Coming Home for Christmas Read online

  ‘You’re a good niece, Olivia, and I’m grateful to you for your kindness. You take after your mother in that regard. I just want you to know that,’ Leo said appreciatively, leaning on her more than he usually did. The tests had taken it out of him today, she noted as they walked slowly down the steps of the hospital.

  ‘Thanks, Uncle Leo, you’re welcome. Now let’s get you home and feed you before I collect the girls from school, and you can go and have a good nap for yourself afterwards,’ she said affectionately.

  One thing about her uncle, he appreciated what she and Esther did for him, and that made all the difference. Some of her friends had relatives who were utterly demanding and thoroughly selfish.

  She’d get the spare room sorted one way or another – it wasn’t the Queen coming to stay, it was only her sister; and it was only for one night, because her parents would want Alison to stay with them for the couple of days she was home. Another thought struck her: Alison would probably expect her to be at the airport. It would be a bit callous to expect her to get a taxi, she supposed. That was if she could get a taxi, she thought grimly. A friend of hers had missed a flight to Spain because the taxi men had gone on strike with little or no warning – you couldn’t depend on them these days. Besides, it was always nice to be met by family, especially after a transatlantic flight. It would be different if she was jetting over from London or Europe.

  She hadn’t factored that in at all. Damn. She’d think about it later: right now she had to get Leo sorted, do her mother’s shopping and get the girls picked up from school. There weren’t enough hours in the day, Olivia fretted silently, helping her uncle into the car and mentally ticking one chore off her list for today.

  Chapter 3

  Esther Dunwoody lined a baking tray with greaseproof paper and emptied several packets of sultanas and muscatel raisins on to it. She slid the tray into the oven to heat the fruit so that it would swell nicely for the pudding mix.

  She’d been making or helping to make Christmas puddings for a long time now – nearly sixty-five years, she thought with a stomach-lurching shock, remembering back to the fire-warmed kitchen in her parents’ house. It had a pantry just off it, where her mother stored all her baking ingredients. As a child she’d loved that pantry, loved the smell of her mother’s homemade brown soda loaves and currant breads. There was either a rich tea brack, apple or rhubarb tart, a jam sponge or a tray of fairy cakes on the cake shelf, and always, her absolute favourites, scones, that would be served with homemade blackberry jam and, as an extra treat on Sundays, a big dollop of cream. Although she’d been baking for years and got many compliments, Esther never felt that she had quite the light touch her own mother had had.

  She could still remember as a five-year-old standing on the little stool beside her mother, sister and brother and cutting cherries in half and tipping a plate full of sultanas and raisins into the big pot where her mother stirred the mixture. Then the most special moment, when they all queued up to make a wish.

  It really was a cycle, she mused as she shook two cartons of red cherries on to a plate and licked the sticky sugar coating off her fingers. She had taken Olivia and Alison to do the Christmas baking at her mother’s house during the years of their childhood, and her young daughters had loved the excitement of it all. Now Olivia was bringing her three little girls to stand around the kitchen table to slice and stir and mix and taste and make their wishes, just as she and her siblings had all those years ago. And the same sense of excitement and anticipation would fill the kitchen as mothers and daughters weighed and poured and sieved and whisked, using the Christmas-pudding recipe that had passed down through several generations of Esther’s family.

  Esther wiped her hands and went to the drawer that housed her collection of floral aprons. She picked out four and laid them on the big wooden table behind her. Part of the excitement for her granddaughters was wearing an apron. It was almost a badge of honour, Esther thought with a smile, looking forward to the afternoon with her precious brood. She loved the anticipation of Christmas. The happiest time of her life had been when her parents were still alive and she and her husband, Liam, and Olivia and Alison had celebrated the festive season together, cooking and decorating and Christmas shopping and going to Mass en famille on Christmas morning.

  And now her daughters were grown women, and Olivia had children of her own, and Alison . . . Alison hadn’t been home for Christmas in three years. Esther felt a stab of sadness. Her daughter worked hard in New York. She came home for a week every summer, but she couldn’t afford the time off at Christmas, and Esther always felt a terrible ache of loneliness at Mass and at the dinner table, despite the clamour of the girls with their excited little faces. Liam always knew what she was feeling, and he’d whisper, ‘Maybe next year she’ll make it.’

