Designs on Life (9 page)

She had a great curiosity about Mr. Ferguson. It was not that she liked him much, for whenever he came to the house, something very peculiar always happened in it, some deep alteration in its atmosphere that brought a sense of crisis, of things stirring under the surface, almost of peril. Yet he was a cheerful, friendly man who often gave her presents and who had told her how to make a snowman, suggesting that he and she should make one together.

She was not yet quite convinced, however, that snow was really falling. She could see that something was moving in the air, moving with a wavering lightness, like an old lacy shawl being shaken out by hands delicately careful of its fineness. But still she could see nothing unusual on the ground, no shimmer of whiteness, no crystalline glitter.

From her conversations with Mrs. Nettle, she remembered a technical term. “Mummy, I don’t believe it’s going to lay.”

“Lie,” her mother said.

“Well, I don’t believe—” Meg stopped, because she heard her mother give a deep sigh. She came out from behind the curtain. “Don’t you like snow either? Mrs. Nettle doesn’t. She says—” She stopped again, because it was clear to her that her mother was not listening.

The child looked at her uneasily. It had happened again, the thing that was always happening these days. Her mother had taken off her coat and hat and was sitting in the armchair by the fire, pressing her hands tightly to her temples, holding back the hair from her face, which was drained of all its brightness. Her body, crouched crookedly in the chair, looked spent of all its energy and her eyes, peering deeply into the fire and far beyond it, were dull and empty.

The child resented the abrupt change. Her memory was still very short, yet it seemed to her that in a place called Alexandria, which she had already forgotten far more than she pretended, such sharp transitions as this from excitable gaiety to dreary and unexplained lassitude, had hardly ever occurred. She had lived then, she believed, at the heart of a cheerful calm, with an attentive and happy mother to look after her.

Moving restlessly about the room, Meg tried to draw some attention to herself by her fidgeting, but her mother did not even look at her.

Presently Meg asked querulously, “Why hasn’t Daddy come home yet?”

“His train hasn’t got in,” her mother said.

“But it’s late.”

Her mother glanced at her wrist-watch. “No, it’s only the snow making it get dark early. All the same, it’s time I was getting the tea.” She stood up. She was frowning, but as she met the child’s gaze, she summoned up a smile. “Did you have a nice afternoon with Mrs. Nettle?”

“Oh yes, she’s an awfully nice person,” Meg said, responding eagerly.

“What did you do?”

“We talked.”

“All the time?”

“Well, some of the time we played beggar-my-neighbour, and then I drew a picture for her. Mummy, shall we play cards now?”

“I’m going to get the tea,” her mother said. “Why don’t you go upstairs to the landing window and see if you can see Daddy’s train come in?”

“Will you play cards with me after tea?”

“Just one game, if you like. But then off you go to bed.”

“All right, but I hope it’s a long game—a terrifically long one!” She laughed and ran upstairs to look out of the landing window.

It had been her own discovery, on coming to live in this house, and it had greatly raised its value in her eyes, that from this window she could see the railway-line, about a quarter of a mile away. Most of the other windows in the house faced in the opposite direction, towards the common, which her parents, to her surprise, considered an asset. However, they had come to realise the virtue, particularly on rainy days, of having one window in their house from which it was possible to watch the trains go by.

The most exciting train of the day was naturally the train on which her father returned from his work in the nearby town, or rather, for the first few weeks, this train had been the one that Meg had been most eager to see arrive at the station. Recently, for some reason, she had found herself forgetting to watch for it. Her father’s arrivals home had somehow changed their character and she no longer felt the same impatience and eagerness working up in her, as the day wore on, as she had at first. He had a way now, when he came home, of sitting watching her mother in a heavy silence, answering only absently and nervously when Meg tried to make him talk. Once or twice this had been so unbearable that she had started to scream in an agony of uncontrolled temper, which had had a peculiarly terrible result. No one had blamed her, no one had taken any notice of her, but her father, usually a very quiet and gentle man, had suddenly started to abuse her mother in hideous, bitter words, as if it were she who was kicking, crying and behaving disgracefully.

