Voces Immortalis
by Randolph Thomas
Winner, 2025 Fiction Contest
As usual, they’d arrived late after a full day, having driven from the North, and struggled, in the late summer gloaming, to find the hotel among gray and unremarkable buildings. Beth spotted it, on a street with a slight incline, overlooking an empty park. Because the small lot behind the building was full, Denny had to park on the street and they had to drag their bags uphill. The lobby was deserted except for one woman crying into a telephone in an alcove and a teenage boy in a leather jacket sitting on a bench by the door, drinking a beer, engrossed in a tabloid.
The room they were given, the one he’d wake up in, panting from the strange dream, felt heavy with somebody else’s past. A big room, deep red and creamy velvet strips of wall paneling and burgundy carpet, with the biggest en suite bathroom he’d ever seen in an English hotel. The decadent bathroom alone retained the aura of some tragic act. The white tub stood proud and unmovable on its ornate legs at the center of the dim room, tight lipped about whatever gruesome murder had long ago been committed there. It was this atmosphere, he reasoned later, that planted the germ in the first place.
Denny’s dream had to do with his best friend from college, who’d died recently from a blood clot during a routine knee operation. Somehow word had gotten to Denny before anyone else and he needed to reach his friend’s parents and tell them before they read of his death on social media. In the dream, they all lived in the same city. It looked like London. He arrived at the home of Jonah’s parents. Now, blinking and sweating in the bed, the room suddenly chilly, he remembered he’d met them years before, during an awkward visit to a tiny apartment, but in the dream, Jonah’s father—flushed, smelling of alcohol, hair askew, met him at the door. He said that he and his son—did Jonah even have a brother?—were having an important meeting. Denny was led into a quiet room to break the news to Jonah’s mother. He sat at a long glass table with glossy bamboo chairs, by a bright but fogged over window. The woman who joined him, interrupted in the midst of wrapping Christmas presents, said she was in a hurry and sat uneasily across the table. Even in the dream, he knew she was impossibly young to be Jonah’s mother, mid-forties at most, in a brown turtleneck, thin and fit, dark hair and penetrating eyes. As he stumbled toward what he was going to say—he’d made no plans—she kept asking him to speak up over the increased shouting in the next room—a drunken argument between the father and the brother.
“What have you come to tell me?” she said. “What’s so damn important?” She lit a cigarette.
Denny mumbled an apology, lost in her intense eyes, her distracted smile. What was this beautiful woman doing with these two violent drunks, he wondered, and what had he intended to tell her? She seemed oblivious to any news he might have, and to be teasing him, challenging him to tell her something she didn’t already know. When he awoke, he was aroused, painfully erect. Beth coughed in her sleep, but she was sleeping, at least. The window that faced the parking lot allowed in a sprinkle of light. Denny could see the big chair in the corner of the room, the high ceiling. He slid out of his side of the bed, found the notebook where he jotted down things that happened to them, and carried it into the big bathroom. Without making a sound, he shut the door and sat on the toilet. He leaned his phone against his belly so it shined down on the open notebook in his lap. For two or three minutes, he sat absorbed in spinning out the details of the dream. Jonah’s mother stared at him while his heart pounded. He wrote it all out, as much as he could remember.
But there was more. While he sat there catching his breath, he felt a gathering around him. One or several spirits. He felt them physically, on his skin like perspiration. Nothing like you’d read in a story—no garment brushing against him, no cold hand on his shoulder. More an awareness, a knowing sadness.
When he came back to bed, Beth appeared to be asleep. It was after four, and the trickle of light from the parking lot, mixed with the dawn creeping up, made the furniture stand out of the dark, no longer ominous, only tired. Denny crawled back into his side of the bed and lay staring at the bathroom door, which he’d left open, the shadowy end of the tub just visible among the gray ephemera.
“I had a terrible night,” he said. He described the dream, read Beth what he’d written, and tried to explain what had happened afterwards, the feeling he’d had in the bathroom. Beth washed her face, brushed her teeth, and put on her clothes.
“It sounds like something from a Henry James story,” she said. Then, comically feigning an afterthought, “So did this woman in the dream look like anybody we know?”
“Not particularly. You know what people in dreams are like.”
“Then just your random erotic fantasy with a morbid twist?”
“Basically, yes, but there was also that other part.”
They headed downstairs to the dining room for breakfast, where a woman at the next table sat absorbed in a crossword puzzle. An elderly man across the room made his way through a rack of six or eight slices of toast and gazed intermittently at BBC Breakfast on the tv in the corner.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Denny said firmly, between bites of egg, while Beth picked at her yogurt and muesli. “I never have.”
