Winter

by Ali Smith

  —

  It was still early enough to be dark out. The foreign girl had gone back out to the barn to sleep. Arthur was asleep there too. Her sister was asleep in the top of the house.

  Sophia went to her room. She closed the door. She opened her wardrobe. She took out the shoes, pair by pair, from the floor of the wardrobe. This took quite some time. She liked shoes. She had a lot of shoes. She was a shoe person.

  She lifted the wardrobe’s flooring.

  She took out the stone with both hands. It was weighty. In the fade from the dark to the morning light it looked fluently veined. It was pale red/brown, very like the material they used to line the upper walls of the Pantheon in Rome. Sophia had seen it, an ancient church where the Renaissance artist Raphael’s remains were kept in a stone box over at one side, with a thousand people flashing their phones and cameras at the box all day from the moment they opened the doors of the place, doors so tall and heavy that they’d always open with a forced serenity, it’d be impossible for them not to, in a building that’s almost always too busy, almost always a mess of people and happens also to be a mess of overdone decor on its lower level in Sophia’s opinion.

  But as the eye rises, and the building itself rises, everything simplifies till there’s nothing but near-plain relief-carved squares-inside-squares of clean stone. Then at the top and the heart of the dome there’s a round opening like a vision, the open air itself, the light, nothing but sky for a roof.

  Pantheon.

  All the gods.

  What was it again, in the old pretty poem, that melts away, like snow in May, as if there were no such cold thing? It was true that stone was cold, until you warmed it. This ball of stone would have come from a warm country originally, would it? She’d heard on the radio someone talking once about a marble-like stone from the north of England and the woman on the radio said that stones had scents and that the northern stone sometimes gave off the smell of decay because it was composed partly of ancient shells of once-living creatures which decomposed when you broke the stone open and they met the air again.

  She raised the stone to her nose. It smelt of her wardrobe, her own perfume.

  She held it against her face.

  Its skin was faultless.

  Out in the early morning through the window the light was up but there was no traffic noise, not yet, too early. What there was instead was the winter sound of crows with the birdsong above it, like two weatherfronts meeting, like the coming season getting ready midway through the old one to make itself heard.

  She put it back inside on the tissue paper. The tissue paper was quite new; the last cushion of tissue paper in here had been feeding a batch of those small gold moths. She laughed whenever she thought about that; she’d looked up into her own clothes hanging there, then out and round the room. Moths could eat it all if they liked. This whole house could fall away to nothing, and when it did, at the centre of its wreckage?

  The stone, beautiful, unchanged.

  She replaced the floor plank then the first of the pairs of shoes, then the next and the next, and so on.

  —

  It is a balmy Tuesday in July 1985, late morning on Great Portland Street in London.

  Is it you? he says. It is you!

  And it’s you, she says. Danny.

  Sophie, he says. The address you gave me. I lost it.

  I lost yours too, she says.

  I put it in my pocket and the next time I looked it was gone, it just wasn’t there, he says. It was terrible.

  I bet Cornwall took it, she says.

  You bet what? he says.

  Or Devon, she says.

  Oh. Ha! Ha ha, he says. You remember. Oh my goodness. You look so like you. You look even more like you than I remember. You look beautiful.

  No I don’t, she says. And look at you.

  Older, he says.

  You’re the same, she says.

  Given that Devon’s at university now and Cornwall’s been and done A levels, he says.

  She laughs.

  You look exactly the same, she says.

  And I found out what Chei Bres means, he says.

  What what means? she says.

  The name of the house, he says. It’s Cornish. Of course.

  You speak Cornish now? she says.

  Well, no, he says, just the same old German and French and Italian and I can still read a bit of the Hebrew if pressed, but Cornish I can’t, no, but I looked it up, and it means House of the mind, of the head, of the psyche. Psyche’s House. I looked it up back then, in 1978. I’ve been waiting to tell you.

  Well, she says.

  Well, he says.

  Now you have, she says.

  Yes, he says.

  Thank you, she says. I can’t believe you even remembered.

  How could I forget? he says. Where are you off to now? Can we go for a, can you come for a coffee or something?

  I’ve got a meeting, she says. But, oh –.

  Oh, okay, he says. Well, we can, another –.

  No. I mean yes. I mean, I can miss the meeting, she says.

  They take a cab. His house is on the Cromwell Road, he tells her he bought it cheap in the 60s. It’ll be worth a fortune now, she thinks. Its windows are huge and it’s all been knocked into open plan space, bedroom above the living room, kitchen below. Its shelves are all books and art, beauty everywhere. When they have sex (and they have sex immediately, as soon as he’s closed the front door) it’s the best sex she has yet had. It’s not like sex. It’s like she’s been heard, seen, paid attention to, not shagged or fucked or screwed, not like just sex – more like something she’s never, something that she hasn’t a name for. Something she can’t put into words happens.

  That sounds quite rude; see what happens with words? It’s not what she means. She means words will make it less than it is, or something it isn’t.

