A Winter Flame

by Milly Johnson

  Violet had a point, Eve conceded. Although, as a counter-argument, con men were often narcissists, arrogant enough to feel they were above suspicion. Double-bluffers.

  Eve huffed impatiently. ‘Why does everyone have to have so many bloody secrets? What harm would it do to just tell people things?’ And Violet knew she wasn’t talking about Jacques any more.

  ‘I take it you’ve had no news from Jonathan’s parents?’ she asked tentatively.

  ‘No,’ said Eve, flatly. ‘They’ve changed their number. I rang a few weeks ago and it was just a dead line.’

  Violet sighed. ‘They were never going to tell you, Eve. You have to let it go.’

  ‘What harm would it have done to tell me? What did they think I would do if I knew what they’d done with him?’ Eve snapped, then immediately apologized for it. ‘I’m sorry, Violet.’

  Violet came over and put her arm around Eve. ‘It’s beyond cruel,’ she said softly, giving her cousin a big hug. ‘But you don’t need to know where Jonathan’s ashes are, because wherever they are, he’s not there with them. You still have your candle flame.’

  ‘And he is there, isn’t he?’ asked Eve, wanting Violet to affirm that he was. ‘It would have gone out by now, wouldn’t it, if he wasn’t?’

  Violet thought about Jacques inadvertently blowing the candle flame out and it mysteriously relighting itself.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s watching over you.’

  The Portakabin was too quiet that afternoon. Eve’s eyes were reaching the bottom of a document and not taking in a word. Her brain was teeming with thoughts of Jonathan and what they should have been doing now – together. Then realizations, like tidal waves, kept crashing into those thoughts, that however many fantasies she had, they would never happen because Jonathan Lighthouse was dead and would never return. Yet that flame kept burning at home and that meant he was still out there somewhere, letting her know that he loved her. There was a membrane between their two worlds, an impenetrable barrier that he was behind. But if she found it, they could be together, couldn’t they? Her brain ached from the philosophical arguments as she reached into the trunk of corporate gift samples, which sat at the side of her desk. Looking through that little treasure box for a few minutes and giving her head a break might get her back on track. She pulled out the world’s ugliest lump of paperweight, which never failed to amuse, and a giant paperclip, then her hand fell on the half-bottle of whisky with the personalized label. She didn’t like whisky at all, couldn’t even get her nose past the smell of it to have a taste usually, which is why this bottle was still unopened after a year. But today, Eve unscrewed the top and tilted it into her mug of half-drunk coffee, then she lifted it to her lips and tipped it down her throat. It burned. But not quite enough to offset the pain that was unbearably messing up her heart. Maybe if she drank a little more . . .

  Chapter 24

  Ten minutes after meeting Corporal Jonathan Lighthouse in a bar in March, six years ago, Eve felt a seismic rumble within her. The man who had tapped her on the shoulder was slim, sexy, fit, with soft grey eyes and a melting smile that made her underwear want to drop to the floor. She was hooked from the off.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ was all he said for her heart to start thumping more than it had done for anyone else – ever. She couldn’t even speak, she had to resort to nodding. He carried her wine and his beer over to a suddenly available niche away from the volume of music and they sat and talked for hours.

  Then, at the end of the night, as Eve knew she was seconds away from receiving a kiss that would send explosions tripping along every nerve in her body, Jonathan confessed that he had a girlfriend.

  It could have quite easily been a line that he then delivered: ‘Look, I really wasn’t expecting to come out tonight and meet anyone like you. You’ve turned my world upside down.’

  But as much as Eve wanted to believe him, she also didn’t want to move in on someone else’s man, and so she kissed him lightly on the cheek and said, ‘Goodbye, soldier.’

  And that, she presumed, was the end of it.

  She didn’t expect that the following week a huge bouquet of flowers would arrive at the small office room she rented then when Eve’s Events was just turning a corner. And with it an accompanying card saying: ‘Ring me, new girlfriend’ and a mobile number.

  She was trembling when she pressed in the numbers and shaking even more – with delight – when she heard his voice.

