Stitch In Snow

by Anne McCaffrey

  But Ireland was under the wings and I felt relieved and rested.

  Mairead’s car was not in the blacktopped parking slot in front of the house so she was at work. She kept erratic hours and I hadn’t told her when I’d be returning, but it is flat to come home to an empty place. My battered green Peugeot 404 was tucked in by the fuschia hedge, looking dustier than ever with rain splotches. As I paid off the taxi, (my last extravagance for a long while) I hoped that the Peug’s battery was okay. Mairead had promised to use the car enough to keep it running.

  Baggins came charging out of nowhere, white-tipped black-tail threatening to wind off his tailbone in his ecstasy at seeing me. Where had I been so long? So glad I was home, lick-lick, bark-bark, getting under my feet, impeding my progress up the front stairs. I gave up at his importunities, knelt and accepted the one lick-kiss which he felt his due, then he wiggle-waggled and barged at me with body and nose to reassure me of his welcome all over again. I wonder if the Irish had a dog in mind when they say ‘cead mille failte’ — a thousand welcomes. A dog certainly tries.

  The house had the still, un-lived-in quality, airless and dry, but clean. Mrs. Munday who comes to me on Tuesday had not evidently come to do her weekly good-turn. I like to come home to a clean house, but a very tidy one makes me uncomfortable for some obscure reason. My room, when I lugged my growing-heavier-with-every-step case up the stairs, looked unfamiliar, austere and depressing. I’d tidied everything before I left, so that the desk, bare of my usual novelistic clutter, looked more accusatory than clean. There was a neat pile of letters in all sizes and types of envelopes: quite a few airmails and air letters, too, and some half dozen manila envelopes and a couple of book mailers. I sighed: too much too soon. I like my mail in small doses so I can savor it with the second cup of coffee. Generally speaking my first daily contact with the world is Mr. Murphy, the bike-pedalling mailman, resembling, but better looking than, Barry Fitzgerald.

  I opened the meadow window and breathed in the crisp cool air: Ireland was its misty self, but the grass was brilliant green, dotted here and there with early weed flowers, white, pinkish and tiny blue stars. The room began to breathe again, too, coming alive with my return and clutter. I opened the mountain window, but my usual view was obscured by the ‘soft’ weather.

  I must have stood looking out the window in thanksgiving for some while. The bleat of a motorist on the winding road outside my oasis penetrated my abstraction. I threw off my cloak, opened my case which I hadn’t relocked after customs (the man had passed me with no more than a glance at my carefully annotated figures) and I hauled out all the washables. I shucked out of the clothes I’d travelled in, including the underthings, found a fresh change from my drawers and closets. I’d bathe later when the water was hot enough: right now just the change made me feel less sticky. Trailing laddered panty hose and dirty jerseys, I clumped downstairs to the kitchen and stuffed the washing machine with the first load. The lingerie could dry by the fire, the other things on the line if the sun stayed out.

  The refrigerator was not full: what was available did not tempt my appetite. The freezer’s contents were likewise unappealing, and unidentifiable. I’d better shop for immediate foodstuffs. Mairead hated to cook and would exist for months on a diet of fried eggs, sausages and mash. She would even descend to using packaged potatoes, an anathema to me. I made myself coffee, using the last of the milk in the fridge. Mairead also had a thing about putting out milk bottles and there were a dozen waiting to be returned. Important things like a full bowl of fresh water for Baggins, plenty of canned and dried food for him, had not been neglected.

  From the window over the kitchen sink I could survey my kitchen garden. My lettuces were thriving, the beets and carrots sprouting with vigor, the onion sets rising from the ground with green spires. By the walk, last year’s glads were piercing the moist dirt which had been weeded, and the roses were pruned and ruddy-leaved with new growth.

  And in Colorado, the snows were drifted deep and thick . . . And, I added briskly, in Pennsylvania they still had that brown stuff that grass turned into in a stateside east-coast winter.

  How glad Tim would be to return to green Ireland! As glad as I was? Or was I?

