The Long Room

by Francesca Kay

  It was actually a miracle that she happened to have Mr Fisher’s number. Being an old-fashioned gentleman, he didn’t like the telephone, preferring to communicate by letter. But a while ago, last May it was, she’d happened to run into him at the entrance to the library and he had mentioned that he was about to have an op to cure a contracture of his hand. Oh, she’d said, you must let me know how it all goes but you might not be up to writing, seeing as it’s your right hand that they’re doing, and he had said that she could always telephone. So she’d noted his number with a pencil on her library ticket and, strangely, she had never got round to rubbing it off. When Stephen rang last night, she’d known exactly where to find the number in the morning: oh my goodness, otherwise she would have been in a pickle. Imagine Mr Fisher turning up as usual, punctual as ever, looking forward to his Christmas dinner and there being nothing to eat but vegetables and pudding. As it was, it had been awkward trying to explain the change of plan but he had understood; after all, he was in the Navy in the war. He’d assured her that she should not worry on his account; he’d fend for himself; he would decorate his fishfinger with a sprig of holly! But she couldn’t bear to think of him all on his own on Christmas Day and missing his nice dinner, and in a flash of inspiration, while she was on the telephone, she’d suddenly thought: why not? Why not have their meal in the evening? Say seven o’clock? And Mr F, bless him, had been rather tickled by the scheme, remarking that it was somewhat unconventional but at his age that was no bad thing. When all is said and done, a change is as good as a rest. So that turned out all right, he’d appear at half past five and they would have a glass or two of sherry. But. But that was assuming Stephen came home by noon. And what if he did not? Coralie has no means of getting hold of him; she has no idea where he is. All that she can do is fret and pray and hope that he is not in trouble.

  She already knows that she will not sleep a wink but it is almost midnight and she really ought to go to bed. She gets to her feet, pressing hard down with both hands on her knees for leverage, switches off first the fire and then the light. The last vestiges of heat flicker like glow-worms in the dark until they gradually fade out. Coralie pulls aside a corner of the curtain and sees the snow; she watches it falling for a while and then, leaving Stephen’s stocking unfilled by the extinguished fire, she slowly makes her way upstairs.

  *

  It’s Christmas Eve. In the windows of the cottages and houses where the curtains are not closed, there are small scenes: children playing, children watching television, families in kitchens, tables laid for meals, a young girl combing her long hair; and in all of these are lampglow and the look of warmth. People are in shirtsleeves, not double thicknesses of wool. Doors bear wreaths of holly, candles are lit on mantelpieces, in front gardens coloured lights bloom on the boughs of trees. Stephen, roving through the town, peers hungrily at these illuminations of domestic life, coming as near to the windows as he can, invisible to those within, he hopes; like a famished creature cast out of its pack, he prowls the quiet streets. Few walkers are out on this cold evening and those who are have their intents and purposes and hurry past him, swaddled in dry clothes and shielded from the snow by their umbrellas. No one stops to talk to him or ask him what he’s doing and even if some kindly passer-by were to see that he is lost, Stephen could not ask her for directions. How could he explain that he is searching for the house of a woman he only knows as Joan, who may live in this little town where the river is messenger to the open sea, but equally might live in one of the secluded houses on its outskirts, and that he needs to tell this woman’s daughter that he loves her?

  Framed in one of the bright windows a woman in her kitchen, gazing out but seeing nothing in the darkness, spoons something crimson into her mouth and tastes it lingeringly before re-filling the spoon and lifting it back to her mouth. In a second window a tall blonde woman seen from the back, and Stephen’s heart misses a beat, but when she turns he sees that she is old.

  Systematically he explores each narrow street and looks into every window still unscreened but as night falls and darkness deepens, more curtains and blinds are drawn. It is almost eight. At the quay the river-water slaps against the stone and the lanyards on the masts of the moored boats clatter and clink on wood and steel. Now no one is about. But light is coming from the pub along the road, and in the bar a lively fire is warming the small cluster of people gathered there. The landlady of earlier in the day has been replaced by an older man who warns Stephen that he will be closing early but cheerfully serves him a double Bell’s.

