Chapter 23 A Dickens of a Christmas Feast
A Dickens of a Christmas Feast
Pearl and Toby had moved on to Monopoly when we went back into the other room, but loud snores came from the library where Kate was ‘thinking’.
They stopped abruptly when the gong in the hall went for dinner and she appeared in the doorway with today’s navy bell tent dress slightly crumpled, so she looked like a well-travelled yurt.
Pearl said she’d better just check on Opal, and Nerys, who had just come in to round us up for dinner, said she would go up with her, in case she felt worse.
The rest of us went into the refectory, to find the long table spread with a crimson cloth embroidered with holly, ivy and yet more mistletoe.
There were large golden crackers at every place setting and the lights on the tree were twinkling madly – all very festive!
There was a lovely porcelain ornament of a robin sitting on a tree stump in the middle of the table, the base wreathed in holly.
As the rest of us gathered and automatically took our usual places for dinner, Nerys and Pearl came back, without Opal.
‘I’m afraid Opal isn’t very well – hot and a bit feverish, so I think it’s flu,’ said Nerys.
‘I’ve taken her temperature, and we’ll keep checking on her, of course, and although she’s not hungry she must have lots of fluids and soup.
It’s such a pity she can’t have chicken soup. I always feel that cures anything!’
‘I’ve never known her to be really ill – I mean, to the point where she admits it,’ Pearl said, worriedly, sitting down by Toby and looking at him appealingly. ‘Do you think it was getting cold yesterday while filming? She would insist on staying out there after we’d gone back.’
‘It might be just a bad cold, and anyone can catch those,’ he said, then added reassuringly, ‘I’m sure she’ll soon be fine.’
‘I knew that girl had caught something,’ said Evie, who had come in with Noel and was now seating herself in her usual place next to Timon and opposite Kate.
‘Toby’s probably right and we must just let it run its course,’ Nerys said. ‘But if she seems worse tomorrow, I’ll ask the district nurse to pop in and take a look at her.’
‘That’s Nanny Jones’s daughter,’ explained Cariad. ‘Nanny lives with her.’
‘Opal says she only wants to be left alone to sleep and for everyone to stop fussing over her,’ Pearl said.
‘We’ll leave her in peace for a bit, and perhaps she can have her soup and hot whisky and lemon later,’ Nerys suggested.
‘What a shame she’s ill and will miss all the fun of Christmas,’ said Noel. ‘Poor girl.’
‘I could take the small TV from our private sitting room up later and fix that up for her to watch,’ suggested Timon.
‘Good idea,’ said Evie. ‘Even I have found myself mindlessly watching inane TV series when recovering from something like that.’
But after that, I’m afraid we quickly forgot about poor Opal as we pulled crackers, put on gold paper crowns and read silly jokes to each other.
We gave the little plastic figures inside the crackers to Cariad.
They made up a whole Nativity scene and you could construct the stable from the box they came in.
Nerys had explained that Bronwen and Tudor wouldn’t dine with us, because immediately we’d finished, they would go to their daughter’s house for the rest of the day and have their Christmas dinner there.
‘So we make do for ourselves later, with sandwiches and mince pies,’ Timon said. ‘And you’ll have seen from the brochures in your rooms that we have an expedition to the Welsh Mountain Zoo in Colwyn Bay tomorrow, so breakfast is the usual time, and then we can set off early.’
‘We have lunch at the zoo, but Bronwen and Tudor will leave soup and sandwiches for anyone not coming on the trip to help themselves to,’ explained Nerys.
‘We’ll be back for tea. But now,’ she added as Timon, who was carving the turkey, began to pass plates along the table, and Tudor came in with the roast potatoes and parsnips to add to the dishes of chipolata sausages, buttered peas and sprouts already on the table, ‘let’s tuck in! ’
It was the sort of sumptuous Christmas feast of a kind I’d only previously seen in recipe books and films, with not only great boats of thick gravy to accompany it, but cranberry jelly and bread sauce, too.
Pearl had a little savoury bake to herself and a boat of vegetarian gravy.
We had Prosecco to wash it all down with, and even Kate got rather merry after a while, while Verity’s sweet Madonna face became a little pinker.
Finally, when we’d helped clear the main course off the table, the lights were put out and Tudor carried in a huge cannonball of a Christmas pudding, the top alight with an unearthly blue flame. There was a big cut-glass bowl of trifle too, with jugs of custard and thick cream.
I don’t think I’ve ever eaten so much in my life. Maybe Evie had had a point about it being the season of conspicuous consumption, but then, it was only once a year!
The bubbles in the Prosecco had gone to my head, and I was probably not the only one, for everyone looked a little flushed after that, even Pearl, who had eaten what was probably her own body weight in roast potatoes and almost all the nut roast intended for two.
She looked pretty with pink cheeks and bright eyes and I could tell Toby thought so too.
Romance might be in the air, and perhaps Opal would wake up from her flu-induced slumber to find the prince had snatched away her sister!
‘Here’s to many more happy Christmases just like this one,’ said Noel, raising his glass for the final toast. ‘Perhaps some of you will come back again next year.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said Rhys, and, catching my eye, raised his glass to me and smiled. I found I couldn’t look away.
Tyger, tyger, burning bright …
Verity broke the spell. She leaned forward and said to me, across Rhys, ‘I suppose this is quite a sad time for you, Ginny, remembering past Christmases with your boyfriend, Will. After all, you broke up quite recently, didn’t you?’
I stared at her blankly for a moment, then said, surprised, ‘No, we broke up ages ago and I haven’t given him a single thought all day!’
‘So brave,’ she murmured. ‘But Christmas does always remind us of our lost loved ones, doesn’t it? I’m sure Rhys must think of poor Annie at this time of the year, too.’ She cast him a sweet, understanding smile. ‘And Cariad too, poor motherless child.’
