The Big Snow Read online

  ‘Will the van be all right?’ his mother asked. ‘It’s lucky you put it in the garage when you came home.’

  ‘Aye, I’ll go out later and cover the engine with some blankets. That’d be all we need – for it not to start.’ His father lifted down the mug of tea, holding it in the pincer of his fingers, then turning it until he reached the handle. ‘Snow’s all right on Christmas cards or in a painting but it’s a royal pain in the neck when it’s real. All the same, a couple of flickers of the electric tonight and they’ll be in on the morning, buying up every candle in the place. We could maybe even get rid of some of that supply I got in last October – you remember the boy who wanted me to buy the coloured ones? What would anyone want with a coloured candle that costs more? Is the snow still lying?’

  His mother shuffled in her slippers to the front window and peered through the narrow gap between the wall and curtain she opened with the back of her hand. Her face pushed into it until only the back of her head was visible. The light reflected off the blue clasp that held her hair in a tight bun. A hairclip stuck out from its core like a nail working itself loose from weathered wood. There was the squeak of her hand rubbing the glass.

  ‘It’s still coming down. It’s hard to see but it’s lying all right. Coloured candles are nice at Christmas. Some of the younger ones like to put them on their tree or use them to make the type of decoration you see on a mantelpiece with a bit of holly or on a wooden log. Something like that.’

  ‘Maybe I should’ve taken some of the red ones off him then.’ His voice was edged with uncertainty, regret at having missed a possible opportunity. ‘I can’t be expected to keep up with every tomfool fashion,’ he said, as if defending himself from some unspoken criticism. ‘Remember we got took with that box of fancy furniture polish. I’ve sold but the one tin since the day and hour thon cowboy wiped me eye with them. And he’ll not be back, for I heard he’s selling insurance up in Belfast. Probably making a mint with the patter he has.’ Then, taking the poker, he raked air into the base of the fire as if trying to dispel the misery of the memory.

  As his father and mother slipped into shop talk, the familiar litany of accounts and ordering, of unpaid bills, he opened his book and tried to read, but his father’s voice with its relentless, jarring vocabulary of commerce grated and jangled inside his head. It was Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier, the book he’d been reading the Saturday afternoon she first came into the shop. It was part of his first-year reading list for Queen’s and it was propped on the counter, which ran at right angles to the rows of metal shelving, home to boxes of nails and screws, bolts and locks, electrical wires and plugs, brown packets of seed, gardening equipment, the rubbery smell of Wellington boots and a thousand other things, each allocated to a precise place and part of a sequence which only his father could explain. The hardware shop acted as an ordering point for coal, slack, and it also sold some small-scale farming equipment and animal feeds. There were a hearse and a limousine which served both weddings and funerals and in which, despite the most scrupulous hoovering, it wasn’t unusual for mourners to discover their dark clothing blushed with tiny spots of confetti, squeezed out from the seams of the seats by their weight.

  He’d read about thirty pages on that particular afternoon as business had been slow. It irritated his father to see him read in the shop – maybe that was one of the reasons he did it – and it also irritated his father, that he wouldn’t wear the same brown shopcoat as he did. Said it made the shop, the service, look sloppy. But to wear the coat tainted the position with a sense of permanency and an acquiescence in the pattern of his father’s life, regardless of the fact that he only worked on Saturdays and holidays in order to supplement his student grant. Occasionally he assisted at funerals, but only when the regular man wasn’t available, and when he did he always insisted on the full rate for the job in the hope that he would price himself out of it.

