The Christmas Bookshop(68)

Oke turned at the very top to survey the bright lights of the market below, laid in front of them like a carpet, glittering and beautiful, with less shouting and fewer small children looking as though they were going to be sick.

‘It’s just people trying to be happy,’ she said.

‘I understand that,’ said Oke. ‘I’m just not sure it’s the best way to go about it.’

‘What do you think happiness is?’ she asked him.

‘A by-product,’ he answered immediately, ‘of being useful.’

She looked at him.

‘What?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

He looked back at her, surprised.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you do good work and are useful, that makes you happy.’

‘What about going on holiday? That’s not useful.’

‘If you have been working hard all year and you deserve some time off, that is happiness. If your family is rich and your life feels like you’re on holiday, I do not think that makes people very happy.’

Carmen thought unavoidably of Blair talking about ‘I Wish it Could Be Christmas Every Day’ and complaining about his hotel room.

‘You’re not very cheery,’ said Carmen. ‘Okay then, what about cuddling a puppy?’

‘If you are going to raise that puppy and be there for them every second to care for their needs and look after them, then of course, that is happiness. But it’s also work.’

‘I thought you might be going to say hot chocolate,’ said Carmen, rather regretful that they had passed the stalls a moment later.

‘Would you like a hot chocolate?’

‘I don’t know. I think I do and I like the smell and then I have one and it’s too much and I spill some and I feel sick.’

He smiled.

‘Stick to being useful. The shop makes you happy?’

Don’t be stupid it’s a job, Carmen was about to say. Then she remembered yesterday, when a very small child had come in, clutching some fairly sticky coins in their hand, and had marched forwards, closely watched by their father, and asked loudly for a copy of The Dark Is Rising, and Carmen had said did they want it wrapped up and they shook their head very firmly because it was obvious they were planning on reading it the very second they left the shop, and Carmen had understood and counted out the child’s change very carefully and told them to enjoy it.

‘Hmmm,’ she said.

‘Ssh!’ He suddenly hushed her as they stole up the steps past the large church building. ‘Can you hear?’

If she strained her ears she just about could.

‘They’re rehearsing. For the big fancy concert at the castle nobody can get tickets for. But why would you need tickets?’

He looked at her, smiling. ‘Come with me.’

There was a little side door off the steps that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t specifically looking for it. Glancing up and down to make sure there was nobody there – though not many people wandered this close as it looked like it led somewhere private – he slipped open the plain black door.

Inside it was pitch-dark and he hushed her as she giggled. They found themselves in some kind of backstage passageway. It felt more like a theatre than a church: it was the assembly hall of the Church of Scotland.

The sound had now become very loud, but somehow quiet at the same time. It didn’t sound like a choir. It sounded like one, multi-throated being, muffled in the dark passageway with cloths hanging down the walls.

‘Wha-at can I give him, poor as I am … ?’

They crept round to where a tiny chink of light appeared in the wall and they could peer through the gap.

There were choirboys in red and white soutanes, and older men singing in black. There was a smaller section of women to the side, dressed like waitresses in black skirts and white shirts. The men were definitely more glamorous, thought Carmen.

The choirmaster wore black spectacles and his hair was grey and curly. He was concentrating ferociously on a huge book in front of him on which lines of music notation were densely printed, and occasionally gesturing in one direction or another, or pointing at the pianist in the corner, or looking up for reasons Carmen didn’t quite understand.

As she was looking at everything, Oke, she noticed as her eyes adjusted, wasn’t doing any of this. He was standing, leaning against the wall, his eyes closed. He opened them when he realised she was watching him and, to Carmen’s surprise, brought a flask out of his backpack.

It was full of hot chocolate.

‘Don’t have too much,’ he whispered. ‘You might spill it or feel sick.’

She was so surprised, she grinned widely.

‘Wow,’ she whispered, dampening down a voice inside her that wondered if Dahlia had made it.

‘Ssh,’ he said. ‘I want to hear the music. And the conductor has bat hearing.’

They settled down on the opposite side of the passageway, widening the chink in the curtain imperceptibly so they could also see.

But you didn’t have to see really. The area was vast and round – and freezing – and the sound swelled up from the ground and filled the air and passageway and all the spaces in between.

Carmen didn’t normally go to concerts which weren’t pop concerts, and had always assumed they would be a bit boring. But when she heard the men’s voices swelling in the deep dark – the cry of good King Wenceslas’ ‘Mark my footsteps, good my page’ answering the page’s lament, ‘Sire, the night is darker now and the wind grows stronger’ – she felt the hairs on her arms go up.