The Christmas Star: A Festive Story Collection Read online

  ‘You mean . . . Rickie, you don’t want to go on this voyage?’

  Rickie said that wasn’t what he meant at all. He wanted to go on a long voyage very much. Only later when he was a proper age, like eighteen or something. After which he burst into tears again and said he wanted his mum.

  Well, that was easy. I hauled him out and shoved him into my parents’ room and Mother said he must be mad to think she’d let him out of the house let alone on a Long Voyage when we all depended on him so much, and Dad said he’d personally thump anyone who tried to take his son anywhere for at least ten years. Then Mother said had he liked his stocking and Rickie said actually he hadn’t opened it because he knew it was packets of soup and things and he’d keep it till he was eighteen. And Mother said did he really think Santa was so completely thick as to fill the stocking of an eight-year-old boy with packets of soup and would he please fetch it at once and bring it in. So that was all right.

  I was just going back to my room to put on some clothes when the doorbell rang. I was on the landing, but even so Tina got down first in her totally useless white broderie anglaise dressing gown, and it was Andy Young saying ‘Happy Christmas’ and giving her a bunch of Christmas roses.

  I don’t know if everyone is the same as I am about Christmas roses. Maybe it’s the legend of how they originated, springing out of the snow the night that Jesus was born, or maybe it’s just them: all those pale, uncoloured petals and delicate green veins. Anyway, I find Christmas roses somewhat moving and it must have been the same with Tina, because she took them and immediately burst into tears.

  Needless to say this had a devastating effect on Andy, who turned pale, put an arm round her and said he promised never to bring her Christmas roses again only would she please stop crying. So Tina said it wasn’t the Christmas roses but being properly engaged to a Finn and being in an awful muddle, and Andy was just taking his arm away and looking stricken when the bell rang again and it was the Finn.

  ‘Wife!’ said the Finn happily, grabbing Tina by the arm. ‘Wife! Yes!’

  And: ‘Yes! Yes! Here I haf come!’ said a lusty voice from behind him and out stepped a big blonde, long-haired girl, beaming all over her face. ‘You haf said I can come for the Christmas Feeding, yes? That is the English Hospitality! Thank you. Yesterday I haf flowed here in the aeroplane. How good you haf been to my Niki!’ said Mrs Nefzelius.

  If anyone tells you that Scandinavians are cold, don’t listen to them. Mrs Nefzelius kissed me and kissed Tina and kissed Andy. She kissed Mother and Rickie and would have kissed Dad only he got away, and when the three Malawians came, she kissed them. We had a terrifically gay Christmas Dinner and afterwards we lit the Advent ring and Mrs Niki pounced on it and put it on her head, flaming candles and all, which is what they do in Finland, like the Germans stand under a plum tree waiting for dogs to bark, and the Malawians nodded happily and said, ‘Very English is this Christmas. Very English.’ And I know you will not be surprised to hear that at this point the telephone rang and it was the police sergeant to say he was extremely sorry but an old lady who’d been laid up with pneumonia had claimed my purse.

  ‘That poor, silly plum-tree woman,’ said Tina later, ‘didn’t she mess it all up!’

  We’d got to the best bit of Christmas: the bit where everyone except the family has gone home (only Andy stayed; I guess he’s going to be the family) and you’ve put a handful of pine needles on the fire to scent the room, and everyone’s relaxed and peaceful.

  Father said that was hardly surprising. The only effect fortune telling had ever had, he said, was on the minds of credulous idiots like ourselves. There could never be any practical effects, he said, because it was all bunkum from beginning to end.

  Mother said she hoped so. She hoped so very much. And then, at last, she told us what the plum-tree lady had foretold for her.

  ‘Of course I didn’t believe it at first,’ she said. ‘But then when everything else seemed to be coming true . . . I just . . . well, I suppose I just gave in, you know how one does. But I expect it’ll be all right.’

  ‘I don’t,’ said Father in a voice of unspeakable gloom.

  And as so sadly and so often happens, Father was right. Not that we mind, really, now that we’re sort of used to the idea. As we keep telling each other when morale looks like cracking, the new baby’ll be company for Rickie. But one thing is certain: next Christmas, at the German Bazaar, no one in this family is moving one step from the Pickled Gherkin Stall!