  Would it be different if Alison was married and had children of her own? Esther wondered. Would that strengthen the ties of family, ties that her youngest daughter had always felt so oppressively binding?

  Olivia and Alison were chalk and cheese. Olivia was the typical older daughter, with a sense of filial responsibility which free-spirited Alison had never been encumbered with. Alison had shaken the dust of Port Ross from her high-heel-shod feet as soon as she could, embracing city life with gusto. She’d worked hard in college and travelled the world before finally settling in New York, where she’d spent three years studying for a degree at night. New York was the city for her; there was no denying that. The buzz, vibrancy and opportunities to succeed suited her daughter’s ambitious nature down to the ground.

  She and Liam had visited her in New York several times over the past few years and thoroughly enjoyed every second of their trips. Since the girls had grown up and left home, she and her husband had spent holidays in the Far East and the Gulf, and had the trip of a lifetime to visit her brother in Melbourne. They’d taken weekend breaks in European cities and explored the wide variety of cultures on offer, but Esther’s favourite city was New York.

  She envied Alison the opportunities she had. Modern women had so many options that hadn’t been available to her generation. Esther had had to give up her job once she’d married Liam and become pregnant. There were no crèches back then. Women were expected to stay at home and mind their children. That had been hard, because Esther had always had a strong streak of independence, which she’d had to surrender to being a wife and mother. Giving up her own salary had been a sacrifice. Giving up her job as a staff officer in the Civil Service because of the ‘marriage bar’ had been even worse. Women had been treated badly in those unenlightened days, but looking at how stressed Olivia was, trying to juggle career and family, Esther could see the other side of the coin. Olivia was ‘time poor’, as they described it now. Not for her the luxury of spending a morning playing with her children on the beach and then having a picnic just because the sun was shining. Not for her the freedom to take a bus into town once the children were safely in school, to shop at leisure or stroll around an art gallery or museum soaking up the fruits of others’ creativity. Neither had Esther had to worry about the expense of a big mortgage and two cars, as Olivia had to. Sometimes Esther felt her elder daughter would like to give up her job and be a stay-at-home mother, just to get off the treadmill of her hectic life for a while.

  Alison’s life was so different and one that Esther would love to have experienced. How wonderful to have no one but yourself to worry about, how liberating to be able to take off at the drop of a hat to go skiing in Colorado, or diving in the Caribbean, or windsurfing in Hawaii, as Alison had in the past few years. How delightful to be able to spend an entire Saturday wandering from exhibition to exhibition in the Met, Esther’s favourite New York haunt.

  Alison was privileged indeed, but she worked hard for it. She was at her desk by seven thirty, having first done a workout at the gym. She didn’t seem to miss home at all, and Esther felt sad sometimes that the daughter who had been so lovingly reared had let go of them all so easil
y.

  Still, she had Olivia and her little girls, she comforted herself as she lined up brown sugar, cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg, almond essence, lemons and a bottle of whiskey. Ellie, Kate and Lia were the joy of her life, and if Alison, by some miracle, were to settle down at home and marry and have children, she would be perfectly happy, Esther decided, setting aside her pudding ingredients and starting to cut steak into cubes and flouring them to braise. She’d add stock and seasoning and diced carrots and turnips to the pot, to simmer slowly on the hob.

  It was a freezing-cold day; a chill easterly blew in off the choppy gunmetal sea. Esther could see the whitecaps pounding against the rocks across the field at Smuggler’s Cove. The trees swayed, their branches long grey skeleton fingers in the wind.

  The girls would need something warm and nourishing after their tiring day at school. She could heat the braised steak for Michael, her son-in-law, when he came home from work, and she’d give him an extra helping of her creamy mustard mash, his favourite. He was exactly like Liam in that regard, a real meat, potato and veg man.

