Christmas in the Snow (30 page)

Allegra straightened her spine a little. It never got easier saying the words out loud; the guilt was as bad now as it had been then. ‘The best mother we could have ever asked for.
Intensely loving and protective. She always did her best for us.’

Lars stiffened, picking up the past tense immediately, his mind clearly still pin-sharp. ‘She’s dead?’ His voice trembled.

‘No! No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you think—’

‘So she is here?’ The urgency in his voice betrayed the emotion behind the question. ‘She has come to bury her mother?’

Allegra shook her head. ‘She doesn’t know about any of this. She has Alzheimer’s . . .’ She hesitated. Did that translate? But she saw his face change and knew he
understood. She fell quiet, understanding the impact of her words: within minutes of bringing hope of reuniting him with his daughter, she was pulling it away again like a child playing a cruel
trick.

His expression folded inwards, growing smaller. ‘What . . . ? When did it start?’

‘Six years ago. It was early onset.’ Allegra rubbed her lips together at the memories – her mother’s sudden violence when she couldn’t find the jam in the fridge,
only for it to turn up in the dishwasher, her overnight clumsiness that saw cups of tea dropped straight to the ground as she missed the table by clear gaps, her excitable chatter in a girlish
voice that harked from the past . . . ‘We kept her at home as long as we could. I tried moving back in with her, but I travel a lot and work long hours and just couldn’t be around
enough. We tried a care home, but she was so devastated about being put in there.’ Allegra exhaled, trying to steady her breath. It made her angry even now, when she remembered the call from
the police saying she had escaped from the home and had been seen walking on the motorway slip road. ‘She’s in an assisted-living complex now, with her own nurse.’

Lars was quiet for a long moment as he looked into the flames of the fire. ‘It isn’t right that she should be so young . . .’ His words trailed away, but his hand tightened
round the arm of the chair.

‘Please don’t be distressed. In her own way, she’s happy. Her nurse is the very best, and she herself isn’t aware of the confusion most of the time. It’s me and Iz
who . . .’ She cleared her throat. ‘Well, we’re the ones who have to adapt. Very often she doesn’t know who we are and we . . . you know, just have to accept it as part of
the disease. But at least she’s not frightened herself. That would be worse.’

‘You are too young to lose your mother in this way.’

She was quiet for a moment, staring down at her hands. ‘There’s never a right time, though, is there?’ She realized their loss was mutual – they had all lost Julia too
young, Isobel, Allegra and Lars.

‘What about her husband?’

‘Excuse me?’ The question was like a bullet that she hadn’t seen coming and she glanced across at Isobel, who looked like she’d taken the hit. ‘Her husband,’
Lars said, his eyes narrowing as he took in her reaction. ‘Your father.’

‘He . . . he left a long time ago.’ Allegra clasped her hands together over one knee, the knuckles blanching.

His expression fell. ‘When your mother fell ill?’

‘Before then,’ she nodded crisply, her voice suddenly distant and formal. ‘He has another family.’

‘And you have no contact with him,’ Lars said, more as a statement of fact as his eyes darted left and right, reading her and Isobel’s body language.

‘That’s right.’ Her chin was beginning to push up in the air, a habit from childhood when she’d thought that to tip her head back would be to force the tears back down.
Gravity on her side.

He turned to the fire again, as though aware of the fragility of the ice he was walking on. ‘She has suffered too much, my daughter.’

‘No,’ Allegra said quickly, too quickly. ‘We were happy. We
are
happy. We didn’t need him anyway. We had each other – me, Iz and Mum.’ Her fingers
found Isobel’s and interlinked with them. ‘Didn’t we, Iz?’

Isobel looked up at her and Allegra saw the hollowness of her lie reflected in her sister’s eyes. Yes, they had had each other, but they had been fatally diminished by his desertion, like
a tree that had been too brutally lopped – still alive but no longer able to grow.

‘And we had Granny too.’ Isobel’s voice rang out cold and steely and strong.

The blood drained from Lars’s face. ‘Who?’

‘Granny.’ Defiance clung to the word.

Allegra trod more softly. ‘She means Anya. We grew up believing she was our grandmother.’

‘Anya said she was . . . your grandmother?’ Every word aged him.

Allegra nodded, watching him closely. The truth was somewhere in this room with them. ‘Mum doesn’t know yet that Valentina was her mother. We only discovered it ourselves last week,
when the police traced us in England.’

