by David Park
‘What’s that you’ve found?’ he asked, squirming sideways in his chair.
‘It’s been in the house for years. I don’t want you to think that I’m a secret drinker or anything like that. The only time I’ve ever touched it was a thimbleful once when I had a toothache.’
‘It has a lot of medicinal qualities, all right. Normally I don’t really myself.’
‘I don’t know what I was thinking of,’ she said, shaking her head as in reproof of herself, and about to carry it back.
‘But under the circumstances,’ he ventured, ‘under these very special circumstances, well . . . Maybe we need all the fortification we can get.’ He stood up to show his willingness to be fortified and watched while she set two glasses on the mantelpiece, then carefully poured two small measures. When she handed him his glass, the flames from the fire seemed to be inside it and he gave them a swirl, then stared at what he was about to drink. He knew he should sip it, that it would look bad to knock it back like some hardened drinker but the fire that burnished it into life made him spurn any attempt to slowly ration it and he tilted his head back and wasn’t disappointed. The heat slipped down the back of his throat and then spread like a rip-tide through his insides until it felt as if it pushed into the very pores of his skin. He blinked as some of the same heat pushed its way back out through the rush of his breath. Flames suddenly spurted in the hearth and for a second he thought he was a dragon breathing fire. ‘That’ll put’ – he was going to say, ‘hairs on your chest’, but caught himself just in time and after a second’s hesitation completed it with ‘a lining on your coat’.
She sat with her glass, sipping from it and grimacing a little. ‘It’ll be a very cold night,’ he said, to help her. ‘It’ll help keep out the cold.’ Then like a child taking unpleasant medicine she took her punishment. He laughed as she fanned her mouth and blew a stream of air. ‘Strong stuff,’ he said, ‘but under the circumstances, maybe just the ticket.’ He leaned forward to the fire but his head swirled a little and he pulled back into the support of the chair. A few minute later she gave him another glass, but this time he sipped it very slowly. He wasn’t an experienced drinker and he hadn’t had a great deal to eat all day. Enough was as good as a feast. He always knew when he’d reached his limits in anything. Moderation was always a virtue. Staggering off into the wintry wastes while under the influence would not be a good idea and might lead to disaster. This time the fire in his throat slid into a more mellow glow – it made him think of a turnip lantern where the hollowed inside turned golden and flickering. He wondered if that was what his face looked like as they sat in silence and stared at the flames.
‘What do you see in the fire?’ she asked.
‘See in the fire?’ He didn’t understand. He searched it for something unusual, something that shouldn’t be there.
‘It’s a game you play. I played it all the time with my sister when we were children. You look in the fire and have to tell what you see. Except she was always better at it than I was – she had so much imagination – and when she told you, she made it so real you felt you could see it yourself. Palaces, caverns, secret rivers – she always saw something different and then she’d make up a story about it with a cast of characters.’
‘I didn’t know you had a sister,’ he said.
‘Florence. She lives in London. With her husband and two daughters. Sometimes I go to see them. Not very often. He’s an architect. She teaches music’
‘Did they come over for the funeral?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said, hesitating, ‘she didn’t come. Florence and my mother didn’t get on, didn’t part on good terms. She never came back after she left. My mother didn’t like me visiting her, wouldn’t even look at a picture of her grandchildren.’
‘Strange things, families,’ he said, standing to pour her another drink.
‘I shouldn’t.’
‘Against the cold,’ he said as he handed her the glass. ‘So what do you see in the fire?’
She smiled over the rim of her glass and he tried to imagine her as a child peering into the very same fire.
‘A house on the side of a black mountain and a candle burning in every window. An inn where travellers call to break their journey. They keep the lights lit all night long. Can you see it?’
‘I think so,’ he answered, increasingly sure he could and conscious of a little shiver of sentiment washing over him. ‘So she never came back when your mother was ill? Even at the end?’
‘No, she wouldn’t come.’
