What is grief? Grief is the suit that fitted once, but no longer. It is the jacket billowing, the waistband gaping. Grief is the house that went from too big to just right, then became too big again. Grief is the thing that feeds upon itself. Grief is the fire and the fuel.
Grief is a fox.
They died on December 23, although not all at the same time. His wife died first—instantly—when the car left the road. His daughter was still alive when a passerby staggered down the steep bank to offer help, and held her hand as the life left her. For that much, he was grateful. His son passed away later that evening in the hospital, with his father seated beside him. He lived long enough to tell the story of what happened: a fox on the road, an instinctive twist of the wheel to avoid it, and then—
Nothing, or next to nothing. Just a house with too many rooms and a man lost at the heart of it, like a rat in a maze, as grief reduced him to a repository of memories.
He did not have the energy to sell up—and anyway, where would he have gone? Wherever he went, he would bring his grief with him. At least here he found a kind of comfort, thin gruel declared sustenance. The house still bore traces of his wife and children, but there was more of his daughter than his son because Simon had been living in Berlin for the final two years of his life, helping to clean up after the Nazis. That Christmas was also likely to have been Caroline’s last in permanent residence. She planned to study medicine in Edinburgh—to her mother’s combined pride and dismay, as that city seemed so far away.
Gone. All gone.
Each day he would walk his estate, always with a shotgun hanging broken over one arm. He was searching for the fox. His son had described it before he died. The animal bore a distinctive white mark on its right side, Simon had whispered, perhaps caused by barbed wire.
So he became determined to find the fox and kill it, because had it not existed, his family would still be with him. But the fox refused to present itself and accept its fate. He spotted others, but not the one he sought. Nevertheless, each day he filled a pocket of his jacket with shells and stalked the woods and fields with the gun over his right arm.
It was the closest thing to hope he had left.
Mrs. Hoggart, who had been engaged as a housekeeper by his wife, continued to come by every day except Sunday. He tried to convince himself that she needed the work more than he needed her, but in reality, he knew better. She represented his only regular point of contact with the world beyond his estate. If she were to vanish, he would likely lapse into almost total silence. Mrs. Hoggart also advised him on the steps necessary to maintain the property, and took care of the payments to the craftsmen and temporary workers required to prevent it from lapsing further into decay. The Manse was not vast, or not by the standards of some of the great houses, but it was still sufficiently old and grand to swallow as much money as might be poured into it. And money he had: the City had been good to him, his investments had flourished, and they would continue to do so now that the war was over. Keeping an eye on his wealth was what passed for work these days.
On the first anniversary of their deaths, something came apart inside him. He could not have said why, or pointed to what might have changed. He simply felt the fracture in his being widen, and grief, as though envious of the few powers of speech he retained, seized his tongue and sought to still it.
And each day he roamed his lands, seeking the fox, while each night thereafter, he wept.
The Manse boasted a very distinctive wine cellar, one of the reasons he and his wife had bought the property. Parts of the cellar dated back to Norman times, with carvings on the walls and pillars suggesting that it might, at one point, have functioned as a place of worship or contemplation. Many of the bottles had been acquired by the Manse’s previous owner and were included in the sale, while others were purchased in the years before the death of his family. Since then, he had neither added to nor depleted its stock. He did not entertain, and now rarely imbibed alcohol beyond an occasional restorative whisky or brandy to keep out the cold. He was afraid that if he began drinking seriously, he would never stop. For the most part, the door to the wine cellar remained closed, and even Mrs. Hoggart rarely ventured down there for long, content to make only occasional forays to keep the worst of the cobwebs at bay.
So it was that one evening after Mrs. Hoggart had departed, a pie left in the oven for him to consume when he saw fit, he was surprised to see the cellar door standing open and what appeared to be candlelight flickering in its depths. The cellar was wired for electricity, so no cause existed for anyone to be lighting candles. It could only have been the work of Mrs. Hoggart, even if he could not imagine why she might have chosen to set a flame. He tried the switch but the cellar remained dark: a blown bulb, perhaps, which would explain the use of the candle. Odd, though, that Mrs. Hoggart had not mentioned it to him or replaced the bulb instead of leaving a candle burning. Perhaps she had forgotten, even if this would have been so out of character as to suggest some form of otherworldly possession.
