by Ray Bentley
The place was a touchstone of sorts for his best memories. He and Debbie went there often in springs past. The window boxes above the yellow door of the little row house in Elnathan Mews blossomed under Debbie’s touch. Each season of new life brought bright colors and new experiments: orange and golden marigolds one year, red dahlias the next.
Though the Brits who ran the shop were too polite to object, Jack was certain borrowing the nursery cart to trundle their purchases home was not usually allowed. Debbie insisted—and Jack agreed—but he returned the cart as rapidly as possible, while feeling guilty the entire trip. Americans were already regarded as so pushy and demanding; Jack never wanted to give the Brits additional confirmation.
The nursery was closed for the evening when Jack stepped off the sidewalk onto the gravel path that crunched under his feet. One more look around convinced him his fears were all nonsense. Even if tweed coat was on the same train he had a perfect right to get off at Warwick Avenue and pass St Saviour’s Church.
The notion of why the man changed cars was still troubling, but now mainly an annoying unanswered question. More out of anger at himself for his silliness than for any conscious reason, Jack reached out and grasped the handle of the nursery gate. To his surprise it was unlocked. The latch clicked and the gate swung inward to reveal the dim grayscale of the silent garden space.
Jack hesitated on the threshold. A light drizzle was falling again. Even a mug of soup sounded inviting. But he was here and the place was full of memories of her—so he entered. He would just linger a minute, savoring past joys gone to vapor.
Of course it wasn’t spring yet. Great, square, wooden boxes held leafless trees, their skeletal branches arching over mossy walkways. Ten more steps inward and the darkness deepened around concrete birdbaths and fountains looming like funeral monuments. This was not the pleasant relived moment Jack envisioned. He turned to go.
A face peered at Jack out of a boxwood hedge lining a fence. Alarmed, Jack fumbled with his phone and dropped it amid a pallet of bare root roses. A ceramic plaque of the Green Man, laughing face swathed in tendrils and leaves, mocked Jack’s folly.
Cursing under his breath, Jack stooped to retrieve his phone and jammed his thumb into a rose thorn. No blossoms and no leaves, but the thorns made their presence known. Jack thought about using his phone’s screen to illuminate the search. I must be getting dumber by the minute.
Cautiously, with great deliberation, Jack slipped his hand down amongst a trio of roses in the direction the device must have landed. His fingertips brushed the edge of the case just as the sound of gravel crushed under heavy footsteps came from the gate.
Jack froze, then seized the phone and pulled it free, heedless of thorns ripping sleeve and skin. His fingers stabbing at the keys, he missed the 9 button two times out of three tries.
“Is someone there?” a voice called from the entry path. “I will call the police if you don’t answer.”
Relief mingled with embarrassment. “Hold on,” Jack called. “I’m coming out.”
A flashlight beam probed the path between the plant tables, located Jack’s feet, then slid up his frame to blind him.
“Dr. Garrison?” the voice queried.
“Yep. Me,” Jack agreed stupidly. “Who’s that?”
“Sayid Khan,” replied Jack’s Afghan Muslim neighbor who worked at the nursery. “I couldn’t remember if I locked the front gate when I left work tonight and when I came to check I saw it standing open. But why are you here?”
“I—ah—I was just walking home and found the place unlocked—like you said. Old memories, you know. Debbie—she loved this place. Just came in for a minute.”
“Of course,” Sayid said. “I remember.”
“Then I dropped my phone.” Jack held it up into the light to show drips of blood running across his hand. “The roses. We should go.”
“Yes,” Sayid agreed. “You’ll need to put something on that.”
Chapter Three
Jack’s bedroom was on the top floor of three. The ground floor contained a single car garage used to store file boxes, a tiny kitchen, and a formal dining room Jack used as an office. Up one flight of stairs was a double reception room/living room, in Jack’s American way of thinking, and one bedroom. It was planned as a nursery but since. . .
