Christmas in the Snow (51 page)

‘Just call him, Legs.’ Isobel’s hand was on her arm, concern in her eyes. ‘Let him explain; I’m probably getting half of this wrong.’

Allegra looked back at her through dull eyes, remembering the first time she’d set eyes on Sam. If she’d had any clue then how interconnected they would become – lovers,
enemies, colleagues, allies . . . If she could go back to change anything about that night, what would she change? All of it? One thing? Nothing?

In a sea of people, my eyes will always look for you.
The bold poetry of the words, the simple longing that leaped from them had been like a chime from her own heart because she
couldn’t forget how her eyes always searched for him – right from the first instant on the plane. He could be everything, but hadn’t Zermatt shown her that love was terminal,
unrecoverable . . . ?

She shook her head. Some risks weren’t worth taking.

‘For God’s sake, Legs, he’s not Dad!’

Allegra looked up at her sister in surprise. ‘What? Why would you say
that
?’

‘A blind man could see how crazy Sam is about you. He wouldn’t have done all this if he was going to leave you.’

‘Iz, you don’t understand—’

‘Yes, I do. I understand perfectly. I know exactly what went on back then, and I know there’s nothing you could have done to change it. You were amazing that night in the church.
Christmas Eve and the whole school stopped just to listen to you sing. I remember Mum’s face as she watched you. I don’t think she breathed once during the whole verse.’

‘Iz—’ Her voice was a croak. She remembered it too – their mother sitting with a rolled-up copy of the
TV Times
on her lap, to read because she’d arrived
an hour early to bag the front pew – her eyes shining with pride and utterly oblivious to the devastation the quiet man in the grey overcoat and brown scarf would wreak on them all the next
morning.

‘You were absolutely perfect.’

‘No.’

‘Yes. But it didn’t matter what you did or how perfect you were, he was never going to stay, Legs, and what he did to you was cruel and unfair.’ Isobel was standing beside her
now. ‘He made you believe you could change things that were already unstoppable; but he never had any intention of staying with us. He was just buying time; he always wanted them
more.’

Allegra looked away, remembering how hard she’d tried, all those teenage nights she had stayed in to revise while Isobel found wild escape in partying, hitting the scholarship stream
within a term of trying, taking the lead in the play, breaking the long-distance record at school, singing the solo in the choir . . .

And when he’d gone anyway – the very next day, to enjoy Christmas morning with his other family – she hadn’t stopped. Others would have buckled, given up, but she’d
taken two jobs around lectures to pay her way through university when everyone else was on pub crawls. And after graduation, she had sat in high-end strip clubs – the only woman in there
wearing more than a thong – as she wooed clients into signing on the dotted line because it brought her the success and security that was a two-fingered salute to the father who’d
left.

Her mother may have crumbled as the bills came in with no way of paying for them, Isobel may have run from the truth that he had other children he loved more, but she had filled the gap
he’d left behind. She had turned her sorrow into ambition and used it to save them, making sure that no one had the power to imperil them again. Their fates would not rest on the caprices of
whether someone loved them enough or not.

Isobel hesitated. ‘I saw them one time, you know.’

Allegra frowned. ‘
You
did? When?’

‘In a restaurant in Kew about three years later. They were just talking, nothing much. The boy was on a Nintendo. I remember thinking he looked about your age.’

‘Yes, I thought so too.’ Allegra sank back into the memory of the moment that had changed everything. ‘It’s funny, there’s so little I can really remember before it
happened, but I can recall that one day so clearly. It was in the park, four days after my thirteenth birthday. I couldn’t understand why Dad was playing with these other kids when he barely
even spoke to us.’ He’d been gone within seven months.

‘I wished you’d told me what he’d done, challenging you to give him a reason to stay.’ Isobel’s hand was on her shoulder. ‘It would have changed everything I
felt about him. I never would have wanted him to come back if I’d known how he’d tricked you. I never would have wanted to keep his name.’

Allegra looked up at her. ‘How
did
you know?’ She had always kept his ‘pact’ with her a secret, too ashamed to admit that she’d failed, even to her mother,
who’d insisted the failure had been hers.

