Читать книгу: «Wish Upon a Star»
TRISHA ASHLEY
Wish Upon A Star
This book is dedicated to all my wonderful readers – my stars to steer by.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue: 2001, The Return of the Native
Chapter 1: A Star is Born
Chapter 2: The Night Watch
Chapter 3: Lardy Cake
Chapter 4: Christmas Pudding
Chapter 5: Falling Star
Chapter 6: Hasty Pudding
Jago
Chapter 7: The Cult of Perfection
Chapter 8: The Happy Macaroon
Jago
Chapter 9: The Blue Dog
Jago
Chapter 10: Sweet Perfection
Aimee
Chapter 11: Flaky
Chapter 12: Fruitful
Jago
Chapter 13: Sad Cake
Chapter 14: Stella’s Stars
Chapter 15: What the Dickens?
Jago
Chapter 16: Puffball
Chapter 17: Honeyed
Jago
Chapter 18: Pinker’s End
Chapter 19: Gone, but Not Forgotten
Chapter 20: The Proof of the Pudding
Jago
Chapter 21: Is There Honey Still for Tea?
Jago
Chapter 22: Princess Possibilities
Chapter 23: Mincemeat Mess
Jago
Chapter 24: Tart
Aimee
Chapter 25: Horse Feathers
Chapter 26: Jumbled
Aimee
Chapter 27: Nearer, My God, to Thee
Chapter 28: Taking Stock
Chapter 29: Nesting
Chapter 30: Plagued
Chapter 31: Cooking Up a Storm
Chapter 32: A Random Lot
Chapter 33: Up the Pole
Aimee
Chapter 34: Babes in the Wood
Chapter 35: Fêted
Aimee
Chapter 36: Surprise Package
Chapter 37: Nuts
Chapter 38: On the Edge
Jago
Chapter 39: To Infinity and Beyond
Jago
Chapter 40: Flying Pigs
Jago
Chapter 41: Boston Beans
Jago
Chapter 42: Piece of Cake
Chapter 43: Celestial Bliss
Recipes, Wish Upon a Star, Trisha Ashley
Acknowledgements
Read on for an exclusive extract of Trisha’s next novel Every Woman for Herself
About the Author
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue: 2001, The Return of the Native
It was early evening in the village of Sticklepond and the bar of the Falling Star was almost empty, apart from a couple of locals who’d dropped in on their way home from work, and the shoe salesman in the corner who had booked a room for the night and was now studying racing form in the paper as if his life depended on it.
As Florrie Snowball slapped a hot, limp, microwaved sausage roll and a pint of Middlemoss Brown Ale in front of Pete Ormerod, who farmed up by the edge of the Winter’s End estate, she said, ‘I hear there’s an Almond moved back into the village.’
‘That’s right,’ he agreed, poking the middle of the sausage roll with the end of a gnarled finger as if unsure what might pop out. ‘News gets around fast.’
‘Someone saw her – there’s no mistaking an Almond, and anyway, we’ve seen Martha come and go over the years, right up till her mother died, haven’t we? Not that she didn’t keep herself to herself, just like her parents did.’
‘They had cause enough, didn’t they?’
‘I’m not one to think the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, poor innocent mites, and only us old ones remember the whole story now,’ Florrie snapped. ‘And anyway, Martha’s parents were no more than cousins, so it wasn’t really anything to do with them.’
‘They still felt the shame, though,’ Pete Ormerod said heavily, ‘and went off to Australia with the rest of the family, even if they were back within the year.’
‘Well, you did all right out of it, didn’t you?’ she pointed out tartly. ‘Buying Badger’s Bolt farm gave you twice as much land and they were in such a hurry to get away, I bet you paid less than it was worth.’
‘It was enough to buy them a sheep holding in Australia and that’s what they wanted – though the sheep were what Jacob couldn’t abide. But there was never a better cattle man than Jacob Almond and I was more than glad to give him his old job and cottage back.’
‘I always thought the whole clan of them upping sticks and emigrating was a bit of an over-reaction myself,’ Florrie said. ‘Came of them being Strange Baptists from that chapel that was over in Ormskirk, I expect. The young ones these days’d think nothing of what happened – they see worse on the soaps every night. So now Martha’s back living in the very same cottage she grew up in, it’s surely time to forgive and forget.’
‘Not exactly the same cottage,’ Pete said through a mouthful of sausage roll, ‘the last people who had it built a big garden room at the back with a bedroom over it and tarted the place up no end.’
‘Well, you should know, you were the one who sold it off to them in the first place. And it’s just as well it’s been done up, because it was no more than a hovel before, and after being married to that London doctor Martha must be used to something different – and come to think of it, she’s not an Almond now, she’s Martha Weston.’
‘She’ll always be an Almond as far as some of us are concerned, there’s no getting away from it,’ Pete said, shaking his head, and seeing he was set in that conviction she said no more, though she did severely admonish him for having the bad manners to talk with his mouth full, before leaving him to the rest of his sausage roll and pint.
It had been sheer serendipity that the house where she was born should have come up for sale just as Martha Weston had started her search for a new home. Now, unpacking books in the almost unrecognisable cottage, she neither knew nor cared whether the locals were talking about her or not – she was just glad to be back where she felt she belonged.
