I drove to Nottingham on Christmas Eve and spent a couple of hours wandering around the Winter Wonderland in the old market square, until the scrum of desperate last-minute shoppers drove me into a café. There was a pay phone in the corner. I sipped my hot chocolate and stared at it. The warmth of my drink couldn’t melt the lump of ice in the bottom of my stomach. I made a decision. This would be my Christmas present to myself: doing the right thing. In the midst of all my mistakes, I could tick this one thing off my list. I picked up the phone and dialled.
“Aye?”
“Eamonn, it’s me.”
There was a hard silence.
“What do you want?”
“I’m sorry. Really, truly sorry. It wasn’t about you – ”
“Is that it?”
“No, Eamonn, I…”
“Bye, Marion. Have a nice Christmas.”
I drove home, nauseous and wretched.
Sitting in the caravan on my bed, I opened the little box with the ring Eamonn had given me. I knew now that he did not love me – only the idea of loving me. I knew he thought of me only in terms of how I fitted into his life. He considered me too fragile, too small, to have hopes or dreams of my own. But he had genuinely believed it would make me happy to be the doctor’s wife, to spend my life looking after him and being protected by him. He had believed I needed a safe harbour, a calm sea, after all the storms I’d endured before. He had never realized that the peace I needed would come, not from my surroundings, but through making peace with myself.
By eleven-thirty I still felt restless with remorse. Old habits die hard in guilty Catholic girls. I grabbed my bag, picked my way through the deserted campsite with a torch and went to church.
I parked on the street outside Hatherstone village chapel. If the full car park hadn’t confirmed my guess about there being a midnight mass, the warm glow of lights shining through the lead-paned windows would still have enticed me in.
From the outside, the chapel looked a typical English country church. Within, it had been surprisingly modernized. Rows of padded chairs greeted me instead of the pews I expected. The floor had warm carpet instead of old stone, and I could see no ancient relics or statues at all. Bright banners hung on the walls, and dozens of paper lanterns filled with coloured lights dangled from the rafters. None of the familiar landmarks I associated with church were visible – no altar or stations of the cross, no pictures of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. If it hadn’t been for the box of white candles stacked behind the last row of chairs, and the wooden nativity scene on a table beside the door, I wouldn’t have known where I was.
Most of the hundred or so chairs were occupied. The glass door from the porch creaked as I slipped inside, and about ninety of the hundred people there twisted round in their seats to see who had come in late. I recognized some of the faces, including Jo from the café. She pointed to the empty chair next to her and, grateful to squeeze in near the back, I scurried over. A teenage girl at the front was about to begin a reading, struggling with the clip on her microphone. I used the empty moment to send up a silent prayer: Forgive me, God. It’s been a long time. But then I guess you know that already. And what I did to Eamonn. I’m not sorry for leaving, but I am ashamed of how I did it. I won’t make excuses for hurting him; I just wanted to say I’m sorry. If you can, help him to forgive me so he can move on without anger. Bless Ma, and the rest of them. Oh, and I hope you don’t mind me being in this weird church. I don’t even know what one it is. It was the best I could do at short notice. Amen.
I settled back and listened as the girl began. It had been years since I’d heard the Bible read. Father Francis had moved to a new parish when I was twenty and I had rarely attended mass since, only making an exception for cousins’ weddings, their children’s baptisms, and maybe a first communion if it was someone I especially liked. The words washing over me felt familiar, stirring memories and feelings long forgotten, but at the same time, it was as if I’d never really listened to them before, never connected the syllables together to understand what they actually said.
Don’t be afraid! I bring you good news of great joy which is for all people.
Glory to God in the highest! And on earth peace, good will to all men.
I thought about that: no longer being afraid. Having great joy. Finding peace. It all sounded so simple. I didn’t know much about anything, but life was never simple – this I did know.
The girl sat down, and a bunch of musicians took her place. A woman sang a carol I hadn’t heard before, about light in the darkness. Her voice was clear and strong, and she sang as if she had heard this good news, and her heart would break with the great joy of it. Then an older man read some more verses, about Jesus being the light of the world.
Somebody turned the lanterns off. The room went black. A hundred people held their breath. There was no sound except for the brief rustling of clothes, a child coughing. The room smelt of pine trees and polished wood. The man spoke again. His voice, though cracked with age, sounded resonant and vibrant in the darkness.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has never put it out.
There came the faint rasp and hiss of a match igniting, and a tiny flickering candle flame lit up the man’s face in front of us. A child, maybe nine or ten years old, went to stand in front of the man, and he dipped his candle to one held in the boy’s hands. Two flames now glimmering, the boy turned to light the candle of the young woman behind him, and so it went on, until every single person in the church held a glowing flame, the brightness shining all around us. The darkness fled.
At gone one o’clock I still lay awake in bed, thinking about churches where people smile instead of tutting when you walk in late, and the person in charge (a priestess? A vicaress? I had no frame of reference for women who ran churches) has skinny jeans, high-heeled pointy boots and a laugh that bounces off the rafters.
Then my thoughts skittered to a dead halt as I heard a crunch. Then another one. The soft tread of footsteps in the frost outside my window. Slow steps, hesitant, secretive.
I held my breath through the familiar wobble of the caravan as somebody climbed the steps outside. I waited for a knock. Or a crash. Neither came. I heard the door rattle, then a bump. The van wobbled again as whoever it was scrunched away.
Great.
I lay in bed a while longer, letting the adrenaline subside, wondering where my phone was.
“Was that you, Santa?” If it was, he wouldn’t have been fooled by my bluster. And besides, my mother had made it very clear that Santa was a big, fat, jolly sack of reindeer droppings. What are you crying for, you pathetic brat? Santa wouldn’t visit a girl like you anyway.
I flipped the covers off, forcing myself to get up. This worked, caravans in December being deathly cold. I dug out a thick cardigan, and carefully laced up my trainers, just in case I had to make a run for it, of course – nothing to do with putting off opening my front door. Peeking through a chink in the corner of my living room curtain revealed nothing; too dark to see. I carefully turned the key in the door, trying to be as quiet as possible even though I had heard the footsteps walk away, and gingerly opened the door a tiny crack.
Well, there was another one in the eye for my mother. Santa had been after all. The sack was a proper brown, Santary one, with a red ribbon tied around the top. Somebody had tried to hang it on my door handle, but the weight had caused it to slip off and thud onto the top step. Still cautious, I slowly took hold of the ribbon with two fingers and dragged it inside, slamming the door shut after it. I faffed about for a few minutes, poking the bag, nudging it with my foot, even sniffing it (to see if it smelt like a bomb?). I finally decided that, quite possibly, I had received a nice message for once.
I cut the ribbon to save having to unpick it with freezing fingers, and tipped the contents of the sack out onto my sofa. A large rectangular present tumbled out. Did I leave it under my two-foot tree like a good girl, ready to open in the morning? Of course not.
It was a cookery book, published in 1979: How to Survive in the Kitchen by someone called Katherine Whitehorn. Hmmm. I remembered the conversation I’d had with my imaginary Santa before we took the grotto down. It wasn’t hard to guess who was masquerading behind this Santa’s beard. I could have killed him for scaring the pyjamas off me in the middle of the night. Except that as he took one final look at the murderous rage on my face I wouldn’t have been able to hide how embarrassed I felt that he had overheard me having a pretend conversation with Father Christmas.
I hugged the book to my chest for a few minutes. Who was I kidding? He had snuck across sub-zero fields in the middle of the night to leave a cookery book in a sack on my doorstep. I loved it.
Stop being nice to me, Reuben Hatherstone!