‘England.’ A sound came deep from inside Lars’s chest, an expression coming into his eyes that would have seemed dangerous on a younger man.

‘You didn’t know that was where she went?’ Allegra asked, her eyes scrutinizing his every move.

Lars shook his head.

‘When we got the phone call, it was the first time we’d even heard Valentina’s name. No one had ever mentioned her before—’

‘Or you,’ Isobel said, interrupting again, her every word a pushback against the new truth that made a liar of the only grandmother she had ever known and loved. ‘We were told
you had died when Mum was a toddler.’

He looked back at her, disbelief slackening his muscles. ‘Anya said all that?’

Isobel paused, a look of regret on her features, and Allegra knew that she felt it too: caught between histories that had been lived out long before either of their first breaths.

Allegra looked back at the old man, who seemed to be withering under every word that told him he’d been forgotten, killed off, dispossessed . . . ‘If we’d known you were still
alive . . .’ she began, but she ran out of words, not quite sure what
to
say next – for what would they have done? Visited? Stayed with the man Anya had left? Reunited the
father with his adult child?

She watched as he lifted his head, stretching his neck like a dog, so that the skin stretched tight against his frame once more. Was he, like her, trying to make the tears drop back too? Was
this something they shared? A small genetic quirk that carried over the generations, even through sixty years’ isolation from one another?

‘Why did she leave here?’ Her words were careful. ‘Here’, not ‘you’. Without accusation, without judgement . . .

The words tiptoed across the space between them, trying to build a bridge that spanned those lost years, reconnecting them all again. Only answers could heal the rift, and there was still time
– just.

Lars rocked gently in the chair, his eyes far away, his mind in a distant land, and for a long time, he didn’t even try to speak.

‘She was jealous,’ he said finally. ‘Valentina was the love of my life; there was no hiding it. I could not! She was the kind of woman who breaks a man with her beauty, her
passions. She was strong, not of her time, and certainly she did not belong to the farming life. Every man wanted her, the richest, the strongest, the married . . .’ His eyes lit up faintly
as the reflected flames leaped higher. ‘Why she ever chose me . . . She was dazzling. No dress was beautiful until she wore it, no joke was funny till she laughed at it.’ He looked back
at Allegra with the eyes of a young man. ‘Are you loved like that?’

She swallowed. How many people were? ‘No.’

‘That surprises me. You are beautiful like her and clever too, I can tell.’

She smiled weakly, not sure what to say, embarrassed that all his attention was on her. Did Isobel see that he looked at her and saw ghosts?

‘Women like you don’t know the power you have over men. I was a – how would you say? – vigorous man in my youth. Handsome, strong, ambitious. I knew I had to excel for
her, be even more than what I was born to be. And I tried. I wanted to be the man she deserved. But when she died, my world was broken, as well as my heart.’ He shook his head, his fingers
blanched as he clawed the armrests. ‘Poor, sweet Giulia. I was no father to her. I could not feed myself, could not eat . . . so when Anya moved in to help . . .’ He fell quiet, drawing
his lips together like a threaded purse. ‘It seemed logical after a while that we should marry. She and Giulia were close, and, well . . . Valentina had always teased me about Anya’s
infatuation with me . . . I couldn’t love her in the way that I had Valentina, but I thought we could be happy enough.’ He shrugged again, a helpless gesture. ‘I was wrong. She
didn’t want to live her life as second best.’

‘
That’s
why she took your daughter?’ Isobel said, accusation in every word, as though the fault was his.

He looked at her. ‘Yes.’

Isobel’s mouth dropped open. She hadn’t expected him to concur. ‘How could you just let her get away with it?’

‘Because it was the best thing for Giulia.’

‘To be raised on a
lie
?’ Her voice was growing shrill, a sure sign that she was on the way to losing it.

‘To be raised by a woman who loved her. Farming is a hard life. I spent most of the year out of the town, on the pastures with the herd. How could I do that alone with a child? It was my
livelihood, the only way I knew to make money to survive.’

‘But how could you survive losing the woman you loved
and
your child?’

He didn’t reply, but picked up his coffee with hands that trembled slightly, and Allegra discreetly put her hand on Isobel’s arm – a plea for caution.

But to no avail.

