This Year It Will Be Different

  Elsa’s friends hadn’t really got to know Tim very well. They were sympathetic but vaguely relieved. Tim had come out of nowhere very quickly and taken all Elsa’s mind and attention. Perhaps it was doomed from the start. And the years went by, five of them. The children grew up and forgot that Miss Martin had ever planned a wedding for which they had all made cards. The other teachers in the school forgot too. If a new teacher came and inquired about Miss Martin’s private life, they would have to root around in their memories of the incident some years back. A wedding called off at the last moment? It didn’t rate as important in their lives. But it was still the center of Elsa’s life. She tried everything possible to uproot the burning anxiety to know why someone thought she was a fine person to share his life hopes and dreams with one day, and the next day was able to say that it had all been a mistake. If it wasn’t anything she had done, then it must be something to do with the person she was. It was a huge matter to put behind you, but of course you had to pretend to—otherwise people accused you of brooding and tried to take you out of yourself, which was wearying and irritating. Elsa’s friends thought she was very absorbed with her school work, her colleagues thought she had a busy life with friends. It was easy to remain within yourself, which was where she wanted to be.

  Christmas was always meant to be the poignant time, the season that pointed out what the lonely were lacking; but, oddly, Elsa never found that Christmas was any worse than other times. One year she had gone to one sister’s, a tense household in South London where a lot of the discussion centered around alcohol and whether her brother-in-law was possibly partaking of too much of it. Another year to another sister’s, a haphazard home where Elsa did most of the cooking and clearing up; and then to a colleague’s house where they had rather too much carol singing and rather too little food. Last Christmas she had spent walking in the Scottish Highlands with a recently divorced friend who wanted to talk angrily about the innate badness of men and how they should all be wiped from the face of the earth.

  And now it was the fifth Christmas. For some reason this year she refused every offer, always grateful, always assuring them of something else long planned, but never specified. At the Christmas concert in the shabby prefabricated annex that served as a school hall, she adjusted the wings of the angels, the fleece of the shepherds, and the crowns of the Three Wise Men as she had done for so many years in this school. The children were overexcited, surrounded by their admiring and proud parents. They all flocked to Elsa and hugged her goodbye. And as she did so often, Elsa thought that teaching was so much better than any other job, particularly at Christmas. Imagine if you were in an office with interminable Christmas parties. How could anyone bear the false cheer, the fake bonhomie?

  “Where are you going for Christmas, Miss Martin?” they asked her from the comfort and safety of their parents’ arms.

  Usually she said something vague and noncommittal, and that she would try not to eat too much Christmas pudding. But this year for some reason one of the children, little Marion Matthews, said confidently to the others, “She’s going to America. She told us she was.”

  Had she? Elsa hadn’t remembered saying anything of the sort.

  “Remember? Miss Martin’s going to make a wish for us from the Statue of Liberty,” cried Marion triumphantly.

  Elsa remembered. There had been some story they read in class about people making a wish when they passed the Statue of Liberty in New York.

  “Have you made a wish there, Miss Martin?” they had asked.

  “No, not yet,” Elsa had said. “But when I go I’ll make a wish for you all.”

  They had considered it with the seriousness of seven-year-olds. Would Miss Martin wish for the new hall for them? If they had a new hall, they could do all kinds of things, dancing classes, basketball, proper gymnastics. Elsa had said lightly that of course she would, but they must remember that all wishes didn’t necessarily come true.

  The Christmas vacation began. The children would have forgotten next term that Miss Martin was going to make a wish for them. Their minds would be too full of the adventures and gifts of a busy holiday. But Elsa didn’t forget. She went to the drawer to look for her passport. Her face had looked different then, she thought, the eyes less weary, the mouth more relaxed. But perhaps this was fantasy.