  Later on her way home, as she walks down a street, there’ll be words again, she’ll be dazed with it, blasted by it, made roofless like a house after a gale by it and the walls all down, made open, maybe such a thing as too open because this street she’ll be on, it’s a pretty run-down street but it will be vibrant to her, though below her there’ll be nothing but a pavement, but beautiful, the pavement, well get real, pavements aren’t beautiful, and the bus shelter a beauty, buildings, scruffy, beautiful, beautiful fast food place, shockingly beautiful coin-operated launderette full of strangers whose profiles in the late evening sun are, yes, though she’ll know they aren’t really, but they will be, right then, unbelievably beautiful.

  Now though she stretches out naked on the long couch. She looks at the art on the walls of the place while he goes downstairs to make something to eat in the kitchen. Some of the art looks really modern. Some of it looks primitive, that stone with a hole in it like a small standing stone.

  Like in the book The Owl Service, she tells him when he comes back up.

  Yes, he says, and she does that, Hepworth, I think, puts the holes through what she makes, because she wants people to think about exactly what you just said, time, and ancient things, but also because she really just wants them to want to touch what she makes, you know, to be reminded about things that are quite physical, sensory, immediate, he says.

  A gallery’d never allow people touching it, she says.

  More’s the pity, he says.

  Is it worth a lot of money? she says. I mean, they, are they?

  I don’t know, he says. Things are always worth more after someone dies, and it’s ten years now since she went. I just love it. That’s what makes it worth the world.

  He tells her they’re sort of a mother and child pairing, the child stone the little one and the larger stone the mother. The larger stone has the hole in it and a flat place on it where the smaller stone is meant to sit.

  He tells her the artist said that she was tired of faces and of dramas and that she wanted a universal language.

  One where the world itself speaks, he says, not
just us on the surface arguing the toss in all the different languages all across it.

  She puts a hand out towards the stones.

  Can I? she says.

  Yes, he says. You have to.

  She picks up the smaller rounder stone, curved like a breast, heavy. She cups it in her hands. She puts it back where it was. She fingers the hole through the larger stone. It’s nothing but a circle carved through stone. But it’s sort of amazing. It’s unexpectedly satisfying to touch.

  It would be good to be full of holes, she says. Then all the things you can’t express would maybe just flow out.

  What a thoughtful way to see it, he says.

  She blushes at the thought that she’s thoughtful.

  She walks round the sculpture. It makes you walk round it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once.

  She doesn’t say so in case he thinks she’s showing off.

  It is stone, two stones is all it is and one with a hole in it.

  She sits down again, settles back into his arms like he’s an armchair.

  Do you know that story, she says, about the brilliant artist and the king, and the king sends his men to get the artist to make the perfect work of art for him, and the artist draws a circle, just a circle, nothing else, but it’s a perfect circle, and gives it to them and says give your king this from me?

  That’s an old story about the artist called Giotto, he says at her ear.

  Oh bless you, she says.

  I wasn’t sneezing, he says. Giotto’s his name.

  I know, she says. I mean I know you weren’t sneezing. I meant it, a blessing. I’m saying a sort of thank you.

  For what? he says.

  For knowing what I was talking about, she says, first of all. Then for making that story real, about a real person, not just a myth. It’s a story I’ve known since I was little. I didn’t know it was true.

  I don’t know that it’s true, it’s more probably apocryphal, he says. But what else are we? We’re all apocrypha.

  She tells him that scientists have just sent up into space a machine called a Giotto to take pictures of the stars and the coming comet.

  Wait a minute, he says.

  He goes over to the shelves by the window where all the books in all their languages are. Sunlight hits his bare shoulders.

  Giotto, he says.

  Then he smiles.

  Bless me, he says.

  It ought to be really boring, someone you’ve just been intimate with getting up and going and getting a book off a shelf and then you having to look at it. It’s the opposite. He kneels down next to the couch, opens the book.

  Christmas in July, he says.

  What a blue, she says.

  And the red and the gold in the blue, he says. That star. Fiery ice. Ice and dust and nucleus. The Virgin’s cloak would all have been blue too. It’s lost its blue. There’s no blue like a Giotto blue. The star was presumably brighter too, originally. Hard to imagine how it could be. The star’s the star of the show. I mean comet. They think it’s an early painting of Halley’s comet.

  It’s due back, she says. Next year. I’ve been waiting for this comet since I was thirteen.

  She looks at the page done by the artist who drew the perfect circle. There are camels in this picture that appear to be laughing with delight, though all the humans and angels look so serious, the kings with their gifts, one king kissing the feet of the infant.

  She looks at how they all appear to be standing balanced on a narrow cliff. She runs her finger along its edge.

  Look, she says. They’re in Cornwall.

  He laughs.

  They’re actually in Padua, he says. I mean in real life. We should go and see them, see the first Giotto comet before the new Giotto sees it. Let’s do that. Let’s go and see it. Let’s go to Italy.

  Italy? she says.

  Tomorrow, he says. Tonight.

