Snow

by John Banville

  He wasn’t always as compliant as I expected him to be – after all, if I had him, didn’t he have me? – and on a couple of occasions I had to call in Richie to persuade him to mend his ways. Oh, I wouldn’t speak to Richie directly, you understand, but there were ways of getting the message to him. He was a clever little hoodlum, was our Richie, and knew which side his bread was buttered on. He also knew exactly how far he could go, and when to stop. He and his gang never hurt Ginger too badly, and those couple of times when they gave him a hiding on my behalf they let him off fairly lightly. But I can tell you, when he came back to me afterwards he was a much chastened fellow. Those were the occasions when I treated him with particular tenderness, massaging his bruises, and going easy on him, in our sessions in the vestry.

  Speaking of which, I often wonder what it was about the vestry that made it the chosen place for Ginger and me to have our little get-togethers? There must have been something about the vestments that attracted me. The care I had to lavish on making sure we didn’t damage them or leave stains on them! Imagine if at the altar one day I had turned around with a big grey stain on the back of my chasuble.

  Oh, yes, there’s another thing I have to confess. The first time, that day of the Corpus Christi procession, I used an altar candle on Ginger. There was a box of them beside me, and I just grabbed one up in my hand. I can only say in my defence that it was my first time, too, and I didn’t really know what to do, and I suppose I was afraid, as well, that I might hurt myself, or even do myself damage. But it wasn’t right, and I only did it the once, with the candle.

  Ah, but I’ve made myself sad, thinking back over those lovely old times. I should go over there, to Carricklea, on a visit, one of these days. The school is still there, busier than ever – they’ve nearly a hundred boys now, I’m told – and you never know what I might chance on. Ginger can’t have been unique, after all. The trouble is, I’ve lost my taste for the younger ones – must be the effect of getting on myself, for I’ll be thirty-six next birthday – and anyway I’ve a new friend, now. A new favourite, as that Dominican would say.

  I don’t know whether it’s God or the Devil who sets up coincidences, but who would ever have predicted I’d end up in Ballyglass? I suppose Ginger thought, when he saw me in the town the first time, that I’d arranged it myself, but how could I have known he’d be here? I don’t know how I even recognised him, for he’s nothing like he was in the old days. I could see from the way he gaped at me – he’s turned into a complete dolt, I’m sorry to say – that he knew me, straight away, but I had the presence of mind to pretend I didn’t remember him at all. It’s for the best, all round, I’m sure. I wouldn’t want him telling stories to the Osbornes, and certainly not to one of them in particular.

  To make a favourite, dear brothers in Christ, is to make an occasion of sin.

  WINTER, 1957

  24

  The heater in the Land Rover wasn’t working – Matty Moran, who was supposed to have a way with machines, had been meant to fix it, but hadn’t – and Lettie complained of the cold, and wanted to go back to the house to fetch a blanket. Dominic, who was driving, said he wouldn’t wait for her if she did.

  As Strafford was getting into the back seat, he was surprised to see Lettie climbing in at the opposite door. He wished she would sit beside her brother, in the front seat. He didn’t feel up to dealing with Lettie just now.

  It wasn’t snowing, but a hard frost had set in, as Colonel Osborne had predicted, and as they lurched and skidded down the drive they heard the ice crunching under the wheels.

  ‘Where’s the party that you’re going to?’ Strafford asked.

  ‘At the Jeffersons’, outside Camolin,’ Dominic answered, without turning his head. ‘I don’t know why we’re going, it’s bound to be awful.’

  ‘Julian Jefferson is his bestest friend,’ Lettie confided to Strafford, in a stage whisper. ‘They’re just inseparable, my dear.’

  Dominic kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead, swerving to avoid lumps of dirtied ice that had fallen into the ruts. Trees loomed in the headlights like frozen dervishes.

  ‘O Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but I’m so cooold!’ Lettie whined, putting on an exaggerated brogue. ‘Sure it’s perished we’ll be, out here stravaging on the wild roads in such a night of shnow and frosht, ochone ochone!’

