Page 12 of A Copenhagen Snowmance

Chapter Eight

“What are you doing?” Jamie’s stopped walking to turn and look at her.

Anna peeps out from the doorway she’s hidden in, one of many she’s scurried between to stay out of view.

“Sheltering.”

Jamie looks up towards the glow of the streetlight. “It’s hardly snowing at all. Mere flakes.”

“It accumulates.”

He tilts his head at her. “Don’t be ridiculous.” Then he walks back towards her. “Come out. It’s dark, you have your hat on, your hood up and no one is looking for you.”

Her face tells him she disagrees.

“It’s not far now.”

“Where are we going, anyway?” It comes out whiny. She’s not proud of it.

“No clues.”

“Oh, come on.” She knows they’re heading down Gothersgade, plodding through the path previous feet have made through the snow, but that could still take them to any number of places.

Worry and curiosity aside, Anna is enjoying being wrapped up in her big coat and her feet are toasty in her winter boots.

It’s a world apart from the state she was in yesterday.

And today she’s more willing to look around her, taking in all the apartments above the shops and offices, each of them with candles burning next to poinsettias in the windows and with white fairy lights strung on balcony ironwork.

Jamie relents. “Fine. What day is it?”

“Sunday.”

“Date?”

“December thirteenth.”

“Which is…?”

Ah. “Sankt Lucia?” St Lucy’s Day, bringer of lights.

“Points to the lady in the hat.”

“Everyone is wearing hats,” she points out. Jamie is wearing a navy beanie of his own.

“Not that hat, though.”

“True.”

“OK. Points to the lady in the red hat with the white bobble.”

“Are you taking me to church?” There will be processions in churches all over the land, with a young woman, dressed in a white gown, a fir wreath crown on her head with four lit candles.

She and a troupe of children, also dressed in white, will process up the aisle, holding candles and singing.

A true Scandinavian custom, Anna has always found it very moving in the dark of winter. She’s taken part in plenty, too.

“Nope,” he says. In spite of his passive face, Anna is sure he is enjoying this, the keeping her in the dark.

Piqued, she takes better stock of where they are. “You know, Tivoli is up that way, right?” And quite a way off, she thinks in her head. The iconic pleasure garden has its own annual procession, all amid the thousands of lights that fill the park every Christmas.

He gives her an indignant look. “I might not be a local, but I know where Tivoli is. Not a complete noob.”

Reaching the end of Gothersgade, they cross to skirt the edge of Krinsen, the ice-skating loop at Kongens Nytorv square.

“Are we skating?”

“Nope.” They keep walking, past the many skaters, and the small stalls at its edge. Children laugh on the ice or in the snow, dressed in their brightly coloured one-piece snowsuits, balaclavas and mittens. This is what Anna loves about snow; the instinctive delight it can bring.

Then the realisation hits her. “Why are we going to Nyhavn?” It’s fine to see it on his jigsaw picture, but she has no desire to be there.

“I have a friend who has access to somewhere special.” She huffs, not entertained by his mysteriousness. “Relax,” Jamie says. “You’ll like it.” Quite how he thinks he can make this statement, Anna has no idea, because he barely knows her.

Nyhavn, the colourfully painted old harbour, has always been one of her favourite places in the city.

She has, on occasion, been known to sit at a table of one of the quayside restaurants for an entire afternoon, just because she loves the vibrancy and the history and the colours of the old buildings.

But all that has been tarnished for her, now she knows Carl and Maiken would meet here.

Hardly discreet and hardly worrying about being seen.

Anna has, since the discovery of the affair and her dissection of all the signs she missed, felt certain locations in the city were, if not complicit in the subterfuge and betrayal, at least involved, and so she’s fastidiously stayed away.

“Have you been to the Tivoli procession?” she asks, her heart rate increasing as they get closer to the harbour.

“Aye. Last year.” His broad frame, just behind her, though not touching her, herds her along. She can’t turn and bolt home. She’d be met by his chest and she’d have no chance of getting through him.

“You don’t want to go again?” she tries.

“Not today,” he says. He is completely unbothered by her clearly being bothered. Infuriating man. She huffs again, frustrated.

“Need I remind you, Anna, that I won the rights to decide this evening. A wager you willingly entered into, of your own volition, quite keenly in fact, and so there really shouldn’t be any objection or push-back, from you, The Loser.” She resists the urge to stamp on his toes with her toasty boots.

