Snow Angels (2 page)

‘His da leathered him,’ she said.

‘Beat him?’

The girl nodded.

‘Two days since.’

‘Why?’

The little maid’s face darkened.

‘Not for summat you’d think. He didn’t do nothin’ like lads do. Locked him up an’ all, like a dog.’ And with that, Abby had to be content.

The evening went well. There were good things to eat: jellies and creams and cold chicken and ham. Abby even had champagne. Edward asked her to dance and, although she shouldn’t have because of her mother dying, her father insisted. The music and the champagne made Abby pleased with everything. The light from the chandeliers glittered inside and the frost on the snow glittered outside. Gil did not appear.

‘Where’s your brother?’ Abby enquired of Edward as they stood against a pillar in the ballroom, flushed from dancing.

‘In his room.’

‘It’s Christmas Eve,’ Abby pointed out.

‘He isn’t there by choice,’ Edward said.

Abby couldn’t rest. She tried to. She reasoned with herself. She didn’t like Gil Collingwood and as far as she knew he had neither looked at her nor spoken politely. It was strange. She kept thinking about her mother alone in the cemetery and Gil by himself and it all got mixed up. She had refused a second glass of champagne and contented herself with lemonade, but her mind did not unmix. She danced with several boys, she talked to girls she knew and it should have been the happiest evening she had spent for a long time, but there was an emptiness inside her which grew and grew until Abby could bear it no longer. She left the noise and the music, took a candle from the hall, wrapped a huge piece of chocolate cake into a napkin and then made her way up the first of two wide staircases.

From the rooms below there were lights and the sound of laughter. It was a big house but conventionally laid out, with the upstairs rooms around a central hall. The rooms were well set
back. The hall was lit and Abby couldn’t hear her own footsteps because there was carpet all along the floorboards. She didn’t know what she was looking for, but she saw it anyway. There was a key in the lock of a door as far away from the staircase as possible. She listened hard, but could hear nothing.

Abby brought her candle down to the key and very slowly turned it in the lock. It made no noise. The door opened soundlessly. Abby drew in her breath at the blast of cold air that came out of the room. It was freezing; she could feel it through her dress, straight onto her skin as though she wore nothing. At first she thought it was an unused room. There was nothing personal about it and, though she looked as best she could in the gloom, the grate was empty and clean, there was no light of any kind and the bed was stripped. There were no ornaments, no books, no clutter. There was no carpet on the floor; the linoleum was like ice. The curtains were drawn back and from there the moon threw its white light in through the window. It was, Abby thought, shivering, the nearest thing to a grave. Nobody was in here. There was no sound. She turned to go and the candle flickered in the draught. Then she saw him.

Gil was quite tall, that Abby remembered, but he was curled up as small as he could possibly be at the far side of the bed, right against the wall, like a hedgehog. He didn’t move or acknowledge her in any way and, as Abby saw him better, she recognised the whiteness of his shirt and the blackness of his hair.

‘God Almighty,’ she said.

Her first instinct was to run for help, but she stopped herself. She couldn’t do that. Adults lived in another world, a powerful world where she had no place and no influence. If she spoke a single word she would get into trouble and get him into even more trouble, if that could possibly be. She mustn’t be found out. She left the room with as little movement as she could. From the room next door she pulled thick blankets and two pillows and carried them back and put the blankets over him and the pillows down onto the bed.

‘Gil, are you dead?’ It was not the time for formality somehow. ‘Gil?’

He didn’t move. Abby touched him on the shoulder.

‘Go away.’ With a strength that surprised her, he shoved the blankets back at her. They enveloped her. She had to push them off. Her heart pounded. She really had thought that he was not breathing. It was her nightmare come back: lying beside her mother, tired from trying to come to terms with the idea that she might lose her, that somebody else would go out of this life and she would not be awake or not be there and be unable to do anything. Nightly she haunted herself, thinking that if she had stayed awake, her mother would still be alive. She knew that it was stupid, but she only knew this in the daylight. When she had been a child the night had held no fear, it was a velvet blackness. She had fallen asleep listening to her parents’ voices coming up from below the floorboards. Childhood had been when life was for ever, when nothing would hurt her. Now the darkness was full of devils and they tormented her with guilt and inadequacy.

