Christmas at Greenoak (A Potting Shed Story) Read online

  “All right there, sunshine?” she asked Pru.

  “’Morning, Ursula. You’ve done up the place properly, haven’t you?”

  If Pru got carried away with paper chains, it could be said that Ursula and her son had sailed far overboard with silver tinsel. Heavy roping framed the mirror behind the bottles, hung from the coat hooks under the bar, outlined every window and door, and drooped from the ceiling in swags so low, anyone taller than Pru would have to duck to walk across the room.

  “Always love a cheerful pub at Christmas,” Ursula replied, admiring her glittering display. “Coffee—and a slice of Madeira?”

  “Yes, please,” Pru said.

  Before long, the four women round the table were deep in lively conversation about the ups and downs of starting over. After almost two hours, Bernadette looked at her watch and said, “Oh my.” Matty and El checked the time and rose to leave, too.

  Pru had enjoyed their talk, but she sensed an underlying tension in the women, and remembered how stressful her own life-changing move had been. Only a few years earlier, and not long before Christmas, she had left Dallas—the only home she’d ever known—and moved to England, the only home she could have ever imagined.

  Before she quite knew that she’d decided to, Pru said to Matty and El, “Look, I know this may sound a bit daft, and you probably have other plans, but—you’re very welcome to come to Greenoak for Christmas dinner. We would love to have you.”

  There was a moment of mild shock, then red faces as they stumbled over each other, saying, “Oh my. How very kind of you. We didn’t really know what we were going to do. What a relief. Are you sure you have enough for us all?”

  “Enough?” Pru asked. “You’ve no idea. And loads of room for the children to run wild in the garden. Please do come.”

  There were teary acceptances, and the women went on her way. Pru felt unaccountably pleased with herself, but she knew exactly who had orchestrated the entire thing. She turned to Bernadette.

  “You’re a sneak,” she said.

  “Why, Pru Parke, whatever do you mean?” Bernadette asked, opening her eyes far too wide for true innocence.

  Pru gave her a hug. “Vicars aren’t supposed to lie. It’s all right—you’re a lovable sneak with good intentions.” She turned to Ursula behind the bar. “Now, about you and Dick on Christmas Day.”

  Pru drove away happy, knowing Christopher would be pleased, too. They shared the “more the merrier” opinion of Christmas Day—and there would certainly be enough food. But only a mile up the road, Pru’s smug satisfaction began to fade as anxiety regained ground. She really would have to cook now—two couples with five children each, plus Dick Whycher and his mother. And Bernadette. That made nineteen of them for Christmas dinner. She’d better review her duties—the pages and pages of directions from Evelyn. But, enough time to worry about that, she told herself, turning up the M3 and heading for Farleigh Wallop.

  She arrived as the sun, low in the western sky, cast a golden glow over the Christmas market. The day before Christmas Eve, and Pru noticed that the shoppers came in two sorts—those who chatted with vendors, sampled food and drink, and admired the wares, and the rest, with pinched looks as they darted here and there, picking something up, putting it down, checking their watches.

  Pru belonged to neither group—she had only one goal and headed straight for the last aisle of stalls, strode down to the end and out into the field where she found … nothing. No plant stall, no outdoor electrical cord leading to where that single bulb had illuminated such an interesting collection of shrubs. Thinking the plantsman might’ve joined the rest of the market, she searched up and down each aisle before returning to the last vendor in the last row—the woman selling muslin baby clothes.

  “A stall out there?” the woman repeated, peering round the wall of her tent. “Never saw no one. Sorry.”

  Pru asked across the way, but the man offering samples of his chutney glanced up only briefly and told her the same.

  Standing in the middle of the aisle, Pru gazed out at the empty field. The light had dimmed, and the shadows deepened. She returned to the chutney man and asked who was in charge of the market. He nodded her toward the main entrance, and off she went to a marquee with a small sign velcroed to the closed flaps: Office.

  How do you knock on a tent? Pru coughed, slid her hand between the opening, gave a little wave, and called out, “Hello? I’m looking for the market manager.”

  “Come,” a woman replied in a sharp voice.

