‘I have a headache,’ I say shortly. ‘I’m going to bed.’
Mum looks unconvinced, but Dad takes her arm. ‘We’ll be late if you don’t stop talking. Will you be alright, Annie?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I say wearily. ‘I just need some sleep.’
‘Don’t forget to hang up your stocking before you go,’ says Mum. ‘Dad and I have already hung ours up, but there’s plenty of room. They’re in the Christmas box under the stairs. Santa won’t know you’re home if he doesn’t see it. Goodness knows, he’s probably forgotten you ever used to live here!’
Dad drags her off still talking loudly about the scarcity of my visits home and the turkey and the oven timer. I pull myself wearily up the stairs, only just finding the energy to carefully hang up my red dress. Mum will be terribly upset if she comes in tomorrow morning to find it in what she likes to refer to as my ‘floordrobe’.
I fall into bed, utterly exhausted and longing for the entire Christmas charade to be over so I can go back to London and resume the life I have so carefully constructed for myself – the life that makes me happy.
Despite my exhaustion, I don’t sleep until the early hours. I stare at the ceiling, wondering what happened to my life. How often have I lain in this very room on Christmas Eve, desperately trying to sleep on the one night of the year when sleep eludes all but the very young and the very old?
I try to count the stars on the ceiling. As a testament to his careful and methodical nature, Dad arranged them into accurate constellations for me. As a child, I fell asleep each night staring at Ursa Major or Orion’s belt. It was nice to have the actual night sky inside my house. It made me feel connected with the great world outside while still feeling safe and protected.
By the time I left for university, Ursa Major had lost several stars, and Orion no longer had a belt, but it still comforted me to look at them.
I hear Mum and Dad return in the early hours. Even if I’d been asleep, I would have been woken by Mum’s exaggerated shushing and heavy tiptoeing up the stairs. Either she’s still running on fumes from the wedding reception or she’s taken an extra generous gulp of the communion wine. Maybe she and Dad stopped in at someone’s house for a nightcap on the way home.
She finally goes to bed, after innumerable trips up and down the stairs for unspecified reasons. But I’m still unable to sleep. I’m more than ever convinced it’s a mistake to go home. What is there waiting for everyone but some form of disappointment? Places change, people change, making it more difficult to hold onto treasured childhood memories. If you can’t come back permanently and build a proper life, it’s better to avoid the past as far as possible.
Lost in these dreary thoughts, I drift into an uneasy doze, waking in the chill, grey dawn for absolutely no reason at all. I’d have preferred to sleep for as many hours as possible and avoid most of Christmas Day and all its festivities.
But it’s no good. I’m too wide awake to sleep again. My head throbs painfully as I slide out of bed, feeling a momentary dizziness as my feet hit the floor. I pad silently along the landing to see whether Mum still keeps the aspirin in the same cupboard. She’ll probably need some herself. She doesn’t usually drink this much, even at weddings. At least, she never used to. But what do I really know about my parents’ lives nowadays, or they about mine? It’s a depressing thought.
I find the aspirin and gulp down a couple with a glass of water. I feel a little better. It will be hours before Mum and Dad wake up, so I decide to go for a walk. Hopefully, it’s raining. It will match my mood and reinforce my sense of dramatic despair.
I ease open the front door, careful not to let it click and risk waking Mum and Dad. I catch my breath in delight. Rain might be more poetic and match my mood, but I love white Christmases.
When I was about ten, Dad woke me and Jamie very early one Christmas morning and took us outside to throw snowballs before breakfast to give Mum a chance to wake up slowly. Maybe that was after another Christmas party.
Well, good for her. Parents should be allowed a life of their own, despite having children. Everyone thinks it’s natural for children to reach for independence, so why not their parents?
It’s right that Mum and Dad should have their own life and plenty of friends. It would be selfish to expect them to exist in some sort of limbo between their offspring’s visits. And it would be a dull enough life for Mum and Dad if all they lived for was my infrequent visits. I resolve to come home more often from now on. I’ve faced my worst fear and found it to be, if not nothing, then at least entirely manageable.
It might even be helpful if Alex starts going out with Suzy again. I could think less of them both and cease to regret what I’ve lost – which is absolutely nothing. I can see that now. It’s time to stop running away from something that doesn’t exist and start walking towards what I want – my life in London, my career, my friends and colleagues.
Resisting an urge to pick up a stick and scrawlGirl Powerin the snow as Suzy used to when we were young, I scrunch down the snowy path and set off towards the old mill. It becomes increasingly difficult to sustain my mood of exaltation. Its Christmas Day and there’s plenty of snow. But that will soon melt, and I’ll be left with the grey emptiness of winter stretching ahead of me.
I pick up my pace. It’s bitterly cold, and a few more flakes are starting to fall. I push my hands deeper into my pockets, trying to enjoy the morning. If I was ten years younger, I could make a snowman.
But I don’t want to stop for too long and risk hypothermia. I press on, looping around the mill and back across the field as quickly as my chilled limbs allow. There’s no one out except for a few dog walkers in the distance. They all look as hunched and miserable as I feel. I hope they have warm firesides and good Christmas dinners to return to.
At least, my appetite won’t be a problem after this walk. I feel ready to face Mum’s turkey with Dad’s special cranberry stuffing. I can probably even manage a portion of Christmas pudding. The last thing I want is to make my parents anxious about me. Why should I spoil their day when they worked so hard to make all my childhood Christmases so special?
Filled with the glow of good intentions, I swing into the lane that leads to our house and stop abruptly. Standing at the end of our driveway, huddled in a thick, winter coat and holding an envelope in his hand, is Alex.
Chapter Twenty-Three
For a moment, we just stare at each other. He’s clearly as shocked to see me as I am to see him. Recovering himself, he holds out the envelope.
‘What’s this?’ I ask, pleased to hear how steady my voice is.
He hesitates. ‘I was … delivering this card.’
My momentary flicker of elation dies. It’s a card from his parents. What else would it be? I wish I’d stayed in bed this morning. He would have put the card through our door, and I would never have seen him.
I take the envelope. ‘I’ll see that my parents get this, thanks. Happy Christmas,’ I add lightly, determined not to show that I see him as anything more than a casual acquaintance.