  ‘Meet me for dinner,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain all.’

  And so she did. And over a meal in a very nice restaurant he told Eve that after meeting her he knew that he wanted to be with her. He couldn’t shake her out of his head. And the following night when he saw Marie – his girlfriend of three years, fiancée of four months – he knew he couldn’t be with her any more, and ended it just like that.

  Of course, Marie was devastated, but what else could he do? He wasn’t normally a creature of impulse like this, and he knew it was crazy, but he was a man of straight lines and it wouldn’t have been fair to carry on in a relationship with Marie when his head was so full of Eve.

  Within six months Jonathan and Eve were engaged and were about to complete the sale on a house together, but Mr and Mrs Lighthouse still refused to meet the woman who had stolen their son’s heart. They had considered Marie as a daughter and would not allow her position to be usurped, especially as Marie was so totally heartbroken about the split.

  ‘They’ll come round,’ promised Jonathan. ‘You watch, we’ll all be sitting around the table at Christmas laughing and pulling crackers.’ But they didn’t. Because three months later, when Christmas Day arrived, Jonathan was dead.

  Chapter 25

  By four o’clock, after quite a few nips of whisky, which she had rather hoped would have dulled the pain of her memories about the cold Lighthouse seniors, Eve found herself more than a little tipsy. Which is why she found herself heading for some air, through the enchanted forest and ending up outside the reindeer enclosure.

  There was no one around. Not even Holly seemed to be there. Eve called to her.

  ‘Holly, Holly – are you in there?’ and she attempted to make the clicking sounds that Jacques had made to lure her forward. It worked. Holly emerged from her shed, tentatively looking around to see who was calling her. She disappeared back inside, making Eve wonder if that was another rejection to add to today’s list, then Holly stepped out and walked slowly over to her, making her snuffly, strange piggy-like noise.

  ‘Hello, girl,’ said Eve, stretching out her hand and wishing she had a treat for her. What did reindeer eat? Polos, like horses? Carrots? Elves? The thought of a small pair of green-clad legs hanging out of Holly’s jaws made Eve suddenly giggle. She wondered where her aunt had recruited all the dwarves and midgets – were they from an agency? Evelyn had contacted a firm specializing in accounts to deal with all the staff. There was very little the woman hadn’t thought of.

  ‘So how’s your day been?’ said Eve, enjoying the white deer pushing and nudging at her hand. ‘Mine’s been a bit shit, if I’m honest.’

  Holly swung her head around and worried at her side before returning her attention to Eve. Her eyes were big and brown and shiny, and so very sad, Eve thought. She recognized that look. It was the look her own eyes had when her mother whisked her out of primary school and into another one in Sheffield, after they’d moved in with one of her boyfriends, though Eve couldn’t for the life of her remember his name. No one would talk to her in the playground and that first fifteen-minute break period seemed to last an eternity. And a week later, one of the girls made a point of giving everyone in the class a Christmas card except her. She felt like a total duck out of water for weeks – until Ruth fell out with her boyfriend and moved them back to Barnsley again in the New Year.

  ‘Do you miss naughty Olly, Holly?’ asked Eve. In the background she heard the tinkly, slightly off key sound of carousel music. It made her feel tearful for a reason she co
uldn’t quite pinpoint, as if it signalled a time before her heart became so sad.

  ‘Life should be much better as a single woman without all that romance stuff, shouldn’t it, Hols? But I miss it. I used to like waking up with someone.’

  Jonathan used to mumble in his sleep. He would make her laugh with some of the nonsense things he came out with. Once he sat bolt upright in bed and announced: ‘The sweetshop will be closed until further notice and all NCOs caught in possession of soap will be arrested.’

  That memory plunged the ever-present knife into her heart a little deeper.

  ‘He would have been thirty-five today, Holly,’ Eve sniffed. ‘I only had him for one birthday before he went over there. I made him a cake. It had Cadbury’s Buttons all over it.’

  Holly nudged her sides again, as if something were hurting her there.