“It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Beth said, letting out a breath. “I don’t believe in them. I only believe in absences, in the holes they leave in your life.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Hard to navigate, but we have to try.”
“Wow, heavy.”
Beth shrugged, took her morning meds and chased them with a long sip of water. The woman at the next table said, “Ah-hah!” and took up a pencil while the man across the room hungrily buttered another slice.
Denny’d never driven on the left before this trip, before he sat down behind the wheel of the Vauxhall Astra two weeks ago at Heathrow. He’d only taken trains and buses the other time he’d been to Britain, all those decades ago, a lifetime ago, he was beginning to think. But Beth had insisted on driving, this being their big trip, possibly their only. She said she wanted to stop, she wanted to touch things, sit on grass, climb on rocks. Not just look at things passing by the window of a train. Denny liked that. He wanted them to pause as they were prone to do, to talk about what they saw, to make it real. Beth said she wanted to sit in pubs and strike up conversations with strangers, not his best talent. Only yesterday, sitting in a pub, she’d told a semi-interested middle thirties couple where they’d gotten the money to travel, about their parents’ declines and deaths, about the de-hoarding and selling of parental houses, about the nursing homes, the wills, the complex systems of responsibilities involved in acting as fiduciaries, how they were owed this trip and others, how they’d earned it. It seemed that she was free with every piece of information except those having to do with her own serious illness, which she always kept close to the vest. He wasn’t allowed to breathe a word.
“You’ve got to learn to do it,” she said.
Denny laughed and shook his head. The next turn, marked most clearly by a convex mirror hanging in vines across the road, brought them up against people’s houses.
“You’re too close,” Beth shouted, white knuckled, from the passenger seat, laughing.
“See,” he said, “that medication that made you dizzy and nauseous sometimes also makes you distrustful.”
“I see clearly enough, thank you.”
Suddenly Denny was reminded of another dream he’d had in the weeks before their trip and scribbled down one night or early morning. Even when he wrote them out, he mostly forgot them except for those moments when he thumbed back through the notebook to read aloud to Beth, but sometimes they jumped back at him in total clarity, like the LSD flashbacks he used to occasionally suffer. Beth said they were brainfarts, unimportant malfunctions that happened to everyone. It was best not to dwell on them, she said, although they both knew he was a dweller. In this particular slip, he was visiting his father in the hospital. The doctor was an attractive woman with black hair and now that he thought of it, the same sly grin as Jonah’s mother. Were they the same woman? Similar, he now realized, a variation of the same fantasy maybe? His father had written something illegible on the wall, using his finger. The doctor pointed at the writing and said, “Is that his own shit up there?” But as soon as she’d said it, Denny knew it was his father’s blood, and the shape of his scrawl resembled a shield or breastplate.
“Are you okay?” Beth said. “You’re awfully quiet over there.”
The GPS guided them to a parking lot where they could easily access the day’s sights, the abbey ruin, the shrine where the mythical chalice was supposedly buried, and the tor Denny remembered visiting that time so long ago, when he was a senior in high school. Once they’d parked and paid the entrance fee, they walked among the remaining columns and fragments of walls of the abbey and played their game of trying to catch the other unaware and snap a picture. The day was bright and warm, and a breeze tugged at the trees and messed with Beth’s short graying hair. They walked the parameter of the abbey and visited the gift shop where Denny insisted on buying a calendar, although Beth said it was too small to be of good use in the kitchen. They followed a street up a sharp incline by a stone wall to the entrance of a terraced garden where the mythical chalice was supposedly hidden in a well in a back corner.
“A cure-all?” Beth had said when he’d first suggested the stop, and he’d gone on to explain the chalice’s powers were more a cultural and historical thing. A small stream drained out of the well, a feat that seemed magical in and of itself, down to a pool on the lower terrace. The stream and the terraces were shaded by lush overhanging branches.
First, they hiked up the path to the well. On it, in ancient iron lettering, there was an inscription in Latin, but the only words Denny could translate were Voces Immortalis.
“So much for the Romans,” he said.
“You better listen to them,” Beth said, “Heed what the immortal voices are telling you. That’s what it says. So heed them!”
She gritted her teeth at Denny, and he held an arm in front of his face like he was Dracula confronting someone with a cross. They took turns staring down the well, decided it was too deep and dark for any reflections, then followed the trail back to the terrace. At the pool, Beth said suddenly, brightly, that this was the most tranquil place she’d ever visited. “I just love it here, Denny,” she said warmly and squeezed his hand. “Just what I needed.”
