The Snow Baby

  THE SNOW BABY

  By Chrissie Manby

  Copyright

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 Chrissie Manby

  Cover illustration copyright © isaak55

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  A Proper Family Holiday

  A Proper Family Christmas

  Also by Chrissie Manby

  Chapter One

  Christmas Eve. The shops in the town centre were finally closed at the end of a last frantic ‘shopping day’. Up and down the country, tired workers bid goodbye to their factories and cash registers and offices ahead of what, for most, would be a week-long holiday full of fun, food and family parties.

  Not so for Kate Farley.

  As most people cracked open the bubbles or the Baileys for that first celebratory tipple of the season, her working day was only just beginning. There would be no Christmas break for her.

  Kate worked as assistant manager at ‘The Stables’, a luxury hotel and spa situated on a hill overlooking the racecourse on the outskirts of a smart Cotswolds town. She had worked at the hotel for almost seven years now – in fact, she lived in a staff flat behind the main building – and so she had long since abandoned thinking of Christmas as a time of peace and relaxation. Every single member of the hotel staff had to choose whether they would work over Christmas or the New Year. Doing one or the other was compulsory if you wanted to hold onto your job into January. Kate always worked over Christmas. Because Christmas was a time for families, wasn’t it? And Kate hadn’t seen hers in a very long time.

  So instead of enjoying a family Christmas of her own, Kate dedicated herself to other people’s Christmases, making the holiday special for strangers. Actually, that wasn’t entirely true. Many of the people who came to stay at The Stables over Christmas were regulars, coming back year after year like migrating birds. Take the Shepherds, for example. They travelled to the Cotswolds from their home in Surrey like clockwork every December 24th.

  ‘Merry Christmas!’

  Kate recognised Mr Shepherd’s voice at once and rushed across the lobby to guide him and his wife to two seats in front of the reception desk. Mrs Shepherd enveloped Kate in a big hug.

  ‘How wonderful to see you, Kate! Has it really been a year?’

  They were a lovely couple, the Shepherds. They had two sons, but the Shepherd boys were long since grown up and had families of their own. One of them lived in Australia and the other in New Zealand. It was too expensive for them to bring all the grandchildren to the UK in peak holiday time or for the grandparents to travel in the opposite direction so Christmas wishes had to be exchanged via Skype. The Shepherds would make the trip down under in February when flights were cheaper.

  The Shepherds had come to consider Kate an important part of their Christmas routine and since the first year they met her, when she had gone out of her way to find Mr Shepherd an emergency bottle of Gaviscon on Christmas Day (turkey gave him heartburn), they always remembered to bring her a little gift. This year it was some expensive Jo Malone bath oil. Lime, Basil and Mandarin. Kate thanked them profusely, though she didn’t actually have a bath in her little flat in the hotel’s utilitarian staff block. Only a dribbly shower.

  ‘I love the way this smells,’ said Mrs Shepherd. ‘I hope you’ll like it too.’

  ‘It’s really kind of you,’ said Kate. ‘But you don’t have to buy me a present.’

  ‘You look after us so well,’ protested Mr Shepherd.

  ‘It’s my job,’ said Kate.

  ‘Ah,’ Mrs Shepherd put her hand on Kate’s arm. ‘But we know you always go beyond the call of duty, Kate. You’re a very thoughtful young woman.’

  ‘It’s easy with guests as lovely as you,’ said Kate. ‘Now, you must have a glass of bubbly.’

  The Kings were another group of guests that Kate had come to know well over her time at the hotel. The three elderly sisters – Josephine, Penelope and Eugenie – lived hundreds of miles apart. They met at The Stables every Christmas Eve as it was equidistant from their three homes.

  ‘And no-one has to do the washing up!’ was Josephine’s favourite joke.

  Eugenie, the youngest of the three Kings, was seventy. Penelope, the oldest, was nearly eighty. But the King sisters still knew how to have a good time and Kate was sure that come ten o’clock on Christmas Night, when the grand gala dinner was over and the guests retired to listen to the live band in the hotel ballroom, the sisters would be the first onto the dance-floor.

  Like the Shepherds, the King sisters also brought gifts for Kate, who had endeared herself to them by ensuring they had the same three adjoining rooms every year.

  ‘Shortbread! My favourite,’ Kate exclaimed as she opened the gift Eugenie King pulled from her bag the moment she arrived. ‘You really are too kind.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Penelope. ‘I got Kate the same.’

  ‘Me too,’ laughed Josephine.

  ‘Great minds!’ Kate gratefully received the three boxes of biscuits that she would pop in the staff kitchen to be shared with her colleagues. There was no way she would keep them for herself – she was only too aware of the havoc working shifts can wreak on a diet. When you’re tired, it’s too easy to reach for the sweets.

  Not that any of the guests would ever know Kate was tired, no matter how late or early the hour at which they encountered her.

  ‘You’re always so full of energy,’ Penelope remarked as Kate carried two of the sisters’ remarkably heavy suitcases up to the second floor.

