by Eva Ibbotson
And she told the story. Told it so that Frau Fischer had to move over to the velvet window curtain and hide her face. Told it so that the sound of Herr Doktor Fischer’s footsteps, the squeak of Cousin Poldi’s returning button boots, were almost an intrusion.
No one said anything. Only when at last the great doors did open and Vicky moved forward to follow Fritzl and the ecstatically tottering twins into the room, her mother held her back.
‘No, Vicky,’ she said softly, ‘let the children go in first. We adults . . . we adults will come on afterwards.’
And then very slowly, she led her daughter forward towards the shining glory of the tree.
The Christmas Star
The story I’m going to tell you is definitely going to be a Christmas story. I mean it will have holly in it and mistletoe and so on (though also one or two other things, like a Finn, three Malawians and a lady with goose pimples). And of course a love interest, because I realized some time ago that if I wanted to earn my living by my pen it would be no good Spurning Romance. It is also a warm-hearted family saga. At least, I hope it is. You can never be absolutely certain with my family.
Actually my family has been a great disappointment to me. At the minute I’m only fifteen and busy with my O levels, but I intend to publish my first novel when I’m nineteen so that I shall still look good on the dust jacket. And of course normally I’d have relied on my home life to provide me with raw material: brooding jealousies, intolerable tensions, all that kind of thing. Instead of which my mother (who ought to be utterly torn about her role as a woman) is nutty about my father, who teaches biology at the local Grammar School and is not only not sexually obsessed by a Swedish au pair girl but gets terribly depressed if my mother even takes him to a Swedish film and only wakes up when the supporting film comes on and people start shooting each other. Then there’s Tina, who’s nineteen and at the university here and is very pretty with long, blonde hair and peat-boggish sort of eyes. Obviously what Tina ought to be doing is reacting frantically against Mum and Dad and staying out all night. Whereas what Tina likes best is to come home early from college and watch old musicals on TV with her knitting. I suppose my brother Rickie . . . well, he could be torn with Freudian frustrations; there’s always hope. I mean he’s only eight and who knows what’s going on inside him, but I must say he seems disgustingly ordinary. So you see what, as a sensitive feminist novelist, I am up against.
However, to return to Christmas. Christmas with us starts in the middle of November with my mother ringing up her friends, and her friends ringing up my mother. My mother has a lot of friends, and when Rickie and I come in from school at teatime we hear her telling them that this year Christmas is going to be different. This year they’re all going to be sensible and economical, and not drive themselves mad. And then there is a long pause which is her friends telling her the same thing back.
After that comes the Christmas Row. The Christmas Row is between my mother and my father and is about how it isn’t necessary for us to go bankrupt every year and that if my mother didn’t think she was a cross between a bottomless cornucopia and Paul Getty we might hope to go on surviving into January and February or even March. The row ends with Dad striding out of the house and Mother tidying things, which she only does when she’s very far gone, and is followed by the Reconciliation, which is both of them saying how foul they are and Mother deciding to economize by not sending a Christmas card to the fishmonger’s son but only the fishmonger.
The next thing after that is that all of us go to the German Bazaar. And that is where this year our Christmas began to go a trifle off the rails.
The German Bazaar is run by the Lutheran Church in our town (which is a medium-sized provincial one, a bit sooty but with a wide river and ships hooting up it in the night) and we go there to get things like Advent rings (which are beautiful fir wreaths with four candles, one for each Sunday in Advent) and Advent calendars that don’t have little Noddy-type characters on them but proper golden angels, and silver frosting, and stars.
This year, however, they had a big money drive on for repairs to the church, so as well as the usual stuff like gingerbread houses and embroidered aprons and cinnamon cakes there were lots of extra stalls and raffles and things.
And there was this rather plump girl in a dirndl, standing by this booth.
‘Poor thing,’ said my mother, ‘she looks cold.’
Actually she did, in those short puffed sleeves. Also fat, and rather sad.
