Digby appeared to be much less concerned. He immersed himself in his Internet discussions until mid-afternoon, when he began to prepare for his evening stall in Blockley. ‘Last-minute presents – that’s the thing,’ he muttered to himself. ‘Plants, knick-knacks, soap. Didn’t we have a boxful of soap somewhere?’
Ant made no attempt to help. His father would have welcomed him as assistant stallholder but would never think to ask. While appearing to the outside world as a classic father−son team, in reality they had opted for quite different means of earning a living. Ant’s chief occupation was as jobbing gardener, with a regular part-time position at a large garden centre. Digby was a wheeler-dealer of the old school, with fingers in a bewildering number of pies. He went to auctions and house clearance sales, did private deals with men and women who lived much the same as he did himself. Only at Christmas did their activities overlap.
‘What a weird day,’ Ant said at one point. ‘And I can’t help feeling there’s more trouble to come.’ This feeling, he realised, arose mainly from Digby’s strange reaction to the disappearance of his wife. It almost seemed as if he knew where she was and why she’d gone, so unworried did he appear. At last, he blurted a direct challenge. ‘You know where she is, don’t you? You know what’s going on. Why won’t you tell me?’
Digby straightened from the cardboard tray he was filling with Christmas cacti and met his son’s accusing gaze. ‘No, I don’t know where she is. All I know is she’s safe enough, and she’ll come back when she’s ready. She’s got some crackpot idea in her head, and all we can do is wait for her to work it out in her own way.’
‘Crackpot idea? Like what?’
But his father would only shake his head and said no more.
In despair, Ant decided there was only one thing he could do – and that was to phone his friend Thea Slocombe and talk the whole thing over with her.
There was a big meal at the Slocombe house that Saturday lunchtime, composed of all the things Thea assumed would not be wanted when Christmas actually arrived. She had been forced to reorganise the freezer a few days earlier to accommodate the extra food that would be needed for their entertaining, so there was stewing steak and pork chops in the fridge, urgently requiring to be eaten. Evidently the beef had been transformed into a nice casserole earlier in the day, because suddenly there it was, with some carrots and broccoli that were also due for consumption. Drew and Timmy were scheduled to leave mid-afternoon, on their adventurous trek north. ‘Of course, we could get there all in one go, but it doesn’t seem right to turn up halfway through the evening, does it? I doubt if she’ll want to put us up overnight,’ said Drew again.
‘Stop agonising about it,’ said Thea briskly. ‘It’s all decided now. She’s expecting you tomorrow morning. You stay four or five hours, and get back here for bedtime. Minimal disruption for all concerned.’
‘Don’t forget I need to hang up my stocking,’ said Timmy. ‘What if we get back too late for that?’
‘There’s no such thing as too late for that,’ said Thea. ‘But if you set out by three o’clock, you should be back by eight or nine. That leaves plenty of time.’
The child seemed to have difficulty grasping the details. He looked round the kitchen in search of assistance and plainly had a new and unconnected thought. ‘Are we going to have Christmas dinner in here?’
‘Where else?’ asked Thea, slightly snappishly. ‘Surely we don’t have to rearrange furniture for Christmas as well as all the rest of it?’
There was a silence as the three Slocombes remembered the succession of small disappointments that the previous Christmas had thrown up.
‘Why don’t we take this table into the living room, and push it up to the one in there?’ said Drew. ‘If we covered it with a big cloth, it would look all right. Then we can have candles and a centrepiece, and be beside the tree and the decorations.’ He smiled. ‘We could do it on Christmas morning, after we’ve opened the presents. It could be quite Dickensian.’
‘With my mum as Scrooge,’ laughed Jessica, not quite kindly.
‘I can make a centrepiece with holly berries and ivy and some silver spray.’ Drew rubbed his hands together. ‘I used to love doing that. Except I don’t suppose there’s time now.’
‘Actually,’ said Jessica, ‘I brought one with me. I wasn’t going to produce it until Monday.’
‘You brought a centrepiece?’ Everybody stared at her. ‘Really?’
‘Why is that so surprising?’ She looked at her mother. ‘Dad and I made one every year, remember? I’m just carrying on the tradition. Isn’t that the whole point of Christmas? Families creating their own special traditions and keeping them going?’
‘Yes!’ said Stephanie, despite not being entirely sure of herself. ‘Can we see it now?’
‘If you insist. It took me ages to make it. Had to drive out to some woods and find all the doings.’ Again she fixed her gaze on Thea. ‘It was funny doing it without Dad, but it felt as if he was there with me, in a way.’
‘That’s nice. Carl was always so good at that sort of thing.’
Stephanie tried to get a sense of the father and husband whose death balanced that of her own mother. He sounded nice, taking his daughter out to pick berries and nuts and things and showing her how to make a decoration out of them. Drew had never done that.
‘No, don’t get it now,’ said Timmy. ‘It’ll spoil it if you do. Wait till Christmas Day. It’ll be a nice surprise then.’
There was general enthusiasm for this plan. ‘Good thinking, Tim,’ said Thea with a sweet smile. Watching her, Stephanie understood that she was making
