The Devil in the Snow

by Sarah Armstrong

  ‘No idea.’

  Jimmy raised his eyebrows and scribbled himself a note. ‘Job?’

  ‘He’s been sacked.’

  Jimmy smiled. ‘What for?’

  ‘I phoned up pretending to be his solicitor, arguing it was wrongful dismissal. The secretary laughed at me and said he’d admitted validating a forgery.’

  Jimmy laughed. ‘Excellent. When did he last contact you about Cerys being missing?’

  ‘He hasn’t. He must have explained it all to the police, or she did. I don’t know. As far as anyone knows he’s been out of the country since.’

  ‘Interesting.’

  Shona put the biscuit back on the plate. ‘You think she’s with Maynard too.’

  ‘That’s where my money would always have been, little shit. Has he left anything at your house?’

  ‘The front room is full of his stuff. He locks the door.’

  ‘Have you changed the locks on the external doors?’

  ‘No. I want to, but I keep thinking Cerys might try to get back in.’

  ‘She can phone you. We need to sort that out and get into the room.’

  ‘I’ve got someone coming round. It was supposed to be last week but I forgot and went out. He was pretty pissed off but he agreed to come back.’

  Shona felt an ache in her shoulders subside, although she hadn’t been aware of it until now. She put her arms out to the side and rolled the twinges away.

  ‘What do you know about Maynard?’ she asked.

  ‘That can wait,’ he said. ‘You need to think about something else. Drink your tea and finish that biscuit. Let me tell you about this Egyptian guy who I met inside. He was being chased by a bunch of Mossad agents in the eighties, I don’t know what he did to piss them off. You don’t survive that very often. He’s in his sixties or seventies now, and on his sixth or seventh name. I asked him, “So, did you ever go to Israel?” and he said, “Only in a tank.”’

  Jimmy laughed. All Shona could think about was not asking what he’d done to end up in prison.

  She said, ‘We had a holiday in Egypt, a trip down the Nile, did I tell you?’

  Jimmy nodded.

  ‘There was a man whose job was to sit next to the tethering rope and stop rats running up it. He just sat there all day reading the Koran, waiting for rats. He looked so peaceful.’ Shona drank some tea. ‘I should get a job like that.’

  ‘Good God, a job? Let’s not be hasty.’

  ‘Jimmy, do you know anything about Greenland?’

  ‘It’s not really my thing, that naïve folk art.’

  ‘Not the art, the place.’

  ‘The place is the art!’ He laughed. ‘Greenland. No, I don’t think I know anything. Denmark, Sweden, all of those places, yes. I always quite fancied Svalbard. Or I would do if I ever felt like painting my own stuff. The light sounds extraordinary, but I suppose there’s a reason that there are no great artists from there or Greenland. It’s just too bloody cold to hold a brush. You’re not going there, are you?’

  ‘No, someone I know might be.’

  ‘Why? There are fifty places I’d rather go before there. Does he want to go dog sledding or is he one of those climate change people?’

  ‘I might have been talking about a woman. No, I think it’s a spiritual thing.’

  Jimmy spat out half a biscuit. ‘Sorry. Jesus, spiritual thing. What a load of bollocks.’

  ‘I always thought that art was your spiritual thing.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t believe in genius, just a marriage of man and paint, a glorious serendipity.’

  ‘Man and paint? Not person and paint?’

  ‘Oh, don’t start. We’re never going to agree on that. Did you sort the phone out?’

  ‘Yes. I put my numbers in too and texted myself so I have your number.’

  ‘I might not answer straight away. I keep pressing cancel instead of answer. Why did they put those buttons right next to each other? Let me know when you’ve booked a locksmith, OK? I want to be there when the tomb is opened.’

  Shona nodded.

