Midwinter Break

by Bernard Maclaverty

  At the far end of the beach they came to a footbridge and walkway. But the tide was out so that the bridge appeared foolish – a leftover, a bridge to nowhere. They climbed the steps and crossed to the middle of the structure. The flooring was of wood and was weather-beaten and bleached. Why was such a thing there? He said, at first, that it was an unfinished bridge to Scotland. Then he reneged on the joke and told her that it was a popular place for rod fishing. At high tide the bridge was necessary to get to the rocks that yielded the most fish.

  They must have been downwind from the town because they could faintly hear the music from the amusements and squeals from the rides. She was resting her elbows on the parapet looking out to sea. A lighthouse on Rathlin Island flashed once. She waited a long time and it flashed again. Beyond, Scotland could be seen as pale blue on the horizon. She turned to him to ask a question and he kissed her. When the kiss finished she rested her forehead on his shoulder. He then moved to kiss her again. She extended her finger to stop his lips and left it there, making him feel she was unsure of him. He smiled a confused smile and she felt the movement of it beneath her finger. Then after a moment’s hesitation she took away her finger and returned his kiss.

  For ages afterwards, every time she wore that coat, she felt a joy of sorts when her fingers encountered the grains of sand in her pockets.

  * * *

  She leaned her shoulder against the wall of the passageway in Amsterdam and looked at her watch. Footsteps. She turned and the light was partially dimmed as a figure came towards her. It was a middle-aged bespectacled woman who excused herself in Dutch and walked past, her block heels ringing. She produced a bunch of keys and let herself into the building opposite. Stella moved forward. She hesitated, didn’t want to crowd in on the woman if this was just the start of her working day. Give her time to take off her coat – polish the rain from her spectacles. She might have a routine that did not include answering questions from the likes of Stella. So Stella walked another lap of the herringbone path around the garden. It would be impossible to get lost here. She lifted her head to the overlooking houses. Curtained windows – some with plants on display. Aspidistras, just like those at home. And in one window high up, the scarlet of a poinsettia, bright as a sanctuary lamp. The layout of the garden reminded her of a cloister, although there was no covered colonnade, no pillars holding aloft a roof. Anyone walking and meditating was open to the worst of the weather. And therefore distracted. A cloister was a sheltered walk to nowhere. A spiritual gym. The one that stayed most in her memory was in the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela. The shadows of its pillars creating a zebra crossing of light and shade, a place to pass in safety. A place of laps – a place which brought you around to your starting point. An alpha and omega place. Where the mind and the spirit could be freed by being restricted. Exercise for those who wanted to remain within walls. Imprisoned yet protected from the outside world.

  Some months later, before the summer ended, Gerry and she went away again. To Galway and the west coast. When they checked into the small hotel the owner looked up from her registration book and asked if they wanted singles or a double room. Stella said, very definitely, two singles.

  At dinner they shared a bottle of Blue Nun and praised the food extravagantly. They could see the garden from the dining room and the woman, who also served at tables, pointed out the very herbs which gave so much flavour to the food.

  They went into the garden afterwards. The light was changing from evening into night. A crescent moon was in the sky over the sea, creating a path of light to where they were standing in the herb garden. He showed her the trick his father had shown him – crushing the leaves between his finger and thumb, then smelling the aroma, gilding his hand with fragrance. But he was not bold enough to offer his fingers for her to smell. He was relieved when she imitated what he was doing and inhaled her own fingers. She made noises of surprise and pleasure after each plant.

  ‘The smells are getting all mixed up,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t have enough hands.’

  The next day – when they praised both the food and garden to the owner – she walked them around and named some of the more dramatic plants. Sage, rosemary, lavender, lemon balm, ordinary fennel and bronze fennel.

  Where Stella was walking now had the feel of a place where you could never go astray. A bleached snail shell could be a milestone. A spiky yellow plant she knew as Winter Sun could be a marker. In the corner of the garden was a silver birch, its branches fine and intricate and they had gathered the rain into themselves. The low sunlight caught these droplets and they flashed. As she moved there was a rainbow effect, throwing out little flints of colour. She stopped to look more closely and was amazed that the colour change happened with the slightest movement of her head. In a corner there was a bush in full blossom. It was only January, after all. She saw it long before she came to it – white petals stained with pink – but she had no idea of its name. She moved her face close and inhaled. Such a glorious smell. How could it be flowering in midwinter? Maybe the sheltered nature of the place had created its own climate. All these things were good omens. God’s grandeur.