He took the winding stone staircase down. There, in the center of the floor, facing the lines of shelves that blended gently into the shadows, a table had been placed, and beside it, a chair. Both were familiar, as they formed part of the furnishings that had come with the house. They were constructed from oak so dark as to be almost black, the legs of the table decorated with carved curls of ivy, the chair with arms worn smooth by centuries of use, and an impressive curved back that enveloped the occupant in a way both comfortable and comforting. When last he had paid any attention to the table and chair, they had been heaped with old boxes, but both were now unburdened. On the table stood a bottle of red wine, a glass, a decanter, a corkscrew, and a single candle in a pewter candlestick.
He picked up the bottle: a 1929 Château Beychevelle, a fine Bordeaux. The dust had been blown from it, not wiped, and visible was the mark of the hand that had plucked it from the rack. He looked closely at the fingerprints, the grip wide, the fingers large. Mrs. Hoggart had hands like a bird’s talons: strong, but small and thin. It struck him, somewhat uneasily, that it might not have been she who removed the bottle and set it on the table. But if not Mrs. Hoggart, then who?
Suddenly, the cellar seemed threatening to him.
He listened but could hear no sound beyond his own breathing and the sputtering of the candle. He lifted the candlestick from the table and held the light before him. He walked forward—one step, then two, slowly forcing back the shadows—and yet with each step he took he created darkness behind him, and the light was not quite strong enough to reach as far as the walls to either side of him, so he felt himself suspended in a fragile cocoon of illumination, one that would not save him in the event of an attack.
Slowly, and not before unsettling himself profoundly, he confirmed that he was the only occupant of the cellar, and finally found himself back at the table, staring at the wine bottle, the decanter, the corkscrew, and the clean glass. He discovered the niche from which the bottle had been removed and returned it to its place. Taking the candle with him, he climbed the stairs back to the landing and closed the door behind him. Only then did he extinguish the flame.
The following morning he questioned Mrs. Hoggart about the bottle and the candle. She professed ignorance and informed him that it had been at least a week since her last visit to the cellar. He thought that she gave him a peculiar look when she finished speaking. She had little idea of what he got up to when she left, and might well have suspected him of indulging in the odd tipple of an evening—not that she would have blamed him, not in the slightest. Her concerns about him might have been confirmed by the fact that the lights in the cellar now appeared to be working perfectly, even though he had not managed to get around to replacing the bulb, and had not asked Mrs. Hoggart to do so either.
So there they left the affair, each puzzled by the other. But that evening, when Mrs. Hoggart, as usual, departed for home, he checked the cellar. The table stood bare and the wine bottles remained undisturbed. He ate his meal—a stuffed capon with potatoes—and put a record on the gramophone while he read in the library, but had difficulty concentrating on the words before him. At last, he set the book aside and walked to the hall.
The cellar door was open, and he caught the flickering of a candle from below.
He kept his shotgun in a locked cabinet by the boot room. He retrieved it now, loaded the chambers, then waited until he was at the top of the stairs before locking the weapon, the click of it echoing against the stone walls.
“You hear that?” he called out. “That’s the sound of a London Best, and you’d damn well better believe I’ll use it if you don’t show yourself!”
But no reply came from the cellar.
His mouth was dry. The shotgun wavered in his hands. He was dreadfully afraid. Still, he set the stock against his shoulder and took the stairs carefully until he reached the cellar. There, as before, stood a bottle of wine—a different selection, a 1920 Château Cheval Blanc—along with a decanter, a glass, a corkscrew, and a candle in a different candleholder, one that was unfamiliar to him but clearly old. A final additional detail had changed: the wine bottle was empty, but the decanter was full, the cork lying beside it.
“I’m warning you,” he said, scanning the cellar, his eyes following the twin barrels of the gun. “Come out, or you’ll be sorry.”
But nobody appeared, and the depths of the cellar remained dark. He could hold either the candle or the shotgun, but not both, so a second search of the cellar was beyond him. He stepped to the very edge of the candle’s reach, squinting into the murk, half expecting a pale hand to reach out and grab the weapon.
“Who are you?” he asked. He did not like the tone of his voice. It betrayed his fear, although he could not have said which he dreaded more—a continuing silence, or a possible reply to his question. In the end, he was left with the former.
A secret passage, he thought: somewhere in the cellar had to be a false wall, unsuspected and undiscovered, and an unknown person was using it to play a nasty game. Come morning, he would call Crichton & Sons, the local builders, and have them conduct a thorough test of the cellar floor and walls. In the meantime, he would keep the door locked, so that no intruder could penetrate farther.
He retreated toward the stairs. He glanced at the table in passing and froze. The wineglass had been empty when he first came down. He was certain that was the case. But it was half-full now.