Although she didn’t know all the ins and outs of it, Martha was well aware that one of her relatives had somehow blotted his copybook and been expunged from the family records in the dim and distant past (‘Never mention Uncle Esau to your father,’ her mother had always said), an event that had precipitated the entire Almond clan taking flight like a flock of startled birds.
She barely remembered Australia, except that it had been hot and smelled of sheep, but her parents had been even more insular on their return and she became a solitary child, happy in her own company, who could often be seen sketching in the countryside.
She’d gone to grammar school in Merchester and then, after being taken up and encouraged by Ottie Winter from the big house (who was even then getting a name for her sculptures), went off to art school in London.
Marrying a doctor and staying there hadn’t been any part of her plans, but love plays tricks on us all. Still, as soon as his death released her, she had flown like a homing pigeon back to the village where she was born.
She belonged in Sticklepond, but since both nature and nurture had made her solitary she often walked in the gloom of the evening when few were about and did most of her shopping in the nearest town instead of the village.
But strangely and without her being aware of doing it, whenever her way took her past the war memorial on the green, she would avert her eyes and quicken her step, just as her mother had always done.
Chapter 1: A Star is Born
While the consultant was explaining the complexities of my baby’s heart condition to me in a hushed, confidential tone, I stared fixedly at his yellow and red-spotted bow tie, half expecting it suddenly to spin round like a joke one: that’s how spaced-out with fear, anaesthetic and shock I was after my emergency Caesarean.
I don’t know why he bothered to lower his voice anyway, since I’d been shunted off into a room of my own … or maybe that should be a store cupboard of my own, because it was a tiny slice of space with one high window and a wall lined with boxes of equipment. They were probably as surplus to requirements as I seemed to be, now that my baby was sustained by the resources of the intensive care baby unit instead of my own.
‘Can I see her?’ I interrupted.
Ma, whose ample frame was squeezed into a tubular metal chair on the other side of the bed, with her elbow resting on a pile of cardboard cartons, said, ‘She can’t come up here, Cally, when she’s in an incubator attached to all those bleeping things, and you certainly aren’t up to going down there yet. But she’s perfect – hands like tiny pale pink starfish.’
‘You said she was so blue she looked like a Smurf,’ I said accusingly, tears welling.
‘I thought you were still asleep when I was talking to that nurse, and anyway, it was just a glance in passing right after she was born. She looks pink now.’
‘She was a little blue at first, but now she’s stabilised and a relatively healthy colour,’ the consultant said soothingly. ‘You will be taken down in a wheelchair to see her as soon as you are recovered enough.’
‘She is going to be all right, isn’t she?’ I pleaded. ‘Only there was an angel hanging around when I woke up and I thought it might have come for her.’
‘That was a nun,’ Ma said. ‘She had a white habit on and flapped past the trolley when you were being wheeled out of theatre. Thought she looked more like an albatross, myself.’
‘Why would a nun be on a maternity ward?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, but it’s a damned sight more likely than an angel.’
I focused on the consultant again and he looked back at me and frowned. ‘Your baby’s heart problems should really have been picked up on a scan …’ He paused and then added with false brightness, ‘Still, there is one good thing.’
‘There is?’ Ma asked incredulously.
‘Yes, the majority of female babies with similar malformations also have Turner’s syndrome, which can lead to other side effects, but your baby doesn’t.’
‘Thank heaven for small mercies, then,’ my mother said drily, without removing the jade cigarette holder that was clenched between her teeth. Having tired of repeating to hospital staff that she’d no intention of lighting up inside the premises, she’d removed the pink Sobranie from it and placed it carefully in a silver case in her vast red Radley handbag. The consultant eyed the empty holder in much the same way I’d been looking at his bow tie, and then his gaze moved to the colourful splashes of oil paint on the legs of her black slacks and across her tunic where her bosom tended to rest on her palette while she painted. She looked like a walking embodiment of Jackson Pollock’s Dark Period – if he’d had one.
Still, it was a measure of her love that she’d rushed down on the first train once my friend Celia had called her, despite her oft-repeated statement that she never wanted to set foot in London again.
‘Never mind Pollock: this is my dark period,’ I muttered.
‘I think our Cally’s a bit delirious,’ she said, laying one small, cool, plump hand on my forehead. ‘Though she often talks daft.’
‘I’m not – and I understand about Stella needing an operation right away. Will she be all right afterwards?’
‘She certainly won’t survive if we don’t operate,’ the consultant said evasively, still in that low, confidential voice. ‘She’s not quite full term and of course there are always risks involved in operating on such small babies. But you do understand that her long-term outlook is at present obscure, don’t you? She will definitely need more treatment later, possibly including further operations.’
‘There seems no option but to agree to this operation,’ Ma said, shifting the jade holder to one side of her mouth. ‘It will give her a fighting chance, at least.’
He nodded, though he didn’t look as if he’d have placed any money on it.
But I clung to that idea, for of course the advances of modern medical science would ensure that my baby would make a full recovery and live a normal life. She’d be one of the lucky ones: my Stella, my little star.
Having been fathoms deep in a bottomless ocean of anaesthesia when Stella came into the world, I worried that I might find it difficult to bond with her. But the moment I set eyes on my baby I was consumed by a blinding flash of such instant besottedness that I could spend an hour or more just marvelling over the perfect convolutions of her tiny ears, or the minute crescents of her fingernails, like those fragile pale pink shells I used to pick up on Southport beach.
