The Devil in the Snow

by Sarah Armstrong

  I did want to go to them. The Sacré-Cœur was about three streets away from our hotel, but I didn’t trust his smile.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

  ‘In those shoes?’ He pointed to my feet.

  I looked at them, oxblood leather with an oversized buckle. I hadn’t had time to save for them before the wedding and I had a good few months until I could pay them off.

  ‘Yes, in these shoes,’ I said, lifting my chin. ‘They’re good enough for anywhere in Paris.’

  He smirked. When we arrived, he explained that bidonville wasn’t the name of a place but a translation. It was a slum, full of bright, clever, filthy children and shoeless, hollow-cheeked adults. They looked at his feet, rather than his face. They knew him and he scared them. All of the anxiety that had built since our arrival began to feel justified.

  I couldn’t understand any of what he said to them or them to him, but I could tell enough. He owned them in some way. I felt as if my wedding and my honeymoon had been some kind of excuse to let him finish his deal. What kind of business he had with poor immigrants living in half-sheds outside Paris I never knew. The next day I had a pretty good idea but I didn’t ask. After all this time I had freed myself from parents who I couldn’t ask about anything, and a brother I couldn’t talk about, and nailed myself to a man I could neither ask nor talk about. I couldn’t look at him either, only at the mud stains around the sides of my shoes. They never came out, no matter how much I polished them.

  The women sat me on a stool while the men raised their voices. One gestured to me, her right hand tapping her left ring finger. I nodded. She turned to a woman next to her and said something to which the second woman tutted repeatedly and shook her head.

  I agreed with her. I wanted to slap myself. I knew I’d never get away.

  When we just missed being blown up the next day, the 22nd, outside the Foreign Office at the Quai d’Orsay, I just wanted to go home. Larry was thoroughly enjoying it, the dead and the injured. He revelled in describing to me the details of how the bomb on the truck killed a postman, how others were injured by the shattering glass which had nearly pierced us, looked slightly disappointed by the safe return of the abducted MP.

  He didn’t show a single flicker of surprise. The bomb was close enough so we could witness it but not so close that we’d be hurt. I knew in one way he intended to protect me, he didn’t want me dead, but I didn’t understand what else he wanted from me. I thought back to the quick-eyed men of the bidonville and the slow-eyed women. I thought I would faint as he explained what had happened and I asked him to stop translating.

  ‘You look pale,’ he said, his voice flat. ‘What a delicate little flower you turned out to be.’

  He sat in the bars, listening to the outrage and gossip, the rumours and condemnations, flexing his fingers, one at a time. It was then that I noticed he could move each finger quite independently. First I couldn’t breathe at all and then I couldn’t stop breathing, shuddering and faint. I couldn’t focus on anything else.

  He eventually saw me watching and turned to me with a grin which showed his teeth.

  ‘Second thoughts, Greta?’

  I shook my head. I was onto my fourth, fifth and sixth thoughts.

  ‘Good.’ He loosened his tie and winked. ‘For better or worse.’

  At home my mother asked me about Paris but Larry answered for me.

  ‘The Eiffel Tower was the best bit, wasn’t it?’

  I nodded.

  We hadn’t been anywhere near it. I had seen it from a few distant places, like Montmartre, but I just smiled as he told my mother all about the incredible views.

  ‘You got Greta to go up the top of that tower?’ My mother was astonished. ‘She can’t climb a ladder.’

  ‘She loved every minute. She was like a different woman. That’s the effect Paris has, I suppose,’ he mused.

  My mother giggled. She didn’t read the papers or watch the news, knew nothing about the fighting for and against Algerian independence. She noticed nothing different about me whatsoever. I said nothing that whole afternoon and she didn’t even look at me. I began to wonder if she’d ever looked at me properly. She started to talk about my brother’s descriptions of Paris to Larry, as if they’d never met. Larry cut her off in mid-flow and she didn’t mind a bit.