Abby stared at the window, glad of the moon. There were thick frost patterns on the window. She remembered her mother showing her all the different ones. They were coldly beautiful.

‘I brought you some cake.’ It was rather squashed by its journey. ‘Chocolate cake.’

He stirred after a few moments and then very slowly turned over. Abby made herself not react. There was a big mark across one side of his face where somebody had done what her mother would have called ‘backhanding him’. His straight black hair hid the expression in his eyes. He didn’t touch the cake as she offered it; he just looked at it and then at her and said, ‘You’ll get into bother.’

‘Nobody will know.’

There was a jug of water and a glass on the dressing-table. Abby went across and poured some and gave it to him and he took the cake and ate it very slowly. Abby was more accustomed to the room now and she could hear the faint sounds of music from the ballroom. It seemed strange here in the almost-silence,
like another world. She wondered if her mother could still sense some things from the life she had left, whether there was any way in which sounds filtered through.

She began to cry and almost choked in embarrassment attempting not to. After all these weeks, she chose this moment in which to realise that her mother could not hear the music nor feel the cold. She couldn’t touch her or speak to her or have the love between them like a shining light any more. It was all gone; it was over.

‘Did you want some cake?’ he asked as the tears flowed. Abby shook her head wordlessly and wished for a handkerchief, for control, for oblivion. The candle, which was never going to be anything spectacular, guttered and gave up and she was left in the cold, white moonlight with a boy she barely knew, a hot face, cold tears, a blocked nose and a terrible desire to sniff before her nose ran. It got worse, until she was blinded and everything was salt and even sniffing didn’t help. She found a tiny stupid scrap of lace and cotton in the only pocket of her dress and blew her nose. It sounded like a train to her ears. She mopped her face on the edge of the nearest blanket and the hairs from it went up her nose. When the crying took over her whole body, she gave herself up to it until it wracked her. When the sobs quietened she found the blankets over her, and his body, which was surprisingly warm, close. Exhausted, comforted, Abby fell asleep.

At some time in the night she kicked off her shoes and settled herself against him and slept again. Then somebody was shaking her gently. When she opened her eyes he was looking down at her and saying, ‘You’ll have to go or they’ll find you here.’

Abby was horrified. She had spent the night with a boy, slept close against him in a bed. She remembered – did she remember it – his arms around her at one point and then his body folded in against the back of hers. ‘Spoons’ her mother would have called it, as in polite households where the cutlery was carefully put away on its side, not like in her house where her mother thought people had better things to do like painting, reading and going
for walks on Tynemouth beach and making sticky toffee cake. The old familiar loneliness punched at Abby’s insides again, but it was not quite so bad today because she had cried and somebody had been there to hold her. At least, she thought that he had. The embarrassment ousted the other feelings and her face burned. She fled and it was only when she reached her own room that she remembered it was Christmas morning.

She washed and dressed and went down to the dining-room, where her father and several other people were breakfasting. She kissed him, but felt somehow as though she had betrayed him, as though she had done something wrong. She couldn’t eat. People were merry and there were sausages and hot coffee, but the smell of food made Abby feel sick. She had a terrible desire to confess what she had done. Only the thought that William Collingwood would no doubt beat his son all over again stopped her. They would blame him. She wished that she had not left the party. She watched Edward across the table, sitting with his best friend from school, Toby Emory, and she could not equate him with the boy she had left upstairs, his silent tongue and closed expression. Edward and Toby were laughing and talking about horses. Edward’s father had bought him a new hunter for Christmas and they had already been down to the stables.