  She smiled and approached the door next to the noticeboard. There were now lights inside and people moving about. But still she hesitated. She needed her questions to be clear. Just in case of language difficulties. A middle-aged man came out of the office building carrying a plastic folder. Sensing the rain, he placed the folder on top of his head. His hand was still on the door. Stella moved forward and went in, thanking him.

  The woman with the glasses was behind a desk talking in Dutch to some well-dressed African men – two in suits, two in colourful tribal costume. Stella waited and the waiting seemed to take for ever. The longer it took the more apprehensive she became. She wanted to try her voice out loud to see if it would shake – give away her nervousness. At some point a man in a fawn gabardine came in and stood in the queue behind her. She had no way of knowing if this woman with the glasses behind the desk could speak English. Until, that is, Stella asked her question. And she was not sure what the question should be, how she should phrase it. The man in the gabardine smiled at her and she smiled back. He said something in Dutch. She said she did not understand.

  ‘Are you on vacation?’ he asked.

  ‘Just for a few days.’

  ‘It is a pity about our weather.’ He shrugged his shoulders, ‘Winter.’ She smiled and nodded. The African party took their leave of the woman with extreme politeness and went out the door. Stella cleared her throat and stepped up to the desk.

  She walked back up the dark passageway into the noise of the city. No need to consult her guide. There were shops everywhere. Many of them didn’t have doors but instead had a curtain of hot air separating street and shop, hawing down on the top of her head when she entered. The gifts she wanted to buy had to be small – simple to wrap, simple to post, when she got back home. Making a family parcel with the Construct-o-Straws for Toby. She hated paying more for the postage than the gift. A postcard from Amsterdam would be nice. Wherever did the mother get a name like Tobias? Of course, Danielle was French. More correctly, French Canadian. ‘Toby’ was a kind of compromise that Grandmother was allowed and she only got to use it on the phone these days. The last time they’d gone back to Canada after a visit to Glasgow she’d talked to Toby on the phone. He was three. She was trying to get him to say something. Did you like visiting your grannie? Silence. Then she heard Michael’s voice faintly in the background, ‘It’s no good nodding your head, Tobias. On the phone you have to say yes.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course you did,’ Stella said.

  And she had a picture of the child at the other end of the phone standing silently holding the receiver nodding his head. It nearly broke her heart.

  * * *

  She found a large and classy department store. Like any other city, Amsterdam was full of shops which sold things that nobody wanted. Or the kind of things some people w
anted but nobody needed. She chose a tie for Michael – a little too colourful, but she didn’t want to seem conservative – and a scarf of black and white stripes for Danielle. All she needed now was a postcard to go with them.

  When Gerry wakened, the roof of his mouth was like corduroy. He lay still and stunned. Last night – why had he remembered the two RUC men coming for him at work? That stuff should stay in the past – should be well and truly buried. But it was a waking thought and for Gerry first thoughts were always bad ones. The dry mouth happened every time he was in a hotel. He blamed the air conditioning. There was never any way of opening a window to moisturise the air. The fact that he had an awful lot to drink the night before had little or nothing to do with it. There were nights at home when he drank as much and he didn’t wake like this. The RUC man’s face was still there but he couldn’t recall the younger one. In the unmarked blue Cortina the older one was twisting in the passenger seat to look round at him. Saying that Gerry was lucky they happened to be going that way. Special treatment was something they didn’t believe in. The young one driving. The older man had set his hat on the dashboard. The track of it was still visible on his hair. From behind, Gerry could see that the older man had a bald spot – like a monk’s tonsure. A little of his scarf appeared above his coat collar. The paisley pattern, complex, coloured, closely interwoven. Now nobody was speaking. Eventually the driver said something to his colleague in a tone of voice which excluded Gerry. Something about what they ought to do later on. When they finished this job. Gerry looked from one to the other. He realised he was ‘this job’. Done under sufferance. Not meeting his eye. There was a fibrillation continuing in his stomach. He sat forward as if looking at the traffic would clear it. But he didn’t speak.