There was another couple, also Americans, in their thirties, with two small children playing in the water. The children were naked, and the parents were encouraging them to immerse themselves although the children looked frightened of the dark green bottom. It reminded Denny of their visit, three days earlier, to the Roman baths and how metallic the water tasted, how green and mired it looked on a sunny day, distorting their reflections. Beth sat on one of the stone benches and removed her shoes and socks and stepped into the water. After a little coaxing, Denny joined her. The water was chilly, but Beth sat on the edge of the pool for a long time with her feet in the water, her eyes closed. Denny got out and put his socks and shoes back on and sat on the bench waiting until she opened her eyes and looked at him. It felt like precious days had passed, wasted in just minutes. The other family had dressed, clamored around the side of the pool, and then gone on.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I’m fine right now. Are you okay?”
“Of course. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Beth sat with her feet in the water another minute or so, then took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” Denny said. “That was totally thoughtless. I know you get tired of that kind of bullshit.”
Beth waved her hand at him but sat looking at him. For a moment he worried that she might reveal some secret about her condition, or a feeling she’d kept to herself for a long time. They’d been together so long, years of days of each other, he sometimes had to remind himself that they were quite different and they could actually hurt each other with the things they said.
“Isn’t there a tor to climb?” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “the main thing I remember when I was here before. There’s a fantastic view.”
Beth got up, painfully lifting one leg at a time out of the water, and put on her socks and shoes.
“I’m not angry, you know,” she said. “Not about your dreams. They show who you are, and you are who you are.” She made a face and laughed.
“Ha, ha. I feel bad about it.”
“No, you don’t. You feel proud of it, in your quirky, passive-resistant way. You just don’t want to admit it.”
They followed arrows on signs—and they could see the tor well enough—the signs led them up an incredibly steep road. Up and up to a gate, then across a field, already high enough that they could see the abbey ruins in the distance. The trail led across another field to another gate with another stone bench beside it, and the beginning of the steep final incline. You could see the stone tower at the top.
“This is where you leave me,” Beth said, nodding to the bench.
Denny felt a little dizzy, cheated. For a second, he thought he might even throw down his phone and shout “Fuck” or something, but he calmed himself. She wasn’t herself, was she? Not that she would have been excited about climbing the tor before she got sick. Seeing how out of breath she was from the steep road and crossing the field, he knew she probably couldn’t do it if she wanted to. He was of course grateful she was there anyway, that they were sharing as much of the trip as they were sharing. He’d wanted her to see it, to look out on the countryside, that was all. He’d wanted them to share the experience and talk about it the way they did about everything.
He took the moment to catch his breath.
“Text me if you need to tell me something,” she said. “Record your thoughts on your phone. Or better, why not try to talk to somebody while you’re up there? Be congenial. You do know how.” She gestured at the distant figures moving up the hill above them, around the base of the tor. “Go on,” she said. “Enjoy yourself.”
It was enjoyable, the loud wind whipping against his all-weather coat, against his sweat-dampened hair. He took selfies to show Beth. He photographed sheep that grazed without a care of the grade they stood on. At the top, there were groups of people sitting around eating and talking, laughing. Denny walked the circumference of the small plateau, skirting the groups and their talk. He stepped inside the stone tower at the center and looked up at the beams far overhead. There was a family milling inside, an older man sitting against the wall bragging to his kids who were winded from the walk about how fit he was. Denny walked around outside the tower, all around the hillside again looking out in every direction, catching hold of scraps of voices, letting them carry over him, through him like the wind did. He sat down for a while overlooking the rolling countryside. He tried to get a lamb to come to him, but it stood back watching. He plucked a handful of grass, held it out, and said, “Here,” but the lamb knew better than to fall for that.
It came to him then, boldly like the wind on the high hill, so boldly he couldn’t imagine how he’d made such a mistake, that he’d never been here before. Not this tor. That time in the past, all those decades ago, they’d climbed that big hill outside of Edinburgh, he and the others, including a dark-haired girl who was ill, who had to lie down in the grass with her eyes closed before they could walk back to the tour bus. How could he have made such a mistake? In Scotland, for Christ’s sake. A massive brainfart, a monumental skip he would not mention to Beth.
