They watched from deck as the ship moved sideways away from the quay and then slowly forward, before turning a sharp right to exit the harbour, lose its pilot and head north east along the coast, eventually leaving Madeira behind and ploughing on in the direction of Southampton. The holiday, though, was not yet over, there still being three full sea days to go and, whilst they knew the weather would only be going in one direction too, they both looked forward to them, as well as to seeing their house again thereafter. Sylvie slipped away while Fergus sat on deck, dozing and lazily watching the sea and the island of Porto Santo come and go in the distance.
After a while, he too headed back to the cabin but, predictably, encountered Mrs Huffington in the corridor. He really didn’t feel like talking, but it was too late, she had seen him.
“Why Fergus, you appear very distracted.”
“I’m sorry Mrs Huffington,” then, thinking of his lost baseball cap, “I suppose I have something on my mind.”
“Madeira can do that to you Fergus,” she stared at him intently as if expecting him to ask why, but he didn’t, risking another question instead:
“Do you still miss your Lawrence, Mrs Huffington?” There were a few moments of quiet while the old lady considered her response to this unexpected query.
“I carry him with me Fergus.” It was a good answer and Fergus was about to say something to that effect, but she hadn’t finished:
“Anyway, we’ll be together again soon enough, I’m sure. You see death isn’t what most people think Fergus. There’s a curtain yes, but I believe there has to be, that what comes after is so wonderful that if we could see it we would all immediately jump through. But we have to live here a bit first, some of us longer than others. Just as we grow physically in the womb, so here we grow spiritually, it’s like the gestation for the more important life that follows.”
Fergus was momentarily stunned, he hadn’t expected such a thoughtful reply from the old lady and he couldn’t match it.
“I hope you are right Mrs Huffington.”
“I am right Fergus…” again she eyed him as if daring him to disagree, one hand on the zimmer, the other playing with the silver chain and medal she had bought herself at a discount with her bingo winnings.
“I very much like your pendant Mrs Huffington.”
“Thank you. It’s a St Jude, he’s the patron saint of lost causes, because everyone always confuses him with Judas Iscariot.”
“But you’re not a lost cause Mrs Huffington.”
The old lady again stood there silently for a few moments and then slowly put her hands around her neck, unfastening the chain’s catch.
“I hope you aren’t either Fergus.” She held out the pendant: “I hear it was your birthday yesterday, so please…” the silver glistened in her palm as she held it out towards him.
“I couldn’t possibly.”
“But you must Fergus, you must, otherwise I shall simply drop it here.”
He tentatively took it from her hand and stared at it, losing himself in thought. By the time he looked up again she had already turned and was shuffling away from him.
“Thank you Mrs Huffington, I shall treasure it,” he called out, but she just lifted her hand in a wave and continued down the corridor.
Fergus rejoined his wife in the cabin and showed her his gift.
“The patron saint of lost causes,” he explained, perversely proudly. They both reflected again on this old lady roaming the seas, dispensing unique wisdom and poignant presents, in Fergus’ case a well-timed substitute (inadequate, but still a consolation) for the priceless gift he had just lost.
They washed and changed and then slowly made their way to the Chinese buffet, he wearing his new St Jude pendant, Sylvie her lapis lazuli necklace.
The café was heaving with people who had plainly had the same idea, but Fergus and Sylvie managed to find a table to themselves and they delved into the buffet which, for vegetarian and non-vegetarian alike, was delicious; so much so that they both subsequently realised they had eaten far too much. They went outside to walk it off on deck, feeling a little better with each lap.
“I think we overdid it,” remarked Sylvie.
“Yes, I rather fear we did,” Fergus agreed.
They drew two chairs up next to each other in one of their favourite spots, a sheltered area at the stern where they had spent many hours reading and drinking lattés.
“I have something for you too,” she said, holding out a small package. “I bought it… in the boutique… as a holiday present, to say I’m sorry about your cap, thank you and that I love you.” This time it was Fergus’ eyes that widened with surprise.
“But you already say you love me in so many ways.”
“I want to say I love you in every way,” and they both smiled as they realised that, consciously or sub-consciously, they had repeated a conversation of a fortnight earlier. Fergus slowly opened the package and found a silver watch with a deep blue background.
“It’s beautiful,” he wondered.
“I know,” she answered cheekily, “and it’s deep blue like the sea.”
“Deep blue like the sea,” he echoed. “You couldn’t have chosen better!”
She put her arm around his and once again leant her head on his shoulder. A few minutes later he realised she was asleep. He sat there like that for an hour or more, reviewing the holiday, reviewing also their lives with Justine and in the long years since she had died. That precious cap, he should have kept it safely at home, what had he been thinking? He pictured it lying, even at that very moment, amongst the thorns of the Madeiran scrubland.
“I’m sorry Just,” he apologised softly and the wind caught his words, stealing them too, both out to sea and into the blackness of the night. After a while, he tried to practise his mindfulness: what more perfect setting than a warm evening, far out at sea, with nobody around except his wife, whose head rested comfortably against his upper arm? However, he quickly realised his own eyes were rapidly growing heavy: it was indeed a lost cause and any attempt at meditating was only going to end one way.
