The Big Snow Read online

  Finally they reached the gates of the driveway and Richmond turned and waved him on with a sweep of his arm that seemed to saw through the falling flakes. The trees bordering each side of the drive were crimped and clumped in white, their heavy heads wilting towards them. When they rounded the curve he could see the lights of the house and their dogged plod turned into a scamper that kicked up skiffs of snow. They drew shoulder to shoulder and the heavy draw of their breathing beaded them together and hurried them on. Richmond headed for the back of the house where the blink and flaw of light was a welcome and he watched him suddenly beat his arms into the air as if flailing at flies, then heard him say, ‘Thank God for that. I’ve never seen snow like it. How’s the hand?’ He started to speak but the snow was on his lips and in his mouth and in reply he nodded and forced a smile. Richmond thumped the door with his fist and even while he was still striking it she had it opened and the light that flowed from the kitchen fought fiercely with the snowy swathe of night, but Richmond’s lumbering shiver into the house blocked his first view of her.

  He hesitated at the door, even in these circumstances unwilling simply to walk in, and then she was grabbing him by the cuff of his sleeve and almost dragging him inside. He blinked away some of the water running down his face and the sudden surge of heat made him think for a second that he was going to melt into a puddle on the kitchen floor. Richmond was struggling with his sodden overcoat and shaking snow off himself the way a dog shakes itself free of water. And she was behind him, shutting and bolting the door, her scent already coiling itself round his senses, the scurry of her slippered feet dancing in his ears. He didn’t know what to do, so he stood there dripping water and didn’t look at anyone.

  ‘Get that coat off, Peter,’ she said. ‘You’re both soaked. I thought you’d had another accident. I didn’t hear the car.’

  ‘We had to abandon it back down the road – the snow’s too deep,’ Richmond said. ‘And listen, Peter cut his hand helping me get the car out of the ditch. It needs looking at – there’s still glass in it.’

  He met her eyes for the first time, smiled, then looked away. He had started to take off his coat but realized he couldn’t get his arm out of the sleeve so it hung over one shoulder like a cape. For the first time he saw his gloved hand clearly, with the sliver of glass protruding from the matted mess of wool and blood. She gave a little squeal and put her hands to her mouth.

  ‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said. ‘I think it’s stopped bleeding. I just need to get the glass out.’

  ‘Do we need to get the doctor?’ she asked, turning to look at her husband, who stood now in his white shirt, which wore a waistcoat of damp. He had stopped towelling his hair and draped the towel round his neck, holding its ends with both hands. He looked like a boxer just finished his training. ‘He’d never get here through the snow,’ he said. ‘Let’s get a look at it and see if we can patch it up until the morning.’ While she stood facing her husband he allowed himself to look at her for the first time. He was only a couple of feet from the back of her head and he stared at the strands of her hair, which tumbled over the collar of her blue dressing gown, at where her hand bunched some of it behind her ear. A strand fell across her cheek and curved forward to the edge of her mouth. She pushed it back again and he watched the slow brush of her fingers. Small, slender hands, the nails rounded and pearl–coloured. Like the colour of her skin.

  She told him to sit at the kitchen table and made him stretch out his hand towards her. Suddenly his badge of honour seemed to dissolve into a disgusting mess when it drew close to her pale-blue dressing gown which was buttoned to the neck and reached below her knees. The collar and front were edged with a white piping. His hand was only about a foot away from her. If he leaned forward a little he could have touched her. A thin bead of water ran down his face from the teeming tails of his hair. She called for the scissors, but when Richmond handed her a pair from the dresser she rejected them and asked for the sharper pair that stayed in one of the kitchen drawers.

  ‘We’ll have to cut the glove off,’ she said, lightly lifting his hand up with the tips of her fingers. ‘Can you hold it up in the air while I cut from the wrist?’

