‘I’m a very plain cook, Will. I hope this Margot isn’t expecting anything too fancy. Should we not have turkey? Should we have a goose instead? She’s not vegetarian, is she? Oh God, is she a vegan?’
‘What will we do if the twins kick off? Shall I tell Ian to tell Rowan not to give them any chocolate until after lunch? It will be better coming from him.’
And so it went, on and on and on until this morning when Mary had sent him off to meet Margot with a doleful, ‘Well, it’s too late to cancel now. She’ll just have to take us as she finds us.’
Will didn’t know why he’d been so worried because Margot and Mary seemed genuinely thrilled with each other. He stayed in the kitchen for a good ten minutes just to check that Sage was behaving herself and that Mary wasn’t stuffing Blossom to the gills with human food, because he knew that Margot wouldn’t be able to stop herself from saying something.
But all was calm. Margot was cheerfully tackling the mountain of washing-up from breakfast and Christmas dinner prep (she’d refused to take no for an answer) as she and a beaming Mary talked about their favourite subject in the entire world.
‘Yes, we have the subtitles on all the time too. How can such a little dog snore so loudly?’ Mary was asking as Will and Alex took Sam and Harry (who’d inevitably eaten every single chocolate coin they could find and were bouncing off the walls) into the garden with Blossom for a pre-dinner kickabout.
‘Margot seems nice,’ Alex said, as he and Will sat on the wall that separated the patio from the lawn. Sam and Harry’s version of football, which involved preventing Blossom from getting hold of the ball long enough to puncture it with her incisors, wasn’t for the faint-hearted.
‘She is nice,’ Will replied. Margot was nice. She was kind. She was thoughtful. She was the only woman he’d ever brought round to meet his family without fear that she’d judge him, or them, harshly. And Christmas Margot was the prettiest incarnation of Margot yet; her face luminous and her dress clinging to the curves that Will always pretended not to notice because it made life easier.
‘Bit more than nice, perhaps?’ Alex probed gently. ‘Easy on the eye, likes dogs, can cope with the Blooms en masse. Rowan wouldn’t let me meet you all until we’d done a year together and she knew it was serious.’
Will prodded his brother-in-law with an elbow. ‘Rowan asked you to do some discreet digging, didn’t she? Because she doesn’t know the meaning of discreet.’
‘Happy wife, happy life, mate.’ Alex looked down the garden to where his two sons were now trying to climb the ancient apple tree, while Blossom circled anxiously below. ‘Don’t do that, lads! Nobody fancies a trip to A&E today.’
He’d barely raised his voice. Sam and Harry continued to ignore him. Will stood up so he could shout properly. ‘Come down NOW! If you break that apple tree, Nanna will kill you before we can even take you to hospital. I’m not joking.’ Will looked to Alex for support but he just waved his hand vaguely, as if Will was doing a splendid job in disciplining his beloved sons and he had nothing to offer. ‘Also, Christmas presents will be going back!’
The boys only came down from the tree when Will physically removed them from it. He was carrying them back up the garden, one under each arm as they wriggled delightedly, when the back door opened and Rowan appeared clutching a jar of piccalilli. There were patches of red dotted along her cheekbones.
‘It’s all kicking off,’ she hissed, and Will instantly dropped both boys so he could get to the kitchen where he just knew Margot would be schooling Mary in all aspects of dog ownership and care.
The kitchen was full of steam and hot air and shouting. Not from Margot, who was sitting at the kitchen table and steadfastly staring down at her phone as if she wasn’t even aware of Sage at full volume and gesticulating wildly while Mary fluttered her hands.
‘Honestly, I’m not a mind reader! How was I to know that you wanted your stupid decorative prawn ring as some kind of seafood centrepiece? You should have said and then I wouldn’t have decimated it and put it in bowls. I was only being helpful!’
‘You never think. It was meant to go on the table intact, as a focal point, and now it’s ruined,’ Mary insisted, her voice breaking. ‘Christmas was meant to be perfect; now it’s spoiled.’ She pointed with a rigid finger at what was allegedly once a decorative prawn ring but was now prawns in some kind of mousse and sauce distributed evenly between nine small bowls.
‘It was going to end up in the bowls eventually, Mum,’ Rowan bravely intervened.
‘The one part of the meal that I contributed to,’ Sage continued, pacing up and down now. ‘I was the one who bought the prawn ring and now you’re saying that I’ve ruined Christmas. Thanks!’
‘You’ve done lots of contributing,’ Mary said in a whisper, a dishcloth in her hands which she held up as if it were a protective shield. ‘You did one of the big shops with me and you helped me with the timings and you laid the table, but the decorative prawn ring was meant to be a centrepiece!’
‘Oh my God, it’s just prawns in gloop . . .’
‘Sage,’ Will said in a low voice. ‘Come on, let’s just not.’
‘Why? Because it’s Christmas and everything has to be perfect? Well, newsflash, Mum, just because I dared to break up the sodding decorative prawn ring doesn’t mean—’
‘Shut up!’ Rowan hurled the jar of piccalilli on the floor, where it shattered so hard that Mary and Margot both jumped. ‘Shut up! Mum’s right. You are ruining Christmas!’
‘What is all this racket?’ said a voice from the back door. And there was Ian, clad from head to toe in Lycra. ‘Oh, love, who’s upset you?’
He clomped into the kitchen in his funny cycling shoes so he could take Mary in his arms, stiff and resisting as usual, and pat her hair. ‘It will be all right.’
‘Ruined,’ came her muffled voice.
‘Not ruined,’ Rowan insisted, as she crouched down to start picking up the larger pieces of glass. ‘Sage, can you find me some newspaper to put this in?’
‘I didn’t mean to shout,’ Sage persisted. ‘But you were totally overreacting. Christmas isn’t ruined.’
‘Except now we’ve got no piccalilli,’ Will said, which was his own feeble attempt to defuse the situation.
There was a muffled little laugh. ‘Don’t be silly. There’s another three jars in the pantry,’ Mary said, and she gently pulled free of Ian’s arms so she could put her hands to her reddened face.
Rowan and Sage worked between them to clear up the mess, Ian went upstairs to wrestle himself out of his cycling gear and have a shower before dinner. Then a timer beeped, which meant it was the appointed hour for Will to wrestle the seven kilo turkey out of the oven again.
Margot was still there, sitting at the kitchen table, her bottom lip caught between her teeth. Not even Margot’s famous ability to instantly bond with strangers could ease the embarrassment, the hideousness of the situation. Mary shook her head, her eyes moist again. ‘Margot . . . what must you think of us?’ Her voice trembled. ‘I’m absolutely mortified.’