Try talking to some people while you’re up there, make friends with someone, get them to take your picture. She’d told him what he should do, but he didn’t feel the need to this time. When he returned, huffing down the path from the tor, when he found her sitting on the bench by the gate, playing a word game on her phone, he told her, with a minimum of the shrugging he associated with half-lying, that yes, he chatted with some people. He thought then of the bragging father, sitting in the tower—he’d nodded to him, and the father had reluctantly and suspiciously nodded back. An acknowledgement of sorts. There were the teenagers he’d walked along beside on the path on the way back. One of them was on a skateboard, and Denny had stepped aside to give the boy room to set it down and get in position while his friends were still coming down the trail. So they could see him better and be impressed. “Excuse me,” Denny’d said. That was a conversation of sorts. Afterwards, he’d stepped back to give room, watched the boy take off, impressed with the way he skated down the steep trail. He was not critical nor judgmental of how dangerous it might be. Boundaries were there for a reason.
Beth pursed her lips.
“I made a friend,” she said. There were lots of sheep in the field where he’d left her, and he immediately knew who she meant. One of them, she said, had come close enough to sniff at her hand before backing away and rejoining the others.
The late summer sunset. It gave its gold to everything—gnarly trees, ancient stone walls, roofs of vine-covered houses. It got in Denny’s eyes as they were driving back. Halfway down a hillside, they turned into the parking lot of the hotel Beth had booked for the night, a pale, washed out ochre four-story eighteenth-century manor house. She’d read to him that it had been a hospital in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then stood empty until it was bought up by a hotel conglomerate. In the late gloaming, the gray building with long windows, lit dimly from within, looked to Denny like a villa from a Fellini film, except it would be Fellini’s most anemic villa, without any of the wild characters. He wondered what dreams awaited him in this place, what ghosts waited to gather around him here. There was a tour bus—a coach, Denny corrected himself—pressed up against the entrance of the hotel, and faces of octo- and nonagenarians peered at them from the windows while they carried their bags, scraped between the bus and building, into the chaotic hallway.
Somehow it was a quarter till nine, the day finished, and they hadn’t eaten any supper. Oddly, neither of them had mentioned it after the lazy walk back across the field, down the steep rutted sidewalk past the walled garden where the well and the pool had been, but now they were both ravenous.
“Let’s get something to eat before I start gnawing on your arm,” Beth said.
Denny followed her down the hallway to the check-in desk.
“Is there any food left anywhere?” Beth said. A young woman in a blazer directed them to the lounge. There were still some cheese plates available from the bar, she said. Denny and Beth placed their orders, plates of cheese, bread, chutney, and grapes.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Beth said. “Did you get a look at those old people on the bus? How happy they looked?” She nudged him with her elbow and chuckled. “I’m sure they all still have plenty of erotic dreams.”
Denny ignored her. They claimed a small round table by an open window. The summer night outside the window hummed with youth and vitality. A myriad of unfulfilled promises, Denny reckoned. What had he known of life on those nights he had first come to this country in his late teens? He remembered they had been put up in college dormitories and youth hostels. He remembered drinking gin and smoking cigarettes, listening to deafening music in pubs, visiting a sex shop where he peeked through a hole in a wall at half naked women dancing, and at some point a walk to the Thames, pledges of friendship for life. He couldn’t recall many of the other students’ names. Not even the name of that girl he’d hit it off with, who’d ridden beside him on the bus, her head lolling on his shoulder. When she fainted after the walk up the hill, they’d all gathered around her and tried to cheer her. Someone had whispered to him that she had a serious condition. He had no idea whatever became of her.
While they were eating, a long line of pensioners from the bus filed slowly but eagerly into the lounge and took seats at the empty tables and sofas. A silver haired man with glasses sat down at the piano and began to play dancehall songs and songs from the world wars. Frail voices joined in singing. It sounded like ringing in the ears, Denny thought, but the singers seemed to know all the songs by heart, and the man behind the piano forged on unstoppable.
Denny sucked his beer down to the foam and noticed, as he wiped his mouth, that Beth’s wineglass stood empty. She winked at him, and he went to the bar to get another round. It took a few minutes to get the bartender’s attention. On his way back, when he saw Beth wasn’t at the table, his stomach dropped. Then he saw her. During a pause in the singing, she’d moved to one of the couches and struck up a conversation with the two white-haired women sitting there. Denny carried over their drinks, slid down beside Beth and grinned guiltily at the two women who eyed him with a curious awe. Beth introduced them, retired teachers from the Midlands. She appeared happy, and Denny felt better about dragging her along on the trip. He concluded that coming to England had been something he’d needed to do, it was therapeutic for him, and probably Beth had understood that from the start.
If this were a certain type of story or dream, he further concluded, these old people might be ghosts too; they might vanish, leaving the two of them alone on the couch, or, in the worst version, he would be left there alone. Stories had their own windy rules, possibilities and impossibilities flitting around your head like the ghosts you say you don’t believe in and the absences you can’t escape. When the piano player started up again, this time with a jaunty number, and when the pensioners started singing in a thick cockney accent, Denny couldn’t understand a word of the song, but he joined in anyway, belting out nonsense words and non sequiturs. The two teachers howled with laughter. Beth laughed so hard at the noise he was making, tears rolled down her cheeks.
