Winter Tales

by Kenneth Steven

  ‘Winifred, you must be exhausted! Come in, dear, and welcome. You remember Roddy, and Lewis would have been an inch smaller when you last saw him.’

  The brown eyes just as he remembered. Like a parcel herself, wrapped in Manchester against the legendary Scottish cold. Granny Cameron wound away layer after layer as Winifred smiled and watched; the boys standing there, feet shuffling.

  ‘Come on, then! Show your cousin some courtesy! Off up and get warm, Winifred, and make sure they look after you. Yes, take Winifred to her room first, Roddy, and then come down when you’re ready. We’ll restore you with tea and cake!’

  As night began falling, Lewis asked if she’d like to see the lake. The brown eyes nodded. His heart thudded, but he felt all right, and he had to show her. Outside, stars sparked above them. They stood in the fierce blue cold.

  ‘You can’t really see stars in Manchester,’ she said. ‘Not like that.’

  Her head was turned right up to look; in the light of the porch lamp he saw the gold hair that curled about her eyes.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘You have to see the lake!’

  Almost as if he’d made it himself. He forgot to go as his father would have, slowly and carefully; he chased through bracken and long grass, forgetting everything. But she ran too and they reached the shore together.

  ‘Out there’s an island,’ he said, the cold catching his breath. ‘Further over to the right. There’s a place on it called the Christmas House. If we get enough ice we can spend Christmas there; we can stay there.’

  He looked to see what she thought. Her eyes were bright – he didn’t need to ask.

  ‘So you’ll come, Winifred, if it freezes?’

  She looked at him, nodding as though he was stupid.

  ‘And I hate Winifred,’ she said. ‘Call me Winnie like everyone else.’

  *

  Lewis drifted in a no-man’s-land between sleeping and waking. He knew he wasn’t in the boarding house; somewhere deep inside he felt back home. He’d worked out the night before that twelve more days remained; if he counted the drive to the station and the train journey then twelve and a half. He’d fallen asleep with twelve and a half days safe in his head; they rocked him to sleep. And he dreamed a real winter came, the sort there’d once been, when forty or fifty degrees of frost locked everything in a white fist of ice.

  He walked through Glenellen rejoicing because there could be no more classes, because everyone had gone. He found himself beside the swimming pool and the water was solid white ice. He’d never have to learn to swim again. Then he turned and Winnie was there. Her brown eyes held him and she began running – out from the frozen pool onto the playing fields. Into the trees beside them till he saw the shape of the Lodge peeping between the birches, the grey-white shimmer of lake behind. She’d brought him home . . .

  He felt someone shaking him and calling his name, but he didn’t want to be dragged from his dream. They kept tugging and tugging him.

  ‘Lewis! Lewis, it’s me!’ It was his granny, and he knew it must be very early. The room still half-dark; in the other bed the unmistakable hump of Roddy’s back. She set a cup of hot orange on his bedside table; he recognized the scent. She’d made it each morning when his mum was so ill in hospital. And she’d put her hand through his hair.

  He struggled to sit up, his face all crumpled with sleep. He heard her smile.

  ‘The ice is thick enough. You can go out to the island tonight.’

  *

  At five Harry went over the ice: they all went down to watch. John Cameron was closest to the shore, the firefly of his cigarette flickering the blue dark. Already eight below. He finished giving instructions about the path that led to the House, and suddenly the quiet fell and Harry set off. His boots thudded the ice; the light of his head torch zigzagging as his shadow grew into the night. Lewis thought of the story of Jesus walking on water, and suddenly realized that what he’d dreamed had happened after all. His father had been wrong; the ice was thick enough and they were going to the Christmas House. Winnie was beside him; he caught the scent of her, was sure of it. He closed his eyes, felt he couldn’t breathe for joy. It was going to happen.

  ‘I’m there!’ Harry’s call reached them; echoed over the ice and hung in the stillness. And they came alive again, the listeners; they shuffled their freezing feet, started talking – John Cameron to his mother with the lantern by the shore, Roddy to Winifred so she laughed. Harry’s head torch flashed in the trees, a single beam of brightness. Then, as they turned back to the Lodge, that light vanished too. Lewis was the last to turn. Harry had found the path.

