Mary's Christmas Read online

  Levi and I stayed well back as Mother walked across the saloon bar to where the publican glowered. She laid down a piece of paper with Father’s name on it and counted out the cost of the barrel, making polite conversation to his silence all the while. When the money was on the surface of the bar, she put away her purse, rested her hands on the wood, and looked expectantly at him. Levi and I held our breath, but since his choice was to take Mother’s order or lose our family’s business, he reluctantly reached down for his order book and wrote down the information.

  Mother thanked him, politely added that her friends always enjoyed his winter ale, and turned to go.

  One had to know her very well to see how relieved she was.

  She was nearly at the door when the man added a parting shot, in a voice that might have been telling a jest. “Don’t know why you people celebrate the Saviour’s birth when it was you who killed him.”

  In the two seconds before anger came, even a complete stranger would have read the shock on her face. She came to a halt. I expected her to turn and go after the man with all the wits and scorn in her armament—I gleefully waited for it—but instead she merely lifted her chin, gathered us up, and left.

  “Why did he say that?” I asked her.

  “Ignorant people spout a lot of nonsense, Mary.”

  “If he’s ignorant, why didn’t you stay and argue?” This was, after all, her technique for dealing with the occasional ignorance of her children.

  “When there is an emotional element in a belief, argument rarely has much effect. Particularly when it’s a man who feels threatened by a woman’s words.”

  “But, what he was saying! Why does he think we killed Jesus?”

  She did not reply, not then and there. Instead, we piled back into the motor and continued the day’s tasks—although she did buy us an unexpectedly generous treat in the Alfriston tea-house. However, once we were back home, she sent me to fetch a copy of the New Testament, and we began to work our way through the relevant parts. The next two days were spent addressing my question of why the man blamed us for a political act two thousand years in the past, until the long table in the library was buried in books, maps, and notes in several languages.

  Not that the question was answered, exactly, except to convince me that the Gospel authors might have been more careful with their choice of words, had they known people would read them as the immortal word of God.

  On the third day, life resumed. Father’s ship was due the next morning, and none of us wanted to see a look of disappointment at our lack of mince tarts and mistletoe. Every corner of the house smelled of baking—Mother had just pulled Father’s favourite ginger cake from the oven, only slightly scorched—when a knock came on the kitchen door. I pulled it open to find a very bedraggled Uncle Jake, wearing a rueful expression, a quarter inch of beard hair, and a beautifully tailored coat, misshapen by damp, that he’d clearly been sleeping in for days.

  Also, a black eye going green around the edges.

  Mother exclaimed and reached to pull him inside, then let go of his arm when he made a sound of distress. “Sore shoulder,” he said, taking the step up to the kitchen as if it was a great height. As he went past me, I hesitated about shutting the door: the kitchen no longer smelled so sweet.

  Mother put on the kettle, laid a slab of the cake on a plate, and had him fed and refreshed in two minutes flat. It took somewhat longer to get him upstairs to the bath, but she asked no questions, made no protest, merely provided clean clothing, left a napkin-wrapped pair of sandwiches and a bottle of beer on the guestroom table, and resumed her kitchen tasks.

  “What happened to Uncle Jake?” Levi asked.

  “I’m sure we’ll find out when he’s had a rest,” Mother said, and directed us back to our construction of many meters of colourful paper chain.

  But nothing more was heard from our resident black sheep, all that day and through the evening. The following morning, I came downstairs to find my mother placidly reading, teacup at hand.

  “Do you think Uncle Jake has died?” I asked her.

  “I heard him moving around during the night,” she replied, to my relief.

  “What happened to him?”

  “I’m sure that if he wants us to know, he’ll tell us. Would you rather stay here when I go to get your father, or come with Levi and me?”

  That was a difficult decision, but in the end, my curiosity about Jake (and my conviction that I could get him to tell me first) overcame my eagerness to see Father.

  An hour after Mother and Levi had driven away, with the house still silent, I was regretting my decision.

  An hour after that, motion came at last.

