Promises To Keep

A Willerby Story

Fifty hit Micheal hard.

Thirty yesterday. Seventy tomorrow.

Well over half way.

But comfortably married with two boys close to finishing school, the mortgage in its final year, he knew had no right to be so uhappy.

He smiled his way through his party and accepted his presents with performed grace – an old fart T-shirt, an expensive whiskey tumbler, funny socks, gardening gloves.

Other odds and ends to age in jumbled draws and then – perhaps years later – to be thrown away.

He hid his deep depression.

Did he like gardening?

He didn’t know, but he did a lot of it.

Perhaps that was what fun was when you reached your half century after even the hope of good times was gone.

He kept thinking about a poem he’d learned at school – about two paths going different ways in a yellow wood and how the poet said he’d taken the one less travelled and how that had made all the difference.

He had not done that.

Micheal’s ways had been well worn and comfortable and now here he was in a life both inevitable but somehow suddenly small and tragic.

It was not how he thought things would be at twenty, backpacking the world in eternal summer.

He thought maybe on one of the trips – somewhere in India, Thailand or Cambodia, Laos or Malaysia – by always taking the sensible route he’d made a wrong turn.

Perhaps without realising he’d missed the right way high up in a Himalayan pass or somewhere in a teeming bazaar.

A night he’d spent with a blonde and sunkissed Australian girl on a beach in Bali kept coming back to him; talking and talking until the rising sun flooded the sea pink and the first of the night fishermen returned with their catches.

He should have asked her to take him with her.

If he had he was sure she would have said yes.

He knew he’d wanted to. Why hadn’t he? What might his life have been if he had?

This and other memories.

Old paths. Old dreams. Old regrets.

His life was claustrophobic with them and thinking it about it brought him often to tears.

He fantasised about walking into deep woods until he was too tired to carry on and then lying down to sleep forever, his body disassembling itself into the new life of brown mulch.

But what to do?

Time did not stop. Clocks could not be turned back.

He had responsibilities. The house. The boys and their futures. His wife. Both their aging parents. Planning for a retirement, preparing to make the best of the sad rags of old age.

In quiet despair he stumbled on, beginning the Tuesday after all the celebrations were over with a routine work trip to a branch office in Daventry that needed to make efficiencies.

He went straight from the office on Monday afternoon with the postcode of a familiar Travelodge in his satnav, wondering whether to have a microwaved room service bhuna or treat himself to steak in the faux-traditional plastic pub in the hotel’s carpark.

It was not supposed to be like this, he thought as he drove from the city, irritated and hurt by a curt message from Sarah, his wife, telling him off for forgetting to put out the bins before he left and then, five minutes later, another that just said, “buy potatoes and milk.”

Then – on a narrow country road following a diversion – the melancholy of mortality made him spontaneous for the first time in years.

When he saw a brown sign for The Willerby Hotel, he turned off his charted route.

He’d stay there that night – he decided - instead of the Travelodge.

For once he would take a road less travelled and see where he ended up.

The turn took him down a narrow potholed road lined by trees that joined above him like clasping skeletal hands.

Twisting and turning, it went on for longer than it had a right to.

Five minutes. Ten. Twenty, and the woods on either side thickened.

The sound of birds outside grew louder, and the late afternoon light took on a heavy quality as if there were about to be a storm.

Twenty-five. Thirty.

Forty-five and dusk began lengthening and darkening the shadows. Something ran across the road, making him start.

Goosebumps rose on his arms.

He’d gone too far. He should go back.

Michael slowed, stopped the car but when he tried to turn it back the way he’d come, he found the road behind him swallowed by the trees as completely as if it had never been there.

He could only carry on.

An hour more? Two?

It was impossible to say because the clocks on his phone and on the dashboard were no longer keeping time, skipping forward, back and then forward again.

The satnav lost its grip on the road – its blue computer car spinning aimlessly on a green background, the screen flickering.

As the last light fell to the night it occurred to Michael that he should be afraid.

But he wasn’t.

Perhaps – he thought- because there were no decisions to make fear was pointless. Maybe that was why those on the brink of what they thought certain death often reported tranquillity.

But if the headlights failed – a column of light the only defence against the strange dark failed, he thought he might be very scared indeed.

He might start screaming, and if he did, he was not confident he would be able to stop for in the dark what dreams might come?

Michael’s car rounded a bend, and he saw an opening in the woods and a long drive that swept through the trees to the hotel.

He crept his car down it – loose gravel crunching under the tyres – and ended up at water fountain in front of a winged three-story stone and brick house wrapped in twinkling festoon lights.

All its many windows blazed, puddling gold on the ground, and there was music – if sounded like jazz – coming from inside.

Michael stopped the car, turned off the engine and wen in, where he found a large and welcoming lobby.

Overstuffed armchairs and sofas were arranged in clusters on a dark marble floor, and a log fire burned cheerily in an open hearth beneath a large landscape painting of mountains and sea.

