The Little Christmas Kitchen: A wonderfully festive, feel-good read

‘Do you want a cigarette out the window?’ he’d asked.

‘I don’t smoke, Adrian.’

‘I know but sometimes moments call for a cigarette. If you don’t want one I might have one.’ He pulled open his desk drawer and fumbled around at the back for a hidden packet of Marlboro Reds and a box of matches. Hauling up the sash window he leant on the sill and inhaled half the cigarette in one. ‘Christ I’ve missed this.’ Exhaling he shook his head. ‘Max. Max, what are you doing?’

‘I think maybe it’s been photoshopped.’ Ella said, crossing the room to perch on the edge of the big leather covered desk. Outside it had started to sleet, watery white flecks cascading down like a snow globe. A couple of mangy pigeons on the roof opposite were shaking out their feathers, huddled up together next to a light up Santa Claus – plump and wet and depressed.

Adrian raised a brow, the creases on his forehead deepening. Ella frowned. ‘You don’t think so? You think he’s having an affair. I don’t think he’s having an affair. Especially not with her. I really don’t. Look–’ she held out her arm where the bracelet slipped forward over the back of her hand. ‘Look.’ she said again, a little quieter.

‘It’s very pretty.’ Adrian nodded. Took another drag and then flicked the cigarette out onto the roof top, the pigeons scattered. ‘Do you want me to see what Anne thinks?’

Anne was Adrian’s wife. Anne had been friends with Max since childhood and it was through a dinner at their house that Ella had met Adrian and he’d given her a job. They had garden parties in the summer in their huge dilapidated mansion and their wild, adorable children ran around in slightly dirty clothes and no shoes while everyone else drank Pimms and adored the roses. They were the antithesis of Max’s other friends. So rich they could bypass into shabby and boho and not care in the slightest. But they were all so inextricably linked. Like a web. Or Kerplunk. One stick pulled out and it all falls down.

‘No.’ Ella shook her head. ‘I trust him. Of course I trust him. There will be an explanation. There’s always an explanation for things like this. It’s not bloody EastEnders is it. She’s one of his friends for god’s sake. If he was going to have an affair, would he really do it on his own doorstep?’ She felt her voice catch in her throat. She thought of Max – gorgeous, funny, beautiful Max, with his arm casually draped round the waist of a woman who wasn’t her – a woman with lovely hair and eyes that tipped up at the corners. Amanda. One of his ‘girls’. The one who had taken Ella aside when they’d first got together and taken her shopping and bought her champagne and linked her arm through hers and managed to get her to tell all her secrets about Max.

Max who she looked at every morning as he slept on their cream linen sheets and wondered how she’d managed to get that lucky. The sleet had turned to rain. It was pouring down the window and making a mockery of the Christmas decorations strung across the street. Little white lights trying to sparkle like her diamonds.

Max was actually having an affair. No longer did she need to worry about it or imagine it. Because it was actually happening.

No he couldn’t be.

Adrian went over to his Nespresso machine in the corner of his office, ‘Do you want one?’ he asked and Ella shook her head.

As it rumbled out the dark, glossy liquid in a thick white cup, Adrian said, ‘I’ve got some eggnog from that Christmas hamper we were sent last week. Do you want me to pour you a glass of that?’

‘No I’m fine. Honestly. I’ll just have some water.’ As Ella leant over to the carafe on his desk, her eye caught the photo that sat next to it of him and Anne and their kids. She thought of the amount of times she’d stared at that picture and imagined having one on her desk of her and Max and a couple of kids with his bright blue eyes and her dark hair. If Max was having an affair then he might want to split up and they’d never have children. And that might mean that she never had children because she’d have to get over Max, meet someone else and fall in love with them enough to want to have kids with them before she ran out of time. She was thirty-one. If Max was having an affair then not only would he have battered her heart, he would have snatched at her chance to have a family photo on her desk.

Please God she thought, please don’t let him be more in love with the woman with the shiny hair and the eyes that tip up at the corners than he is with me.

She felt Adrian watching her over the rim of his coffee cup.

‘Ok.’ she said after a pause.

‘Ok what?’ he said.

