He closes the hatch with the pole and there are tears, real tears, running silent tracks down his cheeks. He places the pole in her left hand so she is standing there like a Nativity shepherd, and takes her other hand in both of his. He is looking at her with great warmth and sorrow.

Never mind, he says. Never mind. We’ll get some new decorations.

‌Appreciation

He insists on visitors. Everybody, he says, invite everybody. Anyone you know in the village. And what about old friends? They could stay. Who shall we ask? Pat and Phil? Frank and Sue? And when she says, Christmas is just for family, really, isn’t it? he says, Sure, let’s invite Tom, artfully deaf to the word just. And when she starts fussing about numbers, he says, I’ll cook. I’ll do the whole thing. How hard can it be? and begins hunting down recipes. Is he simply shovelling people into the space between them, sandbagging in the face of a flood? She can’t tell. She can’t ask.

The new decorations come in packing cases. Job lots, he explains, from a closed-down hotel. A week up stepladders and every room is foil-garlanded back to the 1990s. He has never, she swears, hung so much as a bauble in his life.

Though the days keep them separately busy, at night they sleep side by side. He rests a hand on her thigh or her shoulder. Friendship, it says, and she doesn’t know how to respond. She is ready to reject him, but he makes no demands of her.

Finally the house is ready. The real Christmas tree that Finlay insisted upon is confusing Achilles; Jules must keep shooing her away from sniffing around its base. Finlay says the best defence is presents, and surrounds it with a ring of parcels criss-crossed with real ribbons and bows. Is he auditioning for the part of Santa Claus? On the morning of the twentieth, the morning Frank and Sue are arriving, she notices him looking at her as she poaches their eggs, and there is something so full about it, as though he needs nothing from her but the pleasure of watching her slide those yellow-pupilled eyeballs onto a bed of spinach.

What? she says.

You’re a wonderful woman, he says.

Because I make you breakfast? she asks.

He laughs.