Midwinter Break

Gerry and Stella Gilmore are a retired couple living in a Victorian tenement flat in Glasgow, Scotland. Originally from Northern Ireland, they left Belfast decades earlier to escape the Troubles, the roughly thirty-year conflict between largely Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists. Their marriage of more than forty years is under mounting strain: Gerry, a retired architect, drinks heavily each evening after Stella goes to bed, and Stella, a devout Catholic, has grown weary of his habits and increasingly drawn to a more purposeful spiritual life. As the novel opens, they prepare for a midwinter holiday to Amsterdam, a trip Stella has planned around a private agenda she has not yet disclosed.

On the evening before departure, their contrasting routines establish the distance between them. Gerry waits for Stella to go to bed, then pours whiskey into a crystal tumbler placed out of sight so she cannot gauge the volume. When he accidentally wakes her with loud music, she warns that if he wants to end up living alone, he is going the right way about it. Later, he discovers she has been looking at a website showing a garden with a religious statue, but he shuts down the computer without registering its significance. Returning to bed, he brushes his fingers against a scar on her stomach, hollow like a second navel, with a matching scar on her back. The scars' origin is not yet explained.

They fly to Amsterdam and check into the Hotel Theo. That evening, walking along the canals to dinner, Stella hooks onto Gerry's arm and remarks on the blackness of the water, mentioning suicide as a condition in which death seems an improvement. At an Irish pub afterward, Stella buys Gerry a double Jameson. When the band shifts to IRA rebel songs, both are angered by the assumption that all Irish people support political violence, and they leave.

That night, Stella reflects on the possibility of leaving Gerry. She is an organizer by nature, someone who has managed property and coordinated complex arrangements throughout their marriage. If he continues drinking heavily, she would prefer to be elsewhere. Through the bathroom mirror, Gerry glimpses her kneeling in prayer and is surprised. After she falls asleep, he is seized by an involuntary memory: two officers from the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary, Northern Ireland's police force) arriving at his Belfast office to say his wife had been in an accident. The memory breaks off.

The next morning, Stella rises before dawn and walks alone to the Begijnhof, the secluded garden she saw on her computer screen at home: an enclosed green space surrounded by ancient houses, a statue, and a church. She recalls her early courtship with Gerry, their first drive to Ballycastle, and their first kiss on a footbridge at the beach. She enters the Begijnhof office but leaves without securing an appointment.

Over coffee, Stella tells Gerry the Begijnhof was founded by the Beguines, a Catholic sisterhood who lived communally but without permanent vows, retaining the right to return to the world and marry. At lunch, she says she is tired of living the way they do and wants a more "devout" life involving charity and prayer. She has made a Monday appointment at the Begijnhof. When Gerry asks where this leaves him, she replies that it leaves them in different places. Over dinner, she elaborates: The family is raised, the work is done, and she has ten or twenty years that do not fit. She wants to use them for something more meaningful than watching him drink. When he asks if he has a place in her plans, she says he does not. Meanwhile, Gerry secretly buys two half-bottles of cheap whiskey at a neighboring supermarket, concealing one in each jacket pocket.

At the Rijksmuseum, Gerry persuades Stella to see Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride, a painting about touch and intimacy. They also visit the Anne Frank House, moving through the rooms in near silence. In the last room, Stella sees tokens left as tributes on a mantelpiece and places one of the gold eternity earrings Gerry gave her for Christmas at the end of the line. Afterward, she is overwhelmed with doubt: She is not Jewish and has not suffered comparably. She returns to retrieve the earring, but an old man wearing a kippa, a Jewish skullcap, sees her and is visibly horrified, believing she is stealing from the memorial. Unable to explain, Stella flees. On a bridge, she drops both earrings into the canal.

Stella grows unwell. She offers Gerry a metaphor for relationships: There is always a gardener who does the work and a flower who displays. On Sunday, she attends Mass in the Begijnhof church while Gerry buys a bag of mixed flower bulbs at a market for Stella's garden at home.

Monday morning, Stella meets Kathleen Walsh, a Begijnhof resident and former nun, who explains that the last Beguine died in 1971. The community now consists of apartments open only to single women between thirty and sixty-five. Stella is too old. Before leaving, she tells Kathleen something she has never told anyone, including Gerry: In Belfast in the early 1970s, while heavily pregnant, she was shot in the stomach. Lying on the pavement, she vowed to devote her life to God if her baby was spared. The bullet passed through her, and her son Michael survived, though doctors said she could never have more children. She has never kept the vow, and this trip was her attempt to repay that spiritual debt. The official she meets afterward confirms there is no religious order, only a real estate transaction, and Stella is too old.

Snow begins as they leave for the airport. All flights are cancelled. Gerry drinks the remaining Jameson directly from the bottle rather than lose it at security. Stella tells him flatly that her meeting was a complete failure. Alone at an empty gate, she is seized by a vivid flashback: the full memory of being shot on a Belfast street, heavily pregnant in a white summer dress, collapsing on the pavement, praying desperately for her baby's survival. Gerry finds her trembling and holds her, telling her to stay in the present.

Through the long night, the argument building throughout the trip reaches its crisis. Stella tells Gerry she wants to leave him but does not know how. She says the drinking and the deception accompanying it are destroying them. Gerry asks about selling their flat. He promises to quit, invoking his success at giving up smoking. Stella weighs the impossibility of leaving against the impossibility of staying and reflects that if he stopped drinking, all things would be possible.

She offers a conditional reprieve: If he keeps his word, the flat may not have to be sold. Gerry recites "All shall be well," the same words Stella sent him from the hospital after the shooting, a quotation from Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth-century English mystic. At Stella's prompting, he completes it: "And all manner of thing shall be well." He admits he hates himself when he is drinking. Stella promises to help him, reminding him they do not have much time left. He gives her the bag of bulbs, saying they are for the gardener. She smiles and says she will plant them in the autumn, and they will see what grows next year.

As dawn approaches, a bright point of light appears over the buildings. They agree it is Venus, the morning star. Gerry reflects that sitting beside Stella is a privilege, and that her presence in his life is miracle enough.