He stared around him. No one could have managed to get behind him while he had the cellar under his gun, and he would have heard any footsteps on the stone floor, yet the wineglass had somehow been filled while his back was turned.
“No,” he said. It was a denial of it all: the intruder, the glass filling, and the invitation to drink—for clearly an invitation it was. He would not accept it, and neither would he linger. He left the candle burning and kept his back to the wall as he made his way up the stairs, his finger against the trigger, the pressure heavy enough to fire a shot instantly if he detected even the hint of attack. When he reached the hall, he slammed the door behind him. The key hung from a hook on the wall: a big iron thing, more ornamental than anything else, but now pressed into service again. It stuck in the lock and seemed reluctant to turn. He shuddered, expecting at any moment to see the handle forced down from the other side. Then, mercifully, the key rotated and the door locked. He stepped back, taking up the shotgun once again. He waited, but all was quiet.
That night, he made up a bed for himself in the library. He kept the shotgun beside him and the key beneath the cushion on which his head rested. He did not sleep, only dozed a little, but each time his eyes closed, it seemed to him that he jerked awake immediately, his ears alert for the sound of some unseen entity testing the cellar door. Only when dawn came did he finally rest, to be woken some hours later by the arrival of Mrs. Hoggart. If she was surprised to find him sleeping on the couch, she chose not to comment, and he was grateful he had been given enough time to hide the shotgun from her sight. She prepared breakfast while he performed his ablutions, but before he ate, he called Crichton & Sons, and old Albert Crichton, the paterfamilias, agreed to come round sometime after 1 p.m. to take a look at the cellar, drawn on the pretext that a rat might have found a means of ingress. The Crichton family had worked on the Manse for generations, and Albert had helped his father with remedial work on the cellar decades earlier.
When, at last, Albert and his son did arrive, he unlocked the cellar door and led the way down the stairs. The table was empty. The candle and candlestick were gone. The decanter—one of three—was back in the sideboard, with no sign that it had ever been moved. All the glasses were present and correct. As for the bottle, the untasted wine had been poured back inside, its cork restored, and it now stood on the sideboard. This detail was perhaps the most surprising of all. His nocturnal visitor appeared reluctant to waste a fine bottle of wine. The temperature in the cellar would keep it cool, and so it would be drinkable for a while longer.
The Crichtons could find no hole or other flaw in the cellar floor or walls and were perturbed when he asked them to check for some concealed door, as though wondering how a rat might use one, even if it existed. Albert believed that the cellar’s walls and floor were sound, and any kind of priest hole or passage would have been discovered long ago. Nevertheless, the current owner’s money was good, and work was work, so he offered to return the next day with two men and begin a thorough examination of the cellar, stone by stone.
When Crichton and his son left, Mrs. Hoggart departed with them, accepting a lift, and he could only imagine the conversation they would be having as they returned to the village. He had half a mind to stay at the village inn for the night, but that would hardly stem the gossip that would surely flow from whatever tales the Crichtons would tell, Mrs. Hoggart being—he hoped—more discreet.
Just as he was about to eat his evening meal—shin of beef—he checked the cellar door to ensure it remained locked. The key was in his jacket pocket, the weight of it threatening to tear the lining, but he did not want to leave it anywhere he could not see or feel it.
He had just stepped into the dining room, plate in hand, when he heard the sound of the cellar door opening. He put the plate on the table, picked up the shotgun, and went to the hall. As before, he could see the stairs winding down and the distant candlelight. Now, though, a kind of rage infected his fear. He was tiring of the game.
“Damn you,” he said, and he repeated the words over and over as he stamped down the stairs. “Damn you, damn you, damn you…”
The same bottle of Château Cheval stood opened and decanted on the table, the same candle had been set in the candleholder, and the same darkness occupied the depths of the cellar, but the atmosphere had changed. He could not have said why, but he was acutely aware of no longer being alone, and felt that, whatever the company, it was watching him closely and curiously. Strangest of all—and for the first time since this peculiar ritual had begun—he noticed his fear ebbing, and his anger fading with it. Whatever was regarding him wished him no harm, but neither did it want to be seen, or not clearly. He thought he caught the slightest blur of movement just beyond the circumference of the candlelight, a hint of gray and white against black, but when he moved closer it receded.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The interloper did not answer.
“What do you want?”
Yet that, at least, was obvious: it wanted him to drink.
Almost resignedly, he lowered the shotgun.
“Fine, then,” he said, “if I must.”
