A Cat, a Hat, and a Piece of String Read online

  I looked at her then, and saw the expression on her face. At first I thought she’d been crying; but Hope never cries. I did, though. I made no sound, but Hope took my hand anyway, and I thought maybe I’d been wrong about that sixth sense. We sat there for a long time – until I couldn’t hold it any longer and had to call Sad Harry to take me to the bathroom.

  I got back to the Residents’ Lounge to find Chris waiting for me. ‘Hey, Butch,’ he said, grinning, and all at once I felt much better. There’s something about Chris that does that; a kind of nonsense that pulls you along like a crazy dance. When I was a girl I used to ride the waltzers at the fair, spinning round and round in a two-seater chair shaped like a giant teacup and laughing breathlessly all the time. Chris makes me feel like that sometimes. I suppose it’s because he’s young – although Tom never made me feel like that, not even when he was twenty.

  ‘Have you finished your work?’ I asked, knowing that Chris works very hard, but hoping that he might spare us a few minutes, just this once.

  ‘I’m all yours, sweetheart,’ he said, grinning, and spun me round in my wheelchair, causing Harry to protest. ‘In fact, I brought you a few things.’ He waved Harry away with an airy hand. ‘Secret things, Harry, so scat.’

  Sad Harry huffed and rolled his eyes. He’s not a bad fellow – not so cheery as Chris, but not half as bad as Lorraine – and I saw his grin as he closed the door.

  ‘Secret things?’ said Hope with a smile.

  ‘You betcha. Cop a look at these, for a start.’ And he dropped a pile of glossy magazine brochures into my lap. The Algarve, the West Indies, the Riviera, the Cook Islands all spilled out across my knees; lagoons, Easter-lily beaches, yachts, spas, wooden platters of tropical fruits piled high with pineapples, coconuts, mango, papaya.

  When it comes to reading, Hope likes books and I have always had a soft spot for magazines. The glossier the better; couture and garden parties, city breaks and designer shoes. I gave a little squeak as I saw the brochures, and Chris laughed.

  ‘That’s not all,’ he said. ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Close your eyes. Both of you. And don’t open them until I say so.’

  So we did, feeling like children, but in a good way this time. For several minutes Chris moved around us, and I could hear him picking things up and putting things down. A match flared; there came a chink of glass; then a rustle of paper, then a number of clicks and rattles that I did not recognize. Finally I felt him pulling my chair backwards into the window bay; a second later there came the sound of him dragging Hope’s armchair alongside. Warmth on my hair; soft air from the open window; outside, a distant drone of bees.

  ‘OK, ladies,’ said Chris. ‘Off we go.’

  We were sitting in the bay with our backs to the window. Late-afternoon sunlight illuminated the room, making the Residents’ Lounge into a magic-lantern show. I turned my head and saw that Chris had hung several of the crystal pendants from the hall chandelier in the bay, so that prisms of coloured light danced across the flock wallpaper. Several posters had been tacked to the walls (quite contravening Meadowbank regulations): white houses under a purple sky; islands seen from the air like flamenco dancers shaking their skirts; bare-chested, beautiful young men standing hip-deep among green vines. I laughed aloud at the sheer absurdity; and saw that he had lit four glass-covered candles on the sideboard (another Meadowbank rule broken). On them I could read a foreign word – Diptyque – that I did not recognize. From them a faint scent diffused.

  ‘It’s thyme, isn’t it?’ said Hope beside me. ‘Wild purple thyme, that used to grow above our house in Eze. Our summers were filled with it. Oh Christopher, where did you find it?’

  Chris grinned. ‘I thought we might fly down to the coast this afternoon. Italy’s too hot in August, and the Riviera’s really so busy nowadays. Provence? Too British. Florida? Too American. Thought instead we could try that big dune at Arcachon, with the long white drop towards the Atlantic, or sit in the shade of the pine woods listening to the crickets and in the background, the sea. Can you hear the sea?’

  Now I could hear it; the soft hissh of water with a throatful of stones. Behind it, a burr of crickets; above me, the wind.

  Hypnosis? Not quite; now I could see the Residents’ Lounge tape recorder running; from the four big speakers came the sounds. Chris grinned again. ‘Like it?’

  I nodded, unable to speak.

