Primogeniture (The Firstborn)

3: Felix alone

Felix sat at his desk on campus where he had been confined to live since the acrimonious split with Cecelia.

His ‘rooms’ consisted of sitting room with galley kitchenette, bedroom with en-suite and small study; although Felix preferred to work in the sitting room which had magnificent windows over-looking the square and clock tower.

Designed in the grand Gothic style with high ceilings, elegant stonework and a feeling of grandeur with classic, solidly designed furnishings from a previous age, these rooms were now feeling the effects of time, wear and ill usage.

He glanced up at the impressive sandstone fireplace with the cards containing the usual medley of Christmas scenes, mainly from work colleagues and students.

His eyes were inevitably drawn to two hand drawn cards, one from Rebecca, ‘Happy Christmas Daddy’, above a colourful but strangely proportioned reindeer drawn with crayons and felt pen, and another from Sarah, ‘Christmas Joy and Happiness’ featuring a psychotic looking snowman smoking an oversized pipe.

Felix, pushed himself wearily up from his chair and moved towards the window overlooking the Square.

This particular Thursday before Christmas was one of those dismal and depressing December days; not one thing or the other. A grey luminous sky, light sporadic drizzle and a buffeting wind. However, still mild for late December, so different from those childhood memories of Christmas that flickered through Felix’s mind.

He seemed to be under the sentimental self-delusion that in the past it had sometimes snowed. Or was it just the residual recollection of snow filled scenes from Christmas cards, arriving like confetti, clipped to long glittering strings and trailed around the fireplace, up the walls, and over any convenient surface.

Felix remembered how he could hardly contain his excitement as he and his younger sister stuck the paper chains together as their father draped them in big loops along the walls held in place with little copper drawing pins pushed firmly into the picture rails. The tree was the last to go up, a cheap artificial specimen, but through the eyes of childhood, a magnificent magical shining, shimmering jewel.

A few days before Christmas his father would slide out an old brown and battered suitcase from the darkest recesses deep under the stairs. Within was a treasure trove of  wonder. Christmas decorations of every hue, some glittering, some adorned with a white paste, imitating snow. And then there was the nativity. The wise men, shepherds and the holy family all waiting to be housed in the stable that would shortly be constructed from an old cardboard box, filled with straw and painted black, with a resplendent sparkling star hovering above and fixed in place with wire.

Then more recent memories overwhelmed him like an unstoppable surge. Christmas Eve and the girls tingling with anticipation, everything still to look forward to and then exhausted to bed and safely tucked up, midnight mass with Cecelia and returning home to large glasses of red wine.

Then suddenly in a flash of pure lust a vision of Cecelia, in bed, naked, passionate, warm and loving. The surge spread through Felix’s body like a physical pain, leaving behind a dull and fathomless ache of desire.

No, don’t think of her, it’s letting her win. How strange it is he thought. This need to possess a woman’s body long after love has flown and the emotional bond broken.

He despised himself for this momentary lapse, yet hated the very idea of Cecelia and Angus together, for the pleasures that could no longer be his. With a shudder Felix jolted back to the present, musing that Christmas was going to be a rather different affair this year. Any thought of festive cheer seemed to have evaporated like a mirage.