Page 15 of I’ll Be Home for Christmas

Bella

Bella watched from the workshop window as Fred, wrapped in one of Aunt Aggie’s Mexican serape blankets, followed the aunts around the garden and in and out of the greenhouses, snipping the herbs and laying them in Aunt Cam’s basket.

It was twilight and the moon was hidden behind scrubby swirls of wire-wool cloud, but the solar-powered fairy lights liberally festooning arches, arbors and pergolas around the gardens provided a soft light to work by.

They were collecting what they needed to make Fred a face pack—since she had a date tomorrow—and a hair rinse that Aunt Aggie had promised would restore Fred’s shine. Bella wished it were that simple.

She saw the way her daughter’s smile slipped when she thought no one’s eyes were on her. She was in the garden, but her mind was somewhere else. She knew that feeling.

When Fred was a girl, she was full of fire; and even when she reached her teens and much of that fire was hurled her way, Bella had reveled in her spark, because she thought it would keep her daughter bolstered against the things life would inevitably throw at her.

It had pained her to watch Tim throw damp tea towels over her bright flames until her embers were almost too weak to glow.

It pained her even more to think that in Fred’s desire to create a life that was in all ways the antithesis of her own, she was partly responsible for Fred seeking out a man like Tim in the first place.

With hindsight she could see the missteps she’d made and could understand why her daughter might have been exasperated with her, but at the time she had simply wanted to give Fred all the freedoms she had been denied.

Bella had been raised in an autocracy. Her father’s word was law, his fists were justice, and the only power higher than him was God.

She grew up understanding that she was sinful by the sheer act of having been born a girl.

In his eyes she was only ever a heartbeat away from damnation and from bringing disrepute upon their house.

There were so many rules that needed following, it was impossible not to break at least ten a day simply by being alive, and each infraction had its own punishment.

Eventually, she realized that it wasn’t religion that dictated these harsh chastisements but her father’s own cruelty and need to exert control.

Her mother spirited them away to the safety of the aunts’ house so many times when she was little that Bella became used to being taken from her bed in the middle of the night and watching dawn break through the window of a train carriage.

But in the end, her father always reclaimed what was his to govern.

Bella swore to herself that Fred would never be fettered by such rules, that boundaries were there to be pushed, that hands would never be raised in anger, but voices would always be loud with laughter.

Fred would know that being a girl was a gift and that being loved was a given.

But every child will rebel, even if you eradicate everything they could possibly want to rail against, because that is human nature. And what Bella had seen as perfect freedom had left her daughter yearning for structure.

Bella had grown up believing that sex was sinful.

It should only happen in the marriage bed and only for procreation.

She had been unlucky in love. Her first love had done a moonlight flit and her second—her truest and most enduring—she had turned away for the sake of her daughter.

His familial duties had required him to live hundreds of miles away and, back then, she didn’t have enough confidence in her skills as a parent to leave her aunts, or enough faith in love to risk moving her child to another country, only for things to fail.

Sex had therefore become the perfect act of rebellion, and an effective antidote to grief and heartbreak too.

With the wisdom of her fifty-two years, she could see how growing up in such a hedonistic environment might have ignited Fred’s desire for a more traditional, mainstream life.

They were each in their own way the products of growing up in environments without balance.

Fred’s craving for normality—whatever that was—had driven her to quieten her voice and tamp down her wildness.

But she’d been forged from unconventional, pertinacious women, and Bella could see that squeezing into the mold she’d created for herself was exhausting.

She nodded to herself as she thought, what Fred needs is to rediscover her weird. And she determined to help her find it.