  ‘Are these enough for you?’ Her husband came through the kitchen door with a big basin of breadcrumbs that he’d grated from half a dozen batch loaves.

  ‘Perfect.’ She smiled at him. ‘I suppose I should buy the ready-crumbed ones, but I don’t think they’d give the puddings the same substance. Batch bread is the best, I think.’

  ‘Well, the girls always thought so. Remember the way they used to pick at the loaves? And Ellie, Lia and Kate were doing exactly the same thing yesterday. It brought me back, looking at them.’ Liam put the breadcrumbs down and snaffled a cherry.

  ‘I’m glad we’re passing on the old traditions, and that we haven’t succumbed to modernity,’ Esther remarked. ‘Even if you’re the one who had to grate them.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the same opening a bag of breadcrumbs,’ her husband agreed.

  ‘Mind, I was tempted to buy them this year, I was even tempted to buy a pudding – that dose of flu knocked the stuffing out of me,’ Esther confessed, as she washed and wiped her hands and turned to face her beloved.

  ‘I know, I’m still wheezing,’ Liam said gloomily. ‘We’re getting old, pet, and I don’t like it, not one bit.’

  ‘Me neither . . . imagine – I’ll be seventy! I just can’t believe it.’ She shook her head, still shocked at the notion.

  ‘Well, you don’t look it,’ Liam said gallantly.

  ‘Do I not, even though I stopped dyeing my hair?’ She arched an eyebrow at him.

  ‘Not at all,’ he said, caressing her silky silver bob. ‘And you certainly don’t act it,’ he added teasingly, blue eyes twinkling as he brushed a streak of flour off her cheek. ‘And you’ll be the same age as me, and I’m still a young fella at heart.’

  ‘We did well, didn’t we? We reared the girls the best we could, we have the grandchildren to spoil, we don’t owe a penny to anyone . . . and . . . most importantly . . .’ she slipped her arms around his waist ‘. . . we still love each other, don’t we?’

  ‘Ummm.’ Liam rested his chin on her head as he drew her close.

  ‘Is that a yes or a no?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, woman, do we have to get into all that mushy stuff?’ He groaned in exasperation.

  ‘That mushy stuff is very important, mister.’

  ‘We’ve been married for forty-five years – isn’t that enough for you?’

  ‘No, dear, it isn’t. It’s nice to hear the words “I love you” every now and again,’ Esther retorted. Even after all these years, her husband still found it difficult to express his love in words.

  Liam took a deep breath. ‘I love you, Esther, will that do you?’ he said gruffly.

  ‘There, that wasn’t so hard, now was it?’ She grinned at him, raising her face for a kiss as their arms tightened around each other.

  Chapter 4

  Alison pulled the duvet over her head to try and shut out the sound of the rackety waterpipes gurgling and rattling overhead as the tenant upstairs took a shower. She should get up and go to the gym, she supposed; her fee was paid up until the end of December. At least it would give her something to do. But it was dark and freezing cold, and she could see a drift of snow piled up on the windowsill. Blizzards had been forecast for the weekend, and the wind chill was sending icy tentacles into the building. Every time the front door opened as the various inhabitants left for work, freezing gusts wafted up the stairs to her first-floor landing and wove under her door. Melora should have gone higher up, Alison thought gloomily. There was a third-floor apartment for rent in the same building, but who would want to lug everything up flights of stairs? 157 Dayton Street did not boast an elevator.

  Alison snuggled into the warm hollow in the unfamiliar bed. She had slept badly in her new, strange surroundings, and she couldn’t face getting up to start cold-calling investment firms in the soul-destroying search for a job. Her eyes drooped. She’d been unable to sleep on the soft mattress. She’d have to buy an orthopaedic one, and to hell with the cost. A good night’s sleep was imperative if she was to keep sharp and focused and on top of her game. She’d lain in the dark, unwilling to switch on her lamp, not wanting to see the stacks of boxes that needed unpacking. The two friends who had helped her move were planning to come at the weekend to help her settle in. ‘Settle’ was the appropriate word. How could this nightmare be happening?