He placed the weapon against the wall, and a thought struck him. He didn’t want to consume the wine without food, so he returned to the dining room, retrieved his dinner, and, after only a moment’s hesitation, descended again. He took the seat that had been prepared for him and picked up the decanter. His hand was heavy, and he filled the glass slightly higher than was advisable. From the darkness came an audible intake of breath, followed by a sniff of mild disapproval.
“Sorry,” he said, and wondered to whom—or what—he was apologizing. He sniffed the wine and took a sip, swilling it in his mouth to release the flavors. It was wonderful. He had forgotten how good a glass of wine could taste.
He ate and drank slowly, now and again staring awkwardly into the dark, and the presence stared back at him. Oddly, it assumed more definition if he did not look directly at it. If he tried to pick it out of the murk, it might have been mistaken for a trick of the light caused by the movement of the candle’s flame. But if he glanced aside, in the direction of the racks or the cellar walls, it had a degree of clarity. A man, quite tall, dressed in the manner of a butler or valet: a black suit, a white shirt with a Windsor collar, and a black tie in a classic simple knot.
The glass was empty. He refilled it. A peace settled over him. He should get a dog, he decided. He and his wife hadn’t wanted another after the last one died. It was just too hard to say farewell to them, and with Simon gone and Caroline about to leave, there didn’t seem to be much point. They had talked about traveling more once the children were settled, and—
He realized, quite gradually, that he was speaking aloud.
He stopped talking and put the glass down. Emotions constrained for too long suddenly threatened to overwhelm him.
“Enough,” he said.
He stood, abandoning the shotgun, and went up the stairs, not caring that he had turned his back on whatever had taken up occupancy in the cellar. He just wanted to be gone from there. As he closed the door behind him, the candle was put out. He might once have attributed it to his own actions, or the draft from the door, except he knew better. The entity preferred the dark.
The next day, he retrieved the shotgun and tramped his fields and forests with a new urgency. More than ever, he wanted that fox. He was certain it was not dead. Had it been removed from the world, he would have sensed its absence. But the fox, as always, eluded him. Crichton and his men arrived to commence a tap-tap examination of the walls and floor, but again found nothing untoward beyond the odd hole that they filled in to discourage rodents.
That night, the cellar door stood open, even though he had the only key in his pocket, having used it to lock up after Crichton left. A candle burned, but he did not go down, and in time the light was blown out. The second night, the same.
On the third, he relented.
The bottle—a Saint Préfert from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, one of the first such wines bottled in the previous decade—stood unopened but the glass, the decanter, and the candle were all in place. He experienced a moment of disappointment at the sight of the corked bottle until he recovered himself and saw reflected in its intact nature the decision of someone who cared for wine and, after two nights without the appearance of the awaited guest, did not wish to waste a good bottle by decanting it only to watch it go undrunk. He turned his head, taking in the racks, before allowing his gaze to shift to the right, where the figure of a man shimmered. He could just make out his face, and the gray hair above it.
He opened the bottle, checked the cork, and decanted the wine. He waited a while before carefully filling the glass to the correct level. He sniffed, tasted, and—satisfied—took his seat.
“It’s very good,” he said.
If this was madness, it was a fine one.
He thought that the figure shifted slightly, its head inclining in acknowledgment.
He leaned forward in his chair, cupping the glass in his hands, warming it. He spoke.
“The first time I saw her,” he said, “she was wearing a blue dress…”
Later, he could barely remember stumbling up the stairs. The house was in darkness, but he was not frightened. He renounced the couch, spurned the shotgun, and took to his bed. His throat hurt, and he knew he had been crying. He slept, and when he woke, his sorrow had eased.
And so it went, evening after evening: a bottle waiting for him, a glass, a candle, movement somewhere in the cellar, and a man listening.
“Simon was always a quiet child…”
“I thought Caroline might have become a surgeon…”
“My wife once had a new variety of rose named after me as a birthday gift…”
He even established a possible identity for his confessor, buried deep in the records of the Manse and those who had served in it over the years. No first name, no clue as to his origins, just a surname: Evans, who had supervised the transformation of the cellar into a suitable repository for wine and assembled the original collection in the early part of the nineteenth century. When he asked Mrs. Hoggart about him, she claimed to know nothing. She made inquiries in the village, but no one could recall an Evans.
“Not from around here, whoever he was,” Mrs. Hoggart told him. “Someone would have tales to tell of him otherwise.”
It took him three days to speak the name aloud in the cellar, and when he did so, he detected a change, a kind of closing of the distance between himself and the other, and he thought that he could somehow see the man more markedly, but still only if he did not gaze directly at him.