  There had always been a girl and then a boy. My grandmother had one daughter and then one son; my mother had one daughter and then one son. But when I had a son (and in my twenties too, not my forties) I could see the stress lift from my mother’s brow. Things had altered. The order of things had changed. Her movements became larger. She even smiled, now and again. She would leave her house, once without her shawl, and come to our new-built house.

  ‘A brand-new bath that’s never been used.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s beyond anything I ever imagined for you, Greta.’ The inside toilet she didn’t mention, because she didn’t talk about them, but she meant that too. She still had to walk to the bottom of the garden to empty the pot she kept under the bed.

  Sean was born on the 22nd of November 1962. For years I told people that he was born on the day that Kennedy was assassinated, but it was a whole year earlier. I’d said it so many times that I started to believe that they’d recorded Kennedy’s death wrongly. I was always looking for links, even then, even when they were wrong.

  Sean was exactly a month old when the winds brought the winter properly and, on Boxing Day, the snow which froze the country. I was convinced he would die, and shut us up in the back room with a fire going day and night. Larry always found coal and wood and I didn’t ask how or where.

  My mother was happy and left her house every day, and not to visit the church.

  She said, ‘When there’s snow, you can see if there have been hoof prints. It’s the only way to be sure if he’s here.’

  I hated her coming, opening the doors to let the heat out. She adored Sean, although she couldn’t understand why I’d allowed his father to give him such a foreign-looking name. She would come round in the daytime and leave after I’d prepared tea in the icy kitchen. When it thawed in March, I didn’t see her for months. I missed her then and didn’t like the thought of her keeping a watchful eye for the devil by herself.

  7

  After seven mornings waking in a strange room, she still wasn’t used to it. Shona lay on the unfamiliar bed, her eyes swollen through tears and exhaustion. At the foot of the bed was a large picture accented with gold-leaf-effect halos. The Madonna was placid and almost sleepy, allowing Jesus to rest against her relaxed left arm. He raised two fingers of his left hand and smiled like a condescending adult.

  Shona wanted to close her eyes but hadn’t slept all night. The dawn prompted the same scene to run behind her eyelids, the last time she could have killed Maynard.

  It was three o’clock when he finally took the baby from her. Meghan had been crying since the ten o’clock news, had been fed and changed multiple times. Shona was exhausted. Although the baby did sleep in the morning and early afternoon, two-year-old Cerys did not. Shona was blurrily certain that she’d got through the last five nights on blinking alone. Eventually, reluctantly, she gave up and passed over the writhing baby. Maynard went downstairs.

  Lying in bed Shona had followed the vibrating, furious sound of the cries, from the kitchen to the dining room, the kitchen to the front room again. She heard the sound of the laptop booting up and a sudden increase in the volume of misery as Maynard must have put the baby down on the sofa. She heard Cerys stirring in her bedroom at the front, a half-murmur, and raised her head. But Cerys quietened down again and Shona rested her head back on the pillow and closed her eyes.

  She felt shivery with tiredness and drew the duvet around her shoulders, her legs bent up to her chest. Her eyes ached, even though they were closed, and she breathed deeply to stop herself from crying. That’s when she realised that the other crying had stopped. She tried to feel relief, to consciously relax every muscle but sh
e couldn’t. It felt wrong, a dangerous, potent silence. She knew she should go downstairs and check but she was too tired. She knew that she should trust Maynard but she didn’t. Her eyes opened and she waited.

  There was a glimmer outside in the gap where the curtains didn’t quite meet at the top. She had seen more dawns in the last three months than ever before and each one was like a secret she wished she didn’t know.

  She heard the laptop shut down and the lid close. His feet were silent but she visualised him approaching the sofa. There was no noise. Cerys mumbled in her sleep.

  Eventually, much later, she heard Maynard come up the stairs. His dark outline walked through their back bedroom and into the third bedroom where the baby’s crib and clothes were. He was holding the baby, now wrapped in the green cellular blanket. They intended to swap the arrangement around; they would have the front bedroom and the children would have the connecting bedrooms at the back. They would grow up to be close, to argue and fight and support each other. They would side against their parents and whisper secrets through doors left slightly ajar.

