The wurse gets two buckets of cinnamon buns from Maud, and George goes to the cellar to fetch up the bathing tub Elsa had when she was a baby and fills it with mulled wine. With this as an incentive, the wurse agrees to hide for an hour in the wardrobe in Granny’s flat, and then Mum goes down and invites the police up from outside the house. Green-eyes sits next to Mum. They laugh. The summer intern is there too; he eats the most Swiss meringue of them all and falls asleep on the sofa.
The woman in the black skirt sits in silence at the table, in the far corner. After they’ve eaten, while George is washing up and Maud wiping down the tables and Lennart sitting on a stool with a standby cup of coffee, waiting for the percolator and making sure it’s not going to get up to any tricks, the boy with a syndrome goes through the flat and crosses the landing and goes into Granny’s flat. When he comes back he has cinnamon bun crumbs all around his mouth and so many wurse hairs on his sweater that he looks like someone invited him to a fancy dress party and he decided to dress up as a carpet. He gets a blanket from Elsa’s room and walks up to the woman in the black skirt, looks at her for a long time, then reaches up, standing on his tiptoes, and pinches her nose. Startled, she jumps, and the boy’s mother makes the sort of scream that mothers make when their children pinch complete strangers’ noses and rushes towards him. But Maud gently catches hold of her arm and stops her, and when the boy holds up his thumb, poking out between his index finger and his middle finger, while looking at the woman in the black skirt, Maud explains pleasantly: “It’s a game. He’s pretending he stole your nose.”
The woman stares at Maud. Stares at the boy. Stares at the nose. And then she steals his nose. And he laughs so loudly that the windows start rattling. He falls asleep in her lap, wrapped up in the blanket. When his mother, with an apologetic smile, tries to lift him off, observing as she does so that “it’s actually not at all like him to be so direct,” the woman in the black skirt touches her hand tremulously and whispers: “If . . . if it’s all right I . . . could I hold him a little longer . . . ?”
The boy’s mother puts both her hands around the woman’s hand and nods. The woman puts her forehead against the boy’s hair and whispers: “Thanks.”
George makes more mulled wine and everything feels almost normal and not at all frightening. After the police have thanked them for their hospitality and headed back down the stairs, Maud looks unhappily at Elsa and says she can understand it must have been frightening for a child to have police in the house on Christmas Eve. But Elsa takes her by the hand and says: “Don’t worry, Maud. This is a Christmas tale. They always have a happy ending.”
And it’s clear that Maud believes it.
Because you have to believe.
30
PERFUME
Only one person collapses with a heart attack late on Christmas Eve. But two hearts are broken. And the house is never quite the same again.
It all starts with the boy waking up late in the afternoon and feeling hungry. The wurse and Samantha come flopping out of the wardrobe because the mulled wine is finished. Elsa marches in circles around Alf and intimates that it’s time to get the Santa suit. Elsa and the wurse follow Alf down to the garage. He gets into Taxi. When Elsa opens the passenger door and sticks her head in and asks what he’s doing, he turns the ignition key and grunts: “If I have to impersonate Santa for the rest of the day, I’m nipping out for a newspaper first.”
“I don’t think my mum wants me to go anywhere.”
“No one invited you!”