  What alchemy or transubstantiation turns liquid into flame when it is swallowed? Shutting his eyes and leaning against the upright wooden back of the bench close to the fire where he is sitting, Stephen pictures the golden drink as a dragon’s tail whisking through the passages of his body, bringing heat where there was frost before. For the first time in hours his teeth stop rattling in their sockets like unsteady tombstones in a gale. He buys another double. It is good but not good enough to thaw out his numbed faculties of reason: his mind is still too frozen to conceive of his next step.

  Around him the group of friendly drinkers is beginning to break up; people are leaving the bar, calling out their Christmas greetings from the door. ‘Last orders, gents,’ the old man says: time for Stephen to have another whisky and a chaser of Adnam’s mild to soothe his throat. There is nothing to eat but peanuts and pork scratchings; they will do. It’s Christmas Eve. He smiles to himself. It’s Christmas, Steve. Unbidden, the image of his mother flickers before his eyes: what will she be doing at this moment? Better not to ask that question but to scrub the thought of her from his imagination. She will be all right tomorrow; he’ll make sure of that. Better also not to dwell too long on images of Helen either. She is not alone tonight but with her faceless husband; will she share her girlhood bed with him, be forced in its narrowness against the wall by his inconsiderate bulk, by his repellent smells? Who is he? What will he have brought for her this Christmas? The gold moon and its attendant pearls shine in Stephen’s pocket.

  He is now the last customer and the publican is sweeping the floor and raking the fire in a pointed manner. It’s time to leave. He’d rather not go out into the cold again or join Alberic in that comfortless hotel but he can’t stay here: it’s getting late, it’s Christmas Eve; he has nowhere else to go.

  On leaving the pub he almost trips over a blackboard propped up against the outside wall. There’s a piece of chalk tied to it, a small streak of whiteness in the dark. On an impulse Stephen kneels to wipe the surface with his sleeve, erasing anything already on it, and with the chalk he writes: I love you, Helen Greenwood.

  It is a relief to find the room in darkness and Alberic asleep – or lying still at least – when he returns. As quietly as he can, he takes off his clothes and gets into the empty bed where the slithery sheets smell of mould and damp like the clothes that even the desperate leave unbought at jumble sales.

  This is the first time in his life that he has shared a bedroom with a man. In the bed beside him, inches from him, Alberic makes no sound at all. Perhaps he is dead. If he could, Stephen would stay awake on guard throughout the night but he is so tired, so bone-achingly weary, that he can’t help sinking into sleep.

  *

  While he is still in the shallows of sleep, a realisation comes to him that jolts him back into alertness, but it comes too late. How stupid he has been. It is one minute before midnight, on the eve of Christmas: he knows where Helen is. She’s in the church with the solid tower where he left his car this morning. He did not need to enter it to know that there will be stained glass and candlelight and choristers and scents of dust and stone. There will be a crib, and a baby with its father and some sheep. And there will be singing: Come and behold him, born the king of angels, and now the carols are over and the service is ended. If he were to get up and dressed and into the car, would he get there in time? No, Helen is at the church door now, wishing the vicar a happy Christmas, s
tepping out alone into the snow.

  Which way did she go? The snowflakes are soft as kisses and moonlight makes a path for her along the dark and dreamless streets beneath the watchful stars. Stephen is halfway out of bed and scrabbling for his trousers before he knows that he has lost her. At a house with shuttered windows she stops to find her key. It’s hushed inside the house; the dog stirs a little in its bed but it knows Helen and it does not bark. She had asked her husband and her mother not to wait up for her; they are both asleep.

  In the drawing room her stocking hangs beside a fire which now has died to barely smouldering embers and for a while she kneels by it and weeps. What does she weep for, Helen? She weeps for endings, truths discovered far too late, for betrayals and for loss, and loss of love.