  The Great Carp Ferdinand

  This is a true story, the story of a Christmas in Vienna in the years before the First World War. Not only is it a true story, it is a most dramatic one, involving love, conflict and (very nearly) death – and this despite the fact that the hero was a fish.

  Not any fish, of course: a mighty and formidable fish, the Great Carp Ferdinand. And if you think the story is exaggerated and that no fish, however mighty, could so profoundly affect the lives of a whole family, then you’re wrong. Because I have the facts first-hand from one of the participants, the ‘littlest niece’ in the story, the one whose feet, admittedly, failed to reach even the first rung of the huge leather-backed, silver buttoned dining-room chairs, but whose eyes cleared the table by a good three inches so that, as she frequently points out, she saw it all. (She came to England, years later, this littlest niece, and became my mother, so I’ve kept tabs on the story and checked it for accuracy time and again.)

  The role the Great Carp Ferdinand was to play in the life of the Mannhaus family was simple, though crucial. He was, to put it plainly, the Christmas dinner. For in Vienna, where they celebrate on Christmas Eve and no one, on Holy Night, would dream of eating meat, they relish nothing so much as a richly-marinated, succulently roasted carp. And it is true that until you have tasted fresh carp with all the symphonic accompaniments (sour cream, braised celeriac, dark plum jam) you have not, gustatorily speaking, really lived.

  But the accent is on the word fresh. So that when a grateful client with a famous sporting estate in Carinthia presented Onkel Ernst with a live twenty-pounder a week before Christmas, the Mannhaus family was delighted. Onkel Ernst, a small, bandy-legged man whose ironic sympathy enabled him to sustain a flourishing solicitor’s practice, was delighted. Tante Gerda, his plump, affectionate wife, was delighted. Graziella, their adorable and adored eighteen-year-old daughter, was delighted, as was Herr Franz von Rittersberg, Graziella’s ‘intended’, who loved his food. Delighted too, were Tante Gerda’s three little nieces, already installed with their English governess in readiness for the great Mannhaus Christmas, and delighted were the innumerable poor relations and rich godfathers whom motherly Tante Gerda collected every Christmas Eve to light the candles on the great fir tree, open their presents and eat . . . roast carp.

  Accommodation for the fish was not too great a problem. The house in Vienna was massive and the maids, simple country girls accustomed to scrubbing down in wooden tubs, cheerfully surrendered the bathroom previously ascribed to their use.

  Here, in a gargantuan mahogany-sided bath with copper taps which gushed like Niagara, the huge, grey fish swam majestically to and fro, fro and to, apparently oblivious both of the glory of his ultimate destiny and the magnificence of his setting. For the bathroom was no ordinary bathroom. French tea roses – marvellous, cabbage-sized blooms – swirled up the wallpaper, were repeated on the huge china wash-bowl and echoed yet again in the vast chamber-pot – a vessel so generously conceived that even the oldest of the little nieces could have sunk in it without a trace.

  And here to visit him as the procession of days marched on towards Christmas came the various members of the Mannhaus family.

  Onkel Ernst came, sucking his long, black pipe with the porcelain lid. Not a sentimental man, and one addicted to good food, he regarded the carp’s ultimate end as thoroughly fitting. And yet, as he looked into the marvellously unrevealing eye of the great, grey fish, admired the gently-undulating whiskers (so much more
luxuriant than his own sparse moustache), Onkel Ernst felt a distinct sense of kinship with what was, after all, the only other male in a houseful of women. And as he sat there, drawing on his pipe, listening to the occasional splash as the carp broke water, Onkel Ernst let slip from his shoulders for a while the burden of maintaining the house in Vienna, the villa in Baden-Baden, the chalet on the Wörther See, the dozen or so of Gerda’s relatives who had abandoned really rather early, the struggle to support themselves. He forgot even the juggernaut of bills which would follow the festivities. Almost, but not quite, he forgot the little niggle of worry about his daughter, Graziella.

