Марджери Аллингем - Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories

Meyer nodded. “Merry Christmas, Kelso.”

There was much cheer in the house that night.

We do Christmas right at our house — the holly and the ivy and the manger and the tree. Stockings all hung and an ever full wassail bowl for thirsty carollers. I use the pronoun “we” editorially, for all this holiday jollity comes your way with the compliments of Joyce and the kids. I’m not much of a celebrator myself, and even in my youth avoided when possible all those cherished tribal rituals.

Some people don’t. Joyce, for instance. For years I didn’t understand. I thought it was just for the children, all the decking of halls and jingling of bells and harking of herald angels. But as the children grew up, the merry mayhem diminished not at all, and I still find myself in my middle years surrounded by a trio of oversized moppets bandaging boxes in miles of red satin ribbon and spreading tinsel all over everything.

A week before this Christmas just past, I was force fed a certain minimal dose of spirit when I was carted to the church youth club’s annual dramatization of A Christmas Carol . This, I must admit, is one of the less objectionable parts of the customary Saturnalia. It’s not the Royal Shakespeare Company, to be sure, but it certainly is an improvement on the pageants of my childhood, where at least one angel fainted every year and the wise men always forgot their lines. As in everything else seasonal, the family had a considerable stake in this production. Stephanie, in a billowy gauze gown that reminded me painfully of a Sunday School angel’s robe, was the Ghost of Christmas Past.

“Long past?” the boy who played Scrooge asked warily.

“No, your past,” Steffy replied in a thin, æthereal voice that actually made me, her father, shiver. I have at times envisioned Steffy as a basketball coach or a carnival barker, but certainly not as an actress, and not with that voice. Remarkable.

Mark played, of course, Tiny Tim. He’s small for his age and is able to project a deceptive air of cherubic innocence.

“God bless us every one,” he intoned with the falsetto intensity of a child evangelist. It was a performance that melted poor sentimental old Scrooge’s heart. It hardened mine, not just because I could not fully separate Mark smiling sweetly onstage from Mark raising hell at the dinner table, but because I always suspect virtuous children.

We stopped at Mister Donut on the way home. Steffy, no longer ghostly, had a double chocolate doughnut and a cup of hot chocolate. I could almost see the acne pop out. Mark, choosing, it seems, to remain for a while in character, selected something gooey called “angel filled.”

“It’s remarkable,” said Joyce, “how a great piece like that doesn’t date. But then the Christmas spirit doesn’t date, either.”

“Bah!” I said. “Humbug!”

“Oh, Daddy,” Steffy sighed as only an adolescent daughter can.

“You know,” I went on, “I’ve often wondered about one thing. Just as it says: ‘Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.’” (I was proud to quote with such perfect accuracy, for the kids were obviously impressed. And how often can a man of my age and shortcomings impress his kids?) “Okay. Marley was dead. But what did he die of?”

“I don’t know, probably a stroke or a heart attack,” said Joyce. “After all, he was a classic type A personality.”

“Have you considered the possibility of foul play?”

There. I had caught their attention, dropped a curdling dollop of vinegar into their emotional eggnog of peace and goodwill. What fun.

“Oh, I get it,” Mark exclaimed in an astounding show of insight, for him. “He could have been murdered.”

“Now who would do that?” Joyce laughed.

“Look for a motive.”

“Scrooge himself would be a prime suspect,” said Steffy. She’s quick-witted for a ghost and a sophomore, and she shares my love of detective fiction. “He had a motive. Money, He inherited Marley’s half of the business, right?”

“Too obvious,” I said. “The obvious suspect is never the real culprit.”

“Anyhow,” Mark chimed in, “if Scrooge had done him in, why would Marley have come back from the dead to save him? I bet it was good old Tiny Tim, bashed the old skinflint’s brains out with his crutch for not paying his father a decent wage.”

“Impossible,” Steffy snickered. “How old do you think Tiny Tim was, midget? He probably wasn’t even born when Marley died. ‘Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,’ Scrooge says. Bob Cratchit might not even have worked for Scrooge and Marley then. Faced you, hosehead!”

Occasionally, not often, mind you, but every now and then, your children make you proud.

We celebrate Christmas early now that the children are older, one tradition that I like, for it gets the worst of it out of the way and permits the household to settle back more quickly into the blessed monotony of the midwinter doldrums. It all starts on Christmas Eve, with an extensive carolling tour of the neighborhood, ending up at St. Nicholas (no less) Parish Church in time for Midnight Mass. I don’t attend, especially at Christmas, for of all tinsel, liturgical tinsel is the most incongruous.

I was feeling particularly Scroogish about the whole business this year, so I took my dinner, a slapdash hoagie on an undersized bun (fast before feast, I suppose), sought refuge in the den, and did not show my face until the merry revellers were ready to leave. Then I sent them off with a resounding, “Bah! Humbug!” which was greeted with much untoward merriment.

“Oh, Daddy,” said Stephanie.

“Don’t get into the brandy,” Joyce warned.

I waved to them from the doorway, then went back inside the house and watched them from the living room window until they had turned a corner and could no longer see the house. Then I turned off the string of colored lights that outlined our front porch, pulled the plug on the Christmas tree, and got into the brandy. Not terribly, for brandy gives a vicious hangover, just enough to make me mellow. Once I was sufficiently mellow, I turned out all the other lights and went to bed.

That was a mistake. Sometimes brandy works, and sometimes it backfires. I don’t know that it really was the brandy’s fault. The house was so empty, so silent. For the last month I had longed and prayed for silence and solitude, but now that I had it in abundance I found it a hollow and empty state.

And then there was the moon, which had the bad taste to be full on a cloudless cold night. It was a silver-white moon, shining down unshaded on a silver-white earth. Too much, much too much, as if the entire universe had been hung with tinsel. And the light wouldn’t stay outside where it belonged; the damned washed-out white light slithered in around gaps in the lined drapes and crawled across the bed to sit glaring on my eyelids and murder sleep. I lay under that light brooding, I don’t know why, on the fate of one Jacob Marley, dead nearly a century and a half.

Finally giving up the struggle, I crept out from under the electric blanket, shrugged on my slippers and went downstairs. The moonlight followed me, illuminating the stairs and the wide entrance hall. The living room curtains were sheer and generously invited all the moonlight in the vicinity inside, as to a silver-white open house. The Christmas tree stood before the large bay window looking tacky as only an unlighted Christmas tree can. The trees outside, undecorated even by their own natural foliage, silhouetted by the overpowering moonlight, appeared like black spectres, skeletal, ominous. I turned quickly about, went into my study across the hall, closed the door, drew the drapes, and turned on the comfortably warm yellow reading lamp.