Celia, the friend who had so luckily been staying with me when I was rushed into hospital, was equally enthralled and enchanted, but Ma, who is not the type to dote on babies, only said the poor mite looked like a skinned rabbit. Then, this obviously having triggered a thought train in her head, she went out and bought Stella a white plush rabbit that was bigger than she was.
When we got the hospital chaplain to christen Stella, Ma suggested we have the rabbit as a godparent, after Celia, though I think she was joking … But there it was in the photographs, along with the special cake iced with the baby’s name that I’d sent Celia out to buy. If all had gone to plan, of course, I would have made it myself at a later date. For me, important occasions must always be accompanied by cake, since it earned me a living as a cookery writer, as well as being my comfort food of choice.
‘Go to Gilligan’s Celebration Cakes off Marylebone High,’ I told her. ‘If it has to be shop-bought, they’re the best and they’ll ice her name on it while you wait.’
‘Oh, yes, I remember you going there to research an article on traditional wedding cakes for Good Housekeeping and bringing me a chunk of fruitcake back,’ Celia agreed. ‘And you said one of the staff was dead sexy and looked just like Johnny Depp.’
‘Did I? Oh, yes, but Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow,’ I said, a sudden flash of recollection bringing up the undeniably attractive image of a thin, dark, mobile face with high cheekbones and a pair of strangely luminous light brown eyes meeting mine across a work table, while the heady scent of dried fruit and spices mingled with the sweet smell of sugar.
‘That seems like another life,’ I sighed. ‘It happened to a different person.’
Chapter 2: The Night Watch
During the long night watches after Stella’s first operation, as the lights flashed on the machinery and the hospital hummed faintly along to the tired buzzing in my head, there were way too many hours in which to think.
Her arrival had instantly turned my life upside down, so that everything I’d once thought important had run right to the bottom of my hourglass of priorities. My hard-fought-for career as a cookery writer, for instance, which paid the mortgage on the shoebox-sized basement flat within walking distance of Primrose Hill, where I lived with my little white dog, Toto.
Toto was a Battersea Dogs and Cats Home stray and looked like a cross between a whippet and a Skye terrier, if you can imagine that: all bristly white coat, with a terrier head but slender body and long legs. Ma and Celia were both staying on at my flat and looking after him, as well as taking it in turns to come into the hospital, though Ma spent most of her visits drawing a series of starfish-like little hands and winged creatures that appeared to be some kind of nun/angel/albatross hybrid. Her paintings are already very Chagall-with-knobs-on, so I could barely imagine the turn they would take when she got back home again.
Toto was an excellent judge of character and although he adored Celia and Ma, he’d never taken to my ex-fiancé, Adam, a tall and charismatic marine biologist who’d proposed to me after a whirlwind romance. In retrospect, I only wished I’d trusted my dog’s instincts more than my own.
Adam had swept me off my feet and we’d planned to get married in the lovely ancient church of All Angels in the village of Sticklepond, where Ma now lived … the minute he got back from the eighteen-month contract in Antarctica that he’d already signed up for, that was.
I’d suggested he cancel it, but he’d explained that he’d always dreamed of going there and needed to get it out of his system before he settled down.
‘It’ll be cutting it fine for starting a family by then, though,’ I’d said. ‘I don’t want to leave it too late, or it might not happen at all.’
‘Mmm,’ he’d agreed, with much less enthusiasm than he’d shown while talking about the Antarctic; but by then I’d discovered his acute phobia about hospitals and illness of any kind, and put it down as some general squeamishness to do with that.
Still, I’d been convinced he’d be bored out of his skull stuck in the Antarctic for eighteen months with a lot of other boffins, examining the local frozen seafood. But no, it turned out that there was a whole community there, with everyone from cooks to dentists laid on, which I supposed made sense when most of the year you couldn’t fly in or out.
They made their own entertainments too, and going by the pictures on Facebook of Adam messing about on Ski-Doos and in the snow with his new friends, he’d found a few ways to occupy his spare time.
Of course, we’d constantly emailed and chatted via Facebook, and sometimes he could call me, though not the other way round. But as time passed he seemed to become less and less interested in anything outside the base … I suppose that’s a bit like hospital, where your real world shrinks to your immediate surroundings and everything else seems remote and unimportant.
I expected that would change once he came home, even if I did feel nervous about our reunion. And there was a sticky moment at the airport, when he looked like an unshaven stranger as he came through into the arrivals hall. But when he spotted me and smiled there was that instant feeling of connection, just like the first time we’d met, and I ran straight into his arms. He’d kissed me, then said, looking genuinely startled, that he’d forgotten how pretty I was!
We went back to my flat and that evening everything was all right between us – in fact, it was more than all right. He was tired and abstracted, not helped by a call from a colleague, though what could be that urgent about Antarctic pond life I couldn’t imagine at the time. His end of the conversation was a bit terse.
I should have smelled a rat right then, because next morning it was like Jekyll and Hyde revisited: right after breakfast he suddenly announced he’d already signed up for another eighteen months in Antarctica and, moreover, he’d met someone else up there and she was going back in April, too.