  Tante Gerda, too, paid visits to the carp – but briefly, for Christmas was something she could never trust to proceed even for a moment without her. She came hung about with lists, her forehead creased into its headache lines, deep anxieties curdling her brain. Would the tree clear the ceiling – or, worse still, would it be too short? Would Sachers send the meringue and ice-cream swan in time? Should one (really a worry, this) ‘send’ to the Pfischingers, who had not ‘sent’ last year but had the year before? Oh, that terrible year when the Steinhauses had sent a basket of crystallized fruit at the very last minute, when all the shops were shut, and she had had to rewrap the potted azalea the Hellers had given and send it to the Steinhauses – and then spent all Christmas wondering if she had removed the label!

  Bending over the fish, Tante Gerda pondered the sauce. Here, too, was anxiety. Celeriac, yes, lemon, yes, onion, yes, peppercorns, ginger, almonds, walnuts – that went without saying. Grated honeycake, of course, thyme, bay, paprika and dark plum jam. But now her sister, writing from Linz, had suggested mace . . . The idea was new, almost revolutionary. The Mannhaus carp, maceless, was a gastronomic talking point in Vienna. There were the cook’s feelings to be considered. And yet . . . even Sacher himself was not afraid to vary a trusted recipe.

  The carp’s indifference to his culinary environment was somehow calming. She closed her eyes for a second and had a sudden, momentary glimpse of Christmas as existing behind all this if only she could reach it. If she could just be sure that Graziella was all right. And she sighed, for she had never meant to love anyone as much as she loved her only daughter.

  Franz von Rittersberg also came to see the carp. A golden-haired, blue-eyed, splendid young man, heir to a coal-mine in Silesia, the purpose of his visit was strictly arithmetical. He measured the carp mentally, divided it by the number of people expected to sit down to dinner, estimated that his portion as the future Mannhaus son-in-law was sure to be drawn from the broader, central regions – and left content.

  And escaping from the English governess, scuttling and twittering like mice, white-stockinged, brown-booted, their behinds deliciously humped by layers of petticoat, came the little nieces clutching stolen bread rolls.

  ‘Ferdinand,’ whispered the youngest ecstatically, balancing on the upturned, rose-encrusted chamber-pot. Her sisters, who could see over the sides of the bath unaided, stood gravely crumbling bread into the water. The fish was a miracle; unaware of them, yet theirs. Real.

  Each night, when the nursemaid left them, they tumbled out from under the feather bed and marshalled themselves for systematic prayer. ‘Please God, make them give us something that’s alive for Christmas,’ they prayed night after night after night.

  But it was Graziella, the daughter of the house, who came most frequently of all. Perched on the side of the bath, her dusky curls rioting among the cabbage roses on the wall, she looked with dark, commiserating eyes at the fish. Yet, though she was by far the loveliest of the visitors, Ferdinand’s treatment of her was uncivil. Quite simply, he avoided her. Carp, after all, are fresh-water fish, and he had noticed that the drops which fell on him when she was there were most deplorably saline.

  She was a girl the gods had truly smiled upon – loving and beloved; gay and kind, and her future as Frau Franz von Rittersberg was rosily assured. And yet each day she seemed to get a little thinner and a little paler, her dark eyes filling with ever-growing bewilderment. For when you have been accustomed all your life to giving, giving, giving, you may wake up one day and find you have given away yourself. And then unless you are a saint (and even, perhaps, if you are) you will spend the nights underneath your pillow, trapped and wretched, licking away the foolish tears.

  And so the days drew steadily on, mounting to their climax – Christmas Eve. Snow fell, the tree arrived, the last candle was lit on the Advent ring. The littlest niece, falling from grace, ate the chimney off the gingerbread house. The exchange of hampers became ever more frenzied. The Pfischingers, who still had not sent, invaded Tante Gerda’s dreams . . .

  It was on the morning of the twenty-third that Onkel Ernst and his future son-in-law assembled to perform the sacrificial rites on the Great Carp Ferdinand.

  The little nieces had been bundled into coats and leggings and taken to the Prater. Graziella, notoriously tender-hearted, had been sent to Rumpelmayers on an errand. Now, at the foot of the stairs stood the cook, holding a gargantuan earthenware baking dish – to the left of her the housemaids, to the right the kitchen staff. On the landing upstairs, Tante Gerda girded her men – a long-bladed kitchen knife, a seven-pound sledgehammer, an old and slightly rusty sword of the Kaiser’s Imperial Army which someone had left behind at dinner . . .

