The Big Snow Page 7

  ‘God in Heaven,’ his father hissed, ‘one minute he’s stopped and the next it’s the race to the North Pole.’ He was strugging for breath. ‘We’re not home and dry yet either – we still have to negotiate the headstones and get it lowered. We’ll need to shoulder it now and please God don’t let anyone slip. I’ve picked out the best of the bunch and no harm to him but her father isn’t up to this – not in these conditions. So keep your eye open and be ready to put your hand to it. And put on your cap, give it a bit of dignity.’

  He did as he was told and the arrival of the procession of mourners coincided with Stevenson’s return. In a few moments the coffin was shouldered and the cortège fanned out amidst the almost buried headstones as they headed for the board-covered grave. The gravediggers had worked hard to keep it clear and only as the mourners approached did they remove the boards and lay them down at its sides. He watched his father in his long black coat and hat lead the coffin forward, his soft litany of guidance his incense and icon. One of the younger men stepped forward and read a short verse from the Bible and said a prayer. When he had finished the gravediggers looked at his father, in anticipation of his signal to start lowering, but then the young man invited Martin Stevenson to say a few words and the gravediggers leaned back on their spades again. Several heads turned skyward where a few slow flakes had started to drift down. Stevenson stood at the end of the open grave with a page in his hand. He was conscious again of the pain in his own hand and when he glanced down he saw that the wound had opened to seep blood to the surface of the bandage. It was some verses of a poem Stevenson wanted to read. He thanked them for coming and his voice was nervous and broken. He asked them to bear with him for a moment more, told them the poem was by Henry Vaughan. As he started to read, his voice strengthened:

  They are all gone into the world of light!

  And I alone sit lingring here;

  Their very memory is fair and bright,

  And my sad thoughts doth clear.

  It glows and glitters in my cloudy brest

  Like stars upon some gloomy grove,

  Or those faint beams in which this hill is drest,

  After the Sun’s remove.

  I see them walking in an Air of glory,

  Whose light doth trample on my days;

  My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,

  Mee glimering and decays.

  Dear, beauteous death! the Jewel of the Just,

  Shining no where, but in the dark;

  What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust;

  Could man outlook that mark!

  And yet, as Angels in some brighter dreams

  Call to the soul, when man doth sleep:

  So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted theams,

  And into glory peep.

  If a star were confin’d into a Tomb

  Her captive flames must needs burn there;

  But when the hand that lockt her up, gives room,

  She’l shine through all the sphere.

  O father of eternal life and all

  Created glories under thee!

  Resume thy spirit from this world of thrall

  Into true liberty.

  Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill

  My perspective still as they pass,

  Or else remove me hence unto that hill,

  Where I shall need no glass.

  Someone coughed; a gravedigger’s spade clanked against his shuffling toe-capped boots. Stevenson folded the page and put it in his pocket and so they knew he had finished. Someone said an uncertain Amen and it echoed round the edges of the group until it faded into a whisper. The snow had started to come down. He looked down at the reddening palm of his hand and knew he had to find her, had to see her again.

  ‘A star confined to a tomb, her captive flames must needs burn there’ – the words ran round his head. When he went back to university he’d look the poem up, write out his own copy. He wished he still had all the words clear in his memory. Something about being set free and shining through all the sphere. But even though he didn’t have all the words, their meaning seemed unclouded as he thought of her. Surely her house was that same tomb, bereft of what she wanted. He stood at his bedroom window and watched the light stretch into the snow until it edged a faint blueness to its surface. The tall trees in the next field had been dressed in a flounce and filigree of white that made them look fragile, even delicate, as if old age had suddenly been thrust upon them. For the first time he had an awareness of time, of its potential for brevity, of its capacity to snatch away what was taken for granted. He thought of Martin Stevenson sitting in his empty house trying to make sense of what had happened, he thought of the long haul to the graveyard, of the tracks the procession had left in the snow, tracks which had already been obliterated by fresh falls, and knew that he had to try to make this thing happen before it was too late.

  There were other cautionary voices in his head but he tried to stifle them and hold on to what he knew was true. If he didn’t, he saw his future replicate that of Meaulnes as he pored incessantly over maps and memories, hoping that they would lead him back to his lost domain. He tormented himself by allowing his imagination to give his father knowledge of what now spun round his head and so he heard that scornful voice rattle out all the doubts he had already constructed for himself. The voice talked about class and money, about age and experience, about things over which he had no control. There were no answers to these doubts but there was something even stronger that diminished their significance when he let himself think of her. It was his father’s real voice that now climbed the stairs to his room as he gave another account of the morning’s funeral, talking his part up until it took on the characteristics of a military campaign, dwelling on strategies and crucial decisions made, of victory grasped in the face of innumerable obstacles. And once again his incredulous descriptions of what he had never witnessed at a funeral before – ‘Never seen the like of it, in all my days,’ he was still repeating while he reiterated every detail that deviated from what he thought of as the right way of doing things. Afterwards he’d asked him several times what the poem was all about, the things placed in the coffin, as if the education his son shared with Stevenson must provide the inside knowledge. His curiosity made him dissatisfied with the answers he received and he had started to talk about it the way he spoke of the Masonic mysteries and rituals, that if only you had access to this inside knowledge everything would make sense and some desirable power would be shared.

