“We need to move the tree,” she said.
I’d been afraid of that. Tomás and Mateo were nearly finished redecorating Mother’s side of the tree. We couldn’t ask them to move it again.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I think the tree adds just the right touch. We only need a little less of it in the room. I’ll have Randall get someone to prune it back.”
I stepped into the hall and called. Randall didn’t answer, so I left a voice mail—one that wouldn’t offend Linda, in case she was eavesdropping.
Then I stepped back into the dining room. Linda had turned her back on the invading vegetation and was sitting on one of her chintz-covered dining room chairs, threading red and gold beads and green holly leaves onto a string to make a garland.
“So,” I said. “Apart from the branches, how’s it going?”
“Fine.” She looked up and gave me a tight little smile. The kind of smile that’s supposed to say “Don’t worry, everything’s fine,” but makes you pretty sure everything isn’t. “Just need to add those few Christmassy touches,” she went on. “I’m essentially finished with the room itself.”
For my taste, she should have declared it finished a week ago. It was a big dining room, but now it felt small and claustrophobic. There were too many things here. Too much going on. Too many small bits of furniture. Too many precisely arranged groups of small prints or decorative plates on the wall. Too many whatnots containing too many delicate tchotchkes. And above all, too many different chintz prints. One for the wallpaper. A similar but not-quite-matching one for the curtains. A third print for the dining room chair seats. Yet another for the occasional chair in the corner, not to mention another for the skirt covering the side table. Even the rug had a busy pattern all too reminiscent of chintz. I knew the effect she was aiming for—she’d told me the first time I met her.
“I like that cluttered, homey, English country look,” she’d said. “Where it doesn’t look as if everything was bought as a set, all matchy-matchy. Where the family just accumulates objects it loves, over the centuries, and doesn’t care whether they’re supposed to go together.”
I had liked the sound of that. I’d expected something low-key and comfortable. Unfortunately, her room looked more as if she’d found a sale on chintz remnants and handed them over to a crew of blind seamstresses.
Of course, I made no pretense of understanding decorating trends, so for all I knew this could be the coming thing. Total sensory overload as a decorating strategy. Maybe I’d be seeing rooms like this in all of Mother’s decorating magazines, if I ever bothered reading them.
Then again, there was hope. Mother hated Linda’s room, I reminded myself, as I gazed at the offending spruce branches.
Linda herself didn’t match the room at all. She was an attractive woman of forty-five or fifty, and I could tell her skirt and sweater were not cheap, but the overall effect was drab and lugubrious.
But she was pleasant and undemanding and went about her decorating business without any of the angst and drama that seemed part of the process for so many of the other designers, so on the whole, I liked her.
A stack of cardboard boxes sat in one corner, all with the words “Christmas ornaments” scrawled on them in one place or another.
“Oh, dear,” I said. “Did you have to bring in your own personal Christmas decorations to cope with the tree?”
“Yes, but that’s not a problem,” she said. “I’m not going to do a tree this year anyway. There’s just me, and I won’t be home enough to really enjoy it. The tree here’s a godsend. I was worried that the room wasn’t turning out Christmassy enough.”
Not Christmassy enough? She’d already looped red, green, and gold garlands, like the one she was making, along the crown molding all around the room near the ceiling. Tucked sheaves of holly and ivy behind every picture. Covered the table with a red-and-green holly print table runner. Scattered china elves and angels along the runner. And placed both wreaths and battery-operated candles in the two windows. To me, the as-yet undecorated branches of the Christmas tree poking through the archway were the one soothing, peaceful, truly beautiful element in the room.
“Don’t work yourself into a frazzle,” I said. “We women are all too prone to do that around Christmas. Take care of yourself.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me,” she said. But I was startled to see that there were tears in her eyes. She bowed her head over her work, clearly not wanting me to see the tears.