  In the bathroom, Onkel Ernst looked at the fish and the fish looked at Onkel Ernst. A very slight sensation, a whisper of premonition, nothing more, assailed Onkel Ernst, who felt as though his liver was performing a very small entrechat.

  ‘You shoo him down this end,’ ordered Franz, splendidly off-hand. ‘Then, when he’s up against the end of the bath, I’ll wham him.’

  Onkel Ernst shooed. The carp swam. Franz – swinging the hammer over his head – whammed.

  The noise was incredible. Chips of enamel flew upwards.

  ‘Ow, my eye, my eye!’ yelled Franz, dropping the hammer. ‘There’s a splinter in it. Get it OUT!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Onkel Ernst. ‘Yes . . .’

  He put down the sword from the Kaiser’s Imperial Army and climbed carefully on to the side of the bath. Even then he was only about level with Franz’s streaming blue eye. Blindly, Franz thrust his head forward.

  The rest really was inevitable. Respectable, middle-aged Viennese solicitors are not acrobats; they don’t pretend to be. The carp, swimming languidly between Onkel Ernst’s ankles found, as he had expected, nothing even mildly edible.

  It was just after lunch that Onkel Ernst, dry once more and wearing his English knickerbockers, received in a mild way guidance from above.

  It was all so easy, really. No need for all this crude banging and lunging. Simply, one went upstairs, one pulled out the plug, one went out locking the door behind one. And waited . . .

  A few minutes later, perfectly relaxed, Onkel Ernst was back in his study. He was not only holding the newspaper the right way up, he was practically reading it.

  The house was hushed. Franz, after prolonged ministrations by the women of the family, had gone home. The little nieces were having their afternoon rest. The study, anyway, had baize-lined double doors. Even if there were any thuds – thuds such as a great fish lashing in its death agony might make – Onkel Ernst would not hear them.

  What he did hear, not very long afterwards, was a scream. A truly fearful scream, the scream of a virtuoso and one he had no difficulty in ascribing to the under-housemaid, whose brother was champion yodeller of Schruns. A second scream joined it and a third. Onkel Ernst dashed out into the hall.

  The first impression was that the hall was full of people. His second was that it was wet. Both proved to be correct.

  Tante Gerda, trembling on the edge of hysteria, was being soothed by Graziella. The English governess, redoubtable as all her race, had already commandeered a bucket and mop and flung herself into the breach. Maids dabbed and moaned and mopped – and still the water ran steadily down the stairs, past the carved cherubs on the baniste
rs, turning the Turkish carpet into pulp.

  The enquiry, when they finally got round to it, was something of a formality since the culprits freely admitted their guilt. There they stood, the little nieces, pale, trembling, terrified – yet somehow not truly repentant-looking. Yes, they had done it. Yes, they had taken the key out from behind the clock; yes, they had unlocked the bathroom door, turned on the taps . . .

  Silent, acquiescent, they waited for punishment. Only the suddenly-descending knicker-leg of the youngest spoke of an almost unbearable tension.

  Graziella saved them, as she always saved everything.

  ‘Please, Mutti? Please, Vati . . . So near Christmas?’

  Midnight struck. In the Mannhaus mansion, silence reigned at last. Worn out, their nightly prayer completed, the little nieces slept. Tante Gerda moaned, dreaming that the Pfischingers had sent a giant hamper full of sauce.

  Presently a door opened and Onkel Ernst in his pyjamas crept softly from the smoking room. In his hand was an enormous shotgun – a terrible weapon some thirty years old which had belonged to his father – and in his heart was a bloodlust as violent as it was unexpected.

  Relentlessly he climbed the stairs; relentlessly he entered the bathroom and turned the key behind him. Relentlessly he took three paces backwards, peered down the barrel – and then fired.

  Graziella, always awake these nights, was the first to reach him.

  ‘Are you all right, Papa? Are you all right?’

  Only another fearful volley of groans issued from behind the bolted door. Tante Gerda rushed up, her grey plait swinging. ‘Ernst, Ernst?’ she implored, hammering on the door. ‘Say something, Ernst!’

  The English governess arrived in her Jaeger dressing-gown, the cook . . . Together the women strained against the door, but it was hopeless.