The wheel of fortune has turned. This Christmas, the Aldridges – finally on an even keel after Alice was exonerated from involvement in the fateful car crash on the Am – spent a day of familial bliss dining on Scandinavian themed treats, like so many Norse gods in a Wagner opera, under the elegant awning of one of Kate’s yurts. The Grundy/Carters, by contrast, are in a state of schism, broadly along the lines of who was willing to grass George Grundy up to the police and who wasn’t. Various festive lunch combinations were mooted in a bid to circumnavigate the great Eddie Grundy/Susan Carter rift (Susan having definitively broken the code of the Grundys when she insisted the police handle the crimes of her grandson). The Grundy festive table was all about turkey, of course, since they raise the birds; the Carters were planning a typically upwardly mobile affair of salmon en croute and a baked ham, with the lower branches of the family expected to shuttle between the two households. Emma Grundy (née Carter) called a halt, though. With her son George banged up she couldn’t face the pretence of joy and celebration.
Emma: what a fascinating package of human qualities she is. She is filled, very often justifiably, with class resentment. She is chippy, yet – what with her recent excursions into studying English literature – aspiring. She can be malicious – as when she posted anonymous remarks to the stables website denouncing her ex-sister-in-law Alice. She can be self-regarding and oddly blind (is it any wonder that, having concealed a crime from the police, someone might have objected to her presence on the parish council?). Amid all that bitterness, though, is a woman who loves her son and wants better for her family. Perhaps, what with the new arboricultural business, she will attain contentment yet. If she doesn’t accidentally chainsaw off her own limbs first.
Joy told so many people she was planning to propose to her gentleman friend Mick on Christmas Day that it was bound to go wrong. And so it turned out: her mystery daughter Rochelle turned up just as Joy was about to pop the question. I had rather decided Rochelle was dead, or an elaborate figment of Joy’s imaginings: but here the prodigal is, albeit stubbornly refusing to shed light on her years of absence. A cult? Substance abuse? A life of crime?
The most glamorous surprise visitor, however, was Brenda Tucker, once Matt Crawford’s PA, now legendarily successful in London with an oligarch boyfriend in her past. She arrived in a swirl of cashmere and silk to hurry along the sale of Willow Cottage.
Tip for 2025: brace for a proliferation of beavers, thanks to the rewilding project.
