by Carys Davies
The Cossack took a step forward, the dry snow squeaked beneath his boot. ‘You should come in now,’ he said.
The woman raised her chin. ‘No.’
‘Then you will die.’
His words hung between them in the freezing night; it occurred to me that it was the cold and nothing else that had brought him out to her. It wasn’t because he wanted to be the one to make peace between them; everything about him was grudging and reluctant; he was as morose and brimful of dislike as she was; it was only the danger she was in that had made him come out—the dark travelling shawl she had on might have been good enough for the day but it would not see her through the night. He stood there for another few minutes while she remained seated on the sledge, mulishly still as before. At one point he held out his hand to her in a cool, unwilling kind of way but when she didn’t take it he let it fall, and in one final furious gesture, he took off his coat and threw it, knife and all, onto the sledge, so it covered her shoulders like a blanket, and then he came marching back into the inn, alone.
Inside, on the low table by the fire, the piece of brown paper lay as before. The man picked it up now, folded it, and put it away inside his shirt. He didn’t ask if I had a room, he just wrapped his giant’s arms around himself and leaned against the high back of the bench and sat there, glaring into the fire.
Sometimes I wonder if at some half-conscious level, I knew then what had happened between them.
If I did, I wasn’t aware of it; when I discovered the truth, it came to me, I swear, as a revelation.
I didn’t go to bed. From time to time during the night and early morning I looked out through the window at the woman on the sledge. It was one of the drawbacks of the inn that we had no covered place for the horses and the sledges, only an open shelter with a beaten tin roof which kept out some of the wind but not the cold and not much of the snow. She wasn’t wearing the man’s coat. It lay behind her like a big dead animal. Still she sat, straight as a pole, though as the hours passed, her body began to shake. Around two o’clock the snow stopped falling; it was too cold now for snow. A crust of ice formed on the leather traces of the sledge and around the woman’s shawl and on the tops of her boots.
Twice in the night I went out with Pyotr, once with a fur wrap and once with some stew; she thanked us for both but when I said, would she come in out of the cold and sit by the fire? she shook her head.
‘Not if he’s in there.’
Towards morning we went out for the last time.
The stone pillars of the town gates were grey against the yellow sky, snow filled the thick clouds but none had come down now for several hours. Something had happened though, to the woman.
She lay now, in the bottom of the sledge. The black dog that had come in the night sat on her feet, as if trying to keep them warm. But she was frozen hard; her hair, when I lifted a piece that had slipped out from her shawl onto her face snapped between my fingers like a frozen reed. I prised open the crisp folds of her clothing—the fur wrap, her grey woollen shawl—and found her hands. I began to chafe them with snow.
Pyotr watched, frowning. ‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Let Pyotr.’
He was strong, Pyotr. Short and stocky and wide. Even so, he couldn’t move her. He put his arms around the lumpy parcel of her body but it seemed to cling with a kind of obdurate force to the sledge. She was frozen and stuck to it. He went inside and came back with a rope, looped it around her and pulled. There was a sharp snap as she broke free from the ice and then he lifted her in his arms and carried her, like a small frost-covered pine tree, into the warm.
The fire was low now, there were just a few embers left glowing in the grate. Mostly it was ash. I raked up what was there and threw on a new log. The Cossack was still sitting up but he was dozing now. Pyotr laid the frozen woman at his feet by the hearth.
Under the fur wrap and her woolly grey shawl she had on one of those pretty, brightly embroidered dresses, like the ones the Sadler’s Wells dancers had worn when Geoffrey took me to see The Rite of Spring a few years before for my birthday. The most striking thing about her, though, was her face, still furious and indignant, gazing out from beneath a thin carapace of ice, like something trapped in a pond, or behind the clouded glass of an old mirror. The effect was curious and unsettling; it was clear to me now that she was dead.
On the bench beside me the Cossack no longer slept. He was sitting without moving, just staring at the body of the frozen woman at his feet.
Pyotr grunted. He bent to the floor to pick up his rope, which was lying in a sodden coil on the hearth. I didn’t know what to say. For something to do I began to gather up the remains of the Cossack’s dinner—his bowl and cup, his fork and spoon, the empty vodka jug—and perhaps it would all have ended there if I hadn’t noticed then the piece of paper on the floor beneath the bench, the one the man had carried in his fist and later folded and put inside his shirt. It must have fallen out while he slept.
I picked it up, opened it. It was a map. A maze of hand-drawn tracks across the snowy wilderness, an arrow in the right-hand corner, pointing north. I thought of the Cossack’s smouldering fury when they arrived, of the woman’s suicidal six-hour sulk in the snow and then I understood; everything that was familiar about the two of them seemed at that moment to reveal itself. Even before the Cossack glanced over and saw me holding the map, even before he’d shrugged his massive shoulders and thrown up his hands and gestured towards the window at their sledge parked outside, even before he’d opened his mouth to speak, I knew what he was going to say:
‘Always when we drive, my wife and I, we argue.’
I thought of Geoffrey.
