A Proper Family Christmas (40 page)

‘Will you get that?’ Annabel called out to her husband, but Richard was changing Humfrey, who had just woken up again.

‘Got my hands full,’ he called.

The phone continued to ring. Annabel abandoned her toilette and picked up the handset in the bedroom before the answering machine could kick in.

‘Hello,’ she said.

‘Is that Annabel? It’s Dawn,’ said the caller. ‘From the hospital. We need you to bring Isabella in as soon as you can.’

Annabel drew breath. ‘Is it …?’ she whispered.

‘Yes,’ said Dawn. ‘It is. For a possible transplant. We think we’ve got a match.’

Sarah volunteered to look after Humfrey. Annabel woke Izzy and helped her to gather the things she would need for a hospital stay. Richard got the car out of the garage and sat in the driveway, warming up the engine and working out the fastest possible route to the hospital on his satnav.

Everyone was excited and terrified all at the same time.

‘Do you think it will happen tonight?’ Izzy asked.

‘If it’s a match,’ said Annabel. ‘As soon as they’re able.’

Izzy grabbed her mother for a hug.

‘I’m frightened,’ she said.

‘It’s going to be OK,’ Annabel promised. ‘You’re going to be in safe hands. But we’ve got to get going.’

‘I’ve just got to kiss Humfrey,’ Izzy said.

Annabel sat in the back of the car with Izzy for the drive to the hospital. She hugged her daughter the whole way and could hardly bear to let go of her when the transplant team took her off to begin their preparations.

In the waiting room, Annabel and Richard sat side by side, holding hands but not speaking. Annabel’s thoughts ranged far and wide. She could see Izzy as a tiny baby. A toddler. Eight years old and winning her first trophy at Pony Club. Now there was a very real possibility she would see her well into the future too. Perhaps even having her own baby and beginning the cycle again.

At the same time, for another family, a family she didn’t know, a story was coming to a close. They were saying goodbye to their loved one for ever. There would be no happy ending for them.

Annabel went into the chapel and offered a prayer for the family whose brave decision had given her daughter a second chance. She didn’t know anything about them. She only knew that the donor was a man in his thirties. Annabel prayed that he wasn’t a father.

Annabel kept praying until Izzy sat up in bed the following afternoon, post operation, and asked for a turkey sandwich.

So after all that, it turned out that the Bensons were not the key to Izzy’s recovery. In the end it was a stranger, dying in a road accident, who gave them the ultimate gift.

The next few weeks passed in a blur. Annabel had never been so busy in her life. Between Humfrey and Izzy, she was always engaged in something to do with one of the children. Izzy had to stay in hospital for a couple of weeks. Humfrey became a popular visitor. Every time Annabel brought him in, she had to take him on a tour of the wards so that he could be cuddled and kissed by all the staff and patients.

Now that Izzy had her kidney transplant, Annabel felt as though she too had been given a new lease of life. There was suddenly so much to look forward to. Izzy and Humfrey both seemed to be growing and changing day by day. To see Izzy’s return to form was every bit as exciting as watching Humfrey get bigger and stronger.

On the day that Izzy came home, which happened to be St Valentine’s Day, Annabel threw a small party for her elder child. Sarah was there, of course. Izzy’s old friends from school were there too. As was Sophie, her new best friend. And Jack and Ronnie and all the Bensons. It was a family affair.

Granddad Bill, Mark and Jack reprised their ‘Two and a Half Tenors’ act to celebrate Izzy’s recovery. There was a cake, like a birthday cake, to mark the start of Izzy’s new life. Towards the end of the party, Richard proposed a toast, to the anonymous young man who had given the whole family so much and enabled them to look forward to a great year full of health and happiness and, God willing, at the end of it, another proper family Christmas.

On the other side of the country, Jane Thynne was raising a toast of her own, to the man she would have married that Valentine’s Day – her fiancé Greg, who died in the early hours of Christmas Day. She would miss him for ever.

For the past seven weeks, she had existed in some kind of fog, almost unable to admit to herself that he had gone. Alone in the house they had decorated together, she took out a box of keepsakes from beneath the bed they had once shared. The box contained everything, from the very first postcard he sent her. He’d gone to Ibiza, on a lads’ holiday, the week after they met. Jane had expected him to meet someone else on that trip and forget all about her, but he had texted twenty times a day, sent her a postcard and brought home the shell bracelet that she now put on again, remembering how he had given it to her on their first proper date.

She re-read everything. The Valentine’s cards. The birthday cards. The Christmas card ‘For my fiancée’ of which she had been so proud. There were silly notes and notes that said nothing more (or less) than ‘I love you’. There was one letter that she hadn’t opened. He’d written it when he was about to go on a tour of Afghanistan. To be opened in the event of his death. She had wanted to throw it away when he came back from the tour in one piece. She wanted to rip it into tiny pieces and burn it on the fire on Christmas Eve, right after he told her that he was going to leave the army and train to be a plumber. But then he went and got himself killed. Not in some foreign field but on the high street not three minutes from where they lived. Driving home from the pub just after midnight. A drunk driver T-boned him at the junction.

He was so close to home.

Of course, he was on the donor register. They’d had that conversation many times. You had to have that conversation when your loved one was in the army. And in his death, he’d changed the lives of so many. His retinas. His liver. His heart. His kidneys.

Jane opened the last letter from her one true love.

Cheer up, babe,
was how it began.
You’re reading this because I’m gone, but the truth is, I’ll be with you for ever …

Jane smiled and cried all at once.

