mothers hurrying their children home from school. Five miles from pubs and boutiques, four miles up the road from solid burghers’ houses with gas central heating and wall-to-wall berber. On other roads there are traffic jams; people wait, their windows misting up impatiently, the soft beating of their windscreen wipers ticking off the time to tea. I was as far away as Antarctica. I was cold. I turned on the engine.
I needn’t have come this way. I could have seen – I did see. Sickeningly, I remember the ‘Road closed’ sign. I saw it. Discounted it and drove on. I look at my watch. Four ten. Soon it will be dark. It will be pitch dark in the car, then; not just dark, but black. I have no torch. Nor blanket. Nor drink. I have half a packet of Polos. I remember that people can die through sitting in cars with the engines on. Something to do with the fumes.
While I sit there, very still, in my bubble of space under my snowdrift, and balk and panic, and still find my predicament incredible – I am watching.
Watching Marion, who has stupidly (unthinkingly – perhaps uncaringly) endangered her life. Whose cold flesh is sweating; whose ears are tensed and intent on the whine of the wind (muffled now), searching its note for any hint (impossible to hear) of other noise that might mean rescue; whose aching snow-blind eyes are riveted on the dark solid mass beyond her windscreen, willing it to shift; a compartment of whose racing, panic-stricken mind is calmly planning Girl Guide methods of survival, considering how long it will take to use up the air in the car, and how a breathing tube might be inserted through the snow; searching her memory for weather forecasts she might have casually overheard at breakfast. Watching Marion who is very intent on not dying. Who wanders the countryside professing to seek blankness – running scared from a burial in clean white snow. And indeed, in part of her head, grovelling (to a swiftly resurrected God) for her rebellion. For her present death can be seen only as just reward for her ingratitude. If she had valued her life, she would not have endangered it.
The irony is, of course, that I did not wilfully endanger it today. I am here, now, buried alive, not by choice but by accident.
I was there for two hours. The wind must have dropped because I heard the noise of the plough before I saw anything – or felt, rather than heard, the deep vibration of its engine. He was passing to my right, very slowly. I turned on my engine and pressed the horn, which made a tinny, muffled sound. I pressed the handle and flung my weight against the door, which was packed solid with snow. It swung open and I half-fell out with force of my push. The snow was falling in flakes – vertically, from sky to ground. A different substance altogether. In the dim blue light I could see that the plough had cleared half the road, passing me with inches to spare. He was already lost in the darkness ahead, had not even noticed my buried shape. I flailed at the snow above the bonnet with both arms, and dug out a patch of windscreen. I put the car into first gear, turned the wheels to the right, and pressed the accelerator. It moved, almost easily, out of its snowdrift and on to the cleared road. The wheels did not stick or skid or spin. They turned, and took me on to solid tarmac. I got out and cleared the windows again, put on my lights and slowly, carefully, gratefully, followed the snow-plough on over the moors and down the winding descent to a village called Greenfield.
Tues. 11
Today she’s sorry for herself. No driving. Hollowed out, sunken, collapsing inwards. Sees herself: Marion, a silly woman stuck in a metal case under a layer of snow on top of a hill, afraid of dying. A mindless scuttler along roads.
Keeping moving. Does she think she’s driving towards freedom, escape? That because she’s driving she’s going somewhere? What will there be at the end of the long narrow road? Does she expect to arrive at flowery fields of freedom? Uninterrupted peace, stillness, after the harassment of continual motion? Sounds like she’s going to heaven.
But when that kind white stillness came down around you, Marion, padding and wedging you in peace – oh sister, when the snowy angels stretched out their spotless arms to clasp you to the breast of heaven – she didn’t want. Not at all. No intention of reaching journey’s end, thank you. No interest in peace and freedom. No desire for tranquillity or angel choirs.
Trapped in motion like a rat on a wheel. You can only move or stop moving. And the only place you can arrive at by moving is somewhere else where you must either stop or move on.
Under the brittle ice my brain begins to stir and thaw. I have managed well on the surface. I like the ice. It holds me up. If I could have kept going – if I could go faster. If I could fly at the speed of light, travel on a rocket to outer space – then I’d be fine.
That’s enough. Don’t poke and prod me.
Story. An elderly woman. Not moving. Blocked and muffled in her life, immobilized. A musty spinster. An ageing daughter. Restrained. A pale drawing, not even pen and ink, I’ll do it in pencil; a shadowy colourless stationary life.
The Spinster Daughter
Restraint. But. The clearest thing about her is the house. Kitchen painted bright gloss green and yellow. Should have been like buttercups, like daffodils, sunny. But the colours were too strong and the gloss too shiny, especially the green, and the room had the enclosed and sweaty air of a primary school cloakroom, a public changing-place. Gloss paint for walls is out of fashion now. And the curtains Alice Clough had made were a large and colourful floral print. The floor, of red quarry tiles, was fresh redded and polished every week, and glowed in the light of the brilliant fire which always burned – always, come summer come winter – in the kitchen grate. On the walls a variety of calendars, still supplied by agricultural merchants and purveyors of farm implements (despite the sale of the farmland back in the sixties), showed country scenes, smiling busty girls, and prize-winning shire horses. On the windowsills and sideboard stood orange and mauve gauze flower arrangements, which Alice had made following instructions in a monthly handicrafts magazine. The blanket that she had on the go at the time would be draped over a chair, with multi-coloured tails of wool dangling to the floor.
Where, in this hot bright little kitchen, is the restraint? Except in the form of the room itself. The windows were never opened; fresh air was poison to Alice’s mother and could set her coughing for hours. Layers of cooking smells accumulated beneath the shiny cream ceiling, jostling for airspace: smells of boiling bones and baking custards, simmering jams and roasting potatoes. There was nothing dirty or old about this – the kitchen was spotless. It was just so hot; so full of things; so oppressive, that the milkman when he called to be paid on a cold morning was relieved to back out again into the frosty air, and the doctor rinsing his hands under the sparkling tap would say,
‘The miners’ll thank you for keeping them in work, Miss Clough,’ with a nod towards the high-banked glowing fire.
Added to the heat and smells was frequently an element of steam, rising from sheets and towels draped over an old wooden clothes horse which stood with its arms outstretched to the fire at night, like a large cold guest. The upper sections of the windows were often misted with vapour, and on Mondays the room would be totally enclosed, windows blinded with heavy condensation. Except that Alice would repeatedly clear a smear, at eye level, with her wet red hand, and peer out (at nothing) many times in the course of the day.
Alice Clough worked hard, in a small hot room, amongst garish colours, and was sustained by air that was saturated with smells and heavy with moisture, between gleaming dripping walls and opaque smeared windows.
They lived on the ground floor, she and her mother. Upstairs the house was decaying rapidly. The roof leaked, rafters were rotting, plaster was crumbling away and window panes rattled themselves loose and cracked. Lumps of Victorian furniture, furry with dust, stood in the shadows like stuffed bears. The electric did not work.
Downstairs Ellen had for
