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  “You’re not a fribble. It just happens to be something you’re interested in. We’d probably be interested, as well,” said Jazz, “if we looked like you.”

  “Hm!” Laurel tried not to sound self-satisfied, but she did like it when people told her she was pretty. “What about you?” she said.

  “Me. Yes. Well,” said Jazz, “I suppose I am a bit like Jo. I mean, I am quite ambitious—”

  “Quite?” said Rose. “I thought you told us you were going to end up in Hollywood and be a megastar?”

  Jazz grinned. “All right. I’m ambitious! And I know I can be impatient sometimes, just like Jo.”

  “Yes, and, you’re definitely boyish,” said Laurel, getting her own back for the mumsy bit. She wasn’t ever going to get mumsy! She looked pointedly at Jazz’s hair, cropped so close to her head it might almost have been a cap.

  “I’m not a bimbo,” agreed Jazz.

  “Maybe you’ll turn out to be a lesbian,” said Rose.

  Jazz picked up a cushion and threw it at her. Laurel shrieked, “Rose! Don’t be so disgusting!”

  “There isn’t anything disgusting about it,” said Rose. “What’s disgusting about it? Honestly, you’re so prejudiced! Anyway, if she’s really like Jo she’ll end up marrying some old man who could be her father. That’s what I call disgusting.”

  “Ageist!” taunted Jazz; and for once Rose actually had the grace to look abashed.

  “Just get on with it,” she said. In spite of herself, she was curious to hear what Jazz would say when she got to her.

  “OK. Well – Beth.”

  “Am I like her?” said Daisy.

  “Yes, you are!” Jazz leaned across and gave her a hug. “’cos you’re good and sweet and everybody loves you!”

  Nobody argued with that. Daisy might be a whole year older than Rose, who had just started in Year 7 that term, but she was still everyone’s pet and treated very much as the baby. She went to a special school, for children with learning difficulties. It wasn’t that she was stupid; just that she couldn’t learn as fast as other people. At Daisy’s school there were only fourteen children in a class. At the comprehensive, there were thirty. Daisy couldn’t cope with that. She had come home weeping every day because “big girls” had bullied her, so Mum had used some of her Icing money to pay for her to go to Linden Hyrst. That was one of the few times when Mum and Dad had been in agreement. They weren’t having their little Daisy being bullied.

  “So what about Amy?” said Laurel, putting the question that Rose had been dying to put for herself.

  Oh! Amy and Rose are definitely alike. Self-opinionated, for a start – you are, Rose, so don’t deny it!”

  Rose wouldn’t. She rather prided herself on having opinions and voicing them.

  “Vain—”

  “Vain?” Vain was something else! Rose’s head jerked up in genuine outrage. How could Jazz accuse her of being vain? “I’m not pretty enough to be vain!”

  It was true. Of the four of them, Rose was the only one who could be called homely. (Meaning plain, only it wasn’t kind to say so.) She was bright, vivid, intelligent – almost a genius, her sisters thought, but not pretty. It didn’t bother her. She left all the girly stuff to the others.

  “You’re still vain,” said Jazz. “You are vain of your brain.”

  Laurel laughed and punched the air. “Yessssss!”

  “You are,” said Jazz. “But that’s OK. We’re all vain about something. Except Daisy!” she added, giving her another hug. “She isn’t.”

  “I am a bit,” said Daisy.

  “You?” Jazz laughed. “What are you vain about?”

  “My nose,” said Daisy, pressing a finger against it. Daisy had inherited Mum’s nose. Small and neat and just the tiniest bit tip-tilted.

  “Well, I never knew that!” said Jazz.

  “Oh. No!” cried Laurel. She banged down her fork and stared accusingly at Mum across the kitchen table. “Not her again!”

  Her was an actress friend of Mum’s, known to the girls as Queen of the Soaps, or Lady Jayne. Her real name was Jayne Crichton, pronounced Cryton. She could be quite snooty if anyone called her Critchton. She could be quite snooty about a lot of things. Modern manners. Modern speech. Modern diction.

  “Speak up! Don’t mumble! Everyone today has sloppy diction. No one projects any more. How do you think you’re going to be heard in the back row of the stalls?”

