Page 58 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
“Tristan,” she replied. “At least, it started on Tristan’s birthday. It was the night of his fifteenth birthday. It was April, just before Easter, and we were all due to go home for the holidays that Friday. And then weirdly, it started to snow—in April! It was so unexpected because it had been sunny all day. So then obviously we started drinking snowballs...”
“Obviously,” said Isaac.
“And then someone, I can’t remember who, said we should sneak out for a game of croquet in honor of the snow on Tristan’s birthday.”
“And you did.”
“And then after that, if there was ever a full moon and snow, we played Snowball Croquet. Huh,” she said, almost to herself, “funny how these things come about.”
The court was set up, and after a brief explanation of the rules for Isaac’s benefit, the game began. Isaac was on Nory’s team with Jeremy and Pippa. Most of them were still a little drunk from earlier in the evening and the snowballs kept them topped up enough that they didn’t feel the cold.
It was fun, even though the game had fairly quickly dissolved into anarchy. Nory liked having Isaac there with them. It felt as though the divide between them, which had seemed so prominent at dinner, was blurring, or maybe it was simply the alcohol blurring her powers of observation. Isaac seemed less guarded, but then it was easier to feel you were on a level playing field when everyone was wearing pajamas. Maybe, she mused, if all the attendees of the G8 summit came in their pj’s they’d get more done.
“Isaac,” Charles began, slinging a friendly arm around Isaac’s shoulder. “Now that there’s a few years’ worth of water under the bridge, I feel we owe you an apology.”
“Oh?” Isaac kept his voice light, but Nory could tell he was guarded. “What for?”
“We did you a disservice. We allowed you to take the blame for something.”
“We never expected it to go as far as it did,” said Guy.
“Oh god,” said Jeremy, shaking his head, “I know where this is going.”
“Can someone tellmewhere this is going?” asked Nory. She felt suddenly on edge; her friends could be boisterous and overbearing, which was unnerving to those who didn’t know them well enough.
“It’s like this,” said Charles. “Isaac didn’t start Turd Wars.”
“What?” A laugh escaped her, nervous energy released into the night. “He threw manure at the back of my head!”
“Thing is, Nory,” said Charles, biting back a laugh, “he didn’t start it at all. It was Guy. Guy chucked a clod of manure at me, actually, I ducked, and it hit you square on. You were so incensed that we blamed it on the gardener’s son.”
Nory was speechless.
“That explains a lot,” said Isaac, nodding slowly.
“You framed him!” said Ameerah.
“We did, Your Honor,” said Guy. “To be fair, Nory was an awful beast when she was angry, and we thought that anger would be better aimed at someone who wasn’t us. We never expected the feud to carry on as long as it did.”
“Oh my god! Isaac, I’m so sorry.” Nory tried to stifle her smile.
“I did tell you I wasn’t the one who started it.” Isaac laughed. “But since I may have inadvertently caused you to fall into a wheelbarrow full of manure the other night, I am prepared to be the one to call it quits.” He held out his hand and Nory shook it.
“When did you fall in a wheelbarrow of manure?” Guy asked.
“Never you mind,” said Nory.
By half past two, the game had been abandoned and the snow had stopped falling. The sky had taken on an eerie amber glow, and the trees were spiky silhouettes lit from below by the snowy fields. They sat on the ground, wrapped in blankets, backs against the stone wall, looking out over land that stretched away to nothingness. Nory was sitting squeezed up against Isaac, resisting the temptation to rest her head on his shoulder.
“I always forget how big the sky is here,” said Nory.
“It’s pretty magnificent,” Isaac agreed.
“When I’m here I feel like I could stay forever. But then I go back to the city and that feels like home too.”
“I couldn’t live in the country,” said Pippa. “It’s too quiet. I need the buzz of the city.”
“I think what constitutes ‘buzz’ is different for everyone,” added Jeremy. “For me, ‘buzz’ is being in the wild. I feel hemmed in in the city.”
