One Christmas Morning & One Summer's Afternoon by Tilly Bagshawe Page B

anyone at the moment, certainly not a man, and
certainly
not Gabe Baxter. There was only so much humiliation a girl could bear in one night. ‘Go back to Lisa. I’m sure she’s back in the warm right now, waiting eagerly for round two.’
    ‘You know what? Fine,’ said Gabe, matching Laura’s anger with her own. ‘Maybe I
will
go back to Lisa.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘Great. At least we agree on something.’ Gabe began walking back towards the house. But after a few paces he stopped.
    ‘You know,’ he said to Laura, ‘for someone who went to Oxford, you can be painfully fucking stupid sometimes.’
    ‘Tell me something I don’t know,’ said Laura, turning her face away so that he wouldn’t see her tears. Gabe might have seen Daniel Smart make a fool of her – the entire village might have seen it – but that was one satisfaction Laura wasn’t about to give him.
    Holding her head high, she walked on through the snow towards the village without looking back.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Laura walked into St Hilda’s church hall with a fixed smile plastered on her face.
    ‘My dear. Merry Christmas Eve!’ Harry Hotham greeted her warmly, making no reference to the large pair of sunglasses she was wearing to cover eyes puffy from crying, nor to the supersized flask of coffee she clutched to her chest like a security blanket. ‘There’s no need to worry about anything. The entire cast are present and correct, a minor miracle if I do say so myself. Now that you’re here, the only thing we still need is an audience.’
    ‘Merry Christmas, Harry. Everyone.’
    It wasn’t a Merry Christmas, of course. It was the worst, most shaming, crushing, awful Christmas Laura could possibly have imagined. By now the entire village, school and probably half the county knew what had happened last night. That Laura’s date for the Furlings Hunt Ball, her big-shot London playwright boyfriend, had publicly dumped her in favour of the stunning Tatiana Flint-Hamilton. The two of them were probably still shacked up at Furlings right now. Either that or they’d already jetted off to some exotic location to begin their glamorous lives together. Meanwhile, Laura was here, in a church hall full of excited schoolchildren, nursing the sort of hangover that merited a call to the paramedics at the very least, if not immediate admission to rehab.
    She’d considered not showing up tonight. Burrowing deep under her duvet and staying there until the snow melted, or her heart mended, or at least until she could stand up without wanting to throw up. But, after a morning spent staring at the ceiling and weakly sipping Alka-Seltzer, she realized that the show must go on. Not just tonight’s show. But
the
show, the tragicomedy that was Laura Tiverton’s life.
That
had to go on, whether she wanted it to or not.
    ‘What happened to the set?’ she asked, as the musicians began a warm-up rendition of ‘Good King Wenceslas’
.
Someone had brought mince pies and a huge vat of mulled wine backstage for the adult performers, and the smell of sugar and alcohol wafting over made Laura feel violently ill. ‘That crib was in pieces last night.’
    ‘Gabe Baxter came in at crack of dawn this morning and repaired everything.’ Harry Hotham smiled. ‘We’ve rechristened him the Angel Gabriel.’
    I wouldn’t go that far
, thought Laura, watching Gabe flirting with the make-up girl as she daubed foundation on his cheeks at the side of the stage. But it was a very kind and thoughtful gesture, especially given what time he must have got to bed last night. She remembered their conversation in the snow last night word for word, and wondered now whether maybe she’d been too hard on him. It was at least possible that he’d followed her down Furlings’s drive out of concern.
    Downing the dregs of her coffee, she walked over to him.
    ‘You fixed the set.’
    ‘Yup. You showed up.’
    ‘Yup.’
    They looked at one another awkwardly. It felt as if there should be more