‘That’s a pity.’ He imagined himself as a weary traveller, almost exhausted by his long journey, ready to give up the struggle, and then seeing the distant flicker of one of those lights. ‘Family falling-outs can be very bitter things.’
‘She wasn’t really bitter – it was just she was never prepared to sacrifice anything of her own freedom or happiness for someone she didn’t really love.’
‘But duty, Miss Lewis, is an important thing,’ he said, hearing a call to arms. ‘We can’t all just follow our own desires to the detriment of others.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, Mr Peel,’ she said, but her tone was unconvinced. He tried to persuade her. ‘We wouldn’t have seen the children home this morning if we’d just concerned ourselves with our own interests. We wouldn’t even have turned up at all.’ An image of Miss Morgan, snuggling below her eiderdown sneaked past his defences but he banished it – this was not a time for self-indulgence.
They sat in silence again. They mightn’t always show it but people were glad of those who made the effort to keep those lights at the windows. Without them there would be only darkness. In a little while she asked him again what he saw in the fire. It felt like a test and he wanted to rise to it but it was difficult because in reality he saw nothing at all. ‘I see blue-topped mountains, mountains to be climbed. Tiny men roped together, having to trust one another.’ And now he really could see it. Slippery lower slopes gave way to blue ice-faces and hidden chasms. Danger all around and only experience and a cool head could pull you through. The trouble was that his head didn’t feel cool at all. It had started to whistle like a kettle and even now she was pouring him another drink.
‘And your own family, Mr Peel, was it a happy one?’
‘Yes,’ he said, wondering if when the time came he would be one of those chosen to make the final attempt at the summit. ‘My parents were quite strict in their religious views: I think my mother would have been happier to see me go into the ministry than teaching.’ He sank back into the chair, hiding in case his late father looked down and saw him with a glass in his hand and the smell of whiskey on his breath. He rasped the back of his hand across his mouth and cringed with anger and shame as he thought of his father’s buckled belt lathering into his bare legs as they tried to skip and high-step away from its swinging arcs. And after whatever sin he had committed had been purged, there were the interminable prayers to salve his soul while the skin on his legs still flared and burned. He felt his eyes moisten. He took a gulp of the whiskey, hoped its swirl and sear would cauterize the pain of memory. They wouldn’t choose him to be one of the elite: he knew they wouldn’t. Never in his life had he been the one chosen. Now time was running out. He had turned forty, and when he thought of the empty house that was his home he stared more deeply into the fire in the hope that he might see some better future.
The candles were burning down, the room more shadowy as each hour passed. He should have been on his way hours ago. He suspected Miss Lewis was a little tipsy. Sometimes she giggled at the things he said, sometimes she hummed a little tune to herself. She was humming now, her head moving in rhythm with the tune.
‘You have a nice voice,’ he said. ‘Does it run in the family?’
‘Florence had the musical talent. But then Florence was the one who seemed to have everything,’ she said, and he thought her voice was edged with bitterness.
‘You have a nice voice, too,’ he repeated. ‘Let
me hear you sing.’
‘I couldn’t. I’m sure it’s a very poor thing.’
‘Nonsense,’ he insisted. ‘Just a little song and then I really must be on my way. I think I’ve overstayed my welcome.’
‘No, you haven’t at all. I’m sure it’s been nice to have company.’ Then she straightened her back and started to sing, softly at first so that he had to strain to hear but then her voice gradually rising until it started to skirmish with the shadows and fill the room. ‘Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing . . .’ He closed his eyes and let the song wash over him. Such a beautiful song, about a prince returning, or was it leaving? It didn’t matter. Opening his eyes he saw her face transported by the music and her voice was so light and delicate that he wondered where she kept it hidden and her face, too, had changed, changed even though she still wore the black smudge on her cheek. It had sharpened into focus, had lost some of its flaccid lack of definition. When she finished he applauded gently and she fluttered her hands in the air in embarrassment and his gaze turned to the picture of the couple kissing and he was filled with remorse for having judged them so harshly.
