Chapter Twenty-One #3
Just at that moment, Christopher’s phone starts to ring. ‘Oh crikey,’ he says, wiggling with his two cups. To his horror, Nash slips his hand into Christopher’s back pocket, answers the phone and holds it against Christopher’s ear for him.
‘Christopher, it’s your mother.’
‘Hi, Mother.’
‘I secured a car for your friend to borrow.’
‘It’s barely been ten minutes, how—’
‘I’m just that impressive. Now, I’ll send through all the details in a moment so that you can pass them on to your friend.
It’s one of those 4 x 4s so it should get him through the worst weather.
When the snow has cleared, your father and I will drive up to see you, and one of us will drive the car back to London so he doesn’t have to worry about that. ’
‘That’s incredibly kind of you.’
‘We do what we can for each other, especially in times of crisis.’
‘You’re right. We’ve been doing the same here. We were just discussing hosting Christmas Day at the bakery for anyone who is home alone.’
‘I’m very proud of you. I always knew you were community-minded like me. Now, let’s not get too mushy on the phone. I’ll send you the details so we can get your chap on the road sooner rather than later.’
That was alarmingly close to a direct compliment. It feels . . . nice. ‘Thank you, Mother.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘Wait. Before you go, do you have any advice for me?’
There’s a distinct pause. ‘You’re asking me for advice? Do I have that right?’
‘Well. Yes. Being with people, managing them. Working together for something. I’ve watched you do that with everyone in Oxlea my whole life and I hadn’t appreciated it before.’
Another pause. ‘You’ve never asked me for advice before.’
Generally, that’s because you give it before I can ask for it, he thinks, but makes sure not to say. ‘I’m asking now.’
‘Well,’ she begins slowly. ‘Firstly, if people offer their help, you have to trust them. Delegate. I can imagine you and I share the same flaw of wanting to oversee everything—’
‘Somewhat.’
‘It’s our cross to bear, and it’s important to work against it, otherwise you end up doing everything.’
‘And that’s bad, yes?’
‘Yes. Secondly, you catch more flies with honey than water.’
He’s not quite sure he wants to catch any flies but resists teasing her when she’s helping. ‘How so?’
‘Even if someone is royally ticking you off, find a way to work with them, even if it’s just telling them what they want to hear.
Fundamentally, Christopher, people want to be useful and respected, or at least have the impression that they are either.
Give them that and you’re on your way to a successful collaboration. ’
‘Thank you, Mother.’
‘You’re welcome, Christopher.’
He nods to Nash to withdraw the phone as his mother hangs up.
‘Surely there was an easier way of doing that?’ Tamara says incredulously.
‘She found a car?’ Nash asks, ignoring her.
‘Yes, she’s sending the details now. Can someone take these cups off me?’
Shaz and Nash leap to help, and Nash returns Christopher his phone in an awkward shuffling of hands.
‘We’d better get hold of Mohan quickly so he can decide if he wants to set off today or tomorrow,’ Christopher says.
‘He says he’s going to leave right away,’ Priti answers for him, her phone to her ear.
Even from here, Christopher can hear the delighted tones from Mohan.
Esther sends over an incredibly detailed set of instructions for where to pick up the car from a garage in London which requires a handful of codes to get into.
It’s only as Christopher forwards the email that he recognises the Chelsea address – it’s where Laurel’s ex, Mark Ratliff-Zouch, lives.
Well, nice to see he has one single generous bone in his body.
Christopher also insists that Mohan drives via the Cotswolds and up the border, a slightly more circuitous route, but one that means if the weather gets bad again, Mohan can hole up at his parents’ place.
They all agree not to tell Myffy until he’s properly on his way, just in case something goes wrong.
There’s nothing like a plan coming together.
Christopher decides the next thing they all have to do is to try and solve this Ursula situation. She wants to help but . . . what’s this barrier between them all?
He thinks back to Christmases in the Calloway house.
Well, not just Christmases. Basically, the whole of his childhood was spent watching his mother wrangle a town’s worth of people into doing exactly what she wanted and needed.
What was it she said to him? Tell people what they want to hear.
It sounded like terrible managerial advice for running a business, but he’s now realising that perhaps that’s not what Esther meant.