  Her hip was pressed against Strafford’s, whether by accident or intentionally he didn’t know. The former, he hoped. Lettie frightened him, a little.

  ‘I can walk from the crossroads, and you can go straight on,’ he said to Dominic. By the green glow from the dashboard he saw the young man’s eyes in the driving mirror swivel to meet his own. Why is it, he wondered, that people always seem so sinister when they look at you in the mirror like that? It was like being spied at through a letter box.

  ‘Wouldn’t hear of it, old boy!’ Lettie said, now impersonating her father again. ‘What if you were to get frostbite? We’d find you stretched out on the side of the road here when we’re coming home. You’d be like Father Tom-Tom, only all over white instead of black, like the negative of a photograph.’ Now she put on a cockney accent. ‘Your Honour, I wuz proceeding in the direction of the town of Ballyglass, when I spotted wot at first I took to be a snowman—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Lettie, do shut up,’ Dominic said.

  Lettie nudged Strafford in the ribs. ‘I believe our Dom-Dom is nervous,’ she said, again in a loud whisper. ‘Must be the thought of seeing little Julie Jefferson.’ She leaned forward and tapped her brother on the shoulder. ‘Did you get him a Christmas pressie, Dom-Dom? Let me guess. A manicure set? A bottle of Evening in Paris? A volume of Oscar Wilde’s witticisms bound in green silk? Come on, brothereen, do say.’

  But Dominic said nothing, only drew his head deeper into the collar of his car coat, and drove on.

  Presently they arrived outside the Sheaf of Barley. There was a Christmas candle burning in one of the downstairs windows, but otherwise the place was dark. It was Christmas Eve, everyone had homes to go to. Almost everyone.

  Lettie kissed Strafford on the cheek and squeezed his hand. Her lemur eyes shone in the dim light from the dashboard. ‘Will you be all on your own?’ she asked. ‘What about that busty barmaid, what’s-her-name? – the one with the red hair. Maybe she could be persuaded to keep you company. Mind you, don’t stay up too long, Father Christmas might get impatient and go on to somewhere else.’

  ‘Enjoy the party,’ Strafford said.

  Dominic had turned all the way round in his seat. ‘Did your colleague turn up?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Gone AWOL, has he?’ Lettie asked. ‘Is that the fellow with the odd-shaped head?’

  ‘Yes,’ Strafford said. He had opened the door and was stepping down on to the snow. ‘I fear he’s dead.’

  He swung the door shut behind him and climbed the snowy bank to the pub. Lettie rolled down her window and called out something, but he pretended not to hear.

  Reck let him in. He had a glass of whiskey in his hand, and a crown made of red tissue paper sat askew on his large round head. ‘Love and joy come to you, and to you your wassail too!’ he sang, in a deep bass. ‘Mistress Claus and I are indulging in a little Christmas cheer in the snug – will you join us, Inspector?’

  Strafford thanked him and said no, that he was tired and would go to bed.

  ‘To bed, to bed?’ Reck cried in mock dismay. ‘But it’s Christmas Eve, sir!’

  ‘Yes, I know. I think I may be coming down with a cold.’

  He was halfway up the stairs when Mrs Reck appeared in the doorway below. She too was wearing a paper hat. She asked if he wouldn’t change his mind and come and have a drink, and he told the lie again about a cold coming on. Then he hurried on up the stairs and slipped into the sanctuary of his room.

  There was no hot-water bottle in his bed.

  When he was hanging up his coat on a hook in the back of the door, something crackled in one of the pock
ets. It was a piece of paper, a page torn from a lined notebook. Some words were scrawled across it in capital letters. He held the paper under the light of the bedside lamp.

  ASK DOMINIC ABOUT THE SHELBOURNE HOTEL

  He gazed at this message for a long time. Then he got undressed and climbed into bed, shivering. A moment later he sat up again and reread the note. He didn’t know what it might mean, but he thought he could guess who had written it.

  Once more he lay down, and switched off the lamp. If only, he thought, if only there were a switch with which to turn off one’s mind.

  The curtains were open, and gradually the room became suffused with the grey-blue glimmer of starlight. He closed his eyes.