There was cheerful taxidermy on all the walls.

In front of an ironwork spiral staircase, rising first to a mezzanine and then to floors above and - standing behind a huge oak desk - was a black-eyed and dark-haired woman in her twenties or thirties in a long red dress.

She looked up.

“Checking in?”

Michael nodded.

“Just for a night,” he said.

The woman laughed as she shook her head.

“You can’t stay for only a night,” she said, teasingly, handing him a fountain pen, “nobody ever does. You’ll never leave! But don’t worry about that now. It’s been a long trip for you. Sign the guestbook and I’ll get you all set up.”

Michael took the pen and leant forward.

The book, heavy paper, thickly bound in leather, was already open in front of her with names- each written in the same blue-black ink – filling the whole left-hand page and half the right.

They went back decades.

None of those who’d signed in had signed out.

He hesitated and straightened.

For an instant the woman’s face looked furious, but she supressed it with a smile so fast he was almost able to believe he’d imagined the anger.

“No problem,” she said brightly, “You can sign in later. I’ll introduce you to the other guests and then you’ll understand.”

She led Michael up the arm up the spiral stairs, past the mezzanine, fitted with floor to ceiling shelves of books, and then up the first floor proper and a pair of closed double doors.

The music was louder here.

“Go on in,” the woman said, giving him a gentle shove.

The doors opened onto a vast ballroom- also marble floored but white – encased by thick drapes, so dust-covered Micheal was sure they never opened.

Chandeliers with flickering candles hung above hundreds of dancers, all men, all about Michael’s age.

Each danced alone, swaying and rocking aimless and listless, their greying, balding heads turned up to the ceiling and their eyes closed.

Micheal looked closer and saw the lips of the men moving and – under the jazz music – heard a soft whispering like the rustle of leaves in autumn.

“Go to them,” said the black-eyed woman, “hear their dreams.”

Michael – hesitant at first – stepped onto the dancefloor and listened to the whispering of disappointed men, dreaming of women, dreaming of men, dreaming of oceans and mountains, of riches and fame, dreaming the unreality of lives they never lived.

“Beautiful,” the woman said with a sigh from behind him, “All my lost boys. I’ll watch them forever. The purest happiness –no worries, all dancing to the music of their memories.”

He felt a weary envy.

How glorious it would be to let go of all regrets and submit to oblivion.

“Ready?” The woman asked and this time Michael nodded.

He followed her down the stairs to the lobby and the book.

“How much?” He asked.

“Everything” she said, “but it’s worth it.”

Michael had the pen in his hand, nib on the paper, when his phone – forgotten about in his suit jacket – begin to ring, shakily, as if it was struggling to hold its connection.

“Ignore it and sign”, the woman said and if she hadn’t snapped it out, hadn’t sounded so unexpectedly irritated Michael might have.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he pulled out the phone and saw – her name swimming in and out of focus on its screen – it was Sarah.

“Ignore her,” said the woman again, “you desere more and she doesn’t understand.”

“I have to take this, to say goodbye,” Michael told her, “I won’t be long.”

“Micky?” Sarah said in a voice that seemed to come from very far away, “Is everything all right?”

Micheal tried to reply but didn’t know where to begin.

“I’ve just had the weirdest feeling,” she went on, “that something’s wrong. Am I being silly? Something awful hasn’t happened, has it?”

“I’m fine,” Michael said.

“Really? I don’t feel like it is. When will you be home? I want to see you.”

“When I’ve got the potatoes,” said Michael.

“I don’t care about the potatoes,” said Sarah. “Just come home. We need you. We love you. I love you.”

“I love you too,” Michael said.

He hung up and saw the dark-haired woman was gone and the hotel around him fading and then dissolving, grass through the marble, trees in the lobby, then no lobby at all, cold spring moonlight instead of the flicker of flame, the flutter of new growth spring leaves in the breeze where there had been jazz a moment before.

Then he was standing all alone by his car in a clearing in the wood, shivering.

He got back in his car, where the satnav worked fine and had him back on the main road in less than five minutes.

He’d been gone less than an hour.

There was nothing at the turn off where before there’d been the sign for the hotel.

Micheal resumed his road-more-travelled to Daventry and by the time he arrived and eaten his room service jalfrezi he’d forgotten the hotel altogether.

He remembered it again only once – after reading a once-familiar poem he’d forgotten all about from a collection Sarah gave him ten years later for his sixtieth.

He’d got back into poetry that year.

While it hadn’t made all the blues go away it put perspective on his sadness so he could manage it.

It was a Frost poem too.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Then it all came back to him in a rush all at once.

The long drive to nowhere.

The dark-haired woman and her dancers.

The pull to the edge.

Why it was important to resist and to keep stepping back, for the sake of all the promises, for the sake of all the miles still to go.