  ‘Just for now, to keep the estate agents at bay, is there anything you could do to lower the price of the house? Temporarily – don’t go knocking down any walls.’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  She thought about hugging him, but didn’t want to crease his shirt. She thought back to his other flats, nice but not opulent. Art materials on every surface and canvases in every corner. Not like here. It wasn’t like him at all. He ate a fig roll, biting around the edges and then eating the middle in one go. The showman had faded back and she could see the man she’d known for years in the way he ate it. She must have been mistaken about seeing him in the museum. He was the same as ever.

  ‘It’s, um, a bit different seeing you here.’

  ‘I know. It’s going to take a while to get back to normal.’ He rubbed his head. ‘But I can stay here for as long as I like, so I’ll just bed down for a while and see what happens next.’ He rubbed his face, one hand on each cheek. ‘I’m old, Shona. I got old, and I never expected to.’

  He held her gaze for a moment and she thought that he was going to cry but he held it, blinked repeatedly and ate another biscuit.

  ‘Come on, there’s one room in this house that contains work by women. Let’s see if you can spot it.’

  Shona was early to collect Jude, one of the pack rather than one of the last. She looked around, realising that she had made no effort to get to know any of the parents of Jude’s classmates. With Cerys she had known all the children’s names, and most of the mothers’. Only Thea recognised her.

  ‘Are you still OK to take Callum for tea?’ said Thea.

  ‘Yes, it’s fine.’ Shona couldn’t remember when they had arranged this. ‘Tonight’s fine.’

  ‘No, tomorrow,’ said Thea. ‘Why would I be here if you were collecting him?’ She tilted her head. ‘It is OK, isn’t it? You can say if you’re not up to it.’

  ‘Tomorrow is perfect. I’m not with it today, sorry. My uncle’s just out of prison and I was visiting him.’

  ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘More than OK. He’s going to be totally fine.’

  She felt better than she had for ages as well, just a bit distracted. Jimmy had given her a lifeline so she could let Cerys go for a while, do the shopping and make the most of Jude. She was back in the real world and it felt odd.

  Jude came out with his teacher and ran to her, beaming. She swept him up in her arms. Tomorrow she would make sure he was wearing a tie, and maybe had matching socks.

  ‘Want to help me set up our new laptop? You and Callum can download some games tomorrow.’

  ‘What happened to the old one?’

  ‘It broke.’ Into two satisfying lumps.

  Greta

  I met Maynard a few times before Shona married him. He wasn’t who I expected for her, or who I wanted for her. She’d had a couple of relationships before and they weren’t any better, so at the time I was relieved that he wasn’t a twenty-seven-year-old postman covered in tattoos that named all of his ex-girlfriends. Shona made a big deal of putting her arm around him if I walked into the room. She even argued with him over the absence of her own name on his arm. She didn’t love him but she wanted to leave her mark – ‘Shona was here’. That one petered out into longer, quieter waits by the phone which stopped ringing altogether after three months.

  The second one never sat on my sofa with a beer can. If he phoned and I answered, the line went dead. Shona would sit by it until, half an hour or two hours later, the trilling started up again. She would draw out the telephone wire and sit on the floor in the hall to whisper. The wire stopped the door quite closing. I suspected he was married. I didn’t suspect he was her old Geography teacher until I saw them arguing by the corner, his car door open. His school books flapped on the road whenever a car passed. She’d taken a gap year to work and save money and she spent most of it running whenever he called.


  After the argument, there was no waiting by the phone. She watched the Iraq War on the BBC from 6am to 10am, then she’d switch between Channel 4 and ITV for their breakfast war reports. Back to BBC1 and the ITV news started at 5.30, an hour of Newsnight. There were evening bulletins and all night she watched live coverage of bombs falling on Baghdad on ITV. Somehow she pulled herself out of it and then she was off. She showed no sign of ever coming back.

  Maynard at least was her age, and for a time I was grateful for that. I learned a little about him from his mother at the wedding itself when it was all too late. There were stories of a selfish little boy preparing to run away by piling up cheese in the trailer of his tricycle, but all children are self-centred and egotistical in their way. There were stories of his profligacy at university, spending all of his money for the term and having to eat porridge for the last four weeks. He told the story of his diagnosis of scurvy with pride.

