What Would Mary Berry Do? by Claire Sandy

Author:Claire Sandy [Sandy, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447253518
Publisher: Pan Books

How Marie came to be on the sofa, she had no idea. A cushion was propped up behind her, her shoes were off – she always cooked Christmas lunch in ‘good’ shoes – and there was a glass of halfway-decent wine (i.e. more than £6.99 a bottle) in her hand.

She remembered the smoke alarm going off. She remembered somebody who sounded a lot like herself saying loud things about ‘this bloody family’ and ‘Who am I? Superwoman?’ She remembered Robert entering the kitchen with a determined but wary air, like a vet about to sedate a skittish llama. She remembered him saying, ‘Step away from the smoke alarm. I repeat: Step away from the smoke alarm.’

And then, somehow, she was on the sofa, with a Terry’s Chocolate Orange.

On the rug the twins were absorbed in a complex doll game. They were silent. Robert had used ‘Daddy’s Remote’ on them. Marie had never fathomed how it worked, but every now and then, when things got out of hand, Robert aimed an imaginary handset at them and pretended to press a button. ‘Mute,’ he’d say. And they would. They’d mute.

Angus came downstairs with his trademark half-stumble, half-lope. ‘All right?’ he said, head round the door. That wary look, just like his father.

‘More than all right.’ Marie popped a dark segment into her mouth, this being the only date in the calendar when a Terry’s Chocolate Orange was acceptable as a pre-lunch snack.

Twenty minutes later there was a Dunwoody bottom on every seat around the dining table. The candles on Marie’s mother’s embroidered tablecloth were lit. The gravy steamed in its boat. (Where on Earth had Robert found the gravy boat? It had been AWOL since last Christmas.) Slabs of luscious white meat lay stacked on their plates, cosying up to roast potatoes all golden and crisp and come-hither.

His sleeves rolled up, a sheen of sweat across his brow, Robert held up his glass. ‘To Mum,’ he said.

‘To Mum,’ three voices echoed.

‘To us,’ said Marie, properly, stupidly happy.

The Yule log lay devastated, as if run over by a tank. The family, already full of turkey and ‘all the trimmings’, had somehow found a second wind when confronted by the magnificent cake.

The ‘twist’ had gone down very well.

‘It’s white!’ Rose had breathed.

‘That’s meant to be snow!’ Iris had melted with the romance of it, and the prospect of so much white chocolate. ‘Awesome, Mum,’ Angus had said.

There were only streaks of white left, and a tiny traumatised plastic robin on its side.

The sitting room – its untidiness a testament to the long, cheerful day – was flattered by the cherry-and-emerald glow of the lights on the tree. Head on her mum’s lap, Iris slept, mouth open, eyelids flickering. On the opposite sofa Rose was propped against Robert, quietly debating Father Christmas’s existence.

Angus, from where he lay flat on his back on the rug, was firmly anti-Santa, but Robert allowed Rose space to prolong her faith in him by saying, ‘If you believe in Santa, he exists.

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