The Big Snow Read online

  ‘Do you remember it?’ he asked. ‘Maybe we should have stolen that boat, sailed away as you wanted.’ He was suddenly aware that the room was cold – the temperature had dropped in the last few hours. He put more coal on the fire and raked it into life. He was glad the drugs helped the pain but sorry that they took her so far away from him. He turned to another photograph but didn’t like the one he saw. It was ‘Jeffrey Pine, Sentinel Dome, Yosemite’. The ancient tree is twisted and gnarled, stunted and wind-shaped in its growth, sculpted and contorted by the elements in its exposed site. Between the frame of its lower branch and the shadow-streaked rock below it stretches a distant mountain range. He turned the page again. It was his old thought. Did where you live shape the limits of what your life could be? Did living in a small place make it inescapably small, unable to grow and expand? Perhaps if he had taken her away from this place she would have escaped this thing that had caught and twisted her life in its fist. He went to the window. It had started to snow.

  That unfettered force of desire, that total abandonment of self, perhaps that was what he had tried to find again in someone else’s arms. Once, only once, he told himself, trying to assuage the guilt that he had carried with him since the moment. Maybe trying to explain it was to elevate it to something that it never was, when the truth was, perhaps, that it had sprung from nothing but a sudden surge of loneliness, a momentary hunger that left as quickly as it had come. It was a weekend conference – she was a teacher, too, married like him, and afterwards they had avoided even a goodbye. And yet how could such a once meaningless thing linger and fester in his head until he thought of it as the meanest, most terrible thing he had ever done, a betrayal that shamed him with unremitting intensity? He had tried to tell her many times, but each time his fear had stifled the words in his throat and then his sense of cowardice whetted the edge of that shame so that it felt like a two-edged knife cutting them both. Of all the consequences he had been frightened of, the greatest was losing her.

  He was frightened now because he knew this was the last chance for the truth. How could he let her set out on the journey while he harboured this lie? He looked at the blue line on the map, the light in the photographs and it seemed there was only room for the truth in these things, that anything else was a deviation from the route, an impure focus. Every day during her illness the lie had coiled a little tighter round his mind so sometimes it felt that unless he tore it away it would choke all the other life they had known. He switched on the electric fire and pulled the curtains, then turned another page. ‘Fresh Snow, Yosemite National Park, California’. The camera looks into a dense frieze of trees and latticed undergrowth frozen into a black-and-white negative, where snow fuses and links the black branches and spindles of stems. It’s like a painting by Jackson Pollock and it’s cold to the eyes. Cold and beautiful. But he isn’t sure, for who is it that needs the truth? And will it be one final selfishness if he tells her now? He isn’t sure. Her head moves a little on the pillow, a thin brittle filament of hair kinks across her cheek. Let her sleep, and in the morning, perhaps, before the doctor comes. When he has thought of the words.

  He wraps a blanket round himself and curls into the armchair at the foot of the bed. In the morning. He tries to sleep, tries to hear one more time her voice threaded with the sea. The Steadfast Hope, the Starry Sky, the Climbing Wave. The final leg of the journey when they see the Pacific. The night is cold, he wakes many times, tries to squirm into new respite. Sleeping under an arch of stars. Once he thinks of joining her on the bed, of trying to be close to her again, but he’s frightened of hurting her and then he falls into a sleep that carries him through to the morning.

  The fire is out, burned away to nothing. His neck is sore and he rubs it with the palm of his hand. The blanket has slipped to the floor. Even in the shaded light from her bedside table he knows that she is dead. As he goes to her something wells up in his throat and pushes for release but then vanishes in a stream of soft noise like the wind running through grass. Her eyes are open but they stare at the wall and he goes to close them, then pulls his hand away, frightened to touch her in death. And there is the sudden fleck of fear and anger because he knows that she has left him with the truth unshared. There is resentment, too, that she has left him, gone on the journey without him, for he knows now that it is her journey and he cannot share it. Then into that loneliness breaks the full pain of loss and he sits on the bed beside her and hugs his hurt like a child, rocking slowly back and forwards as if the motion might drain it away. After a while he stands up because he knows there is work to do and soon the doctor and nurse will come and what he has left will have to be shared with them. So he goes to the window and pulls the curtain and there is a new cry in his throat when he sees the world outside, but it is a cry of something beyond the pain of grief. The old world is gone and in its place the whiteness of snow. Its sudden brightness hurts his eyes. Instinctively he turns to tell her and then he remembers and he turns again and stares.

