by Rhys Thomas
22
SINCE THE PLANE CRASH, Christmas had been a solitary time. Sam had always hunkered down at home, shutting himself away from the world for a few days. All the ingredients for his Christmas dinner fitted into a small bag at Tesco and looked depressing—a turkey crown, a small pack of brussels sprouts, a single carrot, a single parsnip and some potatoes for roasting, a jar of cranberry sauce, Tesco Finest stuffing and a bag of frozen peas that would last him the entire year. He’d take a trip to Marks & Spencer for fresh gravy and a tin of shortbread with a picture of a stag in a misty meadow on the front. The preparation of Christmas dinner with his Johnny Mathis CD (his mother loved Johnny Mathis) playing in the background was nice, but the sitting down to eat, with Cherry Coke in a wineglass, pulling a cracker with one end wedged beneath his foot (the same box of luxury crackers had been on the go for years) was depressing. Not unbearably, but depressing in a comedic way. With a paper crown on his head, the humor of how pathetic he was being was not lost on him. All of this notwithstanding, this was the day he missed his family most, and after his long Christmas Day run—which blew away a lot of the badness—he would sit in front of the TV and watch BBC One, even if he didn’t enjoy it, because in some way it made him feel connected to others, other families gathered around the TV with their loved ones, watching the same thing as him. But this year would be different. He felt ready and prepared, and there wasn’t even a hint of guilt.
The sheep in the freezing winter fields and the plowed lands with frosted furrows as they whizzed by on the train, the bleak winter trees and a black river curling down a wide, flat valley made him think of old English ghost stories. They’d managed to get a table seat opposite each other to look out the window, and it felt weird that this was Christmas Eve.
Sam had brought his Settlers of Catan dice game, but Sarah had lost interest after a few goes, so now they were sitting enjoying the view. She’d brought a headphone splitter and said she wanted him to hear her favorite album, called For Emma, Forever Ago, by someone called Bon Iver.
“He split up with his girlfriend and went off to a cabin in the woods in the middle of America and recorded this album,” she said.
Sam put in the headphones and lost himself for the next half hour in the sound of lush but strange harmonies, quite unlike anything he’d ever heard, a kind of rich, woody, soulful sound, and the type of voice that only a broken heart can make. Occasionally he’d steal a glance across the table, at Sarah staring at the rushing landscape. The music and the harshness of the cold countryside were a perfect combination. It was wonderful. This was wonderful. His heart started vibrating at the exact same frequency as the whole universe. The last song was one of the most beautiful things he’d ever heard.
“Isn’t it amazing?” she said, taking her headphones out.
“You love music, don’t you?”
Her face tilted toward the window, making her skin look golden in the morning light.
“It’s like, when I have my headphones in, I’m safe and the music blanks everything else out. All my troubles and stress. The music puts a wall up between them and me. Just for as long as a song.”
“That’s a sad thing to say.”
And it made him aware again of how little he really knew about her.
“Walter Pater said all art aspires to the condition of music, like music is the art form that creates the biggest response in people. I don’t know if that’s true for everyone, but it’s like, for me, if a song gets me at the exact right moment, I get these—” she thought for a second and shrugged “—little quakes of the heart.”
Sam imagined telling her he loved her. The rhythm of the train traversing the tracks made a chugging in the cabin and he couldn’t tell if that was creating the effect in his own heart, those same quakes, or if it was something else. Something he never thought he would have. Because what else, if not Sarah, would have got him on this train?
* * *
The taxi took them through a maze of tall hedgerows. Between farm gates he saw forestry conifers spiking the horizon, or cow-grazed fields, or wild meadows with cold, color-bleached winter grasses. Sometimes they passed through small stretches of ancient woodland where the tree trunks had grown thick and distorted with deep fissures, gnarled branches and dense beards of moss. The road curved around, and on the right a steep slope ran down to a rushing stream curling between banks of bracken.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
He glanced across to Sarah, wearing a checked lumberjack shirt over a hoodie, the light as the trees passed between them and the sun strobing gold and dark across her face.
“This is it,” she told the driver.
They took a sharp left between two gray boulders and came to a set of ancient-looking iron gates that led them up a steep gravel path, with views out across fields for miles and miles, until it became long lines of trees that stole the view and leaned over the lane to form an archway. A cathedral of trees and the sense of deep magic.
“What is this place?”
“Isn’t it awesome?” she said.
The lane snaked and the trees grew denser. Even without summer leaves the branches made a near-impenetrable, knotted canopy, giving the impression of hundreds of snakes intertangled. Glimpses of deep green moss carpets punctuated by brilliant red toadstools, a fairy-tale world.
Ahead, the trees relented and the lane became more of a sweep, the color of the gravel ocher. A stone fountain covered in lichen patterns and then, beyond it, a house: Arcadia. Maybe three times the size of Sam’s own house, two sets of bay windows protruded either side of a small portico held aloft by grand columns. Three stories and a small slate roof with a few red-and-yellow-bricked chimney stacks, the stonework was stained dark by dirty rain. Dead vines crawled around the windows.