He gently roused Sylvie and led her sleepily to bed.
24
Ljubljana – December 2013
His sixty-third birthday was spent in Madeira, but three years earlier, for his sixtieth, Sylvie had treated Fergus to a week in Slovenia. In fact, without intending it, they had followed much of the initial route around the small country that Jones and his friends had taken some ten years earlier, although at slower pace. Jones had seen it in summer, lush and green with warm mountain airs; the Slovenia they saw was transformed by an early cold spell, which had laid blankets of snow and ice across its higher ground.
Their itinerary began by hiring a car at Ljubljana airport and heading north towards Bled. On the way, they diverted to see the Vintgar gorge, where they strolled the boardwalks fastened to the sides of the canyon, while an icy cold river gushed dramatically beneath them. There, suspended as they were between the two cliff sides and with trees towering overhead, the rays of the winter sun could not reach them and the already low temperatures dropped further, a cold they could feel sharply against their faces, even though their bodies were warm in the winter coats they had bought a few days earlier. As they exhaled, their breath visibly froze in the air before them, as if they were old steam locomotives and the boardwalk their tracks. They had grown up in an age before mass, budget travel and there still felt something miraculous to them that they could board a plane in a grey corner of England and disembark just two hours later in Scandinavia, Spain or in this case Slovenia, a country which immediately felt so different and whose beauty (as well as whose cold) could take their breath away.
Ultimately their new jackets were no match for the extreme temperature and, after ninety minutes, both were pleased to return to the car. Fergus cranked the heater up to full and, as they s
et off again, they waited impatiently for the engine to start pumping warm air into the cabin. Sylvie kicked off her shoes, ready to thaw her toes in the heat:
“You’ll never get them back on again!” Fergus warned, but at that moment, as she massaged her feet to restore the blood flow, she didn’t particularly care.
It was already early evening by the time they arrived in Bled and they quickly installed themselves in the modest but comfortable hotel which would be home for the next two nights. This was the first time they had properly stopped since leaving their house that morning and a wave of tiredness overcame them both, so they allowed themselves an hour to recover, before going down to the restaurant for a birthday-eve meal.
Replenished by this supper and warmed by a large, open fire, they emerged outside again for a brief wander around the town and down to the lake itself, which they were surprised to discover was completely frozen. It was too dark to see much, except for a few lights dotted around the shoreline and, there in the centre of the lake, the tower and steeple of the famous island church, illuminated softly and pointing up into the clear night sky, as if a chimney for the petitions of those who prayed there.
In daylight, the following morning, they could better see the field of shimmering pure white ice which surrounded the church. Fergus briefly wondered whether they could have safely skated across, but – having neither the daring nor the skates – they contented themselves with two circuits of the lake on foot, one either side of lunch. As dusk fell, they returned tired and red cheeked to their hotel, where the fire seemed to be waiting impatiently for them in its hearth, crackling and spitting its contempt. Every now and then, a waiter served it logs from a pile stacked by its side, and the flames consumed these ravenously. As they warmed themselves nearby, Fergus and Sylvie were far better humoured, but no less hungry.
“You’re really going to get chilblains!” Fergus cautioned his wife once more as she rubbed her toes in the heat, but again she didn’t care, focussed only on restoring her circulation after so long out in the cold.
The next day, after a final walk around the town, they drove the more mountainous of the two possible routes to Bohinj, where a cloud hung low in the valley just above its larger, half thawed lake. On all sides there were pine trees, weighed down by snow: dark forests which climbed up the slopes from the water, mirrored with crystal clarity in the pools where the ice had melted. The bridges along its perimeter and across its tributaries were also reflected on the surface, their arches forming perfect ovals as they reached down to meet their counterparts in the water below. Mountains rose all around, bleak and beautiful in the winter sky. The lakeside path was rough and slippery, while to its sides, in the places without tree cover, snow lay thickly on the ground, as it did on the roofs of the few buildings along the shore, including the churches, though it had slid off their steep Balkan spires.
After an excursion to the water’s edge, Fergus and Sylvie checked into their hotel and planned a lap of the lake for the following day, though opting to do it by car. And so they set off the next morning, driving its length, but pulling over frequently in order fully to enjoy the scenery, the snow crunching satisfyingly underfoot as they explored. When they eventually reached the far end it was lunchtime, so they found an inn where, asking a waitress to recommend something traditional, they ate a warming bean and sauerkraut hotpot, followed by a pastry filled with cottage cheese and walnuts for dessert.
They emerged back outdoors, lethargic after their meal, but the fresh air quickly reinvigorated them. Finding no road to drive back down the opposite shore, they walked contemplatively along it instead, engrossed in a silence broken only by the burbling and splashing of the occasional mountain stream cascading down to the lake.
“How are the toes now?” Fergus enquired, after twenty minutes.
“Still toasty,” Sylvie replied cheerfully, “the hotpot’s working wonders!”