  *

  Granny Cameron came to see them off. Lewis went first with such a bundle he almost couldn’t see where he was going. He tried to look all the same; not just ahead but around him – up into the hill opposite, silver-plated with moonlight, the pines eerie white with their jewellery of frost. He caught the wary eyes of hinds in a clearing low down, ears like bears’ – half-moons of listening. They watched and then, as though on cue, turned and scattered.

  ‘Not so fast! Wait for me!’ Winnie protested.

  He stood, waiting and happy. The Lodge lights cast vague gold trails over the ice. Roddy had barely set out, was trying to carry all that remained despite his grandmother’s chiding.

  ‘Did you tell your parents?’ Lewis suddenly asked when she’d caught up with him.

  ‘Tell them what?’ She kept her eyes on the ice.

  ‘About coming here. That we’d come here.’

  She shook her head. ‘They were busy with everything. I don’t remember. Look at Roddy! He can hardly walk!’

  Her laughter rang out and echoed, and for a moment Lewis wanted to tell her she was breaking the quiet. She’d turned back a few steps, as though wanting to help Roddy. Granny Drummond was making her way slowly up towards the Lodge; she’d told Lewis to remember every second.

  So Winnie and he reached the island first: the little beach he’d seen from the top of Croft Hill. They fought between trees, trying to follow something that might once have been a path. It was difficult, even in the steel whiteness of the moonlight. Lewis broke his way onwards, stabbed by branches.

  A spray of shadows brushed back against Winnie’s face. ‘Is it much further?’

  He didn’t answer because suddenly they were there, in a little glade encircled by pine trees and dense undergrowth. They were there and the cabin stood right in front of them. A plume of maroon smoke curled from the roof; the fire inside popped and whined. Good old Harry.

  But the door had broken and the only thing was to crawl under what remained. Lewis looked inside, from the vantage point of his knees. The one thin window; the red roar of fire. They left their loads and crawled. Winnie went to the window to look out.

  ‘It could be Siberia!’ she breathed. ‘Look, Lewis!’

  He hunched there too, head bent close to hers. Like in an advent calendar, he thought. The moon high over the trees; the lake with its silver patternings, a white floor of whorls and paths.

  ‘Can’t you imagine wolves?’ Winnie said. ‘Wolves coming across, hunting? As if it could be any time; I mean ages ago. Like walking into a story, a story you once read!’

  Then Roddy arrived, and they struggled to bring rugs in, light lamps and make up beds. All their toes would point in to the middle. Roddy built a great stack of wood and it smelled like mushrooms. They barricaded the broken door, then lay in the darkness listening to the fire. Roddy said he’d get up at three to make sure it was still alight; he always woke anyway, and he’d rebuild it so it was going in the morning.

  Lewis didn’t want to sleep, but lie somewhere between waking and sleeping, the thump and hiss of the fire in his ears. They had got to the island; it had happened.

  He slept just the same, though his dreaming felt real enough. He woke and the fire was dead. The Christmas House was
filled with silver light, shone on the face of Winnie next to him, and on Roddy who was furthest away. She was facing him, on her side, and might have been sculpted from silver. He couldn’t even hear the sound of her breathing. He got up, slipped out, glided over the ice towards the Lodge lying in darkness, asleep. He crept inside, found his fiddle case, took the violin and went back out into the very middle of the lake and began playing. And creatures came alive and gathered at the edge of the ice to listen; deer and pine martens with their gorgeous orange tummies, and long-snouted badgers. Last of all, Winnie came out of the Christmas House, smiling, and he turned towards her, for it was for her he really had played.