  He was an ordinary, arrogant boy, good looking in a carefully cocky way. He was quite unsuited to Shona, but at the time she was striving to be ordinary. He had quite a different reason to be with her.

  The story came out slowly, much later. In June, he had woken Shona just before midnight at the house she shared with three other students in Brighton. They had gone out a couple of times, but then he’d gone out a couple of times with most girls at the university, so she was surprised. She was also pleased. He was attractive in that long-haired, posh boy kind of way, and Shona was determined to be like everyone else. And all her housemates chased him like mad, so she was flattered that he’d come to her. He’d taken his final exam that day and didn’t think twice that Shona still had two left. He called and she responded.

  He’d been drinking, but then they had all been drinking apart from Shona. He fell at her feet, declared undying love and jumped into her bed. Or something like that. He didn’t leave her side but made her meals and cups of tea as she revised for her exams. He seemed to have dedicated himself to her alone. She was his choice.

  It wasn’t until the police arrived four days later, seeking to verify his alibi, that any doubts surfaced. As he sat beside her, Shona, the most torturously honest of people, swore he’d arrived at ten o’clock. He couldn’t have hit the cyclist hidden in the sea fog that rolled in suddenly on the promenade. He wasn’t there to see the intermittent flash of reflection from the pedals and wonder what it was. He hadn’t veered away from the heap in the gutter, and gone to her house because it was closer than his. He hadn’t stayed to make her fall in love with him.

  She didn’t come home for the summer holidays.

  She wasn’t answering the phone or replying to my letters. I opened the letters confirming her graduation but the date came and went. I took the train down to see her in August, walking from the station without any idea whether she was still at the same address. I knocked on the door for ten minutes before she let me in and went back to the sofa. She was tiny, shoulders jutting beneath her T-shirt, her hair lank. I waited for her to react to me being there. I waited days.

  I found her key and went shopping. Bit by bit, I took her washing to the laundrette, apart from the T-shirt and pants she never took off. I went into Brighton some days to avoid the ringing phone on the hall table. I answered a couple of times but she didn’t want to talk to Maynard. There were also letters that I didn’t open. Sometimes, after the pubs closed, someone would knock on the door for as long as I had, or until the neighbours shouted obscenities from the windows. The housemates had emptied their two bedrooms and I lay in Shona’s bed, wondering whether she should be sectioned.

  Some days I walked through the Lanes through the tightly packed groups of tourists, grilled red on the beach and unaware of their width. Overheated children cried for ice creams and teenagers milled around the arcades. There was a fortune-telling machine that I fed large old one penny pieces before laying my hand on the soft spikes, hoping against hope that the next fortune would be different.

  I brought favourite food into her house, placed it in front of her. Accidentally, she started to eat. Then she started to skim through some of the bulletins. No-one else contacted her. The lease ran out at the beginning of September and I didn’t know how I was going to extract her from this dark room and get her back to my own house. On the 1st of September Maynard arrived at the door. He had been bought a flat in London for work, a reward from his mother for his 2:2.

  They spoke and I left them alone, never thinking I would see him again. I think she must have told him she was pregnant before this, or he would never have been seen again. Two months later they had arranged the wedding so that the baby would be a legitimate heir. The October wedding revealed my Shona, pale cheeked in her creamy dress, stomach pressing outwards, and his family’s disapproving looks.

  The miscarriage confirmed to them that he’d married a gold-digging harlot. I gathered that much although I never saw them after the wedding. After Shona’s trouble in the papers, Cerys was born, and they moved to Essex, and I was relieved that she would be close to me again. It turns out that this was wishful thinking. She hadn’t moved back to be close to me. It was almost as if she’d forgotten I lived in Essex too.