A little later however, when they turned round to head back, the chill was once more beginning to bite and Sylvie was relieved finally to arrive at the car, where again she quickly removed her footwear. This time, though, the relief was short lived because the drive to the hotel was too brief to enable her feet to thaw properly and, as they approached its entrance, she could not put her shoes back on.
“What did I tell you?” said Fergus, with an irritating hint of triumph.
“Oh, just drop me by the front door, I’ll make a dash for it…”
And so Sylvie found herself hobbling up the cold hotel steps in her socks, feigning composure as she collected their key from the disapproving receptionist, before stumbling on up the stairs to their room. By the time Fergus joined her there, she was already soaking in a deep, warm bath.
Later that evening, in the hotel’s restaurant, they were again confronted by a menu of incomprehensible dishes, leaving neither of them under any illusion that they were becoming experts in Slovenian cuisine. Fergus found himself tucking into a grilled meat dish, without being entirely sure what it was, while Sylvie, as a vegetarian option, was pointed to the unpronounceable široki rezanci z jurčki, which turned out to be a wide ribboned pasta with local mushrooms.
The following day was a Sunday, which made for a leisurely drive back to Ljubljana, where they returned the hire car and checked into their hotel for two nights. They were to spend the next day and a half ambling through the streets and parks of this small capital city, which to them, apart from the graffiti here and there on its walls, seemed a world away from the stress and grime of its larger European cousins. They wandered through Tivoli, across the Three Bridges, around the Farmers’ Market and into the old town. They visited churches, museums and, snubbing the newly installed funicular railway, hiked to the castle, climbing the spiral stairs up its turret. There, Sylvie’s head span as, protected from a sheer drop by just a waist high wall, they gazed out across spectacular vistas of a Slovenia which was slipping ever deeper into winter.
Early their final evening, outside a bar on the banks of the Ljubljanica river, not far from where Jones and Justine had first met, Fergus and Sylvie waited for their meal in the warmth of a patio heater, sipping at wine and watching life go by. An old man with a walking stick unhurriedly made his way step by step across the cobbles, as if engaged in a quietly determined act of rebellion against the pace of modern life. A woman with long brown hair walked past more briskly in the opposite direction, a coat of the same colour buttoned up and stretching down to her knees, as she pushed her two year old daughter home in a buggy, talking softly, perhaps about what exciting things they might do the next day. A street sweeper assiduously brushed dirt into a pan and tipped it into his bin, before taking a brief respite from his toils to lean against his broom and look back at his work, proud to be keeping his Capital clean.
On the far bank, they could see the stall holders from the Christmas market packing up their wares for the night, looking forward to warm evenings at home with their families, after a long day out in the cold selling festive trinkets and steaming hot mulled wine. They banged around, taking down trestle tables and shutting up their little wooden huts: noises which carried across the river, along later with the sound of their vans starting up and driving away. Fergus and Sylvie only became aware that Christmas music had been playing gently in the background when it suddenly stopped mid-carol, leaving a strange silence hanging in the air, a vacuum which the city quickly filled with the clattering of cutlery on plates, a nearby child crying at a perceived injustice and, in the distance, a siren wailing, as if to prove that emergencies could even happen here.
They went for one last walk later that evening around Prešeren Square, with its festive lights, pink cathedral and enormous Christmas tree; the river glistening with reflections as it flowed nearby. The scene felt enchanting and they didn’t want to leave. Instead, they loitered briefly around the Three Bridges, gazing up at the castle, illuminated high above them on the hill behind the old town,
with the city’s fairy tale ‘castle and dragon’ flag billowing out in the mountain wind from the turret where, just a few hours earlier, they had giddily stood.
“I can see why she liked it,” said Sylvie. “I mean, I know she was here in summer rather than winter, but you can still tell.”
Of course there was no need to say who ‘she’ was. They hadn’t come to Ljubljana just because of its poignancy to Justine… but somehow the city had drawn them and, in truth, this had felt something of a pilgrimage.
“Yes, it’s been a good trip,” Fergus replied succinctly, with his right arm around his wife’s waist, and they slowly turned and made their way back to the hotel.
A freezing fog hung over the city as they climbed into a taxi the next morning for the drive to the airport. They arrived early and there was little for them to see from the departure lounge, until the gloom was finally pierced by the bright lights of their plane feeling its way towards them across the apron. Boarding began just ten minutes after the last inbound passenger had disembarked and Fergus and Sylvie were pleased to find they had a row to themselves, three from the back.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, I’m First Officer Casey Williams and it is my pleasure to fly you to London Stansted this morning…”
As the announcement continued, Fergus and Sylvie looked at each other:
“Did you hear that?” he said.
“Yes, it’s Jones flying the plane!”
For two years after the accident, they had kept in close contact with him, but his life had then moved on, while theirs had stood still. He had continued to write to them every Christmas and around Justine’s birthdays, but he hadn’t ever mentioned flight training. They didn’t begrudge him any of this though and, as their plane trundled its way back across the airfield, they felt excited that they might now have a chance to see him again and thrilled that he had achieved his ambition.
Times and Places Page 20
