Page 72 of The Christmas Retreat
Bronwen was cooking and Rhys sitting at the long table, drinking coffee.
‘Happy Christmas, Ginny!’ he said, the exact words he’d spoken last night before he had kissed me. I felt my face glow.
‘Sit down and have some coffee,’ invited Bronwen, who was flipping sausages over in a large pan.
‘Only if I’m not in the way?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Sit here, between me and Daddy,’ invited Cariad, plumping herself down in front of a disembowelled Christmas stocking, ‘so I can show you what I’ve got!’
The coffee was hot and strong, which was just as well, because I’d suddenly had an out-of-body experience where I seemed to be looking down on myself, sitting at a kitchen table on Christmas morning, in a big house in the middle of nowhere, and withRhys Tarnpouring coffee for me.
I came to, realizing I was staring at Rhys, because he now grinned at me with that familiar quirk of his lips, and patted the seat of the chair next to him.
‘Sorry, I’m still half asleep,’ I said, sinking down and taking the cup. ‘This should wake me up, and I’d love to see what was in your stocking, Cariad.’
She displayed her treasures, including the smallest member of the stuffed toy dragon family, the gingerbread pig, made by Bronwen, and the large chocolate penny in a bronze tin Rhys had told me about, plus a bag of chocolate coins.
‘And this bag of coal, too,’ she said, exhibiting a Cellophane cone of black lumps. ‘It’s for naughty children really, but it isn’t actually coal. It’s crunchy like the cinder toffee Bronwen makes sometimes.’
The rest of the contents were an assortment of small novelty stationery items, aHorrible Historiesbook, a pack of replica Victorian Happy Families cards and a Chinese paper dragon made in a honeycomb way and mounted on two sticks, so you could make it wiggle about realistically.
‘I love that – I’ve never seen anything like it!’
‘Nerys found it. She said she’d had them when she was alittle girl and actually, we have some fold-out Christmas decorations dating from then, too, but they’re in the family sitting room,’ explained Rhys.
‘I want to open my other presents,’ Cariad said. ‘But I always have to wait for everyone else to eat breakfast first!’
‘The anticipation makes it more fun,’ said Rhys, but she didn’t look convinced.
‘Did you have a Christmas stocking when you were little, Ginny?’ asked Cariad, carefully stowing everything back into the long, woolly sock.
‘Yes. I had a nanny called Liv, who is now my mother’s housekeeper and PA, and she always made me one. It was a bit more basic than yours, though: a tangerine, a handful of nuts in their shells, a candy cane and a book. That was about it. Liv and Evie usually gave me book tokens as presents too, so I could hardly wait for the bookshops to open after Christmas.’
‘I like reading too, but if I only got book tokens for Christmas, I’d be disappointed,’ said Cariad.
‘It was what I was used to,’ I said, and then Bronwen announced that everything was ready and we helped Tudor carry it all out to the long serving table, where there were two hotplates waiting for the covered dishes.
As if summoned by the smell of cooking – which perhaps they were – the others all came in together.
When we’d all wished each other a Happy Christmas, we heaped our plates with scrambled eggs, bacon and sausages. There was a dish of vegetarian sausages too, as well as beans and grilled tomatoes.
‘What a treat, to have a full cooked breakfast,’ said Noel. ‘Although I don’t suppose my arteries could take the cholesterol overload more than once a year.’
‘What’s cholesterol?’ asked Cariad, who was, against all the rules, slipping bacon rinds to Snookums under the table.
‘It furs up the inside of your arteries,’ he explained.
‘It serves everyone right for eating animals,’ said Opal severely. She had come down to breakfast, but didn’t appear to have any appetite. She nibbled at a piece of toast and drank coffee, her usually pale face flushed and slightly heavy-eyed.
Nerys looked at her now with some concern. ‘You really don’t look well, Opal. Don’t you think you really might be going down with a cold or flu?’
‘I’m fine!’ she snapped. ‘I told you last night, I’m never ill.’
‘But you’ve hardly eaten a thing,’ pointed out Verity.
‘I’ve never seen any reason to stuff myself with more food than I need, just because it’s there in front of me,’ Opal said, looking pointedly at her sister’s full plate of vegan sausages, tomato and beans on toast.