  The door was always left ajar.

  Maynard put the baby in the crib and quietly pulled the door closed with a tiny click. That was when she knew, the quiet closing of the door.

  Now it had stopped pretending to be night. The bedside light had faded as the sun rose and the room, the painting, was cast in a red light through the thin guest room curtains. Jimmy said that Maynard was after something from me, she thought. He must have it all now.

  When she didn’t have Jude, she thought she could live without the house. She hated Maynard for making her think she had to make a choice – her son or her house, and her daughter with it.

  She listened to Mariana getting Jude ready for school, gently teasing him. Jude asked for Shona but Mariana distracted him. She was good to Jude. She was kind. Hearing them together made Shona twinge with guilt for being so useless and for lots of other things. She should have let them get to know each other and not withheld him from other people just because Cerys’ father was so awful. She should have been a much better person, but she couldn’t un-wish Jude.

  The bed felt large and empty. Shona couldn’t get used to not having Jude in the bed alongside her, but this was a single and there were other bedrooms. She’d been in this room before, over five years’ ago, and wished that she had been given a different room.

  A door closed somewhere in the house and the sound of running water became masked by a radio. There were noises next door too. People were going to get up and get clean and go to work, regardless. They would eat and think about sex and worry about exams, look both ways before crossing the road and come home. People would survive today, despite all of the reasons why they should not.

  Mariana opened the door and then knocked. ‘Breakfast, Shona.’

  Shona turned over and faced the blood red window.

  ‘If you’re not up in ten minutes, I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘I don’t want to get up.’ Her voice sounded as if she was speaking through scarves tied around her mouth. Her throat was scarred and she could taste metal in the back of her throat. She didn’t want to argue all day again for the right to go home.

  ‘Ten minutes.’ Mariana shut the door.

  She heard someone call, ‘Imaculada!’

  Fernando was here. Shona pulled the duvet over her head. What couldn’t have got worse was much, much worse.

  Shona had met Fernando once. She had never intended to stay over, never intended to leave Maynard in charge of Cerys for a whole night, but the amount of sweet wine and food, endless courses of Mariana’s Portuguese back catalogue, had floored her.

  Mariana had invited her over on the pretext than it was some important saint’s day. Shona had no idea which one. They had spoken at length a number of times but Shona found this sudden elevation to dinner guest peculiar. But she had had no other offers for years. She had no other friends. She had Cerys, now eight years old, and a husband who lived in the same house. ‘Mariana’ turned out to be a middle name chosen for the English. She had brothers and sisters. Many of her nieces and nephews were godchildren, and the way she showed Shona their photos was touching. She had no children of her own to show off in silver frames. Mariana turned out to be a whole person rather than just a stout, pushy solicitor who rubbed people up the wrong way.

  They had sat at the table in the dining room for the entire evening. Usually in any room, Mariana would be the centre of attention, provoking and angering whoever was in there with her. In this room she didn’t stand a chance of domination. Fernando, balding and bearded, nothing to shout about on paper, was even more captivating than his wife. Shona’s eyes flicked towards her, to see how she handled this coup, but Mariana seemed to willingly abdicate the floor, leaning back in her chair and talking over him when she wanted to correct or rebuke him.

  Fernando had much less of an accent than Mariana but more of the hand gestures and sly sidelong looks. The more Shona looked at him the more she became convinced that he had just come into his looks, that he had been quite ordinary until he started to lose his hair. Some men did only suit age and he was one of them. And he knew it. Mariana wouldn’t have married someone who would challenge her dominance. Shona suspected that he had found a sense of virility in maturity and something had shifted between them.

  He had spent the first hour claiming to have been raised to hunt wolves around Lisbon, while his wife calmly repeated that there were only wolves in the very north, above Porto. She said that, far from being a goat herder, Fernando’s father was the main driving force fighting for nuclear power plants in Portugal.

  ‘He’s a scientist,’ said Fernando.