The remaining flight of very steep steps opened on a landing beside a bathroom and the door to the master bedroom. The space was as big as the living room, but was partly taken up with another bath.
The mews house dated from the 1800s. Originally built as servants’ quarters over stables behind the larger, grander homes fronting the major avenues, Elnathan Mews felt like a hidden gem when Jack and Debbie moved there. Handy to all parts of London through the nearby Tube station, it was also a short walk from the canal basin that gave the neighborhood its Little Venice nickname.
Jack ate a cup of microwaved chicken noodle soup and a fistful of soda crackers while staring at Sky News on the telly. There was another knife attack in Brussels, another bombing that killed forty in Kabul, Afghanistan, and another kidnapping of a Christian missionary couple in the Philippines. In other words, a routine day’s events for worldwide Islamic jihad. Jack heard little of it and paid attention even less as he nodded over a goblet of something French.
Nor were Jack’s thoughts occupied with his meeting with Lev, or with the anxiety-ridden journey home, about which he only felt shame.
As always, Jack’s reflections were all about Debbie. He looked around the room. The stumps of long-dead flowers were still visible beyond the curtains she chose. The mahogany-framed mirror, gathered in like a treasure during a deep discount sale at Harrod’s, hung unpolished over the mantle. The scenes of English cathedrals—Salisbury and Winchester—flanking the fireplace were purchased by her on two different expeditions to Storey’s, the antique print seller in Cecil Court.
It was like that everywhere he turned. Padding upstairs to bed he knew her clothes still hung in the wardrobe in the corner, just as her Bible was still on the nightstand on her side of the bed. The ribbon still marked the passage—Gospel of John, chapter 14—she was reading the night before she—left.
Jack tried, unsuccessfully, to bury himself in his work. Mostly there was just a dull, unrelenting ache, brought into even sharper pain by this season of the year. Maybe the trip to Israel would be good for him. At least it would get him away from being immersed in Debbie’s absence all the time. They traveled around Europe together, but were in Israel as a couple.
Sitting up in bed he glanced at her Bible, then thumbed open the Kindle app on his iPad to continue reading a P. G. Wodehouse novel. Jack read all the Jeeves and Wooster novels countless times and the plots were interchangeable anyway. That was why he kept them as his steady diet: they were mindless, pointless, required no effort, and could be abandoned at any point without harm. No getting to the end of a chapter was ever required with Wodehouse.
Tonight was true to the pattern. The wine kicked in, the Wodehouse patter grew irritating, the light switch was close at hand—and Jack was asleep.
“I’m dreaming,” Jack said aloud as Debbie wrapped packages beside a Christmas tree. “You’re not really here. I didn’t put up a tree this year.”
She smiled and looked up at him with pity. “It doesn’t matter, Jack. It’s Christmas anyway.”
“Not without you.”
“Why waste your life on bitterness?”
“You took the light with you. Even the cat left me after you were gone. I see her perched in the window of the neighbor’s house.”
“You never really liked her. She knew it.” Debbie folded gold paper carefully around an old shoebox and taped it shut.
“What are you doing there? The shoebox. Mom’s old pictures?”
“We’re all here together, Jack. Happy.” She slid the package beneath the tree. “I just wanted you to know. You have to let me go.”
“I can’t.”
“I’m happy.” She began to fade.
>
“I’m not.”
“Here’s a gift for you…”
“Don’t leave—Deb!”
As she spoke, a mist came and surrounded her. Her voice became a soft sigh. “He asked me to tell you, Jack, whatever comes—not to be surprised—He says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people—men will dream dreams and see visions…”
And then she was gone.
Jack opened his eyes. She was gone. No Christmas tree. No gold-wrapped package.
No cat.
A blast of cold morning air slapped Jack in the face as he emerged and locked the yellow door of number 4 behind him. Few were awake at this early hour. The memory of the dream played over in his thoughts. Like Scrooge in Dickens’ Christmas Carol, he told himself the vision was caused by something he ate.