‘It was something Lloyd said, actually. He was talking about how driven you are and I told him how you didn’t used to be, but that you’d changed literally overnight into this
mega-swot, just when Dad started staying away more, pretending to be on the rig, even though we all knew it was forty days on, forty days off, like we couldn’t count or something.’

She sighed. ‘Lloyd figured you must have thought you could stop him leaving by becoming the perfect daughter.’ She shrugged. ‘And as soon as he said it, I knew that was it! I
remembered what you said to him at the front door when he was going and it all made sense at last.’

Allegra’s eyes flickered away, wet with unshed tears. She remembered that like it had happened yesterday, too – crying at the front door as he put on his coat, the Christmas presents
untouched and unwanted beneath the tree. ‘
But we had a deal. You promised.
’

‘Lloyd thinks you’ve never trusted anyone since, and especially not him, the token adult male in the family. He thinks you don’t think he’s good enough for me and Ferds.
He said sometimes it’s almost like you’re auditioning him.’ Isobel’s voice wavered. ‘You don’t do that, do you?’

Allegra hesitated, seeing her scorn through his eyes. ‘If I did, I didn’t mean to,’ she replied after a moment. ‘I just don’t want anyone to hurt you again.
You’re my little sister. It’s my job to protect you.’

Isobel smiled, sitting on the arm of the chair beside her. ‘Legs, it’s his now.
He’s
my safety net. He always catches me, even when I go too far.’ She gave
Allegra a meaningful stare and Allegra thought of her sister’s brush with Brice. ‘And he knows that sometimes I don’t feel as lovable as he thinks I am.’ She bit her lip.
‘Hey, we’re all works in progress, right?’

Allegra smiled. ‘I guess so.’

‘Just trust me on this, will you? Pretty much the only thing I know more about in the world than you is men, and Sam’s one of the good guys, Legs. Give him a chance.’

Allegra looked back at the screen – a new set of experts were giving their opinion on the scandal, weighing in and adding momentum to the juggernaut that would sooner or later bring her
name into the mix.

She had been saved from this, Sam had saved her, but he had also lied to her every step of the way and Isobel still didn’t see that it wasn’t a white knight Allegra needed – it
was someone she could trust.

‘Because it would happen on Christmas Eve,’ Allegra muttered to herself as she darted around Ikea with a trolley that was the size of a flatbed lorry, trying to
load up a flat-pack kitchen table with stacking chairs, floor lamps and several nests of tables that could be separated, one in each room. If she’d thought Selfridges was bad the other week .
. .

Hmm, she stopped in front of some giant fluffy sheepskin rugs. Were these good, or would Isobel worry about dust mites or something? She grabbed three anyway.

Lloyd was in the Poplar flat, unscrewing the arms off her sofa and trying to get it down the stairs, while Isobel was at theirs packing up her cutlery and crockery and unloading the fridge of
the enormous Waitrose order that had been delivered about forty minutes before the pipe burst and the ceiling fell down in their sitting room. Half the joists could be seen, and no one had fooled
themselves for one minute that Isobel was going to contemplate her son spending his first Christmas dodging plaster ceiling missiles.

She checked her watch. Eleven twenty-six. The beds – the world’s two most expensive beds, which had required a £200 express-delivery surcharge – were arriving anytime
after one. Everyone else could sleep on the floor, and Ferds had his cot, but both Timo and her mother needed proper beds. The thought of the reunion again this afternoon almost made the floor drop
away from her and she squeezed her eyes shut and counted to five.

What else? Towels? How many? Five sets? She took eight, just in case. Oh, and bedding. She’d need that too . . .

She grabbed things from the shelves as she passed, pushing the trolley with a groan and feeling like she was a muscleman heaving a lorry.

The queues at the tills stretched halfway to Surrey, but the Golf was less elastic and she had to unpack almost all the furniture, stamping on cardboard boxes in the car park, before she could
cram it in, driving all the way to Islington with her head held at a right angle.

Lloyd was just parking his white van – begged from an ex-City friend who’d decided the area’s local wealthy residents would pay more for a ‘posh plumber’ they could
trust – when she turned into the street, driving along at a slow crawl as she checked the house numbers for the one that was actually hers.