  It was the knock of the handlebars of her bicycle against the glass that made him look up from his book. His father was putting in time by stock-taking, jotting numbers and codes into a ledger with the stub of a pencil. When she came in she said hello before the bell above the door had finished ringing and her voice mingled with its peal. He guessed almost immediately who she was, although he’d never seen her before. The clothes she wore and the way she wore them said that she wasn’t local, even though there was nothing special about the way she was dressed. She was probably about thirty and wore a casual woollen jacket and corduroy trousers. Her blond shoulder-length hair was pulled back from her face by a black band and the perfume she wore was the scent of wealth. Her name was Alice Richmond and she and her husband had bought the manor house and estate of Colonel Ashbury, who had been forced to put it on the market after he got into financial trouble. They said her husband was big money from Belfast, one of two brothers who had inherited their father’s engineering company. He looked ten years older than her, maybe more, and they had moved in a short time earlier, spent a lot of money on redecorating and restoration, kept on the existing staff, who were the only source of information about them the village could find. They didn’t mix with the village, didn’t attend the church, but at regular intervals they had dinner parties when convoys of cars arrived from Belfast and for these outside caterers were brought in and the food served was described as ‘nothing ordinary’, as ‘high-falutin’’.

  She came straight to the counter and her face was flushed by the cycle ride, the corners of her eyes dampened by the wind. Smoothing stray hair with the comb of her fingers she shook her head lightly to wave it back in shape, and as her eyes went to the cover of his book she smiled and asked him if he was enjoying it. He explained about his course, glad to have the chance to distance himself from his current position, and she made a joke about not expecting to find French literature in hardware stores, then on impulse he said his father was out the back reading Sartre. At her laughter his father appeared with his ledger, sticking the stub of pencil behind his ear, and asked was she being served all right. ‘Admirably’ was the word she used and it rang in the air like the timbre of her voice. It struck him that it was a word that had probably never been used in the shop, and at its audacious syllables his father retreated behind the shelves again but peered out at her, inspecting her, weighing her up.

  She bought picture hooks, white spirit, brass-headed screws, and when he wrapped them in brown paper his hands felt clumsy under her gaze. As he made a mess of the folds she turned back to the shop and ambled amongst the displays. She picked a brush and a garden rake. ‘The leaves get everywhere,’ she said. ‘So many trees. A lot of leaves to clear up.’ She weighed the rake in her hand as if testing its balance.

  ‘The best clear-up for leaves is a good east wind,’ his father said, walking towards the counter, holding the ledger under his arm like a bible.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ she said smiling, ‘but they blow up round the house, get wet, then clog up everywhere.

  ‘Would that be Colonel Ashbury’s old place?’ his father asked, his feigned ignorance transparent.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘So you’re Mrs Richmond, then,’ his father said, extending his hand over the counter. ‘You’re very welcome to the village.’

  He watched their hands meet briefly and saw the soft glint of gold on her wrist. Then his father said he couldn’t possibly let her carry her purchases on the bike in case she had an accident, and when she protested he insisted, saying it wouldn’t be any trouble to deliver them later that afternoon. She smiled again and thanked him for his trouble, hoped she wasn’t putting him to any bother.

  ‘No bother at all,’ his father returned, ‘and anything you need, just let us know, and if we don’t have it here we’ll order it in.’

  She glanced again at the book, wished him good reading and then she turned and walked towards the door. They both stood watching her, and as she stepped into the cold winter sunlight she turned up her collar and flicked out the
sudden burnish of her hair.

  ‘Did you see her hands?’ his father asked. ‘Never raked a leaf in her life. And that sparkler didn’t come from Woolworth’s. Big bucks there all right. Put a sheet of brown paper over the rake head and tie it with string.’

  After closing time his father had another delivery to complete so he dropped him off at the gates to the estate and left him to deliver the purchases, then make his own way home across the fields. The bare branches of the trees pleached across the driveway and a frost was already beginning to whiten and coarsen the grass. The shafts of the brush and rake felt cold in his hands. He had been to the house several times before but only as a child and never inside – mostly when the Colonel had opened the grounds on special occasions. The last time had been a Coronation party when they had sat at trestle tables and there’d been music and little flags. As he followed the curve of the driveway the house suddenly came into view, and in that moment he felt like a character in a Hardy novel, a poor boy delivering his message, but the house looked less grand than he remembered it, smaller, even a bit shabby in the dropping darkness. He wasn’t sure whether to call at the front or the back but it was in the back that the lights were on and when he headed towards them he saw her bike propped at the side of the door.

