Mutts and Mistletoe Read online

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Betsy Tobin

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Ebook ISBN 9780525539230

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Tally the chocolate Lab, my trusty fireside companion and canine muse these last fifteen years, and to Grace the Great Dane puppy, who already exasperates and inspires in equal measure.

  chapter

  1

  T. S. Eliot was wrong. December is the cruelest month. If the rampant commercialism of Christmas doesn’t get you down, the dreary London weather will. This morning, on the way to work, when it was bucketing with rain and I should have been answering e-mails, I got to thinking about everything that was wrong with the holiday season. And almost without trying, I came up with a list of Ten Things I Hate About Christmas:

  The phrase Happy Holidays, which is meant as a greeting, but feels more like a command: one that instantly makes me want to disobey.

  Ditto foreign language salutations: Feliz Navidad, Joyeux Noel, Yuletide Greetings. If I don’t want them in English, I don’t want them in French or Spanish.

  Office Christmas parties, which are really just a pathetic excuse for married coworkers to drink too much and take liberties with each other. (Unless it’s Sean from finance, who is free to liberate himself with me anytime.)

  Drunken revelers on the tube, aka the bloated guy wearing a tissue-paper crown who fell asleep next to me last night on the Northern line and drooled on my coat. To be fair, my late-night rendition of “Santa Baby” on the Jubilee line last Thursday did draw some aggrieved looks. But I was egged on by my companions. Who were even drunker than I was.

  Stupidly large wheels of cheddar cheese in lieu of proper food at parties. Partial though I am to cheese, I need some sausage rolls, too.

  Mulled wine: Why does everyone get so excited about bottom-of-the-bin Bulgarian red, heavily laced with sugar and spice? Especially since it leaves you with a monstrous hangover the next morning. Which I now have.

  Chocolate advent calendars. This is just marketing run amok. Scarf a large bar of Cadbury’s on the first day of December and be done with it.

  Disney-themed holiday decorations, especially those along Oxford Street. When it comes to Hollywood at Christmas, we should emulate Nancy Reagan and just say no.

  Greeting cards bearing photos of offspring that lurk like land mines in my postbox, reminding me that I am thirty-one and have not yet spawned.

  Elves. The annoying kind. Which is pretty much all of them.

  * * *

  In the spirit of fairness, I decide to compose a rival list of what I do like about the holidays:

  Mince pies.

  Real Christmas trees (the kind that smell nice and will cause untold misery for future generations by contributing to global warming).

  Time off work.

  Obviously 10:3 is not a great ratio, so I guess I’ll have to work on that second list. But right now, as I elbow my way along Oxford Street, I am struggling to understand the appeal. These days Christmas is little more than a parody of itself: any vestige of Victorian charm has long since been quashed by Black Friday and the Top Gear Christmas Special. At Bond Street I’m forced to shoulder my way through a flock of excited Japanese tourists taking photos of a neon orange Christmas tree (whatever happened to silver and gold?). I then sidestep a portly older woman garlanded with bright red tinsel who rattles a tin aggressively in my face, like some sort of charitable assault. It’s not that I don’t believe in being generous during the Christmas season, but I honestly don’t think Jesus intended donkey sanctuaries to be the beneficiary of all that goodwill. Even if they were present at his birth.

  I dash down a side street and reach my favorite Italian café, pushing open the door with relief. Inside, people are huddled up to cappuccinos, their overstuffed shopping bags nestled like loyal spaniels against their feet. On the far side of the room I spy my friend Sian, her cheeks flushed pink and her ash-blonde hair swept atop her head in a ratty mess. I pick my way across the restaurant and sink into the chair opposite. “Aw,” I say with a grin. “You did your hair just for me.”

  “Never let it be said that I don’t make an effort,” Sian replies, patting the unruly tangle. As always, Sian makes zero concessions to femininity while still being every inch her own woman. “Here.” She slides her mug of cocoa over and I take a restorative slug.

  “Bring on the New Year,” I say. “I’m fed up with Christmas and it’s only the second week of December.”

  “Season’s Greetings to you, too.”

  “I should warn you that I’m not in a particularly festive mood.”

  “Was that meant to be some sort of spoiler?” Sian raises an eyebrow.

  Suddenly I lean forward, eyeing her clothes suspiciously. “Please tell me that’s not a Christmas jumper.”

  Sian opens her coat and proudly flashes a bright red sweater with a reindeer’s head emblazoned across her chest. Each antler sports a tiny bell at its tip. “Owen chose it,” she says proudly.

  “Since when do you take fashion advice from a three-year-old?”

