Knowing something was up, Marilise smiled gently and agreed. We all trooped out of the front door and stood looking at the house.
‘It’s that one!’ said Sofia, pointing to the sitting room window where my large – and now, I could see, rather wonky – number two was displayed.
‘Oh!’ said Marilise. ‘The next part of the advent calendar! For me?’
‘Yes!’ said Sofia. ‘Come in and see your present.’
We all went back inside and showed Marilise the pile of cookies.
‘Oh, my goodness,’ she said, and swayed slightly on my arm. I quickly helped her to sit down.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes, more than all right, I am delighted,’ she said, brushing a tear away. ‘It is such a long time since I saw these – for a moment, I’m afraid I was overcome.’
The worried look had crept back on to Sofia’s face and I squeezed her shoulder.
‘It’s okay, that’s a good thing.’
‘Very, very good,’ said Marilise. ‘You have made me feel very happy. Maybe, after lunch, we can all share these, and I will show you some photographs I have of Christmas when I was a girl. Nick, maybe you could fetch the albums, if I tell you where they are?’
I looked at him to see what his reaction would be. Did he want to see pictures of his grandmother’s past Christmases, or would he make some excuse about a work call and vanish? But he surprised me.
‘I’d love to,’ he said, and his eyes flickered over towards me.
After lunch, we all made ourselves comfortable in the sitting room: Marilise in her chair, Greg, Angela and me on the sofa, Astrid and India perched on the window seat and Sofia flitting from chair to footstool to floor. Nick brought in a pile of photograph albums, bound in blue silk. He placed them on a small table next to Marilise and she picked up the first one and opened it, turning a few pages.
‘Ah, yes,’ she said, smiling. ‘This is Christmas when I was eight years old, the same as you, dearest Sofia.’ Sofia beamed. ‘We had a lot of snow that year, even more than usual, and here you see my sister, Leonore, and I wearing the beautiful outfits my mother bought for us.’
She held out the album with shaking hands and although I made to take it from her, Nick was faster. He gazed down at the photo, then showed it round to us all. Two little girls with pretty, mischievous faces smiled out at us through the years. They were wearing capes with fur-lined hoods and long velvet skirts with shiny lace-up boots peeping out from underneath. India pointed at one of the children.
‘She looks like you, Sofia!’
We all leant in for a closer look and saw that she was right.
‘Let me see,’ said Marilise, and she took the album back and examined the photo closely. When she looked up, she had tears in her eyes. ‘It is true, you are so like my darling Leonore. Beautiful girl,’ she whispered, but we did not know if she meant her sister or Sofia; maybe both. ‘Come now,’ she said, turning the page. ‘I think there is a picture of the tree… Ah, yes! Here it is, and another of us with our parents.’
Again, we looked, admiring the beautifully decorated tree with its real candles and piles of wrapped presents underneath.
‘There’s another family resemblance,’ I said, pointing to Marilise’s father.
‘And I have said that many times,’ said Marilise. ‘But now maybe you will believe me, Nikolai. Look.’
He peered at the picture and a strange look came over his face. For a moment, I wondered if he would be the next to well up, but he blinked quickly and the moment was gone.
‘He’s very handsome,’ he said, and the weak joke moved the conversation on.
We looked at the albums for another twenty minutes or so, until Greg checked his watch.
‘I’d better get going,’ he said. ‘I need the windows of this house sparkling clean if you’re going to be making them all into an advent calendar and the light fades so early these days.’
I also checked my watch and looked up at Marilise’s happy but pale face.
‘I think it’s time for your afternoon nap,’ I said. ‘Can we look at these some more later?’
She agreed readily, and I took her upstairs, along with the precious albums, which I thought she might want to look at again if she woke up early.
I went downstairs and headed straight to the kitchen, thinking that I could do some chores and take them off Angela’s list. Nick was in there, crouching down over Steve, in his habitual sleeping place. Nick looked up at me as I came in. His face was grey and his eyes panicky: something was very wrong.