  Mum said she was an actress of the old school and they had to be patient with her.

  “But why does she always have to come at Christmas?” wailed Laurel.

  “Because she has nowhere else to go.”

  “Not surprised,” muttered Jazz, twizzling her fork in a mound of spaghetti. “Who’d want her?”

  “Jazz, don’t be unkind!” said Mum. “It’s only once a year. Try to be a bit charitable!”

  But Jazz couldn’t. None of them could, not even Daisy. Lady Jayne didn’t like cats, which meant that Tink and Muffy had to be shut in Daisy’s bedroom all the time she was here. Imagine having to shut your cats away at Christmas! Just for the sake of some sour old woman who did nothing but nitpick.

  “She’s not really sour,” said Mum. “It’s the business that’s made her that way.”

  By “the business,” Mum meant show business. Lady Jayne had spent her life making small appearances in soaps – EastEnders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Icing. She had been in them all. But only ever bit parts. Half a dozen lines if she was lucky. Now even that seemed to have dried up. Mum said it was no wonder she felt bitter.

  “When I first worked with her” (years ago, before Mum and Dad had got married) “she was enormous fun!”

  It was hard to imagine the Queen of the Soaps being fun. She was dried and withered and crotchety and she made their lives a misery. It hadn’t been so bad when Dad was there. Dad used to pull her leg and tell her to chill out. Lady Jayne said that was sloppy speech.

  “Chill out? Is that English? What is it supposed to mean?”

  And Dad would wink at them and say, “Go sit in the refrigerator!” which made Daisy giggle and Lady Jayne sniff. Dad refused to take her seriously.

  “I was hoping that this year she wouldn’t come,” grumbled Laurel.

  “Why this year?” Mum said sharply.

  “Well.”

  “Well what?”

  “Well.” Laurel scowled. It was Jazz who said it for her.

  “With Dad not being here.”

  “What difference does that make?”

  “It’s not fair!” Jazz burst out with it, passionately. “We can’t have Dad but we still have to put up with her!”

  “Just because your father chooses to spend his time in America that’s no reason for leaving one lonely old lady on her own at Christmas.”

  “You mean, if Dad were back in England,” said Rose, “he could come and be with us?”

  Mum tightened her lips. “He’s not back in England, so the question doesn’t arise.”

  “But if he was—”

  “I wasn’t the one who sent him away!” Mum rose to her feet, sweeping dishes off the table and clattering them noisily into the sink. “It was his decision, not mine.”

  “So he could come back if he wanted?”

  “Yes, if you didn’t mind your mother ending up on a murder charge!”

  “Mum.” Jazz stared at her mum, reproachfully. Mum was always so dramatic! Way over the top, thought Jazz, severely. Up on a murder charge! What a thing to say.

  “Mum turned from the sink, took one look at Daisy’s stricken face and dropped to her knees beside her.

  “Sweetheart, forgive me! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean that. I just meant – well!” Mum gave a little laugh, not very convincingly, and swept her hair back off her forehead. “You know how your dad and I used to fight. You wouldn’t want that again, would you?”

  Daisy’s thumb went to her mouth. A sure sign of tears to come.

  “You wouldn’t,” said Mum, �
��would you?”

  Slowly, Daisy shook her head. A tear trickled out of the corner of one eye. Mum sighed.

  “You see, what it is,” she said, “sometimes two people just can’t get along no matter how hard they try. It doesn’t mean they don’t love their children! It means they do love their children, and that’s why they decide to live apart. So they won’t always be quarrelling and upsetting them.”

  We have heard all this before, thought Jazz. And it just isn’t true! If people really loved their children, really, really, really, then they wouldn’t always be quarrelling and fighting. At any rate, that was the way it seemed to her.

  “Try to cheer up!” said Mum. She gave Daisy a squeeze. “In two days’ time it’ll be Christmas, and who knows what you might find under the tree?”

  “I th–thought we weren’t having p–presents,” hiccuped Daisy.

  “Not having presents? Who said that?”

  “J–Jazz did.”

  “I didn’t really,” said Jazz. “I was being Jo from Little Women. But I didn’t think we’d be able to afford expensive ones.”

