Snow Sisters

by Carol Lovekin

  The fire was out, grey ash spilled onto the hearth. Allegra was cold and wanted a fire. Casting around for kindling, she discovered the box was empty. She grabbed it and yanked on the backdoor handle. It resisted her and close to tears, she kicked the door, screeched her fury as her toe hit the wood. ‘You stupid fucking thing! For God’s sake, what the hell is going on round here?’

  ‘It’s the house; it doesn’t want us to leave.’ Meredith, still mutinous around her mother, occasionally allowed herself to speak. ‘You’ll regret it.’

  Allegra fixed her daughter with calculating eyes. ‘Don’t think that’ll work, you silly girl.’ She hit the door with the heel of her hand, tears of frustration spilling over. ‘Stupid games, stupid door.’

  As if it heard her and resented the accusation, the door flew open and Allegra almost lost her footing.

  ‘The sooner we’re away from this place the better.’

  When she turned, Meredith was gone.

  Verity slept late, dreamed of the ocean and as soon as her eyes opened she remembered the man and lost her dream.

  Quickly she pulled on her clothes and came downstairs. In the kitchen she could hear her mother swearing. Meredith flew through the door, her face paler than chalk, her hair rust-coloured tumbleweed.

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Nothing. Are you okay?’

  ‘Never better, thanks.’ Meredith’s voice was ragged with the effort it took to hold onto her tears. ‘She’s lighting a fire. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s planning to set the entire house alight.’

  Verity didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Verity. I’m not twp. I’m not demented, even though she thinks I am, and given half a chance she’d have us both locked up, the way Angharad was.’ She gripped the bannister. ‘That way, she could be done with everything: the house and us. I wouldn’t put anything past her.’

  Before Verity could conjure an adequate response, her sister was running up the stairs her feet barely touching the carpet. Tiptoeing across the hall, determined to avoid her mother, Verity opened the front door and raced across the lawn to the lookout. Sitting with her back against the tree, she gazed across a vast sky to the clouds shifting like silver-blue scales.

  Let’s go sky-fishing…

  She let her eyes move slowly, taking in each familiar point and landmark.

  As she stared at the rocks, they quivered as if they were alive. Her arms were folded around her body, tight and taut, and she felt heavy: heavier than the rock and it was as if she had changed places with it.

  She couldn’t move and realised she didn’t want to.

  I’m saying goodbye from here, where I can see it all and make a memory.

  Fifty-four

  Meredith’s fear was palpable.

  She wandered through the house touching objects; talking to them as if to reassure them, even though she was convinced they wouldn’t be coming back. If she caught sight of her face in a mirror, she didn’t recognise herself. She dreamed silent dreams. Time and her weightless arms and legs moved through grey air touched with glimpses of silver like rips in cloth, and Meredith dreamed she saw Angharad. As she reached out to the slashed edges, they sealed up.

  Two nights in a row she woke, certain the ghost was in her room. There was nothing – only a jumble of frantic whispers in her head. And then she felt a touch on her hand as if fingers stroked her skin.

  Have you come back..?

  Something brushed her hair and Meredith froze. And then it was gone and it was impossible for her to get back to sleep. She lay in a half-dreaming state until dawn.

  Seeking her reflection in the mirror again, what she saw was paler than any ghost.

  One night she went out to the blue garden and waited in the last place they had seen Angharad.

  Above her and between the black leaves of the trees, stars burned holes in the sky. She thought she glimpsed a figure between the trees; it could just as well have been mist in the shadows. She lay down by the twig baby’s grave and fell asleep amongst the forget-me-nots and speedwell already beginning to grow over it.

  In the middle of the night, Verity woke and checking her sister’s room found her gone. She ran out to her grandmother’s garden and found Meredith covered in leaves with tiny double-winged insects like miniature dragonflies hovering above her.

  Fairies…

  ‘Wake up, Meri,’ she whispered, ‘come on, it’s the middle of the night.’

