Christmas at Strand House: A gorgeously uplifting festive romance!

‘Are you going to let that thing go, love, so I can get it in the boot? Or are you one half of its Siamese twin? You seem very attached. Your knuckles have gone white you’re gripping on that tight.’

And she could still keep on gripping it tight and go back into the railway station, find the other platform and take the up train back to Totnes, and home. It wasn’t far. Stuart was probably still crashed out on the couch and wouldn’t even have noticed she wasn’t there.

Janey had left before dawn, the previous night’s phone call still fresh in her mind.

‘Who was that?’ Stuart had asked when Janey put down the phone. He made it sound as though she ought not to have answered the phone in the first place.

‘Suzy.’

‘I might have known. That sister of yours is a total waste of space. What crisis is she having now?’

Yes, Suzy did seem to have more crises in her life than anyone else Janey knew, but then her health wasn’t as good as most people’s either. And Suzy’s son, Daniel, had learning difficulties and problems with mobility, while her six-year-old twin daughters needed a lot of attention as well. Janey wondered how she coped sometimes.

‘I might need to pop over there tomorrow,’ Janey had told Stuart, her voice a wobble with the lie she was telling. Would Stuart be able to detect that or was he too drunk? She hoped the latter. ‘Give her a hand with all the last-minute Christmas things.’

Janey had looked around the room, the only nod to Christmas by way of decoration was a few cards on the mantelpiece and a faux Christmas tree about a foot tall in a plastic pot. Janey hadn’t even bothered to put any tiny glass baubles on it this year. Or the miniature fairy on the top. Her sister’s house, she knew, would be full of colour and glitter and delicious smells of mince pies and brandy. And laughter. Despite all Suzy’s problems her house was always full of laughter. But then, Suzy didn’t have a husband like Stuart. And Janey wasn’t going there anyway.

‘Be her slave more like,’ Stuart had said.

And it was the word ‘slave’ that had made Janey’s decision for her. The only person she was a slave to was Stuart. And he didn’t exactly have her chained up so she couldn’t leave.

‘I’ve had more than a bit of practice,’ Janey said, her voice no longer wobbly.

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Whatever you want it to,’ Janey said, a snake of fear rippling up her spine – a spine that seemed to be straightening as she stood there in front of Stuart challenging him, possibly for the first time. ‘There’s plenty to eat in the fridge, and more than plenty to drink seeing as the spare room has got cases of wine and twelve packs of beer from floor to ceiling.’

‘Won’t even miss you then, will I?’ Stuart said, opening yet another can of Foster’s.

And now here she was, on her way to spending Christmas with Lissy and Bobbie. And Xander. She’d only ever met Xander at his wife, Claire’s, funeral, which was sad. She wondered what she might talk to him about, or he her. The only thing they had in common was the fact they’d both known Claire. And that they were all alone at Christmas. Well, that was the story she’d told Lissy who had invited her to Strand House for the festivities. Festivities! How Lissy had got hold of her landline number Janey had no idea and wasn’t going to ask but she was glad that she had. She might not have left otherwise. That phone call had been just the push-come-to-shove that she needed.

Janey fingered her mobile in her coat pocket, feeling for a vibration which would probably mean Stuart had woken up and found the note she’d tucked beside the tin of teabags on the kitchen counter. I’VE LEFT AND I’M NOT COMING BACK.

‘I don’t know where you are, sweetheart,’ the taxi driver said, ‘but it sure isn’t here with me on a bit of tarmac that needs replacing, because doesn’t it almost wreck the tracking of this taxi every time I drive over it.’

‘I know. I’m sorry.’ Carefully, Janey unpeeled her fingers from the grip of her wheelie case and flexed her fingers. Her knuckles cracked, like popping corn. ‘Lots on my mind. Christmas and that.’

‘Oh gawd, yes, Christmas. Right old fandangle, isn’t it? The wife starts preparing back in September and heaven help me if I don’t make all the right noises when she shows me what she’s bought for this one and that. I expect you’re the same. Most women are.’

Not me, Janey thought. As her marriage had slowly died so had her joy in any sort of celebration. But all that was about to change, wasn’t it?

‘Right then, sweetheart,’ Sam said when he’d got Janey’s case on board and had closed the huge, hinged, rear door. ‘Where’s it going to be? Paris? Rome? Or maybe Moscow if you’ve got your thermals in that case?’

Usually, Janey hated anyone she didn’t know calling her ‘sweetheart’. But right now, it was welcome. It was as though this tall, kindly, man who reminded Janey of her long-dead granddad, knew she needed that familiarity. His cheery chatter was a balm for her bruised soul. Bruised, not broken, she told herself.

‘Strand House. It doesn’t seem to have a number,’ she said, taking the piece of paper from her pocket on which she’d written the name of what was to be her home for the next five days, and Lissy’s mobile phone number. ‘TQ5 1QS if that helps.’

‘Cor, blimey,’ Sam said. ‘That’s posh, sweetheart. Strand House. But then, there’s lots of posh around here.’

‘You know it?’

‘I do. So, sweetheart, will you ride there in style beside me in the front or do you want to queen it in the back? You’ll rattle around a bit but you could practise your regal wave.’