  Mariana tutted. ‘He’s a moron.’

  Fernando rolled his eyes and smiled at Shona. Shona smiled at him, and then Mariana, unwilling to be allocated a side in their civilised altercation.

  After two bottles of wine and most of a bottle of port, the conversation turned to Mariana herself.

  Fernando leaned forward. ‘Has she told you about her weeping statue?’

  ‘Fernando—’

  Mariana’s tone would have stopped anyone but him.

  ‘She was twelve, the age of greatest delusion, when her statue of the Virgin Mary started to weep blood.’

  Shona covered her mouth to suppress a laugh. She didn’t dare look at Mariana, but she could tell that she had become very still and could just see her clenched fist resting by her wine glass.

  ‘Can you imagine her, in her nightdress with two little plaited pigtails, on her knees? Her eyes are squeezed shut and she’s praying, praying, praying for a horse. And she opens her eyes and Mary is crying ruby tears, dripping down her face and off her cheeks. And what does little Mariana do? Does she pray even harder, does she collect the tears in a little bottle with a cork stopper? Does she phone the Vatican? Or does she run to her parents and demand that they come, immediately to see how much the mother of Christ wants her to have a horse?’

  He laughed, throwing his head back as if it was the first time he’d told such a well-rehearsed story. He didn’t look at Mariana when he’d finished but rested his head on one hand and gazed at Shona.

  ‘You don’t believe that, Shona?’

  Shona lowered her hand and frowned. ‘That a statue can cry or that Mariana wanted a horse?’

  ‘That a statue can cry tears of blood, of course. Mariana is clearly the kind of woman that came from the kind of child who desperately needed a horse.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Shona hoped she could tread between them. She had a feeling that when they got going there was little chance of escaping. ‘I’ve heard of weeping statues and ones that drink milk from spoons. Who knows?’

  ‘So you do believe her?’ Fernando raised his eyebrows dramatically and then focused his eyes and hands on his glass. ‘She’ll be pleased. She invited you tonight because, even though you have no feelings left for your husband, or no good ones, you refuse to break the covenant
of marriage.’

  Shona heard Mariana inhale.

  ‘She thinks she can make a good Catholic out of you, Shona. Get you in the Mother’s Union, take you to Walsingham and Lourdes. There are heavy-duty pilgrimages where you have to stay up all night with no shoes on and walk around on stones all night. Not somewhere warm – Ireland.’ He faked a shiver. ‘That kind of experience can get anyone seeing a statue weep. Ah, you think I’m joking.’

  Shona turned to look at Mariana, for reassurance that this was another of Fernando’s teasing statements. Mariana, quite composed now, held her gaze quite steadily. It was true.

  Shona cleared her throat. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Mariana said. ‘Would you like some Medronho? Think of it as strawberry schnapps.’

  Shona felt very sober all of a sudden. ‘I’ve had wine and port. I think I should get a taxi.’

  ‘No,’ said Mariana. ‘You must stay here tonight. A nightcap, just one.’ She pushed the dish of fat, brown olives towards Shona and left the room with some empty dishes. Shona looked at the doorway after she’d left. She’d expected – what had she expected? Not some strange conversion over rosemary and lemon pork stew.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ Shona said to Fernando. ‘I have to get home to Cerys.’

  He ran his finger along the top of his glass before finishing his port. ‘She’ll make you stay. I wouldn’t fight it, if I were you.’ He placed the glass down carefully. ‘I’d like you to stay.’

  Why, Shona wanted to ask, but she knew. He raised one eyebrow.

  ‘It’s a big house,’ he shrugged. ‘And I’m not as Catholic as Mariana.’

  ‘I noticed.’

  He slid over one hand towards her. ‘What else have you noticed?’

  ‘A few things.’

  She couldn’t sleep with Mariana’s husband. But then she couldn’t believe that Mariana brought her here to awaken a non-existent Catholic faith. It wasn’t religion or marriage that kept her with Maynard, but pure anger and fear.