  Later, when he thought he was asleep, he discovered he hadn’t been when a hand touched his shoulder, making him jump. He had not heard the door opening. He struggled up in a tangle of bedclothes and switched on the lamp.

  ‘Ssh,’ Peggy whispered. ‘I’ve come to give you your Christmas box.’ He was never to forget her laugh, a sardonic, mischievous gurgle. ‘I don’t suppose you got me a present, did you? No, I thought not. Ah well.’

  She wore a green jumper and a white blouse and a heavy tweed skirt, but her feet were bare. She began to take off her clothes.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.

  She had struggled out of her jumper and was unbuttoning her blouse, and now she paused. ‘What does it look like I’m doing? Do you want me to stop?’

  ‘No, no. It’s just—’

  ‘It’s just what?’

  ‘Well, it’s Christmas Eve. Why aren’t you at home, with your family?’

  ‘Because I’m here, with you. Have you an objection to that? No? Then move over – I’m perished with the cold.’

  He squirmed back against the wall and she lay down in the warm spot he had vacated in the middle of the bed. ‘Feck it,’ she said, ‘how did I manage to forget the hot-water bottle! Your feet are freezing.’ She held his face between her hands and kissed him. The taste of her lipstick reminded him of the penny sweets of his childhood. ‘Now you’ll think I’m a tart,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’ve never done this before – I mean, I’ve never got into bed with a paying guest.’

  ‘Peggy, what age are you?’

  ‘I told you, I’m twenty-one.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘All right. I’m nineteen, going on twenty. But I’m not, you know—’

  ‘You’re not what?’

  ‘A virgin – God, you’re slow!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said.

  The feel of the girl’s body against him caused a catch in his throat. For a terrible, panic-stricken moment he was afraid he might be about to cry. What was the matter with him? He thought of Jenkins.

  They lay face to face, he on his right side, she on her left. She snuggled closer to him, letting one of her breasts loll on his forearm. ‘I’m glad you’re slow on the uptake,’ she said. ‘Not like that fellow Harbison. Jesus, he never gives up. By the way, he was looking for you earlier. Something about a horse.’

  ‘Oh, Lord.’

  ‘Don’t worry, he’s gone.’

  ‘Gone? Where did he go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Home, I suppose, if he has one. He left a note for you, Mrs Reck said. Anyway, no matter about him, we’re well rid of him.’

  For a moment Strafford was confused, thinking of the note he had found in the pocket of his coat. That couldn’t be the one that Harbison had left. But then what—? Oh, to hell with it. He would think about it in the morning.

  Peggy leaned into his embrace, twining both her legs around one of his. ‘Ow!’ she squeaked. ‘You’ve terrible sharp toenails, do you know that? And you could do with a haircut, too. What you need is somebody to look after you.’ She chuckled. ‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m not offering to marry you.’

  They heard a church bell chiming far off across the fields.

  ‘Mrs R. must have taken a shine to you,’ Peggy said.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘She told me to give you fresh sheets. Usually I just iron the ones that are on the bed, and change them once a week, no matter how many dirty old buggers have slept on them.’

  He laughed. The down on her arms was as soft as her breath.

  ‘Oh, Peggy,’ he said.

  She was trembling.

  ‘Listen,’ she whispered, ‘have you one of those things? – you know what I mean.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Jesus, you really are hopeless! A Frenchie – a French letter!’

  ‘Oh. I’m afraid not. I’m sorry.’

  Condoms were illegal in Ireland, and even if they hadn’t been he wouldn’t have had one. Cheerfully accommodating girls of the likes of Peggy were a rarity, or they were in his life, anyway.

  ‘Then you needn’t think you’re going to stick that thing in me.’ She pressed his leg more closely between her own. ‘Don’t worry, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.’ She kissed him again, laughing into his mouth.

