They’d used the same verse at Pauline’s funeral years before. His sister had died of leukaemia at fifteen, two years his junior. Before her illness, she had dazzled everyone in sight. A glorious future had been predicted. All in the grave now, her name chiselled in stone above it.
Abigail had been twenty-five when she died. It was eight years ago now. He’d been thirty. Now, almost forty, he could not bear the starkness of mornings or the oncoming of sleep. The thought of her at such times tunnelled through his brain like a worm that had no end.
‘I don’t have a young woman, Granddad.’
Gerald frowned.
‘I’d understood—’
‘You understood wrong. Women don’t stay long with me. I’m married to my job, they all say that.’
‘Man needs a woman, boy. You should know that by now. Even when we were out in the desert on some bloody awful trip, we’d head straight for the Berka when we got back. Or have a night out with one of those gals from the MTC. You don’t have to love them, you know.’
Ethan smiled and said nothing. Women were one of his grandfather’s obsessions. He’d been married to his wife Edith for over forty years, but that hadn’t stopped him taking up with a steady string of ‘lady friends’. Edith had died fifteen years earlier, forgiving him, and it was said he hadn’t seen another woman once since then.
One of the grandchildren, an Ellis by the look of him, ambled up and pulled Gerald away. Ethan stayed by the nativity, a fine Arts and Crafts job with Italian pieces. His father found him there, and dragged him off to join the melee of aunts and cousins, half of whom he’d never met before.
After dinner, the younger children, all in a state of high excitement, their thoughts fixed on chimneys and men in white beards, were sent to bed or driven off to the village. The rest of the party settled down in the Long Room, with its selection of battered armchairs, sofas, and window seats. Old friendships were revived, old animosities buried or given new life.
‘You must be Ethan,’ said a voice beside him. He looked round to find a woman standing next to his chair. A dark-haired woman in her mid- to late-twenties. He did not recognise her, and yet something about her was familiar. He got to his feet.
‘Afraid so,’ he said. ‘You must be…?’
She laughed.
‘You haven’t a clue, have you?’
He shook his head.
‘You’re familiar, but I don’t think we can have met.’
‘Of course we have. Think hard.’
He scrutinised her features. Short black hair, green eyes that danced, pale cheeks, a full mouth that might have been made from cherries. As he struggled to place her, he realised he wasn’t dealing with memory at all, but with the surprising clarity of her face, its beauty and the secret claim it seemed to make on him, whether from the past or the present.
‘I’m Sarah,’ she said. ‘Your niece, in case you’ve forgotten. We last met when I was ten years old. Your parents brought you down to Canterbury. I thought you were terribly grand. In fact, I had a crush on you for weeks, you were my divine creature next to Mr Boko, my pony.’
He looked at her, and the memory flooded back. The pony had been piebald and short-winded.
‘You’ve changed a lot,’ he said.
‘Thank you.’
He shook his head.
‘I didn’t say you’d changed for the better.’
‘Ethan, when I was ten I was a geeky little girl with bad teeth. Old Boko looked better than I did. Surely I’ve improved since then.’
He thought back to the impression he had formed back then, when she was ten and he was twenty.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘You have improved. Quite a lot, actually.’
He looked at her admiringly. If only the rest of the family were as elegant and poised, he thought.
‘Sit down again,’ she said. ‘I’ll pull up a chair. We have eighteen years to catch up on.’
Two hours later, they’d gone about ten years down the line and were just settling in to the next eight when Ethan’s father got to his feet.
‘It’s half past eleven, everybody. Those who want to go to midnight mass had better get a move on. St Benedict’s isn’t at all large, so there’ll be standing room only if we get there late.’
As though summoned by him, a magus in tweeds, the bells of the parish church started clanging through the still night. As though angels had come to Earth. Or, some thought later, demons in the disguise of angels.
Hats and coats were fetched, galoshes grabbed from the hall, little groups formed. The road between the hall and the church had been cleared earlier that day. While the older folk cadged lifts, anyone below the age of sixty walked, and soon a crocodile of worshippers crept down the icy path, their way lit by the gentle fall of moonlight as it glittered on icicles and varnished the snow. Ahead, the lights of the little church shone out like beacons on a world become a virgin filled with God. Even the solid band of non-believers shivered, not from cold, but the mere beauty of the scene. As they drew near the church, the sound of singing reached them across the snow.
Sarah took Ethan’s arm and stood with him at the rear throughout the service. The parish choir sang valiantly, carol after carol booming through the decorated nave, medieval songs mingling with modern lullabies, as though all was at peace in the world. They sang against the darkness and the cold, against grey misery and black grief. The coming birth of the new god seemed to exorcise all evil from the world, to draw a line between past and present, darkness and the coming light.
Ethan watched and listened, joining in the hymns when called upon, remembering, trying to forget. Sarah slipped her hand through his arm. She’d heard of his demons, of the night that shadowed his days. And though she did not believe in angels or powers or principalities, nor worship a god in a manger, she prayed for him.
Gerald and his old mate Chips had stayed behind at the hall, along with half a dozen of the seriously old brigade. Leaving the others to a round of bridge, the two old soldiers went upstairs to Gerald’s study. Chips stepped for the first time into a cluttered room where the master of Woodmancote kept a lifetime’s souvenirs, some scattered across desks and tables, others locked away in dark cabinets or shoved into drawers. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, these latter crammed with a higgledy-piggledy collection of books. The volumes were of every colour, size and binding; some stood straight between the shelves, dozens were laid horizontally across their fellows. On the floor, piles of books had grown like stalagmites, some built into tall towers, others crumpled as though they had rested on a geological fault and come to grief. The study was the inner sanctum of the house, a hideaway to which few outside the family had ever been admitted.
On either side of a wide fireplace sat two easy chairs, old, battered and, to tell the truth, no longer very comfortable, save for the air of habitude and familiarity they exuded. To these the former comrades repaired. On his way, Gerald picked up a bottle of his beloved Benromach, which he sat on a low table between them. Two tumblers and a jug of water had been placed there earlier by Mrs Salgueiro, the Portuguese housekeeper.
It was over ten years since the pair had last met. In that time, old friends had grown ill, and some had died. There were no more annual reunions, hadn’t been in years. Memories once sharp as blades were blunted now, but if much of the past had blurred in their minds, the time they had spent together in the deserts of North Africa was as if it had been yesterday. As they talked between sips of whisky and puffs on their foul-smelling pipes, the past came alive for them, a living thing, as vivid to one as to the other, Gerald’s recollections sparking off anecdotes from his friend, Chips’s store of off-colour jokes bringing back long days and nights when death had seemed a likely thing, and a moment like this beyond all credence.