Chapter 39
Elizabeth made everyone a hot chocolate before bed and they assembled in the Lutine bar to drink it.
She’d found an ornate tin with French writing on it – Le Joli Marron Chocolat – in the pantry when she’d been looking for Horlicks or something suitable for a night drink.
In the galley she mixed the powder with milk, a hearty splash of cream and warmed it gently.
It filled the whole carriage with the most beautiful nutty aroma.
Vincent nearly asked her to marry him on the spot when he tasted it but he stopped himself.
He could have joked like that easily with Roo, but there would have been a completely different undertone with Elizabeth.
‘Tomorrow, we are going to breakfast like kings on the leftovers, because if you have never had a Boxing Day mash-up, you haven’t lived,’ Frank announced.
‘That sounds intriguing,’ Elizabeth said, not quite sure how that would taste.
‘Trust me, Elizabeth, it is the best.’ Vincent made an ‘okay’ sign with his fingers circled.
His dad always made the Boxing Day breakfast, throwing all the remains of the Christmas dinner into a big pan with butter then flattening it into a giant patty which he’d serve by the slice.
Funny but he remembered enjoying that more than the Christmas dinner itself.
‘Hello, everyone,’ Brian’s voice interrupted the music playing on the radio. ‘Are you all having a lovely Chis… Christmas evening?’
‘Wahay, Brian’s blotto.’ Tim laughed.
‘I don’t know whether to be happy or sad about the big thaw, do you? It’s going so fast now, isn’t it, as fast as it came down. I think I’ve even spotted some grass and it’s weird, isn’t it, it’s like an assault on the eye, that green… it seems so bright.’
It was dark outside the train but there was definitely no thaw going on out there. Their benchmark guide was those inches of snow settled on the tree branch and they hadn’t budged. They’d presumed Brian lived fairly nearby, but maybe not in that case.
‘I just bobbed on, like the red red robin, to say that I’ll see you all tomorrow, when normal service will be presumed…
assumed… I mean resumed. Sorry, I’ve had too much port with my Wensleydale.
What a wonderful cheese. If that cheese were a human being it would be the king, wouldn’t it? I love the king. God bless the king.’
‘God bless the king.’ Everyone raised their cups to him.
Then there was a female voice in the background hard-whispering.
‘Brian, you’re drunk. Come downstairs.’
‘All right, all right, Mrs Cosgrove. Listeners, I will leave you in the faithful hands of my gentle sounds of yesteryear. God bless you all and I’ll see you tomorrow.’
‘Hark! Hark…’
Roo’s favourite carol started up and she began to sing it along with Henry, who was word perfect now. She’d written the lyrics down for him but it was as if he’d always known them.
‘Remember, Henry,’ said Vincent, doing some CPR on an invisible patient sprawled across his legs.
Henry smiled and mirrored the action.
‘I think I’m going to have to turn in soon,’ said Tim, still in his Santa costume.
He looked colossal in it, much bigger than Tim in his normal clothes.
‘Can I just say, I’ve had the best day with you all.
I really didn’t expect things to turn out like this when my engine died and I had to roll the car into Derringbury station. ’
‘Yes, me too,’ said Jane. ‘I’d like to thank you for listening to me earlier. I probably wouldn’t have said anything had it not been for that eggnog.’ She had a lot to thank Mr Ingleton’s eggs for, plus Henry’s ability to turn them into a truth drug.
‘Well, I think we are all glad you did,’ said Elizabeth, pleased she had been part of a gang that, hopefully, had saved Jane from a fate worse than death.
She’d had a wonderful conversation with Jane over those mulled wines, and she’d found herself joyously infected with the old lady’s zest and energy.
Jane had told her how much she had survived in her life, and the many knocks and dents she’d endured seemed to have forged her into steel.
She hadn’t arrived ready-made like that from her mother’s womb.
And though Elizabeth hadn’t traded with stories of her own life, it was as if Jane knew when she told her that however much she might think she could settle for a life without love, she shouldn’t.
Jane turned to address the couple at her side. ‘Frank, Grace, I would like to take you up on that offer, please. But I will pay my way.’
Frank said, ‘Well, I’m delighted and we’ll fight about that when you come to us.’
‘It won’t be for very long. By the time the contracts are exchanged, there will only be about three or four weeks before the cruise sets off. If I can manage to get on it, of course.’
‘If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. And if you don’t get on that one, you can get on another.’
‘Yes.’ Jane smiled. She had few doubts she would get on the ship, she felt that she would, which was an odd way of operating for one so grounded and not given to the airy-fairy. She was beginning to wonder if it was more than coincidence that all of them had ended up here together.
Coincidence. One of those subjects that always landed in the middle of a group of scientists, gathered at a dinner party, like a Barnes Wallis bomb.
‘Coincidences bow to the law of statistics, but people are desperate to interpret them in a way that fills them with meaning.’