They reach the bulwark end of the harbour basin, where the tour boats start and finish.

She always advises visitors to Copenhagen to start with a canal tour, to get a feel of the city before they start their foot tours.

The entire area is teeming with people, well wrapped up, hands clasped around cups of steaming gl?gg from the nearby stalls.

The air is heady with the spiced scent of the mulled wine. It’s pure Christmas.

“This way,” Jamie says, steering them not to the restaurant side to the left, but down the right-hand side, which leads to the cycle bridge.

“Are we heading to Reffen or Christianshavn?” she asks. Both the street food and entertainment island, and the old part of the city lie across the main harbour.

“Nope,” he says and then, “We’re. Here… Now.

” He guides them through a cluster of people standing along the pavement and onto the gangplank of an old, moored boat.

The wheelhouse roof carries both a thick snow layer and a festive weave of party lights, to charming effect.

Anna feels her braced shoulders sink; she has no chance of resisting Nyhavn’s loveliness in the face of this.

There are numerous people milling around on the deck already and a man appears from inside, having spotted them. “James! Velkommen til.”

They shake ’n’ hug in that way men do, and Anna stands behind. The man looks to her. “And this is your guest.”

“Anna, Mikkel. Mikkel, Anna,” Jamie introduces.

Mikkel bids her welcome and tells them there’s a vat of gl?gg further around the deck and they should help themselves to any of the sm?kager they’d like.

Anna has never needed asking twice when it comes to cookies, Christmas or otherwise, and she leads them around the light-spun wheelhouse to the other side of the boat.

A roar from the crowd across on the other quayside draws them to the rail.

They’re just in time to look down towards the mouth of the basin, where there on the water, a flotilla of lights has rounded the corner and is coming towards them.

Hundreds of kayaks, all adorned with fairy lights, are floating up the quay through the dark, the kayakers wearing head torches, Santa hats and even more strings of fairy lights around their bodies, all reflecting in the ripples of the inky water. It is utterly magical.

“Oh…” she sighs.

“Exactly,” Jamie concurs.

“I’ve written about it, but never actually been to one.

It’s quite a new tradition. The one year we did try, we screwed up the timing and the crowd along the Christianshavn canal was so huge, we couldn’t see a thing.

” We. Carl had been late home for some reason, and they’d simply arrived too late.

That and, unlike some, they didn’t have a friend who had access to a boat in Nyhavn.

The flotilla glides to a halt, clustering together in a fairy-lit mass.

From somewhere, a voice starts to sing, soon joined first by the other kayakers, and then from all three sides of the quay.

Anna knows the carol by heart, so joining in is instinctive.

The lights, the water, the unity of voice move her in a way she hasn’t experienced since she left.

Mikkel appears, singing in a rich baritone, with cups of gl?gg for them both, hot and secretly hiding the rum-and-port-steeped raisins and almonds at the bottom.

There’s a spoon handily placed in the cup to scoop them out, and Anna knows these are the bits that really get people drunk.

Spirits by stealth. Jamie has tucked in already, but he doesn’t know the words to the carol, so fair enough.

Mikkel has also left them a small paper bowl of cookies, and Anna snaffles herself a brunkage, a brittle brown disc with gingerbread-like flavours, a couple of pebern?dder, small, sweet biscuit nuggets, and a vaniljekrans, a vanilla-spiced wreath, which she sticks her finger through and eats like that – just as she did as a kid.

As the song comes to an end, a huge cheer goes up, and the kayakers slowly negotiate their way to turn and extract themselves from the floating cluster, before heading back out of the harbour.

“Danes do like their singing,” Jamie notes.

“It’s integral to the national culture, I think.

Faellessang. Not sure what you would call it – community singing, maybe?

‘United singing’. I honestly believe singing’s good for the soul, and coming together with others, strangers even, to sing together …

well, I think it’s a cornerstone of our society and community.

Danish society,” she corrects herself. It’s not her society anymore.

“I’ve been to a wedding here,” Jamie says. “The guests wrote songs for the wedding couple. Known melodies, personalised funny lyrics. Everyone really got into it.”

“Oh, yes, and not just weddings. Literally any party. And during Covid there was daily Faellessang on the television throughout the lockdowns. It helped people feel less isolated. It’s a big thing. And tonight, it was beautiful.”

“Totally,” agrees Jamie. “Who’s glad they came out, now?”