  Pru parted the flaps, and a wave of damp heat hit her in the face. A woman about her own age sat at a table covered with papers, a laptop, a map, and a half dozen used paper cups. A multitude of electrical cords snaked off the table and led off to a power strip. Next to the woman, a portable whiteboard held a great deal of red and green writing on it, none of it legible.

  The woman’s dark hair was held off her face with an Alice band—unsuccessfully, as a short piece had escaped and hung limply in her eyes. She fanned herself with a leaflet and said, “It’s like a sauna in here—sorry. It’s only that if I keep the flaps open, I get a steady stream of ‘Where are the loos, luv?’ when there’s a map just outside and we’ve an information stall as well. People need to open their eyes.”

  She stuck her lower lip out and blew air straight up her forehead, knocking the hair off her face, but for only a moment. “What can I do for you?”

  Pru had neither noticed the map nor seen the information stall, but she couldn’t back out now, and decided to lead with a compliment.

  “You’ve a fabulous market here—I don’t now how you do it with such lovely crafts and food.”

  “You mean you don’t know how we do it when we’re so close to Winchester?” the woman asked. “We are not a mere shadow of any nearby famous Christmas market. We are an entity unto ourselves. Perhaps that should be our advertising hook—‘Farleigh Wallop: We’re Not Winchester.’ ”

  “I’ve quite enjoyed myself,” Pru said. The woman pointedly looked at Pru’s empty hands. “And now that I’ve had a good look at everything, I’ll be going back to shop. It’s only that, yesterday when I was here, there was a plant stall, and I don’t see him today.”

  “Plants? What’s his name?”

  “Eh … Alf?”

  “Elf?” she snapped.

  “Alf.”

  The woman sniffed. “We’ve no Alf with a plant stall. In fact, we’ve no plant stalls of any kind. We do have an Alf Finnegan selling reindeer carved from yew—are you certain it wasn’t him?”

  “There were no reindeer.”

  “Well then, you must be thinking of another market. Perhaps you saw him at Winchester.”

  The withering look sent Pru on her way, backing out of the tent and letting the flaps close. She paused, took a deep breath of chilly air, and looked about her. The sky had darkened completely, and now the fairy lights had taken over, winking against the blackness. Should she give up?

  The tent door parted, and the market manager thrust a Farleigh Wallop Christmas Market canvas tote into her hands.

  “On the house—thought you could put it to good use,” she said.

  Pru started shopping.

  Soon her new tote bag was filled with a tea cozy for Evelyn, a billed cap for Peachey, a slim volume titled The Ancient Villages of Hampshire for Christopher, a bottle of local pear brandy for Simon, and earrings or scarves for all the women she could think of. On she went, until a whiff of grilled sausages caught her attention. She located the stall and joined the queue.

  The sausage man was all business, filling orders quickly and moving the queue along, and all the while keeping up a running conversation.

  “And Gertrude with the doilies,” he said, “she’ll tell you to keep away if you’ve got mustard on your sausage, but pay her no mind. Next!” They all moved up one.

  “Tell you what,” he said, as a sausage flew through the air and plopped into the bun in his other hand, “when Donald sellin
g kilts tells you he’ll fit it to you, you tell him to watch where he puts that sewing needle. Next!”

  And so it went. At last, Pru stepped up and ordered. As the sausage took flight, she asked, “Do you know Alf, who sells plants?”

  The sausage landed in its bun and the man paused.

  “Alf?”

  “Yes, his stall is usually way at the end, but I don’t see him today. Do you know him?”

  “Alf?” he repeated. “Is he not—” Sausage man’s eyes darted left and right. “No, I don’t know Alf. Next!”

  Behind her, the queue stretched halfway down the line of stalls. The sausage man seemed to know something about Alf, and so Pru decided to come back to him later.

  When she reached the end of the last aisle, the woman selling baby clothes eyed her cautiously. Pru stayed well away until she’d popped the last bit of bun in her mouth and dug in her bag for a tissue to wipe her fingers. But when she looked up, ready to hold out her hands for inspection, a light caught her eye—a single bulb further out in the field.

  She rushed toward it, afraid it would go out and the vendor vanish before she got there. The bulb remained on, but illuminated only a few plants—a couple of variegated hollies, a single gold-hearted ivy trained onto a cone shape, a smattering of nursery pots on the ground.