  At the back of the passport were ten folded bills, each for twenty dollars. They had been there for five years, losing value. Why had she not changed them back into pounds? Perhaps it had all been too painful at the time, and then she had forgotten them. Still, it was a good omen. A whole two hundred extra dollars to spend on herself when she got there. She would give herself some little luxury. She would think not at all of what the money had been intended for. She didn’t even know why it was there. Had she changed it herself, was it a gift? Strange that she could remember so much about that time with frightening clarity and other things not at all.

  It was surprisingly easy for a single woman to buy a ticket to New York and ask a travel agency to book her a hotel room. Nobody asked her why she was going there. Elsa was an adult, she presumably had plans of her own, her own agenda.

  Other passengers read their books, watched the movie, or snoozed on the flight.

  “Have a good Christmas, you hear?” the man at Immigration instructed her.

  “Enjoy your stay,” ordered the man at Customs.

  “Best city in the world,” volunteered the bus driver.

  At the hotel the receptionist asked if she’d like a little Christmas tree in her room or not. “Some folks do, some folks want to forget the holiday, so we always ask,” she said.

  Elsa thought for a moment. “I’d love a little Christmas tree,” she said. For five years she had not even placed a sprig of holly in her apartment at home.

  She put on her comfortable shoes—she had already forgotten what time it was back in Britain—and went out to mix with the shoppers and the crowds coming home from work. She had heard that New York was a busy, frightening place where they pushed past you on the street, but the people seemed courteous to her, and smiled when they heard her accent.

  She watched the skaters at Rockefeller Center and marveled at the fairy lights twinkling on every tree along the huge avenues of Manhattan. She stared, fascinated, into the windows of the great department stories, and the lavish displays of gifts. Exhausted, she returned to her own hotel and the individual tree trimmed in her honor by a little oriental chambermaid.

  “Do your family celebrate Christmas?” Elsa asked. Back home she would never have asked a personal question about anyone’s background or culture. Perhaps being in New York was changing her personality.

  “Everybody love Christmas holidays, people are happy and good-tempered,” said the girl, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  At the reception desk they had a brochure advertising a Christmas Eve treat. It was a special tour: it began with children singing carols, then it took you around New York in a big bus pointing out the sights and the way various communities celebrated Christmas. There was a festive lunch and then a boat trip to blow away the cobwebs. They would go past the Statue of Liberty.

  “Do people make a wish there or is that in my imagination?” Elsa asked.

  “I don’t know that they do, but then I was born and raised here so I wouldn’t know. Perhaps all visitors or first-time people seeing the statue make a wish,” answered the receptionist.

  Elsa studied the tour again. It was certainly full of interest, but it was expensive. Then she remembered her magic money, the ten twenty-dollar bills she had not known were hers. “I’ll book it,” she said.

  There were twenty of them setting out. Couples and people on their own. They each wore a paper name badge as big as a dinner plate. “Merry Christmas—I’m Elsa.” Some of them photographed each other.

  “Shall I take one of you with your camera?” a man asked Elsa. She didn’t like to tell him that there was nobody on the face of the earth to whom she
would show such a picture, but he looked kind.

  “I’d love that,” she said, not to disappoint him.

  They got to know about each other, the people on the tour: the Japanese couple whose son had been killed in the war more than fifty years ago. They had corresponded over the years with an American couple whose son had been killed on the same day. This was their first visit. Elsa looked at the four old people in their seventies sitting together in such solidarity and mystification at what had happened to them all half a century ago. It made her own problems seem small.

  There were a mother and daughter who fought good-naturedly and almost automatically as they had done for a generation and would do for another. There was a scattering of people on their own, all extroverts, all able to talk as if they were old friends. The only quiet person was the man with the kind face who had taken Elsa’s photograph for her. He smiled as they passed places by. He looked as if he knew New York well, and might even be from the city, but that would be odd. Why would a native New Yorker take a guided tour of his own place?