  There isn’t much time before the doctor and nurse come. The bed is old and heavy so he can only move it a few inches at a time. It scrapes and plucks the linoleum where the rugs don’t cover it but the slowness of the movement leaves her still and undisturbed. As he lifts lightly and drags it, he wonders how anyone can ever think that death looks like sleep. His breathing is heavy from the effort and he glances at the window over his shoulder and goes and opens it as wide as it will go. Inch by inch he pulls the bed until it is tight against the wall below the window. The cold air brushes against his face. The breeze blows a few flakes off the sill into the room. There may not be much time. Then, touching her for the first time, he raises her up on the pillow so that her face is level with the window and she can see the snow, and he talks to her in a low whisper and his voice and the voice he remembers sound to him like the soft ebb and shuffle of the sea. A strand of her hair is disturbed by the wind and falls across his sleeve and the light burnishes it for a second into a memory of its former colour. The camera feels lighter in his hand than he can ever remember it. In a few seconds everything is ready. Her eyes are open and in them the light of the world. He kneels beside her, their cheeks touching, his eye level with hers, his hand clasping the coldness of her hand, and then he presses her finger downwards. The shutter opens and closes.

  Snow Trails

  He stood watching from under the trembling lattice of branches, his back pressed against the dark bark. Already the first fine eddies of snow were beginning to fall, drifting in dreamily on the sighs of wind, uncertain and vague in their direction. They flecked and salted the distance that separated him from the house and its yellow squares of light. Above him the whole tree suddenly seemed to shiver, shaking loose the scent of pine, and he pushed his back tightly against the solidity of its trunk and let his hands brush and trace the knotted surface.

  There were spaces in the snow, pockets of what felt like stillness, and in the silence of its fall he sensed a mockery of his own agitation. He was conscious, too, for the first time of his own coldness. He had no watch to tell him how long he had been waiting, and he stamped his feet on the frozen earth and blew a stream of his breath into his cupped hands. The sound rushed in his ears, an intrusion into the silence, and he stared again at the distant house as if somehow it might have betrayed his presence, but it stood squat and imperturbable, its yet uncurtained windows unblinking and resolute in their indifference. He dreamed it wouldn’t always be like this. The cold, the distance. And other images warmed and sparked the darkness as the desultory, languid fall of snow quickened and the wind slanted it as if it was riddling through the brindled wash of sky. He walked out of the inner shadows of the tree until his face touched the tremulous sift of the branches that veiled his presence, and for a crazy second he thought of pushing them aside and walking through the falling snow towards the light.

  Then he saw her cross one of the downstairs windows, come back and stare out, her face close to the glass, one hand shading he
r eyes to block out the reflection. He pulled back into the darkness even though he knew she couldn’t see him, and as he did so his memory painted in the blueness of her eyes, the pale softness of her skin. Painted them from his secret store. She was looking for him, waiting for him to come, and soon she would open the door and call out to him. That’s how he would see her – framed in the fan of light, holding out her arms, and he would step out of the faltering folds of darkness and, shrugging off the clutch of the snow, would walk towards her open arms. Walk into the corridor of light towards her.

