‘Mum?’
‘Leave a message after the beep.’
Nina glared at the phone, which she held below her mouth with the speaker setting on.
‘Oh,um, it’s me. Maybe you’re all still in bed? Or you’re at Auntie Lynn’s? And Toby’s spending Christmas with Dad?’
Dammit, she thought. She should have asked if they had changed their plans for a cosy Christmas at home once they’d discovered that, once again, she wasn’t coming back. Maybe they hadn’t wanted to be alone today, just the two of them, and so they’d split up to spend the day in happier, busier households than their own. Christmas at Dad and Tina’s would probably be more fun for Toby, her little brother, what with the three younger boys there too, her dad’s other kids.
She looked down at her phone as she spoke into it. The clock told her it was eight a.m. In any normal year Toby would have been awake and ripping into gifts in front of the tree at least two hours ago, but now that he was sixteen and all he wanted was the latest iPhone, perhaps the excitement had faded for him? She wasn’t there to find out, and she still had her news to break. Maybe an answering service declaration of guilt was preferable to trying to reach her mum on her mobile anyway? She could get it out of the way and avoid all the questions doing it like this.
‘So,um, I’m not in New York. I was given an assignment over the holidays in… in Scotland, actually.’ It sounded worse now she was saying it out loud. This information was likely to hurt her mum far more than thinking she was staying in the States for Christmas.
Here they were in the same time zone, albeit at opposite ends of the land, but still, her mum probably wouldn’t be able to stop herself wondering why her daughter hadn’t come home for a night or two.
‘It was all a bit last minute. My boss said he was relying on me to represent the company over here in the UK. It’s quite exciting really.’ She winced at the truth-stretching but had no intention of admitting what had really happened; that she’d been dumped and sent away on some half-baked buying assignment.
‘I’m here meeting with potential brand collaborators, lots of meetings lined up, you can imagine the sort of thing. Busy, busy, busy.’
She closed her eyes and pressed the phone to her forehead.Ugh!What had she become?
‘Anyway, I’m having a great time. My contacts here are treating me to Christmas dinner later on.’ She thought of that tall guy’s invitation to eat with everyone in the bar restaurant at four o’clock today. There was nothing she’d rather do less, but her mother didn’t need to know she intended to spend the day alone, researching the Highland arts scene.
‘I hope my presents arrived from New York. You can always use the gift receipt and return them if you don’t like them.’
Nina thought she’d done well this year, playing it safe by sending Jo Malone gift baskets. Who doesn’t like candles and perfume? She knew, however, her mum had very different ideas about gifting, so maybe she wouldn’t care for them after all.
She looked around the room, emptiness in the pit of her stomach like she’d never felt before. This wasn’t just hunger, or homesickness; this was something else. This was waking up alone on Christmas day in a strange room in a strange country without a single present to open. This was wanting a hug from her mum and knowing she was miles away – they may as well have been separated by the Atlantic she was so distant and unreachable right now.
‘Sorry I won’t have time to come and see you,’ she said weakly.
She’d searched last night on the inn’s computer. How many miles between Port Willow and Hove? Six hundred and forty-one miles, or a twelve-hour drive.
She’d asked Mitch if he could book her a flight just so she could spend the day there and he’d told her not on company expenses he wouldn’t, and she’d found there were no seats to be had on any of the cross-country flights anyway, not at this time of year and not at the very last minute. She’d tried not to cry in the media room in case that annoying guy with the laughter in his eyes was still hanging around to make her feel ridiculous just by the way he looked at her, as though she were only here to provide him with fun at her expense.
Anyway, there was no time for a journey down south, she had work to do. She had to keep her eye on the prize. She’d asked Mitch to firm up her return flight to JFK last night.
‘January seventh, six-forty a.m., Edinburgh International,’ he’d messaged back.
She was going home soon, and triumphantly too, she hoped.
‘Maybe I can come and see you in the spring?’ she told her mum’s voicemail. ‘I could try to get some time off.’
She knew this wouldn’t be any comfort to her mother; she’d said it so many times before and had never once used her annual leave entitlement; she just couldn’t escape her work commitments. In all her time in New York she hadn’t even taken one whole weekend off. That’s why this Christmas had been so important to her. She’d been pinning so many of her hopes upon it.
She shook away her most secret hope as it popped into her head again, thinking now how preposterous it seemed in the cold winter light – how naive and girlish.
She’d hoped that with a little encouragement to focus only on her and not on work, just for a few days, and what with it being the most wonderful time of the year and everything, that Luke would have had enough time to think about what mattered to him most and he’d conclude that it was her. And if she planned the perfect, cosy Christmas, just the two of them, he’d realise they really were a winning team, a dynamic duo, and maybe he’d produce a neat little box and get down on one knee in front of their ten-foot tree in his one-and-a-half-thousand-square-foot apartment and he’d ask her the question while a Cartier Destineé cushion-cut solitaire with its pave studded white gold band glinted and glistened and the Rat Pack crooned Christmas songs over the apartment’s invisible sound system.
She tried not to sigh. ‘Better go, Mum. Lots to do… Happy Christmas.’
She let the phone slide to the floor as she dropped her shoulders and hung her head, thinking she might just sit there all morning, feeling sorry for herself. A knock at her door made her pull herself together again.
On blowing her nose and trying to fix her face, she found that whoever had knocked had now gone but they’d left the breakfast tray she’d requested last night (egg whites, breakfast tea, no milk this time). Gene had taken the liberty of adding little dishes of grilled tomato and some buttery field mushrooms and granary toast. Beside all this on the tray was a little red tartan gift bag with greenery sticking out the open top.
Taking it inside, she found it was a tiny plant with a handwritten tag.
For you, Nina, a Salix bebbiana, better known as a North American or ‘diamond’ willow. It needs plenty of fresh air, water and light, as do we all at this time of year. If you plant it in the spring you’ll find it can grow to twenty feet or more.