  I can’t just go to Italy, she says.

  Well, okay, he says. France, then. Let’s go to Paris. Just for a day or two. I mean it. There’s a few things there I’d like to see.

  Paris, she says.

  What do you say? he says. It’s not far. It’s not as far as Italy. Will you come? Will we go?

  I’ve work, she says.

  I’ve work too, he says.

  He smiles at her.

  You’re a man of the moment, she says.

  I am, he says. Is that a good thing?

  Yes and no, she says.

  They put the book down, still open.

  They do the wordless thing again.

  It goes all through her.

  It is so good it’s frightening.

  She’ll have to be careful, with this one, to be sure to keep her head.

  On the shortest day in 1981, in the snowiest December since 1878 and on a foggy damp cold Monday morning, the people who are camped outside the main gate of the airbase wake up to the sound of bulldozers.

  The earth has been flattened all round the camp. A new sewage system will be running, the military authorities have decided, right underneath the protesters.

  Like hell it will.

  Some of the camp members sit down on the ground in front of and behind the digger. They refuse to move.

  The work stops.

  The protesters tell the camp commander there will be no laying of sewage pipes.

  They tell each other, privately, that they’ll have to be up a bit earlier next time not to be caught on the hop.

  The number of protesters living at the camp tends to vary right now between six and twelve people, still both sexes, though soon the camp will become a women’s protest only. This decision will cause a good few arguments over the months and years.

  There’s a blue Portakabin for urgent shelter. That won’t last. It’ll be dismantled and taken away not long from now.

  There’s a communal area made out of plastic, tarpaulin and tree branches. People come and give talks in it and it’s somewhere a bit less weather-worn to sit. It won’t last either.

  Some local people have been kind and have made available their bathrooms to the protesters; this was crucial when the base command turned off the water main across the road. So the protesters wrote to the water authorities. The water authorities now charge them a monthly rate.

  Soon the numbers of protesters will rise beyond anything imagined. The women will be threading coloured wool and ribbon through the fencewire and across between the gates in intricate webbing, they’ll be cutting holes in the perimeter fence with wirecutters and breaking into the base almost every night then being sent to court to be charged with breaching the peace then back to the camp after fines and imprisonments and cutting the holes in the fence again.

  There will soon almost always be holes in the fence, as many holes as there are new songs coined and sung by the protesters. In fact there’ll be so many songs sung in the camp that writing them all down will take over a hundred pages. There’s a hole in your fence, dear Major, dear Major. Then fix it, dear Private. But the women are cutting it, dear Major, dear Major. Then arrest them, dear Private. But that doesn’t stop them, dear Major, dear Major. Then shoot them, dear Private. But the women are singing, dear Major, dear Major. The military and the police will soon discover that there’s not much action they can take, in stopping a protest by a group of singing women, that doesn’t reveal the shame and the core brutality in the action they take.

  In just under two years from now the first cruise missiles will arrive.

  In just under a year from now on a sleety December Sunday more than 30,000 women from all across the country, all across the world, will line up round the base fence, nine miles of fence and nine miles of people. They’ll join hands in a human fence.

  This will have been organized by chain letter. Embrace the base. Send this letter to ten of your friends. Ask them to send it to ten of their friends.

  The
y think of themselves, the protesters, as wakers of sleepers.

  They consider the millions of people in the world who can’t see the danger as snowblind or like explorers in a polar region about to make the mistake of lying down and going to sleep in the snow; books about them afterwards will comment on how this is one of the analogies the protesters like most to use when it comes to trying to describe to the world the urgency of what they’re doing.

  Close your eyes and you’re dead.

  For now, though, it’s the protest’s first Christmas week (and there’ll be Christmas weeks spent protesting here till all the way into the new century). The postman delivers the post. The protesters heat the water up to make him a cup of tea. He sits down to drink it on a chair that’ll shortly be mashed by the bailiff’s pulping machine. Right now it’s still a chair.

  After it’s gone?

  Sit on the ground.

  The time will come when the military authorities will flatten this camp completely and make it impossible to rebuild it here, when they widen the road into the main gate improving access for increased military traffic.

  The protesters will move slightly along from where the first camp was and settle there instead.

  Back in London a few days into the new year, Art will be lying in bed in the empty flat flinching at the memory of how useless he was when Charlotte said the thing about the dream she kept having, of herself cut open at the chest with the chicken scissors.

  That particular uselessness, of all his many uselessnesses, will haunt him. It will, yes, cut him open.

  He will wish he’d got up from behind the screen he was looking at and crossed the room and just hugged her whenever she’d told him that dream. Just a hug, right then, would’ve been better than the nothing he did, the worse-than-nothing he did, the despising her because she’d felt something, because she’d tried to give it words, give it an image.

  He will wish he’d been the kind of man who says, if his partner tells him something like that dream, don’t worry love, I can mend this, wait a minute, and then knows to pretend to be a surgeon with an imaginary metaphysical needle and thread and to mime sewing up the zigzag divide. Even just the gesture of stitches.