  I managed to get the coffee made before I heard his feet on the stairs. I was sweeping up the last of the spilt grounds when he appeared in the doorway, shaven now and wearing an assortment of clothing—old trousers of his from a previous visit, a heavy sweater with rolled-up sleeves belonging to Father, and a pair of Mother’s too-large bedroom slippers.

  “Mary, Mary, my favouritest niece,” he said, coming to wrap his arms around me. “Good heavens, child, you’re nearly as tall as I am! Who gave you permission to become such a beautiful young woman?”

  It was true that I had to shrink down a little to nestle into his shoulder, but if I had changed, he had not: still tautly muscled, and still warmer than other people seemed to be, his natural odour had returned. I breathed it in, the smell of uncles and exotic places, and I might have stood there forever had his stomach not given a loud grumble.

  “Oh!” I said, standing back, “you must be starving. Can I get you something to eat?”

  “Let’s see what there is in the pantry,” he said, and was soon merrily stirring eggs and herbs into a perfect omelette, grating just the right amount of cheese over it, and snatching the toast from beneath the grill a moment before the brown went too dark. He put one serving in front of me, replicated it for himself, and sat down at the kitchen table, emptying his plate in what seemed one rapid swipe of the fork. He washed it down with a swallow of coffee, ignoring the odd bits that floated on top.

  We washed and dried the dishes, wiped down the stove and table, talking all the while. Perhaps I did the majority of the talking. In any event, he did not reply to my none-too-subtle queries as to his eye and shoulder (Come to think of it, I never did learn what had happened to him.) although he did hear all about Mother’s decision to return to California. When the kitchen was restored, we went into the sitting room where I carefully arranged more wood onto the fire (my domestic incompetence, then as now, being largely confined to the kitchen). He lowered himself onto the divan, stifling a groan. I fetched a rug so he could put up his feet.

  “So, Mary, what’s new in your life?”

  Unlike most adults, Jake seemed genuinely interested in what children were doing. He listened with the occasional comment as I told him about my tutorials during the autumn, my decision about the future (I was torn between being a surgeon and a mountain climber, realising that the latter as a hobby might negate the former as a profession, what with the liability of frost-bite) and the ridiculous antics of one of my older friends who had recently discovered boys.

  He nodded, he shook his head, he sympathised, but he also half-drowsed in the growing warmth—until I started telling him about the Evil Publican. His eyes came open as he watched my face. He said nothing, and although with someone else I might have downplayed the insult, I did not mind Uncle Jake seeing how upset I was. At the end, I plucked at a frayed spot on my sleeve, and listened to the crackling fire.

  “That wasn’t a nice thing to say,” he told me after a time.

  “It was nasty. Although Mother explained to me the history of what it meant, and how it came about. Uncle Jake, do you have to go there and play cards any more?”

  His hand came out to gave a sharp tug to the nearest plait. “I might have to. But if I do, I promise not to give him any of my money. Is that the car I hear in the drive?” />
  It was.

  After my enthusiastic greetings, the hand-shake between Father and Jake seemed particularly subdued, and during luncheon, some large Presence loomed at the back of the room. When we had finished, Father and Jake left us and walked up to Jake’s room, where they spent a very long time behind the closed door, broken at one point by Father’s retrieval of the first aid box and a bowl of water.

  Nothing more was said about the black eye, the sore shoulder, or the state of the overcoat.

  That afternoon, I heard Jake leave his room to go down the hallway, and after the flush of the toilet, go back. When his door shut again, Levi and I looked at each other, then put down our books and ventured upstairs. I tapped on the door. In a moment, Jake looked out.

  “Your father’s ordered me to stay in bed today. But he didn’t say I had to be alone. You two want to come in?”

  We did.

  We spent a happy hour playing Faro on the counterpane. When Levi grew tired of losing, Jake had me put the footed breakfast tray over his legs and showed us card tricks—how to snap-change a card, then how to vanish one from the table. His hands were good—in fact, looking back, I can say that his hands were great. Even knowing how the tricks worked, neither of us could catch the card snapping back, or flicking beneath his outstretched arm to his lap. As we practiced, he amused himself by shooting cards across the room into the waste-basket, only missing twice out of the entire deck.

