God rest you merry, merchants,
May you make the Yuletide pay!
Tom Lehrer
‘A Christmas Carol’
Daniel and I went to bed and slept. I woke at four and did my favourite Saturday thing—well, second favourite, now that Daniel had arrived in my life—which was to turn over and go back to sleep. The rain got on with its task of filling the dams and Corinna got on with cashing in her sleep debt.
At ten or so we rose languidly, bathed sumptuously, ate sourdough toast and drank coffee. I was just luxuriating in the cool air coming through the open window when I remembered, dammit, I had to go to one of the big shops and buy Christmas decorations. For the shop. I was feeling conspicuous when all the others had them. Even the Lone Gunmen, our very own Geeks
Unlimited, who I would have thought had not a festive bone in their collective chilli-sauce-stained bodies, had a wreath on the door neatly framing the ad for a new game, Universal Slaughter.
On cue, the sweet voices came seeping up from the wine cellar.
‘
And offer’d there, in his presence
Their gold and myrrh and frankincense.
Nowell, Nowell, Nowell
—no, no, you’re flat, sopranos! Sarah, what have you been smoking? Cigars?’
There was a shriek of outrage, and Daniel laughed, so I laughed too. But not heartily. While the voices bickered about the pitch of the soprano voices, I found clothes and reluctantly donned them. Stout sandals. Loose Indian shirt and jeans. Strong straw hat, attached by robust cord under my chin. Large cloth bag. Purse. Sunglasses. Sunscreen. Umbrella. It was coolly shiny outside but I did not trust it for a moment.
Daniel offered but I refused his assistance. Misery is supposed to love company but I wasn’t taking an innocent Jewish boy into the front lines of Christendom. He might find himself a starring role in a merry Yule re-enactment of the Sack of Jerusalem by the Emperor Titus with a supporting cast, the Roman army.
Horatio had already resumed his little all-day nap on the coffee table as I went out into the street, wincing at the light and the heat. I hate summer, did I mention it?
And as I turned into the main street my ears were assailed and my patience began to evaporate. I kept my feet in the lunchtime crowd only by hanging onto the lamp-post as the grim Christmas hordes ramped past and damn near over me and the music jingled and rattled.
‘Oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh!’ declared one shop, selling DVDs of mayhem and murder. The staff of which would not know a sleigh unless someone had been slain in
it … My sense of humour was degenerating. One who makes a pun would pick a pocket, as Stephen Maturin would say. Doubtless the real pickpockets were also out in force in this melee. They probably loved Christmas shopping.
Up the steps and into the biggest store in Melbourne, and up the escalator to the Christmas decorations, and they were all ghastly. Trash made by slave labour in China. Expensive trash, too. I wondered what had happened to the old blown-glass bubbles and wooden figurines from my own childhood. I had probably given them away. I found that I could indeed have blown-glass bubbles, if I felt like mortgaging Earthly Delights.
Pausing in exasperation, I noticed a sign saying
TO THE CRIB
and followed it, to stand becalmed in a sea of knee-high excitement. And it was rather pretty. A square had been fenced off and an open-fronted stable built. In it were the holy family, a girl in a blue mantle, an older man and a small child, which was screaming its head off. Even the baby Jesus had his off days. Surrounding them were animals. A donkey, a calf, a few sheep and goats, some chooks and ducks and a sleeping dog completed the picture. Only the goats looked comfortable. Goats always look comfortable, due to their cat-like conviction that they are masters of a universe which was built specifically for goats.
The greedy grabbing hands of the children sank into sheep’s wool and snatched at feathery tails, but never got near the goats. Likewise the shrieks and tantrums of the spectators did not seem to disturb them, while the rest of the animals were looking stressed, shifting from hoof to hoof. That calf was too young to be away from its mother, I thought, and the ducks had no water.
‘They die a fair bit,’ said someone near my ear. He was not speaking to me. A man in shorts and a T-shirt which proclaimed him an habitué of Club Med was speaking to a man in a suit.
‘Trick is to get ’em out before the kiddies notice. Ducks’d last a bit longer if you’d let me put in a duck pond.’
‘Too messy,’ said the suit.
‘Ah well, I’ll just bring in a couple more bantams. Kids yesterday mauled ’em. You don’t want your Christmas crib with bald fowls, do you? And I’ll pack up the deceased.’
