – and notably not mixing with the staff – were several guests, including two in dressing gowns – an older man and a younger woman, whose face was bright red – in the middle of the day.

  The fire brigade already had their hoses trained on the blaze, and several enterprising characters were taking photographs on their telephones and, presumably, sending them to the newspapers. Rosie jumped out of the car and kissed Stephen and Apostil. Stephen looked torn.

  ‘Maybe I’ll just get out and see if they need a hand …’

  ‘What did you just say to me?’

  ‘Um, no heroics.’

  ‘Quite! No heroics! What are you going to do, teach the fire out?’

  Stephen bit his lip.

  ‘But—’

  ‘But nothing! Look, Derbyshire’s finest are all here.’

  It was true, there were copious numbers of both firemen and police.

  ‘And if they can’t handle it, I promise I’ll call, okay? Now get going, Apostil needs a feed. Moray can give me a lift back.’

  Stephen stared at the scene for a few moments more, then sighed.

  ‘Okay. Go. Be safe. I love you.’

  Rosie ran behind the house and found Moray tending to a slightly confused-looking man.

  ‘Did they get everyone out?’ she gasped.

  ‘I think so,’ said Moray. ‘I don’t think there were that many people in there. The fire alarm worked well.’

  His smooth, handsome face was unreadable.

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘A pan fire in the kitchen, I believe. Fortunately they had fewer than half their staff on rota today.’

  Rosie looked at the shaking man sitting on a chair. His gaze was fixed.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said. She recognised him from church, but she didn’t think he had any children. Anyone and everyone with children Rosie knew incredibly well.

  ‘This is Mr McIlford,’ said Moray, in a toneless voice. ‘He’s the manager of the hotel.’

  ‘Oh, you poor thing,’ said Rosie sympathetically. ‘Oh my, how awful. It’s lucky there weren’t many people in today.’

  Mr McIlford looked at her briefly and didn’t say anything.

  ‘I think you’ll be all right,’ said Moray. ‘One of the paramedics is bringing you a cup of tea, okay?’

  The man nodded carefully. Moray led Rosie away to the side.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Rosie. ‘I was terrified when I saw the smoke, really feared the worst. Have you checked out everyone else?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Moray. ‘Pretty much. It seems the fire alarm went off in good time.’

  He glanced back at the white-faced Mr McIlford.

  ‘Insurance job,’ he whispered.

  ‘NO,’ said Rosie. ‘No way. Can’t have been. Surely not. Oh my God, do people actually do that?’

  ‘Half the kitchen staff conveniently not in today? Hotel practically empty? This place has been losing money for years.’

  ‘He couldn’t have set it on fire.’

  ‘They’re sending the police in to check, see if he used an accelerant.’

  Sure enough, there was a police van there with a dog. Rosie had wondered whether the dog was to look for people in the wreckage. Clearly it wasn’t.

  ‘Oh my goodness,’ she said. ‘OOH, I have to ring Stephen.’

  ‘Don’t mention it to him. Don’t mention it at all.’

  ‘In case you’re wrong?’

  ‘God, no, I’m not wrong. I knew this place was up shit creek. No, in case we get called as witnesses. Seriously, you don’t want to do that. It is INCREDIBLY boring.’

  ‘Well I’m telling Stephen.’

  Moray rolled his eyes.

  ‘Oh yes, blah blah blah, we’re so in love.’

  ‘I bet you’ll tell Moshe.’

  Moray glanced away and didn’t answer. ‘How’s Nemo?’

  ‘Don’t call him that. He’s brilliant. Except …’

  And Rosie filled Moray in on the gossip from Lipton Hall.

  ‘Oh my,’ said Moray.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter,’ said Rosie, ‘but we really are skint. There are people in Africa waiting for a school we promised.’

  ‘Nobody thinks you’re skint,’ said Moray. ‘Everyone thinks you’re minted because you’re from London and Stephen’s Stephen.’

  ‘I know,’ said Rosie. ‘It’s a problem.’

  There was a skidding noise behind them, and Tina’s little Ford Escort ploughed up the gravel.

  ‘Oh GOD,’ came a voice.

  ‘Shit, I’d forgotten about Tina,’ said Rosie, turning round. ‘Um, who’s minding the sweetshop?’

  But Tina was completely distraught. Although the blaze was dying down, the fire had blown out the kitchen doors and windows and half the back wall was down. All the windows were broken and there was rubble everywhere, while the water cascading from the upper storeys was clearly making a horrible mess of the flowery wallpaper and chintzy curtains; floorboards too were splintering under the weight of the water.

  ‘The hoses are doing more damage to this place than the COMPLETELY NATURAL AND NON-DELIBERATE fire,’ said Moray loudly.

  ‘MY WEDDING!’ said Tina, bursting loudly into tears. Rosie put her arm around her.