  He nodded his head. As she raised the hand holding the scissors he glimpsed the whiteness of her wrist, paler where it vanished into the blue of the sleeve. He didn’t know where to look. Her blue eyes were so close. Darker than the blue of the gown. So he stared into the corner of the kitchen and tried to hold his hand still, only flicking his eyes to it for the briefest of seconds while the scissors started to snip the glove. Richmond had moved closer to the table and was staring at the operation. He had opened the front of his shirt and a splurge of tightly curled black hair tumbled from his chest. The thought of it touching the softness of her skin made him shiver suddenly and she stopped cutting and let go of his hand. ‘Does that hurt?’ she asked, pushing back another fallen strand of hair. Hurt more than he could ever explain, but he shook his head and forced a smile. ‘Good lad,’ Richmond said, ‘we’ll soon get it fixed up. Alice is a good nurse.’ She held the scissors poised at the side of her head for a few seconds and they glinted in the light, before she lowered them and then turned and said, ‘Brian, get changed out of those wet clothes and put something cold on that bruising or it’ll look a sight in the morning. And look out some clothes for Peter.’ Richmond nodded and disappeared into the hall. There was the sound of his heavy tread on the stairs. ‘So, Peter, let’s get this glove off and see the damage.’

  He held up his hand and by the total exertion of his will tried to stop it shaking. He searched for something funny to say, but the sentences collapsed like felled trees and the most he could utter were meaningless expressions of surprise at the extent of the snow. She nodded at each of them but all her attention was on the cutting and he saw the way she angled her head and the thin little lines of concentration above her eyebrows and at the corners of her mouth. His black, blood-soaked hand hung between their heads and slowly the scissors snipped the sodden wool. He could feel the cold of the metal on his skin and he blinked at its touch. She had reached the base of the fingers. ‘The Red Hand of Ulster,’ he said and she smiled, then said, ‘Don’t make me laugh or I’ll end up cutting a finger off.’ There was the sound of footsteps above their heads. ‘Bad enough him nearly killing himself without involving other people. Get yourself a good lawyer and sue him. That’s the only place you can hurt him – his pocket.’ Her voice sounded like water. Just below the lobe of her ear was a tiny thin white scar. He only noticed it when she turned her head and it was exposed to the light. The glove was almost cut, and to help he pulled the tips of the fingers free from his skin and she moved closer to snip the final strands of wool. Close enough to touch. He wondered what her hair felt like. He wondered what it felt to touch her milky skin and then he looked at the bloody hand that was slowly emerging from the glove and felt the flare and burn of his foolishness and he wanted to snatch it away and be gone into the hidden folds of the night.

  Little bits of glove were still stuck to his skin and she got up from the table, fetched a pair of tweezers and started to pick them free. She held the tips of his fingers with hers and he wanted to flow into her across that narrow bridge of touch before it was too late and it slipped away. Then her hand slipped under his, supporting it as she worked, careful always to avoid the embedded shard of glass. He could see now that it had entered the fleshy fold of skin between his thumb and first finger and that the damage was not as great as might have been imagined. ‘I’ll live,’ he said. ‘We need to get the glass out,’ she replied. ‘I don’t think it’s in too deep.’ She puddled around in his palm. He felt as if she was reading his future and he was frightened. Two lines that diverged, never to meet. Two different orbits. How could it be otherwise? He felt the weight of his foolishness again. ‘Maybe it would hurt less if you did it yourself,’ she said. He looked into her eyes and he saw she was a little frightened by the thought. ‘It’ll be
all right,’ he told her. ‘Just try to get it all.’ She asked him if he was sure and he told her again that it would be all right. Then she lowered his hand until it rested on the table and tried to get a good grip with the tweezers. He braced himself by holding the edge of the chair with his other hand. Her face was almost hidden from him by the forward fall of her hair when she brought it close to his palm. Close enough for his breath to touch the strands of hair that glinted under the light above until they shone like the gilt-edged leaves of a bible. And then there was a short hiss of pain in his lips and the sudden bubble and spurt of blood as the thin spear of glass also glittered in the light. ‘Got it! she said. ‘Got it!’ but then she saw the new flow of blood and rushed to smother it in the folds of a towel. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s out and it’s all right. Just a bit of blood.’ She was using both her hands to press the towel against the wound and nodding and then he looked up into her eyes and they smiled at each other.