This is my thirtieth novel (counting those written under my various pseudonyms) and I don’t mind telling you that at times it was hell-on-a-stick to write! For their help in getting me to ‘the end’ once more, I would very much like to thank the following people:

Dr Chris Browne, Dr Anna Trigell, Dr Conor Byrne, Professor Tariq Massoud and Roy J Thomas and Melanie Wager of the Kidney Wales Foundation for their thoughts and advice on the kidney transplant storyline and related medical issues. Any mistakes herein are absolutely mine.

Francesca Best, Sharan Matharu and the gang at Hodder for their magic in taking my Word doc and making it into the book you now hold in your hands.

My agents Antony Harwood and James Macdonald Lockhart for their continued hard work on my behalf.

My co-conspirators at the Notting Hill Press: Matt Dunn, Michele Gorman, Rosie Blake, Sue Welfare, Victoria Connelly, Belinda Jones, Talli Roland, Ruth Saberton and Nick Spalding, for the tweeting, the Facebooking, the mind-boggling factoid threads and for reminding me how lucky I am to live a writer’s life.

Victoria Routledge for being the very best kind of friend, always ready with jokes, sympathy and wonderfully accurate advice. Even if I never take it.

My dear Mark, for being understanding when the muse is in the building (mostly moaning, crying and making a mess) and for making the very best tea. Still.

Finally, I would like to thank – again and again and a thousand times over – Ann and Don Manby, my mum and dad, who changed my life for the better when they adopted me back in 1971. All adoption stories begin in sadness. I wish they could all have such a happy ending as mine. Together with my sister Kate, Mum and Dad became my very own proper family and I love them with all my heart.

To find out more about how you can help kidney patients, visit:
www.kidneywales.com
.

If you enjoyed
A Proper Family Christmas
, catch up with the first hilarious instalment following the lives of the Benson family and their friends:

Chrissie Manby

Could you survive a week-long holiday with your entire family? Newly single magazine journalist Chelsea Benson can’t think of anything worse.

Your grubby small nephew torpedoing any chance of romance with the dishy guy you met on the plane …

Your eighty-five-year-old granddad chatting up ladies at the hotel bar …

Getting nothing but sarcastic comments from your older sister, who’s always been the family favourite …

And all this is before your parents drop their bombshell.

Is a week enough time for the Bensons to put their differences aside and have some fun? Or is this their last ever proper family holiday?

Out now in paperback and ebook.

Now read on for a taster …

Of the many family photographs that graced the shelves in Jacqui Benson’s living room, there were three of which she was particularly fond. The first, taken in the mid nineteen-eighties, was a photograph of an apple-cheeked baby girl, her younger daughter Chelsea, smiling in toothless delight as her grandfather Bill held her for her first paddle in the shallows of the sea. Chelsea’s big sister Ronnie, just two, stood alongside, gripping their father Dave’s hand for balance. Ronnie’s smile was big and proud as she waved a plastic spade at her mother behind the camera. That photograph was taken at Littlehampton, on a rare bright day in a fortnight of rain. They were staying in a borrowed caravan that smelled of Benson and Hedges and wet dog, but didn’t they have a great time?

The second photograph had been taken four years later. Same resort. Different caravan. Chelsea was five by now and Ronnie was six and a half. This time, neither sister needed an adult for support as they dashed in and out of the sea. Together with Granddad Bill, they had built a sandcastle and were filling the moat bucket by bucket. It was a thankless task; they spent the entire afternoon going backwards and forwards, spilling more than they managed to tip into the channel and finding it soaked away altogether before they got back with another load. In the photograph, the sun was shining, though Jacqui remembered it as another wet fortnight. Stormy even. Wasn’t that the holiday where the caravan’s awning blew away in the middle of the night? All the same, they had a laugh.

The third photograph was taken in the late nineteen-nineties. Littlehampton again. Granddad Bill liked the old-fashioned seaside town so much he’d bought a static van on a proper full service campsite when he retired. It was a great idea – free holidays for all the family when money was especially tight. In this photograph, the girls were on the beach once more but they were too old for paddling and sandcastles now. They’d spent the morning – a brief respite of sunshine in a fortnight of near monsoon conditions – stretched out on their beach-towels, listening to music, playing it super-cool whenever a good-looking boy walked by and dissolving into giggles once he was past them. They sat up for the photograph, taken by their father. Ronnie had slung her arm round her sister Chelsea’s shoulders. Chelsea’s expression, eyes rolling even as she tried not to laugh, suggested their dad had just told one of his ‘jokes’. This photograph was especially precious to Jacqui. It was the last photograph she had of her daughters together, great friends as well as sisters, enjoying each other’s company on a family holiday.

Sixteen years later, Jacqui had decided that it was time to recreate that togetherness again. Only this time with more reliable weather.

Saturday morning, five thirty-seven. The alarm clock on Chelsea Benson’s bedside table had been going off for five whole minutes. Chelsea remained in a deep slumber, flat on her back, legs and arms spread wide like a starfish, and snoring so hard that her breath actually stirred the panels of the Japanese paper lampshade hanging above her bed.

Six twenty-three. The alarm had been sounding for fifty-one minutes. Chelsea snored on. She was finally woken by the sound of hammering on the front door of her flat and staggered to answer it, still half asleep. Her next-door neighbour, Pete, stood on the doorstep, in his pyjamas.

‘You’re in. I told myself she can’t be in. I told myself it would stop automatically. Or the batteries would run out. Or … or …’

With a good portion of her brain still stuck in the Land of Nod, Chelsea looked at Pete in confusion.

‘Your alarm clock!’ Pete spluttered. ‘I can hear it through the walls.’

‘Be-be-beep, be-be-beep, be-be-beep …’ The little clock had not given up.

As if hearing the alarm for the very first time, Chelsea turned back towards her bedroom.