  While Kate was working, she was the consummate professional, with a smile for everyone. Even if they didn’t deserve it.

  Because not everyone was as easy to please as the Shepherds or the Kings. Often guests would arrive in a state of some agitation, having got lost on the way or met heavy traffic on the road. They would snap at the porters who tried to help carry their luggage from the car park. They would be ready to find everything wrong. Kate could pick those guests out on sight and made sure that she gave them her personal attention. By the time she had finished checking them in, they would be beaming and relaxed. They would inevitably write in the guest book as they left that The Stables was the ‘best hotel ever’.

  Yes, Kate was a great asset to The Stables. Not that her manager, Dave Baron, would ever admit it. But Dave wasn’t there on Christmas Eve. He spent every Christmas Eve drinking with his pals from the golf club. And on New Year’s Eve Dave’s mates from the golf club all came to the hotel and he joined them on the best table in the restaurant, even if he was officially on duty. Dave never missed out on his parties.

  ‘Perk of being manager,’ he’d boast. ‘I’ve earned it.’

  Dave considered himself the best o
f the best when it came to running a hotel but when Dave wasn’t on duty and Kate was in sole charge, the whole atmosphere at The Stables was different. Better. The staff were more patient with the guests and with each other. In the restaurant, the level of stress was lower and far fewer plates were dropped. The porters even claimed they got bigger tips. Everyone was happier.

  With Kate at the helm that December 24th, the scene was set for a wonderful few days.

  The hotel certainly looked the part. The decoration scheme Kate had chosen for The Stables that year was red and gold. Perfectly traditional. The guests seemed uniformly delighted. Unlike the year when the decor was chosen by Annika, a design student who worked as a part-time receptionist. Annika had gone with an ultra-modern silver tree with iridescent white tinsel and baubles. It was certainly stylish, but everybody felt it lacked a certain something. It was more the kind of tree you would see in the window of a fashionable London department store, than the kind you expected in a hotel that prided itself on being somewhat ‘old-fashioned’ in style.

  And of course fake trees don’t have that smell. Kate always relished that moment when she first walked into the hotel lobby at the start of her shift and her nose picked up the scent of pine, mixed with wood-smoke from the fire in the great hall and the happy tang of satsumas and tangerines in the fruit bowl on the front desk. Together they constituted the very whiff of Christmas. With the fire lit and the fairy lights sparkling, The Stables hotel could not have felt warmer or more welcoming. Kate let the atmosphere envelope her like a big hug, though sometimes the festive perfection of it all brought a prickle of tears to her eyes as she remembered Christmasses past. But the guests didn’t need to know that.

  ‘I can tell we’re going to have a fabulous time,’ said Josephine, the middle Miss King, as she raised a complementary glass of Buck’s Fizz to her sisters.

  ‘I’m going to make sure of it,’ said Kate.

  Chapter Two

  But it wasn’t all tinsel and glitter. Earlier that day, long before her shift started, Kate went into town. She knew it wasn’t the best idea. On Christmas Eve the town centre was always frantic with people doing last-minute present shopping. The car parks were completely jammed. But alas Kate had a little last-minute gift shopping of her own to do. Dave had told her only the previous evening – by text – that he ‘hadn’t had time’ to buy the traditional gifts for his staff. It was left to Kate to rush to the shops to find twenty suitable tokens of her boss’s esteem. This seemed to happen every year. She wondered why Dave didn’t just delegate this particular job at the beginning of December rather than pretend he would ever get round to it.

  With a lack of time and imagination as to what single kind of gift might work for twenty such disparate people as The Stables’ team – for everybody had to receive the same thing to avoid accusations of favouritism – Kate went to Thornton’s and bought up their entire supply of chocolate reindeer. They didn’t look like much in return for a whole year of hard work, but the budget Dave had given Kate barely covered a £5.99 chocolate animal per person and she still had to add some money of her own. That was especially galling, since she had no doubt that Dave would present the gifts as though they were entirely the result of his efforts.

  It was while she was walking back to the car, laden down with Thornton’s bags, that Kate first saw them (she had stopped for a moment by a bench to rearrange her burden. The chocolate deer may have been hollow but the plastic bags in which she carried them still cut into the palms of her chilly hands). They were sitting a few feet away, right next to a cashpoint. A young couple, perhaps in their mid-twenties, dressed in clothes that seemed much too flimsy for the cold December weather.

  Kate was immediately rattled. There was nothing that upset her more than seeing beggars setting themselves up next to a cashpoint. It was so intimidating.

  It wasn’t as though Kate didn’t want to sympathise. She did. Very much so. All the same, she wished she didn’t have to come face-to-face with such a stark reminder that not everybody would have a warm and wonderful Christmas that year.

  The young man caught Kate frowning in his direction.

  ‘Spare any change?’ he asked, holding out a hand towards her. His wrist was bony and thin. His hand was red with the cold.

  Kate shook her head. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got any.’

