Page 5 of The Christmas Retreat
‘I’ll be off, then,’ he said, and Dash immediately stood up, tail wagging, as if he understood every word Eli said, which he probably did.
*
I suppose I’d unburdened myself to Eli because there just wasn’t anyone else to tell, other than my cat, and while Mrs Snowboots was a good listener, she was a bit wanting in the advice department.
Of course, therewasEvie. I usually call my mother by her Christian name (unless I want to annoy her, when I call her Ma) because she is the least maternal woman you could ever meet, but she had, quite literally, flown in the face of reason, setting out on her latest lecture tour of the States a few weeks ago.
She was a well-known academic. ‘Feisty feminist art historian Evie Chase’, as the tabloids called her, after a TV series she made calledReassigned Brilliance, in which she conclusively proved that ten major artworks ascribed to men had actually been created by their female – and lesser known – contemporaries.
She was extroverted, brilliantly clever, argumentative and confrontational, all the things I most definitely was not, so that I was always deeply thankful that, being still technically married to my father at the time of my birth, she had, in a quixotic moment, registered me as Ginny Chase Spain. I’dquickly dropped any mention of the name Chase, especially when my first children’s book was published.
My American father never knew about me and died when I was about two. Evie’s idea of a bedtime story had been to tell me my father was a kind of obscure genie, who had vanished into a bottle and never came out again. But later she opened up a bit about one crazy summer she spent in New York, when she had fallen in love for the first – and last – time, with my handsome, romantic-looking poet father, Leigh Spain.
Then, as she put it, somewhere between the wedding in what passed for a registry office over there, and the hotel where they were to entertain a few friends to a celebratory dinner, before flying off to Bermuda on honeymoon, she realized she had made an error of judgement.
‘It was as if I’d been in a dream and woken up. The clincher was, when we went up to the honeymoon suite to change and he fell on the drinks cabinet instead of on me. I mean, I didn’t mind coming second to his muse – because hewasa very good poet, after all – but I wasn’t playing second fiddle to a fermented beverage! So I told him I had a headache and would take some aspirin and follow him down in a little while. Then I picked up my bags, left for the airport and was on a flight to London before he or any of his equally lush friends had thought to check up on me.’
It was made clear thatIwas an unexpected and late bridal gift, arriving just before her divorce came through, but having, as she put it, popped me out between a lecture tour and the completion of a new book, she installed a competent nanny in her London flat and carried on her life exactly as before. As they came up for sale, she had bought the flat next to hers and the basement and expanded into them.
I’d been curious about my father as I grew up. Evie gave me a book of his poetry, which she said was very good even if the author proved to have as much emotional depth as could be contained in a teaspoon.
That had made me wonder if writers and artists could create work that was deeper and more emotionally complex than they were themselves.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Evie, when I asked her in one of the rare moments when she was both at home and giving me her full attention. I supposed, being an art historian, she would know.
‘In your father’s case,’ she had added, ‘it wasin vino veritas.’
Now, sitting there on the window seat at Wisteria Cottage, my thoughts seemed to have wandered a long way back, to the time when Liv, the cool, competent young woman originally employed by Evie as my nanny, had provided the core stability in my life as I grew up, and Evie came and went like a minor hurricane.
Liv was still there in the London flat, and now the lynchpin of Evie’s existence, since she had become housekeeper, PA and so much more over the years.
While I knew Liv was fond of me, despite her undemonstrative nature, if I had told her about the accident and Will leaving me for someone else, she would simply have urged me to close up the cottage and move back to the London flat before lockdown began, while everything in me was urging me in the opposite direction: at the moment, all I wanted was to shut myself away with my cat and possibly never come out of my burrow again.
Confiding in Eli had done me good, however, and I could feel the dark clouds lifting.
I thought of Dorothy Parker and how she said we might aswell live, although that was written about suicide, which was not an option that had ever appealed to me. I mean, there’s no certainty you’ll like the next place any more than this, is there?
I could feel myself coming back from the shocked, cold, shivery state I’d been in for the last ten days and I determined that I was never going to slip back there again. It was as if I’d been moving in a muted black-and-white world and now, quite suddenly, a tide of warmth and colour had rushed back in.
I looked around the usually cosy sitting room, seeing it clearly for the first time in days, and found it cold and forlorn.
The small log burner held only long-dead ashes and there was a litter of empty glasses and mugs on the coffee table. My stock of home-made wine had taken a bit of a hit.
When I stacked all the crockery on a tray and took it through to the kitchen, I found that in little better state. The sink was piled with dishes, the fridge empty of fresh food other than a hard nub of Parmesan cheese and a couple of covered bowls containing furry green mould.
‘Grow your own penicillin, the new cottage industry,’ I said to Mrs Snowboots, who had followed me in.
As to my little studio off the kitchen, I hadn’t even opened the door since everything had happened. I did now, hoping to let creativity flow back in.
Mrs Snowboots called me back with a few pungent-sounding remarks that were probably to the effect that I needed to get a grip – and she was quite right.
‘It’s just you and me, kid,’ I told her in a mock cowboy drawl, reaching for a notepad and a pen to make a shopping list.
‘Now, what super-expensive gourmet cat dinners would you like to turn your nose up at next week?’
2
Eden’s End