  I found my jacket, my car keys, raced upstairs to retrieve my purse and left my home. The car started, the chain rattling comfortably. I’d often wondered in whimsy if ghost chains sounded at all like a Peugeot’s inner workings.

  And so I picked up the threads of my Irish life, about where I’d left it six weeks before when I’d gone blithely off on my tour.

  But I wasn’t the same person.

  My friend, Mairead, arrived home from her boutique at 6:15, utterly knackered as she was prone to say.

  ‘You’re back early,’ she remarked, standing in the doorway and glowering at me where I sat going through the mail pile. ‘Whyn’t you let a person know? Christ, I could have closed the shop.’ Which she did at the drop of a hat. Mairead has really red hair, she walks as if her bones might fall away from the joints at any moment, because she had no meat on her at all. She believes in nobody and nothing, argues with me on every topic imaginable so that it is surprising our friendship survives; she derides my philosophy and theories, reads all my books in manuscript and print and consistently reserves her judgment, remaining in her aloof way, my closest and most valued friend. ‘You didn’t think to bring in any Carlsburg?’

  ‘Yes, I noticed you’d drunk it all,’ and as she sagged into the couch, I rose to refill my own and get one for her.

  ‘Ah, that reaches those unrefreshed places,’ she said, swigging down half the glass.

  She did look exhausted, dark smudges under her darker eyes. Her hand was shaking a bit and I suspected that Mairead hadn’t been eating properly again. She not only manages the boutique, but does the buying of European giftie-type thingies twice or three times a year.

  ‘How’d it go, pet?’ she asked me, meaning the trip.

  ‘Great,’ I replied with an equal lack of enthusiasm.

  ‘Oh, like that, huh? I told you I thought they wouldn’t pay you just for talking.’

  I laughed. That had been one of her arguments: who would pay someone for just talking?

  ‘Oh, I got paid. As soon as I stopped talking, my hand went out for the cheque.’

  She raised her eyebrows, mockingly. ‘Well, well. And did you see my boyfriend?’

  Mairead is genuinely fond of Tim: they have a running battle of insults, digs, innuendoes and arguments which get extremely heated at times, occasionally to the point of my frantic intervention. So I told her all about my visits with Tim, and about Trish and her research on lilting.

  ‘Is that what the young call it this generation?’ she asked with one skeptical eyebrow raised.

  Tim says that Mairead speaks better body than Queen’s English, using the various parts of her anatomy to express the impressions and feelings she does well not to express verbally.

  ‘Hope she’s good enough for him! Are you willing to resign in her favor?’

  That was another of her favorite arguments: over-mothering the young. That all kids would turn out better if deprived of doting mamas at an early age. As Mairead had been an abandoned child, I would have thought she’d feel quite the opposite.

  ‘I don’t think it’s come to that, but he is seriously taken with the girl and she is a very nice child.’

  ‘Have they, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know and I haven’t thought.’

  ‘Now, now, mother dear, don’t get huffy with me.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mairead, what they do is their own business.’

  ‘I’ll remind you of that one day, pet.’

  I caught hold of my temper because sometimes Mairead says outrageous things and I never know if she means them or is merely having me on. ‘I’m sure you wouldn’t forget to, Mairead.’ I felt that now was the time to shut her up with the gifties I’d procured in the States. Last year I’d brought her back a bo
dy-shirt and she’d complained bitterly that I’d only brought her the one because it was the most useful garment she’d ever worn.

  This year I brought six, bought in various parts of the country, wherever the sales were tempting. She was unreservedly overjoyed with my selections. Then she made me show her the things I’d bought myself and, although I tried to be casual about the ski jacket and mask, and the sweater, she is very perceptive. I avoided the issue by cooking dinner, chattering on about places and people, all the while aware that she suspected I was leaving something of great moment out.

  Then I wondered why I was withholding the story from her — I wouldn’t have to draw diagrams to Mairead — but she’d certainly hoot over the manslaughter charge and my part in fouling up the D.A.’s case. I could hear her chortling with glee when she learned that my ‘reputation’ in Denver, at least, was unassailable. It was obvious that my brief affair with Dan meant more to me, much more to me, than to parade it for amusement before my friend, even though she was my best friend.