  Why had he not remembered midnight mass until it was too late? He could have been there with her. He could have knelt beside her in a pew and shared her hymnal; their fingers would have brushed against each other’s on the page and she would have spoken to him. With the sting of his own tears on his face and in his ears, Stephen slowly drifted into sleep, and in the silent night outside, the falling snow.

  Christmas Day

  He woke to a shaft of sunlight and an empty room. Alberic was not there, nor was his coat, but his suitcase was still lying on the floor. He must have gone out for breakfast or a walk. Stephen pulled the thin blankets and the sticky sheets closer about him and considered the day ahead. Whatever else, it must include his mother. He had to get to Didcot soon. Yesterday he’d barred his mother from his mind but she was back in it this morning and he knew how worried she must be. His heart tightened when he thought of her hobbling across the kitchen in her purple dressing gown, wondering what had happened and if he were ever coming home. She’d be anxious for her turkey. Could he leave Alberic to make his own way back to London? If so, the drive would probably be quicker – cross-country, instead of south, then north and west. But there would be no trains today. Perhaps Alberic would choose to stay here longer, to do whatever he was doing by himself? Definitely, that would be best. And definitely it would not be wise to ask him any questions now. With his newly abraded vision he can see that Alberic may not be quite the harmless friend he wanted to believe in. But he does not want to be told the truth; that would be too dangerous now.

  And Helen? Stephen watched dust dancing on the beam of light and saw that, wherever she was this morning, he would never find her. It was hopeless to pace the streets of Orford yet again, for only by a miracle would she appear and, if that miracle occurred, it would take another for her to be unaccompanied. On Christmas Day no one who is loved is on their own. She will be with Jamie, or her mother, with other people maybe – Stephen cannot know. His strategy, such as it is – and he would admit it is contingent – has only ever been to contrive a time and place where they could talk alone and unobserved.

  But unexpectedly on the sunlight comes an answer, like the answer to a prayer, or a miracle indeed. He may not know where Helen is now but he knows where she will be: at the place of the hunt in two days’ time. The meet on Boxing Day, which is not on Boxing Day – how insulting that Rollo had assumed that fact would need to be explained, and how aggravating that it did – but on the next day, Monday, the day after tomorrow.

  Stephen can see it so exactly it as if he had already been to that mill house on the edge of a village in the Cotswolds on a late December morning. The road that leads to the village runs above a river valley; on either side of it, stone walls, lone trees standing sentinel, and fields shaped to the gentle contours of the hills. Sheep, white against the white of snow, and crows on wintry branches, like black notes on a stave, hungrily awaiting the coming of new lambs. The frost on the branches is so deep that they are sheathed in ice.

  There is a turning off the road: an ancient lane, hemmed by leafless hedgerows, leading through fields and meadows to the river; hawthorn and bramble, and contorted roots which clutch at the frozen earth.

  A narrow humpback bridge. The river, flowing through its low arch, swirls and eddies, a swan is circling with it, its neck an echo of the arch when it plunges its bill deep into the water. Over the bridge, following the path and the river where it curves and forms a crook half-islanding gardens and a house, and he’s there, at Harcourt Mill.

  No one has ground grain here in a hundred years. Nothing is left of the mill but ruins and nothing interrupts the river except the threat of ice. The house has grown fat over the years on the remains of the mill, eating up its walls and land, swelling from workman’s home to this long stretch of pale stone set around a courtyard. Frosted flagstones and in the centre, a marble fountain – a naiad bending from her waist and pouring water from an urn but the cascade arrested, turned to sculpted ice.

  In this white world, a blaze of sound and colour. Voices calling, horses stamping, their hooves ringing on the stones, jangle of metal upon leather, riders in bright scarlet, white-cravatted, dogs snarling, yapping, their din merging with the neighing horses and the braying men into one great clashing discord. Hot breath steaming on the air. Stephen, leaning against a slender yew and hidden by its branches, watches as the riders, hounds and horses throng, a woman moving between them with a silver tray of cups, and shouts, instructions, laughter split the morning air until, at a horn’s piercing command, they turn and wheel and clatter one after the other out of the courtyard, over the bridge and off towards the hills.