Of course I was devastated and furious. I told him to get out of my flat and my life and he’d packed up his stuff and left within the hour, with my parting shot that I hoped they both fell down an Antarctic crevasse on their next tour of duty ringing in his ears.
Toto, gleefully grasping that the hated interloper was out of favour, managed to sink his teeth into Adam’s ankle at the last minute, which would give him something to remember us by till all the little puncture wounds healed up again.
It was only much later that I realised that Adam had left me a much longer-lasting and life-changing memento.
Once Stella was out of immediate danger, Celia needed to get back to her husband, four rescue greyhounds and six cats in Southport, who were all pining for her.
I would also pine for her, though she’d promised to return when Stella was finally allowed home.
Ma was staying on for a few more days, though I was sure she was dying to head straight back up north, too. In fact, I was surprised she’d stayed as long as she had.
When I was growing up in Hampstead I’d thought she’d seemed happy enough, though she was always fairly reclusive and preoccupied with her work, of course, but she sold up and moved back with alacrity to the Lancashire village where she was born after Dad died.
‘Ma’ is not some cute contraction of ‘Mum’, but a relic of her early attempts to get me to call her by her Christian name, Martha. She was never much like any of my school friends’ mothers, delegating most of her maternal responsibilities to a series of foreign au pairs, but I’d never doubted that in her way she loved me. And Anna, the final and most beloved of the au pairs, a tall, blonde, Swedish domestic goddess, had instilled my love of cooking and baking, so it worked out brilliantly for me.
I emailed Anna the news about Stella and received a warm, reassuring reply straight away: she’d always had the power to make me feel comforted, an effect that has also rubbed off onto the cakes she taught me to make.
I decided that for Stella’s first birthday I would make her a prinsesstårta, that most splendid of Swedish celebration cakes.
‘You are going to tell Adam about Stella at some point soon, aren’t you?’ Celia asked, just before she finally set off home.
‘No! Why should I, after he accused me of getting pregnant on purpose when I told him she was on the way and then suggested I get an abortion?’
‘I know he didn’t want the baby, but now she’s arrived he might feel differently,’ she suggested. Having an incredibly generous heart she was always looking for the best in everyone, even my absent ex-fiancé, Adam Scott – or ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, as Ma generally referred to him.
‘I don’t think so. Anyway, he’s changed his email address and I couldn’t phone him in Antarctica even if I wanted to, which I don’t.’
‘Facebook?’
‘I’ve blocked him.’
‘I still think he ought to know,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He has a responsibility to support you, too.’
‘I don’t want his support and I’m sure he still wouldn’t be interested – even less so in a baby with health problems, because he’s got that phobia about illness and hospitals, remember?’
‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. So perhaps you’re right, but if he hears about the baby from anyone, he may contact you when he comes back to the UK.’
‘I doubt it, and it wouldn’t be till October of next year, when Stella—’
I broke off, swallowing hard, and she said quickly, ‘Stella will be walking and saying her first words by then, you’ll see. The operation went well, didn’t it?’
‘Yes, but they made it plain they couldn’t fix everything in one go and would have to wait and see how her condition developed. She seems to be making progress.’
‘The body has great powers of self-healing,’ Celia said firmly.
I clung to that thought after she’d gone back to Southport: once I finally got her home, Stella and I would take the future one step at a time, savouring each moment like a special gift.
Chapter 3: Lardy Cake
Long before Stella’s due date I’d stockpiled articles for my two regular publication slots: the ‘Tea & Cake’ page in Sweet Home magazine, which are quick, easy recipes, and my Sunday newspaper supplement one, ‘The Cake Diaries’, which have more complicated recipes along with some quirky background history, or stories about where I first came across a particular cake, thrown into the mix.
I usually work months in advance for magazines anyway, filing my Christmas articles in summer and my summer articles in winter, but this time I had almost a year’s worth in reserve. This foresight proved to be a very good idea, given the distractions and alarms of Stella’s first weeks, because the pieces all came out just as if nothing was going on in my life but baking and eating cakes.
Of course, I’d missed out on all the extra articles and assignments that would normally have come my way during this time, which usually put a bit of icing on the gingerbread of life. Once Stella was home, I knew I needed to get back into the groove as quickly as possible, even though this wasn’t going to be easy with a brain occupied entirely with worried thoughts wrapped in a thick fuzzy blanket of hope.
I hadn’t even lost any baby-weight, either – in fact, due to lack of activity and comfort eating, I’d put more on – so when I inadvertently caught sight of my stolid, stodgy pale nakedness in the bedroom mirror soon after Stella finally came home, I thought I looked just like a lardy cake.
Oh, lardy me!
I sat down on the bed and wept, and once I’d started I found I couldn’t stop for ages, which I expect was all the hormones still whizzing about in my system. But at least it was cathartic. It finally shook me out of the zombie trance and set me back onto the researching, experimental baking and writing track again, even if I did tend to shoehorn most of it into the times when Stella was asleep.
I’d kept on the expensive dog walker I’d had to hire for poor Toto while I was spending so much time at the hospital, and she took him out in the mornings. Eventually, when Stella was well enough, the three of us would head for Primrose Hill every afternoon for a bit of fresh air. (It’s as about as fresh at the top of the hill as you will find in London.) Toto, thank goodness, had taken to the baby immediately and didn’t seem in the least jealous, so slowly we all settled into the new regime.