  Light snow began to fall as they approached the Statue of Liberty. Elsa looked at it with awe. You must be able to make a wish at a place like this, a symbol so important to so many people who had come to start a new life with hearts full of hope. She closed her eyes and wished that the children in her school would get a new hall.

  “It’s not a very important thing,” she said, struggling to be fair, mouthing the words without realizing it. “There must have been more important wishes made here, but I did promise the children I’d ask. And it would make a difference to music and concerts and everything as well as games. It’s not just for showing off, and there aren’t any funds left to build one, you see.”

  She felt a camera flash; the man with the kind face had taken a picture of her.

  “You were praying so hard I wanted to record it for you,” he said. He was easy to talk to. She told him about the hall and the schoolchildren back in London, and later when they were having eggnog in a tavern with the group she told him about Tim and how he had left her and about the dollars in the back of her passport.

  And he told her about his friend Stefan, who had died six months ago. How every year on Christmas Eve, Stefan had come out to thank the Statue of Liberty for giving him a home in America, but that he had never been able to give Stefan a real home because his father was old and his mother frail, and they could not take on board their only son’s having a friendship with a man. They still lived in hope that he would marry and that all their great wealth could be handed on to future generations.

  He had never been able to spend Christmas Day with Stefan; for years he had sat, mute and miserable, trying to be cheerful for two elderly people who were disappointed in him, trying to put out of his mind the thought of Stefan sitting lonely and confused in an apartment drinking a bottle of vodka but assuring himself that he was loved even though it couldn’t be acknowledged.

  So every Christmas Eve they had been together and come out to salute the Statue of Liberty at the gate of New York’s harbor. And sometimes Stefan played the violin to say thank you for being invited into America. People had smiled at him, some had thought it sentimental, some had thought it touching.

  He had tears in his eyes as he spoke of Stefan and how he had promised him that one day he would build a great auditorium in his name so that everyone would know of him. He wouldn’t be one more immigrant, he would be a violinist who loved this city. But he couldn’t do it yet. Not yet while his parents were alive. He must allow them peace in their last years, months even. Stefan would understand.

  “Did he play in concerts?” Elsa asked.

  “No, he taught music in a school,” said the man with the kind face, and then suddenly they both knew how Stefan’s monument could be built and where. A hall with his name on it could go up three thousand miles away. The children would be pleased but not astonished. Miss Martin had made a wish, that was all. And Stefan could be honored in another great city until the time was right for him to be acknowledged in New York, his own hometown.

  THE HARD CORE

  Ellie liked them mainly. The old people who had come to live and die in Woodlands. There were very few trees in Woodlands, but that didn’t matter, it was as good a name as most and better than some. The place down the road was called Rest Haven, and the one across the road, Santa Rosa della Marina. Woodlands had a bit more dignity somehow.

  Ellie was popular with the guests, she didn’t call them dear or dearie like some of the carers did. She didn’t speak to them as if they were deaf or mad. She never asked how are we feeling today. She didn’t lower her voice in respect of their huge age and imminent death. Ellie would admit to them when she had a hangover or had got involved yet again with a highly unsuitable man. She was twenty-seven, eager, untidy, and loud. She brought life and energy into their bedrooms with their early morning tea and into the Day Room with their midmorning coffee.

  Kate Harris, the matron, watched Ellie with amused exasperation. She was certainly no advertisement for Woodlands with her stained white coat … yet she had got those stains by helping the old people to move to more comfortable positions and maybe knocking over their coffee while doing so. Her hair escaped from its cap because she was always running to be somewhere that she was needed. She spent little time in the staff room preening herself at a mirror. Ellie had held the hands of dying men and women, she had prattled on to them about their families, she had a natural kindness that more than made up for a sloppy, careless, and overfamiliar style of going on. She remembered the names of the visitors, too, which was a bonus, and had a tendency to flirt with some of the sons or grandsons who came to visit the elderly.