  *

  The three of them were up at nine. Roddy hadn’t woken after all in the night and the fire was a mess of charred ends of wood. They could see their breath. Lewis pulled on his clothes, juddering, fingers like whittled twigs. They didn’t speak: their mouths locked and sore. Lewis crawled under the broken door, everything covered in white like cobwebs. The Lodge gone; a carpet of mist over the lake hiding the shore from them. He whirled his arms and bashed his red hands against his sides. Then he heard Winnie; saw her standing laughing at him helplessly. He smiled, shy, and remembered his dream.

  It took thirty-six matches and a great deal of blowing to coax the fire back to life. For the next hour they did little but huddle in the room, watching the flames.

  ‘What’s that box?’ Winnie asked at last. She’d noticed something under one of the ledges, something they hadn’t brought with them over the ice. They looked, reluctant to move. Lewis finally struggled up, feet still freezing, and slid it out – covered with dust and ash, like something that had survived a volcano, belonged to another world. He swept his hand over the top to clear it.

  ‘The Christmas Box,’ he read. He brought it over, not opening it till he was there. Winnie took out a velvet bag that rattled; she struggled with the drawstring, poured a collection of sheep and shepherds and kings and angels into her hands. They were white and roughly carved, all the size of her thumb.

  ‘I bet Granddad did those,’ Roddy said, leaning over, and glanced at Lewis. ‘Gran’s still got his favourite knife, the one with the mother-of-pearl handle.’

  And Lewis thought of the elephant in his pocket, made of the same white wood. He remembered the knife from his gran’s bedroom they’d been allowed to pick up and look at, but never take away.

  Winnie set the nativity figures on the stonework beside the fire. Firelight played on the faces. There were candles in the box, and one or two ancient Christmas cards; half a dozen pine cones dry and fragile with age, light as air. They brought out everything with a kind of puzzled reverence, as the mist swept at last from the lake and the morning turned a fierce white-blue, one single pane of light.

  *

  It was Christmas Eve and Granny Cameron brought down a box of skates from the attic. They’d been hers, and would do for Winnie, and after much rummaging there was a pair for Lewis too. Roddy assured them he’d only break a leg; that would mean no cricket for the whole next season. Instead he found Tosca and Rascal, took them running up Croft Hill.

  ‘Watch that bit at the bottom of the island,’ John Cameron called over the ice. ‘Not sure I’d trust it. Keep over here, between the Lodge and the top.’

  Lewis heard, but he was calling and whooping. He fell and it hurt but he laughed, at the blue sky and Winnie’s face smiling down at him. And Granny Cameron stood at the shore, arms folded tightly against the frozen air, remembering how he’d been just two years before – broken and bereft, like a bird that wouldn’t fly again. She’d never wanted him to go to Glenellen; fought hard with her son against that. She well knew what awaited him there; how ill prepared he was. But she was never going to have the last word; knew she would lose in the end. Yet he was here now, and that was all that mattered.

  Later they trailed inside for mulled wine. Roddy came back with Tosca and Rascal and the story of a fox; then they sat and grazed, as Granny Cameron put it – sprouts and ham, tea. The light gathered itself to crystal white, and Lewis watched through the window as six wood pigeons ruffled soundlessly from the trees on the far lake shore, blinked into that whiteness and were gone. His granny was suddenly beside him.

  ‘May we come over and join you this evening?’ she asked. It was his permission she’d sought, and he noticed. His face shone.

  ‘If you bring a present.’

  She thought for a moment. ‘Why don’t we open all our presents there, all our family ones?’

  So they did. Roddy and Lewis took an arm each because she was afraid of falling; John Cameron came behind with a sledge laden with parcels, and the bottle of his favourite malt from Winnie’s parents.

  The fire was coaxed into life and the candles lit so a lemony light filled the Christmas House. They blocked the gap in the door as best they could so it felt like an igloo. That was what Lewis suddenly thought.

  ‘We should have Harry with us,’ Granny Cameron said, looking over at her son. ‘We could have given him his present here. Still, I expect he’s perfectly content with his family.’

  ‘And with a large bottle of brandy, if I know Harry Cartwright,’ John added. ‘What about presents, then? If my arms don’t have movement soon they’re liable to get frostbite. Shall I be Father Christmas?’