The front door swung open and a tall, lean person came out, skipping down the low steps and hurrying toward the car.
“You made it!”
The American accent was recognizable right away, though it was soft and generic.
“You must be Sam,” he said, shaking his hand and smiling, revealing a perfect set of pearly whites. “I’m Kabe.”
There was an energy to him, but not a fast one, a solidity to his essence; a presence. He was cool-looking, if not quite as handsome as Francis, with a well-formed nose and big, brown, alert eyes behind long lashes—vaguely androgynous. He was wearing a pair of ragged cords and a striped, woolen sweater that looked hand-knitted; he had the kind of skeleton that all clothes look good on. Sam guessed he was a few years older than him, around thirty maybe, but it was hard to tell.
Overhead, a V of geese crossed the opal sky and there was a hushed silence.
“Come on, let’s get you guys inside,” said Kabe. “It’s freezing. Lunch is almost ready.”
He led them into the house, from the bright, winter-slanted light to a dark atrium with peeling wallpaper and damp patches. Aware that decaying decadence was in vogue, Sam nevertheless thought it a great shame a lovely house like this was in such a state of disrepair. How could someone Kabe’s age even afford a place like this?
They came to an old kitchen, where a blonde girl stood guard over a bubbling pot of gravy on a ’70s hob.
“Kristen, look who’s here.”
The girl turned. “Hey, you.” She beamed to Sarah.
The two hugged and, over Sarah’s shoulder, the girl smiled at Sam. Her hair was very blond, cut messily at her shoulders. As he stood there, he felt a sensation fizzle up. Welcome. It was the feeling of being welcome.
In the open area of the kitchen a farmhouse table was laid with steaming food; a rustic meal of potatoes and vegetables and a big orange pie in the middle.
“Sweet potato, pumpkin and butternut squash,” said Kristen when she saw Sam eyeing it. “Hope you’re hungry.”
Two men entered the room from a side door and sat at the table. Both old
er than Sam, they smiled and nodded to him. Then a woman came in, midforties, with unkempt graying hair but a pretty face; French-looking. Quite who these people were, Sam had no idea and Sarah didn’t introduce them. They took their seats at the corner of the table and Sarah spooned some cauliflower onto her plate. More people came in and the room flooded quickly with conversation, streams crisscrossing.
Kabe sat next to Sam and poured himself a glass of wine, lifting the bottle with long, elegant fingers.
“Thanks for having me,” said Sam.
“Absolutely no problem at all,” he said. “I’ve heard a lot about you, man, and you’re welcome here.”
This surprised him. Sarah had told people about him?
“I’ve got you a present.” He went into his bag and handed Kabe a wrapped parcel. “To say thanks.”
“There’s no need to—”
“It’s only small,” said Sam, thrusting it toward him.
Kabe took the parcel. “Should I open it now?”
“You can open it now.”
Kabe’s eyes glanced across to Sarah and a smile fell on his lips. He unwrapped the present.
“It’s the best,” said Sam. “It’s from Marks & Spencer.”
“Oh man, I love shortbread,” said Kabe, examining the picture of a mother and son stag standing in a misty Scottish glen. “Thanks, Sam. This is really cool.”
Sam beamed. “That’s okay.”
He turned to Sarah and found her smiling at him.
“What?”
“You’re so funny.”
“No, I’m not.”
She laughed. “Eat,” she ordered.
Sam looked at all the food on the table.
“So, Sam, you work in a Japanese screw factory, Sarah said.”
“I do.”
“Japanese screw factory. Love it! Do you like it?”
Kabe grabbed the pumpkin pie and used his free hand to expertly shift a slice onto Sam’s plate.
“Thanks. It’s okay. It’s different from working in a British office.”
“I bet, yeah.”
Despite Kabe’s friendliness, Sam felt self-conscious about how normal his life must appear to someone who lived in a place like this, how unimpressive.
“They’re a mysterious people,” he said, trying to compensate, though he knew as soon as he said it that it must have come across as racist.
“Its land too,” said Kabe, surprisingly. “They’ve got all those sacred islands and sacred mountains. And their art. It’s, like, so in tune with more...elemental things. Makes you think they know something deeper than us.”
“Listen to you two,” said Sarah.
Kabe turned to her. “Ignore her, Sam. Sarah believes the days of the polymath are over.” He put a small slice of pie on his plate and nudged Sam. “This is the best pie in the world,” he whispered.
He was so friendly! Sam felt a little overwhelmed by how well he was being treated. So unused to this, he didn’t know how to respond.
“So what do you think of the house?” said Kabe.
“It’s amazing.”
“It was made grand like this by a coal magnate in the nineteenth century. There are two hundred species of trees here, apparently, from all over the world.”
Someone else joined them at the table, sitting next to Sarah, so she had to shuffle up and press into Sam.
“I’m glad you’ve come,” said Kabe, quietly.
Sam wondered just how much Sarah had said about him. Did he know what had happened to his family? Was that why he was being so nice?
“We’re gonna have an awesome Christmas,” Kabe said.
Sarah pressed into him a little more.