  ‘Need to get it well cleaned up,’ Richmond said from the doorway of the kitchen. He was wearing dry clothes. ‘Stop any infection.’ He came over and asked to see it and, when she lifted the towel away, inspected it closely before saying that it might need a few stitches in the morning. ‘Did you get Peter any dry clothes?’ she asked and he told her that he had left some in the guest bedroom.

  ‘That’s very good of you,’ he said, ‘but I should be gettin’ back home. They’ll be worried about me.’

  ‘You can’t go back out in that. It’s worse than ever by the look of it. Tell him, Brian. It wouldn’t be safe.’

  ‘She’s right Peter, there’s no need for you to head out in that blizzard. Stay here tonight – give your folks a ring. Tell them everything’s all right and you’ll be over first thing in the morning.’

  She showed him where the phone was in the hall, holding the receiver while he dialled the number, then left him to speak to his mother. He could hear the concern in her voice but reassured her as best he could, telling her that the cut to his hand wasn’t serious and that it was only the snow that was keeping him from returning home. She broke off to exchange words with his father, whose voice droned in the background, and when she spoke again it was to tell him that he was to ignore his father trying to remind him that the funeral was in the morning. There was more argument away from the phone and then she told him to thank the Richmonds for looking after him and after an almost embarrassed hesitation she said goodbye.

  When he returned to the kitchen there was a basin of warm water on the table and the smell of disinfectant. She was cutting a length of bandage, gnawing at its stubborn resistance with the pair of scissors. He pushed back the sleeve of his jumper and slipped his hand into the warm froth of water, wincing at the sharp sting but glad to have the cleanness of it flow over the sticky mess that spread across his palm and oozed between his fingers. ‘Good for it,’ she said, measuring out a length of bandage and fiddling with safety pins. ‘It’ll clean it up, stop an infection.’ He nodded but when he glanced up at her the electricity quavered and the house stuttered into darkness. ‘That’s all we need,’ Richmond said, knocking against something before there was the click and flicker of his cigarette lighter and the whole kitchen seemed to have contracted into the tiny bleb of its blue light. She told him there were candles on the boards, that the electricity had gone off earlier but come on again, and in a few minutes Richmond had them lit and the room shuffled into a soft tremble of light that formed vague little pools which drained everything of its solidity and substance.

  ‘Let’s get this finished, Peter,’ she said, lifting a candle and placing it on the table close to the basin and the light seemed to echo the sudden sheen and flush of her skin and he couldn’t help but stare. He lifted his hand out of the water and patted it dry with the towel and then she took it and, holding it out towards her, began to work the bandage round it. His hand turned and moved about the light like a moth. Richmond stood supervising, bending over the table and throwing his shadow across its wavering grain. When the job was finished he stared at his white-gloved hand and thanked her and she said it would do the job until he got the doctor to look at it. Then she made them a cup of tea and Richmond offered him a brandy to go with it but he declined it and made a little joke about his mother making him a cup of cocoa most nights. He watched Richmond swirl the brandy in his glass, then jerk it to the back of his throat and he saw that there was a physical intensity about the man that only the snow had managed to subdue. It lurked under the surface of his good manners, his social ease. He remembered the way he had sought to push the car out of the ditch, remembered the momentary contorted ugliness of his face, and in his presence suddenly felt his own boyishness.

  After they had sat for a while she took one of the candles and went to check the room he was to sleep in, and there was a thrill in that image as he turned it over in his mind and he let it warm him. He tried to think of something to say to Richmond but couldn’t and instead stared at his cup of tea and the little spiral of steam that vanished into the soft seep of light. It was Richmond’s strength that had made him the money he had, his strength that made people work for him, rather than the other way round. He was the type of man his father wanted to be. But her? He couldn’t understand that. She read books, looked at paintings. Her touch had been gentle. He couldn’t understand, no matter how hard he tried. It had to be a mistake, a mistake realized too late and then she was trapped with no way out. He listened for her tread above but heard nothing, then looked at Richmond and everything about him seemed to confirm his judgment. The way he held the brandy glass, the very way he sat in the chair, and as he glanced at him the bruising on his cheek seemed to have frozen into a stain on his skin.