  “No, we can’t,” agreed Mum. “But that needn’t stop us having fun!”

  “What, with the Queen of the Soaps?” muttered Laurel, gloomily, only she waited till Mum was running water into the sink and couldn’t hear.

  “We’ve got the play,” mouthed Jazz.

  Jazz had worked them hard on the play. Like true professionals – they weren’t Mum and Dad’s daughters for nothing – they had all set to and managed to learn their lines, even Daisy. Laurel, as promised, had concocted costumes. She had found a stack of wire coat hangers and turned them into hoops. Over the hoops they wore their longest skirts, with their school blouses demurely buttoned right up to the neck and one of Mum’s large flowery scarves draped over their shoulders and tied, cross-wise. Jazz had been really impressed.

  “Never mind being a fashion model,” she told Laurel. “You ought to be a designer!”

  “Well, maybe I’ll be both,” said Laurel, who was secretly rather impressed with herself. “It’s just a pity you haven’t got long hair. Short hair ruins the effect!”

  “Can’t be helped,” said Jazz. “We can’t afford wigs.”

  There was a pause.

  “Mum’s got a wig,” said Laurel.

  Jazz giggled. “But it’s blonde!”

  “We could always dye it.”

  “Dye it?” Bold though she was, even Jazz shrank from the thought of dyeing Mum’s wig. It was what she wore for auditions when they wanted someone young and glamorous. It had cost a lot of money, that wig.

  “Well, we could,” said Laurel. “After all, it’s real hair.”

  “What about the others?”

  “They don’t matter so much. You’re the important one! You’re the lead.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to manage without,” said Jazz. “It’ll be a test of my acting.”

  On Christmas Eve, they put the presents under the tree.

  In some ways,” said Mum, “lots of little things are more fun than just one big one.”

  “Yes, they are,” said Daisy, loyally. “They take longer to open.”

  “Who are these from?” said Laurel, taking out four brightly-coloured packages from the box where Mum had been storing them. “Oh!” A rush of colour burned her cheeks. “They’re from Dad! And oh, look!” she cried, delving back into the box. “He’s sent you one, as well!”

  “Yes, I saw,” said Mum.

  “I know what these are,” said Rose, shuffling envelopes like playing cards. “These are from Nan.”

  Nan always sent them money – new, crisp £20 notes. She lived in Malta, so they very rarely saw her. She hadn’t approved of Mum becoming an actress and she hadn’t approved of her marrying Dad and she hadn’t approved of her having four children “without visible means of support". Nan always said that Dad ought to go out and get himself a proper job, which made Mum angry, even though she and Dad had quarrelled about money.

  “Why should he be the one who’s expected to go out and get a proper job and not me?”

  In any case, as Jazz pointed out, acting was a proper job – when you could get it. Mum had worked six days a week, sometimes all day and half the night, while she had been in Icing. And sometimes in rep, she told them, when they were striking one set and putting up another, she had worked twenty-four hours without a break. Let Nan try saying that wasn’t a proper job!

  She was the only nan they had, unfortunately. Dad had been an orphan, brought up in foster homes. Jazz often thought longingly of how it would be to have a cosy, cuddly sort of nan like you read about in books. Carmel, her best friend at school, had a nan like that.

  “We are so short on relatives,” sighed Jazz, surveying the little mound of packets and parcels at the foot of the tree.

  “Sorry, I’m sure,” said Mum. “I couldn’t help being an only child.”

  “Is that why you had the four of us?” said Rose. She didn’t exactly say it accusingly, but she did sound rather stern.

  “Well … not exactly,” said Mum. “You can blame your dad for that. He w—”

  “Wanted a boy!”

  Jazz and Laurel chanted it together.

  “Men are so grungy,” said Rose. “I suppose it was him that chose all these stupid flower names for us?”

  She only asked because she wanted to hear Mum say it.

  “Yes, he used to call you his little flowers,” agreed Mum.

  “Vomit,” said Rose.

  Mum smiled. “It was rather sweet, at the time … oh, now, Daisy!” She pulled Daisy towards her. “Whatever is the matter, pet?”

  “If we’d b–been b–boys,” wept Daisy, “he m–might not have g–gone away!”