  ‘Don’t leave me.’

  ‘Whatever happens, I’ll never leave you; never go anywhere you can’t come too, or follow and find me.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘You know I do.’

  Meredith’s eyes brimmed with tears. Verity touched her cheek and they knew they were holding a moment they wouldn’t ever relinquish.

  Brushing leaves off her legs, Meredith said, ‘They’ve started falling. It’s too early. The magic is spoiled.’

  Verity’s glass bones shivered; her sister’s hand was cold as ice. ‘You’re freezing. We’d better to go inside.’

  ‘Do you mind if I stay by myself a bit longer?’

  ‘Of course not, but don’t be too long.’ Verity pulled off her cardigan and wrapped it round her sister’s shoulders. ‘And sleep in my bed, yes?’

  Meredith nodded and watched her sister walk away, running her palm down the frame of the gate, as if to make an imprint of the wood on her skin. She stared across her grandmother’s garden, to the wisteria – in spite of knowing it was pointless because the ghost had gone. Her tears left salt tracks on her face. She thought she heard the sound of sobbing so raw, a piece of her heart died.

  It was over.

  ‘I want to write a note for the house,’ Meredith said, flourishing a pencil.

  Her hair was a red-gold halo against the window. Long fingers hovered over a page of thick paper.

  ‘Did you nick that from Allegra?’

  ‘What if I did? The least she can do is to provide some nice paper.’

  Verity didn’t ask her sister what she planned to write.

  Meredith’s head bent to her task. ‘How about this?’

  Her writing was pretty with the right amount of flourishes.

  Dear house

  We won’t forget you and we promise to come back.

  Look after Angharad Elin Lewis and her baby.

  Signed Verity and Meredith Pryce (sisters)

  ‘It’s perfect.’

  Meredith sealed the note in an envelope and as she slid it under her pillow, Verity touched her sister’s hand. A small spasm shot through her.

  ‘If we believe, Verity…’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Meredith’s face was a mask made of desperate hope and resignation. She smelled of sorrow and dead roses and as Verity watched the tears fall down her face, the wish she whispered to herself settled on her heart like a brand.

  We will come back, I promise.

  Part Three

  Present

  The letter has somehow found its way to her.

  She is in a garden, under an agapanthus blue sky. It’s hot, more yellow and red than green, what grass there is gilded and shining, tiny blades of gold. Her pale skin still recoils from the sun and she shelters in the shade of a lemon tree filled with tiny brilliant birds.

  The birds are different here…

  As they take off their wings sweep through the brittle air. She blinks and for a second she’s in another garden, white and smooth as her grandmother’s bed linen. Her bare toes scuff the sandy ground, her eyes drawn westward, to where this white-hot sun will slip below the horizon.

  Your handwriting hasn’t improved.

  The paper is pristine and white.

  White as snow.

  Closing her eyes she falls.

  Her sister waves and smiles, laughs when she says she can’t wave back because she’s making angels’ wings. The golden shimmer turns to silver. They shimmer too – girls in snow
drifting in fat flakes, deeper and deeper until they are gone.

  Her eyes blink open. In spite of the heat, her skin is icy; the sweat on her chest runs cold.

  It’s too late, Verity…

  The sun starts its slide, falling away into another sea: underworld and oystercatchers and a mackerel sky…

  Looking at her hands, she floats in the heat. Blue flowers sprout from her fingers, trail across the snow white paper.

  I knew one day I’d be gone too long to go back…

  Fifty-five

  Under a sky rendered unreal by sodium lights, Mared Pryce noticed how the light fell on the wet pavement making it look like glass.

  She thought how her granddaughters would hate the non-silence and the rattling, the lines of parked cars and the raucousness of it: the buildings, row on mile and never being alone. Trying not to mind for them she wondered if, for once in her life, her wilful daughter might yet be persuaded to see sense.

  Who am I kidding?