  Her voice called him from the hall, telling him to bring one of the candles. Richmond wished him good night and thanked him for his help, then lit a cigarette and its red tip swept in an arc through the air when he waved his arm in farewell. She stood at the bottom of the stairs, the candle’s light drawing only a part of her face from the shadows and making her hair a part of the flame’s tremble, and she told him to follow her, waiting until he was only a few steps away before she moved ahead. Pictures briefly emerged from the dark patina of wood on the stairs, then faded again into shadows. He thought of the snow on the roof of the house, pressing against its walls, filling the fields all around it, and he remembered the way it had changed the world he once knew, transforming what had been the familiar and mundane into something that he no longer recognized and the memory suddenly lifted his step and filled him with an unexpected hope.

  He followed her along a corridor which had a large window at one end with its black white-webbed glass pulling the reflection of her candle towards it, until the light seemed to be outside and beaten by the swirl of the snow. And then she was showing him into a bedroom lit only by their two candles, which fluttered and echoed each other in the glass of the dresser. There were clothes laid out on the bed and he knew that if he were to wear Richmond’s they would be too big on him and he didn’t want the foolishness of that but she encouraged him to wear as many of them as he could against the cold.

  ‘Bed’s probably the warmest place now that the heating’s off,’ she said, and then she told him where the bathroom was and wished him good night. He listened carefully to her voice, trying to hear some inflection that might say something beyond the words but there was none to be heard and instead he mumbled a thank you for her care. She cupped her hand round the flame of her candle when it flickered in a draught from the open door and told him that it was him they had to thank and then she was gone, leaving behind her only the faint trace of her scent and a little whisper of smoke.

  He stood looking at Richmond’s clothes for a second, then moved them off the bed to a chair. There was a bowl of potpourri on the dresser and a set of silver-backed brushes that were cold to his touch. He wondered again how her hair felt, remembered the strand that fell across her cheek, wondered had she ever slept in this bed. H
e let his hand touch the cover and then he went to the window and opened the curtain. In the glass he saw the reflection of his face but it wasn’t that he wanted to see and turning to the dresser he blew out the candle, its final stutters lingering in the frost of the mirror. Then he stood and watched the fall of the snow.

  The bed seemed inescapably large after the narrow single bed of home and there were great pockets of cold in it that stopped him sleeping. He listened for their voices but what sounds there were seemed to have been muffled by the size of the house and the smother of snow-brindled darkness that surrounded it. He clustered little memories of what had gone before, sifting through them like coloured stones picked on the beach, polishing each with the intensity of feeling that flecked them with the grain of something precious. His hand was still sore, its smart of pain flaring at intervals, but he tried to blank that out by a new focus on something rescued from the flux of his thoughts. He had never felt like this before and it scared him a little because his control over his feelings seemed tentative and liable at any moment to slip beyond his reach and ability to impose any sense of order or understanding. He wasn’t a boy, a moon-struck teenager, falling headlong Narcissus-like into the depths of his own reflection, the mere creation of his own consuming need. He had read books. Once he had drunk whiskey. He had kissed girls. He tried to anchor himself by a recognition of his own foolishness, but he felt like a vessel thrown about in a storm, his thoughts careering dangerously like loosened cargo. And what was his experience? A few scraps of nothing, the vicarious experience provided by books.

  He tried to sleep but was conscious of the space in the bed for someone else. Little melodramatic fantasies played out in his mind, involving escapes in the night, rescues and pursuits, duels in the snow. And all of them involved her seeing the potential of a different world in him, of breaking free from the deadening weight of a material existence and a life subdued by the repression of money and power. There was the sound of laughter. It was as if someone had been listening to his thoughts. He pushed his head into the pillow to shut it out but it came again and through it rustled the scornful reminder of what patched together the fabric of his life. So it was his father’s store he was standing in and this time he was wearing his father’s coat and his fingers were brown, as if stained by nicotine, from searching in the box of rusted nails and screws. And he was writing the account of his life in the big ledger, filling in the columns and totalling up what his life amounted to, and as he struggled to do it people came into the store, setting the bell ringing angrily and asking for things he couldn’t find, even though they were somewhere on the shelves. There he was again, cleaning out the wedding car for a funeral but spilling all the gathered bits of confetti and as if in a dream they floated slowly down like snow and his hands were powerless to catch them.