  “Darling, it was nothing to do with you not being boys! It was me he stopped loving, not you.”

  “And you stopped loving him,” said Rose.

  Mum frowned.

  “D–did you?” said Daisy.

  “Which of you stopped first?” Rose looked at Mum, challengingly. “You or Dad?”

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Mum patted Daisy on the head, then reached out a hand and began rather fussily to rearrange a rope of tinsel on the tree. “It’s not that simple. Relationships are things that grow, like people. They change, like people. But gradually.”

  “Like one morning you wake up and say, hey, I just realised! I don’t love this person any more? I’m just trying,” said Rose, “to understand.”

  “It’s not something I can really explain.” Mum looped the tinsel over a branch. “It’s something you have to discover for yourself.”

  “Not me!” declared Rose. “I’m never going to have a relationship.”

  “That would be sad,” said Mum. “Even though it may not have ended happily, your dad and I had a lot of good times together. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world! Apart from anything else,” she reminded them, “it’s given me four beautiful daughters.”

  Laurel preened. Rose said, “Vomit. I’m not beautiful.”

  “You’re not when you pull faces like that,” agreed Mum.

  Rose immediately crossed her eyes, let her mouth go slack and her tongue loll out. Daisy squeaked, “If the wind changes, you’ll get stuck like that!”

  “Who told you that rubbish?” scoffed Rose.

  Daisy hung her head. “It was Dad.”

  “It’s still rubbish,” muttered Rose.

  Lady Jayne arrived in time for coffee on Christmas morning. She started complaining the minute she walked through the door.

  “Do you know how much that cabbie had the nerve to charge me? Ten pounds! Ten pounds! For a fifteen-minute journey. Well, I’m sorry, I said, you’re not getting any tip out of me, I said. You can like it or lump it. Daylight robbery!”

  “Of course, they probably charge double at Christmas,” said Mum. “I should have come and picked you up. You should have asked me!”

  “No, Debs. My goodness, no! I wouldn’
t dream of it. You’ve got enough on your hands, coping with four children. These men!” Lady Jayne gave one of her famous sniffs. “Better off without them, if you ask me. Best not have anything to do with them in the first place.”

  “But then we wouldn’t be here,” pointed out Rose.

  “And a great loss to the world that would be, I’m sure!”

  Rose thought about it. ”Nobody would be here. We’d all die out!”

  “All right, clever clogs.” Lady Jayne gave her a little push. “I can see where you’re going to end up … Houses of Parliament, that’s where! Spouting hot air along with the rest of them.”

  “I might well become an MP,” said Rose. “It’s something I’ve considered.”

  “Heaven help us!” said Lady Jayne.

  Rose and Lady Jayne were always sparring with each other. Secretly, Jazz thought they rather enjoyed it.

  Over coffee they listened to Lady Jayne’s latest list of complaints. Mostly they were tales of how she had been done down or insulted.

  She had gone for an audition for a commercial and been kept waiting over an hour and then been told she was too young.

  “Too young! At my age!”

  “Well, I suppose it’s quite flattering, in a way,” said Mum.

  Jazz giggled, and hastily clapped a hand over her mouth. Lady Jayne said, “You can laugh, miss! You wait till you get to my age. And that’s another thing! I went for this interview for a telly part. Director was there. I thought he was the tea boy. Looked about twelve years old. Ms Crichton, he says to me. Ms Crichton, how much experience have you had? Well! I told him, in no uncertain terms. I’ve had more experience than you’ve had hot dinners, sonny! That put him in his place.”

  “Did you get the part?” said Jazz.

  “No, I did not, thank you very much for asking. Wouldn’t have wanted it, anyway.”

  “So why did you go for the interview?” said Rose.

  Mum cleared her throat, rather loudly. “I think we’ll open the presents, now.”

  “Yessss!” cried Laurel.

  “Daisy,” said Mum, “come and help me give them out.”

  “For the next ten minutes all that could be heard was the rustling of wrapping paper being ripped and scrunched, together with glad cries of “Oh! Brilliant! Just what I wanted!” plus the occasional sniff from Lady Jayne, who always found it difficult to be pleased about anything.