  Mared rearranged her brother’s home, and crossed her fingers.

  The first floor apartment was old in an entirely different way to Gull House. Elegant in its Georgian simplicity, number twenty-three was a house to be quiet in. Tall windows looked out onto a grassed square edged with ornamental plants, surrounded by iron railings and mature trees. Ornate lamps cast false night-light. In the centre, a statue of a woman – her draped gown fixed in perpetual flight – gazed at passers-by with blank eyes.

  Mared drew her granddaughters to her, doing her best to soothe their fears.

  Meredith’s fears woke the house up.

  Clocks struck the wrong hour; dust spiralled into spiteful whirlwinds, landed on piano keys sabotaging the sound. When Mared sent for the piano tuner he said he couldn’t find anything wrong. In the room she had made warm and welcoming, windows that normally didn’t budge unless forced, began rattling; moths no one had ever seen before caught in the curtains. Busy with her brother, whose fragility meant he no longer knew who anyone was, Mared struggled with this new chaos.

  Meredith rescued the moths and told Verity it was proof Angharad wasn’t done with them. When she found her coral necklace, tucked inside a pair of socks, her conviction overrode Verity’s insistence it must have been there all the time.

  Meredith threw her a look like knives.

  ‘You wait,’ was the only thing she said.

  Both girls became unhappier versions of themselves but when they went to London, Meredith broke. She became fearful of the smallest things. You would never believe a girl who would happily sleep in a wood under the moon could be so terrified of traffic and trains or tramps in doorways. Meredith, who, before she left Gull House hadn’t been afraid of anything, in London became a hostage to irrational fear.

  One night she fled the house, convinced the bedroom was full of spiders. The noise of the front door slamming woke Verity and she ran downstairs. She caught up with her sister and held her as she sobbed her terror.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘I know you do. So do I.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of anything in Wales.’

  They walked back to the house, two grey shadows with no direction.

  It was a devastating time. There was nowhere for Meredith to be happy. Her yearning for home was so deeply embedded she stopped eating again. Meredith tried to forget about gulls and trees, cried herself to sleep and listened for the voice of a ghost.

  ‘Where is she, Verity?’

  Verity said she didn’t know.

  ‘Because you don’t care.’

  It would have made sense to assume that when they were forced to leave Gull House it would bring them closer. The opposite happened. Meredith blamed Verity for not standing up to Allegra the way she had tried to.

  Meredith’s fears had been confirmed. London was every bit as daunting as she had expected and worse – her mother really did intend sending her to school. Helpless, she improvised her way through the days in a state of shock and if Allegra didn’t notice it was because she was rarely around to see anything. Busy settling into the flat the man had found for them, she had no time for what she called tantrums.

  And once again it became Verity’s fault, only this time her sister blamed her too.

  When Verity began attending the local comprehensive school Meredith said that if her mother tried to make her go, she would run away.

  ‘And don’t expect me to tell you where I go.’

  Meredith’s fear of London meant there was nowhere to run to; she was too young and frightened to take off on her own.

  She wondered if Angharad was disappointed in her, and that was the reason her ghost had vanished.

  Are you brave enough…

  Not brave enough to run away, the way Angharad had.

  Forced to join her sister at school and paralysed by fear, Meredith was finally confronted by the kind of girls she had always dreaded: critical, condescending in their taunts and without mercy. Clever too, in comparison, because school learning came down to the kind of knowledge Allegra had eschewed as pointless. Meredith knew what time the moon rose without opening her eyes but she had no idea how far away from the earth it was.

  And it wasn’t only her clothes that were wrong; she didn’t understand these terrifying girls or their culture, their music or their gangs. From the first day, she played truant vowing as soon as she was old enough, she would run so far no one would ever find her.

  ‘It’s not a threat,’ she told anyone who would listen. ‘It’s my best promise.’

  It was easy to dismiss it as another of her obsessions, even her grandmother made the mistake of brushing aside the warnings.