  In a few seconds she pulled away again and disappeared but it was enough, for even a little was enough. Her face pressed against the glass, looking for him. Waiting for him. He walked forward again and pushed his face against the clumps of needles and they held the softness of her hair and what he breathed was the musk of her scent. One of the needles broke free and stuck to his cheek like a fallen eyelash and he let it linger on his skin before shaking it away. He knew it was time to go, but hesitated while he stared at the sky. Something strange was happening to it – it was as if all its dark folds, its tight seams and creases, were being slowly prised open, as if all its secrets were being surrendered and given up to this fall and flow. It was really coming down now, coming down as if all restraint had been brushed aside in a sleet and slurry of flake. Already it was beginning to shadow and cream the contours of the earth into a oneness. He pulled up his collar and stuck his hands deep into his pockets, then crouched so that he could see the house from below the branches for one last time.

  Nothing had changed, but the thickening tide of snow made it harder to see and even the yellow squares of light were marbled and blurred. Some snow sifted through the spread of the branches like dust and he held out the palm of his hand and let its coldness wet his skin before he carefully raised it to his bending head and touched it against his lips. Then he was moving back the way he had come, heading across the open pasture towards the tall sentinel trees which guarded the boundaries of the estate on two sides. As the snow arrowed in on him, plastering his hair and plashing against his eyes, he bowed his head against it. Another few steps and he wouldn’t have heard it, the sound swirled away into the depths of the night, another few steps and the bark of the dog would have been just another frozen particle crunched by his feet.

  He stopped and turned his gaze back to the house. The sound came again in a succession of sharp, angry barks but he was too far away to see and for a second he stood motionless, holding his head to the sky, indifferent to the flurries that beat against him. He looked down at the dark sleeve of his jacket and saw it spangled and glinting, saw the spreading bruise of damp seeping into it, then walked back to the canopy of the branches. The lights on either side of the front door had been switched on and the falling, stuttering snow, flitted into brief wisps of yellow in front of them.

  She was a few feet from the door, wearing a dark duffel coat with the hood pulled up so only a thin rim of her hair was visible. In front of her, the dog snapped at the strangeness of the snow and jumped in the air to bite the flakes, determined to ward off the intruder. She took a few steps forward and feathered up the settling snow, shuffling it in the air with kicks of her feet. The dog was bouncing higher, its head twisting to snap at the fall. Then she stood still again and he wished he was the snow that fell on her. The dog stopped jumping, circled itself, snuffling for some scent, then started towards him until she called it back and it retreated reluctantly into her shadow. He watched it follow her when she turned back towards the house. He stood motionless, watching through the thickening frieze of snow as she stepped into the arc of light spun from the open door. Watching as she suddenly turned and stretched out her arms, the black cross of her body transfigured by the light.

  ‘Are you off your head?’ his father asked, staring at his sodden clothes and dripping hair. ‘Only someone with a screw loose would be out the door on a night like this.’ Then without waiting for an explanation he turned back to his paper.

  ‘Peter, Peter,’ scolded his mother, ‘in the name of fortune what’s got into you? Get those wet clothes off and something dry on before you’re laid-up with pneumonia.’

  She fussed around him, pulling at his jacket and smoothing the damp tails of his hair with the towel that hung on the back of the kitchen door. His father snorted into his paper, a sound of disbelief, but it was unclear if it was related to his son’s appearance or what he was reading: his mother took his jacket and hung it over the back of the chair, before pulling it up to the side of the fire. Soon thin snakes of steam seeped upwards from its dampness.

  ‘You’re a bit old for playing in the snow,’ his father said.

  ‘I wasn’t playing.’

  ‘Well, what in the name of God were you doing out there? Looking for Scott of the Antarctic?’ He blew a thin burst of breath and flapped the paper to get a clean fold on the next page.

  He stared at the fire but didn’t answer his father’s question. On the hearth was a row of socks and handkerchiefs. The front of the fire was an angry gash of embers.

  ‘Go and get changed, Peter, and then come back down and warm yourself at the fire. Don’t be going to your room before you get dry.’