  “He has surprisingly good taste. He talked me out of a purple velvet onesie the other day that would have been a terrible mistake.”

  “Are those real bells?”

  In answer, she jiggles up and down in her seat and I hear a vague tinkling. I shake my head.

  “Don’t be such a grump,” says Sian. “I love Christmas.”

  “Not me. I’m opting out this year. So don’t expect a present.”

  “You can’t opt out of Christmas.”

  “Watch me.”

  Sian
narrows her eyes suspiciously. “What brought all this on?”

  “Capital Radio,” I say. “This morning I woke to the sound of aging rock stars desperately trying to salvage their careers by exhorting me to feed the world yet again. They should know by now that I can’t even feed myself.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.” I shrug. “I’ve never been much of a fan. And this year I’m not only a Scrooge, but a newly single Scrooge. So I’ve decided to indulge my inner killjoy.”

  “What about your mum? Won’t she be counting on you for carols at the Ark?”

  My redoubtable mother and her fifth husband, Richie, sold up and retired a few years ago to a houseboat in Little Venice, which Sian promptly dubbed the Ark. They’re forever dropping in on me when the plumbing goes wrong on the boat, which happens frequently, especially during cold weather. Thankfully, this year they decided to put the boat in dry storage and decamp to warmer climates for the winter.

  I shake my head. “Not this year. They’re off to Melbourne to see my stepbrother and his sprogs.”

  “Then you should definitely come to our place for the holiday.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Why not? It’ll be grand! You can stuff sausage meat up a turkey’s arse while I ply my elderly aunties with prosecco until they collapse in a drunken stupor on the sofa.”

  “It goes in the neck cavity.”

  “What?”

  “The sausage meat.” I might not be a gourmet chef, but even I know that.

  Sian frowns. “I knew that,” she says.

  “As tempting as it sounds, I’ll pass.”

  “Listen, Charlie. I’m not about to let you spend the holidays moping over He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.”

  “Lionel. His name is Lionel. And I’m not moping.”

  “Good. Because he doesn’t deserve it.”

  “But I’m still not coming for Christmas.”

  * * *

  It takes most of my lunch hour to persuade Sian that I am serious. The truth is that I have no intention of spending the holiday with anyone. I plan to hole up in my flat in Nunhead with a six-pack of chardonnay and watch old black-and-white Audrey Hepburn movies back to back. Lionel always hated watching movies on TV, so I’m relishing the opportunity to indulge myself now that he’s moved out. I also intend to binge on gummy bears, anchovy pizza, and barbecue-flavor crisps, all of which he also abhorred. In fact, I realize now that I abandoned great swathes of myself during the four years we lived together: reading in bed (he hated the light), crossword puzzles (he found them tedious), tinned chicken noodle soup (he pronounced it full of additives), and singing in the shower (it was Lionel who first told me I couldn’t carry a tune). There are loads of upsides to single life, I tell Sian: more wardrobe space, fewer dirty dishes, and the freedom to wear whatever I like in bed.

  Eventually, I manage to convince Sian that I am fine, but back in my flat that night I feel the familiar creep of doubt. The truth is that my seemingly stable life had capsized in an instant and I’m still floundering to make sense of what happened. Bizarrely, my breakup with Lionel was prompted by an anonymous e-mail. I might never have opened the attachment if the tagline hadn’t caught my eye: The camera doesn’t lie. And it was true: the photo of Lionel having sex with a fleshy brunette on a rowing machine appeared entirely legitimate, his hair darkly matted with sweat, her breasts splayed outward like badly inflated balloons.

  When I showed it to him, Lionel confessed that he’d been sleeping with his personal trainer for more than a year. Relationships, he told me earnestly, weren’t meant to last. They were fragile, fleeting constructs propped up by society’s expectations and by the outdated institution of marriage. Looking around the kitchen, his eyes alighted on the kettle, and he held it up as if to underscore its relevance. What happened to us was inevitable, he said. Relationships ran smoothly at first, then deteriorated over time, until they finally broke down and you replaced them. Like a kettle.

  So I’d been traded in for a younger appliance. Initially, I’d been devastated. I’d noted with bewilderment that my replacement was not as conventionally pretty as I would have expected, and I had no idea whether I should feel relieved or angered by that fact. Lionel and I had been together four years. And, for the first few, I’d been crazy about him; indeed, we’d been crazy about each other. But over time our relationship had slowly soured. And while four years wasn’t an eternity, I quickly calculated that it amounted to more than a hundred million seconds of my life. Lionel had stolen that time from me—or maybe I’d given it away. Either way, there was no getting it back. More than a hundred million seconds of me were gone forever. I would have to make the most of what remained.