I thought of our last horrible scene in the car after his brother’s wedding in Salford, after I’d told him to come off the M6 just north of Manchester at junction 26 and go into Wigan; after we’d got lost in Wigan and been stuck in traffic for an hour and three quarters in the centre of town, then trailed slowly on for another hour through Hindley, Atherton and Tyldesley, and ended up arriving at the church when the wedding ceremony was just finishing; I thought of how we’d sat through the reception without speaking a word to each other and then walked silently back to the car, of how Geoffrey had taken the road atlas out of the compartment in the door on my side and said to me in that quiet voice that pretends to be patient and understanding but is in fact a hair’s breadth away from being speechless with incandescent fury, ‘Why would you do that, Harriet? Why wouldn’t you tell me to come off at junction 21a and then take the M62 all the way up to the M602 into Salford? Or junction 20 so I could have taken the M56 and picked up the western ring road until we hit the M602 there and gone in that way? Jesus Christ, Harriet, why would you take us in through the centre of Wigan on a Saturday morning?’
I remembered how I’d turned away from him and stared out of my window at the trees and the departing wedding guests and the other cars in the hotel car park and said, quietly, as he had, ‘It seemed like the best way to me, Geoffrey.’
I thought of the five hours we’d spent on the Boulevard Périphérique in Paris. I thought of the horrible, fat Michelin book with its hundreds of pages, each one with a small piece of Paris on it so that the road kept running off the edge of one page and on to another but never onto the next page, always onto a different page somewhere else in the book that you could only find by consulting the index at the back and by the time you’d found it, it was too late. I thought of Geoffrey’s demented shouting as we went whipping past the Saint-Cloud exit for the fourth time. Shall I come off here, Harriet? Shall I? Shall I? Tell me what I need to do Harriet, you need to tell me, you need to tell me, you need to tell me NOW. Look! There’s the exit. You need to tell me now now now now now oh too late. I thought of the evening we drove down to London for a seven thirty performance of Oklahoma! at the National Theatre; of how at around eight o’clock, somewhere between Hendon and Cricklewood, Geoffrey stopped the car and pulled over and switched on the overhead map-light and without a w
ord put his hand out for the A to Z; how he turned over a few pages and studied them and then handed me back the book and extinguished the light and moved slowly off again into the traffic. I thought of the satellite navigation device Geoffrey had bought, not long after his brother’s wedding, and what high hopes I’d had of it, but it too had been shouted at, and then banished, for choosing the wrong way and taking us to places we didn’t want to go, and after a short time we’d gone back to doing things the way we’d always done them, and I thought, now, of the hundreds of occasions when things had gone badly for us in the car. I thought of how, somehow, the between-car-journeys bit of our life suddenly became an unimaginably distant thing; I thought of how every single time it happened, my heart shrivelled up into a tiny dry peanut without the tiniest drop of love left inside it for Geoffrey, until the only thing left to do was to show him the back of my head and stare out of the window on my side and cry and silently repeat the chant, I hate you Geoffrey Parker, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.
Next to the fire, the Cossack stared sadly at the body of his dead wife. Pyotr had fetched a mop and was dabbing gently at the wet floorboards around her where the ice from her clothes had begun to thaw.
Upstairs in the dormitory the bunk beds creaked. People were getting up. Soon they would be down, the young lawyer on his way to Vladivostok and the old salesman from Irkutsk and the others, wanting their breakfast. Well, I would make breakfast. I would fill the samovar and give them hot tea and fresh rolls. I would send Pyotr into town for the carpenter and the priest and when he got back I would say to him that I was very sorry but I was going back to Birmingham now. I would tell him that he could keep the inn if he wanted it, I would leave everything for him, the beds and the cooking pots, the crockery, the vodka jugs, the knives and forks, the wood pile in the back, my balalaika, and then I would pack my bags.
I would walk out into the snow and climb on the first train that was heading west out of Siberia and I would keep going until I got back to Geoffrey, and once I was there I would do what I should have done years ago, I would have some driving lessons, and when I passed my test, I would drive, and Geoffrey would navigate. And if I failed my driving test, I would take Geoffrey’s hands in mine and tell him I loved him. I would make us a good dinner and open a bottle of wine, I would put on the blue Margaret Howell linen blouse he gave me for our twelfth wedding anniversary and the cedar-wood bracelet he gave me for our fifth, and I would talk to him about public transport.
MYTH
IT WASN’T LIKE you think.
When the time came I was brought to the queen’s tent and told to lie down on the couch.
The whole place was lit with tapers and it was bright as day. All the other women were there, standing in rows on the carpeted ground—to give me strength, said the queen. She herself bound my wrists and ankles and secured them to the couch. I was given a beaker of cordial to drink and after that I can’t tell you how long it seemed before the Chinaman arrived.
When he did I began to shake. My feet bucked against the leather straps and my gorge rose.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I prefer to die,’ but the queen shook her head and the little Chinaman asked for water.
He was tiny. A minute person in a soft blue tunic and a bamboo hat who had once set the queen’s broken leg. Black cotton shoes on his neat little feet, in his hand a hide bag with a pleated neck holding his instruments.
‘I will cover your face and be very quick,’ he’d told me the day before and shown me the ivory comb he would place between my teeth.