  ‘We made plans to go to Mexico after that Christmas. We were going to buy our wedding rings there. But he died. Roadside bomb. He never thought it would happen to him. He thought he was invincible.

  She had imagined the noise of that bomb in her head so many times, seen Jonathan fly into the air, his arms and legs flailing, before he landed on the ground a beautiful whole corpse. She never let herself think that his end wouldn’t have been like that. The army sealed his coffin before they sent it home. Jonathan had made no will, so his next of kin were his parents. The army told Eve of his death but she thought it right and proper that his mother and father took charge of the funeral. Still, they didn’t even tell her when it was. She might never have known had one of his friends not rung to tell her.

  Eve remembered the many messages she had left on Mr and Mrs Lighthouse’s phone. They never picked up, they never rang back. The first time she met them was at Jonathan’s funeral.

  There was no mistaking the couple immaculately dressed in black, huddled around a weeping, skinny blonde woman whom Eve recognized from Jonathan’s old photos as Marie. Eve remembered the narrow-eyed scowl Mrs Lighthouse gave her when someone whispered to her that Eve had arrived. Even the memory of that look burned her. She had the same grey eyes as Jonathan. It was hard to see those eyes viewing her with so much hatred.

  They weren’t so disingenuous to tell Eve she was not welcome at Jonathan’s funeral, but they didn’t have to – they made that perfectly clear by ignoring her, concentrating on comforting the distraught Marie and accepting condolences from Jonathan’s friends.

  ‘I was terrified to go up to them,’ said Eve, stroking Holly’s furry head. ‘But I had to, I wanted to. I waited until after the ceremony.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ said Ann Lighthouse when Eve attempted to introduce herself.

  ‘I had all this stuff rehearsed, but all I could manage to say was that I loved him so much,’ said Eve, tears rolling down her cheeks. She remembered Mrs Lighthouse bending over and speaking in her ear.

  ‘Then you should have left him alone. He was happy with Marie, but within months of meeting you, he is dead.’

  ‘It was like she was telling me I’d killed him,’ said Eve. ‘She said that they didn’t want to know I existed. They wanted to “consign me to the obscurity in which they wished I’d stayed”. She said I was a temporary madness from which their son would have recovered. “We do not acknowledge you”.’ Every frozen word had ripped into Eve like razor wire.

  ‘He was my life,’ Eve had sobbed quietly, not wanting to draw attention to herself. She didn’t know how many more people hated her. For a moment she imagined they all did.

  ‘He was our life for a lot longer than he ever was or would be yours’ snarled Ann Lighthouse, the weight of hatred evident in her voice. ‘Ours and Marie’s.’

  Tears tickled Eve’s cheeks but she didn’t wipe them away.

  ‘She laughed when I asked if I could have some of his ashes. A teaspoon of them would have done. “He will come home with us where he belongs,” she said to me. “ALL of him.”’

  Eve remembered then how Ann Lighthouse turned away from her and Eve reached out to touch her arm.

  ‘Will you let me know what you’ll do with him then, please,’ she had said. ‘So I can think of his resting place.’

  But Ann Lighthouse had stared at the dark-haired woman reduced to rubble in front of her, wiped her sleeve very pointedly where Eve had touched it, as if it were now disease-ridden, and said a very cold, ‘No.’

  The reindeer was looking in Eve’s eyes now as if she was really listening. She had never told anyone before what happened at the funeral and yet she was pouring it all out to a pregnant animal.

  ‘I tried ringing them after the funeral but they never answered. So one day I drove to their house to ask them again, and Gregory Lighthouse called the police.’

  Indignity was poured on top of the pain. The police were kind but firm and told her to go home.

  Jonathan and Eve had joint insurance on the house, which paid out but brought no comfort to Eve. She gave a huge anonymous donation to Help for Heroes out of the monies, but what she wanted most of all was to know where Jonathan was resting. She didn’t take the pension that she could have claimed, signing it over to Jonathan’s parents because she didn’t feel it belonged to her, but not even that softened the Lighthouses to her.

