and handed it to him, poking a finger up her own nose to indicate the need for extraction. The carol ended and her father blew his nose, checking the handkerchief’s contents before returning the crumpled cotton to his pocket.
‘Let us pray,’ commanded Father Kinley.
A grumbling sound spread through the church as the congregation pulled out their hassocks from under the pews and dropped to their knees. Esme’s mother was the first to kneel, her dark curls falling forward like a curtain. She was being terribly pious today, Esme thought, wondering whom she was praying so hard for. Or maybe she was having a little nap. Her mother found it so easy to sleep anywhere; watching TV, having lunch and even once when she was driving. Luckily, she had been on her own and hadn’t been going too fast when she hit the tree as she was coming back from the village shop. Lexi’s father had found her and brought her back home, her white face even paler than usual. She hadn’t driven for a long time now.
The congregation rose as the organ sounded the first note to the next hymn, and her father’s singing began in earnest. Her mother was definitely asleep because she didn’t stand up and suddenly, as if struck by lightning, this made Esme very angry. She kicked her mother hard on the calf and, like a new-born foal, she scrambled confusedly to her feet before starting ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ once more.
‘Mummy,’ Esme breathed, ashamed of herself for hurting her mother. She pointed to her hymnbook. ‘That’s the wrong hymn. We are singing this one now.’
Her mother looked at Esme with an empty expression, then slowly turned the pages to the right carol, picked up the chorus and sung in perfect pitch along with her fellow worshippers. She rocked back and forth to the music, like a swing in the breeze. Esme saw her father’s hand stretching past her sister, searching for her mother’s arm. Discretely, he tugged his wife past his daughter to position her next to him.
‘You’re on my foot. Get off!’ Sophia whispered, shoving her mother angrily.
‘For God’s sake, Diana,’ Esme’s father hissed. ‘Pull yourself together.’
Esme hoped no one around them could see what was going on. Diana stopped singing and stared ahead, emptied of life once more.
Father Kinley began his address and Esme tried to listen but found herself looking instead at the other mothers in the congregation, wondering if they were empty or full of life. She didn’t have any good friends at school because she didn’t invite any of them to her house for fear her mother might behave strangely. But she had been to Lucinda Burgess’s house and she wished that they could swap mothers. Lucinda’s mother wasn’t a beauty like hers but she made up for it with colourful clothes and big earrings. She fussed over her children; kissing and cuddling them, making them laugh.
Snatches of tales about the poor and needy, the homeless, soldiers fighting in unpronounceable countries, the Prime Minister and Her Majesty the Queen, drifted past her. Then, as he always did when he neared the end of his sermon, Father Kinley began to list the local villagers who had gone on to the next life, saying how much the community would miss them. Once, Father Kinley had come to The Lodge. Her father had stood awkwardly at the front door while he had asked how Mrs Munroe was getting on. It was only when Mrs Bee asked him to come inside that her father remembered his manners and offered him a cup of tea. He hadn’t stayed long and Esme had been made to come into the drawing room and play him a piece on the piano. Her father hadn’t said much and her mother had been upstairs resting. Father Kinley had not come back to visit since then.
‘Pray for their families, dear friends,’ he was saying now, ‘at this time when family is everything and the loneliness that their dearly departed has left becomes all the more painful.’
The blood of shame rose into Esme’s cheeks. Wanting another mother was like wanting your own dead. And she didn’t want that. Father Kinley was referring to the butcher’s daughter, Karen, whose mother had died of cancer. That was sad enough but then Karen had been sent away because the shock had broken her father’s heart and he had died too. Esme’s mother was like a yoyo but at least, she thought, she had a father who could take care of them. With Mrs Bee’s help, of course.
She looked over to her father. He was holding on to her mother as if he was about to haul her off to jail. She tried hard not to be cross with her mother because between her father and Sophia she got quite enough crossness already; it was important that she and Mrs Bee topped her up with kindness.
Outside the church, Esme tried to spot Lexi as the Culcairn family left through a side door – like they were a famous pop group leaving the stage, she thought, smiling. Sophia went off to find Rollo like a starstruck groupie.
‘Merry Christmas,’ came a familiar voice.
Esme looked up. It was Jimmy, a mound of freshly fallen snow collecting on his cap. Her mother brightened and smiled at him.
‘Jimmy! Happy Christmas. How are you?’ Diana said.
‘Well, I’d be a lot bleeding happier if it weren’t for this bloody snow. I had to come here by sleigh, didn’t I? And how are you, Mr Munroe? Broke, I’d imagine. How many diamonds did Diana get this year?’ He roared with laughter at his own joke. Esme’s mother smiled, too. She loved Jimmy because he made her laugh. Somehow he managed to be rude to everyone then get away with it. Esme wondered if it was because he didn’t care what people thought of him.
‘Jimmy!’ said Esme. ‘Guess what? Father Christmas gave Homer the smartest brand new dandy brush.’
‘Like we don’t have a thousand of those already,’ said Jimmy. ‘But at least yours won’t have most of its bristles missing.’ He ruffled her hair. ‘You looking forward to the Boxing Day meet? Homer’s going to buck like a randy whore when you get on his back – he’s practically jumping out of his skin in his stable.’
Jimmy had made an effort with his appearance this morning, thought Esme. His thinning hair, which he cut himself with horse clippers, was smeared across his bald patch. The few strands left stuck to his scalp in lines like a cattle grid. His tweed jacket hung off his narrow shoulders and the top button of his shirt was missing, a mishap he had tried to disguise with a pony club tie that hung like a bow around his neck.
‘I still want to go to the meet, though, Jimmy,’ Esme said, eagerly. ‘We can do what we did last time it snowed and put butter on his hooves to make sure it slips right off. I asked Father Christmas for a sheepskin numnah. That would have stopped him bucking but I don’t think I was good enough last year.’
‘No you bloody wasn’t,’ he cackled. An explosion of spittle blew out of his mouth in a great wheeze, some of it landing on Esme’s cheek, which she quickly wiped away with her glove.
‘You’ll believe anything, Esme. Maybe pigs really can fly. If a rug stops that horrid pony bucking, I’ll give you ten pence. You should have seen him this morning when I put him out. His tail went up and he farted his way around the field like a rocket. When you get on him tomorrow it won’t be the doctor you’ll be wanting, it’ll be the bloody undertaker!’
It was her father’s turn to guffaw at Jimmy’s outburst this time, which surprised Esme.
‘Oh come on, Jimmy,’ he said, patting him on the back. ‘Give the damn pony a lunge or get on his back to wear him out before Esme rides him. Look at you, you’re probably only a stone heavier than her.’
‘Oh, right,’ Jimmy said, annoyed. ‘So it’s fine for me to end up in a bloody coffin?’
‘Come now, my lad,’ said her father, like he was talking to a disobedient but beloved gun dog. ‘It is what we pay you for.’
‘I’d like to see you sit on the monster. You wouldn’t last five seconds before you were in a heap on the floor, crying for your old nanny.’
‘Jimmy, I’ll have you know that I was a fine rider