A Christmas Cracker by Ashley Trisha

Author:Ashley, Trisha [Ashley, Trisha]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780008133719
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-09-02T07:00:00+00:00

‘Though we won’t tell Mercy about it, because she’s convinced we’re all as temperance as she is. I don’t know what she thinks we drink up at the Auld Christmas – lemonade, perhaps?’

Her cottage sitting room was tiny, bright and cosy, cluttered with rugs, ornaments, candles and throws. It was all very Out of Africa by way of Ikea.

Over slices of violent pink- and yellow-squared Battenburg cake, I found myself telling her about the call. I suspect this was due to inadvertently drinking too much sloe gin, but I was out of the habit and, in any case, had never had much of a head for spirits.

‘That Jeremy doesn’t sound much of a man to me,’ she said disparagingly. ‘Guy Martland now, he’s a proper man – and a proper scoundrel, too!’

‘I think I’ve grasped that,’ I said.

‘He’d be good for a quick fling, if you were in the mood, luv,’ she said, in her warm Liverpool accent. ‘But the first hint of you getting serious and off he’d fly.’

‘I’m not a fling sort of girl,’ I said. ‘In fact, I think I’m a settling-down-into-a-mad-old-spinster-with-my-cat one, so I’ll leave trying to clip Guy Martland’s wings to someone else.’

She pressed on me another glass of gin and a slice of Battenberg and then told me a few things about her deprived but jolly-sounding childhood in Liverpool, where there was a shortage of everything except love.

It still struck me as odd that she could look so like Maya Angelou, yet sound purest Cilla Black.

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