Chapter 2: Christmas Day

April Dunlough was accustomed to rising early and arriving at the TV studio before dawn for early shoots, so it wasn’t unusual for her to have several warm layers under her comfortable pink dayglo sweats and out enjoying the cool brisk breeze coming off the dark grey sea. It was chilly and damp but she got up a respectable speed with her training shoes springing off the firm wet sand left by the retreating tide and the effort soon warmed up her slight petite body. Although it was still dark, her eyes could easily follow the white line of the surf from where it pointed north-east at her mother’s house and curved round towards due east by the time her eye reached her initial target of the ancient wrecked pier about a quarter of a mile away.

She noticed that somebody else was moving about this early on Christmas Day. A set of car headlights could be seen running down the seafront to the pier before turning right and disappearing from view. Other than that, April seemed to be utterly alone on the shore in the half-light of pre-dawn.

She rarely visited her home town nowadays. April had surprised her mother very late on Christmas Eve, bursting in on her and finding her 65-year-old widowed mother enjoying a passionate embrace with her pensioner lover on the living room sofa, which was a surprise for everyone involved!

April usually avoided Sandmouth Bay like the plague but was driven here by unexpected events in her life, which left her with nowhere else to go. She preferred to invite her mother to join her in whatever far flung exotic location she happened to choose for her vacation, or to her flat in London or even the Paris apartment, where she intended spending Christmas.

‘Paris ... Damn Paris!’, she thought.

She had gone back to her and her husband Jacques’ apartment there a day earlier than expected, having completed shooting her scenes and been released early by the studio, but now she won’t be going back to Paris in a hurry, if ever again.

April enjoyed exercising, particularly running, it kept her 43-year-old body in excellent trim. She was quite musical and appreciated the regular rhythm of exercise, the bass vibrations pounding through her legs, the looseness of her arms and the metronomic swishing to and fro of her long blond pony tail. The rhythm enabled her to think and marshal her thoughts, sort them into some semblance of order and priority, making sense of the complications of her busy, demanding life.

As a dedicated and professional television and film actress, she was used to assuming attitudes and putting on an act, feigning emotions required on demand and suppressing any natural feelings that were inappropriate for her recorded performance. She almost always had to keep up an act as she was so rarely on her own. Running, though, she could just be herself ... and that was why she was crying. April was sobbing her poor little heart out as she pounded the firm wet sand of Sandmouth Bay.

It was still dark when the sensible dark blue Volvo estate pulled up outside the private house that was once The Porter House Restaurant, and previously known as The Station Hotel before that, situated almost exactly opposite the ancient broken pier. There was a driveway to one side of the house that led to a large garage and substantial former car park behind the building. At the moment a large skip full of broken tarmac and hardcore blocked the way as contractors who were breaking up the car park surface to turn it back into a garden were away on their Christmas break.

Rebecca turned the car lights out and opened the driver’s door. She went round to the passenger door and opened that, too. She undid the seat belt restraining Pete and carefully shook his shoulder to wake him up.

“We’re here, Pete,” she said gently.

Pete lifted his bandaged head and nodded before starting to make his way out of the seat. Rebecca held his arm and helped him to his feet. Standing, he towered over the Doctor by six or seven inches. In a couple of minutes she had locked the car and they had entered the darkened house.

The large hallway had a number of cardboard boxes piled up in it, evidencing that Rebecca had only been in residence a matter of days. To the right of the hallway was a large L-shaped sitting room, with a single settee set in front of an unlit fire. There was a window opposite the fire at the front of the house, a second front window further down and a large side window. It was for this room that she had three pairs of curtains that she intended erecting later in the day once she had caught up on at least some of her beauty sleep.

Rebecca sat Pete down on the settee and set about lighting the fire. It had already been primed with paper, kindling wood and coal and ready to light since first thing the previous morning. Satisfied once the initial flames started licking around the wood and coal, she headed off to the kitchen to prepare the cocoa. Having filled and switched on the kettle, she ran up the back staircase and opened the airing cupboard, pulling out some warm blankets and a sheet. Then she grabbed one of the spare pillows from her own bedroom and skipped down the front staircase, to find Pete sitting as still and as quiet as she had left him, staring at the crackling flames in the fireplace.

“What is it that is so fascinating about living fires?” Rebecca asked Pete by way of conversation as she laid the pillow and blankets on the end of the settee.

“I guess it’s the changing patterns you imagine you see in the flames,” Pete suggested, somewhat listlessly.