‘In the front, please,’ Janey said, getting in. ‘Is it far?’

‘No journey’s long with good company, sweetheart,’ Sam said, getting in the driving seat and doing up his seatbelt. ‘Well, that’s what they say. You can tell me to belt up and that you like your journeys the way Oscar Wilde liked his haircuts – in silence – if you like. Or I could keep wittering on because the old boy that’s me, who’s been around the block a bit, thinks you might be needing a bit of company.’

‘I do,’ Janey said. ‘Need a bit of company.’

Sam started the engine and indicated he was pulling out.

‘So, you’ve come away from somewhere else for Christmas, then? That’s my guess because you don’t know where Strand House is.’

‘You guess right.’

‘Well, Strand House is pretty big so there’ll be company once you get there. Rich old biddy used to live there, ran it as a sort of upmarket B&B – boutique hotel or somesuch – for years but she’s dead now. I got a lot of trade ferrying guests to and fro back in her day. And her as well when she wanted to go into Torquay for a bit of shopping and the like. I have no idea who owns it now.’

‘I do. She’s called Lissy. She’s a … a friend.’

Janey had few friends – well, none unless you counted Megan who ran the newsagent with whom she’d been at school – because Stuart discouraged it. Friends with bigger incomes than hers would only fuel jealousy, was what Stuart had said. And he hadn’t wanted her to go out to work either because that only put ideas in people’s heads and encouraged extra-marital relationships. Janey had her suspicions that Stuart had had one of those with a colleague at the school where he worked. When she’d challenged him, Stuart had cut her down to size – with his words and with his fists. Why, oh why, hadn’t she left before? What was she going to do now that she had? Another shiver snaked its way up her back and over her shoulders. She felt for the phone in her pocket again. No vibration. She was safe for the moment.

‘Well, I hope she’s a friend, this Lissy, if you’re spending Christmas with her. I mean, most of us spend Christmas with family who we’d never in our right minds choose as friends, but there we are, all shackled up together, for the duration. We all might have a better time of it if we could spend it with friends. And I hope this blooming taxi isn’t bugged because if the wife gets to know I said that she’d strangle me.’

Janey didn’t think for a minute that Sam had a hard time of it with his wife and family at Christmas. He was just being self-deprecating and trying to make her laugh in the process, wasn’t he?

‘I could be a private detective for all you know,’ Janey said. A giggle escaped, fizzing up from inside her somewhere where giggles had long been buried, like bubbles in a glass of lemonade. It made her cough a little. ‘You know. Hired by your wife to check up on you.’

‘Yeah, and I’m that Richard Branson, moonlighting to make a few bob.’ Sam indicated he was going to overtake a bus, and Janey breathed in because there was hardly any space between it and an oncoming car. She was still holding her breath when Sam said, ‘You can breathe out now, sweetheart. I’ve done that before you know. Not killed anyone yet. Anyway, this Lissy, got a family, has she?’

Had she? Janey had no idea. When they’d met at the art weekend in Dartington none of them had got around to sharing histories. She knew only that Lissy had been married then and wasn’t now. And that Claire had been married to Xander back then but wasn’t now because she’d been killed in a road traffic accident. And Bobbie, who had been the model for that life-drawing art class – she didn’t know much more about her other than that she was good fun and impossibly glamorous, and she saw Bobbie’s face in a magazine or a Sunday supplement sometimes. Bobbie put up Facbook blogposts dripping with glamour shots that were a world away from Janey’s experience but sometimes, when she was more down than usual, she’d look at Bobbie’s page and be transported to her world if only for a little while. Lissy had still been married to Cooper when they’d all gone to Claire’s funeral and the opportunity for asking if they’d left children in the care of grandparents hadn’t arisen. But then none of them knew much about her either, did they? They probably knew she was good at art. Xander had popped up on Janey’s Facebook page a couple of times asking to buy a painting from her, but she’d said no, it wasn’t for sale. She wondered why she’d said that because if she’d sold a few paintings she’d have had some savings instead of the nothing she had now.

‘A family?’ Janey said, her brain being dragged back to the present with great difficulty, as though it was being pulled through treacle filled with bits of gravel. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘What does she do then, this friend of yours?’

‘She’s an accountant. With her own practice.’

‘Now there’s a useful friend to have!’ Sam turned to Janey and smiled broadly. ‘Help you fiddle your taxes and that. You’ll have to give me her details.’

Janey didn’t pay taxes. She had no income on which to pay them, and the cheerful banter she’d been having with Sam seemed to be leaching out of her. Perhaps she’d already said too much, divulged too many confidences.

‘Oh, I don’t know that I can. It might not be professional or something. I don’t really know about these things. We’ve only met up a couple of times although we do pop in and out of one another’s lives on Facebook and an email now and then. We went to an art class together and a funeral and that’s about it really.’ The words seemed to be gushing out of Janey, like water through a crack in a lock gate.

Janey took her mobile from her pocket, checked it quickly and slid it back in again.

‘Oh dear, do I suspect someone’s telling porkies?’

‘I … I—’ Janey began.