  This was the proverbial land of opportunity where hard work was lauded and getting to the top was within everyone’s grasp. Obama had proved that for sure. Jobs had been a dime a dozen when she’d arrived in America, eight years ago. Now, in the banking and financial sector, there wasn’t one to be had. What the hell was she going to do? She couldn’t stay living in Manhattan unless she had a salary coming in. She had money tied up in a bond but she was reluctant to cash it in early; because she’d take a hit, it was down 15 per cent. Her shares in the company were worthless. Shares she’d had in Anglo at home were down the tubes because of the mismanagement of the bank by avaricious bankers, and the AIB and BOI ones she had were on the floor.

  She’d never felt so unnerved before, never felt such knots of anxiety and, even worse, fear, in her stomach. It was demoralizing and unsettling, and for the first time in her life she felt totally out of control. The professional in her knew it would take time before the US economy began its recovery; the human part hoped against hope that a miracle would happen quickly, especially now that Obama was in charge and there was talk of ‘green shoots of recovery’ on Wall Street.

  A sudden urge to ring her parents almost overwhelmed her. She wanted to hear Esther tell her the news from home and hear her dad’s gravelly voice, strong and reassuring. What a relief it would be to tell them her sorry saga. But she couldn’t do that, not before her mother’s surprise party. It would ruin it for her, and Alison wouldn’t do that in a million years. Her heart sank as she remembered that she’d assured Olivia that she’d pay half the cost of the party and half the cost of the bangle she’d bought in Tiffany’s on her credit card. She’d paid for her flight home months ago, a premium ticket – that hadn’t cost her a thought. She should make the most of it; she wouldn’t be flying premium again for a long time, the way things were going. It would be back to economy for her. That was a painful realization. It made her feel like a failure. She’d worked so hard for her luxuries; they hadn’t been handed to her on a plate like Jonathan’s had.

  He’d phoned her to see how she was getting on. She could hear women laughing in the background. He was at his friend’s house in Malibu, and they were all having brunch. If she wanted, he could ask his friend, a risk manager in a Californian financial institution, to keep an eye out for an opening for her, he offered magnanimously. If she got a job on the west coast, she’d only see him when he flew out on business every month or thereabouts. So much for their great romance, she thought in wry amusement. ‘Do that,’ she’d told him. ‘And don’t forget Melora, she’s out in LA too.’ If a
job came up out there, she’d think about it if all else failed.

  Alison yawned and stretched lethargically. Usually she slept like a log, but last night she’d twisted and turned until desperation had got the better of her. She’d got out of bed and gone to the little galley kitchen and poured herself a stiff brandy and port, hoping that turning to drink in the middle of a sleepless night wasn’t the first step to alcoholism. She’d padded back to bed and propped herself up against the Egyptian-cotton-clad pillows she’d brought with her, flicked through the TV channels and spent an hour watching My Super Sweet Sixteen Party, aghast at the obnoxious, spoilt teenagers trying to outdo their friends with lavish parties. Three of them had received cars from their parents – and not just run-of-the-mill cars: one had got a Merc, another a Range Rover, another a Lexus. Another one had had the designer of the clothes Nicole Kidman wore for Moulin Rouge design a replica of a dress for her. And had got a video message from the actress, as her impressed friends had stood with their mouths open. Alison had sat watching with her mouth open. What on earth was she doing watching such rubbish? This had to be her lowest point ever. It stung to think those kids had cars she couldn’t afford to drive now. She was an unemployed thirty-two-year-old professional who’d worked her butt off, and sixteen-year-old kids out there were swanning around in Mercs!

  It was crazy, irresponsible stuff. What sort of values did those precocious teens have? None. Wealth could be so corrupting, she’d seen that herself. Seen how people had borrowed more and more to buy stocks and shares from banks which had been eager to lend, ignoring the fact that their clients were gambling on making a profit with loans way beyond their means. The whole pack of cards had come tumbling down, and while she’d lost out on her job, and her bonuses and shares, at least she still had some values, she’d reflected, turning off the TV and eventually falling into a restless sleep, until the sound of the gurgling waterpipes had woken her up.