Why Don’t You Come for Me (35 page)

Jo knew that Marcus genuinely liked Christmas, and in previous years she had endeavoured to make a great deal of it. Not just for Marcus, but also because she was ever mindful of the possibility – however faint – that Lauren might be there to share it with them. Wasn’t Christmas the time of triumphant homecoming? The arrival of the long-lost relative, the erstwhile lover and returning prodigal sons – the time of family unity, reunion and forgiveness? Imagine if Lauren were to come home at Christmas, and find instead of fairy lights and tinsel, an undecorated house without so much as a mince pie in the larder to herald the festive season. So, this year, as she had done every year, Jo decorated the Christmas tree in mid-December, wound garlands of expensive artificial greenery around the uprights which supported the banisters and stocked up the cupboards with everything from brandy snaps to pickled gherkins. It seemed to take her longer than usual, and all her efforts felt hollow, not least because she was unable to summon up much optimism that this year would be the one when she was finally able to lay that longed-for extra place at the Christmas table.

There had been no more postcards, seashells, or any other signs and portents. Nor was she getting any further with Dr Heinsel’s Method. She had relived their final day with Lauren again and again, but her memory was treacherous, forever introducing someone or something alien to the scene, some cunningly contrived distraction which prevented her from seeing what had really happened.

As the number of unopened windows on the advent calendar decreased, the Met Office began to forecast heavy snow. There was already snow on the tops, of course. They had been iced white since mid-October, but the valleys remained green save for the spun-sugar frosts which settled across everything on clear nights. Jo had very little faith in the Met Office. They seemed to get it wrong as often as they got it right, and changed their forecast from hour to hour. The most reliable indicator was still a glance through the window, and on the Sunday morning before Christmas any fool who had risen early and looked out into the grey half-light could tell that snow was imminent. Sure enough, a curtain of white flakes began to descend at breakfast time, steady and persistent, the kind of snow which an experienced Lakeland dweller recognizes as here to stay: picture-postcard pretty, but creating havoc on the roads. Easter Bridge was well off the route of any gritting lorry, and there was never enough passing traffic to keep the lane clear. Not that passing traffic would be a match for this stuff, which had soon fallen to a depth which could be measured in inches.

Jo watched the garden transform itself into an illustration from a children’s story –
Winter Holiday
perhaps, or
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
At around eleven o’clock the sound of feet stamping beside the front door alerted her to Shelley’s arrival. She had come to deliver their Christmas card, and at Jo’s invitation was easily persuaded to divest herself of coat and wellingtons while Jo located their card and made some tea to have with mince pies. The November floods had drifted her back into the orbit of her neighbours. She had returned Shelley’s books, and even exchanged an uneasy greeting with Gilda when they passed one another in the lane.

‘Is Sean out, enjoying the snow?’ Shelley asked, cupping her hands round the warm mug.

‘He’s still in bed. I expect he’ll want to take the sledge out when he gets up. Harry’s family are supposed to be coming up for Christmas, so if this carries on the kids will have a whale of a time.’

‘Do you think they’ll still come, if the weather’s like this?’

‘I suppose so. They’ve got a four-wheel drive. More fun for Sean if Harry’s here.’

‘Isn’t Gilda’s daughter home? I bet she’d like to go out sledging.’

‘Sean thinks younger girls are beneath his attention.’

Shelley shrugged. ‘I would have thought he’d be glad to have someone to throw snowballs at. And I bet he’ll be interested enough in a couple of years’ time. That girl is going to be absolutely stunning. I don’t mean to be rude, but she doesn’t get it from her mother, does she?’ Shelley took a dainty bite of mince pie and masticated thoughtfully, before saying: ‘This is nice. Did you buy them at Booths? My mum used to make her own and you could have paved the streets with them – they were all pastry and no mincemeat.’

‘Mine used to buy them,’ said Jo, ‘when she remembered.’

There was a short silence.

