“He must be staying in the same hotel,” Robert told her.
His aunt was getting far too jumpy. She had two high spots of pink on her cheeks.
“It’s the way he went ‘Ho, ho, ho,’” she said, coming out of the en suite, brushing her teeth. “It sent a chill right through me...”
SEASON’S GREETING
The next morning they were sitting at their window and waving at the vaporetti, trying to get the passengers to wave back.
“Well! The cheeky devil!” Aunt Jane burst out suddenly. Robert looked and saw why. It was Santa, up on the top deck of the passing bus. He was waving both arms at her energetically, grinning his head off through his beard.
It was Jane’s idea that the two of them split up for that morning and do some exploring alone. She felt Robert may be tiring of her nerviness and want to get away. lie shrugged, nonplussed.
Jane found herself drifting about not too far from the hotel, since she’d come without her map. It was a cautious exploration, with her clothes sticking to her.
She sat right out on the front of the bay, where the choppy Adriatic came up to the front of the newsagents and bistros. She sat a table and ordered a coffee and then she saw the two waitresses from last night’s trattoria ambling along the prom, carrying between them what looked like a big bag of leftovers, a huge doggy bag, one handle each. It was as if they had been working in that tatty restaurant all night and were only now setting off home on aching feet, looking even more ancient in the lemony-grey morning light.
Jane had a kind of future-shock then. One of her sudden, horrible glimpses of what might be in store for her. She often tortured herself like this. In these queer flash-forwards, she never saw things going well for herself. She saw herself as a real old lady (really, she knew she wasn’t one yet) and she was still grafting away at the Christmas Hotel. And Robert was still with her, twenty years and they were still finishing their backbreakingly festive shifts and struggling home together at the end of them, just like these two gamey old birds — who had noticed her by now, and were waving at her as she sat under her awning, blowing On her coffee.
They were jeering at her really; two wizened old death’s head crones, knowing that her life might as well be over already and it was always going to be the same.
She gulped her coffee and refused to wave back. They moved on, out of sight. And then Santa was pulling up one of the aluminium chairs, scraping it on the cobbles and seating himself heavily at her table.
Jane narrowed her eyes, deciding to treat him, if not with contempt, then at least as an hallucination. Sunspots. Fever. Malaria from her insect bites.
“Ho, ho!” he said.
WINTER BREAKS
“Go away,” she hissed, mustering the nerve to swear at him.
He looked hurt in an exaggerated way, an operatic way. “You treat me like exactly the kind of man who you don’t want to meet. But look at me! I’m perfect! I’m doing everything to catch your eye.” He laid a bunch of bedraggled, wilting anemones on the table. Their petals were like wet rags. “Is it my age?”
“No, no,” she sighed. “I’m just not used to being pursued across a strange city by...”
He chuckled. “Pursued...”I
“It’s very disconcerting.”
“You act as if I appal you. Am I so grotesque?”
She relented for a second. “I don’t even know you.”
He twinkled at her. “Are you sure?”
She pulled a face savagely. “You’re so bloody jolly and good. Every time we’ve seen you on this horrible holiday, you’ve looked so, well, happy...”
“Is it really a horrible holiday you’re having?”
She realised her mistake. “No, not really. It’s fine, actually.”
He leaned forward conspiratorially. “You know, Jane...you’ve got me all wrong.”
“I have?”
“I’m not the man you think I am.”
“You’re not.”
“I do have my darker side.”
“You do?”
He nodded happily. “If I really was the man you think I am, don’t you think I could have solved all the world’s problems? Conquered famine, and hunger and disease? Oh, but I’m too selfish for that.”
Her eyes were swimming in the dappled light from the sea. She tried to snap out of it: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“If I was the man you thought I was I’d be a very powerful, magical old man, very remiss in my duties, leaving the world so mixed up and sad. I’m too selfish to use my powers to put everything right.” He stroked his luxurious side-whiskers and beamed at her. “You were quite right about who I am. But I’m a very limited, selfish, sexy kind of Santa Claus. Nothing to do with your preconceptions. Nothing to do with Christmas.”
She snorted. “I’ve had Christmas coming out of my ears.”
She was staring at him. Could she think of Santa as an erotic object? It seemed perverted, almost.
He whispered, “I promise, you’ll only have Christmas when you want it. Only the bits you like. If you come with me.”
She flushed. “Come with you where?”
“I know you think your life is over. That it holds no more surprises for you. All I can say is, if you carry on in your regulated life, sticking with your nephew and living in a hotel where every day is necessarily the same...of course that will be true. Your life will be smooth and predictable till the end of your days.”
He produced another present for her then. It was wrapped in tissue paper. She took it like an unexploded bomb and unwrapped it in front of him. It was the glittering blue bauble he had bought in the glass shop yesterday.
“You can walk across the surface of your own life forever,” he