  Later they switched on the lamp, and Peggy put on her jumper and they sat cross-legged side by side on the bed with the blankets draped over their shoulders – ‘We sure did skin that poor old cat,’ Peggy said with a happy sigh – and played jackstones, using pearls from Peggy’s necklace, the thread of which had snapped at some point during their improvised exertions. She had to teach Strafford the rules of the game. ‘We start with onesies,’ she said. ‘You throw up all five stones – imagine the pearls are stones – and catch as many of them on the back of your hand as you can. Then you throw up a single stone and pick the others up one by one – see? When you’ve got all five of them in your fist you win that round, and then we go on to twosies.’ But the fake pearls were no good because they kept rolling off the backs of their hands, and in the end they gave up the game and lay down again side by side.

  ‘You know they play jackstones in Mongolia?’ Peggy said. ‘—Or is it Tibet. Somewhere like that, anyway. I read it in a magazine. Amazing, isn’t it, to think of children playing the same game here that they do there, all that distance away.’ She hummed a tune under her breath. ‘I’d love to go somewhere like that,’ she said, ‘to India, or China. Somewhere really far away.’

  ‘Perhaps you will, one day.’

  ‘Oh, yes. In the meantime, keep an eye out for flying pigs.’

  They were silent for a while, then Strafford turned on his side and gazed at her profile. She had the beginnings of a chubby little double chin.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘For what?’

  He leaned forward and kissed her shoulder, dipping his lips into its milky sheen. ‘For – this.’

  ‘Ah, well, I couldn’t leave you on your own, on Christmas Eve, now, could I.’ She paused. ‘Your friend that’s missing – have you known him long?’

  ‘Jenkins?’ He turned over on his back again and gazed up at the shadowed ceiling. ‘Not long, no. And I wouldn’t say he was my friend, exactly. We work together.’

  Now it was she who turned to look at him.

  ‘You’re a lonely fellow,’ she said.

  He glanced at her in surprise. ‘Lonely? Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because it’s true, I can see it in your face.’ With a fingertip she traced the outline of his nose, his lips, his chin. ‘You should have someone of your own. You’re not bad-looking, you know, even if you are a bit on the bony side. And you should cut those toenails. But I like the way your hair falls over your forehead. It makes you look like a little boy. Stop tapping your nails against your teeth, though. That would set a girl’s own teeth on edge.’

  She was, as he soon discovered, a snorer. He didn’t mind. She rested heavily against him, twitching and murmuring in her sleep. He turned off the lamp and lay for a long time gazing out at the blue-black night and the sky crowded with stars. He had been living in the city for so long he had forgotten what the night sky was like out her
e in the country. He had forgotten about the silence, too, which was louder, somehow, than the city’s night-time hum.

  The weather forecast had said the snow was gone for good, but that there would be frost and ice for some days yet, before the thaw set in.

  A white Christmas.

  In the middle of the night Peggy sat up with a start, mumbling urgently. Strafford touched her shoulder and she lay down again.

  ‘I didn’t know where I was,’ she said sleepily. She ran her fingertips over his face again, barely touching him. A blind man’s touch. ‘You’re nice,’ she said. ‘You’re a nice man.’

  He sighed. That was what Marguerite used to tell him, fondly, but not without a certain wistfulness – niceness was not exactly an exciting quality in a man. But that was long before the night she flung the wine at him. By then she had discovered a side to him that wasn’t nice at all.

  Peggy sat up again and switched on the lamp. There were little pads of baby fat in the folds of her armpits. He admired the soft gleam of lamplight across her bare back. He too sat up. She was putting on her blouse.

  ‘And now,’ she said, ‘I have to go back to my own cold bed.’

  He kissed the nape of her neck, which made her shiver.

  ‘May I come with you?’ he asked.

  She looked at him over her shoulder. ‘Certainly not,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Are you joking? I’ve taken enough of a risk, for one night.’ She was in the middle of pulling on her jumper, and now she stopped, and stared at him through the neck-hole. ‘Holy God,’ she said, ‘I’ve just realised, I don’t even know your name!’

  ‘My name?’

  ‘Your Christian name.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘No, you don’t, do you.’

  ‘Well, are you going to tell me what it is, or not?’

  ‘It’s St John.’

  ‘Sinjun?’ she said. ‘What sort of a name is that?’

  ‘It’s spelled Saint John, but pronounced Sinjun.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Tradition.’