So she wasn’t even to be allowed the fleeting distraction of doing something pleasurable for the very first time. And why did he have to believe that every time she opened her mouth a lie came out?
She swung round on her heels. It was time he got a few things straight. She didn’t lie, for one.
Tossing the glittery star on the tabletop, she told him levelly, ‘It happens to be the truth. If you can’t believe it, then that’s your tough luck. Not mine.’
Still unloading the tray, he gave her a penetrating look. Maybe he was taking distrust too far. Distrust had been stamped on his soul when his father had taken his life. Of his parents, his father had been his rock, a larger than life figure he had respected as well as loved. The loss of financial security and the huge debts his father had left behind had been as nothing compared with that final betrayal.
To begin with, he’d believed he had learned to trust again with Bella. But infidelity made a mockery of marriage vows, turned them into lies. Infidelity was a sure-fire way of killing trust.
He pulled out a chair for her and took one for himself on the opposite side of the table. ‘So tell me about it. Didn’t your parents let you help dress the tree when you were a kid?’
She took her chair, shrugged very slightly. ‘It’s not important.’
‘Probably not.’ He pushed a plate of sandwiches towards her. ‘But it would help pass the time. And, now I come to think of it, you’ve told me very little about your past.’
Pass the time. It stretched endlessly before her, arid, awkward and painful. She blinked rapidly. She would not cry. She took a sandwich of doorstep proportions, refused the soggy-looking salad garnish he’d prepared.
‘I thought, for the purposes of Christmas peace and goodwill, we had to ignore the past.’ She threw his cool stricture back in his face. The little rebellion helped to smother the feeling of hurt. She calmly eyed the thing on her plate and wondered if she could open her mouth wide enough to take a bite.
‘The distant past doesn’t count.’ He found himself approving this new spark of defiance. And, watching her, he had to fight to stop himself from grinning like a clown. If he’d been asked to describe the marital meals she’d used to go to such endearingly endless trouble to prepare for him, he would have said elegant. And beautiful to look at. Ten out of ten for presentation, and two out of ten for hunger-quelling content.
Right now she was having difficulty hiding her dismay. He hadn’t gone out of his way to produce such massive, untidy offerings. He couldn’t have been concentrating on what he was doing.
‘OK.’ She capitulated, and reached for a knife to cut the sandwich into smaller, more manageable pieces. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t help the festive spirit much if we both sat here in gloomy silence. I’ll go along with you, and try to avoid contentious subjects. But I warn you, I’m not going to pussy-foot around, double-checking everything before it trips off my tongue, like a reformed trollop at a vicar’s tea party.’
He did grin then, but hid it behind the rim of his wineglass. An excellent vintage claret, he’d noted back in the kitchen, twisting the corkscrew with cynical ferocity. She’d spared no expense to get the party moving, to find the right mood!
He caught the thought, examined it. Was he being unfair? Was she in some kind of trouble? Had she engineered this time together because she needed his help? It was something to think about. Maybe if she relaxed enough she would tell him the truth. ‘So?’ he prompted gently, watching her long, narrow hands as she cut into the thick, crusty bread and the filling of hacked meat. He wondered why she didn’t push it fastidiously aside and float out to prepare a medallion of tenderloin on a bed of unidentifiable leaves. She was obviously trying hard to please.
‘So Dad thought Christmas was a waste of money, right? But Mum always did her best to make sure Evie and I had a package to open on Christmas morning. Granted, money was in short supply—but he didn’t even make an effort, and wouldn’t let us try, either.’
She chewed reflectively on a piece of her sandwich; the meat was wonderfully tender, spiced up with just the right amount of mustard. His sandwiches were no way as inedible as they looked.
‘I like to think he wasn’t a Scrooge by nature, but acted like one because it upset him to think he couldn’t give his family everything they wanted.’
She looked so earnest, Jake thought, watching her closely. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to say what was on his mind—that any father who didn’t make the effort to find some way of making Christmas special for his kids didn’t deserve to have any. Let her keep her manufactured delusions if they helped her.
‘Dad was mostly out of work, and we were always on the move,’ she was telling him, long fingers idly stroking the stern of her wineglass now. ‘He always thought the grass would be greener in the next county or town. It never was, though. Things just seemed to go from bad to worse. Smaller flats in seedier areas. And moving meant Mum had to keep finding new jobs to make ends meet. Sometimes she couldn’t. Things got really tough then.’
Her mother had never complained. Bella wondered if she’d inherited those doormat genes, making her willing to let Jake call all the shots during the time they’d lived together.
Unconsciously she shook her head. Now wasn’t the time to delve into cause and effect.
Jake said, his voice surprisingly gentle, ‘I remember you telling me your parents were separated, and your mother settled in New Zealand with her widowed sister.’
‘Yes, but Mum going out to live with Auntie May came much later. She wouldn’t have dreamed of leaving us until Evie and I were both on our feet. But Dad walked out on the lot of us when I was fourteen. We stayed put, then, and for a couple of years the three of us had our first settled home. A two-bedroom flat above a greengrocer’s in a backstreet in Newcastle. Downmarket, but home.’
She was twisting the glass now. Jake expected the contents to spill out at any moment. There was a lot of tension there, waiting to be released.
‘It must have been about that time I knew what I wanted out of life.’
She wasn’t looking at him; her expression told him she was in another world. But at least she was trying to share it with him. Funny how they’d never really talked, either of them, never delved deeply enough to find out what made each other tick.
Too busy making love, discovering each other physically to begin with. And then, after the initial honeymoon stage, he’d been too busy. Full-stop.
Not sure that he should want to, but feeling driven to know, Jake asked, ‘And what was that?’
Christmas every day of the year? Everything her deprived childhood had seemingly put out