you, not really.’
Now I just felt bad.
‘But you are! You’re the best company I could wish for, honestly.’ I fixed a bright smile across my face. ‘And I’ve met Noel, too, and Percy and his wife …’
She didn’t look convinced.
‘I am cheery – honestly! I’ll find my Christmas spirit this year, you’ll see!’
She leant forward and winked.
‘Lucky for you I can help out on that front …’
She rose slowly and shuffled sideways to the back room, returning with Christmas spirit already bottled in her hand (I should have known from the wink). ‘Let’s get some of this down you with a nice bit of grapefruit tonic and you’ll soon be singing along to Christmas songs.’
I doubted it, but who was I to argue. I looked at the clock. The sun was just over the yard arm … I poured the gin into two large glasses.
‘What was Christmas like back then?’ I asked. ‘During the war, I mean.’
Fenella took a frozen piece of grapefruit out of the freezer and popped it into my glass, it fizzed.
‘I only remember the tail end of it.’ She took a sip of gin, the tea now abandoned, and smiled. ‘I do remember the kiddies’ parties up in the hall, though. Christmas has always been a good time in Angels Cove, we all pull together, you see. Did you know this village has done a lantern festival on the harbour wall every year at Christmas since 1918, except for during the war, a course – blackout, you see. But this year …’ she tailed off.
‘This year?’
She shrugged. ‘Well, I suppose what with all the goings on with the council and that blooming Storm Katherine pitching up (why they have to go putting a name to a storm these days I will never know) we haven’t even got the lights up, yet. And with half the cottages used as holiday lets now, and not so many kiddies around the village, it all seems to be dying away – first time since the war, too. Tragic really. And with Gerald away, no one’s had the umpf to grip it. It’s such a shame, but there you go.’
She was right. It really was tragic.
‘Not to worry,’ she added brightly. ‘There’s still my gin tasting for the old folks to look forward to. Do you think you could drop by tomorrow evening and help bottle it up, we’ll have a nice old sing-song – no sad Christmas songs, promise.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’d love to.’
I sipped on my gin and thought of Gerald’s original letter – save Angels Cove for all the little children this Christmas. In all honesty, I was yet to see any children, but that was academic, because Fenella’s face was so full of disappointment, it broke my heart, and when combined with her occasional glances towards the empty dog bed, I couldn’t not want to help – genuinely – and realised that, for all of Gerald’s nagging, Dorothy needed to run back up the yellow brick road, grab her wing men, and take this apostrophe business a bit more seriously, because maybe Gerald was right. Maybe I could save Angels Cove in time for Christmas … but there was one very special lady I needed to see first.
Chapter 18
Katherine
A Promise
I stood by the gates to Lanyon, chewing my bottom lip, feeling odd. Through Juliet’s memoirs I had immersed myself in this place and my imagination had conjured a Lanyon of the 1940s, but the house standing before me was not quite as I imagined. I arrived during a busy moment involving an ambulance and an elderly gentleman. He was wrapped in a red blanket and strapped to a stretcher and was being loaded (such a dreadful word for the movement of a human being and yet it fitted the scene perfectly) into the ambulance. A woman, perhaps in her sixties, walked alongside, fussing. I continued down the drive and looked on just as a care worker, wearing not only a Christmas jumper but also reindeer antlers, said her quick goodbyes to the gentleman and turned towards the front door. The house, the ambulance, the man – it didn’t seem to all fit together, somehow.
The care worker was called Yvonne, her badge said so. After signing in, I was led beyond the entrance hall with its tinsel-strewn notice boards, to Juliet’s room past open doors that led into all the other resident’s rooms. The residents were all much older and more infirm than I had imagined. Some