Hard work in the Christmas Hotel, pandering and present-wrapping, all summer long. Then came autumn and meagre, rather begrudged bonuses and the determination in both nephew and aunt alike that they had to get away on holiday. Away from the churning froth of the North Sea and the keening, kamikaze gulls. Time to fly on some cheap airline to Italy and hopefully catch the last of the sun.
They took the kind of flight where you have to pay up for even a glass of water and the stewardesses sell things like aftershave and bikinis up and down the gangway.
PEACHY
They’d been in Venice for a day. It was misty and the drizzle was warm. Like dishwater, as Robert put it: dropping on them slowly as they sat in pavement cafes, traipsed foggy, perplexing alleys, and minded their steps on slippery humpbacked bridges. “Well, I think it’s downright romantic, seeing it off-season and autumnal,” Aunty Jane announced just this morning as they embarked on their exploration of the Left Bank. “When it’s foggy like this, you never know who you might end up bumping into, coming around the next corner.”
Aunty Jane was coming up to fifty. Robert had to admit she’d kept herself nice. She was slim and still, as she put it, with-it. She’d bought a caseful of patterned summer frocks. She was here, she said, to take in the culture: the music, buildings and paintings. All Robert had seen her looking at was the men.
Having bruschetta and a glass of the local pink Pinot Grigio in an off-licence last night, she’d told him: “I’ve finished with those chat-and-date phone lines. Never again. All those fellas want to know is what dress size you are, and are you still pretty, have you got your hair done nice. And when it comes to them, they don’t want to tell you anything. Well, then you go to meet them in some godawful wine bar — a place too young for both of you — and he’s sat there waiting and he looks like Wurzel Gummidge. Oh, no. Not for me. No more shooting in the dark.”
Once she’d thought that she was bound to find someone, working in a big hotel. Some millionaire with a rakish glint in his eye as she brought his fried breakfast. Someone with cash to spend on a smart, mature person like her; who couldn’t believe his luck, meeting her in Whitby, where he’d come to spend an unseasonable Christmas. She wouldn’t mind if he was eccentric.
But no one at the hotel had caught her eye. More to the point, she hadn’t caught theirs.
Robert and his Aunty Jane sat at the high stools of the off-licence bar for a couple of hours, drinking the pale, murky wine served to them by a bloke who looked like Harvey Keitel. They talked about love like they never really had before. The conversation was an eye-opener for both of them.
They drifted out, bought peaches off a fruit stall gondola and sat on the steps of a white stone bridge. The evening mist and dark came down and they talked about their ideal men, and how sick they had become of turkey, tinsel, and the blazing blue Christmas puddings.
“Look at him,” Robert suddenly said, laughing and pointing at an old man strolling by the closed up front of a church.
“He’s ancient,” his aunt said, wiping peach juice off her chin.
He had a huge white beard and a scarlet face. He was a skinny old thing in a checked sleeveless shirt and Bermuda shorts.
“It’s Santa Claus!” Robert laughed, choking. “On holiday!”
They both laughed until the old bloke was out of sight. “He must wear padding at Christmas time,” Aunty Jane said, and then shuddered. “Oh, don’t talk about Christmas to me.”
WATCH THE BIRDIE
“But who could afford all this? And how would you carry it back in your luggage?”
They were looking at the coloured glass objects in the shop windows.
Twisted, sculpted glass with crimson and aquamarine seeping clouded and frozen in spirals and whorls like ink dropped rough water. The two of them gazed for an hour or more at jewellery and vases and bottles and, finally, a whole tree of blown glass that teemed with life-sized and haughty-looking parrots.
It was as they were studying the glass birds that Robert glimpsed a familiar figure inside the shop.
“Don’t look now,” Robert hissed. “But there’s Santa again.”
Santa was having something carefully wrapped in green tissue paper. His Bermuda shorts showed off his pale, hairless legs and sandals. He looked affluent and pleased with himself, scratching at his magnificent beard.
“Oh, no,” said Jane. “Let’s ignore him. God, I hope he didn’t hear us laughing at him last night...”
She was blushing as the old man came out of the glass shop, struggling with his precious parcel and the awkward door. Aunty Jane looked away, but Robert was watching.
Santa fixed them with a genial frown, his feathery eyebrows pulled together. He waited until Aunty Jane met his glance.
Then he said, “Ho, ho, ho!” and she gasped.
The old man moved off into the narrow, bustling arcade and soon he was lost to them amongst the brolleys, damp fleeces and shopping bags.
Regret tastes of coffee
They had tiny cups of bitter, gritty coffee at a table by their hotel.
“The canals smell of damp wool,” Robert said, staring at the milky green water. He looked at his despondent Aunty Jane and sighed. A litre of wine at lunchtime in the Peggy Guggenheim museum hadn’t been such a good idea. The sour wine had tasted like rainwater, like tears, and as they’d trooped around, dutifully taking in the surrealist pieces (nightmare interiors by Ernst and Magritte, driftwood assemblages knocked up by Picasso), Robert had watched his slender, nervy Aunty Jane sink into a deep depression.
She bolted back the rest of her espresso like medicine,