‘I have to disagree with you there, my friend. Everything is connected by invisible threads. You are familiar with the story of Jung and the golden scarab beetle?’
‘Yes, of course I am, Clifford, but—’
‘A “coincidence” that defies any notion of chance occurrence?’
‘My dear Wutheridge, coincidences are inevitable when the common laws of chance are at play. As humans, we are inclined to seek patterns and in coincidence we find them. We focus on the connections, ignore the evidence that doesn’t fit.
Random luck and our compulsion to filter, that is all there is to your “phenomenon”. ’
‘In 1898, a novella was written about an unsinkable ocean liner crossing the Atlantic on an April night where it hit an iceberg and sank. The name of this ship: the Titan, and it carried an insufficient number of lifeboats to serve its crew and passengers resulting in a catastrophic loss of life. Fourteen years later, April 1912, a ship called the Titanic … you know the rest. Coincidence? I think not.’
Both sides of the argument as strong, as fascinating, the most incisive minds of men in conflict with one another.
‘Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous’, Einstein said.
Freud disregarded such nonsense: everything could be explained was his mantra; whereas Jung believed coincidences were a manifestation of a deeper order in the universe.
Certainly, after Clifford’s ‘experience’ he was more inclined to believe in the magic of them.
‘Accept the mystery, Jane,’ he’d say. ‘I am a happier man for doing so.’
Was he right? Could it be they were all brought here for a reason?
Was Grace meant to hear her story to help her heal?
Would Tim have defrosted without them? Was she meant to overdo the booze and tell them all about being railroaded into living in a place she didn’t want to go, and be saved?
Did Roo understand the impact that squashing that orange and squeezing out the juice had upon her?
Was it chance she’d won an orange pendant in the cracker to reinforce that scene, if she should ever begin to doubt herself?
She couldn’t speak for the others, but she knew that getting on the train to Eskford had changed her life.
No, more than that, it had given her back a precious future she thought had been buried in the grave with Clifford.
‘You’ll have to write a poem about us all, Roo,’ Jane said.
‘Oh, don’t you worry, I will.’
‘I quite like the idea of being in a poem,’ said Vincent. ‘Make sure you put down how ’andsome I am.’
‘Vincent, I write the truth in my poetry.’
Vincent grinned.
‘You written one about Mr Urine?’ he asked her.
‘I’ve written about five hundred. None of which would be fit for reciting in respectable company.
’ Roo smiled, mainly because she was able to make a joke about it which was a big step forward.
She’d be okay, she knew she would be, give or take a little pain here and there.
So now there was just the rest of her life to sort out.
‘You are an insightful young lady,’ said Jane. ‘I laughed at so many points in that Christmas poem. I thought, how can she get into the head of someone so much older than her?’
‘People don’t realise how similar they are to each other, which gives you loads of material because it always surprises them when they realise it. For instance, what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a swan?’
‘They mate for life,’ said Elizabeth and Vincent together then laughing that they were in sync.
Grace went for a different fact. ‘They can break your arm.’
Tim nodded. ‘I would have said break your arm too.’
‘Or that they all belong to the king.’ Frank smiled smugly. ‘Bet you didn’t know that’s not actually true.’
‘Point made,’ said Roo. ‘It’s either: they can break your arm, they mate for life or they’re owned by the monarch – except when they’re not.
But people tend to think they’re the only one who knows it and they’re enlightening you.
’ Roo grinned. ‘I used to watch my dad’s girlfriends.
They all had these common denominators. Like, for instance, they’d sit in front of the mirror plucking hairs out of their chins, swearing because they couldn’t grasp the one that the tweezers couldn’t find.
Or they’d come in from work and as soon as they were through the door they’d fiddle about under their shirts and whip off their bras like a magician producing a bouquet, and make this groan of relief.
Once you have your eyes opened to those sorts of patterns, they crop up time and again and I tap into them.
A bit like Jane and her glimmers. I spot them everywhere, especially at work, how the bosses, who were probably normal once upon a time, speak management bollocks: blue-sky thinking, having all our ducks in a row, circling back to…
When your job is as mind-numbing as mine, you need something to alleviate the boredom. ’
‘Well, you have a gift for observation and you need to utilise it.’ Jane wagged her finger at Roo.
‘I promise you, I’ll give it my best shot, Jane.’
‘Right. That’s me done for the day,’ said Tim, forcing himself to get up before he drifted off to sleep in the chair which was embracing him like an old friend who didn’t want him to leave. ‘Henry, you sure you don’t want the second bed in my room? You don’t know what you’re missing.’
‘Thank you, but I’m fine in “Maria Gloriosa”, “the most beautiful bell in Europe”.’
Tim’s standing seemed to trigger everyone else into moving.
They were all tired, but it took great effort to move as they were too comfortable.
Yet the idea of an even more comfortable bed galvanised them.
This could possibly be the last night they spent on board, if what Radio Brian was saying about the thaw was true.
And all of them, without exception, had mixed emotions about that.