The Banker's Niece 32: The artist

Jane can hear scrunching. The noise reminds her of something, something from long ago, but she can’t remember what. Then there’s a clunk and a rush of cold air and a woman’s voice says, ‘I saw your roof on my way back and I knew it hadn’t been there when I went out, so I raced home and fetched a shovel and . . . and . . .’ The woman pauses and pants for a while. ‘. . . and are you all right?’

    Jane opens her eyes. She feels as if she’s been woken from one of those dreams when you forget to put your clothes on and have to walk around naked. Or as if she’s still asleep and dreaming.

    Slowly, she takes stock of her surroundings.

    She’s in her car. The driver’s door is open. By the door, framed in whiteness, stands a woman. She has damp grey curls hanging to her shoulders. She’s wearing a pale blue anorak, none too clean. She has a doughy face, blotched red, and is staring at Jane with eyes that see too much.

    Around the woman’s feet, amongst piles of snow, sits an assortment of steaming dogs, also staring at Jane.

    ‘I . . . I . . . ’ Jane stammers.

    She what?

    What is she doing here? Where is she?

    ‘Can you stand?’ says the woman, grabbing Jane by the right arm and hauling.

    Jane falls out of the car and the woman holds her up. She hangs on to the woman as sensation to return to her legs. She realises that she’s shaking with cold - or something.

    ‘I’m Maisie, by the way,’ says the woman.

    ‘Jane,’ she croaks.

    At least she can remember her name.

    ‘Look,’ says Maisie, ‘I only live down the road. If you can walk, why don’t you come back with me for a bit and warm up?’

    The dogs are sniffing round her legs and groin. She puts her hand on the back of the tallest, a distant relation of the greyhound, and it gives her a look of deepest sympathy.

    ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘That would be lovely.’

   

The woman leads Jane up a tussocky bank, using her shovel upside down as a walking stick.

    Even though only a few tufts of grass show above the snow, Jane knows the bank is tussocky because her feet keep descending into nothingness. Soon she’s panting too and breaking out in sweat, the shivers gone. The dogs leap in and out of holes and tunnel under the snow with their noses as if the whole thing were a game.

    ‘My car - ?’ she gulps.

   ‘Oh don’t worry about that,’ says Maisie. ‘It’ll be perfectly safe. No one ever comes this way.’

    ‘Oh,’ says Jane.

    Except her.

    They reach the top of the bank and step at last on to something flat and firm. A road she guesses. The snow still reaches the top of her boots.

    Her boots (knee high, fleece lined) and her quilted coat are the only sensible things about her today, she thinks, as she returns to herself, and the events of the morning begin to replay themselves. What on earth is she going to say to this kind woman? How is she going to explain?

    She tries to suppress her memories. She doesn’t want to return. She wants to remain as uncritical as the dogs, as pure as the whiteness all around.

    They kick along the road through loose snow and crest a small rise.

    Jane gasps.

    Spread out before her is the white sea she remembers from her headlong arrival – in that other life – but now it sparkles with a zillion points of light. The sky is a deep clear blue. A sweet breeze sways back and forth like the breath of the planet. She wants to fly.

    Perhaps she is still dreaming.

    Yup,’ laughs Maisie. ‘It catches me too. Every time. With or without snow.’

    The woman heads down the other side of the rise and Jane follows, head fizzing.

        

At the bottom of the slope, huddled in a dip, a cottage appears. Its walls are white, streaked with green. They bulge over the road as if in the last stages of collapse. Its thatch hangs in a heavy fringe over tiny upstairs windows like something out of a fairy tale.

    They make their way round the side, past piles snow with bits of machinery poking out and a crooked open shed filled to the roof with logs. A row of dark firs stands guard behind the shed. They stop in front of a low door, once yellow.

    ‘There’s a knack to getting this open,’ says Maisie, putting her shoulder to the top of door while lifting it by its handle and giving the bottom of it a good kick. ‘That’s why I never bother to lock it.’

    The dogs cluster round as if trying to help.

    ‘Out of the way you stupid animals,’ she says affectionately, still pushing.

    Jane keeps trying to count the dogs but every time she reaches a different total, perhaps because each is different from the others and none bears close resemblance to any known breed so it’s hard to tick them off.

    ‘You do have a lot of dogs,’ she says.

    ‘I know,’ says Maisie ruefully. ‘Tom won’t let me near the Rescue Centre any more.’

    ‘Tom?’ says Jane.

    ‘Husband,’ says Maisie, finally managing to open the door and tumbling through the opening in a tangle of dog legs.

‘Soup?’ asks Maisie, sticking her head into a rickety fridge.

    Unlike William’s kitchen which is an echo of the faded grandeur outside, Maisie’s kitchen is a complete contrast to the scruffy and comfortless exterior.

    It’s warmed by a cream Rayburn, above which hangs an airer filled with drying clothes whose scent almost but not quite masks the scent of the drying dogs, who have arrayed themselves on blankets and cushions around the edges of the room.