  When they reached the hospital the driver dropped them outside Casualty but stayed with the car. The older man, who hadn’t bothered with his hat, ushered Gerry into reception. The place was busy – all bustle and plastic doors which slapped shut, trolleys with or without patients being pushed here and there, nurses in sensible shoes seen through an open door whipping curtains around bed spaces. A nurse in an apron came out of the door half running, half walking. The plain-clothes RUC man queued behind some other people waiting at the reception desk and nodded to him to sit down. Gerry got the distinct feeling he was being treated like a second-class citizen. It had something to do with his name. From the very start they knew he was Catholic. Gilmore in conjunction with Gerry equalled Fenian. Then there was the eye contact. Or lack of it. Eventually Gerry saw the cop speak through an aperture in the glass to the nurse in charge. He then left, nodding. ‘These good people will look after you,’ he said.

  After a while a nurse led him along a corridor. She walked a pace or two in front of him – or maybe it was that he followed a pace or two behind her. Like a child. No idea where he was going. All the corridors looked the same. Peppermint green above the dado, lower down, bottle green. Two soldiers carrying guns walked past them going in the opposite direction. The corridors became less crowded and they could hear their own footsteps, the starchy sound of the nurse’s outfit as she moved. He wondered if this corridor led to the mortuary. Was this the way they broke such news? Perhaps the whole thing was a mistake. The accident involved another woman who had been confused with Stella. He would get in to visit her and the woman would look like nobody he had ever seen before and he would smile and sympathise and pat her arm and leave and tell the nurse in charge – dressed in scarlet beneath a white apron – that that wasn’t his wife at all. There had been an error. A case of mistaken identity. But the nurse was walking on ahead of him with solemn determination. She knew what she was about. They came to another area of seating. About half the seats were occupied. The nurse asked him to wait and she went off to another room. Gerry sat down at the end of an empty row. This space looked like a gymnasium – wall bars, ropes, treadmills. The people sitting seemed to be talking quietly, seriously. Nobody was laughing or whistling. But bizarrely there was a brightly coloured toy mounted on a table – a game where the player had to negotiate a wire monocle the length of a metal maze without touching it and setting it off.

  His head moved on the hotel pillow. He tapped his tongue against the roof of his mouth to see if he could raise any moisture but there was none. His hand reached out and his fingers closed around the glass. He brought it to his mouth and the water was wonderful.

  For a while he just lay there with his eyes closed. Inside the room – silence. Outside – some distant hammering – and always and everywhere pneumatic drills. Probably at the behest of some architect.

  The silence inside the bedroom was unusual. He turned in the bed and looked. Stella was gone. Her half of the sheet was neatly folded back in a triangular dog-ear. He looked towards the bathroom but the bathroom door was open – not a habit of hers. She must have gone down for a paper. Or was it a Sunday? And she’d charged off to Mass? He looked at the day on her crossword newspaper – it definitely wasn’t Saturday. So today was not Sunday.

  He got up and sat on the side of the bed for a long time. Another drink of water was necessary – he had absorbed the first one so totally. Everything that could be done, should be done to make him feel better. He stepped out of his black pyjamas, went to the bathroom and turned on the shower. While he waited he brushed his teeth and hoped the shower would arrive at a suitable temperature. A cartoon he had seen once was a shower handle with only two settings: ‘Too hot’ and ‘Too cold’. Never a truer word. There was no bath mat so he slow-hurdled the side of the bath with great care and barely let go the chrome handle on the tiled wall as the warm water poured down on him. He used the two toy-town bottles of shampoo and conditioner supplied by the hotel. The towel was the size of a toga when he wrapped himself in it. He gingerly got out of the bath and shaved.

  When he was dressed he sank into the armchair. It was just after nine. Television at this time of the morning sickened him. The very fact of it. And it was the wrong time for his iPod music. So he endured the room’s silence. Outside there were occasional voices – other hotel guests, domestic staff, the bump of a fire door closing. Maybe Stella had gone down for breakfast – had said something to him, thinking him awake when in fact he’d been asleep. He tried her mobile but it went straight to voice message. Maybe he should look in the dining room. He stood and plucked the plastic key from the power source on the wall. In the corridor the girls in lilac housecoats dodged in and out from room to trolley to the sound of vacuum cleaners. They all seemed to be foreign – from Thailand or Puerto Rico. If he made eye contact with any of them they smiled. Their lovely faces lit up.