  After he knocked, it was opened by someone he knew – Jenny Chambers, his old Sunday School teacher, who was now working as a housekeeper. She seemed pleased to see him and as she chatted and took the objects he handed her, a voice he already recognized called to her to bring him in. He hesitated, frightened that she was going to humiliate him with a tip, but as he stepped into the blushing warmth of the kitchen she stepped forward to offer him only a cup of coffee. He hesitated, fumbled with the seeming weight of his hands. ‘Warm you for the walk home, the kettle’s just boiled,’ Jenny said, and he sat at the table with its blue-glazed bowl of fruit and his cack-handed parcel of brass-headed screws and picture hooks. Mrs Richmond was wearing a blue smock, scribbled with paint. A smeared rag dangled from the corner of a pocket.

  ‘You’re painting,’ he said.

  ‘Trying to. Not very successfully at the moment.’

  ‘A lot of rooms to paint, I suppose.’

  ‘Not painting, decorating, Peter,’ Jenny said, scolding him with a smile. ‘Mrs Richmond paints. Pictures, like.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, squirming his hands across the table, relieved when he was given a cup to hold.

  ‘I might be more successful at painting and decorating, probably make more money, too, if the bill we got for the work done here is anything to go by.’

  He declined the cigarette she offered him and watched the movements of her hands as she lit hers. ‘What do you paint?’ he asked.

  ‘Whatever takes my fancy, I suppose. Portraits, landscapes, interiors. Goes in phases. At the moment I’m trying to be a bit more abstract in style. Jenny doesn’t like them very much.’

  ‘Can’t really make head nor tail of them, but then I know nothing about it so it’s hardly surprising,’ Jenny said while she washed dishes in the sink, turning her head sideways when she spoke.

  Then Mrs Richmond asked him about his university course and how he liked it and what he hoped to do.

  ‘We always knew Peter would make something of himself,’ Jenny interrupted. ‘The whole village knew it. When he was in primary school they called him The Professor.’

  She laughed at his embarrassment, flicked the ash of the cigarette into the saucer of her cup. He saw that she held the cigarette more than she smoked it.

  ‘It says more about the others than about me,’ he countered. ‘It wasn’t a vintage year – if you could do joined-up writing you were considered a prodigy.’ Then he asked her if she’d gone to Queen’s and she told him she’d gone to art college in London, then spent a year studying in Paris. ‘So you can speak French?’ he asked.

  ‘Enough to get by. But we went back a couple of years ago for a short holiday and I felt a bit rusty. Had forgotten a lot of things.’

  He felt able to look at her only when she was speaking. Her eyes were blue and they never rested on anything for very long, flicking to his face and then away again, flitting about the room. When she was teasing him, as she was now, they widened, then crinkled with laughter.

  ‘Your father didn’t strike me as a man who reads Sartre.’ The laughter in her eyes encouraging him to momentary boldness.

  ‘Oh yes, Sartre, Camus, Victor Hugo – he’s read them all in that shop. Never without a book in his hand.’

  ‘The only book I’ve ever seen him with is his accounts book,’ Jenny said, her hands pressing and plumping the water.

  They both smiled conspiratorially at her confusion. ‘I really like Le Grand Meaulnes,’ Mrs Richmond said. ‘I read it when I was in Paris. I cheated, though, read it in English. Too much like hard work in the original. That’s probably the root of my problem – I’m a bit lazy. Don’t work hard enough at things.’

  There was a moment of silence and he stared at his almost empty cup. Jenny dripped a plate on to the draining board.

  ‘Do you like the Impressionists?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose everyone likes the Impressionists,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Sometimes now I think they look a bit chocolate-box cover – maybe it’s a case of familiarity breeding contempt. I like Van Gogh very much.’ He searched frantically in his memory for a painting but his mind had gone blank and so he nodded as if approving her choice. ‘They say he only sold one painting,’ she continued. ‘A sad life.’