Two weeks after he had begun speaking to Evans, he was walking in the woods, the shotgun over his arm, when he came across the fox. He knew it from the marking on its side. A female: he could see its teats. It was standing in the path before him, perhaps a dozen feet away at most. The shotgun was loaded. He brought the barrels up and closed the break.
The click was loud, and the animal’s ears twitched in response, but it did not run. Instead, it remained where it was, as though to say Here I am. You have sought me for so long, and I am tired of hiding. Do what you will. Do what you must.
He leveled the gun at the fox and put his finger on the trigger. He felt it give beneath the weight. Slowly, slowly…
He closed his eyes, willing himself to relax. When he opened them again, the fox had altered position. It was now sitting on its haunches, regarding him closely. They remained like that, man and beast, until the former lowered the shotgun, opened the break, and let the shells fall to the palm of his hand. Perhaps he had always known it would end this way. If he were to kill the animal, what would he have left?
The fox rose and trotted away. He watched it vanish into the undergrowth, and then it was lost to him.
He never saw the creature again.
The days went by. Each evening, he descended to the cellar, but often he did not drink, and sometimes did not even speak. But always, Evans was waiting, and if he wished to talk, Evans would listen.
The pains began to intensify a month after he saw the fox. He had been enduring them for a year but chose to ignore them until they started to come between him and his sleep. The doctors spoke of tumors that had spread through his system and admitted that surgery would be of little benefit at this late stage. He would be helped with his suffering; they would do their best to make the end as comfortable as possible. But death is rarely accommodating, and so he suffered.
A team of nurses cared for him in his final weeks, and during that time he managed a final visit to the cellar, on Christmas Eve. A nurse helped him down the stairs before leaving him alone, as requested. A bottle stood on the table, and a glass, but the candle had not been lit.
Evans, being careful.
He lit the candle himself with a match. The shadows retreated. At the very periphery of the illumination, he picked out the toes of a pair of polished shoes, a servant’s livery, and a face hovering above it like a waning moon.
He poured himself a glass of wine. It was a 1928 Château Mouton Rothschild, a jewel of the cellar, but he could only manage a few mouthfuls. It seemed a shame to waste it, so he replaced the cork and determined to give it to the nurse to take home when she left the next morning. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and saw bright blood beside the deeper crimson of the wine.
“I came to say thank you, Evans,” he said, “and goodbye. These evenings with you have meant a great deal to me. They have helped in ways I cannot even begin to explain. I shall miss our times together.”
He felt a strange sense of disappointment that, even now, when they were about to be parted, Evans would not permit himself to be seen. The feeling passed. He had no right to be disappointed with Evans, no right at all.
He stood. He called for the nurse and heard her footsteps on the stairs. He wondered if she had been listening. No matter.
“Farewell, Evans,” he said.
He blew out the candle, and Evans was gone.
Shortly before midnight, he lay on his deathbed and dreamed. He was on the forest path and saw the fox. When the animal trotted into the woods, he followed it.
He slept, and he died.
Darkness visible through a gap in the curtains. Starlight and moonlight. Sounds, voices. His robe hanging from a hook on the door.
He rose from his bed and put on the robe. The room smelled of fresh pine and woodsmoke. He opened the door and walked to the landing. The stairs stretched down to the hall, where a woman was adjusting the position of a Christmas ribbon around a mirror.
She looked up.
“You’re awake.”
“Yes.”
“We’ve been waiting for you, the children and I.”
He started to cry. He could not stop himself.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh.”
She went to him and held him until he was ready to speak again.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“Walking in the woods, but they won’t be long. Breakfast will be served soon, so you’ll have to hurry up and get dressed. Why don’t you choose a bottle of champagne and set it to chill? After all, it is Christmas. And,” she added, “I think there is someone you might like to greet.”
The cellar door stood open. A candle flickered. He descended.
A bottle stood on the table: Krug, 1928, one of the greatest vintages. Beside it was a tray with four champagne flutes. A man emerged from the shadows, both strange and familiar.
“Hello, Evans.”
“Hello, sir. I took the liberty of selecting a bottle.”
“I see that. An excellent choice.”
“And I’ve set aside a claret to go with the goose later.”
“I expect it will be very well received.”
He looked at the Krug. “Why don’t you open that now, so we might share a glass?”
“Most kind, sir.”
He watched as Evans uncorked the champagne, the candlelight illuminating the spectral cloud of the vapor. Evans poured, they toasted, and they drank.
“All is well,” he said.
“Yes, sir. All is well.”
And the evenings with Evans stretch on forever.