And – waste not, want not – at least the lardy cake revelation inspired a new ‘Cake Diaries’ recipe.
Lardy Cake is a wonderfully stodgy, bready cake that originates from Wiltshire. It’s made with yeast and dried fruit – plus, of course, lots of lard, but I thought I would try to devise a slightly different version, replacing some of the lard with butter and adding a little spice …
Stella’s first three years were as up and down as a ride on the Big Dipper at Southport fun-fair, and while I struggled to persuade my changeling fairy child to eat and put on weight, I went from a curvy size twelve/fourteen to a Rubensesque sixteen/eighteen. This is what happens when your comfort food of choice is cake, and the nature of your work means the oven wafts the sweet smell of temptation at you every day.
The proof of the pudding was in the eating and I was that pudding.
I said so to Celia, who had come down to stay with me so she could do some early Christmas shopping, pop into the Sweet Home office (she did their ‘Crafty Celia Pull Out and Make’ section – if you could stick it, knit it, or stuff it, Celia was your woman) and, most crucially, support me through the next meeting with Stella’s hospital consultant, when he would outline her care plan for the next year.
‘The extra weight suits you, though,’ Celia assured me, ‘because you’re quite tall and still in perfect proportion, while I’ve never had a waist to start with and now gravity’s pulled me into the shape of a squishy pear. Just as well that Will likes pears,’ she added, grinning.
That was a bit consoling, but I’d have to accept that I was now never going to be an airy confection of spun sugar, only a solid Madeira sponge. My smart clothes had been packed away for so long I feared the creases were permanent and I was living in jeans, trainers and sloppy T-shirts. I’d also given up any attempt to straighten my curly fair hair, or cover the freckles across the bridge of my nose with makeup. In fact, I’d entirely resigned myself to looking wholesome, it just didn’t feel that important any more … though I might still grind cake in the face of the next person to remark brightly that I looked like a young Hayley Mills, because I’d Googled her films and no, I didn’t.
What would I have done without Celia? Other friends had slipped away since I had Stella, but she had remained constant since the day I first moved out of the family home and we shared both a flat and the struggle to make a living. She met her husband, Will, when Sweet Home commissioned an article about his driftwood sculptures and we happened to be in the offices when he came in to ask about getting a regular column. Love at first sight. Will is so nice, he almost deserves her.
‘What does Stella want for Christmas – or need I ask?’ she said now. ‘More of those Sylvanian Families?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid the addiction might be permanent, and it’s all my fault,’ I said ruefully. I’d been too old really for the little fuzzy animal toys when they first came out, but I’d loved them anyway and, over the years, added a few more to my collection. Now Stella, at three, had taken them over and I’d bought her even more.
‘I know she’s scarily bright, but isn’t she a bit young for them?’
‘Perhaps, but she’s never put things in her mouth, apart from her thumb, and she plays quietly with them for hours. She wants a house for the mouse family to live in next, but there are a few other things that I know she’d like. There’s a Father Christmas mouse too, with a little tree and parcels – that looked fun.’
‘You can show me on the internet, and I’ll order something. You’re coming up to Sticklepond to stay with Martha for Christmas, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, and bringing all the ingredients for festive fun with us, as usual, because Ma wouldn’t bother otherwise. I do love going up there and I know that Ma, for all her reclusive ways, loves Stella.’
‘We all love Stella, she’s bright and delightful – she read her Meg and Mog book to me last night,’ Celia said. ‘And then she said if she knew a witch she would get her to do a spell to make her heart better.’
‘I only wish I knew one. She’s so tiny for nearly three and a half and she gets tired so easily that we still have to take the buggy everywhere. She doesn’t eat enough to keep a bird alive and any slight infection is dangerous …’ I sighed. ‘Well, we’ll see what the treatment plan they’ve drawn up for her at the hospital for next year is.’
‘They did say she might need another operation, didn’t they? Perhaps it will be the final one, so she can live a normal life,’ Celia said optimistically.
But there didn’t seem to be an ongoing treatment plan – or not one leading in a positive direction. I was shocked when the consultant told me there was nothing more they could do and gave me to understand that Stella’s long-term outlook was poor and she was likely to go slowly downhill as her condition increasingly put a strain on her body, until finally she succumbed to some infection.
‘Of course, we would like her to gain weight so that she has the reserves to fight infections, but then again, as she grows, that will also put a strain on her organs …’ he explained.
‘When I asked him if they couldn’t operate again, he said no, because no one in the UK was doing the kind of complex surgery she needed,’ I reminded Celia later, back in the flat, when Stella had gone for a nap and we were talking it all over. I was still shell-shocked and tearful, but Celia suddenly seized on what I’d just said.
‘So he did! But maybe that means they are doing it in another country, like America? I saw a newspaper article about a child who’d gone to America for life-saving surgery, though it cost thousands and thousands of pounds, so they’d had to do a lot of fundraising to pay for it.’
I stared at her blankly. ‘But – wouldn’t the consultant have mentioned it, if there was anyone else capable of helping Stella?’
‘Not necessarily, I don’t think, if it was another country. Come on, it’s worth a go – Google search.’
And that’s how we found Dr Rufford Beems’ experimental programme over in Boston, and a fresh spring of hope.