  As he climbed the stairs he heard his father call after him, ‘Tonight’s not the night for skulking in your den,’ and then there was the soft chiding of his mother, her ‘whist’ and her ‘easy’, her ‘Let the boy be.’ In his room he didn’t switch on the light but went to the window, lightly pressed his fingers to the glass and watched the snow’s unrelenting fall. Already, their tussocky snatch of garden had been smoothed into a uniformity that made it strange and unfamiliar. It seemed as if the whole world was turning, slowly changing and it felt right for he was changing, too, leaving behind the meaningless husk of his past and becoming something new. It frightened him, the power of it, the pain of it. Not like anything he’d ever known in the past, for what few tawdry moments of feeling existed there seemed now only a foolishness in his memory. This was real, real as the falling snow layering and smoothing the world. It silted and coursed through his veins in his waking moments, came whispering home in the moments before sleep, in the warm confusion of waking. Lifting his fingers away from the glass he watched the ebb of his print, the settling of the snow on the sill, its smudge and crimped lisp against the glass. The world was beautiful, the world was strange. And there was something happening to him. At times he wanted to scream it to the sky, at others it was joy, and sometimes it was the scourge of more pain than he felt he could bear. Maybe the snow would help him. Be a salve. Maybe its fall would call her to the truth.

  ‘Is there something wrong with us? Are we not good enough for him? Has he joined some holy order, taken a vow of silence? Well, if he wants to hide up there, it’s no skin off my nose.’ His father’s voice, riddled with irritation, clattered up the stairs. ‘And what was he doing out in the snow? Did he say?’ His mother’s reply was lost in the gush and drum of the kettle being filled. ‘A dog would have more sense than to go out on a night like this. Is it still coming down?’

  ‘Aye,’ his mother said, ‘and getting heavier.’

  He turned away from the window. Under the green smoothness of the eiderdown was a small hump where she had placed the stone jar and he knew without looking that she had wrapped his pyjamas round it. She was making supper, and if he didn’t go down soon she would call and there would be more from his father, so he lifted the book from the side of his bed and went down to the living room. His father folded his paper and dropped it into the cardboard box at the side of the hearth.

  ‘I’ll bank the fire up later on,’ his father said to no one in particular, ‘and put slack on. Keep it going overnight.’ Then, partly turning his head towards him, ‘Did you see many people out?’

  The tone was not sarcastic and he recognized it was as close as his father would come to an offer of conciliation. He looked up from his book. Thin trembles of steam were still curling upwards from his jack
et. The smell of its sodden fibres infused the whole room. ‘No, I didn’t see anyone. It’s starting to get heavy, beginning to lie in the fields and roads.’ He paused, then offered his own gesture. ‘Is there more forecast?’

  ‘Who knows? Thon forecaster boys aren’t worth a spit in the wind. Never see anything coming till it hits them full in the face. Sure, you remember the time of the church fête, way last year: they said it was going to pour and we had the extra tents up and everything inside the hall and wasn’t the sun splitting the trees. Not a drop of rain all day.’

  His mother came in and set plates of toast on the hearth, then went back into the kitchen for the mugs of tea. Leaning forward to the fire, his father cleaned his hands by rubbing them together and stretching them towards the blue-tipped flames. ‘You’d be better slipping oul Janey Thompson a few bob and asking her to read the tea leaves,’ he said. ‘Probably be just as accurate as those boys with their charts and their isobars. And one thing I do know is that if it falls heavy tonight, there won’t be many venturing out to the shop tomorrow, for they’ll all be tucked up round the fireside. So let’s just hope it’s a bit of a puff and a blow and thawed away by the morning.’

  They both took the mugs that were handed to them and his father set his on the mantelpiece to cool before starting to eat a slice of the toast. He noticed that his mother was wearing, over her stockings, a pair of thick woollen socks which frothed out of her slippers and stretched over her calf muscles. Through the door into the kitchen he could see that she had rolled an old towel and laid it along the bottom of the door in an attempt to keep out draughts. Sometimes a spot of water dripped from the chimney into the fire and there was a sudden sizzle.