  There was a mirror in the empty lift and he saw that his white hair was sticking out all over the place. Like he’d slept on it. The hotel’s conditioner had not agreed with him. Cheap rubbish, no doubt, bought by the gallon to fill their own expensive tiny bottles. He tried to smooth his hair with the palms of his hands, swore death to the security man at the airport, the bastard, who had relieved him of his own Rolls-Royce conditioner. Walking across the foyer he wondered if he might approach the female desk clerk, ‘Did you see my wife going past here without me?’ He was laughing at his own joke when the desk clerk looked up. She smiled at him and it did him good.

  The breakfast room was large and ornate. Stucco and cut-glass chandeliers. Victorian. But that word didn’t apply here. Did they date periods in the Netherlands by who was on the throne? King Billy-an? He stood at the head of a shallow marble staircase overlooking the place. Stella wasn’t there. The plan they had worked out for such emergencies didn’t apply. ‘If we get separated, return to the last place we were together.’ That meant bed.

  He gathered himself some cereal from the buffet and proceeded to a table set for two beside the window. Since Belfast, he always sat in a chair facing the door. Prunes on top of cornflakes. Good for the bowls and jugs. The sucked prune stones transferred from spoon to plate had a disturbing similarity, in colour and shape, to cockroaches.
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  Now that they had mobile phones, theoretically it should have been easier to keep tabs on one another. But practically it had not helped. In the first instance you had to remember to bring the bloody thing with you. If you had it with you, invariably one or other of the mobiles was switched off or needed charging. And then, even if you did get through, Stella’s phone had some mysterious setting which diverted incoming calls straight to ‘Leave a message’. And her phone did not ring. And she did not answer it. They were of a generation who had used crank-handled phones in Donegal.

  A waitress came to his table – her hair, like watch springs, piled high on her head. Young people. There was something about the glint in their eye, the cut of their jib, their enthusiasm, the resilience of their skin.

  ‘Tea or coffee, sir?’

  How had she guessed his language group right away? Did he look so British? But he was Irish. And proud of it. Despite the pub last night. Despite the last fifty years.

  ‘Black tea?’ he said.

  After the waitress brought his pot of tea he walked to the buffet. He normally avoided fried foods but felt that because he was on holiday he could indulge himself a little. And Stella wasn’t there to protect him from the saturated fats. Or was it unsaturated fats? Trans fats were even worse, it seemed. But he didn’t know where they resided, so they were difficult to avoid.

  Where was she? She’d never done this before – wandered off on her own. Was it to meet somebody she’d met the last time she’d been here with the teachers? An affair? At her age? Who conducted pre-breakfast affairs?

  He was almost swooning with pleasure as he forked the bacon and eggs into his mouth. His own little affair. Fried potatoes and two eggs at breakfast. When he finished he had another cup of tea, taken leisurely. All the papers in the rack were in Dutch so were of no use to him. He just stared around. It was such a rarity for Stella and him to be apart. And before he knew it, he was back in that waiting room in the Belfast hospital. An older woman in a pink overall had brought him a mug of milky tea. She sat down and updated him on the situation but could say little more than that his wife was in theatre. She explained she was one of the ‘pink ladies’, volunteers who helped in A & E. Her name was Mavis. All he could do was shake his head. When he asked if his wife would live, the woman said she had no way of knowing. It was someone he loved, he said, as if to explain his persistent questioning. The woman put her hand on his arm. She seemed concerned about whether he took sugar or not. He hadn’t the heart to tell her he didn’t take milk. Still, after she walked away, he drank the tea and smoked another cigarette. Rubber-soled shoes squeaked as people walked to and fro. The woman came back to him again. She said that she had just had a word with one of the nurses and that his wife left a message for him when she was being prepped. She said to tell you that all shall be well. The woman said that his wife had said it twice. That all shall be well and all shall be well. Said you would understand. They would keep him informed the Pink Lady said. Gerry nodded. A teenage boy came out of one of the doors with a white sling and a bright new plaster on his arm. He left with what looked like his mother and father. The boy was very pale.