But this morning it was almost as if Debbie walked beside him as he took the long way toward the Warwick Avenue Tube station.
“Why are you wasting your life on bitterness?” she asked.
He answered the question now in a whisper. “Because it’s Christmas in London and you aren’t here.”
Oh, how Debbie loved this quaint neighborhood where old transport canals from the early 1800s merged. Her favorite place was Browning’s Pool, a triangular basin where the poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning lived and wrote poems to one another. “How do I love thee—let me count the ways. . .”
A small island in the center of the pool was crowned with a willow tree. It remained as it had been more than a century before. “Pure romance,” Debbie said when she described the scene to her students.
Generations of lovers lived and died in London’s “Little Venice” since those long ago days. Debbie, a professor of English literature with the American College, expected she and Jack would grow old together in their nineteenth-century cottage.
But it was not to be.
Jack paused a moment beside her favorite bench but did not sit. He walked along the embankment where cherished canal boats, converted into pristine dwellings, were moored. The vessels, berthed along the waterways, and decorated for fierce holiday competitions, sported garlands of holly and bunches of mistletoe. St. Nicholas, captain’s hat replacing his stocking cap, navigated the channel from atop a lean craft named Loralei.
Cocooned within shiny, black-enameled hulls painted with daisies and roses lived actors and artists and writers. Jack recognized the houseboat where once-impoverished entrepreneur Richard Branson dreamed Virgin Airlines into existence.
Looking down on the idyllic scene were tall, white-plastered, Regency-period town houses. Christmas trees and colored lights were framed in the windows.
How could all of this remain so cheerfully intact and unchanged without Debbie? Little Venice was like a set on the stage of an empty theater. There was no love story, no conversation, no actors. The script they imagined for their lives was lost in one unthinkable moment.
Chapter Four
The third act of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town, unfolded on the bare stage of the Royal National Theater.
It was Debbie’s favorite. “Best American play ever written,” she told Jack. But he had never seen it before tonight.
Jack bought his ticket at the half-price ticket booth on a whim. Maybe it was a way to avoid going home alone. Or maybe it was a way to learn something more about the only woman he ever loved, even though she was gone.
He was not prepared for the devastating final act—“Death and Eternity.”
Jack gripped the arms of his seat as the spotlight focused only on Emily as she said goodbye to Grovers Corners and her beloved George.
“I can’t! I can’t go on! It goes so fast! We don’t have time to look at one another.”
The actress sank to the stage and sobbed.
Jack glanced toward the exit. The green-lit WAY OUT sign was too far away for him to escape.
“I didn’t realize. All that was going on in life and we never noticed…”
Jack blinked back tears. Was this written just for him?
“One more look…Goodbye. Goodbye, Grovers Corners. Mama and Papa. Goodbye to clocks ticking and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses. Hot baths and sleeping and waking up. Oh earth! You’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you!”
The actress seemed to look through the glare of the footlight and speak only to him. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—Every, every minute?”
Jack shook his head slowly, “No,” in reply.
Her gaze lingered on him a moment, as if Jack were the only person in the audience. She sighed and turned away.
Jack wished he had not come. He wondered why Debbie loved this story so much. She was one of the rare humans who seemed to notice and cherish every moment. No joy escaped her attention. Ah, but Jack, on the other hand, missed blue-sky days and starry nights as he played the chess game of politics and policies.
Angry, Jack wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
Why? Why did she love this play so much? It was an accusation, not entertainment.
The play ended quietly. Applause erupted and the lights came up. Standing ovation. Jack escaped the still-clapping crowd and fled into the cold London night.
The breeze up the Thames stung Jack’s face as he charged up the metal steps and onto the Hungerford footbridge that crossed the great river. A half dozen beggars and buskers positioned themselves along the span to appeal to theatergoers for spare change as they made their way home. Jack did not make eye contact, but fixed his gaze on the bright lights of London. To his right, in the distance, was the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral. To his left were the illuminated Houses of Parliament and Big Ben shining like a set in Peter Pan.