‘Perhaps we ought to go and see what she’s doing,’ said my mother – at which point Father, who has a nose for trouble, bolted cravenly to the Pickled Gherkin Stall. The rest of us, however, trotted obediently along.
Well, what this cold, sad German girl was doing, it turned out, was telling fortunes. It wasn’t, she said, what she should have been doing. What she should have been doing on the last day of November (which is what this was) was standing under a plum tree waiting for a dog to bark, which was an old German custom and would tell her from what direction her future husband was due to arrive. But the town, she said, was short of plum trees and in any case she was already married to Herr König who kept the Delicatessen and so the Herr Pastor had told her to tell fortunes instead.
At which point we should all have gone firmly away, because in my view it is fatal to meddle with the gods, always has been, always will. However, try explaining this to my mother.
‘In you go, Janey,’ she said, pressing half a crown into the plump girl’s hand, and pushed me into the booth.
My fortune was pretty dull. Dark men, long life, that kind of thing. One bit however was interesting. ‘You shall have soon some money,’ said the fat girl, the goose pimples rising like igloos on her arm. ‘Very soon. Before Christmas there comes to you this money. Is gut, yes?’
I said yes, and went out to tell the others. The mention of money cheered Rickie, and when Mother handed over another half-crown and pushed him in, he went quite willingly.
‘A voyage,’ he said when he came out, looking extremely pleased. ‘A long, long voyage with adventures in it. Soon. Before Christmas I shouldn’t wonder.’
Then it was Tina’s turn. ‘Don’t tell me,’ said Mother when she came out. ‘Wedding Bells!’
Tina nodded smugly. ‘Who?’ demanded my mother, who has been gunning for ages for a boy called Andy Young, who lives down the road and is training to be a musician.
‘Well,’ Tina said thoughtfully, ‘Actually . . . a Finn.’
‘A Finn!’
‘Well, I think so. She said a handsome blue-eyed man from a far northern land where the sea freezes in winter. I thought at first it might be a Russian, but I don’t think they’d let anyone through the Iron Curtain just to marry me, do you?’
Mother said she doubted if they’d do anything so sensible and went into the booth. She was only in for a short time and when she came out she was blushing.
‘Come on,’ we said, ‘give!’
But Mother absolutely wouldn’t. I suppose it should have struck us then that something pretty odd was going on, because the difficulty with my mother isn’t getting her to tell you things, it’s getting her to stop.
I need hardly say that the matter of the fat German lady passed completely from our minds. I mean, if someone who themselves admitted that they should have been standing under a plum tree waiting for dogs to bark told your fortune, I doubt if you’d take much notice, especially if they were covered in goose pimples at the time.
Anyway, I was suffering very deeply with my end-of-term exams and Tina was writing terrible essays about tribes like the Hehe and the Mumu, whose customs were inclined to put her off her food. (When Tina got to university they gave her a lot of forms to fill up and when she’d finished she found she was reading Social Anthropology.) She also went to a lot of Christmas Dances with Andy Young, the music student Mother is gunning for. Meanwhile the vicar had chosen Rickie to be ‘A Boy’ in the Carol Service on Christmas Eve and whenever I tru
dged in late he was standing at the top of the stairs doing his bit of Isaiah 9: 2, 6, 7, and Dad was standing at the bottom saying, ‘Don’t shout, Rickie, project! Project!’ which was all right except for the gaps in Rickie’s teeth, which made it uncertain just what was going to be projected.
And then suddenly the exams were over. And on that day, as I trudged home through the last of the piled-up leaves, my foot bumped against something.
It was an old-fashioned leather purse. And inside, when I opened it, were thirty pounds in notes!
As you can imagine, I wasn’t exactly pleased. I was tired and hungry and the police station was half a mile in the opposite direction. However, when I got there I had a nice surprise. The sergeant took my name and address and then he said if the purse wasn’t claimed within three months it would be mine. It was extraordinary, he said, how often people didn’t claim things, and he would let me know.