  ‘There’s lavender, too,’ said Hope dreamily. ‘Blue lavender, that we used to sew into our pillows. And grass – cut grass – and figs ripening—’

  More of those candles, I thought; but Hope’s sense of smell is better than mine, and I could barely make them out. I could hear the sea, though, and the sound of the pines, and the scree of birds in a sky as hot and blue as any in those brochures.

  Now Chris was on his knees in front of us. He took off Hope’s shoes, then mine – Meadowbank slip-ons in sensible brown – and flung them (rules, rules!) across the room. Then, turning, he came back with a square basin, water slopping messily over the curved edges, and placed it at Hope’s feet. ‘I’m afraid the Atlantic’s a little cold, even at this time of year,’ he warned, and looking down I saw that the basin was filled with water and stones, the flat round pebbles you find on a beach. Hope’s bare old feet plunged into the water, and her face lit with sudden joy.

  ‘Oh!’ Suddenly she sounded fifteen again, breathless, flushed.

  Chris was grinning fit to split. ‘Don’t worry, Butch old love,’ he told me, turning again. ‘I haven’t forgotten you.’

  The second basin was filled with sand; soft, dry, powdery sand that tickled my toes and made small crunching noises in my insteps. Deliciously I dug my feet in – I can move them a little, though I haven’t done any dancing in a long while – and thought back to when I was five, and Blackpool beach was twenty miles long, and the candy-floss like summer clouds.

  ‘After that lunch I don’t expect you’re hungry any more,’ went on Chris, ‘but I thought I’d try you on this, just in case.’ And from some magical place at the back of the Residents’ Lounge he brought out a tray. ‘Not quite champagne and caviar, not on my budget, but I did my best.’

  And so he had: there were canapés of olive and cream cheese and pimiento and thin-sliced salmon; there was chocolate cake and mango sorbet and strawberries and cream. There were iced whisky sours (definitely against the rules) and yellow lemonade; best of all there was no tuna, no egg and no pink fairy cake.

  I hadn’t thought I was at all hungry, but Hope and I finished the lot, to the final cracker. Then we paddled again, and then Chris opened the lounge piano that no one but he ever seems to play and we sang all our old favourites, like ‘An Eighteen-Stone Champion’ and ‘You Know Last Night’; and then Chris and Hope did Edith Piaf with ‘Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien’, and then we were very tired and somewhere along the line we both fell asleep, Hope and I, and awoke to find the empty tray gone, and the water, sand and pebbles gone, and the posters removed from the walls and the danglers back on the chandelier.

  Only the tape was still playing (he must have turned it over while we slept). But although the candles were gone, we could still smell them, grass and fig and lavender and thyme, quite covering up that Meadowbank smell, and when I popped back to my room I found the brochures there, stacked tidily behind a row of books, with a note from Chris lying on top.

  Welcome back, it said.

  I returned to the Lounge just in time to hear the coach pulling into the driveway. Hope heard it too, and neatly removed the tape from the machine before putting it into the pocket of her dress. Neither of us spoke, though we held hands and smiled to ourselves as we waited for our friends to return: Polish John and Mrs McAllister and Mr Bannerman and Mr Braun and poor Mrs Swathen, who had, she said, lost her lace handkerchief on the beach, had sand in her shoes and had surely caught heatstroke from that horrid sun, it was a disgrace, no one knew how much she suffered and if she had only known�
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  No one noticed, among that disorder, that we, too, had sand in our shoes. No one saw us pick at our ‘celebration dinner’ (rissoles) – unless it was Sad Harry, who never talks much anyway – and no one seemed to care when we went to bed early, Hope to smell the candles that Chris had slipped into her bedside drawer, and I to read my brochures and dream of orange groves and strawberry daiquiris and plane rides and yachts. Next week we might try Greece, I think. Or the Bahamas; Australia; Paris; New York. If Tom can do it, so can we – besides, as Hope always says, travel broadens the mind.

  There’s No Such Place as Bedford Falls

  When I was a small child I believed implicitly in the magic of Christmas. Now, try as I may, I seldom see anything but tawdry commercialism, false hopes and increasing disillusionment. I wrote this story to combat that feeling. I’m not sure it quite worked out that way.