‘What do you do with them?’ asked the suit.
The man in the shorts grinned. ‘Roasted. With orange sauce.’
I was disgusted. Those animal-rights people would have things to say about this, I thought. On the other hand, I could approve of eating the deceased duck, since it was deceased. I have never liked waste. I beguiled my time in wondering what the freegans would make of a dead duck, and realised that they too would be hoping to find a few discarded oranges. The baby Jesus was still crying and I was not far from it. The donkey looked me full in the face and twitched her ears miserably. The baby calf lowed and tried to eat a mouthful of hay. The air was heavy with the smell of dung and humans. A child plastered his ice cream on my thigh and screamed.
At last the mob of moppets moved along and I was free and able to remove myself from the crib, the floor and eventually from the shop, having bought nothing. I did get a nice gust of Arpège on the way out, though.
I was partially deaf and very hot and there seemed nothing else to do but walk back to Insula as fast as was comfortable in the heat. My hat was drooping and so was I as I pushed open the front door and dead-heated Mrs Dawson, looking disgustingly fresh and cool in ivory linen. All she lacked was a solar topee to be the complete memsahib.
‘Corinna, dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘Come up to my apartment for a nice cool drink?’
‘Thanks,’ I muttered, dragging off the hat and losing my last hairpin. My hair fell ragged and wet around my face and I shoved at it. It was just long enough to be annoying. I briefly contemplated shaving my head.
‘You look like you have been in combat,’ she said, leading the way to the lift.
‘I have been trying to buy Christmas decorations,’ I told her. ‘Behold my success.’ I displayed my empty hands.
‘Oh, my, you should have said.’ She opened her door and ushered me into a cool parlour. ‘Sit down now and I’ll get us a gin and tonic. My son has just sent back to me the family box of decorations. The children don’t like them, he says. Too old-fashioned. Too breakable. If you would like to take them off my hands I would be delighted. I’ve put up the ones I really love.’
I saw that she had. There was a little crib with hand-carved wooden figures. There was a delicate set of Viennese candle chimes, little golden angels, which would revolve and ring when the tiny candles were lit. Two tall elegant porcelain angels, one with a trumpet, one with a scroll. And there was a superb set of glass bubbles, hung from a branch of pine fixed to the mantelpiece.
Mrs Dawson gave me an icy glass and produced a large cardboard box. It seemed rude to fall on it and rummage so I sipped my drink. Mrs Dawson leant over me, gathered up my hair and fastened it both securely and comfortably on top of my head, something I have never been able to do. She is an example to us all.
The drink was generous and I began to feel my coiled nerves unwinding. The soft Christmas carollers through the walls were sweet, singing in perfect harmony a song about the holly and the ivy.
‘There,’ said Mrs Dawson—one day I am going to be easy about calling her Sylvia. ‘If you haul your hair up and coil it on
the top, you can keep it out of your eyes and it looks, I must say, very good. Actually, you are doing me a favour, Corinna. I was feeling sad and lonely with the Christmas decorations returned. I have had a very long and happy life and there are memories in all of them. And now my husband is gone and my children are living their own lives and here am I. I don’t often feel lonely and I really don’t like the feeling.’
‘You could acquire a cat,’ I suggested. ‘You never feel lonely with a cat. Or a particularly lovely little dog, like Therese’s King Charles spaniel, Carolus. People also speak highly of birds and I have one friend who is devoted to her fish. Tetras. Little neon fish.’
‘An idea,’ she said diplomatically. ‘I thought that I would be away from home much more than I have been.’
‘Well, what say you settle for a half-share in Nox the black kitten and an unashamed wallow in nostalgia?’ I offered. ‘I’m not expected back for hours. Break out the gin again and let’s open the box.’
‘Accepted with pleasure,’ she told me. She poured us another drink from a frosted jug and opened the box.
They were a representative collection, I saw, laying them out on the sofa one by one. The neon shiny fifties’ balls, made of something other than glass. The plaster Indian decorations of the sixties—all animals, camels, elephants, studded with little mirrors and glittering like stars. The woven tinsel bells and wire stars of the eighties. The cool wooden and straw Scandinavian decorations of the nineties, which were the most recent. And the inherited ones, hand-blown glass and elaborate Victorian ice-drop decorations, with places inside for candles, in which Mr Scrooge might have seen his scowling face. Beautiful silken flower wreaths and meticulously cut Chinese hanging fantasies. And the fairy in a feather skirt for the top of the tree.