I went home dreaming of a dove-grey portable typewriter yielding to my lightest touch. But it wasn’t till we were all together at tea that Rickie produced an angle that I hadn’t thought of.
‘Well, the goose-pimple lady was right about you, anyway,’ he said.
Needless to say I didn’t take much notice; Rickie after all is my brother. However about a week later something happened which really did shake me a bit.
Tina had gone to a party with Andy Young and some other friends. When Tina stays out late, Mother sits up Not Being Worried. Mother Not Being Worried is such a heart-rending sight that Dad or I usually take it in turns to go through it with her. My exams being over, it was me.
We could see there was something a bit odd about Tina as soon as she came in. She had a glazed, dreamy, rather awed look in her eyes – a look that didn’t seem to be due to nice ordinary Andy Young.
‘I met,’ she said, ‘the most fantastic man.’
I like to think that I knew what was coming, but actually I didn’t.
‘Who was he, love?’ asked Mother, beaming.
‘Well,’ said Tina in rather an odd sort of voice. ‘As a matter of fact, he was a Finn.’
She brought him to tea a couple of days later and one had to admit that Tina had not exaggerated. Niklasson Nefzelius was tall and blond with light blue eyes which seemed to reflect the unmoving waters of one of his native lakes. He was beautifully dressed, mostly in those pale, clean Scandinavian mackintoshes and in fact had no drawbacks at all except for a complete inability to speak English. This was unusual in a Finn but it was just our bad luck that Niklasson had been educated in a private school which had decided that the British were done for and had taught him a lot of other languages instead.
‘What does he do?’ my father enquired. ‘I mean, what’s his job?’
Tina pulled out a piece of paper. It had on it a large number of tubes all curled up together. They could have been sewage pipes, frankfurter sausages or some subtle chemical experiment, but what they were was Niklasson Nefzelius explaining to her what he did.
In the days that followed, Tina’s dazed and glazed look persisted. She said that there was obviously more in this fortune-telling business than we believed, and even took a book out of the library on German Christmas customs. As a result of this she went to bed one night with her feet on the pillow and her head on the bottom of the bed because if you did this during Advent it was supposed to make you dream of your future husband. When she came down next morning she said she’d dreamed she was eating scrambled eggs on top of a Number Fourteen Bus.
‘Who with?’ demanded my mother.
Tina said she couldn’t see his face but he’d been wearing a pale mackintosh and worrying about getting egg on it. After which she went off to do some Christmas shopping and Mother and I stacked the breakfast dishes in a gloomy silence because not even by the remotest stretch of the imagination could we imagine Andy Young worrying about egg on his mackintosh. Andy Young didn’t wear a mackintosh and, if he had done, was most unlikely to worry about getting egg on it.
Meanwhile Christmas, in the way that it does, suddenly got its bit between its teeth. Mother and her friends still rang each other up but now it was to say that next year they wouldn’t drive themselves mad. The Christmas tree arrived and got stuck in the door and Mother said that if Father was going to use language like that it made a Mockery of the Whole Festival and Tina asked three Malawians to Christmas Dinner.
It was in the middle of all this that we suddenly realized how oddly Rickie was carrying on. We’d find him crouched in the garden at night, trying to adjust his Woolworth compass by the stars, or in the bathroom rubbing vinegar into his feet to harden them. But it wasn’t till Mother showed me his letter to Santa Claus that I realized what was up.
‘Dear Santa,’ it said, ‘Please can I have some (lots) of pakets of supe and some vetamin pills and some ships biscits and if youve some money left some boots with nales in (Sined) Rickie.’
‘What do you make of that, Janey?’ asked my mother.
‘Don’t you see?’ I said, horrified, ‘The plum-tree lady said I’d find some money and I did, and she said Tina would meet a Finn and she did. So of course he thinks what she foretold for him will come true also.’
‘A long voyage!’ said my mother, clutching her forehead. ‘Oh my God!’