    Jane is sitting at a circular table covered in a red and white checked cloth, the red echoed in the roses on the curtains framing the window. The slate floor is covered with rugs which appear to have been made from patches of thick woollen material sewn together like crazy paving.

    Baskets of logs sit by the back door, next to the Rayburn and at the bottom of a step which leads to a white door.

    ‘Everything in this house runs on wood,’ explains Maisie, seeing Jane looking at the baskets. ‘Tom’s a woodsman for the National Park.’

    Jane isn’t sure what a woodsman does, but she thinks again of fairy tales, and woodcutters heading into the forest.

    ‘This soup is amazing,’ she says.

    She can’t pin down the soup’s taste – it’s so different from anything she’s had before – but she has the sense that it’s feeding more than her body. With every mouthful she feels stronger.

    ‘Own leeks, own potatoes,’ says Maisie.

    Jane finds it hard to imagine how anything could grow in this landscape, but she supposes that even the moor must experience summer at some time.

    ‘You’ll have to come back when the weather’s better,’ says Maisie, ‘and I can show you the garden.’

    Jane looks up. ‘Oh, I couldn’t. You’ve done more than enough for me already.’

    She’s let this woman dig her out of a snowdrift, take her to her house and give her home-grown home-made soup. At the time she was too weak to say no. But that must be an end to it. She hates being beholden to anyone.

    ‘I’d better go,’ she says, pushing back her chair and standing up.

    ‘Of course you can’t go,’ Maisie remonstrates. ‘How are you going to get your car out? Anyway you haven’t seen my studio yet.’

    ‘Your studio!’ exclaims Jane. ‘You’re an artist?’

    How romantic to be an artist – of any kind – and how lucky she is to be consorting with a real live one.

    ‘You could call me that,’ laughs Maisie.

They go up the step and through the white door into an arctically cold passage, at the end of which Maisie opens another door, stands back and says, ‘Voilà.’

    Jane steps into a conservatory with windows on three sides above low white walls. Pieces of felted material in every colour imaginable hang from a line along the back wall, spill from baskets on the floor and cover every available piece of furniture – a sagging armchair, a table against the front window, an upright chair. A milk-churn log-burner glows in a corner, scenting the room with wood-smoke.

    Through the windows the land falls to a stream and then rises again through trees, with the curves of the high moor behind. Everything is snowy, tinted apricot by the setting sun.

    ‘Oh,’ breathes Jane. ‘It’s beautiful.’

    ‘Yes,’ says Maisie. ‘I’m very lucky.’

    She takes a couple of logs from yet another basket and throws them into the burner, which flares into life.

    ‘Sit down,’ she says, clearing the armchair by dumping the piles of material on to the floor.

    Jane sinks into the chair. It has faded-blue loose covers and a shape that speaks of generations of slumped humans.

    Maisie sits on the upright chair.

    ‘What, er, what sort of art do you do?’ asks Jane.

    Art – painting – is something about which she knows next to nothing. Her ignorance embarrasses her.

    ‘I shrink old woollen jumpers in the washing machine and then make them into tapestries,’ says Maisie.

    ‘Oh my goodness,’ says Jane. ‘That sounds like so much fun.’   

    ‘It is,’ smiles Maisie.

    ‘And have you always done that?’

    ‘Oh no,’ says Maisie. ‘I used to be an art teacher. I took early retirement.’

    ‘And what does Tom think about your art?’

    Jane found it hard to imagine a woodsman and an artist having anything in common, except perhaps solitude.

    ‘Well, I was already an artist when we met so he must be OK with it.’

    ‘Oh,’ says Jane, confused.

    ‘Yes,’ continues Maisie. ‘I was in my late-fifties when we married. He’s younger than me.’

    ‘I see,’ says Jane, impressed.

     They carry on talking as the sun sinks behind the hills and the sky turns cobalt.

    Maisie tells Jane about her son and her previous life as a single mother.

    She explains how the tapestries started as a hobby, a way to use up old clothes and an excuse for exploring charity shops. How they began to be snapped up by rich people in large old houses which needed heavy hangings to block draughts. And how eventually the tapestries paid for the room they were sitting in.

    Perhaps it’s something about the strangeness of the day, but Jane’s happy talking to this woman. All her usual reservations about tête-à-têtes have vanished.

    Just as they did with Sharon, she remembers.

    And remembering Sharon makes Jane remember everything Sharon said about destiny and life-plans.

    And remembering that makes her less ashamed of her behaviour over the last few days and weeks.

    And more optimistic.

    She’s on the way to somewhere, even if she doesn’t know what that somewhere is yet and even if she’s going about it in a mad way.

    And if Maisie can start a new life in her fifties, then so can she.

A cacophony of ecstatic barking breaks out in the kitchen.

    ‘That’ll be Tom,’ says Maisie. ‘Come and meet him.’

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