  IT’S SIX IN the morning, and Santa’s on the blink. Good job I checked; can’t have a malfunctioning Santa on the front lawn, today of all days. Lowers the tone, you know – and the neighbours are a snotty bunch, always complaining about one thing or another. Last week it was the penguins. Three of them, cheery little fellows, the latest addition to the Wall of Lights at the front of the house; one wearing a Santa hat, the other two carrying ice skates, all three wired to play ‘Winter Wonderland’ and twinkle the whole night through.

  They’d been up for less than a day when Mr Bradshaw complained.

  ‘Listen, mate. We can live with the fairy lights, and the dancing snowflakes, and the Christmas trees, and the inflatable snowman, and the magic grotto, and the Three Wise Men and even the flashing Santa and his twelve reindeer, but that’s it. The bloody penguins have got to go.’

  Talk about overreaction. I mean, what harm is there in my putting up a few Christmas lights at this time of year? I’m not asking anyone else to do it. I’m not offended when the neighbours don’t return my cards. To be honest, I’m not expecting peace or goodwill from any of them, but you’d think they could just leave me to enjoy the spirit of the season in my own personal way. But no. There’s always something. If it isn’t the penguins, it’s the sleigh bells keeping the neighbours awake. Or some estate agent trying to blame me for the drop in house prices. Or someone complaining about the daily deliveries. Or the postman giving me funny looks as he comes up the drive. Or the local yobs belting out ‘Silent Night’ at one in the morning and leaving empty beer cans outside the door. Only the other day in the supermarket, a lad yelled, ‘Where’s yer reindeer, Santa?’ over the aisle, and the girl at the checkout (a new girl, a blonde) sniggered in a most unprofessional way.

  That’s why I try to get all my groceries delivered nowadays. It’s quite easy; I phone in the order every Monday at nine, and two hours later the van comes round with the week’s goods. 1 medium turkey, frozen. 5 lbs King Edward’s potatoes. 1 lb Brussels sprouts. 1 lb carrots. 1 packet sage and onion stuffing. 1 packet Bisto gravy. 7 chipolata sausages. 7 rashers streaky bacon. 1 luxury Christmas pudding. 1 packet luxury mince pies. 1 packet Bird’s custard. 1 bottle sweet sherry. 1 jar Branston’s pickle. 1 medium Warburton’s loaf. 1 small box Milk Tray chocolates. And last but not least, 1 packet economy crackers, the red and green kind, with party hats and clean jokes.

  I love Christmas. I really do. I love writing Christmas cards and wrapping presents. I love the Queen’s Speech and the Phil Spector Christmas album. I love my tree, with its tinsel and its little foil-wrapped chocolates. I love my Wall of Lights. I love the artificial snow on the mantelpiece and the wreath of plastic holly on the door. As for the food – well, I still don’t know which I love the most: Christmas dinner with all the trimmings, or cold turkey and pickle sandwiches and the late film – White Christmas or It’s a Wonderful Life – with the fire on and my stocking up by the chimney, the single chocolate, glass of sherry and the giddy, breathless feeling that tonight, of all the magical nights of the year, anything – just anything – could happen.

  White Christmas … Doesn’t happen very often, I’m afraid. Most of the time I have to make do with artificial snow, cotton wool, and that spray-on stuff you get in cans. Still, it doesn’t beat the real thing: the silence of it; the feeling that everything has been miraculously renewed. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Not much chance of that, not with all that global warming you hear about, but we can only hope.

  Phyllis gave up two years ago. She left between Morecambe and Wise and the Queen’s Speech (1977, one of many, video-ed and kept for the occasion), without even staying to open her present. Her note was typically confused; couldn’t bear it any longer; thought we’d travel now we’d retired; wanted a change; would write when she was settled. And so she does, once a year; a long and dutiful letter (but never a Christmas card), wishing me well.

  She never did get into the spirit of things the way I do.

  Oh I wish it could be Christmas every day –

  Imagine that. If every day was Christmas Day – every day a new start, a new celebration. Chestnuts roasting on an open fire (though I make do with Living Flame); and I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

  In fact, I’m slightly worried someone might have interfered with Santa. Someone with a grudge perhaps, or just kids out to cause a nuisance. Still, it could be the fuse, or even a dead bulb – we go through rather a lot of them, and although I do turn off the illuminations during the daylight hours (I’m on a pension, you know, and I have the electricity bill to think of) I know I’m putting more pressure on the Wall of Lights than it was ever really designed to take. Still, I wouldn’t change it. Not for Mr Bradshaw, not for the Residents’ Association, not for all the tea in China.