We emailed the hospital in Boston straight away and after that things just seemed to snowball, so by the time Stella and I finally set out for Christmas with Ma in Sticklepond, I’d had Stella’s medical information sent over to Boston, a very kind and detailed response from the surgeon, and a reluctant agreement from my consultant that it was currently Stella’s only option, other than settling for palliative care.
‘Dr Beems says it would be best to do the operation before Stella’s fifth birthday, but the sooner the better,’ I told Celia when I called her to give her the latest update. ‘I’ll need as much time as possible to raise the money, though, because it’s going to be phenomenally expensive.’
‘Nothing is too expensive if it can cure her,’ Celia said. ‘We can do it.’
‘The surgeon is going to waive his own fees, since it’s still experimental surgery … and when he says experimental, my heart goes cold,’ I confessed.
‘Yes, but his success rate is already excellent and the alternative isn’t to be thought of,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s the best option. So now we need to work out a fundraising plan over Christmas. I’ll bring Will across and we’ll put our heads together.’
‘I … am doing the right thing?’ I asked her.
‘You’re doing the only possible thing,’ she assured me, but it suddenly felt as if Stella and I were drowning and someone had thrown us a lifebelt: I wasn’t quite sure how I could get my arms through it without letting go of her, but I’d have to give it my best shot.
Chapter 4: Christmas Pudding
I drove Stella up to Sticklepond a few days before Christmas with a boot full of hidden presents, the cake, turkey, mince pies and pudding – in fact, most of the ingredients we’d need for the festive season. Left to her own devices, I’m very sure Ma wouldn’t treat the day any differently from the rest of the year, but she went along with it all.
As usual, I had the emergency numbers for Ormskirk Hospital and Alder Hey (the big children’s hospital in Liverpool) just in case – but I hoped we wouldn’t need them, because I was determined that this was going to be the best Christmas yet.
‘Toto has very sharp elbows,’ Stella said from her child seat in the back, as the dog adjusted himself into a sort of meagre fur lap rug. ‘Did you remember to bring his presents, Mummy?’
‘Yes, they’re in the boot.’
‘Will Father Christmas remember we’re staying with Grandma?’
‘I’m sure he will: he knows everything by magic.’
‘Like God,’ she agreed sagely. ‘Hal says God knows everything.’
Hal is under-gardener at Winter’s End, the historic house just outside Sticklepond, and lives in a cottage on the edge of the estate, across the lane from Ma. A taciturn man with a bold roman nose and a surprising head of soft silvery-grey curls under his flat tweed cap, he’s been moonlighting as Ma’s gardener ever since she moved up there, and they seemed to have become increasingly friendly …
‘I like Hal,’ she added. ‘He makes me sweet milky tea in a special blue cup when he brews up in his shed and last time we came he showed me a dead mole he found in the woods.’
‘That was kind of him,’ I said. Hal had created a cosy den in the old shed next to Ma’s studio in the garden, with a little Primus stove where he brewed up endless enamel pots of sweet tea for them both. Just like Dad, Hal seemed to wander in and out of the studio, or sit reading the paper in the corner, without appearing to bother Ma in the least.
Despite looking so morose he was really a very nice man – and what’s more, he’d slowly brought Ma out of herself a little bit, to the point where, as well as the library, she went with him to the monthly Gardening Club, and the occasional game of darts at the Green Man with the other Winter’s End gardeners.
Ottie Winter occasionally visited her too, because over the years her early patronage and help had turned into friendship. I’d often met her at our house in Hampstead, and Ma had taken me to one or two exhibitions of her sculptures, which are bold and figurative … sort of. You could say the same about Ma’s paintings.
Her only other regular visitor seemed to be Raffy Sinclair, the Sticklepond vicar, despite her not being a churchgoer.
‘Are we nearly there yet? I wish we lived in Sticklepond. It’s much more fun than home,’ Stella said from the back seat.
‘Do you?’ I asked, startled and glancing at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘Wouldn’t you miss Primrose Hill and the zoo?’
‘No,’ she said firmly.
Sometimes it was hard to remember that she was only three and a half going on a hundred … But I was just grateful we’d left the tricky subject of God behind and were not again pursuing the question of where people went when they were dead like we had the previous week, after I’d had to tell her that she wouldn’t be seeing one of her little friends from hospital again …
While I chatted to Stella as we trundled north up the motorway, part of my mind was occupied with how I was to raise the astronomical amount of money it would take to get her to America and to pay for the operation. It seemed near impossible – but how different her life would be if I pulled it off and the operation was a complete success … which it surely must be. If only she stayed well enough, till then …
But if she didn’t, if things took a turn for the worst and the need for the operation became urgent – which, please God, they wouldn’t – then I had a contingency plan to raise the money quickly, one that I’d need Ma’s agreement to. It would be a big ask and even though I’d already declined her generous offer to mortgage the cottage to pay for the operation, I wasn’t quite sure how she’d react to it.
Will had already started the process of setting up a fundraising website, Stella’s Stars, having had experience of doing something similar with his and Celia’s greyhound fostering one. It proved to be quite a complicated affair: I’d never have managed it on my own. He’d promised it would be up and running by the New Year, though.
Turning off the motorway as the short winter’s day grew towards dusk, I clicked on the Bing Crosby White Christmas CD that was Stella’s surprise favourite and resolutely turned my mind to having a merry little Christmas with a bright yuletide and jingle bells all the way.