  “Hello?” Pru called. “Alf?”

  No one answered, and she could see nothing past the circle of light. She returned her gaze to the plants sitting in the corner, searching for what she thought she’d seen the day before.

  “Hiya, Pru.”

  A shadow moved in the darkness, and then there was Alf with a sausage and bun in hand, a grin on his face, and the fairy lights twinkling in his eyes.

  “I’ve caught you at your dinner break,” she said.

  “No, it’s all right. Neil always saves me a leftover at the end of the day.” He set the sausage on a plant shelf. “Come back for more hollies?”

  “No. Yes. Well, possibly.” She looked back into the corner. “It’s only that yesterday, I thought I saw that you had Sophora secundiflora.” She laughed. “That’s sounds a bit crazy, doesn’t it?”

  “Ah. Hang on a tick.” Alf stepped into the darkness. Pru heard rustling, and he reappeared with a black nursery pot containing a small shrub with rounded, leathery green leaflets.

  “It is!” Pru said. “Texas mountain laurel.”

  “That’s the badger,” he said.

  Pru glanced round, but saw no badger.

  “It’s an uncommon plant in these parts,” Alf said, “but don’t you think it would do well in the right situation?”

  “Full sun,” Pru said, nodding. “A wall shrub, as they say, and that would mean the soil would be a bit more alkaline, which would suit it.”

  “Winter temperature shouldn’t be a problem,” Alf commented, “only the constant cold and wet.”

  “Yes, it would certainly need a well-drained spot.” She thought they might have just the place at Greenoak. Pru, always heartened to meet a young person interested in horticulture, looked over the slim offerings and Alf’s dinner—a leftover sausage—and made a quick decision. “Look, Alf, do you live locally? Do you have family? Would you like to join us for Christmas dinner? You’d be very welcome. It’s only that when I asked about you—”

  The market gong clanged.

  “Bollocks,” Alf muttered.

  “Who’s out there?” A woman’s voice called from up by the stalls—a harried voice. The market manager.

  At once, the light bulb over her head went out, and Pru was plunged into darkness.

  “Hello?” the manager called again.

  “Listen, Pru,” Alf said quietly, “could you distract her? I need to skedaddle.”

  Even before the light went out, Pru had added things up and realized Alf wasn’t supposed to be there.

  “Sure, yes.”

  She trotted off, pulling out her phone to light up the uneven ground, and met the manager halfway. The woman stopped and pointed over Pru’s shoulder.

  “What was that light?”

  Pru waved her phone in the air. “Only me trying to see where I was going—sorry to alarm you.” She began walking toward the market in a hurry, and the woman followed. “I thought for certain I’d parked out that way. You see, I bought so much—” she held up her overstuffed tote “—that I thought I might stash it in my car and come back for more. I didn’t realize it was the end of hours …”

  “End of the market,” the manager said. “This was our last day.”

  Pru stopped dead, whirled round, and stared out into the black night. She saw no movement.

  “The car park is this way,” the woman said, pointing in the opposite direction and, as if she didn’t trust Pru to find her own vehicle, took hold of the tote. “Here, let me help.”

  They walked down one of the aisles as vendors packed away their goods and broke down table displays. When they passed Neil the sausage man, Pru caught his eye. His gaze darted to the market manager and back to Pru, and he shook his head.

  Arriving at her Mini, Pru popped the hatch and stowed her goods. “Thanks so much,” she said to the woman.

  “Well, then,” the manager said, “hope to see you next year.”

  As she watched the woman leave, Pru stuck her hands in her coat pockets and felt something crinkle. She pulled out the bag of little doughnuts from the day before—cold and a bit squashed, but still coated in cinnamon sugar. She popped one in her mouth as she contemplated a plan.

  “‘That’s the badger’ is what he said,” Pru explained to Christopher at dinner that evening. “But we were talking about a plant, not an animal.”

  “It’s an old West Country saying,” her husband replied. “It means ‘That’s the one’ or ‘That’s exactly what I was looking for.’ ”

  “I’m not entirely sure he was supposed to be selling at the market,” Pru said with a glance at Christopher. “He pretty much disappeared when the manager showed up. And I wanted to invite him for Christmas dinner, but I didn’t have the chance.”