  I watched in fascination, then demanded, “Show me how you do that!”

  So he showed me. I had a good arm for throwing, but at first, the cards flew wildly over. Jake picked up one that had landed on his pillow—well behind my back, and said, “You’re thinking too hard. Don’t throw the card; let it throw itself.”

  I focussed closely on his arm, his fingers: relaxed and sure. On my tenth try, the slick paper seemed to find a pathway cut through the air: instead of fluttering up or sideways, it spun, its corner tapping against the wallpaper twelve feet away.

  My whoop attracted attention from downstairs, and Mother came up, sending Levi and me away to let the patient rest. The cards went with me.

  By the end of the afternoon, I could hit a waste-basket twelve feet away nineteen times out of twenty. By the time I went to bed, I could get the entire deck in at fifteen feet.

  The next morning, Jake was impressed.

  That afternoon, he was well enough for a walk over the snow-sprinkled Downs.

  And by evening, he felt recovered enough to go up to the Evil Publican’s inn for a few hands of poker.

  I was, frankly, hurt: why would my beloved uncle turn his back on us to socialise with That Person?

  The next day, I asked him.

  He and I had graduated to throwing competitions by now: who could get the most cards in the basket, the fastest, and the farthest away. There in the sitting room, in a house redolent with cinnamon and evergreen boughs, I ventured a suggestion that Jake was being a touch disloyal to us.

  He did not reply, not directly, merely finished his run of tosses (he missed two, to my one) and then said, “Let’s try something else.”

  He took a tall, thin glass vase from the mantelpiece and stood it on the low table. Backing away a few feet, he held a card between his fingers, made a couple of practice runs, then snapped his hand out—and the card magically appeared between vase and table. The effect was like a magician whipping away a laden tablecloth, in reverse. He handed me the deck of cards, watched me knock the vase over a few times, suggested a correction of my elbow, and said, “When you can feed a sequence of cards under the vase, ask me again about my poker games.”

  Perfection took me two days, by which time my fingers were somewhat raw.

  It was now December 20, a Wednesday. I took Uncle Jake into the dining room, balanced a ½ inch wooden dowel upright, and let a series of ten cards take up residence between the dowel and the tablecloth, each one shooting the previous card to the floor beyond.

  I felt Jake’s strong, supple fingers come down on my shoulder, gripping it in approval. I had never felt prouder of anything in my life.

  Then the work began.

  I listened with something near awe as my uncle casually suggested to his older brother (his experienced, and hence suspicious, older brother) that Charles really ought to take advantage of having another adult in the house and take Judith for a night out. In London, even. Wasn’t there something at the theatre that she’d mentioned wanting to see? Yes, he supposed it would make for a late night—unless they stayed in Town. In an hotel even, so as not to face the currently cold and empty London house?

  Oh, certainly, whatever Charles thought—it was merely an idea…

  His apparent indifference set the hook. But when Jake went on to point out that it would of course mean that he couldn’t drink or go out—couldn’t so much as take his eyes off either of us until we were tucked into our beds—well, then the hook was truly buried.

  Maternal suspicions flared when Father surprised her with the proposal of twenty-four hours of adult freedom, but when Jake swore to her that he would be responsible, that he would not have more than one drink, or two at the most, that he would watch over his charges as if they were his own, she let herself be convinced. My parents set off for the Eastbourne station on Friday morning, trailing an air of giddy anticipation.

  Jake rubbed his hands together, and put his team to work.

  Walking towards the inn that night, well bundled against the cold, we saw the gleam of expensive motorcars from down the road. As we grew near, we heard men’s voices, then saw a hand-lettered sign pinned to the door: CLOSED TONIGHT FOR PRIVATE PARTY.

  Jake pushed open the saloon-bar door and walked into the warmth and brightness. Half a dozen men in expensive suits looked around at our entrance, their faces first lighting up as they saw who it was, then going confused when they saw Levi and me.

