A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [24]
By the time she came out of the bathroom, much more sober now, Dan was fast asleep in bed, but she was wide awake, very much aware it was the early hours of Christmas morning and for the first time in her life she wouldn’t be sitting down later to a family lunch.
She and Dan had bought a tree and put up decorations everywhere, and until then she’d thought the flat looked like an enchanted grotto. But as she sat huddled up on the couch wrapped in her dressing-gown, thinking about what Robin had said earlier, the twinkling lights, tinsel and paper streamers all looked so garish in comparison to the elegant decorations her parents went in for. There was only a handful of Christmas cards too, just from girls at work, and suddenly she felt an enormous sense of loss.
Christmas at home was always so jolly and noisy. Even when they’d all got too big to have stockings, they still crowded into their parents’ room quite early in the morning and insisted on opening the presents. Neighbours would pop in during the morning for a drink, and there would be a record of carols playing on the radiogram. Sometimes her maternal aunts, Rose and Lily, would come up from Somerset with their husbands and children; other times Uncle Ernest, her father’s brother, would come with his wife and two boys who were a similar age to Robin and Peter. After a huge dinner they’d play games, charades, Monopoly or Ludo.
This year there would be just her and Dan, no carols playing, no games. She had believed until now that she would be glad to be alone with Dan, that family gatherings were boring, yet all at once they seemed so dear and precious. She began to cry because she felt forlorn and cut off. If Robin was against her, that meant Peter probably was too, her father would always side with her mother, and that left only Patty. Her family had shrunk to one person who wouldn’t even be able to visit over the holiday.
‘Would you like an aspirin?’ Dan asked, looking concerned.
Fifi forced herself to smile. ‘No, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I got so legless last night, and Happy Christmas.’
‘Santa’s been,’ Dan said, pulling a bulky stocking out from under the bed. It was one of the white net ones, trimmed with red crêpe paper, that Fifi had often had as a child, and peeping from the top was a teddy bear in a red woolly hat.
‘Oh, Dan,’ she exclaimed, all at once aware he must have planned this weeks ago. ‘I didn’t think to make you one.’
‘I didn’t expect one,’ he said, sitting down beside her on the bed and pouring her some tea. ‘You are all I want for Christmas.’
‘I have got you presents,’ she said. ‘Just not the stocking. I intended to get up before you and put them all under the tree. They’re still in the sideboard where I hid them.’
‘Eat your breakfast, then we’ll open them,’ he said, kissing her on the cheek. ‘Our first Christmas together, that’s very special.’
Fifi’s eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away and laughed, saying it was because he was so sweet, but the truth was that she felt ashamed of herself. She could have thought of making Dan a stocking. And she shouldn’t have spent half the night thinking about her old home and feeling sorry for herself.
Dan was taken on by a Bristol building firm the day after Boxing Day. He was ecstatic when he returned home, for the job was building a new rank of shops, and the site he would be working on was right in town. Just a walk from home, and better money than he’d been earning with Jack-son’s. He was due to start work on New Year’s Day.
On New Year’s Eve Fifi hurried home from work with two steaks and a bottle of Blue Nun. They had no plans to go anywhere special to see the New Year in, but some of the girls at work had said it was always like a big party up at the Victoria Rooms in Clifton. Apparently the previous year someone had put detergent in the fountains and the bubbles went right across the road. Fifi thought if Dan was agreeable they might walk over there to have a look.
Dan had the chips cooking and the table laid when she got in. He’d lit candles and he had Little