Rebecca went back to the kitchen and spooned the drinking chocolate into a couple of mugs and poured in the boiling water, stirring the contents vigorously.

They sat side by side on the settee, warming by the fire, drinking their steaming mugs of cocoa.

“This used to be the bar area of the restaurant when I lived here, over twenty years ago,” Pete observed, once Rebecca was settled. “I recognised the place when I got out of the car. People who were waiting for their tables to be ready, or had finished their meal and wanted to relax with their coffee would sit in here. It makes a comfortable sitting room.”

Rebecca nodded, in the hospital cubicle Nurse Carter had said as much about where Pete had once lived.

“Well, I do need to add some more chairs and a bookcase in the corner, the room looks too big and empty at the moment. I couldn’t get out of my hotel room fast enough as soon as the house purchase went through,” Rebecca told him. “Rest of the house needs a lot of furnishing, I haven’t started any guest rooms yet, I’m afraid, so this settee will have to do for now. It might get a bit too bright to sleep later on this morning.”

He turned and smiled, “It feels comfy already. It’s better than that basement room at the club, anyway. There were no windows at all.”

“There’s the downstairs bathroom at the back next to the kitchen you can use for now. I will look out a towel and toothbrush for you.”

Later, Rebecca had a quick shower in her en suite shower room before climbing into bed. She had lost a bit of time dealing with her unexpected house guest, so decided to forego the long soak in the bath that she had been looking forward to for the last twenty plus hours. It was already starting to get light outside, so she had drawn the one set of bedroom curtains that she had managed to put up and taken the precaution of locking the door to her room.

You couldn’t be too careful, Pete had a reputation for violence but, while she thought it unjustified, there was no point in testing him unnecessarily, she’d had her fill of emotional involvements for now. She set her alarm for one in the afternoon, about five and a half hours’ sleep. She had put a small chicken wrapped in foil into the oven before having her shower, which should be nicely done by mid-afternoon, she thought; she would worry about the vegetables when she arose.

When she got downstairs just after waking early, at noon, she found the warm sitting room empty, but the fire was banked up with fresh coal and burning well and the blankets neatly folded on the settee. She found Pete just outside the back door to the kitchen, cutting down wood from the wood-store for kindling. When she opened the door to the chill outside, he welcomed her with a cheery smile.

“Hi, Doc, sleep well?” he asked, his warm breath making white steam in the cold air of Christmas Day.

“I did, yourself?” Rebecca replied, her smile matching his.

“Sure did.”

“How’s your head?”

“Thumping, but the fresh air’s definitely helping.”

“Good, I’ll have a look at the dressing later. Hope the settee wasn’t too lumpy for you.”

“Nah, I was comfortable and the room was quite warm. I noticed you had plenty of coal and logs for the fire but not much kindling for fire-starting, so thought I’d cut some up for you. Found the chopper in the garage, I think it’s the one we useta have when we lived here. There’s a load of my dad’s old tools out there, too.”

“If you can use some of those tools you can give me a hand putting the curtain rails up in the sitting room.”

“Sure, no problem. In fact, I’ve got a suggestion to improve that room, if you want to hear it.”

“OK,” she said hesitatingly.

“I’ll show you,” he said, putting down the axe, “It’ll be easier than describing it.”

He brushed off a few wood shavings from the hospital greens he had been loaned, wiped off his still shiny patent leather shoes on the mat and took Rebecca through to the large L-shaped room where he had slept earlier. It was reasonably warm in there compared to outside which was damp and chilly.

Pete pointed up to the ceiling between the two front windows, there Rebecca could see a beam running across the room between two bulkheads.

“This was originally two rooms, the snug front sitting room with the fireplace, and...” he turned back into the larger part of the room, with the windows at front and side of the house and doorway leading to the kitchen, “ ... this was a parlour and behind this wall panel, where the back of the hotel bar used to be, must be another fireplace. So this could easily be turned back into two much more comfortable rooms by blocking up this space and reinstating the doorway.”

“Wow! I can see that working! I’ll have to contact a builder after Christmas.”

Quietly, Pete said, “It’s a simple job, I could do that. Pay you back for putting me up over Christmas.”

“Are you a builder?” Rebecca asked.