‘We’re supposed to be going down to my parents for Christmas.’ Shelley paused for another mouthful of pie. ‘Although I don’t think we will if this weather keeps up. Brian won’t be broken-hearted, I can tell you. My dad’s driving us all crazy with his family tree. He started with the online census, but now he’s going off all over the place, looking at old gravestones and heaven knows what. You can hardly get in the door these days before he’s producing a huge long chart and going on about great-uncles no one has ever heard of, and people emigrating to Canada in 1850. I can’t keep up with it, and Brian isn’t interested at all.’

‘I don’t suppose it is very interesting unless it’s your own family.’

‘And believe me, not always then.’

After Shelley had gone, it occurred to Jo that she could have asked her to pop their card for the Perrys through the door of Throstles as she passed, although asking someone else to deliver your Christmas card was a bit lazy, surely. And anyway, trudging along the lane in the snow to deliver them yourself was very traditional, very
A Christmas Carol
. That was the proper way to do it. What had Brian said about people managing before things had been mechanized? Not that the tradition of exchanging cards went back all that far, but never mind.

The card destined for the Perrys was propped up on the back of her desk in the office, where it had been left with Shelley and Brian’s when she took all the others to the post office. It struck her that she could not walk to the Perrys without passing The Old Forge. She had never so much as considered adding Gilda to her Christmas-card list, but there was something very pointed about walking straight past the woman’s gate with a card in her hand which was obviously destined for the only other permanent residents. Gilda was part of their tiny community, too. She thought of the way Gilda had saved the day when she spotted the overflowing beck in the nick of time; Gilda tugging on the rope, while the rain beat down on her shiny, black-clad shoulders … Gilda always being the last person to be picked for teams, the only Christmas cards to appear on her desk coming from one or two of the kinder girls who pitied her – although not enough to make her their friend. It was Christmas, after all, and Gilda was her neighbour. Peace on earth and goodwill to all men.

She rooted out the box of unused cards and selected a snow scene (nicely appropriate) for Gilda, writing inside
With best wishes from Jo, Marcus and Sean.
Then she addressed the envelope to
Mrs G. Iceton & Miss R. Iceton,
pushed the card inside, sealed it down and propped it against the one she had written a couple of weeks before for Maisie and Fred.

It was still snowing hard, so before leaving the house she wrapped the two envelopes inside a plastic bag to keep them dry. The snow on the drive was pristine except for Shelley’s footprints, which had already been partially obscured. Strange how heavy snowfall brought its own special intensity to everything, that special hush, the acute brightness, in spite of poor visibility and a leaden sky. She avoided Shelley’s tracks, preferring to scrunch into the virgin snow, sinking almost to her ankles at every step before the compressed snow beneath her feet brought her up short. If this went on they would need Mr Tyson with his snowplough, never mind a four-wheel drive.

Even after a heavy snowfall The Old Forge did not manage to look picturesque. Gilda had been in residence for nearly a year now, but there had been no sign of any improvements. No builder’s vans parked outside or planning permission notices tied to the gate. Perhaps Gilda was doing it up herself, from the inside out.

Either Jo’s approach had been observed or else coincidence was in play, because just as she reached the front door it was opened by Gilda’s daughter. Shelley was certainly right about Rebecca Iceton – she was extremely pretty. It must make Gilda so proud to have a daughter who had turned out like this.

‘I brought your Christmas card,’ Jo said, fumbling with her plastic bag, while the girl stood just inside the door, regarding her with an uncertainty which might have been no more than shyness. ‘What do you think of this weather?’ Jo groped for something suitable to fill the silence. She had to get her glove off in order to separate the two cards, and the glove was proving stubborn. ‘Will you be out sledging, later on?’

‘I don’t have a sledge.’

‘We’ve got at least two,’ Jo said. ‘I’m sure Sean will be out later – when he gets up. I’ll tell him to call for you, if you like.’