  ‘Oh darling,’ she said. ‘I am so sorry.’

  ‘We’ve paid the deposit and everything,’ said Tina, sobbing and hiccuping. ‘People are coming from Grimsby!!! It’s all arranged.’

  Rosie had listened patiently to little else but this wedding for about ten months, and couldn’t help feeling desperately for Tina.

  ‘But fortunately nobody was injured,’ put in Moray, and Rosie shushed him.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ said Tina.

  ‘Is the shop just shut then, or what?’

  ‘Moray, I
think I saw someone tripping over a paving stone,’ said Rosie pointedly.

  She sat Tina down on one of the ornamental benches next to a plaster urn.

  ‘Maybe it’s not as bad as it looks,’ she said just as there was an enormous crash that sounded like a chandelier falling down.

  Tina looked up at her.

  ‘Oh Rosie, you know what this meant to me.’

  ‘I know,’ said Rosie. ‘I’ve had it in the diary for a year. Circled in red!’

  ‘What are we going to do? There’s nowhere else.’ She sniffed. ‘Well, I mean …’

  Rosie got a sudden awful lurch in her stomach. She knew what was coming. Oh no.

  ‘I mean, there is one other place that does weddings …’

  Lipton Hall did occasionally host weddings, but big society weddings, with helicopters, and expensive caterers from Leeds, and three hundred guests, and Bentleys and doves and gold Portaloos and stilt-walkers and hundreds of Chinese lanterns that Stephen wanted to ban because the ducks in the pond kept eating them. It was the only way Lady Lipton could keep the lights on in the wintertime, but because she absolutely abhorred having people in the house (especially when lots of them wanted to meet ‘the real lady’ and cornered her to ask her stupid questions about Downton Abbey), she only let it happen two or three times a year, charged a frankly outrageous amount of money, and suffered it in a not very silent silence. It wasn’t for the village people; nobody would ever dare hire Lady Lipton’s own house for one of their gatherings. It simply wasn’t done; it would be an insult. As well as a long way beyond Tina and Jake’s humble means.

  All of this flashed through Rosie’s mind in a milli-second, as well as her own precarious position vis-à-vis her future mother-in-law. But all she said, of course, stroking Tina’s hair, was ‘There, there. Don’t worry. We’ll sort something out.’

  Chapter Twelve

  By the time Rosie got home, Stephen already knew the gossip. Oddly, it seemed to have cheered him up.

  ‘Insurance job!’ he announced, pulling open the door with Apostil in his left arm. Rosie thought how carefully they had handled the brand-new baby, just weeks ago, whereas now they hauled him everywhere. In fact, he loved being jiggled up and down and thrown about; he would giggle when Stephen pretended to drop him. Rosie would inwardly wince a little bit but wouldn’t let it show. She knew children needed to be toughened up by their dads. And after all, she was the one who’d nearly dropped him up at Lipton Hall.

  ‘I can’t believe how quickly gossip passes through this town,’ grumbled Rosie.

  ‘Well, aren’t you pleased nobody was hurt?’

  ‘Someone was, actually,’ said Rosie, explaining Tina’s meltdown. Stephen’s brow furrowed when he heard, and Rosie couldn’t bear to mention Tina’s idea, not right now. They’d had about a bellyful already. Tonight they were going to put Apostil to bed nice and early, cuddle up and do their best not to think about practicalities, or families, or anything other than the joy and warmth of being together, their baby sleeping peacefully, their own little world small, cosy and safe.

  The next week passed peacefully enough – they didn’t see Henrietta or Pamela at all. But the cottage was growing colder and colder every day. It simply wasn’t suitable. Rosie started looking at houses online in Derby. The ones in their price range were pretty grim – long terraces on busy roads – but they had three bedrooms and central heating. She didn’t dare mention it to Stephen again. They were going to have to make some very tough decisions. An estate agent came over from Carningford to have a look at the cottage, and made some very approving noises about saleability and weekenders, which Rosie did not enjoy one bit and certainly wasn’t going to mention to Lilian. But he mentioned too that he could quite possibly rent it out for the summer season, which she thought might be more attractive. Not quite so devastating for her great-aunt as selling the only home she had ever known; her last remaining link to what had once been a busy little place, with her brothers thundering up and down the little steps; her father, tending the roses; Lilian herself, a funny, angular little thing, skinny and dark, running the sweetshop, looking after the house after her mother died, never marrying. Rosie didn’t want to sell any more than Lilian would.

  One morning in early December, the children came rushing to the school gates to meet Stephen as he walked down the hill with his cane. Mr Dog liked to accompany him about halfway, then go and have a sniff around Malik’s Spar shop, in the unlikely event that Malik was throwing out any unwanted sausages. After that he would pad back home on his own.

