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one.’
    Did all parents assume their children were stupid or was it just mine? ‘Actually, it was a present for you,’ I muttered, stomping off feeling utterly humiliated, the unwanted Father Christmas dangling from my hand.
    On Christmas Day itself even Madox and I ended up colour co-ordinated. I was wearing a brand-new sapphire-blue dress, to match my eyes, Audrey said, but I knew it was actually to match the drawing-room decorations. I got quite worried when I peeped inside the dining-room and saw the green-and-gold colour scheme there; would I be forced to spend the entire Christmas in the drawing-room? Just to be on the safe side I tied a green ribbon in my hair. Madox was wearing a gold silk cravat. ‘She didn’t try to tell you it matches your eyes, did she?’ I asked sourly. We both knew there was no stopping Audrey once she was in the grip of some new fad, interior design being the one for the moment. I fervently prayed that she would be gripped by cake baking, like Arabella Felix’s mother. Mrs Felix baked a cake every day for Arabella’s tea: chocolate, Victoria sponge, lemon sponge, coffee and walnut. I liked the chocolate best.
    â€˜That poor child won’t thank her mother when she ends up with clogged arteries and a permanent weight problem,’ Audrey would say as she pointed me in the direction of the fruit bowl. I tried to tell her that we could worry about my arteries and my weight in a year or so’s time and eat cake now, but she wouldn’t listen.
    At least we did have a real tree this year. It had been a close-run thing. Audrey hated pine needles, or at least she hated them when they fell on her parquet floor and Trish, her friend who ran an interior design shop, stocked American artificial ones. ‘… Not those dreadful plasticky ones you get from Woollies, darling, I promise,’ she had said to Madox, but he had threatened to spend Christmas at his club so we got the real thing after all. ‘I warn you.’ Audrey had shot the tree a nasty glance. ‘Once it starts messing the place up it’s out.’ She had sounded as if she were talking of some untidy house guest. So to make sure the tree stayed, I went to the drawing-room every morning to top up the water and to check that it wasn’t getting too hot in there. And now it was Christmas Day. I spotted a green needle on the floor and bent down quickly to pick it up, secreting it in the breast pocket of my velvet dress. I straightened up and looked again at the tree. It was a murky morning and the room was in near darkness but the tiny golden Christmas lights twinkled like minute stars and cast a warm glow across the blue-and-gold baubles. Right at the back, on a low branch, I could glimpse my Father Christmas, put there by Madox and me the night before.
    â€˜So, Linus, did you enjoy your Christmas?’ Olivia asked him at breakfast on Boxing Day.
    Linus thought about the question and decided that he had not. ‘It wasn’t anyone’s fault,’ he assured Olivia. He had known this Christmas wouldn’t be right from the very start on the first of Advent when Bertil had said, ‘I assumed you wouldn’t want to bother with a calendar this year, now you’re almost fifteen.’ Age, Linus thought, seemed not to be absolute but relative, a convenience that shifted according to the whims of adults. All he could be sure of was that he was never the
right
age. The other day it had been:
What are you thinking about? Of course you can’t go skiing on your own with your friends, you’re only fourteen
. Now, all of a sudden, he was nearly fifteen and too old for an Advent calendar. He had to remind himself of this as he woke on the first Sunday of Advent. Not for him lying there, tingling with excitement at the thought of the beginning of Christmas.
He
was too old.He had got out of bed and gone into the kitchen to make coffee for them all as he had done