He rose from the chair and reached for his coat. He had to go. He felt a little dizzy but he lumbered into the dark overcoat as he thanked her once again for her hospitality. They made their way carefully down the dolorous hall and she struggled with the door. He had to help her and their hands briefly skimmed against each other. When the door opened they both gasped at the sudden shock of snow that pelted against their faces and stretched before them like a terrible tundra.
‘You can’t go out in that, Mr Peel,’ she declared with an insistence that he had never heard from her before. ‘I would never forgive myself if something was to happen to you. It would be really dangerous to try to make it home in conditions like that. There’s nothing else for it – you’ll have to stay here.’
‘I’ve been out in worse,’ he said, ‘but I did have the benefit of the right equipment. But I can’t stay here – how would it look? You know how these things get out and misunderstood.’
‘No one’ll be any the wiser and you can head off early in the morning. I’ll make up a bed for you on the settee. You’d be risking life and limb to venture out in that.’ She shut the door and he offered no further opposition. Special circumstances. Relief rustled through him.
They went back to the living room and she drew the curtains. There wasn’t much left of the candles. Taking one, she climbed the stairs, returning a few moments later with some blankets and a green quilt. ‘I’ll put some slack on the fire to keep it going, keep some heat in the room.’ He nodded and felt embarrassed without fully knowing why. ‘Will you be all right there, Mr Peel?’ she asked, pointing to the settee. ‘It might be a bit uncomfortable.’
‘It’ll be just fine. Don’t forget you’re talking to a man who’s slept on a ridge strapped to the side of a cliff,’ he said. She smiled and he was pleased.
‘Goodnight, Mr Peel.’
‘Goodnight. But my name’s Terence. Call me Terry.’
‘Call me Milly.’
‘Goodnight, Milly.’ The word tasted strange on his tongue.
‘Goodnight, Terry.’
He sat on the end of the settee and felt the return of his sadness. In a few minutes the candle would flicker for the last time. Undressing to his vest and pants, he curled on the settee under the blankets and quilt. The blankets scratched his legs and he couldn’t get his head comfortable no matter how hard he tried. After a while he got up and spread the blankets on the floor in front of the hearth, rolled his coat into a pillow and pulled the quilt over himself. His face was only a few feet from the smear of embers at the fire’s base. He could hear the wind murmuring in the chimney in broken little sobs of air. He had started to feel sleepy. His thoughts turned to the couple above his head and he felt a voyeur of their passion, an intruder into their nightly privacy. Suddenly something touched him on the shoulder making him start. She was holding a pillow out to him. She had forgotten to give him one. He sat up.
‘Thank you, Milly,’ he said, reaching his hand into the shadows. She was wearing a dressing gown and as she bent down to him he glimpsed the white rise of her breasts. He thought for a second of the two snowballs that had curved through the air towards him. White as the snow and blue-tinged like ice. ‘You’re very kind.’ She kneeled down at the side of the quilt. Flames pushed through a crack in the slack, illuminating the side of her face with its smudge still nestling on her cheek. He stretched out his hand to brush it off and as he did so she pressed her own hand against his as it settled on her skin. She hadn’t understood. But special circumstances: the unexpected welcoming flicker of lights in distant windows, the promise of rest and shelter. Never in his life had he been so weary. He held out his thin, hairless arms and as she came towards him he repeated silently to himself the words that made everything all right: ‘Against the cold. Against the cold.’
The Big Snow
Each time the outer door of the barracks opened, the draught made the fire smoke. It didn’t matter how tightly they wedged the inner office door closed, or jammed the lock with cardboard, there was still a regular puff of grey smoke which seeped silently into the corners and crevices of the room. Spidery filaments of smut hovered and rested on the Coronation picture of the Queen above the fire, landed on the wooden cupboards and settled on the sagging tiers of fat-bellied, string-tied files. Some drifted aimlessly, then fell on the high table where fingerprints were taken, to disappear amidst the hundreds of smudged whorls. Some fell, too, on the large frame of the figure hunched over a typewriter and speckled the white shock of his hair or vanished into the dark wool of his suit. In another corner of the room the younger man looked up and fanned the air with his open book.