  When I did see Shona, everything seemed to be fine. She was fond enough of Maynard, helped, I think, by the amount of time he spent working away. She was committed to dedicating herself to Cerys, and that meant making the most of Maynard. But if his mother suspected the social gap between them was too large when they met, she was convinced when Maynard’s career blossomed and his suits became more expensive. She tried to make Cerys her own, staying for weeks at a time to help Shona out and pass on her hard-won advice, but then Maynard’s sister gave her a grandson. The visits were halted. The pressure was off Shona, but Maynard missed being centre of attention and pushed for a second child, a son. Drunk with disappointment, the day after they found out the sex of the baby at the twenty-week scan, he told Shona what it was like to kill a cyclist.

  When she phoned, six weeks after Meghan was born, I had to wait for the morning bus. I hadn’t been invited before. They usually came to me so that they could keep the visits brief. Maynard wasn’t there. He was too important to take any time off, just as when Cerys was born, and he had a nice, quiet flat in London where he could get a good night’s sleep.

  The curse of our family, as I saw it then, was that the daughters always hated the mothers. I had hated mine, after all, and Shona blamed me for not protecting her and Sean. This was the first time she had needed me. I could see it in the way she held her head. I held the baby and watched Cerys while Shona talked, told me all of it from the earliest days in Brighton to the way he avoided her now. I couldn’t have been happier that she’d had a second girl. It showed that the curse had really been lifted. All I’d had to do was ignore it and it evaporated with advent of computing and reason and everyone having a phone. My mother would never have believed any of it, calling it the devil’s work. I knew that modernity had emasculated him. No-one believed in the devil. No-one cared. We all held the power of our own lives, and that’s what I tried to convey to Shona. Of course I’d told her at the same age that my mother told me the story of the running, but she was already too old for it, too knowing to believe it. And my heart wasn’t in it to try again.

  Now, in Shona’s home with her curled-up baby sleeping, we talked like never before and I began to believe we could be a mother and daughter. She was tired and vulnerable in a way she’d never shown me. I loved her more than ever, now that I could show her. I could help and I could listen. When Maynard came back unexpectedly, she seemed more solid. I’d told her to make sure she got some time and space. She wasn’t the only parent and deserved a long bath and a good sleep. If she was tired, she promised, she would ask him to watch the baby.

  When I left, a man walked past me on the other side of the road. It had started to snow lightly and it didn’t seem strange for him to have his hood up. There was something about his walk that made me recognise him, but I couldn’t pinpoint e
xactly why he seemed familiar. I stopped and turned to watch him cross over and walk down the alley next to Shona’s house.

  I shook off the discomfort. It would be someone Maynard knew, someone they were expecting. Or maybe it was someone calling at their neighbour’s house. There was nothing of comment or concern. It was just a man, walking down the road. My biggest worry was getting a bus before the snow got heavier.

  That’s what happens when you’re fooled into believing in a world that is infinitely explicable. We don’t react in a real way any more. If there is a loud bang, we cautiously turn our heads, scared of making a fool of ourselves, instead of running away. When we shiver inside at the way someone looks at us, we castigate ourselves for being superstitious. I denied my instincts and allowed the devil to walk past me and into Shona’s house.

  13

  There was a brief knock at the back door before Jimmy let himself in.

  ‘It takes me ages to open a text message,’ said Jimmy. ‘Next time, can you phone me?’

  ‘You’ve had the phone for over a week,’ said Shona. ‘It’s not that hard.’

  ‘I told you, I’m old.’ He saw Jude. ‘You’re not Shona’s little one, are you?’

  Jude nodded and Jimmy bowed.

  ‘The pleasure is all mine,’ said Jimmy.

  Jude shrugged as if there had never been any doubt.

  Shona told Jude, ‘This is your great-uncle, Jimmy.’

  ‘Right,’ Jimmy said. ‘Let’s go and rummage.’

  Jude stayed to watch CBBC with a bowl of ice cream while Jimmy followed Shona. The locked door looked odd now it was open, as if it was part of the house again. She sat on the sofa and watched him work through the boxes and the drawers. Eventually Jimmy knelt among four piles of papers. He was shaking his head.