  Then silence. Stephen waits patiently until the sounds of the hunt have died away and the world is once again suspended in cold and the lightest mist. There are stone steps rising to the porticoed main door of the house but he knows a better way, through a wooden door at the end of the west wing, which admits him into the garden by the river. The path is bordered by a mass of palest green and by stems of willow that hoar frost has embroidered with traceries of crystal – each leaf, each twig distinct and clearly outlined in the winter light. No one else is in the garden; no one but Helen in the house.

  Helen is on the side of the hunted not the hunters: she will have watched the pack depart and breathed in the new stillness with relief. Since earliest morning she’s been longing for this moment when the house is empty and nothing disturbs the quiet but the murmur of the river and the chiming clocks. She opens the door of a room that her husband’s family seldom uses – a room in the west wing, where the windows open straight onto the garden and white silk curtains billow in the breeze. There is nothing in this room but a sofa and a grand piano and, on the floor by the piano, a vase of winter jasmine. Helen lifts the lid of the piano and props it open, takes her place at the piano stool. Bowing her head as if in prayer, she strokes one hand against the other, runs her fingers down the keys: ivory white, a string of notes, a minor chord. But then a small shift in the light attracts her, the slightest of passing shadows, and she looks up to see Stephen at the window, framed against the willows, the cold sunlight on his hair. She knows him at once. Because souls sing beyond the reach of bodies, they recognise each other, and Helen stands up to open the window and let Stephen in.

  *

  A need to pee that could no longer be ignored broke into Stephen’s chain of thought and he got out of bed, clutching a blanket to him. It was bitterly cold in the corridor and toilet. When he returned to the room, he found Alberic sitting on his bed, examining the map that Stephen had bought yesterday. He must have seen it sticking out of his coat pocket. Or perhaps he had been through the pockets first.

  ‘Good morning, old boy. I trust that you slept well? It’s a beautiful morning, the sun is shining and the rain has gone.’

  ‘Have you been for a walk?’

  ‘I went to get myself a breakfast. I woke early. But there is nobody about, not in here or in the bar. I can only suppose they have all forgotten we are here. They’ve buggered off because it’s Christmas. Fortunately there is that kettle over there, and tea, but if there’s one thing that I detest, it’s powder milk. Still, it will have to do. I make you a cup?’

&nb
sp; ‘Yes please.’ Stephen felt a marked reluctance to get dressed in front of Alberic but at the same time it seemed foolish to struggle with his trousers underneath the blanket. He was glad when Alberic turned round to fiddle with the kettle. ‘So, what plans have you made today?’ he asked.

  ‘You clever boy to find a map. We would have done better to have it yesterday. In the night, I was thinking we would walk again today. But now I see that it is not so easy and I cannot be positive that we can cross the boundary.’

  Stephen, emboldened by his own firm plans, was suddenly decisive. ‘I am quite positive that we cannot. There will be barbed wire, electric fences, dogs, security: we would be arrested.’

  ‘But not on Christmas Day? Surely the guards take holiday as well? Come on, my friend, let’s have a go!’

  ‘No. You go if you want to. I’ll drop you off in Aldeburgh now.’

  ‘Stephen! Stephen, please!’

  Shteefen. He will not be swayed. ‘I’m sorry but I have other things to do.’

  ‘Well, but it will not be fun if I stay here without you. Also I think there is no public transport.’

  ‘I think you’re right.’

  ‘Hey, don’t be angry with me. We make a compromise. We drive back to Orford, from where there is a pleasant view, okay? Because all I want is a photograph or two for my family album. Like a souvenir, you know? Something to remember with, like those papers that you “borrowed” from your work. I try to get pictures of everywhere I visit in this country so that when in the end I leave it, I will remember and look back. I would have bought a postcard but I saw none. And yesterday it was so cloudy. Today is better: clear and bright; actually, a very good day for being outdoors. Your girlfriend: does she have a dog? For if she has a dog, she will have to take it for a walk.’