  The night Lionel left me, it took only a few hours (maybe ten thousand seconds) for my anguish to be replaced by anger. But after several days, even that had faded to resignation. It occurred to me that maybe Lionel had been right; maybe romance is a modern fiction. Maybe it has been conjured out of the barest ingredients to satisfy our cravings, and maybe love itself really is as flimsy as a kettle. The more I thought about it, the more I questioned whether what I’d felt for Lionel really was love, or whether it was something else altogether. What exactly had we experienced all those years? Familiarity? Comfort? Security? Convenience? Perhaps all of these things. Did they add up to love? Or did they just equal expedience?

  Over the years I’d watched countless female friends slide into relationships with partners who fell short of their expectations. Perhaps, unwittingly, I had done the same. In the future, I resolve that I will not make the same mistake twice: I would rather be alone than settle for an impostor. And when I crawl into bed, wearing jogging bottoms, a flannel shirt, and oversized socks, I know that if I can just get through the next few weeks, January will bring a fresh outlook. This thought is still circling my head like a lazy fly when the explosion tears through my flat.

  chapter

  2

  Apparently, I am extremely lucky. Or so the stout Nigerian nurse in the emergency room tells me the next morning, while carefully cleansing my wounds with iodine. A concussion, bruised ribs, and a random smattering of abrasions are nothing compared to what might have happened when my upstairs neighbor’s gas oven exploded. Someone was watching over me, to be sure, she declares, yanking open the curtain that surrounds my bed with a startling ferocity.

  I bite my tongue in response: my own definition of luck does not involve ambulances, bedpans, or a prolonged risk of exposure to deadly airborne pathogens. In the next moment I catch a glimpse of two orderlies on the far side of the room restraining a drunk. The blurry-faced man lurches sideways, skittering a wheeled bedside table into the wall with a clatter, before he is unceremoniously removed from my line of sight, thereby depriving me of my only form of entertainment. The nurse disappears and I lie back with a sigh.

  Someone has strung two spindly strands of silver across the ceiling, like aimless tinsel snakes, and a 1950s-style poster of a Santa has been taped to the wall. But instead of smiling, retro Santa wears a grimace on his face: red-cheeked and grumpy, he looks as if he’s about to be wheeled down the hall for gastric surgery. On the far side of the room a half dozen handmade snowflakes have been stuck to a window; and across the corridor a tiny, crooked tree perches atop the nurses’ counter. The combined effect of all these efforts is almost tragically heroic. It is virtually impossible to kindle the spirit of Christmas on a National Health Service ward, but God bless them for trying.

  As luck would have it, the explosion tore a hole right through my bedroom ceiling and I was hit by flying debris. A jagged chunk of pipe had impaled itself on my pillow, missing my forehead by millimeters, but a vast hunk of ceiling had landed squarely on top of me, and now I feel as if I’ve ingested a lorryload of plaster dust. My head throbs and my breasts feel as if they’ve been fed through a meat grinder. At some point in the early hours of t
he morning I tried ringing my father to let him know what happened. My father has long been my go-to parent: while he isn’t very practical, he’s always sympathetic. But when he failed to pick up, I texted my mother with a carefully edited account of the night’s events, downplaying their severity.

  I should have known better; within minutes I received a distraught phone call from Melbourne. She was already in full crisis mode, demanding details of the incident, consultants’ names, work contacts, etc. At the time I was feeling too crappy to fend her off, but now I regret that I hadn’t had more presence of mind. Especially since she ended up berating me for living in substandard accommodations (somewhat unfairly, I thought, given her own aquatic living quarters—not to mention how often she’s turned up at my flat for a shower) and chastising me for my failure to have private health insurance.

  Now I hear an insistent buzzing in my bag. I reach down and pull out my phone. “Hi, Mum.”

  “How are you? Has there been any change?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “No double vision or nausea?”

  “Honestly, it’s just a few bruises. I’ll be right as rain in a day or two.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Charlie. You’re obviously in shock. You shouldn’t be left on your own. Your cousin Jez is driving to London as we speak. She’s taking you back with her to Devon.”

  “Mum, I can’t go to Devon! I’ve got to work.”

  “Not anymore. I spoke to your boss, and he’s giving you the rest of the week off.”

  “He agreed to that?” Frankly, I’m amazed. My insufferable boss, Carl, is the most unsympathetic person on the face of the planet, especially when it comes to illness. You’d have to be stricken with Ebola before he’d grant you sick leave.