Every one had a story and Sylvia—I managed it!—recalled
them all as she handled each and laid it back in its wrappings. I soon got lost among the relatives and the children and the parties but she was right, it had been a long and happy life. We were both crying as the last one, the fairy, was put back in the box.
Mrs Dawson wiped her face, laughed a little, and poured us another drink.
‘Thank you, dear,’ she said. ‘I feel much better. Now, tell me, what are you working on at present?’
She clearly wanted something else to think about and so did I. I told her the strange tale of the pregnant girl and her descent from the second floor of her prison house. Sylvia shook her head.
‘No, dear, she couldn’t have. I’ve been that pregnant three times and, although I managed to stay fairly active, I could not have climbed down a rope. One has no sense of balance, you see—one is all belly. And she was carrying a rabbit as well? No. However she got out of the house, it wasn’t like that.’
‘I’ve never been pregnant,’ I said slowly. ‘But of course you are right. The rope was a decoy. She must have just walked down the stairs. But who, in that case, let her out, risking her parents’ wrath?’
‘A servant, perhaps, felt sorry for her. Children in those wealthy households depend more on the staff than on their parents. The housekeeper is always there, you see, when they come home from school. They tend to live in the kitchen, poor mites. I was determined that my children should not lose sight of their parents, and we made time to tell stories and play games and I was always home when they came in from school.’
‘A good point. I don’t know if Daniel has spoken to the staff.’
‘Or there is the gardener,’ she added. ‘Since she fell in love with the gardener’s boy. Or there is her little sister. I do hope you find her,’ she added, as I stood up and she put the box into my arms. ‘She could die giving birth in the street. Poor girl. Some
families,’ she added, opening the door for me, ‘should not be allowed to have children.’
I arrived at my own apartment and rang the bell, because I could not reach around my armload to use the key. Almost like a pregnant belly, in fact, and I saw Mrs Dawson’s point.
I was a trifle woozy with gin during the day, but very pleased.
Daniel answered the door and took the box.
‘I like your hair like that,’ he commented. ‘Have you been to a salon?’
‘No, Mrs Dawson’s. Those are her family decorations. Just let me see what I actually look like,’ I said, passing him on the way to the bathroom, ‘and then I have a tale to unfold.’
I looked good. I had never thought of just coiling the hair up on the top of my head, or if I had, I would have assumed that I would resemble Wilma Flintstone. Instead it looked both cool and comfortable and I approved. When I went back to unfold my tale, Daniel had made me a fruit juice and ice drink. He buys all these strange juices from a bulk discount grocery store. Today’s was delicious.
‘What is it?’ I asked, rolling it round my mouth.
‘Serbian apricot,’ he replied. ‘With a judicious admixture of Malaysian strawberry juice and soda water. I’ve put the decorations on the table. What is this tale?’
‘Ah,’ I said wisely, and told him Mrs Dawson’s opinion of the likelihood of Brigid getting down that rope.
‘I hadn’t thought of that, but then, I haven’t been pregnant either,’ he commented. ‘Time to go and talk to the household, and especially to Brigid’s little sister, Dolores. Trouble is, the last time I tried to talk to her she just goggled at me.’
‘Well, you are gorgeous,’ I said soothingly. Daniel often forgets this.
‘Thank you, but it won’t help in unlocking that little parcel.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ I exclaimed, sipping more Serbian Surprise. ‘I don’t know anything about girls.’
‘Nonsense, you manage Kylie and Goss.’
‘And we need one of them,’ I told him. ‘Fourteen to twenty-one is a long way, but Goss knows the dialect. Ideally we need to separate the girl from her parents.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Daniel. ‘I happen to know that Mr and Mrs O’Ryan are in Canberra at some evangelical convention this weekend.’
‘Leaving a fourteen-year-old home alone?’ I asked.
‘No, there’s a housekeeper. Nice woman, brisk and sensible. Sandra? Sarah? I’ll get my notes. Then we can have a briefing with Goss or Kylie. Which one, do you think?’
‘Goss is more intelligent,’ I shrugged. ‘I think. Then again, Kylie can be surprisingly shrewd in her own way. I’ll see who’s home, if either. They could always do with some extra money,’ I added meaningly.