Free The Christmas Angel by Marcia Willett Page A

to enjoy his semi-bachelor existence, though he won’t let her guess this.
    She makes a little face at him. ‘It’s just so silly to be so far apart. After all, we don’t need to be, do we? There’s plenty of room at the flat and Mummy would love to have you there.’
    She’s wheedling now, regretting her grumpiness. He watches her, still smiling, thinking, as he always does, how ridiculous it sounds to hear a grown woman calling her mother ‘Mummy’. One day soon Mummy will leave her darling daughter a beautiful ground-floor flat in Sneyd Park in Bristol, some very valuable ‘pieces’ and a comfortable bank balance. Not that it matters: he has plenty of money of his own, though most of it is tied up in property. Still, it’s a comforting prospect. One can always do with extra security . The cottage has been a bit of a bolt hole from the restrictions of the flat: a good excuse to get away from the invalid atmosphere.
    ‘It’s serving a turn,’ he shrugs. ‘You don’t really want me in the flat in Bristol all the time while you’re looking after your mother and it’s keeping me busy.’
    She glances around the small room, at the temporary shabby furniture, and he almost laughs aloud at her expression of distaste.
    ‘Come on, love,’ he says. ‘I warned you what it was like here. Anyway, you know perfectly well how uncomfortable renovating a house can be in the early stages. We’ve done it often enough.’
    ‘It’s different now,’ she argues. ‘I’ve got used to the comfort of the flat.’
    He shrugs, bored with this increasingly familiar argument which leads nowhere. He might point out that if she were with him they would have made the cottage much more comfortable but some instinct tells him to stay cool; not to press her. Her determination to visit despite his attempts to discourage it has surprised him – and slightly unnerved him.
    ‘I have to finish the cottage,’ he points out reasonably. ‘It’s my job. It’s what I do.’
    She sits with her head bent, watching the flames through the glass door of the stove.
    ‘Well, you don’t have to do it for much longer,’ she says. ‘It’s time we relaxed a bit and enjoyed ourselves.’
    He feels a thrill of fear at the prospect of being joined at the hip to Kitty in the Bristol flat with her elderly mother, who suffers from aortic stenosis, and no work to which he can escape, no excuses of meetings. He’s done very well since he came out of the army and started his restoration company. It owns a great deal of property, including five cottages down on the Roseland Peninsula. Her father respected him, no doubt about that, though he was always slightly cautious about his, Rupert’s, background: good schools, good regiment, yes, but there was something indefinable that unnerved that unimaginative old stalwart of Bristol’s merchant aristocracy. He’d been wary of this ex-army officer’s approaches to his little princess: he’d glimpsed that odd, passionate, creative streak that made Rupert a perfectionist in his work and meant that a beautifully finished product was much more important than simple profit.
    Rupert grins to himself, remembering the predictable old fellow who was so anxious for his precious daughter’s financial wellbeing. His wife – whose life was full of good works, charity lunches and photographs in Country Life – was an easier prospect. Flustered and flattered by compliments, charmed into approval of this young man’s absolute need to create something beautiful, she’d added her persuasions to Kitty’s passionate appeals and they’d carried the day.
    ‘What are you grinning at?’
    He laughs aloud. ‘I was just thinking about your dear old dad. He didn’t get it, did he? My theory that each old house has a soul that has to be consulted before you can start work on it? It made him nervous. He never really reckoned me, did he?’
    ‘Of course he did,’ she says quickly. ‘Don’t be silly.’ But she smiles