She made her sound like Little Orphan Annie and I saw that Cariad was looking across at her with her clear, critical gaze.
‘If you mean Mummy, I don’t remember ever seeing her at Christmas, and she just sent me an token.’
‘I don’t see why you’ve decided to cast yourself in the role of Scrooge and summon all the ghosts of Christmas Past to join us, Verity,’ said Nerys tartly. ‘You have a propensity for saying exactly the wrong thing!’
‘I’m sure I didn’t mean to upset anyone,’ faltered Verity, looking stricken.
‘Good, because you haven’t managed it,’ said Rhys, brusquely.
But Verity’s words had summoned not only Will’s ghost, which I had no trouble in banishing, but also that of the mercurially beautiful and bewitching Annie, which was less easy to banish.
Evie leaned forward, her beady dark blue eyes sparkling. ‘Well, now we’ve got the Spirit of Christmas Past out of the way, perhaps we can have a little spirit of another kind to follow our feast with?’
‘Of course,’ agreed Timon. ‘Here’s Tudor with the coffee, so anyone who wants it can take it through to the sitting room. Noel can be bartender for those who want something stronger while I help clear up here.’
‘Certainly, dear boy,’ said Noel.
I noticed that Tudor managed to whisk Verity’s plate, from which she was still consuming minute teaspoons of trifle, out from under her nose while her attention was distracted.
Toby, Rhys, Pearl and I volunteered to help clear up, so Timon could take up the small TV set to Opal’s room.
Bronwen was obviously a cook who liked the kitchen tidied and things washed up as she went along, for there wasn’t much left to do in there, other than hand wash the champagne glasses, and Rhys did that while I dried.
Pearl followed Timon upstairs with some soup and a hot whisky toddy for the invalid, and reported back that she didn’t seem any worse and still just wanted to be left alone.
‘If she’s only had soup to eat today, then the whisky will probably knock her out nicely,’ Rhys said cheerfully.
‘Yes, and perhaps she will feel much better in the morning,’ suggested Bronwen comfortably, taking off her apron and hanging it up.
Snookums and Pompey took this as a sign that no more turkey would be forthcoming and ceased to hang around her feet.
‘Cupboard love!’ she said severely to them both.
*
In the sitting room the rest of the party were slumped around in the comatose state induced by too much rich food all at once, except Noel and Evie, who were helping Cariad construct the Nativity scene on the coffee table.
The rest of us were all too stuffed to move for a while, but I had two cups of coffee and began to wake up a bit and, when the Nativity scene was finished and put in pride of place on the mantelpiece, I helped Cariad transfer most of her treasured new possessions up to her room.
She wanted me to watch another film with her after that – Arthur Christmas, another old favourite – but Rhys suggested we all go out to work off the excess calories and get some fresh air, instead.
Nerys and Timon had already slipped away – I expect they needed a little time on their own occasionally, when they had a house party – and Verity and Kate both said they intended working in their rooms for an hour or two, although I suspected they meant they would lie on their beds and examine the insides of their eyelids!
‘It’s going dark, Daddy,’ protested Cariad.
‘Not completely yet, and anyway, we’ve got torches,’ he said, but gave in eventually and let her stay to watch her film.
Evie and Noel told us they were just going to walk over the bridge to the bookshop, because Noel had remembered a book that might be useful to Evie.
So that just left me, Rhys, Toby and Pearl to wrap up like polar explorers and, armed with a selection of torches from the shelf in the garden hall, set out into the chilly dusk, our breath hanging in the cold air like ectoplasm.
We went past the pottery and took the processional path all the way up to Mab’s Grave, not using the torches as our eyes adjusted to the dusk. It was a clear evening and we could see lights across the estuary and the first stars coming out above.
Rhys had been right: the fresh air and exercise did make me, at least, feel much better and cleared the last haze of Prosecco out of my brain.
Toby and Pearl set off ahead of us on the way back down and when we got to the glade in the middle of the oak wood, there was no sign or sound of them.
I lingered a bit by the pool, where the still surface reflected a star or two through the gaps in the branches.
All was quiet and imbued with that special magic the spot seemed to hold … and once more, as I had at dinner, I seemed to feel a ghostly presence: this time not the disturbing one of Annie, but Arwen.
Had she, I wondered, loved this spot too?
I remembered Rhys saying that since she was a city girl, living at Triskelion must have made her feel as isolated as if she was living on an island.
But even if it had felt a little like a prison by the end of her stay, at least she had soon got away to live the life she really wanted, however briefly.
In fact, her life had been a three-act tragedy, with her parents’ deaths and then her guardian’s, whom she may well have grown fond of before his accidental demise ended her stay – and then, of course, her own life had come to a premature close the following year …
There was a sudden cracking noise – perhaps some creature stirring in the wood – and I came back to the present to find Rhys looking at me quizzically.
‘I’m icy cold!’ I said, suddenly realizing it and stamping my feet to try and restore the circulation.
‘That’s because you’ve been standing there in a daydream for about twenty minutes, at least.’
‘Oh, sorry – you must be freezing! You should have left me to it.’
‘You might have turned into a wood nymph and vanished into the trees, never to be seen again,’ he teased.
‘I think that’s more in Opal and Pearl’s line, really.’
‘Like the flu – and you don’t want that, either. Come on, it’s time to go back for an unbridled orgy of turkey sandwiches, Christmas cake and mince pies, washed down with whatever takes your fancy, while indulging in a frenzy of board games, jigsaws, table tennis and cheesy old films.’
‘That sounds quite irresistible!’ I said happily, and followed him through the dark wood and out again into the clear, cold starry night.