What does a woman like Ursula want? Respect, almost certainly, which she likely doesn’t think she’s getting at the moment, especially after her disastrous vote and the way Shaz’s whole job seems to be running interference.
Perhaps she just wants to be listened to.
Christopher decides to channel his mother, and hopes that his big blue eyes make up for the gap.
‘Ursula, why don’t you and I get out of here for a moment, and get some fresh air?
I really haven’t introduced myself properly, and I really would like to ensure we’re well acquainted.
Perhaps you can come over and tour the bakery with me, get a feel for how things could work tomorrow? ’
He worries for a second that Esther’s words delivered via his mouth might read considerably differently.
But to his great surprise, Ursula ever so slightly blushes. ‘That sounds delightful,’ she says, taking his arm in hers.
As she steers him out of the village hall, he catches the bemused, amused and horrified faces of Tamara, Nash and Shaz in turn, and flashes them a hopeful smile.
* * *
The sun is low in the sky and Christopher is grateful to get the last of the daylight, even if it does mean stepping out into the cold with his friend’s mortal enemy.
‘Shall we go to the bakery?’ he asks.
She gives him a quiet little nod, some of the bluster gone out of her, and he leads her across the least icy bits of the road.
For once, he’s thankful that he clearly left the heating on in the bakery as it’s relatively warm when they arrive.
Ursula steps in like a nervous animal, as though ambush awaits.
It’s clear she hasn’t been here before, which is a small sting that Christopher tries to ignore.
But it’s not as if he’s gone out of his way to speak to her either.
‘Ursula, I do think you have the power to really help us all out here and make this disaster of a Christmas better for some of the lonelier people, but perhaps we have not been completely fair to you. I would like to make up for that,’ Christopher says.
He fires up the coffee machine, thankful that it doesn’t take too long to heat up once it’s on. ‘Coffee?’
‘A cappuccino, please,’ she asks quietly. It’s really rather strange. Now that she’s not around Tamara and Shaz and Priti, or the rest of the town for that matter, she seems to have shrunk a little.
‘Do you think this would be enough space to host everyone?’ he asks as the water in the coffee machine starts to heat up, releasing the hot-metal-and-steam smell into the air.
‘If we move all the tables around,’ she says, snapping into action, counting them up. ‘We could do two long tables, and that would seat about twenty, maybe thirty people. Perhaps a few short ones.’
‘I have a table upstairs we can bring down and a couple of chairs. And we can serve right onto the counter buffet-style, which will save us some space.’
The grinding of the beans fills the silence as Ursula tallies up the logistics and seems to make some notes on her phone.
With two cappuccinos freshly made, Christopher encourages her to sit with him at a table together.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘This was . . . kind of you.’
‘You’re welcome. I did mean what I said – we don’t really know each other yet, and I want to know everyone here.’
‘You’re new here, right? You seem determined to stay.’
‘I am. And I want to actually be a part of the community.’
She snorts a delightfully piggy snort. ‘Oh, don’t ask for what you might regret,’ she says, but not in a cruel way.
It’s a little sad. ‘I don’t mean to be such a stickler all the time.
I suppose it’s who I’ve always been. Who my mother was.
Who I had to be with my ex-husband, or perhaps who he made me be. ’
Ursula sighs and Christopher could swear he heard his own heart break a little. ‘And I know being that version of me just makes Tamara and me fight, and means everyone hates me. But I don’t really know how else to be.’
How long has she been moulding herself into someone she doesn’t even recognise?
Christopher reaches across the table and takes her hand. ‘I think there’s always time for us to reinvent ourselves. I’m trying it right now.’
‘How’s that going?’
He pulls a grimace, and she snorts once again. ‘It’s hard, but I’m trying to find out who I am, I suppose. And, like you say, how I want to be, which I think is halfway to who.’
‘That sounds nice. I think I’ve been here too long. No one will think I’m being genuine,’ Ursula replies.
‘When is there a better time to turn over a new leaf than Christmas?’
It’s quite possible that he really has watched too many holiday movies in the last few months, as he’s almost certain that’s one of Nash’s lines from Mushing Home for Christmas.
It’s one of Christopher’s favourites, even if it is a very thinly veiled Balto-rip-off-turned-romcom, where Nash played a musher called Forrest Tenzing opposite an Anna Kendrick-type.
No wonder he’s so good at being around snow, though it’s quite possible it was all fake for the movie.