‘Well, you’re obviously not a farmer now,’ Isobel said drily, gesturing to the decorous chalet.

‘No, that is true. When the tourism began, I sold the farm and developed some properties. Even became town mayor for a while.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And I know what you are
thinking – I had money by then, yes, but it was too late. Even if I had known where Anya and Giulia were living, I had no way of knowing whether Anya had remarried, had children . . . I would
be a stranger to my own child. All I could be certain of was that Giulia was safe with her. Anya loved her as much as any real mother loves her child.’

They were all quiet, only the crackle of the fire between them.

‘She never remarried,’ Allegra said quietly, trying to mitigate her sister’s harsh scorn. In protecting their grandmother, Isobel was attacking him. Couldn’t she see he
had clearly suffered enough? The man looked broken by their news. ‘And she did love our mother, very much. They were extremely close.’

A spark flew from the fire, landing on the granite hearth, and he watched as it sizzled, twisted and extinguished before them, but Allegra couldn’t take her eyes from him: the poor man who
had become rich, the loved man who had been forgotten, the father who had ended up alone. What had their grandmother done?

She sat forward slightly on the seat, clasping her hands around her half-full cup. ‘I’ve spoken to Father Merete. He’s agreed to conduct a private memorial for Valentina on
Thursday.’ Isobel gave a small gasp beside her, but Allegra just kept her eyes on him. ‘Will you come?’

‘What are you doing?’ Isobel whispered furiously.

‘He’s Valentina’s widower. He deserves to be there.’ Allegra kept her voice to as low a murmur as she could manage.

‘And Granny’s too, remember. He married them both, or have you forgotten that?’

‘You heard him. He was trying to build another family for Mum.’

Isobel rolled her eyes and sat back furiously in the cushions, making her feelings perfectly plain.

Allegra turned back to Lars with an embarrassed smile. ‘Please.’

He looked back at her with reddened eyes, gratitude on his face. ‘It is the goodbye I have both dreaded and longed for . . . Thank you, I will be there.’

Allegra smiled, feeling something inside her strengthen. They had been right to come here – Isobel would see that when she had had time to cool off. ‘We should go,’ she
murmured, setting her cup down on the tray and smoothing non-existent wrinkles from her trousers.

Isobel followed with impolite haste.

‘Wait.’ He beckoned Allegra over to him, taking her hand in his – which were marbled hot and cold – and looking up at her gratefully. ‘Will you come back tomorrow?
We can talk some more. There is so much still to be said. I am an old and lonely man. I want to know my family before I die.’

‘Of course we’ll come,’ she smiled, making sure to include Isobel in the invitation. ‘This time tomorrow?’

He released her hand with a satisfied sigh, falling back in the chair as though a cushion that had propped him up had been suddenly whipped away.

The nurse appeared at the door. Had she been listening in? Her timing was too perfect.

Allegra and Isobel followed her out to the front door, collecting their jackets from the pegs and shrugging them on in silence as Bettina held the lift doors open. Allegra stepped in after
Isobel, turning and staring back into the hall with a growing giddy delight. She watched as the doors closed on the expensive portrait of a woman who, with every new fact, seemed to be explaining
Allegra to herself. She had always been the black sheep in the family – too dark, too stubborn, too proud, too awkward compared to her mother and sister’s fair-haired sensitivity and
easy smiles. She’d never had a feel for those softer social skills that came so easily to Isobel. She’d never had a knack for making people laugh or holding a room as she told a story.
Allegra dealt only in logic, black-and-white facts, mathematical reasoning, abstract concepts with immutable rules. To Allegra, something was either right or wrong, good or bad, and even as a
thirteen-year-old girl she’d known, standing on the grass, that her father wasn’t supposed to be having a picnic with that family.

She had often wondered how different things might have been if it had been Isobel, and not her, in the park that day when she saw them all together for the first time and realized the truth.
Would Isobel have been able to make him stay? Certainly, she’d always thought so. He had chosen the wrong daughter to save them. But at last she had found her people. If she was her
grandmother’s image, she was also her grandfather’s pupil. The parallels between them were obvious: like her, Lars had achieved great success; like her, Lars had endured devastating
personal loss; like her, Lars needed a family again. Isobel had her own, her mother had her past, but Allegra was every bit as alone as the old man in a chalet who had been written out of their
history because of a broken heart.