He would need dry sponges, he said, and plenty of light; a bucket.
He seemed anxious now.
Anxious and uneasy and reluctant.
I saw him glance at the queen, as if he hoped for some kind of last-minute reprieve, but all she did was nod and point with her muscled finger at his little bag.
He bowed and took out his ink-stone; moistened it. From an invisible pocket in his tunic he produced a cloth and put it over my eyes.
I felt the point of his brush, trembling and wet, describe a circle for his knife to follow and then he made the first cut.
It must be a horrible thing to carve off a piece of a living person who has only the benefit of a beaker of strong wine to steady them.
Five times I counted he went in with his knife, pushing and pulling and sawing and—oh—just when I thought it was over, scraping away at the bone beside my heart to take the last of it.
Half the women fainted, their big broad-shouldered bodies going down like trees and through it all the clatter of their spears and bows falling against each other, arrows dropping like pins from their upturned quivers.
The air stirred and the Chinaman’s cloth slipped from my face. I saw the queen sway beside the couch. She looked ill and green and when the diminutive doctor asked her humbly, would she be next? she seemed embarrassed.
She toyed with the tassel of her golden girdle and coughed a little; mumbled something about second thoughts and changing her mind.
Told him, in a quiet voice, that he could go now—that some of her ideas, perhaps, were better than others.
(The suggestion that the Amazons removed one breast—either by cutting or burning, in order to enhance their prowess on the battlefield—is a persistent one; however there is no indication of such a practice in works of art, in which they are always represented with both breasts, though the right one is often shown covered.)
BONNET
IT’S EARLY WHEN she boards the London train—dark when she leaves the house and still dark when she arrives at the station in Leeds and enters her compartment and nods to her fellow passengers.
What do they see, her fellow passengers?
They see a small, plain, obscure woman in a black travelling outfit, on her head a large funnel-shaped bonnet, also black, with a dark grey lining—a small, plain, obscure-looking woman who has been to London several times before and has no plan when she gets to her lodgings to do anything differently from the last time or the time before that or the time before that.
It’s only the next morning when she is walking along Gracechurch Street that she decides to do it—and even then it doesn’t feel like a decision, it feels like she is being carried along on a wave of something she cannot help.
For a long time she stands there before going in. She knows that in a great many ways she has led a sheltered life and that there are plenty of things she doesn’t know, such as the right places to go for certain things. Even now, when she comes to London, she feels most of the time like a clumsy traveller in a foreign land.
She can see herself in the glass: her black travelling outfit, her big dark bonnet with its grey lining; her reflection very clear in the sparkling window.
How clean the window is!
She herself has been doing a lot of cleaning lately. When she can’t write, and these days she cannot seem to write a single line, cleaning feels like a good productive thing to do.
Still not quite knowing what she’ll do when she gets inside, she pushes open the door.
He wants to talk to her, he said in his letter, about her next book. The appointment is at four o’clock which means she has two hours.
As soon as she’s inside, the bell on the door ringing out its last chimes behind her, she knows why she’s come.
The choice is bewildering.
‘That one,’ she says, pointing, after much deliberation over the possibilities, and takes the money from her purse. A huge amount, it seems, for such a thing. And then she takes off her bonnet, and puts it on the counter and watches it being taken away through the curtain, and sits, and waits till it’s ready. She feels naked, without her bonnet; almost asks if there is one she can borrow while she’s waiting.
At a quarter to four she leaves the shop, her bonnet back on her head, and makes her way along Gracechurch Street and from there to Cornhill to attend the meeting that is due to take place at four with her young publisher.
He has written her a le
tter, her tall, dark-haired, handsome young publisher, but she has not received it.
Not the letter asking if they can meet to talk about her next book.
Another letter, a second letter.
It was early when she left home yesterday and climbed into her compartment, first at Keighley, then at Leeds, and she has not received this second letter, as he had expected she would have, before her visit.
A second letter in which he’s told her the news that he has fallen in love with a Miss Elizabeth Blakeway and is engaged to be married.
He is standing behind his desk when she is shown into his office, a collection of papers in his hand.
His pale complexion is flushed from his morning ride in the park, and in the half-second it takes for him to look up from his reading, she takes him in afresh: his rangy, athletic height, his youthful, generous, intelligent, shrewd and sensitive face.
Never, in her whole life, has she been as conscious of her own appearance as she is at this moment—and she is always always acutely and painfully conscious of her own appearance when she is with him here in London, here in his office or having dinner with his mother and his sisters, or out in public, at the opera, or at an exhibition or at some terrifying literary party; but she has never, ever, been as conscious as she is now of her own tiny body and large, ill-proportioned head; her crooked mouth and her thin hair, bulked up with its little pad of stuffed brown silk—of her big nose, of her spectacles, of her age, or of how until this moment, she has never appeared before him in anything other than black or grey.
It is pink, the new lining of her bonnet—a lustrous, pearly pink like the interior of a shell, and it is the worst imaginable thing, when he looks up, for him to see it; for him to see this small plain woman, his friend, with this unexpected bonnet on her head.