Christmas on the Home Front by Roland Moore

Author:Roland Moore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-08-27T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

‘La la la-laaa la la la laaala.’

Mrs Arbuthnott was swaying and singing in time to the music. Her face was flushed as she cajoled some other villagers to join in. Soon the whole room was singing along.

But Henry was looking weary; his charming bonhomie and eagerness blunted by hours of smiling dutifully and making small talk in a hot room.

Connie eyed him with sympathy. She felt similarly exhausted. He’d been sitting at the small upright piano and she’d been standing singing by it for nearly an hour. They’d finished their third rendition of ‘(There’ll be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover’ and Connie was heartily sick of the song. She also felt a catch in her throat, a nagging reminder that she hadn’t warmed up her voice properly. Doctor Channing had hoped she’d take it easy. But there was fat chance of that.

She and Henry hadn’t played together for a few months. Life and the war had got in the way, as had the waning interest of their erstwhile, self-appointed manager, Frederick Finch. Recognising they weren’t going to be the cash cow that he hoped, Finch had ambled off to other more lucrative ideas on which to waste his time, but the crowd of old folk in the village hall were lapping it up.

‘Can you play ‘White Christmas’ for us, Reverend?’ An old woman in a green coat asked. It was Mrs Fisk, one of Henry’s admiring coterie of pensioners. She hadn’t taken her coat off or indeed unbuttoned it during the whole meal. And as the temperature in the hall was uncomfortably warm with such a large number of people, this was no mean feat. Perhaps she was trying to hide a stain on her blouse. Connie realised that’s what she would do. Mrs Fisk was made of stern and upstanding stuff. She sat with her friends and Henry fans, Mrs Arbuthnott and Mrs Hewson. All three women talked in hushed tones about how wonderful the vicar was. All three of them would sing along with Connie as she sang. All three women would look down their noses at Connie. They thought, like a lot of people in Helmstead, that Henry could have done better. They thought that Connie was fast and flighty.

But Connie hoped that she’d shown them how committed she was by how happy Henry seemed in their marriage. For her part, she loved him, with his floppy fringe and his puppy-dog enthusiasm. She loved how she could still embarrass him with an off-colour joke or lewd comment and his face would flush and his hands would fiddle unnecessarily with his hymn book or whatever he was holding. It was a good pastime that warmed her heart.

‘Please play it,’ Mrs Hewson chimed in. ‘It’s my favourite Bing Crosby.’ She, like the others in the coterie, was looking straight at Henry for his consent. None of them bothered looking at Connie. This meant that Connie felt safe in the knowledge that she could curl her lip in contempt.

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