  “Perhaps he has plans already.”

  “He was eating a leftover sausage for his dinner,” she said, putting her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand. “He was dressed all in sheepskin,” she added, “from his head to his foot.”

  Christopher watched her for a moment, and then asked, “What’s his name?”

  “Alf.”

  “Does he have a second name?”

  “He didn’t offer it,” she said. “And I didn’t really have a chance to ask. “Now, how will I find him? It was the last day of the market.”

  That hit home in more ways than one. The next day was Christmas Eve, and that meant Pru needed to turn her attention to the following day’s feast. Before they went to bed, she retrieved Evelyn’s compendium of dinner instructions from the drawer in the Welsh dresser, and set the stack on the table. In the morning, she would read them through.

  Early, early morning. At four o’clock, Pru slid out of bed without disturbing Christopher, wrapped a blanket round her shoulders, and slipped out of their bedroom. She paused at the large window on the landing and looked out onto the parterre garden in the front of the house. Not a creature was stirring.

  She continued to the kitchen and sat in the chair closest to the always-warm Aga. With a cup of tea to clear her head, she began to study her duties.

  When Christopher came downstairs three hours later, it was to find an empty kitchen. He had just set the kettle on the hob when Pru walked into the mudroom bringing with her a cold gust of wind. She wore a lined canvas coat over her flannel pajamas, and wellies. She’d been driven outdoors by a creeping dread of flattened Yorkshire pudding and seized-up gravy, and had sought refuge in the gray morning light of the kitchen garden. Now, under each arm she carried a three-foot-stalk of brussels sprouts, and in her hands lugged a basket of potatoes, parsnips, carrots, and onions.

  “Christmas Eve gift,” she said, as always catching Christopher with
her family’s traditional greeting.

  “How long have you been up?” he asked.

  “Oh, awhile.” She set her harvest in the mudroom sink, pulled off her wellies, and shrugged out of her coat, then kissed her husband. The warmth of his lips and face told her how cold she must be. She washed her hands and then pulled a box out of the freezer and took it to the Aga.

  Christopher looked over her shoulder. “Mince pies for breakfast?” he asked and nuzzled her ear. “One more reason I love you.”

  Pru turned and snuggled into his arms. “And why not? We’ve several dozen—Evelyn was feeling guilty about leaving and overdid things—so I thought we could spare a few.”

  While they baked, Pru, in a burst of conscience, cut the sprouts off one of the stalks. One small step forward.

  She and Christopher settled at the table and admired the plate of little pies, each topped with a star-shaped lid of crust. Then they tucked in. After breakfast, still wearing her pajamas, she returned to the sprouts, and when tires crunched on the gravel, signaling the arrival of the grocery delivery, she pulled on her coat again and stuck her feet back in her wellies.

  Once the boxes of groceries were unloaded, the van left and Christopher got ready to go, too. Businesses across Britain would be having daytime Christmas Eve parties, and that made a busy day for police.

  “Would you ask around about Alf?” Pru asked as he dug for his car key. “In case someone’s heard of him. Not that I want him, you know, to be ‘known to police.’ ”

  “I’ll see what I can find out. Stoke Charity, you said?”

  “Yes, thanks. See you this evening.”

  Stoke Charity, Pru said to herself as she took a quick shower and got dressed. That’s what Alf had said—he’d worked at a nursery there. As she clipped holly, winter-flowering camellia, and bare, fiery-red stems of dogwood, she chastised herself for not asking his surname. Did she have enough clues to track him down?

  She laid the plant material on a blanket in the back of her car and drove it over to St. Mary’s, where she found Bernadette, Matty and El, and a passel of children, not a one of them older than ten. The vicar had provided red and green strips of paper and glue, but they had no intention of sitting at a table making a paper chain, and instead skittered, caromed, and shot round the rear of the old stone church, driving themselves into a wild Christmas Eve frenzy. While the women worked on window arrangements and a large vase for the base of the pulpit and one for the entry, the mothers ignored the children while the vicar and the gardener looked round nervously every time the noise died down or flared up.