The street it was on was family dominated, with the buildings inhabited as houses, not flats, and in every window she could see tall, handsome Christmas trees and majestic wreaths nailed to the
front doors.

‘Christ, Legs,’ Lloyd muttered as she hopped out of the car to join him.

The sale may have been completed five weeks ago, but this was the first time she was actually seeing for herself how £3.7 million translated into bricks and mortar, and it was far bigger
than she’d envisioned. Five storeys in total, it was stuccoed on the ground and basement floors, honey-brown bricks on the upper levels. The white door was embellished with a glazed crescent,
and the metalwork balconies outside the long, narrow Georgian windows bowed as though blown. When she put the key in the door, the lock was stiff and reluctant to turn, as though sulking with her
for its long neglect.

‘Here, it’s probably frozen,’ Lloyd said, barging her gently out of the way. ‘Let me try.’

She watched as he blew on it, rubbing the copper plate with his hands before blowing on it again.

It worked a treat and they both stepped in with wide eyes, curiosity finally catching up with her critical investment faculties as she looked down the long hallway that ballooned out into a
kitchen at the back. Oak floors – too treacly in colour for her liking – ran through every room like excited children. The walls, depressed in their grubby, taupe-painted skins, were
stained with greasy handprints and flecked with small circles of exposed plaster that looked like scars from where mirrors and pictures and photographs had once hung. The marble fireplaces in the
reception rooms were still mottled with wax crusts, a box of Swan matches left on one windowsill. The chandeliers – which she’d thought too grand and fussy anyway – had gone, the
exposed wires left dangling in express defiance of building regulations. So often it was the richest people who acted cheaply.

The kitchen was less expensive than it had looked in the photographs – ply backs to the drawers obfuscated by expensive handles, the granite worktop merely entry-level grade. The garden
was pretty and generous for London, though, its long, narrow proportions emphasized as overgrown shrubs in beds on either side practically met in an arch overhead, the grass dotted with prickly
dandelions and scorch marks from the neighbourhood cats.

She wandered through the ghostly house, Lloyd at a polite distance, her hi-tech, blacked-out running kit – she had left it at Isobel’s the other week and hadn’t been home yet
to get another change – at odds with the domestic palette of creams and blues and taupes, her neon mesh Nike Flyknits flattening the deep-piled carpets. The staircase was beautiful –
tight and winding, but with a mahogany handrail that fluted in the palm, inviting a careless leg thrown over and a Peter Pan-style ride to the bottom.

She stopped in the doorways of the bedrooms – the master bedroom was too large for one, the nursery for children she didn’t have, guest suites for friendships long since lapsed. Only
a week ago, this house could have felt like a sharp slap in the face, but now she felt its walls close around her like arms. Today, at least, it was perfect.

She patted Lloyd on the shoulder. ‘Come on, then,’ she smiled. ‘We’d better get this place shipshape before Little Miss Health and Safety gets here and closes us
down.’

Three hours later, it was getting dark. The first street lamps were beginning to switch on, and the houses opposite glowed a warm, honeyed colour, the windows like television
screens as the lives inside were illuminated to show children racing through rooms, their parents wrapping presents and straightening pictures, drinking wine, some of them dancing.

What did her windows show? Allegra wondered, as she fixed the wreath to the door, the finishing touch to their afternoon’s labours. She jogged down the steps and looked back in.

It certainly didn’t have the lifestyle finesse or colour-matched sophistication of her neighbours yet. The orange and yellow plastic chairs sat uncomfortably with the veneered pine table,
and the floor lamps looked like they belonged in a loft in Wapping, not a Regency house in Islington. And yet . . . flames were leaping from the fire Lloyd had managed to get going (after a heroic
last-minute dash to the petrol station for smokeless coal), Noemie was sitting on one of the sheepskin rugs, rolling a ball for Ferdy, and Barry was single-handedly hoisting the giant eleven-foot
Christmas tree into position in the corner by the window. But it was Timo she couldn’t take her eyes off, sitting on her battered too-small sofa with her mother’s hand in his, neither
one of them speaking, an expression on both their faces that transcended words.