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.