Ma’s house was a long, low building made of slightly crumbly local sandstone, once a tied cottage on the Almonds’ farm, Badger’s Bolt. From what I’d gleaned, Ma had a fairly solitary childhood there, with parents who didn’t mix much with the local people. But it sounded like the Almonds had always been clannish before they emigrated after the war, so I suppose when Ma’s parents came back, they would feel isolated. Ma didn’t like to talk about the Almonds much, but that could be because, apart from her father, she didn’t really remember them.
I do dimly recall visiting Grandma Almond: a small, plump, silver-haired woman, who only ever seemed to have a real conversation with her hens. The cottage had still belonged to old Mr Ormerod, the farmer who’d bought up the Almonds’ land and buildings, so it was a very different place now from how it was originally. A few years before, he’d sold off the buildings he didn’t need, including this cottage, and the new owners extended upwards and out at the back, giving Ma an upstairs master bedroom with ensuite over the light airy garden room, as well as a garage at the side.
The big barn nearby has been converted into a smart house, but the old Almond farmhouse at the top of the lane was currently uninhabited and for sale, since there had been some trouble with the last owner a year or two back and it had lain empty ever since.
Stella and I had the two small downstairs bedrooms just off the old sitting room and next to the family bathroom, and Toto and Moses, Ma’s cat, fight it out for the rag rug in front of the wood-burning stove in the kitchen.
Ma seemed mildly pleased to see us, but it was just as I thought: she hadn’t remembered to get a tree, or find the decorations, and was even hazy on which day of the week Christmas Day fell. But we quickly settled in and next morning I decided to leave Stella with Ma after breakfast while I went into Ormskirk to do a huge supermarket shop for basics: anything else I needed I intended to buy in the village, which has a good range of shops now.
I would take Toto with me, since he was always happy to go anywhere in the car and it took him and Moses the cat two or three days of wary circling and jostling before they settled down happily together, so time apart was good.
Ma and Stella were going to go up to the studio and, since it was a Sunday, I was sure Hal would also be about to keep an eye on her. Stella, though, saw things differently and promised to look after Grandma while I was out.
‘I’ll tell her off if she puts her paintbrush in her mouth,’ she assured me. ‘And Grandma, you shouldn’t smoke.’
‘I’m down to two Sobranies a day now, so have a heart, love,’ Ma said, guiltily laying down the jade holder she had removed from her mouth for long enough to eat her breakfast and which she’d been about to replace. It seemed to be a comfort thing, a bit like the thumb-sucking Stella still resorted to in times of stress. Today’s Sobranie was the same green as the holder.
Stella made a tut-tutting noise and shook her head, so that all her white-blond curls danced.
‘You leave Grandma alone,’ I told her. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t breathe the smoke in.’
Ma looked even guiltier, and Stella unconvinced, but I left them to it and went to brave the pre-Christmas shops: with only a few days to go a kind of feeding frenzy was taking place in the aisles and a near-fight erupted over the last family-sized deluxe Christmas pudding.
There was no sign of anyone at the cottage when I got back so I put away all the shopping in Ma’s almost empty fridge, freezer and cupboards – though she was big on packets of coffee, Laphroaig whisky, Plymouth gin and frozen microwave dinners – and then went up to the studio, where I found Stella and Ma painting at adjacent easels. Hal was sitting in an old wooden chair reading the Sunday paper, which in her painting Ma had origamied into a newsprint winged creature trying to escape from his hands.
Stella’s painting seemed to be an angel of a more traditional sort. ‘Look, Mummy – this is a dead person’s angel from the graveyard. Me and Grandma went there to draw and there are lots more.’
‘I hope you fastened your coat up, because there’s a cold wind out,’ I said, admiring the picture.
‘They went in the car and she was wrapped up warm. They were only out half an hour or so,’ Hal assured me. ‘They both had a hot cup of tea when they came back, too, and a couple of garibaldi biscuits.’
‘Oh, thank you,’ I said gratefully. It was certainly warm enough in the studio, where an electric stove in the corner radiated fake flames and heat.
I went off to get lunch ready, but Toto jumped onto Hal’s knee, so I left him there. He’d probably be immortalised in oils too, winged or otherwise.
Stella’s health usually seemed better in Sticklepond and, as always on our visits, we soon settled into a pleasant routine. I pushed Stella in her buggy to the village most days, sometimes with Toto when he would deign to come with us, since he always ungratefully attached himself to Ma. We would do a little shopping and feed the ducks on the pond by the village green, or go on a longer walk up towards the Winter’s End estate and back round the right of way used only by locals.
It was all very familiar from previous visits, though it had changed a lot in the last few years since the discovery at Winter’s End of a manuscript purporting to have been written by Shakespeare. The village had flourished and turned into a thriving tourist destination and now there was an almost cosmopolitan hum about the place. Several long-empty shop fronts had suddenly sported new signs and opened their doors for business.
I’d been visiting the village for so long that many of the inhabitants were also familiar and it suddenly occurred to me that Sticklepond now felt more like home than London ever did, what with everyone so friendly when I was out and about with Stella.