‘Sergeant Gracey, do you think we should open the door and let some of this smoke out of the room?’
‘What smoke’s that, then, son?’ Gracey said without looking up. He narrowed his eyes in a little effort at concentration and pinged the keys with two fingers. ‘I’ll tell you what you can do, though, get your arse out round the back and get that coal bucket filled. And listen, let’s make it your most important duty of the day to see it’s never empty. I don’t want caught out like we were in January. Two days without a soddin’ piece – ended up having to burn whatever was in the lost property cupboard. And when you’re going past the desk, ask Maguire if he’s ordered some. Half the time I think he’s wheeling it home to keep his ma warm.’
Swift stood up and went over to the bucket. He hesitated, watched as an inky mote landed on the soft brown hat sitting beside the typewriter, then asked, ‘Do you think we’ll be going out later?’ As Gracey lifted his head for the first time to look at him, he added, ‘I was just wondering, like.’
‘What in the name of all that’s holy would anyone want to go out in that weather for? Believe me, son, any criminal worth his salt is sitting beside the fire, same as we are. Just concentrate on keeping the coal bucket filled. And can’t you see I’m trying to write this report – and making a pig’s arse of it in triplicate. There’s something wrong with the ribbon again. Listen, son, fill the bucket, help me type this thing and we’ll take a spin out later. Now I can’t say better than that.’
‘Can I drive the car, Skipper?’
‘Get that bucket filled and you’re in with a chance. But stop calling me bloody “Skipper”, son – a skipper is someone who sails a boat.’
As Swift left the room he almost collided with a man carrying a brown parcel under his arm. ‘Watch where you’re going, son,’ the man said. ‘And don’t bring that bucket anywhere near this parcel.’ Gracey nodded almost imperceptibly at the new arrival, then bounced the keys of the typewriter with his fist, tore the page out and scrunched it into a ball.
‘See you’ve got the lad doing something useful. How’s he shapin’ up?’ the newcomer asked.
‘Keen as mustard,’ Gracey said. ‘Put your head away havin’ him hangin’ on your sh
oulder all day. When he’s not takin’ notes he’s readin’ some book or other. Grammar-school boy he is. Doesn’t know his arse from his elbow yet.’
‘And will you be able to train him up? Will he make it in the end.’
‘Probably will – I’ll say whatever he wants just to get rid of him.’
The man set his parcel on the table, close to the typewriter, then moved it slightly as if worried about the possibility of damage. It was tied with string and neatly bowed in the middle.
‘Found the Crown Jewels, then, have you?’ Gracey asked, prompted by a desire to have the inevitable explanation over and done with, rather than by curiosity.
‘Next best thing,’ Burns said, lifting the parcel and carefully pulling the bow open. He whisked the brown paper away with the flourish of a magician doing a trick. Gracey stared impassively at the roll of green tweed that bounced on the table and said nothing. ‘Well, what do you think of that?’ Burns asked as he skimmed the cloth with his fingers.
‘Very nice,’ Gracey answered. ‘So what’s it for?’
‘A suit – I’m going to get Nugent to run it up for me.’
‘Where did you get it?
‘Let’s just say it was a thank you for services rendered,’ Burns replied. ‘Make a crackin’ suit, that will.’
‘Wear it any time you have to go up the Falls – the colour’ll go down well.
‘What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with the colour.’
‘Never said there was,’ Gracey answered, going over to the fire and spitting into the flames. There was a sudden sizzle and then the door opened and a lop-sided Swift struggled into the room with a full bucket of coal. Burns started to wrap the cloth, smoothing wrinkles in the paper with the palm of his hand.
‘Get your coat, Swifty boy, we’re going out,’ Gracey said. ‘Can’t hang around here all day.’ As Swift clanked the bucket to the floor, some of the top coals slipped over the rim but when he bent to retrieve them he heard Gracey say, ‘Leave them, son, we don’t have all day. Leave them.’