At last her mother had answered, “But it’s all over—I’ve told you so again and again. Why can’t you believe me?”

“Because I know you, I know what you are!” he had shouted.

“Then let’s go away from here—far away—as far as you like! Will that convince you?”

“What’s the good of going away?” he had asked. “Hasn’t it always been the same, wherever we’ve been, except that you didn’t let me know so much about it?”

“Sometimes I think you’re crazy,” her mother had said.

None of it made any sense to the child, but that scene was the most frightening thing that had ever happened to her, and some of the fear that she had felt then in the midst of her own helpless rage, was now projected on to the train that came snaking through the dusk every evening at five thirty-five, its windows all beautifully glowing.

But this evening she could not think seriously about anything but the snow, and she went upstairs happily to watch for the train. The snow made everything different. For one thing, as she saw as soon as she reached the landing, it had almost completely blocked the window and she was hardly able to see out at all. Great flakes were being hurled against the glass by the north wind. A drift had thickened already along the window-ledge. A white crust had formed round the edges of each pane and a fine spray seemed mysteriously to be coming straight through the glass itself and falling in tiny crystals on the sill inside.

Through the rapidly thickening curtain, Meg saw a flicker of lights outside in the darkness, telling her that her father’s train was arriving, but it was the wonder of the snow itself that held her tense and still. Then suddenly, with a shrill squeal of excitement, she raced downstairs.

“Mummy, it’s snowing right into the house!” she shrieked. “Mummy—”

As she reached the bottom of the stairs, the hall door opened. A freezing gust blew in from the garden and she saw an extraordinary figure standing there, a figure such as she had never seen before. It had a white hat, a white coat, queer bulky white boots and even bristling white eyebrows and a white moustache on an oddly grey-white face. Against the darkness it looked enormously tall. Quivering with shock at the surprise, it took the child a moment to recognise her father.

When that happened, she could not help shouting with laughter.

“I thought you were a snowman!” she cried. “You look just like a snowman!” Turning, she rushed on into the kitchen. “Mummy, come and look—Daddy’s come home and he looks just like a snowman!”

Her mother was toasting some bread under the grill. She put a hand over her eyes and said in a shaky, muffled voice, “For God’s sake don’t make such a row—it’ll drive me mad!”

Too excited to take much notice of her mother’s odd tone, the child ran back to the hall.

Her father was still in the open doorway, but he had turned his back on the house and was beating the snow off the front of his coat with his gloved hands and stamping his feet on the brick doorstep, so that the chunks of snow that had made his boots look so big fell away from them. When he turned again, coming in and closing the door and beginning to unbutton his wet, dark overcoat, he was no longer a strange, white, almost faceless monster, but was the familiar figure who always arrived home at this time.

The child ran ahead of him into the living-room, thinking that he would follow her at once, as he usually did, to warm himself at the fire. The room felt delightfully cosy after the cold and draughty landing, though the fire, which her mother had made up with fresh coal before going to make the tea, was not burning well.

Making a great show of warming her hands at it and of stamping her feet on the hearthrug, as she had just seen her father do on the doorstep, the child called out, “D’you know the snow’s coming right in at the window upstairs. Daddy? But the window’s tight shut. I looked and I know it is. Can snow come through glass. Daddy?”

There was no answer and she realised that he had not followed her into the room, but was still in the hall. Yet no sound of voices or of movement reached her from it, and what seemed suddenly stranger, no sound came to her either from the kitchen, where a moment before her mother had been moving quickly about, making the tea. The silence in the house was so complete that Meg might have been alone in it.

Instantly the swift panic of her age seized her and she felt utterly convinced that both of her parents had gone away and left her in an empty house in the midst of a terrible storm. She rushed to the door.

They were both there, just outside it, staring at one another across the small hall. The woman’s eyes were enormous and terrified in her colourless face, the man’s eyes burned feverishly. But there was something so alike in the expressions on their dissimilar faces that for once they bore a strange resemblance to one another. Both of them were shivering.