Nobody noticed that Abby didn’t eat. She went off to church with her father and the others in the nearby village. In church, she felt dirty and she was cross with Gil. This visit could have been so pleasant. Another girl, Rhoda Carlisle, who came from Allendale Town at the top end of Tynedale where it met Weardale on the felltops, chatted freely to her as they came out of church. She was here with her parents and two small brothers. Rhoda was a tall, pretty, brown-haired girl who liked books and when they got back to the house Abby was happier. She had done nothing wrong. And then the happiness dropped away from her. Gil was there. He stood out, or was it just because of what had happened? He was taller than the other boys and stood away from them. Abby blushed until she couldn’t blush
any more and ignored him. It wasn’t difficult to do. He didn’t even acknowledge her. He didn’t smile and to her he seemed unapproachable and aloof.

There was a huge meal and so many people that it ceased to matter. She wasn’t seated near him, but with Rhoda, Toby and Edward. Edward paid Abby so much attention that she was flattered and pleased.

It had snowed all the way through the meal but afterwards it stopped and they went outside and threw snowballs at each other until it was too dark to see anything. They called by the stables to admire Edward’s new horse and Abby found herself asking, ‘What did your brother get for Christmas?’ Out the words came. She was astonished at herself and not surprised that Edward frowned.

‘I have no idea. Whatever he asked for, I suppose. Why?’

‘I just wondered.’

‘You just wondered? Tell me, Abigail, what is this sudden interest in my brother?’ His eyes danced. Abby could have hit herself.

‘He doesn’t seem very happy.’

‘You wouldn’t be very happy if your father had taken a horsewhip to you.’

‘Why did he do that?’

‘My brother is stupid. He came bottom of the class. No, I lie, second to last, except in geometry. Can you imagine?’

‘I don’t think that’s much of a reason to beat somebody and lock them up.’

‘My God, you like him!’ Edward stood back, watching her from astonished eyes. ‘What is it you like best about him? His elegant manners, his erudite conversation, his fine wit?’

Abby would have given a lot to have said, ‘I liked the way he put his arms around me’, but she couldn’t. And that was the moment she realised she felt proprietorial about Gil Collingwood, as though some kind person had wrapped him up in paper and presented him to her on Christmas morning. She shook her head and laughed but the feeling didn’t go away, even when Edward had
stopped teasing her. She understood something – that touch was the most important thing in the world between people, that because of it she would have defended Gil against anyone who tried to hurt him. It was totally irrational but her mother, Abby couldn’t help thinking, would have approved of the idea. No wonder older people kept younger people apart. There was nothing like sleeping close against someone and seeing the old day out and the new one in for bonding you together.

As she came into the house Gil was in the hall. There were shadows, it was growing dusk and the lamps were lit, but he looked straight at her and Abby looked back at him. His eyes were so dark that you couldn’t see the iris in them. He didn’t say anything and Abby didn’t linger. Late in the evening, when she had danced with half a dozen different boys and hated every moment of it because he didn’t ask her and she couldn’t see him, she went outside just to get away. It was bitterly cold out there; she had put on her coat and boots. She needed the quietness. It was completely still, just like the previous night, with a huge full moon and a complete quota of stars. Abby walked away from the house on the crisp snow; the trees were thick with it. Further over, the snow became too heavy on one branch and dropped with a dull thud to the ground.

She was feeling a little melancholy. Everyone sounded so happy. It made her think of last year and what things had been like then. Her mother had been well and in her impetuous way had decorated the whole house, made two Christmas cakes and bought Abby every single gift she had shown an inclination for. She wondered whether her mother could have known that it was the last Christmas they would ever spend together and consequently had made it the best ever. Why was it, Abby thought, that you could not return to those times? She thought of her mother’s sweet laughter. It had snowed then, too, on Christmas Eve and her mother had taken her by the hand and run outside and they had danced in the garden. Abby could remember the small, square snowflakes on her dark hair. And every year they
had made the snow angels. Abby couldn’t bear to remember it. It seemed to her now that her childhood was completely lost because her mother had given her that childhood. Her father was a kind man, but it was not the same. It was all gone; it was finished; nothing would ever be like that again.