The room they were given, the one he’d wake up in, panting from the strange dream, felt heavy with somebody else’s past. A big room, deep red and creamy velvet strips of wall paneling and burgundy carpet, with the biggest en suite bathroom he’d ever seen in an English hotel. The decadent bathroom alone retained the aura of some tragic act. The white tub stood proud and unmovable on its ornate legs at the center of the dim room, tight lipped about whatever gruesome murder had long ago been committed there. It was this atmosphere, he reasoned later, that planted the germ in the first place.
Denny’s dream had to do with his best friend from college, who’d died recently from a blood clot during a routine knee operation. Somehow word had gotten to Denny before anyone else and he needed to reach his friend’s parents and tell them before they read of his death on social media. In the dream, they all lived in the same city. It looked like London. He arrived at the home of Jonah’s parents. Now, blinking and sweating in the bed, the room suddenly chilly, he remembered he’d met them years before, during an awkward visit to a tiny apartment, but in the dream, Jonah’s father—flushed, smelling of alcohol, hair askew, met him at the door. He said that he and his son—did Jonah even have a brother?—were having an important meeting. Denny was led into a quiet room to break the news to Jonah’s mother. He sat at a long glass table with glossy bamboo chairs, by a bright but fogged over window. The woman who joined him, interrupted in the midst of wrapping Christmas presents, said she was in a hurry and sat uneasily across the table. Even in the dream, he knew she was impossibly young to be Jonah’s mother, mid-forties at most, in a brown turtleneck, thin and fit, dark hair and penetrating eyes. As he stumbled toward what he was going to say—he’d made no plans—she kept asking him to speak up over the increased shouting in the next room—a drunken argument between the father and the brother.
“What have you come to tell me?” she said. “What’s so damn important?” She lit a cigarette.
Denny mumbled an apology, lost in her intense eyes, her distracted smile. What was this beautiful woman doing with these two violent drunks, he wondered, and what had he intended to tell her? She seemed oblivious to any news he might have, and to be teasing him, challenging him to tell her something she didn’t already know. When he awoke, he was aroused, painfully erect. Beth coughed in her sleep, but she was sleeping, at least. The window that faced the parking lot allowed in a sprinkle of light. Denny could see the big chair in the corner of the room, the high ceiling. He slid out of his side of the bed, found the notebook where he jotted down things that happened to them, and carried it into the big bathroom. Without making a sound, he shut the door and sat on the toilet. He leaned his phone against his belly so it shined down on the open notebook in his lap. For two or three minutes, he sat absorbed in spinning out the details of the dream. Jonah’s mother stared at him while his heart pounded. He wrote it all out, as much as he could remember.
But there was more. While he sat there catching his breath, he felt a gathering around him. One or several spirits. He felt them physically, on his skin like perspiration. Nothing like you’d read in a story—no garment brushing against him, no cold hand on his shoulder. More an awareness, a knowing sadness.
When he came back to bed, Beth appeared to be asleep. It was after four, and the trickle of light from the parking lot, mixed with the dawn creeping up, made the furniture stand out of the dark, no longer ominous, only tired. Denny crawled back into his side of the bed and lay staring at the bathroom door, which he’d left open, the shadowy end of the tub just visible among the gray ephemera.
“I had a terrible night,” he said. He described the dream, read Beth what he’d written, and tried to explain what had happened afterwards, the feeling he’d had in the bathroom. Beth washed her face, brushed her teeth, and put on her clothes.
“It sounds like something from a Henry James story,” she said. Then, comically feigning an afterthought, “So did this woman in the dream look like anybody we know?”
“Not particularly. You know what people in dreams are like.”
“Then just your random erotic fantasy with a morbid twist?”
“Basically, yes, but there was also that other part.”
They headed downstairs to the dining room for breakfast, where a woman at the next table sat absorbed in a crossword puzzle. An elderly man across the room made his way through a rack of six or eight slices of toast and gazed intermittently at BBC Breakfast on the tv in the corner.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Denny said firmly, between bites of egg, while Beth picked at her yogurt and muesli. “I never have.”
“It sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Beth said, letting out a breath. “I don’t believe in them. I only believe in absences, in the holes they leave in your life.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Hard to navigate, but we have to try.”
“Wow, heavy.”
Beth shrugged, took her morning meds and chased them with a long sip of water. The woman at the next table said, “Ah-hah!” and took up a pencil while the man across the room hungrily buttered another slice.
