Coming Home to Me This Christmas

2. Bridegroom Oak-1

2

Bridegroom Oak

Until they boarded the train, Karen didn’t consider it worth mentioning that the trip to Eutin and the tree known as Bridegroom Oak was rather longer than Emily might have liked for her last day of their holiday. As the train trundled north to Kiel, from where they needed to change for Eutin, Emily had plenty of time to reflect on what had happened over the last few months to bring her here.

Her grandmother, Elaine Margaret Wilson, had passed away on October 1st, at the ripe old age of eighty-seven. She had died happy, in her sleep, after a pleasant evening of dinner and card games with her granddaughter, who had been sleeping in the adjacent room. Emily’s shock at finding her grandmother the next morning, seemingly asleep but with a gentle smile on her face, might have been ameliorated by the fact that it was not wholly unexpected; Elaine had been elderly, and by her own admission had not been long for the world.

Really Emily, at the age of twenty-nine, should have been happy that twenty-seven years had passed between the two major tragedies in her life, but it was the ensuing circumstances which continued to cause her the most distress.

‘She was my only family,’ she said to Karen, sitting across the table from her in the train’s buffet car. Karen, as attentive as ever, nodded with understanding, even though she already knew the details so well she could have written the book on Emily’s life.

‘After my parents died in the crash, she brought me up.’ Emily sighed. ‘I don’t even remember them, even when I see photographs. They’re just people, little more than strangers. My grandmother was my whole life.’

With her own husband—Emily’s maternal grandfather—having passed away early in life, Elaine had thrown herself into a second parenthood at the age of sixty, bringing Emily up with such ease that Emily considered her a grandmother in name only; Elaine had been father, mother, siblings, best friend, and at times even teacher, all rolled into one. And later, after university, when Emily returned to her home town to help her aging grandmother in her teahouse, Elaine had been manager.

The void her passing left in Emily’s life was barely comprehensible.

‘What about your grandparents on your dad’s side?’

Emily laughed. ‘I’ve met them once, when I was fourteen. They were heading to France in a campervan and they parked in our driveway for a night. After they went off to Europe, I don’t think they ever came back. For a few years we got a Christmas card from them, with unusual postmarks—Denmark, Latvia, once even Kazakhstan. The last one came when I was nineteen. I don’t know what happened to them after that.’

‘And you’ve got no cousins, have you?’

Emily sighed. ‘Both Dad and Mum were only children.’ She tried to smile, but the next line came out as barely more than a whisper, as she fought to hold back tears: ‘Nope. I’m quite alone in the world.’

Karen patted her hand. ‘A good job you’ve got me.’

Emily wiped away a tear, and was about to say something ridiculously sentimental when an announcement came over the loudspeaker that they were entering Kiel Station.

‘This is us,’ Karen said. ‘Not long to go now.’

* * * *

After changing to a commuter train, they reached Eutin an hour later. A pretty little town made even prettier by the Christmas tree standing in a square outside the station, and the strings of fairy lights on local businesses, Karen pointed out that they didn’t have time to linger if they wanted to get to the Bridegroom Oak before it got dark.

They found a taxi rank outside the station and climbed into the nearest.

‘Bridegroom Oak,’ Karen told the driver, an elderly German man.

‘Ah, you looking for love?’ he said with a grin. ‘Two pretty girls like you? What the world coming to, eh?’

With another chuckle he pulled them out into traffic, tapping on the wheel in time to a Christmas song playing at low volume on the radio.

‘What on earth have you got us into?’ Emily whispered.

Karen just smiled. ‘You’ll see.’