‘Ok, ring Anne.’ she said, when really she just wanted to ring Max and hear him say something funny down the phone and then walk into Claridge’s tonight looking all shiny and satiny in her new dress and for him to whistle and then grin and pull her chair out for her the way they’d taught him at Eton.

But instead they were going to ring Anne. Anne wouldn’t lie.

And that was why she was standing in her bedroom now, hauling her wheely case from under the bed, chucking in whatever was in front of her. Not her packing style at all. No rolled clothes and shoes in their own little bags, and travel sized toiletries. No outfits laid out on the bed making sure that she hadn’t missed a vital top or pair of shoes. This was more Max’s style of packing. Ella was the organised one, he was the haphazard fun one. That was how they complemented each other. That was why they worked so well. She succeeded, he charmed. They were the perfect unit. They were ‘Maxwella’ his friends joked.

Going over to the wardrobe she yanked out everything closest to hand – a pair of Jimmy Choo flip-flops, Ralph Lauren shorts bunched up next to the top half of her Missoni bikini and the bottom half of a Stella McCartney one. Record temperatures across southern Europe this winter was all the news could talk about. Violent thunderstorms and above average hours of sunshine were creating flood havoc alongside flocks of holidaymakers jetting off for cheap winter sun. But – as she threw in some white Victoria Beckham jeans that she’d bought just because all ‘the girls’ had them, a kaftan and a huge wooly cardigan that she usually wore to watch TV on her own – she didn’t actually think she’d be wearing any of it. Her subconscious knew it was all for show. The case, the holiday, the fleeing just before Christmas. Because her knight would come home, throw his sword to the ground, scoop her up and carry her off into the rainy London sunset while declaring it was all lies.

She chucked in toiletries, scattered in loose. Half pots of Eve Lom moisturiser and her specially mixed shampoo clattered alongside her hairdryer, straighteners, trainers. The crisp shirts she’d paid a fortune to have pressed at the dry cleaners were stuffed in willy-nilly. She stopped for a second and called a taxi – to the airport? Which one. I don’t know. Heathrow? Yes madam.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she hung up the phone. Hair uncharacteristically skewiff. Eyes that someone who knew her well might say had been crying. The trace of mascara stains on cheeks that she’d scrubbed already with cold water and while telling herself to get a grip.

Adrian hadn’t had to say anything. She’d just watched the expression on his face when he’d asked Anne if Max ‘might be perhaps being unfaithful’. She’d heard the cough he’d done to try and buy himself some time. Then the nod as if he was pretending that Anne was saying something completely different.

‘Shit. What am I going to do?’ Ella had said without thinking when he’d put the phone down.

‘Talk to Max.’ Adrian had said. He’d looked worried, like a boy watching his mother cry. Ella couldn’t break down. Ella didn’t show her emotions. Ella was always the strong, confident one.

‘Yes good idea.’ She’d swallowed, pulled herself together. ‘There’s bound to be a rational explanation.’ Perhaps Anne didn’t know Max that well.

But instead of calling Max she had gone home and rifled through his drawers. Discovered nothing. Wondered if that was because their style was so minimalist or because it wasn’t true.

As Ella was just zipping up the overstuffed bag she heard the click of the front door, the pad of Gucci loafers on the beige carpet, and turned to see Max standing in the doorway, one hand pulling his tie loose.

‘I thought you were going to Claridge’s straight from work?’ he said, his beautiful face innocently perplexed. Arrow straight eyebrows drawing lightly into a frown, blond hair casually dishevelled.

‘Are you having an affair?’ She asked, her lips tight. Infuriatingly her hands were trembling.

Max paused, his eyes narrowed momentarily, then he swept the tie from under his collar and threw it on the bed. ‘Not this again.’ he said, incredulous, ‘Ella, come on!’ He rolled his eyes and then stalked into the en suite as if the question hadn’t been asked. ‘Of course I’m bloody not. Honey, I never have and never will,’ he added after a minute with a laugh that echoed round the bathroom. Then he popped his head back round the door and said with a wink, ‘You’re crazy. It’s our anniversary.’