Denny’d never driven on the left before this trip, before he sat down behind the wheel of the Vauxhall Astra two weeks ago at Heathrow. He’d only taken trains and buses the other time he’d been to Britain, all those decades ago, a lifetime ago, he was beginning to think. But Beth had insisted on driving, this being their big trip, possibly their only. She said she wanted to stop, she wanted to touch things, sit on grass, climb on rocks. Not just look at things passing by the window of a train. Denny liked that. He wanted them to pause as they were prone to do, to talk about what they saw, to make it real. Beth said she wanted to sit in pubs and strike up conversations with strangers, not his best talent. Only yesterday, sitting in a pub, she’d told a semi-interested middle thirties couple where they’d gotten the money to travel, about their parents’ declines and deaths, about the de-hoarding and selling of parental houses, about the nursing homes, the wills, the complex systems of responsibilities involved in acting as fiduciaries, how they were owed this trip and others, how they’d earned it. It seemed that she was free with every piece of information except those having to do with her own serious illness, which she always kept close to the vest. He wasn’t allowed to breathe a word.
“You’ve got to learn to do it,” she said.
Denny laughed and shook his head. The next turn, marked most clearly by a convex mirror hanging in vines across the road, brought them up against people’s houses.
“You’re too close,” Beth shouted, white knuckled, from the passenger seat, laughing.
“See,” he said, “that medication that made you dizzy and nauseous sometimes also makes you distrustful.”
“I see clearly enough, thank you.”
Suddenly Denny was reminded of another dream he’d had in the weeks before their trip and scribbled down one night or early morning. Even when he wrote them out, he mostly forgot them except for those moments when he thumbed back through the notebook to read aloud to Beth, but sometimes they jumped back at him in total clarity, like the LSD flashbacks he used to occasionally suffer. Beth said they were brainfarts, unimportant malfunctions that happened to everyone. It was best not to dwell on them, she said, although they both knew he was a dweller. In this particular slip, he was visiting his father in the hospital. The doctor was an attractive woman with black hair and now that he thought of it, the same sly grin as Jonah’s mother. Were they the same woman? Similar, he now realized, a variation of the same fantasy maybe? His father had written something illegible on the wall, using his finger. The doctor pointed at the writing and said, “Is that his own shit up there?” But as soon as she’d said it, Denny knew it was his father’s blood, and the shape of his scrawl resembled a shield or breastplate.
“Are you okay?” Beth said. “You’re awfully quiet over there.”
The GPS guided them to a parking lot where they could easily access the day’s sights, the abbey ruin, the shrine where the mythical chalice was supposedly buried, and the tor Denny remembered visiting that time so long ago, when he was a senior in high school. Once they’d parked and paid the entrance fee, they walked among the remaining columns and fragments of walls of the abbey and played their game of trying to catch the other unaware and snap a picture. The day was bright and warm, and a breeze tugged at the trees and messed with Beth’s short graying hair. They walked the parameter of the abbey and visited the gift shop where Denny insisted on buying a calendar, although Beth said it was too small to be of good use in the kitchen. They followed a street up a sharp incline by a stone wall to the entrance of a terraced garden where the mythical chalice was supposedly hidden in a well in a back corner.
“A cure-all?” Beth had said when he’d first suggested the stop, and he’d gone on to explain the chalice’s powers were more a cultural and historical thing. A small stream drained out of the well, a feat that seemed magical in and of itself, down to a pool on the lower terrace. The stream and the terraces were shaded by lush overhanging branches.
First, they hiked up the path to the well. On it, in ancient iron lettering, there was an inscription in Latin, but the only words Denny could translate were Voces Immortalis.
“So much for the Romans,” he said.
“You better listen to them,” Beth said, “Heed what the immortal voices are telling you. That’s what it says. So heed them!”
She gritted her teeth at Denny, and he held an arm in front of his face like he was Dracula confronting someone with a cross. They took turns staring down the well, decided it was too deep and dark for any reflections, then followed the trail back to the terrace. At the pool, Beth said suddenly, brightly, that this was the most tranquil place she’d ever visited. “I just love it here, Denny,” she said warmly and squeezed his hand. “Just what I needed.”
There was another couple, also Americans, in their thirties, with two small children playing in the water. The children were naked, and the parents were encouraging them to immerse themselves although the children looked frightened of the dark green bottom. It reminded Denny of their visit, three days earlier, to the Roman baths and how metallic the water tasted, how green and mired it looked on a sunny day, distorting their reflections. Beth sat on one of the stone benches and removed her shoes and socks and stepped into the water. After a little coaxing, Denny joined her. The water was chilly, but Beth sat on the edge of the pool for a long time with her feet in the water, her eyes closed. Denny got out and put his socks and shoes back on and sat on the bench waiting until she opened her eyes and looked at him. It felt like precious days had passed, wasted in just minutes. The other family had dressed, clamored around the side of the pool, and then gone on.