Ma might keep to herself, but of course she knew who everyone in the village was, and they knew who she was before she married. And I couldn’t hide who I was even if I wanted to, because just like Ma I have inherited the typical Almond looks: very fair curling hair and slightly wide-apart clear blue eyes, with a tiny gap between my front teeth.
Occasionally some elderly villager would look at me closely and then tell me I was an Almond and, when I told them yes, my mother was Martha Almond before she married, he would nod and walk away; but though I knew that my distant cousin Esau had blotted his copybook, no one ever told me how, and my mild curiosity remained unsatisfied.
Stella still needed a long nap every afternoon, she got tired so easily, but once awake again we had a lovely time preparing for Christmas: sticking together paper-chain garlands, setting up the Nativity crib, decorating a quick chocolate Yule log, and baking star-shaped spiced biscuits, which we threaded with red ribbon and hung on the modest Christmas tree we’d carried home from the Spar in the village, partly wedged down the side of the buggy.
Later, I wrote up the Yule log for my ‘Tea & Cake’ page.
To whip up a quick and easy Yule log, cut out the fiddly task of making your own Swiss roll and instead buy a large one – the brown kind with a white creamy filling looks best. Cover with a thick coat of chocolate butter cream, roughly spread with a knife to give the effect of bark. Decorate with a robin and some holly, or whatever takes your fancy and keep in the fridge until you need it.
While we were back in the Spar buying the hundreds and thousands and little edible silver balls to decorate the trifle with, Stella told the friendly middle-aged shop assistant that we’d just been to visit the angels in the graveyard again (which was unfortunately becoming a habit, though at least it didn’t seem to be a morbid interest). The assistant asked if we’d been into the church to see the Nativity scene, which was apparently well worth viewing.
Stella remembered this later, and badgered Ma into agreeing to go and see it with us next morning. I hoped Stella wouldn’t be disappointed, because I was expecting no more from the Nativity than the usual dustily thatched crib and battered plaster or plastic figures, but they turned out to be the most beautifully carved wooden ones. Stella was enthralled by every tiny detail.
‘The Winter family brought them from Oberammagau before the war. It’s where they have that there Passion Play,’ said a voice behind us, and when I turned round I saw a small, wrinkled, lively-looking woman regarding us with sparrow-bright eyes full of curiosity.
‘This is Florrie Snowball, who has the Falling Star at the other end of the village,’ Ma introduced us. ‘She was at school with your grandfather.’
‘Oh, yes, I’ve seen you about,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t know who you were.’
‘And I’ve seen you – and I’d have recognised you for an Almond, with that hair and those eyes, even if I hadn’t already known you were Martha’s girl.’
‘Yes, everyone says that.’
Her eyes rested on Stella who, ignoring us, was still rapt with enchantment by the Nativity. ‘And your little girl, too – the Almond blood is clear in her veins.’
‘Well, we’re not trying to hide that we’re related to the Almonds,’ Ma said slightly snappishly.
‘And why should you?’ Florrie demanded. ‘I said to that old fool Pete Ormerod that what’s past is past and it’s only us ancient relics that remember what happened. And in any case, it was nowt to do with you, was it?’
Ma looked at her. ‘I suppose you’re right and no one cares much about the old stories now.’
‘You should come to the pub,’ she invited me. ‘We have a coffee machine what makes any kind you fancy, and my son, Clive, will show the little ’un the meteorite.’
‘The meteorite?’ I repeated.
‘That’s how the pub got its name,’ Ma said.
‘What’s a meatyright?’ Stella put in suddenly, having finally torn her gaze away from the Nativity scene.
‘It’s a big rock that fell out of the heavens,’ Florrie explained.
‘God threw a rock at you?’ Stella gasped, impressed. ‘You must have been really naughty.’
Florrie gave a wheezy laugh. ‘Not me, lovey – this was last century … or maybe the one before that. But there it sits in the courtyard now, right in the way, but bad luck to move it.’
‘I’d like to see it,’ breathed Stella, and I had to promise to take her next day.
‘Good. I’ll make you a charm, poppet, too,’ Florrie promised obscurely.
On the way home, I asked Ma what old stories Florrie knew about the Almonds. ‘Is this Granddad’s cousin Esau that you never want to talk about? Did he do something very bad?’
‘Nothing that matters now,’ she said, and wouldn’t be drawn. I’m not sure if she even knew exactly what it was.
‘And what did Florrie mean when she said she was going to make a charm for Stella?’
‘Rumour has it that she’s a witch, one of Gregory Lyon’s coven that has the witchcraft museum opposite the Falling Star.’
‘Really? How do you know?’
She shrugged her plump shoulders. ‘Hal tells me stuff, and anyway, there’s always been a history of witchcraft in the village. Ottie says the Winter family are distantly related to the Nutters, and her sister, Hebe, dabbles in the dark arts, though really I think she’s more of a herbalist.’
‘The Nutters?’ I repeated.
‘A famous witch family, further north. Didn’t you read the information boards at Winter’s End when you visited?’
‘No, mostly we were in the gardens, but maybe I should.’
‘Well, you’ll have to wait till it reopens for the season at Easter, if you can come up then.’
‘That would be lovely,’ I agreed, then ventured tentatively, ‘I … don’t suppose Esau’s disgrace was anything to do with witchcraft …?’
Ma gave a derisory snort. ‘Don’t be daft! Strange Baptists, the lot of them.’
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