I’m attempting to ascend the cardboard box mountain at the foot of my bed. They’ve been piled up like this for three weeks – since the day I moved in – and it’s getting ridiculous now. I ran out of pants back in week two and have been round at Mum and Dad’s using their washer dryer more times than I’m proud of. I know that somewhere at the top of this pile there’s a box full of tinsel, pompom snowmen and silver pinecones.
‘Ah-ha!’ I shout in triumph at the exact moment the mountain gives way beneath me and I slide down onto the floor sending the contents of the decorations box flying into the air. A corner of the Michael Bublé CD that Mum gave me years ago hits me on the temple. I’ve been listening to The Smiths a lot since the summer, but I suppose they’re not exactly festive so I shrug off the undignified fall and put the CD into my ancient laptop. Out pours some Canadian Christmas crooning and the scene is set for tree-decorating.
Since leaving Nari in town, I’ve already downed three glasses of bubbly with my baked beans and oven chips and I’m getting down tipsy single girl style to ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas’ when I spot it: a glittering vintage solitaire diamond on a thin rose-gold band. My engagement ring. It must have been in one of the fallen boxes and it’s just lying there among the scattered silver bells and stars.
I don’t know why I do it but I slip it onto my finger and hold out my hand, making the stone shimmer. It is still gorgeous. I wore this thing for nearly ten years waiting for Cole to set the date, but there was always something in the way. He needed to get his flying hours up, then he had to commit to the long-haul schedules in order to get promoted, then he moved airlines… Oh, did I mention Cole’s a pilot? I know what you’re thinking. Lucky me, landing a gorgeous, uniformed, suntanned high-flyer, but the truth is we barely saw each other and the Love Shack was a pretty lonely place out there under the twenty-four hour flightpaths.
I remember the summer day he slipped this ring onto my finger. As a romantic teenager I’d always dreamt that my future fella, whoever he might be, would propose over dinner in a classy restaurant; the kind of place I’d seen on eighties romcoms, with candles and tinkling piano music and white linen tablecloths. I’d imagined many times how my mystery man would secretly drop the ring into my champagne flute and as he made a quiet toast to our future his eyes would linger on my glass and I’d see the ring and weep tears of surprised joy.
But quiet romance was never Cole’s style. Everything had to be a statement, reflecting him and his overinflated sense of himself – instilled at an early age, I’ve come to learn, by his doting mother.
At the time, I hadn’t exactly minded the public question popping; at least, I had been taken by surprise, and I had wept, just like in the rehearsed fantasy proposals of my girlhood, and I’d smiled away the qualms rising up with the colour in my cheeks.
He chose to do it at his sister’s wedding reception. This should have been my first clue.
His sister, Clementine, is a consultant cardiologist, just like her father was, and the wedding party was basically a gathering of the great and the good of Harley Street. To give Cole his due, I hadn’t suspected a thing all day. All the way through the overly long service in the glittering Mayfair church and the delicious wedding breakfast in the hotel across the street, even during the speeches and elaborate rituals of cake-cutting and bouquet throwing, I hadn’t the foggiest notion he was about to pop the question. Why would I? We’d only been together for four months, and I’d only met his mother for the first time a couple of days before at the Love Shack house-warming bash.
Poor Clementine clearly had no idea what was about to happen either. Just as the room was bursting into rippling applause and the quartet were readying themselves to strike up a tasteful number for the couple’s first dance, Cole had tapped at his champagne glass so loudly I thought it might shatter. Before I knew what was happening, he was dragging me – yes, me, the girl the bride and groom didn’t know from Eve – into the centre of the room, coming to a stop directly in front of the perplexed happy couple.
I’ll never forget the look on Clementine’s face as, without any further warning, Cole sank to his knee before the gathered crowd and held the ring up to me. The diamond gleamed in the sudden light from the wedding photographer’s flash.
That’s when I looked from Cole’s confident grinning face to his sister’s. Clementine’s expression didn’t mirror my own blushing shellshock or my look of creeping embarrassment at Cole’s ill-timed matrimonial fervour. Instead, she was hitching her bottom jaw a little to one side and, after glancing wearily at her new husband, raising her eyes to the vaulted ceilings. I watched her shake her head as if to say, ‘I knew it. They couldn’t let me haveone day’.
The guests had broken out into a polite smattering of sudden applause – Clementine’s set are nothing if not socially astute and smartly responsive. But, as Cole loudly declared his undying love for me and, with a struggle, forced the too-tight ring onto my finger, I glanced around the room to discover what I’d feared all along; that not one of Clementine’s doctor friends was actually smiling, nobody was. Except for Cole’s mother, Patricia Jordan. She was smiling, alright, with a look of defiant pride aimed directly at the shrinking Clementine.
I should have known then. If the pair of them could cook up a plan to upstage their own nearest and dearest on the best day of her life, they’d be capable of anything. But I’d managed to pack away all those reservations, and I performed a delighted ‘yes’, overwhelmed by what I chose to interpret at the time as Cole’s impulsive largesse and his hapless enthusiasm to pile happiness upon familial happiness and bring me into the Jordan family in the biggest, showiest way possible, and as soon as possible.
I could count on one hand the number of times we met up with Clementine after that day, though I made sure to send gifts to their London home as each of our nephews was born, and I always made sure to remember their birthdays.
