Barney was at the counter and waved when he saw Alice. He was in his late sixties, with a mop of white hair, and wore his usual soft cotton plaid shirt under a woollen cardigan with leather buttons that reminded Alice of toffees.
For some years, Barney had run a financial consultancy in Alice’s office building, and when they’d discovered a mutual love for Scrabble, they’d become Scrabble partners – and in time – good friends. It was years before she’d discovered that he’d been high up at GCHQ. Jinx was still convinced that Barney’s job at the library was an elaborate cover and that he was still some kind of spy, but Alice was fairly sure he was retired from all of that.
Like her, Barney was single. He had, until quite recently, been married to the formidable Honey, who had been, when Alice had met her, a lot less sweet than her name had implied. In fact, she’d been so scary that Alice had wondered if her name had been some sort of ironic joke. Sometimes Barney would recount a story that seemed straight out of the pages of the books Alice like to read — about him and Honey escaping from ‘a scrape’ in a sewer in Moscow in the early Eighties, or crash-landing a private plane in Marrakech. They were outlandish stories that fascinated Alice, but also made her feel incredibly boring by comparison.
She’d spent the last twenty years placing staff who facilitated other people’s fun-filled lives, assuming that, at some point, she’d have adventures herself. But she always seemed to be several steps removed from the action. It was why, she guessed, she liked reading so much. At least in a book, she could put herself centre stage.
After exchanging pleasantries, Alice handed over her last library book and Barney lifted it close to his face, looking over the top of his rectangular glasses. For a librarian, he had possibly the worst eyesight of anyone Alice had ever met.
‘Ah yes. The professor,’ he said.
‘It was obvious.’ Alice smiled. ‘Never trust a man with a dimple in his chin, I say.’
Barney laughed.
‘Did you save the next one?’
‘Of course,’ he said, lifting it from beneath the desk. ‘Not as good. Great cliff-hangers though.’
‘You’re always saying you’re going to write a book yourself. Have you started it yet?’ Alice asked.
‘No,’ Barney said with an embarrassed shrug. ‘I can’t seem to motivate myself to do anything. I actually hate this time of year.’
Alice rarely got an insight into his inner emotions and the little comment wrenched at her.
‘What are you doing for Christmas?’
‘My sister’s. You?’
‘I’m going to Hawthorn.’
‘I wish I could stay at home by myself and wait until the whole thing is over. Christmas is no fun when you’re single.’
He looked up and pulled a face. ‘Sorry. Don’t mean to rub it in.’
Suddenly, there was a whoop, and she and Barney looked towards the door. A little boy ran in through the doors.
‘It’s started,’ he shouted. ‘It’s snowing.’
Barney stood up and came around the desk to walk with Alice to the door, where they all stood watching the fat flakes fall from the sky. There were few things that stopped people in their tracks in London – the death of a celebrity, the birth of a royal baby, and this: the arrival of snow. Even a smattering of flakes was an event. Alice smiled at Barney as three children ran out into the spill of light from the library doors, and Agatha barked and ran bravely after them, before rapidly chickening out and running back inside.
‘Here,’ Barney said, taking a treat from his cardigan pocket and feeding it to Agatha, who took it daintily.
‘She doesn’t deserve it,’ Alice said. ‘She growled terribly at a new employee earlier. I was most embarrassed.’
‘Was there something wrong?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘With the client?’
‘No, quite the opposite. She was absolutely perfect.’
‘Well, Agatha might have a point. I find perfection to be most overrated,’ Barney said.
Alice shrugged Barney’s words off, but as she walked back to the office, her beret pulled down low over her head, the fat snowflakes pricking her eyes, she remembered Jinx’s surprised look and felt a nagging doubt that she’d acted hastily. Gut instinct was all very well, but she was in the business of crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s so perhaps, just to be on the safe side, she’d pay Enya a visit in the morning to see for herself how she was getting on.
Back at home, determined to summon the Christmas spirit, Alice changed into her cosy cashmere sweatpants, put a Michael Buble CD on in the ancient sound system and rolled up her sleeves to start on her cake mixture. She lifted down her ancient Book of Household Management from the shelf in the cupboard, careful to keep all the cut-out recipes from magazines and the ones she’d handwritten and printed out over the years that lived amongst its pages. She carefully placed the thick tome onto an old wooden pulpit stand in the kitchen and put on her glasses.
Mrs Doulton used to make a large traditional cake weeks ahead of Christmas, which she’d feed with brandy and cover in thick curved white icing like ceiling cornicing. Alice could remember the almondy smell of the marzipan and how she’d cut out holly leaves and paint them green with a fine-tipped paintbrush then fashion the leftovers into little marzipan berries and fake oranges in little baskets.
But the cake itself was stodgy and heavy, and in later years when Mrs Doulton would bring Alice a cake in London, there’d rarely been takers for it in the office and Alice had often ended up throwing it away rather than eating it, much to her upset.
This recipe was far lighter and contained no alcohol. Lord knows Jasper imbibed enough over Christmas and extra brandy was the last thing he needed. Besides, her nephews Baxter and Woody liked this version better. It was a more like a treacle and ginger cake than a fruit cake. As Alice found the recipe and started gathering together the ingredients, the smell of the powdered ginger gave her the shot of Christmas oomph she was missing.
She hummed along to cheesy Christmas favourites as she stirred the mixture, feeling a fuzzy warm glow. Her mind filled with flashes of childhood memories of Christmases at Hawthorn.