  ‘Alain-Fournier only wrote one novel,’ he said, staring into his cup. ‘Died in the First World War.’

  ‘Maybe if he’d lived he would never have written anything else so good. Who’s to know?’

  ‘Starry Night,’ he remembered. ‘Starry Night is a beautiful painting.’

  ‘Very lovely – I like it a lot. What people don’t understand about Van Gogh is that he wasn’t strictly a great painter in the technical sense, but what he was was a great colourist. He used colour in a way that was new and original. And in the paintings he was using colour to represent human passions. So if you look at Starry Night, you can feel the darkness and the fear but also the beauty and I suppose the love.’

  His hand tightened on the bevelled edge of the table. Her words were little splashes in his consciousness like the fall of rain on water. He tried to stop himself getting lost inside the sudden swirl inside his head. He looked again at the empty cup and it felt as if a tumbler of whiskey had hit the back of his throat, the way that it had that first time in McCullion’s bar the night their exam results came through. He was walking over the thinnest sheet of ice, so fragile and beautiful, as he sat at this table where this woman, this most beautiful woman, spoke of Paris and colour and love. He held more tightly to the table, trying to anchor himself in some outward show of stability, frightened that the earlier clumsiness of his hands would transmute itself and splutter into an excruciating embarrassment of speech. So he made himself think of the contents of the shelves in his father’s shop, the soiled sheen of his father’s coat, listened to the clink and squeak of the plates being washed in the sink.

  She was looking at him and holding the cigarette at the side of her face and he watched the smoke curl into nothing. He went to speak but stopped himself, frightened that his voice would buckle and warp in his throat, spill itself in some form that would be unrecognizable. He had to go. He had to leave before he made a fool of himself. ‘Starry Night,’ he said suddenly without knowing why he’d said it or what was to follow. She stared at him and nodded. ‘Starry Night,’ he repeated, looking towards Jenny for help.

  The phone rang in the hall. Loud and insistent, demanding attention. She excused herself. As soon as she had left the room, he stood up and took his cup and saucer to the sink. ‘I better go now,’ he said, staring into the hall, half frightened that she would return before he had the chance to leave.

  ‘She’ll only be a second,’ Jenny cautioned him. �
�Don’t be running off before you’ve said goodbye. It was a treat to hear you both chattering away ten to the dozen. I didn’t follow the half of all that stuff about painting and books. I had to laugh to myself when you were talking – me being your Sunday School teacher when you were a boy. Not much I could teach you now, I think.’

  He remembered her sincere little lessons written out on the back of old Christmas cards, the slap of her hymn book on fidgeting legs, her warnings against the modern manifestations of sin – television, films, rock‘n’roll. He was still standing with his hands on the back of the chair when he heard the phone being replaced and she returned to the kitchen.

  ‘Brian, my husband, has to work late. Getting to be a bit of a habit. Then he drives here like a madman. He’ll end up killing himself some night.’ She saw that he was about to leave and stubbed out her cigarette in the saucer.

  ‘I have to go now,’ he said, and in his ears it sounded as if he had made himself a boy who had to be home by a certain time.

  ‘It was good of you to call,’ she said as she showed him to the door. ‘I got a new brush and rake and a conversation about art. And all at a bargain price.’

  He said goodbye to Jenny, who wished him luck with his studies, then shuffled through the open door. The cold night air nipped and tightened his face. ‘Thanks for the coffee. I hope the painting goes better.’ He turned to go but she called him back.

  ‘My name’s Alice,’ she said, extending her hand. There was a small slender touch, but no matter how hard his senses tried to hold it, it slipped away from him like his breath in the night air. ‘Starry night,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Starry Night,’ he repeated, not knowing why he was smiling in return, before she ended his confusion by pointing at the sky. Above their heads shuddered a cold shock of stars and while he stared at them she said goodnight and when he turned the door had been closed.