* * *
In the last hour of daylight a lane running alongside the house took them down a hill to a line of overgrown cottages with roofs half-collapsed and brambles in the smashed windows and, after these, on the left, to two stone gateposts with no gate.
“Does he own all this?”
“Uh-huh. Come on.”
“How?”
“He won the lottery.”
“Seriously?”
“Yup. He won eight million pounds, bought this place, sold off lots of the farmland to farmers who always used to rent as his concession to social justice, and now lives off the interest on his winnings.”
Sam thought about this.
The gateposts gave to a steep path matted in leaf mulch. Steps cut into the path carried them down a dark curve beneath thickly knotted branches, so dense the light of the late afternoon was gone. The suggestion here of deep age.
“These are rhododendrons. You should see them in spring. They’re so beautiful.”
Slow and the world will reveal itself, his father had once said during a walk in the woods, explaining how chaotic and fast things had become, how the world is harder to understand because it operates at a speed nonconducive to humanity and how in hectic moments the act of slowing down, closing your eyes, taking a breath, offers a fresh perspective. Here in the dark forest of giant rhododendrons the natural pace of the world dominated. He felt the strange connection you sometimes make with nature when you suddenly fit perfectly into it. They stopped, and in the gloom he could hardly make out her face.
“Thank you,” he said. “For bringing me here.”
There was the briefest of pauses, like they were about to kiss, but instead she smiled and punched him on the shoulder, quite hard.
“Come on,” she said. “The lake’s not far.”
At the bottom of the steps they came to a small clearing where it was brighter again, with stacked logs and a paddock of horses. Tall trees hemmed the horizon, and the soft sound of running water was nearby.
Sarah looked somehow smaller among nature. The white rims of her Converse boots were muddy and her winter coat engulfed her.
“Come and look at this,” she said, and dragged him to a stand of brush.
A stone staircase led down to a pond. A wall next to the staircase was inscribed with scripture from Genesis. In the center of it a tiny archway leaked springwater.
“You can drink it,” she said.
The pond released a gentle mist to its surface. Sam loved how a place like this just...existed...while the world happened around it.
She slipped her hand into his and he said nothing when this happened, like it was nothing, as if a lightning bolt hadn’t just shot through his body.
They found themselves wandering down a path between beech trees, a brook from the pond running alongside. The mist thickened around their feet and through the trees he caught glimpses of open water on the right. From the main track they found a narrow walkway, a spit of land, and at the end of it rose the white steps of a stone bridge. Water to the right and left, they were at the waist of a figure-eight-shaped lake. Mist swirled. Up the steps onto the bridge, Sam breathed what felt like the cleanest air he’d ever tasted.
“There’s no need to thank me,” she said, leaning against the stone balustrade. “I wanted you to come. You do know that, don’t you?”
Her cheeks were white in the dying light as she stared out across the glassine water, this perfect space.
“I’m really glad you’re here,” she said.
* * *
The fire was roaring in the stone fireplace of the drawing room. There were lots of old sofas and chairs, and Sam and Sarah found themselves tucked away in a warm corner. Kristen came over and refilled their glasses with some of Kabe’s homemade cider. It was very strong, so Sam made sure to take only small sips.
“How long have you been together?” Kristen said, her head tilting on its neck and her fringe flopping out from behind her ear.
“Oh, we’re not a couple,” Sam got in first before Sarah was embarrassed.
“Oh,” said Kristen. “Sorry, I thought...”
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br /> “I haven’t got my talons into him yet,” Sarah said, reaching across and trying to squeeze his cheek.
He pulled away and some of his cider sploshed over the top of his glass.
“Shoot.”
Kristen laughed and took the cider to the next group along.
Sam watched the particles in his drink drift, having to squint to focus because, despite his best efforts, the cider was going to his head.
“You know,” said Sarah, “you always dress very smartly.”
He was wearing a pair of navy cords and a tucked-in gingham shirt.
“Have you ever seen when Mormons go door to door?” he said. “They always wear very simple clothes but good quality, and very smart.”
“You’re going for Mormon chic?”
Sam smiled. “Yes! I don’t know. I just think...clothes like this they help you disappear into the background, don’t they?”
Sarah sipped some of her cider and grimaced. “This is fucking awful,” she said, holding the glass up and staring at the contents. “You know, you might be ahead of your time. I read the next evolutionary step for hipsters is going to be norm core. Which is wearing smart clothes, like you.”
“That’s cool,” he said. “So how come you’re here for Christmas? Don’t you want to visit your folks?”
She shook her head, seemingly not noticing his segue. “Nope.”
“I still don’t really know much about you.”
“Sure you do.”
“I don’t, though.”
She drank some more cider. “Look, I was in a relationship and it ended badly.”
Sensing it might be okay to push a little, he said, “But how does that affect your family?”
She went to say something but stopped.
“Can I ask you something?” he said. “Ages ago you said you didn’t like yourself. Do you remember? You said you weren’t a nice person. When we were looking for shooting stars.”
She put both her hands around her glass.
“Did I? I didn’t mean it. Not really. I mean, I used to not like myself, but I’m better now. I’m not the same person I was then, when I was in Edinburgh.”