The first time Ella had met Max’s parents they had been shown onto the veranda by the Portuguese maid and poured iced mint water from a crystal jug. The still air had hummed with heat and the only noise was the sprinklers battering the lush lawn as the ice clinked in their glasses. His mother and father were standing rigidly next to one another, muscles tense, clearly having been interrupted in the middle of a blistering row. Max’s father had patted the golden retriever at his feet and trudged off down the garden without even a nod of hello, his mother had looked Ella up and down with an expression of languid distaste, her lips unnaturally plump as she pouted and said, ‘When the men in this family lie, their cheeks go a very unnatural shade of pink.’ Then she’d taken a sip from her white wine glass that sweated in the humid air and said, ‘It’s a gem his mother passed on to me. Very useful,’ before heading into the house and leaving the two of them alone on the decking watching as the labrador bounded through the jets of water drenching the lawn.

‘Ella.’ Max turned, leant against the sink, paused for a moment then walked towards her, wrapping his arms round her waist and said, as he always did, ‘You literally mean everything to me.’

His hands were warm on her back, his eyes seemed to soak deep into her – but his smile wobbled as if he was nervous and, much as she wished she couldn’t, even under his Val d’Isere tan, Ella could see the hint of pink tinging his cheekbones.

‘I’m not having an affair.’ he said, looking her straight in the eye. ‘I don’t know where you’ve got the idea from but I promise, I’m not.’ He bit his lip, his fingers curled into the fabric of her shirt.

He smelt of Max. Of the shower gel from the gym mixed with his bespoke patchouli aftershave and perhaps a glass or two of wine.

‘Look.’ he said, pulling away from her, taking her hand and drawing her into the hall. ‘Look what I just carried all the way here.’ In the doorway was a Christmas tree, massive, ten or twelve foot, lying wrapped in white netting, a trail of needles behind it. ‘I had to drag it the last bit,’ he laughed. ‘So bloody heavy.’

He was nervous. Ran his hands through his hair as he almost bounded forward and propped up the tree. ‘We’ve never had a real one and I know you really like them so I wanted to surprise you. What do you think?’

‘Max?’ Ella said, nervously, watching as he moved quickly, edgily, holding the tree up then laying it down again and ripping at the netting to set the branches free.

‘I really love you.’ he said without looking up. ‘I really really love you.’

She realised then how many times before she’d asked him if he was cheating on her – usually when she was a bit pissed, unable to squash her insecurity and the carousel in her head that whispered, what does he see in me? – because she knew that he usually sighed and rolled his eyes, told her she meant everything to him, then got a bit cross. He never told her he loved her, or pleaded with her with big watery eyes that reminded her of one of his parents’ labradors. He was almost desperate.

Max was never desperate.

Maybe she could live with it. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe she could turn a blind eye. Maybe this was the price you paid for having the perfect man. And then she could have her perfect kids and her perfect life.

As he pulled at the netting on the tree, it wouldn’t tear.

‘Let me just get some scissors.’ he said, and went through to the kitchen where she heard him rifling frantically through some drawers.

For a moment Ella thought about putting her suitcase back in the cupboard, forgetting the whole thing and getting changed ready for dinner, as she stood looking at him from the doorway. At the triathlete’s body and the skier’s tan. At the hands that sat in the small of her back when they walked into a room full of all his terrifying friends. At the boyish smile and the dimples as he jogged back with the scissors and started slicing through the mesh, needles flying off the branches. She thought how their cleaner would have a terrible time getting them out the carpet. She’d talked in the past about wanting a real tree because that was what they had had when she was little, but in this apartment it was completely impractical.

At the thought of her childhood Christmases an image suddenly popped into her head. Completely unexpectedly and entirely unwanted. Of sitting at the top of the stairs with her sister, both in their matching red dressing gowns and hearing her dad say, in a whisper so they wouldn’t hear, ‘I can’t do it. Not any longer. Not even just for the kids.’ She’d thought he meant dressing up as Santa. She’d realised how wrong she was the next day when he left and the world fell down.

She remembered her mum saying to the neighbour in a daze, ‘I’m not ready to be alone.’ Her phone vibrated with a message to tell her the taxi was outside at the same time as a horn beeped. God this was all happening without her really thinking about it. It was all suddenly real. ‘That’s my taxi. I er– I’m going to Greece.’