  She didn’t press me, knowing that eventually I’d come out with it in my own good time. She told me her own news: surprisingly good sales at Easter, a good contract with a ‘reliable’ firm in the States wanting to be supplied with handknits, though shipping costs were triple what they’d been three years ago. I still had that feeling of disorientation you get when you realize that life has continued in its usual merry pace despite your absence.

  She didn’t, however, spend the final night at my house but, after dinner, packed her things with such alacrity that I suspected she had a boyfriend again. She insisted house and Baggins had been no trouble, she’d do it again, so long as I continued to provide her with body shirts.

  I don’t get as de-synchronized travelling east as I do going west. I had no trouble getting to sleep that night.

  The next morning I struck off in my usual routine, rising at eight to let my eager Baggins out for his morning tour of duty and inspection. I had one cup of coffee waiting for the mail, another reading the Alumnae Bulletin, the sole piece of morning mail. I dutifully went upstairs to write thankyou notes for hospitality but here the routine dribbled away.

  As I stared out the mountain window, I had to admit to myself that routine was not going to suffice me. Distance had not ended my attachment to Dan-the-Man. Had our romantic interlude ended after that snowstorm, I think I could have talked myself out of the infatuation. But I’d had to go to his rescue and when you put yourself on the line for someone, like the Chinese adage, you become irretrievably involved. I hadn’t saved Dan’s life as had been claimed but I had saved him from the ignominy of standing trial and a possible twenty year sentence for manslaughter. Okay, to split a semantic hair, I suppose I had saved him the better part of his active life. He’d have been 60-ish when he got out — if they’d been able to make that asinine charge stick. I found myself wishing the bondage were more than Chinesely proverbial but I had also done my living best to keep it nebulous. I pondered now on the folly of sending him that sweater. But the deed was done and couldn’t be undone, excepting postal inefficiencies. I was glad I had done it, and told myself to expect nothing in return for the gesture. Such ruminations were not making bread and butter come in, nor writing those thank-yous.

  My mother, bless her heart, had a thing about discipline: you disciplined your mind and your body, and I always flung back at her, your heart. That wasn’t precisely true, or fair. And I only learned what she meant during Ray’s illness. Particularly about disciplining the heart — in my case, not to break while I watched him waste away and die.

  So I set about exercising discipline. I tried not to see resemblances to Dan in strangers who just happened to have silvery hair and bushy moustaches, were the same height and general build. I succeeded in that endeavor in the next few weeks. What I couldn’t succeed in bending to my will was my memory of smell, curiously enough. It seemed to me that in the April crispness of County Wicklow I could scent the Denver air, crisp with snow and cold and pine, mingled with those indefinably evocative scents of ironed cotton, maleness and aftershave lotion. I was also physically ill with wanting to feel his hands on me, his lips on mine, the prickle of his moustache against my nose and lips, the water smoothness of his flesh against mine. I bloody woke up a couple of nights whimpering in my sleep for that reassurance. And wished him the same sort of frustration, damning his luck that, as a man, he had more chance of easing his condition than I.

  Some of my frustration also stemmed from the realization that Tim had found himself a female companion. Not usurping my place in his affections, God forbid, but Tim maturing enough to stretch past our rewarding relationship to attach himself to a nubile female. I have never been a possessive or clinging female. I wouldn’t start now, if I had to tie mental and literal hands behind my back and gag my mouth. I wanted for Tim what Ray and I had enjoyed before he got sick. My respect, admiration and deep love for Raymond Lovell had sustained me through the adjustment after his death and my loneliness while Tim was growing up. But I saw more loneliness ahead of me as Tim graduated from the position of’ man in my life.’ Trish was helping to write on that particular wall in my emotional life and I’d better start planning ahead.