The next day she went out and sold her amethyst brooch and bought a space rocket and a game of table football in addition to the pile of presents she’d already hidden for Rickie on top of the wardrobe. All the same we all knew that when you have expected to go on a Long Voyage with ship’s biscuits and nailed boots, not even twenty-seven games of table football will compensate for your disappointment. And this was the way matters stood on Christmas Eve.
Christmas Eve, if you remember, was Rickie’s Big Day when he was being ‘A Boy’ in the Carols by Candlelight Service. So at five thirty we all wrapped ourselves up and went off to church with a big box of Kleenex tissues for Mother to weep into when Rickie started on his bit of Isaiah 9: 2, 6, 7. Andy Young was playing the organ and we sang ‘Unto Us a Boy Is Born’ and ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ and then Rickie went forward and climbed on to the lectern. Only his head didn’t nearly reach to the top and all we could see was this slither of fair hair in the dark church, and I have to admit that he hadn’t got past ‘The people that walked in darkness’ before not just Mother but all of us were diving for the Kleenex. And it was at that point that I realized suddenly that Rickie didn’t have to be disappointed about his voyage because it was in my power to put things right.
Afterwards Tina went off to meet her Finn and we went home and got Rickie to bed and helped him to hang up his stocking.
When Tina returned, she looked odd. Niklasson had taken her, she said, to a Scandinavian restaurant and the waiter had brought some small white nasty drinks which was what they had in Finland to help them with the winter solstice. After that everything swam about, she said, and Niklasson had got out his dictionary and taken her hand and drawn things. Then she took out a piece of paper. On the paper was a picture of a girl with long hair very like Tina, and the word ‘wife’. There was also the word ‘yes’ and the word ‘no’. The word ‘no’ was crossed out. Tina said she thought she’d done it.
‘Oh my God,’ said my mother. ‘Tina, you’re engaged.’
Tina said she supposed she was. She said you never really knew about fat ladies at bazaars who ought to have been standing under plum trees and she supposed it was all meant. She said she was sure she was going to be very happy and why was there never a handkerchief in this house when one needed one.
So then we opened some cooking sherry and kept telling Tina how thrilled we were, honestly, and Mother said she was sure she would be able to learn enough Finnish to tell her grandchildren the story of the Three Bears, it just might take a little time.
But my last memory of Christmas Eve wasn’t of Tina’s engagement or of us creeping in to fill Rickie’s stocking. It was of Mother standing in the bathroom in her dressing gown, looking wild and distraught
and dabbing eau de cologne behind her ears. ‘She obviously had second sight, that woman,’ she said, gazing at me unseeingly. ‘It seems to me I might just as well give up struggling.’ And with a last dab at the eau de cologne she tottered off towards her bed.
The morning of Christmas Day was beautiful and crisp and clear, with that marvellous silence you only seem to get on that particular morning. When I’d opened my own stocking, which was most satisfactory in every way, I did what I always do on Christmas Morning; I went along to Rickie’s room.
The usual thing on Christmas Day is Rickie bouncing about in bed on a pile of shattered coloured paper, and a noise like thunder which is him banging and thumping and rattling with his toys.
Today no sound came from his door. When I opened it I found him lying flat on the pillow like a child in hospital. His bulging stocking was unopened, and tears were streaming down his face.
‘Rickie!’ I said, trying to scoop him up. ‘Rickie, what’s the matter?’
No answer. Just more tears, desperately swallowed. Then suddenly of course I knew.
‘Rickie, it’s all right,’ I told him. ‘You are going on a voyage. I promise!’
And I explained my plan, which was to use the money in the purse I’d found (and which still hadn’t been claimed) to book him on a Children’s Trip to the Continent.
Rickie continued to gulp. He said he knew he was going on a long voyage. Everything else the plum-tree lady had foretold had come true so obviously this would too. It just struck him as pretty unusual, he said, for boys of eight to be sent on long voyages. Most people, he said, wanted to keep their boys at home when they were only eight years old. They liked to look after such boys, he said, and not push them out to places where they would get smashed up and eaten by crocodiles and miss the pantomime.