  Winnie had hers first, since she was the guest; a present she knew at once was a book. A copy of Swiss Family Robinson, something she had – but this was much nicer-looking, and she didn’t let on. The other parcel soft and small; she squashed it to guess.

  ‘They’re going to come in pretty handy,’ her uncle winked, and that was true. They were sheepskin gloves, and Winnie put them on then and there.

  Roddy got a new satchel for fishing; examined every pocket and compartment. Granny Cameron had only brought her presents from the boys; Roddy had made her a bird table in woodwork, Lewis a toast rack.

  ‘Your grandfather would be proud of you,’ she told them.

  ‘Just don’t eat your breakfast from the wrong one,’ her son told her, throwing another log on the fire. ‘There’s a parcel for you, Lewis, one from me.’

  It weighed nothing, was wrapped in grey paper. He opened it carefully, remembering always he hadn’t to tear the paper.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, put us out of our misery!’ his father said, and Lewis felt his face reddening, thinking of Winnie.

  He opened the little box and it was a pair of swimming trunks; blue, with a white stripe down one side.

  ‘For when you can swim! Later this year!’

  ‘You mean next year, Dad,’ Roddy pointed out.

  ‘All right, whatever, next year.’

  Lewis said thank you, but he felt far away, as if someone else spoke the words inside and the real him shrank and shrank. The talk around him became one single voice and all the words melted together.

  Later, when the three islanders crawled out and said goodnight to their visitors, and they’d barricaded the door again and built up the fire into a golden dome of flame, he took the swimming trunks and buried them in his bag so they were gone, so they weren’t there any more.

  ‘Where are you, Lewis?’ Winnie asked, tapping his head playfully, as the three of them sipped sweet cocoa in the burning glare of the fire.

  ‘I’m here,’ he murmured, but he knew it wasn’t true all the same. He tried with all his might to clamber back into himself and return, to the only place he wanted to be. But he kept falling away, hearing the drip, drip in his head that dragged him back. He kept remembering though all he wanted to do was forget, even when they went to bed at last, and he lay awake long after he yearned to sleep.

  *

  It was partridge they had that Christmas afternoon, when the Lodge clock had fluttered four times, and they sat round the table at last with its red napkins and white candles.

  Granny Cameron looked older. Lewis suddenly
realized that; she sat opposite him in her white dress with the topaz brooch her husband had brought back from Ceylon after his war was over. It glittered like the blue of her eyes, but she was older just the same. It was as though it had happened while he was away, and he felt an overwhelming desire to hold her and not let her go.

  He watched Winnie as she sat talking to his father; he was leaning close to her and she was nodding, her brown eyes bright. He knew he should look away but he couldn’t; then she seemed to know and glanced at him and their eyes met. Just a flash and he looked away, shy, and she and his father were laughing. He wanted there to be time; to go up into the wood to look for red squirrels, to take her up Croft Hill. If there was enough moonlight they could go sledging.

  ‘Gran, can I get something from the island?’

  He’d remembered the Christmas box. He wanted to show her the figures his grandfather had carved, know if she had seen them before.

  His feet hissed through the white bracken. Out onto the ice and now the sky was a mingling of white and blue and yellow. He wished he could paint and capture it. He stopped, there in the middle of the pathway of ice, gulping air into his lungs. He wanted to walk into that light and never stop.

  He brought back everything in the end; somehow he wanted things just as when Winnie found the box and opened it. For his grandmother to see exactly what it had been like. But when he emerged on hands and knees, the box held awkwardly in front of him, the air was dark blue and the light gone. He’d been no time at all yet it had passed.

  The box was heavier than he’d imagined, banged against his thighs as he carried it so he had to walk slowly. He felt every step as he trudged the hillside to the Lodge.

  ‘Lewis?’

  He’d not seen his father in the shadows: jumped, didn’t answer. His father had come out for a smoke.

  ‘I want you into the house tonight. It’s to be milder by the morning. Another half-hour then go over and get all your stuff.’