Hopefully they don’t still make that stuff out of asbestos, like the snow in It’s a Wonderful Life.
In the end, they sit and talk for half an hour over their coffees.
Christopher shares his recent adventures in baking, while Ursula opens up about how tricky it is to co-parent with her ex-husband.
In the end, he finds he likes her – there’s some elements of Esther’s bristliness that he recognises.
He’s used to brusque people bossing him about, after all.
The thing he needs to remember is that someone might have an attitude he can’t quite place, but it’s so often because strangers are unknowable. It’s only when you can see where someone is coming from that you might be able to understand their slightly cranky exterior.
Sure, that absolutely doesn’t excuse someone being a total dickhead, but that was how it had seemed to be with Nash too, wasn’t it?
Christopher had thought him rude and cocksure and demanding, when really he was stuck in a new country, alone, with seemingly no one knowing where he was, with a tricky disability to manage alone. No wonder they sparked off.
And they still have so much to talk about, he and Nash.
As the last of the light fades outside, Ursula says, ‘I’m going to do it, you know. Try and start afresh. I always was going to.’ Her confidence appears to wobble and she falters slightly as she adds, ‘If you think they’d like that?’
‘I think everyone would like that.’
He’s not one hundred per cent sure of that, but hell, if the village took him in, an outsider, maybe they can stretch to find space for Ursula to be a different kind of person than the one they’ve always known.
* * *
They walk back to the village hall together, and everyone seems ready to embrace Ursula’s help .
. . Perhaps that was all it took, someone else to disrupt old habits, for them to work together?
Or maybe, a quiet part of him says, maybe it was you.
Maybe all it took was Christopher putting himself out there and bringing someone else into the fold. It feels good, he must admit.
Thanks to all the visits they’d made over the last few days, they already have a list of people who are going to need a hot dinner on Christmas Day.
‘Ursula, do you want to join us ringing everyone?’ Shaz asks, all the former snark dropped now. ‘We were going to ask Nash to ring, but we thought everyone would just say yes to him no matter whether they need it or not.’
‘Yes,’ Ursula nods happily. ‘Please. I want to help.’
It takes a couple of hours to ring round everyone, and together with Ursula, they work out the best routes to pick people up, so that everyone can be at the bakery for mid-afternoon the following day for an early dinner – late enough to give them time to cook, and early enough that the older members of the community wouldn’t be asleep before it was served.
When Ursula nips to the bathroom, Shaz nudges Christopher. ‘How did you get her to agree?’
‘I just listened to her,’ he says truthfully. ‘I think she wants to turn over a new leaf.’
Shaz raises an eyebrow. ‘Might take the whole tree.’
‘I know it’s not my place when you all have history, but perhaps it could be a kind of Christmas miracle.’
‘You’ve been watching too many of his films,’ she says, thumbing in Nash’s direction. Christopher shushes her, and he swears he sees a tiny grin in the corner of Nash’s mouth.
‘All we need now is the food,’ says Nash, who this whole time has been scribbling down ideas on a piece of paper, whole menus of dishes, what ingredients are essential and what could be substituted.
Christopher has no idea where he’s pulled all this from, but it aches his heart a little, in a good way.
Despite Christopher’s accusations of him not being serious the other night, Nash has kept showing up.
All this time. He fits in here, Christopher thinks, but quickly banishes the thought.
It’s not as if Nash is going to be here much longer. Would he even want that?
He can’t get lost in daydreams and wishes right now. He needs to focus on the real challenge: cooking for God knows how many people tomorrow with hardly any ingredients.
An ominous rumble sounds, growing louder and louder, and for a second Christopher worries that the real danger is some kind of avalanche. But to his relief, it’s just the sound of an enormous tractor pulling up outside the village hall, one giant wheel visible through the window.
And in strides a tiny farmer, carrying what Christopher is pretty sure is at least half an animal, followed by another tiny farmer, carrying bags and bags of potatoes.
‘We heard some rumours of a Christmas dinner,’ Dai says.
‘And we thought you might need something to cook!’ Thelma finishes.
The pair of them look like post-Christmas Future Ebenezer Scrooges.
Nash grins, and rushes to take the food from them both. ‘Now that is a Christmas miracle,’ he confirms. ‘And I should know.’