  “You can’t bring those two in here,” the Evil Publican declared.

  “I didn’t think you’d be keen on it,” Jake said easily, “but I’m afraid I’m stuck with them for the night. Playing nursemaid, you know. So unless you want to give them a bottle of lemonade and let them sit in the corner for a while, I won’t be joining you tonight.”

  Protest arose, most vehemently from the Evil Publican who had planned this evening for some weeks (and, no doubt, intended to reap financial benefits from it.) But Jake stood firm: he’d promised his brother that he wouldn’t take his eyes off the kids, so…

  Having seen Uncle Jake’s wiles at work on my parents, I was not surprised when his ploy of innocence worked on men with drinks in their hands and gambling on their minds. Levi and I were settled into a corner with lemonade and a packet of stale biscuits. Since we had come armed with books, we were content.

  The evening wore on. Empty bottles collected on the bar, neck-ties were loosened. For the most part, the men only recalled our presence when one or the other of them shushed some thoughtless language. After Levi curled up on the cushions with a travelling rug pulled up over him, we became even less visible.

  That would not have been the case had I been even a year older, but being some days short of my twelfth birthday, I was a child, not a young woman. And when I put down my book and wandered up to look over my uncle’s shoulder, one of the men called me Jake’s good luck charm—which that night, Jake Russel surely needed. He won occasionally, but when he lost, it was big. Gradually, he slid deeper into the hole. All the while, the Publican’s winnings grew. The room grew warmer. Jake irritably ripped off his tie and loosened his collar. His hand movements grew more clumsy, his voice louder.

  I walked back to Levi’s corner and picked up my book again, but the voices were growing too loud, the vocabulary a touch uncontrolled. I went back to Jake, leaning against his left shoulder.

  “Uncle Jake, can we go soon?”

  “Not until I win back my stake, honey.”

  “You’re a long way from that, Yank,” the Publican sneered. “You’re just abou
t cleaned out!”

  But the Yank was not quite without resources.

  Jake reached down to his pocket, then laid his fist on the table. He withdrew his hand, revealing a mound of brilliant green and pale gold. I gasped: “Mama’s emeralds! Oh, Uncle Jake, you can’t—”

  “Just borrowing them, Mary,” he said. “They’ll be back before your mother is.”

  The necklace was old, heavy, and valuable—extremely valuable. I watched these strangers pass my mother’s treasure along the table, debating its value as if they were talking about horseflesh or a grain shipment. Two of the men had a lot of experience in buying ladies’ jewels, and both agreed that the piece was worth more than everything on the table. More than everything around the table, for that matter.

  “I don’t care,” Jake declared, looking flushed and sounding desperate. “My luck’s about to turn, I can feel it.”

  The others looked at each other, then sat up with renewed interest. Playing commenced, wagers climbed. One player folded, and another. And then with a convulsive motion, Jake shoved forward his entire bankroll—including my mother’s emerald necklace. “All,” he said.

  A third player put his cards down immediately. The fourth mulled it over for a minute before he too decided that discretion was the better part of poker.

  That left Jake and the innkeeper. As was his habit, well known to anyone who played against him, the man picked up his cards, checked them, and laid them down again on the table to his right side. “I’m in.”

  “Like everyone says, there’s not enough on the table to match my sparklies,” Jake pointed out. “So what’ll you add? That pretty new motor of yours? I’d really like a new motorcar.” However, I thought that his voice and face did not quite match the confidence of his words. Also, his left leg was jittering beneath the table, a thing I’d noticed he did when his hand was questionable.

  The innkeeper saw it, too. “You’re bluffing,” he scoffed.

  “Then match the bet. What can you put up but the car? This joint, maybe? Yeah, okay, how about the keys to this place? Or should I…” Jake wrapped a hand across the heap of gems and gold, pulling it a fraction towards himself. When his arm rose again, the necklace had hit upon a stray beam from the overhead lamp, and sparkled all the brighter.