  That much was actually true. Kate had put the last few coins in her purse towards the Christmas gifts that Dave would give to his staff in a show of such largesse the following day. Kate actually needed to use the cashpoint but there was no way she would do it while those down-and-outs were sitting so close by. What if they tried to grab her bag? What if she felt compelled to give them a twenty-pound note she could ill afford to spare? She hadn’t had a pay rise since the beginning of the recession. She was feeling pretty skint herself.

  The beggar withdrew his hand. He wasn’t going to argue. Instead, he went straight back to making sure that his companion was comfortable, tucking their single threadbare blanket more tightly around her and arranging his ruck-sack as a cushion at the base of her spine. The girl smiled at him gratefully. She too was thin about the face and red-nosed and snivelling from the cold. As Kate picked up her bags again, the young girl leaned into her boyfriend’s shoulder. She didn’t look terribly well. The girl glanced up at Kate. Kate looked away. She wanted to pretend she’d never seen them.

  She tried to tell herself that she had done the right thing as she walked away with her purse still empty. If she had taken twenty pounds out of the cash-point and handed it over, they probably would have gone straight to the nearest drug dealer. She wouldn’t even have been surprised to hear that they weren’t really homeless. Just trying it on.

  But the sight of that young woman’s pinched and tired face stayed with Kate all the way back to the hotel. She kept thinking about the shivering girl and her attentive but equally pathetic boyfriend. And then another memory would creep in. One that was much older and even more painful. Kate could not allow it.

  She was glad when her shift started. The hotel would be almost full over Christmas. Only the Shergar Suite was empty (ridiculously expensive as it was, even in low season). More than eighty guests were due to arrive that afternoon alone. While she was checking them in, Kate did not have a moment to think about the beggars by the cash-point. Her head was filled with room allocations and dinner reservations and whether or not the housekeeper had prepared Mr Shepherd’s emergency Gaviscon. She was too busy to be unhappy and she wanted to stay that way.

  Chapter Three

  The check-ins went smoothly. There were a few hairy moments when several car loads of people arrived at once, meaning that some guests had to wait up to fifteen minutes, but Kate made sure that those people who couldn’t be checked-in right away were given suitably Christmassy refreshments. Fifteen minutes doesn’t seem so long when you’ve got a glass of Buck’s Fizz and a mince pie to distract you. And there were very few guests who arrived ready for a fight that year. The traffic had been good. The weather was cold but clear. Everyone seemed set to enjoy themselves. They were full of Christmas spirit.

  At about five o’clock, there was a short period of calm when the guests were all checked in and mostly in their rooms, refreshing themselves after their journeys. During that time, Kate prepared herself for the welcome drinks reception, which would kick off the Christmas break’s official timetable of events. She and two youngsters from the restaurant – A-Level students working in the school break – arranged dozens of gleaming champagne glasses on trestle tables in the galleried lounge, where the hotel’s largest Christmas tree twinkled like a vision from a Hollywood film.

  This drinks reception was one of Kate’s favourite parts of the Christmas programme. She loved to see her guests transformed, having changed from their travelling clothes into their finery. This was the point at which it really felt as though Christmas had started.

  The King sisters were the first to appear, moments after
Kate set out the last glass. They were all three of them dressed in red and gold. Kate showered them with compliments.

  ‘I promise we didn’t arrange to coordinate,’ said Eugenie, the youngest. ‘But how lovely that we match your wonderful tree.’

  ‘Oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree…’ Penelope burst into song. Her sisters soon chimed in. They had beautiful voices. Kate pretended to conduct them as their song filled the room.

  While the King sisters helped themselves to champagne and nibbles, Mrs Shepherd came in on the arm of her husband. She looked as beautiful and proud as any duchess in her silver chiffon and lace ensemble.

  ‘What a fabulous dress,’ exclaimed Kate as she welcomed them.

  ‘It matches my grey hair,’ Mrs Shepherd laughed.

  ‘Silver hair, darling,’ said her husband. ‘Silver.’ He gave Kate a wink.

  ‘You’re looking very dashing yourself, Mr Shepherd,’ Kate told him.

  Mr Shepherd blushed. His wife playfully swatted him with her clutch bag.

  ‘Champagne?’ Kate asked.

  Mr and Mrs Shepherd accepted a glass each and made their way over to greet the King sisters.

  Under the influence of the champagne – vintage this time, not like the plonk the hotel used for Buck’s Fizz – the guests mingled and chatted. Regulars like the Kings and the Shepherds greeted each other with delight and shared a whole year’s worth of news: catching up on grandchildren and godchildren, knee replacements, parking tickets and planning applications.

  Mr Shepherd collared Kate when he went back for a second helping of canapés. ‘I’ve been told, by my wife and the King sisters, that I am to find out if there’s a man.’

  ‘A man?’ Kate was confused.

  ‘You know,’ Mr Shepherd winked. ‘A man. A boyfriend.’ He mouthed the words as though he was being naughty.