  Kate Harris felt that Ellie’s judgment in men left a lot to be desired. The most recent one, a dark, brooding-looking man with an irritating tendency to hoot his car horn just at the time the residents were settling down to sleep, was no great addition to the scene. But then Kate Harris had not been a wise chooser of men: her ex-husband had left eventually with a woman half Kate’s age and somehow without leaving Kate half the community property. It had never been sorted out, and it never would be.

  Kate’s mother had always said that it was an unwise marriage. It was doubly and trebly irritating that she had been proved right. There was nothing Mother had not been right about. She had even been right about the future.

  “Don’t come and live with me, Kate,” Mother had said. “We would be enemies in a week. Get started in some kind of business. You had quite a brain before that man set about destroying it.”

  She had decided to go into business herself and established Woodlands in a Melbourne suburb, an only moderately successful retirement home. Kate Harris sighed; she wasn’t one to criticize young Ellie’s poor choice in men. And at least she hadn’t married any of them.

  Ellie was going to spend her Christmas holiday in Sydney with the dark, brooding man called Dan. She had told them all about the apartment he had rented. Well, was going to rent. From people he knew, or friends of his knew. And they were going four days before Christmas or maybe three. There was no pressure, no fuss. It would be great. And somebody had asked Ellie yesterday did it have a sea view and she had bitten her lip and said yes, sure, probably.

  Kate Harris got the impression that Dan and the apartment hadn’t quite firmed up as expected. Still, let them work it out. It wasn’t Kate’s problem, she was not Ellie’s mother, there was no need to advise or warn as her own mother had.

  There were thirty-two people in Woodlands, twenty-eight of them were going out for Christmas. Four, the Hard Core, would remain. Kate Harris would manage this herself, she had done so last year and the year before. These were the complainers, the moaners, the groaners. It was not hard to see why no one wanted them to spoil Christmas peace.

  Twenty-eight old people would be collected and driven to their children and grandchildren, or to their nieces or the children of their cousins. They were people who would smile at a barbecue on C
hristmas Day, men and women who would choose presents from a gift catalogue, or arrange a case of a nice vintage to be delivered from a winery. They would come back with photographs of Christmas and New Year’s festivities.

  The Hard Core would sit, resentful and unyielding, refusing always to be interested in the activities of others. Kate sighed. It was not the most glorious and celebratory way to spend Christmas, listening to the collective complaints of the Hard Core. But she owed it to them. They paid to live here, it was their home, if they had nowhere else to go for Christmas, then she wasn’t going to turf them out to other places like so many parcels. She couldn’t say that Woodlands was closing so she could place them in Santa Rosa della Marina or Rest Haven and retrieve them later. Christmas was an unsettling time anyway and too full of memories. Besides, Kate was glad to be busy, it shut out the thoughts of her husband, the unhappy years before he left and the lonely years after he had gone.

  She was totally unprepared for the phone call from Darwin. It came five days before Christmas as the guests and staff were beginning the long, slow business of winding down operations. Her mother had had a stroke, she was in hospital, miles away; a flight and a long drive.

  The Hard Core would have to be resettled. Kate sighed a heavy sigh. At least it put the shock and flood of racing emotions about her mother onto one side. Would she call Rest Haven first? Perhaps they might take Donald. They might, but he was so choleric and bad-tempered and waved his stick so imperiously. Yet Rest Haven had pretensions about snobbery and class. Donald was the most top-drawer of the Hard Core. She wondered which was going to be harder, persuading Rest Haven or persuading Donald. Then there was Georgia. She would hate Santa Rosa della Marina, she would say that Italians and Spaniards made wonderful maids but one shouldn’t have to talk to them socially. She had once gone to Rest Haven but then had been barred from there, so it was Santa Rosa or nowhere. And then there were Hazel and Heather, sisters who hated each other even more than they hated everyone around them, which was very deeply. Their days were spent plotting discomfiture and distress each for the other. Kate sat for a while, head in hands. Ellie came in and saw her.