‘Thank you.’ The girl continued to look uncomfortable. Jo wondered if she was remembering their first encounter in the lane; or perhaps Gilda had actually instructed her to steer clear of the strange woman who lived at The Hideaway. When she handed the card over, Rebecca said ‘Thank you’ again. As she was shutting the front door, Gilda’s voice came from somewhere at the back of the house. ‘Is there someone there, Becky?’ Jo was still on the front step, taking a moment to replace her glove and reorganize the plastic bag around the Perrys’ card, and in the stillness of the snowy hamlet she heard the girl’s voice clearly through the closed door. ‘It was the woman from across the road, bringing a Christmas card. Shall I open it? It’s addressed to both of us – although she’s got my name wrong, as usual.’ The voice was growing fainter as the speaker retreated down the hall and any reply was inaudible.

Jo froze on the spot. In what way was the name wrong? Why would Rebecca’s name not be Iceton, the same as her mother’s? It was not as if Gilda had kept her maiden name, which might have explained it. What other reason but that this was not Gilda’s daughter at all? She set off almost at a run towards Gilda’s perpetually open gate, nearly forgetting in her hurry that she still had the Perrys’ card in her hand. She almost turned back towards The Hideaway, but stopped herself just in time. She must walk calmly and quietly to Throstles and deliver the other card. She must not let Gilda – if she was watching – realize that she had overheard.

And Gilda might be watching. Gilda was always watching – she had been watching from her bedroom window that night when Jo had returned from Claife Station, and again from her bedroom window when the beck flooded – except that one of those events could only be seen from the front of Gilda’s house and the other from the back. No wonder she had been turning things over and over in her mind, because subconsciously she had known all along that Gilda was lying when she said that she just happened to be drawing her bedroom curtains that night. Gilda’s bedroom was not at the front but at the back – she had given herself away the night of the floods. Of course, Gilda could have moved from one bedroom to another, said the devil’s advocate in her mind, but Jo was not really listening.

How would it work, exactly? Supposing you saw someone you really hated, had always hated and longed to get back at: someone who had something which you had not got but badly wanted. What would you have to do, if you had taken the ultimate revenge and stolen their baby? She swung the Perrys’ gate open so violently that snow sprayed off it in all directions, plastering itself against her jeans and cagoule, some of it dropping in icy dollops down her boots, but she scarcely noticed. You would have to pretend to everyone that the child was yours. It would be much easier to pull it off if you had money to take you to different places, plenty of cash to set yourself up with an instant kit of cot and pram and so on. Difficult to explain to friends and relations how this child had suddenly appeared in your life – but if you didn’t actually have that many close relatives … or friends … Gilda was an only child, and her parents had been getting on when they had her. They might have been dead by 1998. What about the husband she claimed to have had? (Ouch, the Perrys’ letterbox was vicious.) Maybe the husband was just a figment of Gilda’s imagination, or maybe the marriage had been short-lived, so that he was off the scene by the time she took Lauren.

‘Hell-o-oo.’ Maisie had been alerted by the snap of the letterbox and was standing on the step, waving aloft the envelope Jo had just delivered.

‘Hello, Maisie. Can’t stop.’ She had already made it to the gate. It was a bit rude, but she didn’t look back. Provided you didn’t look back, you would neither be turned into a pillar of salt, nor snared by Maisie’s invitation to join her for a festive sherry.

But why call the child something different? Surely that just drew attention to the fact that she wasn’t yours. It was because you would sooner or later need documents. Children only had their birth certificate. You would have to apply for someone else’s birth certificate, then come up with some plausible reason why the details didn’t fit properly – could you make that work, or was the whole thing just plain crazy?

By now she was passing The Old Forge again. She forced herself not to look up at the place, concentrating instead on where she was putting her feet. The falling snow had softened the set of prints she had made coming the other way. The outlines were there, but the imprints left by the soles of her boots in the bottom of each hole were already gone. It would be impossible to get a car along the lane now.

When she opened her own front door, Sean was just coming downstairs. She took a deep breath. ‘I’ve just dropped a card off with the neighbours,’ she said as casually as she could. ‘Becky at The Old Forge is home, but she can’t go out sledging because she doesn’t have a sledge. I guessed you’d be going out later, and we’ve got the wooden sledge and at least one of those cheap plastic ones in the garage, so I said you would call for her on your way out. I hope you don’t mind.’

Sean didn’t look exactly pleased, but he didn’t argue. ‘I want something to eat first’ he said.