  He tried to obliterate the voice by concentrating on something else and he tried reading but the words swam round his head like a shoal of fish where each one was indistinguishable from the next. He knew his father was about to leave and open the shop again. Despite the snow there had been a steady stream of customers, earlier that morning, mostly looking for the same things – candles, gas cylinders, bags of coal, spades. He had wanted to keep the shop open during the funeral with his mother holding the fort but she had refused on the grounds that it would look disrespectful, ignoring all his arguments about special circumstances and his claims to be providing an emergency service.

  Then there was a phone call and a few minutes later his father’s pleasure–laden voice calling to him. ‘I’m going to have By Royal Appointment painted above the shop – it was the Duchess asking if I was open today. She’s looking for undercoat, says she needs buckets of it.’ He knew he meant Alice. ‘Says that if she’s stuck inside she might as well get some more work done to the house. I said you’d run some up to her right away.’ And then to anticipate arguments that never came he added, ‘You know I can’t leave the shop when there’s so many looking for things. There’s some out in the shed, you don’t even have to come to the shop – you could use the sledge to run them up.’

  There seemed something disrespectful about using the sledge for commerce so soon after it had carried a coffin but he had tried lifting the tins on his own and knew they were too heavy and
too awkward to carry with only one good hand. So the eight tins sat in two cardboard boxes with a piece of cord securing them as he set out across the fields. His father waved him off with a chorus of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ before the sound of the van’s engine rang out across the space he had put between himself and the house. It wasn’t how he imagined himself returning to the house but the thought of seeing her again shaded out hesitations about his message and into his step slipped a run of anticipation that sent him scurrying and kicking through the snow with as much speed as he could muster. Sometimes he plunged almost to the top of his boots and he had to wade as if through water with slow deliberate steps and pull of the sledge. It felt as if he were making the journey for the first time, seeing the foreignness of the landscape as if it was a stretch of tundra transported from some distant empire. Fresh drifts and humps of snow had rendered even the most familiar fields both confusing and intriguing in their unfamiliar sweep and contour. There was a glittery throw of iridescence that overlaid everything and touched even the most humble of objects, making him feel that in this world the doubts he had spoken to himself in his father’s voice were stripped of their full power and replaced by the force of something else. And it felt, too, as if the landscape belonged to him alone, for apart from a couple of inky crows and a solitary rabbit emerging from a hedgerow, he had seen no other signs of life. Once he stopped for a rest and sitting on the sledge watched as the wind powdered the trees ahead so it looked as if they were shivering the snow off their black branches. Then he pushed on again, driven forward by anticipation of who waited for him.

  About five minutes from the house he saw a figure in the distance, zigzagging down a slope beyond the estate boundary of fir trees. He stood on the sledge to gain a better view and realized it was someone on skis. There was a smooth lightness in the turns and curves and a speed that he envied as he glanced at the plodding, heavy path he had left in his own wake. For a few seconds he told himself that it was her but as he watched the figure drop below the top of the firs he saw from the frame and size of the skier that it was Richmond. He headed on, trying to infuse his steps with greater lightness, trying not to press so much of his weight into the snow, but he felt clumsy and slow. He remembered Richmond’s clothes laid out on the bed for him to wear and he wondered what it would have felt like and what it took to be the person who wore them. There was an edge of fear, too, in the thought that there must be things below the surface of the man that he had been blind to, things that had attracted her to him in the first place and that maybe these things were too powerful to be broken. And what did he know of what passed between them or what existed unseen and unknown to the rest of the world? What had anyone known of the life that Martin Stevenson shared with his wife or what the words of the poem had really meant? So now his arrival at the house was shrouded in doubt and by the image of a man skiing effortlessly down a slope.

  He was greeted by the dog’s barks as it fretted and sniffed at the snow from a cleared area round the back door. It was Jenny who opened the door to see what the noise was about. As always she was pleased to see him but when she glanced at the sledge she said, ‘It’s been put to some use today,’ and he felt anew his original disquiet at using it so soon after the funeral. ‘It was my father’s idea,’ he said, ‘and he’s a hard man to change his mind.’ She nodded and opening the door invited him into the kitchen. His eyes hunted the room and hall but there was no sign of her when he sat down at the table where he had sat the night before. Jenny offered him a cup of tea and while he wondered if she was out skiing with her husband, she came into the kitchen wearing a paint-smeared smock and denim jeans. Her hair was pulled back sharply from her face.

  ‘I wondered who you were talking to Jenny,’ she said. ‘How’s your hand Peter? Looks like someone more expert than me has done your bandage.’