Yeah, I should have known then.
I realise I’m still spreading my fingers out, making the ring sparkle in the light of the bare, unshaded bulb on my bedroom ceiling. Michael Bublé seems to have shifted his attentions to Frosty the Snowman and either the festive season is finally winning me over or I’m teetering on the edge of the abyss of jilted brides again because I find myself racing to the living room sofa and tearing into a chocolate orange with frightening ferocity. The phone rings in the hallway as I’m six segments in and I let it go to voicemail.
‘Hello, Sylvie love. Have you unpacked your stuff yet? Me and Dad are hoping you’ll pop round for dinner tomorrow before we jet off to the Big Apple. I’m experimenting with chilli dogs and fries to help us acclimatise. Lots of love. Oh, and… bring a friend if you like. OK, bye, love.’
Bring a friend. That’s Mum’s not so subtle way of asking if I’ve managed to get myself a boyfriend for Christmas. Which, of course, I haven’t, because this isn’t a Richard Curtis movie and Castlewych Academy isn’t exactly bursting at the seams with eligible bachelors. I’ve drank enough bubbly to laugh out loud at the thought of Mum’s expression if I turned up tomorrow with old Mr Halcrow (the sweaty mathematician) on my arm.
It’s getting late and even though I’ve taken a perverse pleasure in parading around with a few grands’ worth of bling on my finger, I know it’s time to take Cole’s ring off. Even after he had it resized for me, it was always just a little too tight and wearing it now is making my skin hurt, not to mention my heart. Just as I resolve to send it back to him in the new year I hear a jumbo jet flying over the flat. I raise my eyes, tracking its passing unseen above me, and I remember I have no idea what his flight patterns are now, or where in the world he might be. I don’t even know where he’s living nowadays. It’s then that I feel the need to go lie down on the bedroom floor in the middle of the spilled debris of our shared life and the remnants of a decade of Christmases where I was Cole’s metaphorical co-pilot and second officer. OK,nowI’m crying.
It’s pitch dark when I wake up and I seem to be dry mouthed and frozen on the floor. I want to say this has never happened before as it doesn’t exactly cast me in a good light, but I’ll admit it has.
I scrabble for the light switch by the bed and squint at the bare Christmas tree across the hall in my moonlit living room. Mary and Joseph, it’s cold in here! So much for cosying up the flat for Christmas.
I can see my mobile flashing on the hall table and drag myself to my feet. It’s gone four in the morning; Bublé and bubbly must have laid me out cold. I put the kettle on and dial my voicemail, and of course it’s Nari.
‘All right, Sylve? Well, I’ve given Stephen a good chatting to via FaceTime, and it was allverycordial. He’s asked his PA to sort out a refund for you; it was all booked through one of his subsidiaries, apparently. The full amount will be back in your parents’ account by morning.Andhe’s got two Finnish Lapland options for us, both leaving on the twenty-second: there’s a hotel in the middle of Rovaniemi, I think it was, or a couple of log cabins somewhere near a ski resort called Saariselkä. Let me know which you fancy and I’ll finalise the details tomorrow. Oh, and I think I’ve got myself a New Year’s date in London. I guess Stephen needed a little reminder of what he’s been missing; he’s jetting in specially. OK, nighty night.’
As I sip my coffee and wander around the flat closing curtains, adjusting the thermostat, and listening for the boiler coming on with a whoosh, I think how nice it was of Stephen to sort everything out like that. Even though I’m grateful, I can’t forget how much he hurt Nari, though I suspect he isn’t even aware of that fact, and Nari just pretends it’s all fine now. I wonder if this New Year’s date means he’s willing to commit this time? It sounds plausible if he’s coming all this way to see her, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Still, imagine having the power to just offer up two choices of holiday like that! I admit I’m impressed. What had Nari said? Rovaniemi or… and that’s when it clicks.Saariselkä?I’ve heard that before.
I grab my laptop and settle on the sofa while making a start on a Christmas Toblerone from one of the school kids. ‘Saariselkä… Saariselkä,’ I say in an increasingly over pronounced and inaccurate accent. I’m sure that’s where he was from. How many other Lappish towns has the average British woman heard of?
Right. Facebook. I’m in, and my fingers hesitate over the keyboard. ‘Stellan… Stellan…?’ What the hell was his surname? ‘V… Vir… Virtanen!’ That’s it! How many Stellan Virtanens can there be on Facebook? Ah, just the one then, and he appears to be a very small, very cute dog. I click on the blue-eyed husky pup avatar and hold my breath. Holy crap! Itishim.
‘Stellan Virtanen. Saariselkä, Inari. Finnish Lapland. Studied Languages and Cultures at University of Lapland and Manchester University.’
Hmm, but that’s all I can see. He’s got his security settings on. Very sensible. You don’t know who’s creeping around your timeline and perving over your summer holiday snaps. Before I know what my stupid fingers are doing, they’ve sent a friend request, and I’m left feeling momentarily panicked, but the bubbly in my bloodstream simply shrugs and I let it go. Besides, my mind is busy elsewhere all of a sudden.
I know it’s a bit sad, and I know I shouldn’t, but it occurs to me that even though I can’t get a peek at what Stellan looks like now (probably paunchy and balding, I tell myself), I at least know where there are photographs of him from way back then. I just have to scale Box Mountain again.