  Wonderful Life. To date, I’ve watched that film 354 times. 1946, Frank Capra, with James Stewart and Henry Travers. Made when I was six years old, in a world where men wore hats and controlled the family’s finances, rosy-faced children went ice-skating on the village pond, and neighbours were real neighbours and not stuck-up yuppie homeowners looking to increase the value of their house.

  Bedford Falls, they called the town. For years I thought it was a real place. For years I wanted to live there – even applied to emigrate once, hoping to find it waiting for me, knee-deep in snow and Yuletide spirit. Now they tell me there’s no such place. But I proved them wrong, renamed my house, and now I live in Bedford Falls Cottage, Festive Road, Malbry, and it’s Christmas whenever I say it is.

  Of course, everyone else thinks I’m crazy. I don’t care; I’m no crazier than that bloke at the chippy who thinks he’s Elvis, or that fellow Smith down the road who’s a druid or something, or Mrs Golightly, walking around Tesco’s car park at three in the morning, or Al and Christine, trying to lose five stone each in time for New Year. Why should Christmas come only once a year? And why shouldn’t I celebrate what I like, when I like, any time I want to?

  I’m not saying it’s always easy. It’s hard to be different – Jimmy Stewart knew that in Wonderful Life – harder still to give up what you want for what you know to be the right thing to do. But Jimmy Stewart had integrity. What he did changed people. Made a difference. And that’s what I’m trying to do, in my way. To change things. To light up the sky. To bring wonder back into the faces of the children who slouch down the street with fags hanging out of their mouths. Christmas is supposed to be a time of miracles, isn’t it? Magic and mystery and tiny tots with eyes all aglow? I do believe in miracles, you know. You have to – don’t you? – when there’s nothing else left.

  But it’s hard to have faith, day in, day out, when no one else believes and everyone thinks you’re a bit of a joke. I had that TV news programme round last year, in December, trying to find out why I do what I do. I thought they were nice; the lady interviewer was pretty and kind; the cameramen ate mince pies and drank tea and laughed at my jokes. But they ran the piece in August, during the silly season; it made the papers – Time-Warp Santa Prays for Snow – and for a while people came from all over the country to look at my Wall of Lights and laugh
at the mad old bastard who thinks it’s Christmas every day.

  For a while it was rather fun. Children came to talk to me; some even sent me Christmas cards. And then it stopped. Word got round in the wrong quarters; vandals broke into my garden and smashed my illuminations; some paper even started a rumour that I was some kind of pervert, luring little kids into my house under false pretences. A new headline – Sinister Santa – and after that the children ran away, or sprayed slogans on my garden wall. Four months on, and they still do.

  I fixed Santa. Turned out to be a loose connection after all, and not deliberate vandalism. I suppose that should make me feel better, but it doesn’t somehow. It’s still dark at six a.m., and I give the Wall of Lights a final burst, just to see it in action before the sun comes up. Funny, but it doesn’t feel like Christmas Day. For once, the calendar says it is; for once I am in step with the rest of the world. Even a broken watch is right twice a day, as Phyllis used to say, and that’s how I feel this Christmas morning. Like a broken watch, all face and no ticker.

  Most days at six I make myself a cup of tea, have a small breakfast of toast and marmalade, then peel the sprouts, carrots and potatoes and get the turkey in the oven ready for lunch. But today of all days, I don’t feel like it. Television? There’s A Christmas Carol (the classic 1938 version, with Reginald Owen) – on one of the cable channels, and today of all days I won’t need my videos. But I’ve seen it 104 times already (and I’ve watched the 1951 remake with Alastair Sim 57 times), with White Christmas coming a close second (301 times, and counting) to It’s a Wonderful Life. They’re all on today, on various channels, but strangely, today, I don’t feel like watching any of them. I try the radio. Christmas music on all stations. I have a library of Christmas tapes, from the King’s College choristers’ eerie rendition of ‘Silent Night’ to Mike Batt’s ‘A Wombling Merry Christmas’. I know them all; but today I can’t concentrate. The music makes my head spin; the cheery voices of the DJs fill my heart with a terrible silence.