  Her teachers reported her as a truant.

  Mared muttered, ‘Déja vu,’ and, ‘Talk about history repeating itself.’

  Verity, to her surprise, found school easy. Her natural love of learning exerted itself and she was too ordinary to become the butt of anyone’s negative attention. When she tried to protect her sister from the inevitable bullying, Meredith turned on her, declaring Verity’s willingness to go to school collusion.

  ‘Stop pretending you care,’ she yelled. ‘And you don’t have to worry about me; I’ll cast spells on them all.’

  She insisted Angharad would come back and save her.

  ‘Her story isn’t finished and when she finds me, those bitches will regret saying so much as a single word to me.’

  At night in bed she was too scared not to allow her sister to comfort her. When Verity asked her how she felt, Meredith said the word was too long; too hard to spell or remember.

  Even Mared ran out of ways to make her feel better.

  ‘Leave her be, cariad,’ she said to Verity. ‘She’ll work it out for herself.’

  And eventually, she did.

  Fifty-six

  Meredith left each morning in a version of her school uniform, fooling no one.

  It was anyone’s guess whether she showed up and Verity, seventeen months ahead of her, stopped checking.

  Distracted by other responsibilities, Mared shrugged her shoulders. ‘She has to work out her own demons.’

  ‘Is there nothing you can do, Nain, to keep her safe?’

  ‘How do you know I haven’t?’

  If Mared said this to reassure Verity, if she cast a small spell to keep her other granddaughter from harm, it was no one’s business but hers.

  Meredith grew taller and thinner, lost in a world she didn’t share, opening the bedroom window each night to let in the moths. She tossed and turned in her sleep, called Angharad’s name.

  ‘Are you having dreams again?’ Verity asked.

  ‘Like you care?’

  Verity tried to reassure her sister she could trust her with her dreams.

  ‘I’m not the enemy.’

  The strength of Meredith’s love for the ghost knew no bounds. Somehow the voice of Angharad Elin Lewis had followed her to London, and Verity knew it.

  ‘She knows what we did,’ was all Meredith
said. ‘I told you there was more.’

  London broke Allegra too. In another part of the city, she tried to make the best of things. It soon became clear her best wasn’t working.

  Mared insisted they spend their weekends together and that Allegra saw the girls alone. ‘He’s nothing to do with them,’ she said. ‘They come first. It’s the least you can do.’

  Allegra, already sensing the precariousness of her situation, on the edge of denial, reluctantly agreed.

  ‘If you got to know him,’ she said to Verity, ‘you’d—’

  ‘Don’t.’ School made Verity braver. ‘What’s he up to anyway? Organising your first exhibition?’

  The man was a presence casting another kind of spell. Until he turned up,Allegra’s life had been driven by the shade of her vanished husband. In an effort to recapture the past, she’d embarked on an endless search for perfect love into which she fell, time and again, like a puppy down a well. Each time she reinvented love, she created another version of her life. This time it was different. In thrall to her lover, she embraced his ideas; and yet her yearning for a metropolitan life in London made no sense. Allegra may have been artistic and eccentric, but she wasn’t sophisticated. And of course, she never listened.

  On principle, Mared said, in case she heard the truth.

  Mared had suspected the truth from the beginning. When Allegra asked her again about selling Gull House, her fury exploded.

  ‘I knew he was a wrong ’un. Now will you see sense?’

  ‘I don’t see what the problem is. We won’t be going back and I need money…’

  ‘Who says you won’t go back? And what do you need money for? I thought he was going to see to things? Introduce you to his fancy friends; watch you dazzle them with your talent.’

  ‘It’s not as simple as—’

  ‘Oh, I think it is. He has no contacts, Allegra, he never did. Not the right ones at any rate, just a few wannabe wasters and conmen. He’s a cheapskate looking for easy money and he saw you coming.’

  It was true. And Allegra knew it.