Two minutes ‘til midnight. Jack paused in the center of Hungerford to wait for Big Ben to ring out. He leaned on the railing and blinked down at dancing lights reflected in the swift current.
One minute ‘til midnight. The hands on the clock face clicked. The four melodious quarters of the Westminster chimes washed over Jack. There was a momentary pause. The first stroke of the hour bell rang out and echoed across London and then—silence. The wind suddenly ceased. All was still. The water reflected light as clearly as a mirror. Jack gasped. The hands of the clock ticked back—one minute. Jack stepped into another time. He heard a roar and the screams of many voices. His eyes widened as geysers of flame erupted from Westminster Bridge and Parliament, then spouted from left to right throughout the entire city! Tall buildings were engulfed in flame. Bodies lay strewn on the pavement of bridges.
This was not the ancient London fire of 1666, nor was it the Blitz of World War II. Jack knew, somehow, he was seeing what was to come upon this city in the future, and he was experiencing it all in one moment.
The flashing lights of ambulances and fire trucks and police cars reflected on the pond-like water.
Terror!
“What. Is. Happening?” Jack heard his own voice speaking as though it was someone else.
And then, just as suddenly, he returned to the present. The boom of Big Ben continued. The freezing wind resumed. Fires vanished. The beggars shook their begging bowls and cried for mercy. All was as it had been.
Jack rubbed his eyes and shook his head. What was that? What caused his waking dream?
But it was not a dream. He had just witnessed something catastrophic that never happened; a vision of future terror in the great city he had come to love. He was there in real time and yet he had not moved from this place or time.
The last stroke of the bell ceased. Jack waited until the last note died away before releasing his grip on the cold metal railing. Then he walked on as if nothing happened.
All was dark and quiet as Jack again entered the little house with the yellow door at number 4 Elnathan Mews.
It was too quiet, Jack thought, as he slid the bolt in place. Tossing keys on the table, he stood listening for a long moment in the dark foyer.
Someone in the neighborhood was
playing old Bing Crosby Christmas carols. A party. Had Debbie been alive the party would have been here in number 4. Heaping platters of food and homemade Christmas cookies would have been laid out on the dining room table. The yellow door would have been open and students would have jammed the living room as the 1938 version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol played on the television.
That was last year. Debbie was a happy dream but her absence was the sad reality.
Tonight Jack’s empty house was the only one on the block not decorated. Neighbors noticed his loneliness and had pity. Cards and invitations slipped through the mail slot were in a heap, unopened on the table.
Jack padded into the kitchen, switched on the light, and turned on the red electric kettle. Water rumbled to a boil and he made himself a cup of tea. He wished he had a cookie.
He looked away from the dark nursery as he passed it on the stair landing. The memory of Debbie painting pastel walls in the sunlight and hanging Winnie the Pooh wallpaper was all too fresh in his mind. Such hope was there, within reach. What might this Christmas have been? If only.
Nothing ever worked out the way it was supposed to. Across the road Bing Crosby sang “White Christmas.” Jack drew the curtains and switched on Sky News to drown out the sound of other people’s joy.
A grim-faced journalist, standing beside an ambulance, reported yet another Muslim terrorist in a stolen lorry had barreled through a Christmas market in Belgium, mowing down dozens of innocents. A home-grown radical this time, not a refugee.
Jack could hardly breathe. So much sorrow. Too much. Too close to home. Switching the channel he found the old black-and-white version of A Christmas Carol and sat down to watch as the ghost of Marley warned Scrooge of what was to come. Three terrible Christmas spirits; past regret, present longing, and future dread.
It seemed a mirror of his own heart. He regretted the past; that one instant which might have changed everything. He longed for a present that could not exist. He dreaded his future alone.