“I used to do work as a chippie, doing first and second fittings, but working with a general builder, so I picked up enough of all the other building trades to be at a good DIY level. We used to tackle kitchens, putting in new units and do the plumbing and tiling too. I can put in the electrics, but it would need inspection because I’m not qualified to certify. As for this room, I could put up a stud wall here, dry-line it, put in a door frame, hang a door and paint it. Cover the wall with a couple of skims of plaster and hang wallpaper or paint when completely dry. Then I could open up the fireplace on that wall,” he pointed, “and reinstate it, the chimney’s probably blocked with some slate or it may even be bricked up. The Victorian fire surround might still be there intact or it might have been removed, we wouldn’t know until the covering has been taken off. If the worse comes to worse you could put an electric fire in where the fireplace was.”

“Mmm,” this was giving Rebecca food for thought. She had bought this place for a song in the current depressed housing market, the hotel hadn’t been a going concern for a long time as the hotel and resort had gradually run down with the loss of the railway line. Ideally a local builder would have turned this building into half a dozen holiday apartments, but in the present economic climate and the rundown nature of the town with its wrecked pier, the returns were negligible, so Rebecca had snatched it up in the face of barely token competition. It was a huge, rambling place and her idea was to eventually bring her mother and sister down to live here in her own self-contained flat and still have five en-suite bedrooms to spare. She had enough money to do the restoration work, following the sale of her half of their London house to her ex-husband, it was only the time she needed to oversee the work required in order to get the place habitable, that was the problem.

“OK,” she said finally with a smile, “You work out what you need, how much time it will take you and what it will cost me. Then I’ll think about it. In the meantime, you can pay for your Christmas dinner by helping me put up the curtain rails this afternoon. I’ve got the rails and fittings for most of the downstairs and half the bedrooms, and I bought a new drill.”

“Sure, no problem, Doc, I’ll measure up after lunch.” He grinned and returned outside to continue chopping and stacking kindling wood.

Pete had put the coffee on before cutting the wood and Rebecca poured them both a cup, taking one out to him while he finished off. Then she returned to the kitchen to peel and cut some vegetables. She checked the progress of the roasting chicken and pulled back the foil to brown off the breast.

By the time that the Queen’s Speech came on her tiny portable TV, they were sitting down and eating their festive repast at the breakfast table in the kitchen. Rebecca was casually dressed in sweatshirt and jogging bottoms, Pete was still in the hospital greens that Doctor John had fished out for him last night. That reminded her that she had brought back his clothes last night and needed to put the shirt and underwear in the wash when she got a chance.

“Do you not have any family round here?” Pete asked casually, as if to make polite conversation.

“Not around here, no. Besides, as regards family, there’s really only my mother ... and a sister,” Rebecca replied after the slightest pause. “Mum lives on her own in London and would benefit for the clean sea air here. My sister has been in an Essex hospital for many years and long-term unwell. I called Mum yesterday and hopefully she will come down in the spring or summer for a couple of weeks once I get the house straight. She won’t move permanently unless my sister can come too. The plan is to move them both here eventually.” She smiled, there was so much to do and she would have started on those bloody lounge curtains, before she had this unexpected guest to stay. “What about your family?”

“I just have my mother, she’s in the Sunnyside Retirement home on the edge of town, I was an only child, my dad left us when I was still a teenager and not heard from him since,” he replied thoughtfully. “And there’s my daughter...”

“You have a daughter?”

“Yes, Annie. Ann Josephine Harris, her mother is Tracie Harris. She was an accident. Annie’s either 11 or 12, we’ve never lived together and I really don’t see her as much as I wish I could, and then only from a distance.”

“Does she live far away?”

“No,” he looked up sheepishly, “Just around the corner, but her mother and me ... Well, we never lived together, weren’t never really boyfriend and girlfriend, and now she don’t want nothin’ much to do with me.”

“Not even at Christmas time?”

“I haven’t seen Annie to speak to since the Christmas before last,” he admitted. “I take a sneaky look at her sometimes when she walks home from school, just to remind myself of how she looks growing up. She’s so beautiful, but I keep well out of their way. I er ... well, I owe her mum a lot, a hell of a lot, in child maintenance.”

“Well, we can do something about that now, if you want.” Rebecca looked at Pete, who was squirming with embarrassment in his chair. “Christmas is a time for families and also for forgiveness.”

“I know,” he admitted, “I’d love to see her, but I think Annie is probably deeply ashamed of me as a father.” He paused, playing with his fork. “I was never close to her mother, just a ... one-night stand that went wrong really. But I haven’t been able to give her much in the way of child support these last couple of years, so I’ve been keeping me distance.”

“Come on, let’s get the washing up done, I’ll wash, you dry and then I’ll change the dressing on the side of your head. After that we can sort out these curtains while it’s still light.”