“Are you okay?” he said.
“I’m fine right now. Are you okay?”
“Of course. There’s nothing wrong with me.”
Beth sat with her feet in the water another minute or so, then took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” Denny said. “That was totally thoughtless. I know you get tired of that kind of bullshit.”
Beth waved her hand at him but sat looking at him. For a moment he worried that she might reveal some secret about her condition, or a feeling she’d kept to herself for a long time. They’d been together so long, years of days of each other, he sometimes had to remind himself that they were quite different and they could actually hurt each other with the things they said.
“Isn’t there a tor to climb?” she said.
“Yes,” he said, “the main thing I remember when I was here before. There’s a fantastic view.”
Beth got up, painfully lifting one leg at a time out of the water, and put on her socks and shoes.
“I’m not angry, you know,” she said. “Not about your dreams. They show who you are, and you are who you are.” She made a face and laughed.
“Ha, ha. I feel bad about it.”
“No, you don’t. You feel proud of it, in your quirky, passive-resistant way. You just don’t want to admit it.”
They followed arrows on signs—and they could see the tor well enough—the signs led them up an incredibly steep road. Up and up to a gate, then across a field, already high enough that they could see the abbey ruins in the distance. The trail led across another field to another gate with another stone bench beside it, and the beginning of the steep final incline. You could see the stone tower at the top.
“This is where you leave me,” Beth said, nodding to the bench.
Denny felt a little dizzy, cheated. For a second, he thought he might even throw down his phone and shout “Fuck” or something, but he calmed himself. She wasn’t herself, was she? Not that she would have been excited about climbing the tor before she got sick. Seeing how out of breath she was from the steep road and crossing the field, he knew she probably couldn’t do it if she wanted to. He was of course grateful she was there anyway, that they were sharing as much of the trip as they were sharing. He’d wanted her to see it, to look out on the countryside, that was all. He’d wanted them to share the experience and talk about it the way they did about everything.
He took the moment to catch his breath.
“Text me if you need to tell me something,” she said. “Record your thoughts on your phone. Or better, why not try to talk to somebody while you’re up there? Be congenial. You do know how.” She gestured at the distant figures moving up the hill above them, around the base of the tor. “Go on,” she said. “Enjoy yourself.”
It was enjoyable, the loud wind whipping against his all-weather coat, against his sweat-dampened hair. He took selfies to show Beth. He photographed sheep that grazed without a care of the grade they stood on. At the top, there were groups of people sitting around eating and talking, laughing. Denny walked the circumference of the small plateau, skirting the groups and their talk. He stepped inside the stone tower at the center and looked up at the beams far overhead. There was a family milling inside, an older man sitting against the wall bragging to his kids who were winded from the walk about how fit he was. Denny walked around outside the tower, all around the hillside again looking out in every direction, catching hold of scraps of voices, letting them carry over him, through him like the wind did. He sat down for a while overlooking the rolling countryside. He tried to get a lamb to come to him, but it stood back watching. He plucked a handful of grass, held it out, and said, “Here,” but the lamb knew better than to fall for that.
It came to him then, boldly like the wind on the high hill, so boldly he couldn’t imagine how he’d made such a mistake, that he’d never been here before. Not this tor. That time in the past, all those decades ago, they’d climbed that big hill outside of Edinburgh, he and the others, including a dark-haired girl who was ill, who had to lie down in the grass with her eyes closed before they could walk back to the tour bus. How could he have made such a mistake? In Scotland, for Christ’s sake. A massive brainfart, a monumental skip he would not mention to Beth.
Try talking to some people while you’re up there, make friends with someone, get them to take your picture. She’d told him what he should do, but he didn’t feel the need to this time. When he returned, huffing down the path from the tor, when he found her sitting on the bench by the gate, playing a word game on her phone, he told her, with a minimum of the shrugging he associated with half-lying, that yes, he chatted with some people. He thought then of the bragging father, sitting in the tower—he’d nodded to him, and the father had reluctantly and suspiciously nodded back. An acknowledgement of sorts. There were the teenagers he’d walked along beside on the path on the way back. One of them was on a skateboard, and Denny had stepped aside to give the boy room to set it down and get in position while his friends were still coming down the trail. So they could see him better and be impressed. “Excuse me,” Denny’d said. That was a conversation of sorts. Afterwards, he’d stepped back to give room, watched the boy take off, impressed with the way he skated down the steep trail. He was not critical nor judgmental of how dangerous it might be. Boundaries were there for a reason.