  I don’t like solitary living. I had had to discipline myself to accept Tim’s departure to University but I could look forward to his summer return. I would have less of his time this year, and, God willing, still less of it from now on. Which was as it should be, but what did I do with the emptiness his going left? I thought of Beth, with Sam and Linda producing a grandchild to fill her lonely hours. I never had been especially maternal: Tim and I were more friends, than son and mother. That flexibility would be a help but . . . there ain’t no all night TV in Ireland. Discipline included occupation, and while I didn’t wear a hair shirt, I knitted hairy Arrans. I finished a size 42 sweater, which usually takes a good fortnight, in less than nine days.

  Mairead had also made herself scarce in my company: at first I thought she’d had enough of the lodge. Then I began to worry if I’d said something that had irritated her. She took umbrage at the most unlikely things. I finally realized that she must be in the throes of a new love affair and I’d better discipline myself out of such subjective whimsies.

  When I brought the finished Arran in to her boutique, her reaction substantiated my guess. She was looking extremely well, with a certain smugness in her manner and a warmth in her eyes. She was as sharp-tongued as ever as she took the sweater and began folding it to display in a plastic cover.

  ‘Youjust brought one in . . . about ten days ago. Don’t tell me you did a 42 in. . . . Well, who is he?’ We were alone in the shop but she glanced around anyhow. ‘Anybody I know?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Ah, c’mon, Dana. Who is it?’

  ‘When I was in the States . . .’

  ‘You do pick ’em,’ she said with an exaggerated sigh of disgust. ‘Go on . . .’

  ‘I got grounded in Denver by a blizzard.’

  ‘I remember the late news about unseasonable blizzards but then the weather everywhere this year had been unreal. So, tell me . . .’

  ‘All planes were grounded . . .’

  ‘Him, too . . .’

  ‘And so the airlines put us up in the airport hotel . . .’

  ‘And . . .’

  ‘We got bored and went swimming . . .’

  ‘Is that what they call it in Denver?’ Her mock innocent expression was malicious.

  ‘If you are swimming in a pool full of water . . .’

  ‘I thought you said you were grounded by a blizzard . . .’

  ‘That stayed outside.’

  ‘And you were inside . . . swimming. Waste of bloody time, you ask me.’ She snorted in disgust. ‘I’ve given you more credit than you deserve.’

  ‘At least I wasn’t just knitting.’

  ‘Should hope to God you weren’t. Nothing quicker to put a man off, I’d say, than you quietly knitting. Zzzzhya!’ Various par
ts of her twitched to emphasize her disgust. She’d always vowed she wouldn’t knit short of a booby hatch: made her nervous, she said, but she used to watch me for hours in silence if she was troubled. ‘I see now why it only took you nine days to do this.’ She patted the Arran and then flipped it into the display basket.

  ‘You don’t suppose I knitted my frustrations into it?’

  She glanced diffidently at the sweater. ‘If I get complaints I’ll let you know. Who knows? It might guy the wearer up to tremendous performance . . .’

  ‘Better not sell it to the Irish then . . .’

  ‘Oh ho, we are in a state, aren’t we? Haven’t you heard from him?’

  ‘He doesn’t know my address.’

  ‘Ssshyoo.’ She punched the sweater. ‘Sometimes, Dana, I’ve no patience with you at all. What was wrong with him? Or was he married?’

  So I told her, delighting in the stunned, shocked, surprised and incredulous expressions that floated across her mobile face.

  ‘You don’t fool me, Dana Jane, with your self-sacrifice. You’re gone on him. You wouldn’t have sent him the sweater otherwise. You’ll hear from him.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sent him the sweater, didn’t you . . .’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Well, he’ll write to thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t put my address on it. I put Tim’s.’

  ‘Tim’s? You clown, you cow, you idiot . . .’

  ‘Look Mairead, the last thing I want is to tie a man up in knots of gratitude . . .’

  ‘That’s as good a beginning as many I can think of.’

  ‘He’s not likely to come here again.’

  ‘He’s been to Ireland?’

  ‘Something to do with oil.’

  ‘Something? Is he an engineer?’

  ‘I think so. I don’t know. I don’t know that much about him . . .’

  ‘You knew enough to know he didn’t murder anybody. Whadd’ya do for three mortal days and nights? Don’t answer. I know. But you’d have to talk sometime . . .’