  ‘The doctor dressed it this morning, said it’ll be fine. Won’t even need stitches. Thanks for looking after it for me,’ he said, aware of his face flushing with colour.

  ‘The least we could do, seeing as we were responsible for you getting it in the first place. And thanks for bringing over the paint. I thought I’d heed my own words and take a break from my work and try painting walls instead. The last work we had done wasn’t so wonderful, so I’m thinking of slapping some undercoat on and then trying something different myself. Maybe a kind of frieze or trompe l’oeil, something like that – I’m not sure yet. Haven’t really convinced Brian yet but if it saves him money he should go along with it in the end.’

  ‘It’s going to be in the big room that’s used for entertaining and parties,’ Jenny added while she poured tea for all three of them.

  He watched her sip the tea, her skin paler than he remembered it but her eyes the same blue. There was a fleck of white paint on her forehead. ‘Brian found his old skis packed away in the garage and he’s out there somewhere trying them out. Probably break his neck. He didn’t like her hair pulled back so tightly – it made her face seem thinner, took away some of its mystery but it also made it more open, less remote. She stood up and, going to the back door, saw the sledge for the first time. ‘So that’s how you brought the paint. All you need now is a team of huskies to take all the work out of it. I haven’t been on a sledge in years, maybe I should give it a try, put one over on Brian.’ He hated the name on her lips. He watched her standing with his back to him while she stared through the glass. Her clothes made her shapeless but, like her pulled-back hair, less elevated into a higher world, far beyond his reach. He found himself wishing that Jenny wasn’t there but was glad for the break her presence put on the swirl of words in his head and then shamed by the knowledge that he wasn’t brave enough to shape what it was he felt into those same words. She opened the door and the light streaked the side of her face. ‘I’m going to bring in this paint and get started again,’ she said, setting her cup in the sink. He hurried to help her but she insisted he finished his tea and after she had brought the last tin inside she lifted one and held it up to read the label as if reading the name on a bottle of wine. ‘Do the job,’ she said and then, reaching for her purse, she asked him what she owed him but he refused payment by saying that his father would put it on her account, desperate to avoid her handing him money.

  There was nothing to delay his departure. Jenny was rinsing the cups and wiping the top of the boards. The back door was still open and the dog wandered in and out, leaving its damp prints on the stone floor. ‘I’ll help you with the painting,’ he said. Maybe just being close to her would be enough. Maybe all the rest was nothing but foolishness. ‘I couldn’t take your time like that,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ve studying to do or maybe your father needs you in the shop.’ Jenny was looking at him. He hoped it wasn’t so obvious.

  ‘I’ve nothing else planned, I could spare a couple of hours,’ he said, frightened that she was going to refuse.

  ‘Well, only if you let me pay you for your time.’

  He wanted to refuse the offer but he saw that it was the difference between helping and having to go and reluctantly he accepted, determining that when the time came he would shrug it off, offer the help as a sign of his friendship.

  The room she was working in was the main drawing room and all the furniture was wreathed in white cloths so that for a second when he entered the room it seemed that there had been a fall of snow inside the house. She had started on the end wall and covered the lower part in a thin wash of white, leaving the area above head height untouched. ‘The walls seem to soak in the paint,’ she complained. ‘It’s going to need a couple of undercoats before the top colour and then the actual painting. At the speed I’m going at, it’ll take about a year. I’ll probably end up bringing in someone to get it done.’ He offered to do the top bit and she went to fetch step-ladders. Then he heard Jenny’s voice in the kitchen saying that she was off and after a brief conversation there was the sound of the back door closing and with a kick of his heart he realized that they were alone in the
house. The wooden ladders were old and rickety and she fussed about him being careful and not having another accident while helping them out. He tried to think of amusing stories to recount but struggled in vain and instead concentrated on painting and listening to what she had to say as they worked.

  ‘I’d like the room to be different,’ she said, ‘from what you might expect to see in a house like this. Something a bit original and surprising. Just haven’t worked out exactly what, though. We’re keeping the ceiling the way it is – I really like all that moulding and plasterwork. Have you any ideas?’

  ‘Why don’t you put some of your own work straight on to the walls?’ he offered.

  ‘I don’t think you’d say that if you saw the abstracts I’m currently producing,’ she laughed. ‘Don’t think people are quite ready for them yet. They’d probably spill their glass of sherry on the carpet in shock. Jenny’s face is a real treat when she sees them for the first time. I was toying with the idea of doing a Chinese theme, painting the walls red and then adding traditional designs – cherry blossom, herons, calligraphy, that sort of thing. Mostly red and black. What do you think?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said, thinking of his own living room and cringing at the thought of her ever seeing it. With a quiver of embarrassment he remembered that her husband had sat in the same room, ameliorated only by the knowledge that he had seen it by candlelight. The memory distracted him a little and he watched his brush run a thin drip of paint. ‘The Chinese invented gunpowder, writing and fireworks,’ he said suddenly without knowing why. He had to lean from the ladders to mop up the escaping drip.