Beth pursed her lips.
“I made a friend,” she said. There were lots of sheep in the field where he’d left her, and he immediately knew who she meant. One of them, she said, had come close enough to sniff at her hand before backing away and rejoining the others.
The late summer sunset. It gave its gold to everything—gnarly trees, ancient stone walls, roofs of vine-covered houses. It got in Denny’s eyes as they were driving back. Halfway down a hillside, they turned into the parking lot of the hotel Beth had booked for the night, a pale, washed out ochre four-story eighteenth-century manor house. She’d read to him that it had been a hospital in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then stood empty until it was bought up by a hotel conglomerate. In the late gloaming, the gray building with long windows, lit dimly from within, looked to Denny like a villa from a Fellini film, except it would be Fellini’s most anemic villa, without any of the wild characters. He wondered what dreams awaited him in this place, what ghosts waited to gather around him here. There was a tour bus—a coach, Denny corrected himself—pressed up against the entrance of the hotel, and faces of octo- and nonagenarians peered at them from the windows while they carried their bags, scraped between the bus and building, into the chaotic hallway.
Somehow it was a quarter till nine, the day finished, and they hadn’t eaten any supper. Oddly, neither of them had mentioned it after the lazy walk back across the field, down the steep rutted sidewalk past the walled garden where the well and the pool had been, but now they were both ravenous.
“Let’s get something to eat before I start gnawing on your arm,” Beth said.
Denny followed her down the hallway to the check-in desk.
“Is there any food left anywhere?” Beth said. A young woman in a blazer directed them to the lounge. There were still some cheese plates available from the bar, she said. Denny and Beth placed their orders, plates of cheese, bread, chutney, and grapes.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Beth said. “Did you get a look at those old people on the bus? How happy they looked?” She nudged him with her elbow and chuckled. “I’m sure they all still have plenty of erotic dreams.”
Denny ignored her. They claimed a small round table by an open window. The summer night outside the window hummed with youth and vitality. A myriad of unfulfilled promises, Denny reckoned. What had he known of life on those nights he had first come to this country in his late teens? He remembered they had been put up in college dormitories and youth hostels. He remembered drinking gin and smoking cigarettes, listening to deafening music in pubs, visiting a sex shop where he peeked through a hole in a wall at half naked women dancing, and at some point a walk to the Thames, pledges of friendship for life. He couldn’t recall many of the other students’ names. Not even the name of that girl he’d hit it off with, who’d ridden beside him on the bus, her head lolling on his shoulder. When she fainted after the walk up the hill, they’d all gathered around her and tried to cheer her. Someone had whispered to him that she had a serious condition. He had no idea whatever became of her.
While they were eating, a long line of pensioners from the bus filed slowly but eagerly into the lounge and took seats at the empty tables and sofas. A silver haired man with glasses sat down at the piano and began to play dancehall songs and songs from the world wars. Frail voices joined in singing. It sounded like ringing in the ears, Denny thought, but the singers seemed to know all the songs by heart, and the man behind the piano forged on unstoppable.
Denny sucked his beer down to the foam and noticed, as he wiped his mouth, that Beth’s wineglass stood empty. She winked at him, and he went to the bar to get another round. It took a few minutes to get the bartender’s attention. On his way back, when he saw Beth wasn’t at the table, his stomach dropped. Then he saw her. During a pause in the singing, she’d moved to one of the couches and struck up a conversation with the two white-haired women sitting there. Denny carried over their drinks, slid down beside Beth and grinned guiltily at the two women who eyed him with a curious awe. Beth introduced them, retired teachers from the Midlands. She appeared happy, and Denny felt better about dragging her along on the trip. He concluded that coming to England had been something he’d needed to do, it was therapeutic for him, and probably Beth had understood that from the start.
If this were a certain type of story or dream, he further concluded, these old people might be ghosts too; they might vanish, leaving the two of them alone on the couch, or, in the worst version, he would be left there alone. Stories had their own windy rules, possibilities and impossibilities flitting around your head like the ghosts you say you don’t believe in and the absences you can’t escape. When the piano player started up again, this time with a jaunty number, and when the pensioners started singing in a thick cockney accent, Denny couldn’t understand a word of the song, but he joined in anyway, belting out nonsense words and non sequiturs. The two teachers howled with laughter. Beth laughed so hard at the noise he was making, tears rolled down her cheeks.