When Pop-Pop and GG, her grandparents, had been alive, Christmas had been magical, but she’d been seven when Pop-Pop had died, and GG had gone into a nursing home where she had died of a broken heart a few months later. And that’s when her parents had inherited Hawthorn.
For a very long time, she’d tried not to think too much about this period of her life, those happy memories so tinged with what happened next, but she remembered her parents revelling in the house and how they’d flung open their doors to their London friends, and how the house had been full of strangers, especially at Christmas, with the festivities seeping well into the new year.
Even now, Alice couldn’t wrap her head around exactly who her mother Beatrice Beeton had been. The memory of her seemed so out of reach and exotic. She’d been the daughter of a diplomat and a celebrated ballet dancer and had fallen hopelessly in love with Alice’s father, Henry, a confirmed bachelor, when she’d been in her early twenties. Henry had been twenty years her senior and a whole foot shorter. But their love had been real. Of that, Alice had no doubt. When they’d been together, Alice had always felt like an outsider.
In her mind’s eye now, she pictured her mother, lolling on her father’s shoulder, both looking down at her, her mother in a long, shimmering dress, her huge eyes smudged with the previous night’s mascara, her manicured finger absently flipping the dangling spinner necklace. She remembered how they’d giggled at Alice in her school uniform, as if it were a funny quirk to see her dressed that way at 7.30 a.m. on a Wednesday, and how it had made her sure that adults were a different species altogether.
But now, with her grandparents, parents and Mrs Doulton gone, Hawthorn Christmases had an altogether different vibe. But her remaining family would all be together and that was all that mattered, Alice thought as she carefully tipped the Christmas cake onto the wire rack and pressed its steaming surface, feeling for the springiness that meant it was done to perfection. She placed it on the table to cool and stood back, satisfied. The first big tick off her Christmas list.
In the bathroom, after a long soak with her library book propped up on the wooden rack, she consulted the packet ofbleach she’d bought in the chemist and gingerly applied it to her top lip. She caught her own eye in the magnifying mirror — giving herself a sharp look of reproach for her vanity.
She left the cream on as she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for a soothing cup of camomile. But as she stood at the sink, she heard an odd noise. A faint plink, plink.
‘What’s that, Agatha? Can you hear something?’ she said.
Agatha barked.
‘Shush,’ Alice said, holding up her finger and they both cocked their heads to listen.
Plink, plink, plink.
Alice turned and stared at the cake, noticing a damp sheen on its surface. As she got closer, she felt a drop of cold water on the back of her head.
‘What on earth …’
Looking up, she moved away just in time, as another drop fell from the ceiling. She snatched away the cake, but she could tell from the weight ofit that it must already be infused with dripping, dirty water.
‘You have got to be joking,’ she fumed, staring up at the ceiling. ‘Right.’
She would never normally consider going out in her casual wear, but this was an emergency. She pulled on her Ugg boots and a long coat in a furious rush.
She stomped up her steps and through the gate, up the stoop and pressed hard on the buzzer for the ground-floor flat. The chill snaked through her coat. The snow was falling thickly now, muffling everything, and the buzzer sounded urgent and loud.
‘Who is it?’ A male voice came through the speaker. Him. The nasty neighbour. Mr whatever his name was, with the awful son.
‘It’s Miss Beeton – Alice – from the flat downstairs. There’s a leak in my ceiling. Coming from your flat. Whatever you’re running … you must turn it off immediately. Immediately!’
‘There’s nothing on.’ His tone was dismissive, bored even.
‘But there must be. I’m telling you … there’s water dripping through the ceiling. It’s ruined my cake.’ Her voice rose slightly hysterically.
‘Oh, piss off, lady,’ he said, and she heard that he’d hung up the entry phone.
‘Well,’ she said, furiously walking back down the steps and slipping on the snow, only just managing to grab the rail and right herself in time.
Back in her flat, she was shaking. And not just from the cold. She was so incensed she was tempted to call the police, but she was stopped by the thought of trying to explain that the ruined cake might be a crime. Instead, realising she’d left her mobile phone at the office on the charger, she went to her padded Liberty address book and looked up Mr Mantis’s number.
She enjoyed still having her old-fashioned rotary phone, which Jinx roundly mocked, but it was rather inconvenient to have to dial the numbers so slowly when one was in such a furious hurry. When Mr Mantis answered his mobile, Alice surmised from the music and clatter of cutlery that he must be in a restaurant, and from his slurred greeting, had clearly had a few glasses of wine. She told him all about the drip through the ceiling and how rude the neighbour had been.
‘I don’t need trouble. Not this close to Christmas,’ he said, clearly annoyed.
Alice watched the damp patch spread across her ceiling.
‘But you’ve got to come. Right now,’ Alice demanded. ‘It’s an emergency.’
‘Put a bowl down to catch the drips. I’ll come in the morning.’
She was still furious as she finally got into bed, huddling under her ancient eiderdown. The top of her lip was sore where she’d left the bleach on for too long, her moustache problem a whole lot worse than it had been. She thought of what Mrs Doulton might have said — undoubtedly a quote such as ‘vanity is the quicksand of reason’.
With a harrumph, she wrapped her duvet even more tightly around her, but no matter what she did she couldn’t stop hearing the plink, plink, plink into the washing-up bowl on the table in the kitchen.
And suddenly it was if she could see herself from the ceiling, like a little lonely mouse in her bed, in her basement flat, in the dark, and that wave of sadness that rarely came washed over her and filled her eyes with tears.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ she said aloud, wiping her eyes before they fell.