  Normally, particularly on clear sunny mornings like this one, when their breath blew cloudy on the frosty air, the children would be charging about at full pelt in the playground, cheeks pink, wrapped up in huge duvet coats that turned them into tiny Michelin men, the occasional stray mitten hung up on the climbing frame, the sound of laughter and hubbub in the air cheering the farmers passing through the village, who had already been up in the cold and the dark for several hours, and who required a steaming cup of tea, sixty-five pence from the bakery, before making their way up to Rosie’s for some mint cake to see them through.

  Today, however, they were lining the gates, and as soon as Stephen hove into view they yelled his name.

  ‘Mr Lakeman! Mr Lakeman!’

  Stephen looked at them enquiringly.

  ‘We got pictures! We got pictures from our other school!!!’

  Stephen walked straight into the classroom, letting the children follow for once, even though the bell hadn’t rung. Sure enough, up on the wall were photographs.

  Mrs Baptiste put her head round the classroom door.

  ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘I hoped to get these done for you as a surprise before you came in. Unfortunately, SOME nosy parkers’ – Clover Lumb, the nosiest girl in the school, looked totally unbowed – ‘peered through the window and made it impossible. We got an email from your friend with the funny name …’

  ‘Faustine,’ smiled Stephen, looking around. The photos were wonderful: pictures of the village children smiling, waving, showing off the little slates they shared one between ten. The tired-looking young, heavy female teacher, the beaten-down shed with more than sixty children crammed into it; even the scrawny pale-coffee-coloured cow who put her head through the gaps in the walls from time to time; they were all there. The contrast between the shimmering heat and arid plains of Africa and Derbyshire’s rolling fertile hills and frosted landscape filled with plenty and variety was striking. But so was the thing that didn’t change at all: the smiles on the faces of the children, both there and here. There was no difference between them whatsoever.

  For fifteen minutes that morning, before work could begin, Stephen took lots of pictures of the children: reading in the little library corner; playing on their climbing frame; next to the whiteboard or clustered round the vivarium with their sad lizard, Blizzard, sitting inside. The huge disparity between what these children had and what there was in Apostil’s village was utterly compelling. After that, they all moved into the gym and Stephen hosted a Q&A session about his trip to Africa, about what it was like there and even, briefly, on how they had brought back Apostil.

  ‘So,’ said Emily, Tina’s daughter. She was normally quiet as a mouse, so when she spoke, people tended to listen. ‘So they don’t have books in their school?’

  ‘Not many,’ said Stephen. ‘People don’t have much there.’

  ‘So we should send them some of ours,’ said Emily. Lots of agreeing noises went round the room. ‘And,’ she added, ‘maybe we could send them some money to help them buy more books.’

  Stephen nodded.

  ‘I think maybe we should try and raise a little money for that.’

  ‘Yay!’ said the children.

  Rosie, meanwhile, was not having anything like as good a morning. Apostil had been grizzly, the bathwater had got cold almost immediately and there appeared to be frost on the insides of the windows. She needed to do a shop, which meant she had to
scrape the insides of the tin for Apostil’s morning bottle, and he had looked at her in a very grumpy fashion as if he blamed her for that, then pooed twice in quick succession, so the entire downstairs smelled bad. She had an order list a mile long to get done with the wholesalers – frankly, if you ran out of Mars Bars, you didn’t really deserve to call yourself a sweetshop – and she was conscious that even by Lipton standards her hair was becoming an absolute disaster area (although it would have surprised her to learn – and she wouldn’t have believed it – that Stephen much preferred it loose and soft around her shoulders rather than lacquered and tonged into reluctant submission. He didn’t really understand the concept of ‘frizz’, he just thought it looked nice).

  So when the doorbell rang sharply and she still wasn’t quite zipped into her long-sleeved dress (there had been a few jokes from Lilian about when she was going to lose the baby weight, none of which she appreciated), she cursed loudly under her breath. She did get the occasional person begging her to open early, normally on Christmas Eve or Valentine’s Day, but this was a perfectly normal December Monday morning.

  ‘Yes?’ she hollered, leaving Apostil on the floor and glancing at him to make sure he didn’t roll over. He couldn’t, not yet, but his strong left arm was constantly flailing that way and occasionally he made it almost on to his side. He thought this was a hilarious joke whenever he managed it.

  ‘Stay!’ she said, smiling at him. His huge dark eyes crumpled up in adoration. Even your worst day, she thought, with a baby in it has its ridiculous moments of joy.

  The bell rang again. Frowning, and remembering she hadn’t brushed her hair, she opened the door a crack.

  In front of her stood a large woman in a too-tight trouser suit, with short hair, a large pair of bright red glasses, and an iPad nestled in the crook of her elbow.

  ‘Hello?’ said Rosie. The air coming in through the door was absolutely arctic, and the fire was only embers. She didn’t want to let in any more than was absolutely necessary.