Christmas at the Island Hotel - Jenny Colgan Page 0,39

eat lutefisk in preparation for Christmas Day itself, the main event.

His mother had loved the traditional songs and booked the local choir repeatedly to come and sing julesanger. She had said it was for the visitors, who filed through the public rooms to see the palace come to life throughout December, but Konstantin had always known on some level that it was for her; she hummed the songs wherever she was in the house.

It had been so much . . . Well, he was a kid. He hadn’t known anything.

It was special to live in a palace, he knew that. People mentioned it all the time. But actually, the really special thing had been having a mother who loved and adored him. He’d taken that completely for granted, not given it a second thought.

It occurred to him to tell everyone where he was from, get them to stop treating him like an idiot. But would they, though? The horror of it, thought Konstantin, if they didn’t believe him or, worse, thought it was funny. Laughed at him. He couldn’t bear it. Better they thought he was a drifter than an absolute loser who’d been banished by his own father. He bit his lip, hard.

“Uhm, are you okay?” said Isla eventually, realizing how quiet he’d been. Even Bjårk wasn’t gamboling anymore. She thought Mure looked beautiful—always did this time of year, when the lights were slung up along the lampposts on the quay. It was just the one string, and usually something was wonky, but it was like a fairyland to Isla. It always cheered her up.

“I miss home,” he said simply. Then he looked around the docks. “Are these all the lights there are? Is this it?”

“I like it,” said Isla.

He fell silent.

“What’s home like?”

“It’s amazing,” he said suddenly. “Where I’m from, up near Bergen . . . there are thick pine forests everywhere, up the mountains. You can smell the fir trees too. Everything smells of pine and fresh white snow. It’s dark like here but not so windy, and you can ski every day. It’s not flat like this place.”

Isla frowned. “Well, we’ve got the ben,” she said, referring to the hill behind the MacGregor farm, which was misleadingly treacherous to climb, and led to the spine up the northwest side of the island of craggy hills that bristled with heather in the spring but now were dull and bare. Konstantin looked at them like they were puddles.

But the dock grew busier and happier. Enterprisingly, Iona had set up a table with mulled wine and hot chocolate for sale while people waited to bid on the tree they wanted. Few were the children who, on seeing another child with a cup filled with marshmallows, cream, and cinnamon, didn’t immediately pester their parents for one. Although more than one parent pointed out that it was absolute highway robbery, most gave in with good grace. It was a part of it, and ritual was important at Christmastime.

“Okay, six-footer, would suit a flat or lovely front room,” bellowed the dispatcher again.

Several people stepped forward; some held back in case there was a fatter, greener tree beneath. Isla waved at Lorna, who was buying two: one for her lovely little flat to sit on the table, and one, out of her own pocket, for the school. She and Mrs. Cook, the other teacher, came in on the second Sunday of advent and decorated it in secret, partly to give the children a wonderful surprise on Monday morning, as if it had happened by magic, and partly because if you invite thirty-five children to help decorate a Christmas tree, nothing good happens, and there’s a lot of needles involved.

Inge-Britt sidled down lazily from the Harbour’s Rest hotel. It needed a big tree, and she would only bother to decorate one side of it, because really, who would see the other side? And she’d have to make two trips up to the attic, which would seriously impinge on her afternoon nap. Inge-Britt was a brilliant person but temperamentally highly unsuited to running a clean hostelry—something Flora was very much hoping to capitalize on with the Rock.

The women clustered together, as both Lorna and Inge-Britt put their hands up for a big tree.

Lorna, however, was momentarily distracted; if little Ash was by the quayside, it meant his father, Dr. Hussein—oh, who was she kidding—Saif, the man she was desperately in love with, couldn’t be far behind.

“Hey, Lorna,” shouted Inge-Britt, holding up a hand to indicate