  ‘I’ll never know, Holly. I’ll never know where my Jonathan is resting.’ She was overcome by a fresh wave of tears and wished she could stop them because tears came from a place where all her pain was stored and she couldn’t close the lid on it. It was as if the tears swelled the sealing door as surely as if it were made of wood and she didn’t want to cry, didn’t want to let all that hurt out because there was too much of it to bear. ‘It just gets worse, not better, Holly,’ Eve said. ‘Time is supposed to be a great healer, but it isn’t working, and I don’t know what to do any more. Any ideas?’

  Holly looked at Eve with sad brown-eyed bewilderment and made a loud honking sound, like an upset goose.

  ‘I know they blame me, Ann and Gregory. They think I changed the course of his fate. People find it easier to blame someone, then they have a target to direct all their hurt. I know it’s human nature.’ Ann’s words had stuck to her like a sugar bomb, then burrowed deep inside and done their most damage in her brain, because more than a little part of Eve wondered if Mrs Lighthouse was right: that if Jonathan had never met her, he would be living still, content with Marie.

  I feel alive with you, Eve. More alive than I’ve ever been with anyone else. You make me believe I could live for ever. He had told her more than once. Did he feel so invincible that he took his eye off the ball? That would make it her fault, wouldn’t it?

  ‘Oh Holly, I miss him so much. I miss him more with every passing year.’ Eve wiped her eyes and then laughed at her ridiculous self. ‘How bloody stupid am I, talking to a reindeer?’ But somehow it didn’t feel as barmy as it should. The kind-eyed beast offered no comment or judgement, just allowed her to dump a huge lump of sorrow off her chest.

  ‘I don’t know how to stop thinking about him, Holly,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to stop thinking about him, even though people think I should. I don’t want to go for counselling. I want him to know that he is mine still and always will be, that my love wasn’t cut off by his death. Is that so bad?’

  Holly offered no comment. Not even when Eve’s tears reached the ground. There was no one around to embarrass herself in front of, so Eve let them. Eve didn’t cry usually. She had learned from an early age to stuff her emotions away. Only when Jonathan came into her life did the cupboard door on them unlock, and she felt truly able to let her vulnerable self peep out.

  Holly flumped heavily to the ground.

  ‘God, don’t say I’m boring you,’ said Eve. ‘Although you must be tired, carrying that weight around.’

  Holly curled her great head around towards her bottom, biting at her sides and braying loudly. And Eve knew.

  ‘Oh, you’re not are you?’ said Eve, looking around her to see if anyone had miraculously appeared to help. She wa
s no reindeer expert but this was looking a bit obvious.

  Holly was shuffling around on the ground and looking in discomfort.

  ‘Wait, hang on,’ said Eve. ‘I’ll get the vet.’ She reached in her pocket for her mobile phone, then realized she didn’t know which vet Jacques had contacted. She thumped in his number.

  ‘Hello,’ came his voice after two rings, sounding more Leslie Philips than she liked.

  ‘I think Holly’s started giving birth,’ she said, feeling as sober as if someone had just chucked a gallon of water over her head.

  ‘I’ll be right there,’ he replied.

  He must have run like Linford Christie from the carousel because he was there in warp-speed seconds.

  ‘Have you rung the vet?’ asked Eve in early panic-mode.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Jacques. ‘I’ve just been busy doing a four-minute mile.’ He took his phone out of his pocket. Eve raised her eyes heavenward, noticing the SpongeBob SquarePants case it was stored in.

  The half of the conversation she heard wasn’t very encouraging.

  ‘Well, when will he be back then? There must be someone you can send . . .’

  ‘Don’t tell me they aren’t sending a vet out,’ growled Eve.

  ‘Well, they’re saying Mr Fleece is on another job, and they’ve got a rush on.’

  He held his finger up as Eve was about to interrupt him again. ‘However, they are also saying that it’s unlikely we are going to need him anyway. Nature knows what it’s doing.’

  Jacques put his phone back in his pocket.

  A gooey-covered head was pushing out of Holly’s rear end.