The woman was the first to speak.

“No!” she said hoarsely in answer, as even the child realised, to something that had not been said. Flinging up one arm, as if to keep something away from her, she repeated it,
“No!”

The man raised his hands. He raised them only a few inches and looked at them as if he had never seen them before. They must be very cold, the child thought, they were shaking so.

“I didn’t know I was going to—I swear to God I didn’t. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t plan—but I had to know, I couldn’t bear it any longer. So I came home early. I saw you together. But what happened after that …”

He stopped as the woman turned her head sharply to look at the child, standing in the doorway of the living-room.

More slowly he also turned his head and they both went on looking at her and the silence returned, a silence that made her start to shiver too, though it held her motionless, as though in the most evil of spells.

Mercifully her mother released her from it.

“Go back into the room, go back at once and shut the door,” she said in a thin, jerky voice. “You’ll catch cold out here.”

Quietly the child turned and went back into the room.

She was glad to go, yet the room no longer seemed as warm as before, or as safe and pleasant. As she closed the door, which she did softly, with both hands on the big round doorknob, releasing it very carefully, fearing to contribute by the least heedlessness to the incomprehensible strain of the situation, she heard her mother say in an even stranger tone, “But what will you do now? What shall we—what can we do?”

Meg went to the fire and knelt down in front of it. The fresh, piled-up coal, which had hardly begun to burn, was like a rampart between her and the glowing heart of the lire. No flame, but only brown, acrid-smelling smoke streamed up the chimney. She felt disgusted with it. She knew that she was not allowed to touch it and at that moment she had no thought of doing so, but as the minutes passed and no one else came to tend the fire or to bring the tea, the silence and the bleakness of the room began to affect her like an active hostility. An overmastering desire came to her to do something drastic, violent. Grasping the poker, she snatched a quick glance over her shoulder at the closed door, then thrust the point deep into the fire.

At first nothing much happened, but when she had repeated the action two or three times, a little flame came licking up from under a piece of coal. Sitting back, she watched with absorption and saw a second little flame appear, and then another, and then two of them lean towards each other and play together, until, with a sudden roaring, they fused and shot upwards in a broad, yellow tongue of fire.

As the heat from it stung her cheeks, the child gave a wriggle of pleasure and withdrawing the poker, laid it down on the exact spot from which she had taken it up, so that no one could know that she had been playing with it. Entranced by the new life that she had stirred into being in the fireplace, she watched it with a hypnotized stare and hardly noticed when, a few minutes later, the door opened and her parents came in.

Her mother was pushing the tea-trolley, her father was smoking a cigarette. They went to their usual chairs on either side of the fireplace and her mother started to pour out the tea. For a little while Meg thought that everything had returned to normal, except that neither of them spoke at all. But this was not really so unusual nowadays that it worried her particularly. Then she noticed that when her mother handed her father his cup of tea, his hands were still shaking so much that he slopped half of it into the saucer.

“Are you very cold?” Meg asked solicitously. “Snow’s always very cold, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s it, I’m cold.” His voice was so low that she could hardly hear it.

“Perhaps you’ve caught a cold,” she said. “When Mrs. Nettle’s son-in-law had a cold he lost his voice. Are you losing your voice, d’you think?”

“Perhaps I am,” he said.

“If you are,” she said, “you won’t be able to help me make a snowman tomorrow, will you?”

“Anyway, Daddy has to go to work tomorrow, as usual,” her mother said. “I’ll help you make a snowman.”

It struck the child with faint surprise that work and other commonplace things should go on when there was snow on the ground.

“Mr. Ferguson said he’d help me make a snowman,” she said.

Abruptly her father put down his plate, which had some hot buttered toast on it, and put his hands to his head.

“Jim!” his wife said warningly. She went on, “Yes, I’m sure Mr. Ferguson will help you. We’ll go over in the morning and ask him.”