The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (24 page)

Next morning, the sky over the downs is a steely grey and there's a stiletto-thin icicle forming in my throat. The downs themselves, dressed in their winter grasses and skeletal copses, along with everything about the village, are the thinnest wash of colour imaginable without turning transparent. The moment the postmistress flicks the sign from
CLOSED
to
OPEN
and lifts the latch, I enter the shop and follow her to the counter, where she sits behind a partition of thick glass.

“Yes?” she says, and I launch into my spiel about finding an old friend called Kate Hainley.

Almost before I finish, she lowers her eyes, pulls across a rubber-banded wad of dockets – pension stubs – and begins counting.

“Do you know anyone like that?” I ask.

“Couldn't tell you even if I did, duckie. Privacy laws, don't you know.”

“I've come all the way from Australia.”

At this, she stops counting and looks over the top of her glasses at me. “Australia, eh? Internet romance, is it?” And laughs.

“No, she's an old friend. We were supposed to meet, but something happened. All I have is this Express envelope to go on.” I unfold it on the counter, but she ignores it. “Her brother's dying,” I add. “It's important I find her before it's too late.”

She pushes her glasses onto the bridge of her nose and sits upright. “Suppose there ain't no law against telling you what I don't know,” she says, “and I don't know no Kate Henry.”

“Hainley. Kate Hainley.”

“No Kate Henry nor Kate Hainley.”

“What about a Kate? Any Kate? She's probably changed her surname.”

From a storeroom to one side of the counter, a man appears. “Whereabouts in Australia?”

“A town called Dungarvan. It's on the coast, a few hours from Melbourne.”

“We like to watch
Neighbours
on TV, don't we, Shirley? That's set in Melbourne.”

I try smiling.

Shirley turns in her seat and says: “Do you know anyone called Kate? This man's looking for a Kate.”

He shakes his head and walks back into the storeroom mumbling and chuckling: “No Kates, no Katherines, no Katies; there's only Shirley in my life.”

“You better believe it,” Shirley calls after him, and returns to her pension stubs.

“What about someone posting this Express packet a few days back?”

“You're joking, right? Give it a rest. Do you know how many people we've had coming through here in the lead-up to Christmas? I usually have these stubs counted two days back. What with the buses of tourists as well as the regulars, there's been a line to the door from opening time to closing.”

Today, the shop is empty and I haven't seen a soul in the streets or a single tourist snapping away at the stones.

“That's a ‘no' then?” I ask.

Shirley raises her eyebrows and carries on counting. “I can sell you a stamp,” she offers. Then adds: “The woman you're after was probably a tourist passing through. Have you thought of that?”

On my way out, I pass a carousel of Christmas cards, and am halted by a familiarity in the style. Flicking through several designs, I pull out one in particular. The illustration is of a cartoon Father Christmas (red-robed and white-bearded), sitting on the branch of a massive Christmas tree in a forest of Christmas trees. Perched next to him is a squirrel, a couple of birds and a mouse, and it's snowing.

“This is the card,” I say, waving it at the postmistress. “The exact same. She must have bought it here.” Pulling Kate's card from my pocket, I hold them side-by-side for her to compare.

Again, she shakes her head and again her husband appears from the storeroom. “Almost every shop in the country sells this brand,” she says. “We even got sent one of those, didn't we, Ken?”

He grins, and I can't understand why they're not trying harder. I'm ready to pick up the carousel of cards and shove it through their bloody plate glass; I'm ready to tell them what arseholes they are, but I slump and take a step backwards instead.

He says: “It's going to snow.”

She says: “I'll believe it when I see it. People blab on about white Christmases every year, but it's only happened once that I remember.”

He says: “It's gonna snow.”

Outside, the cold steel of the sky presses even lower and the insipid wash has almost frozen. I cough to clear my throat, but the icicle prods my lungs, inspecting each in turn. There's little left to do except walk the silent streets and hope that Kate, if she's here, might look out a window at the moment of my passing. I'd rather do this than admit my loss and head back to Nenford, and there's no betrayal in it. My mother doesn't need me; she never has. If I eat lunch at the pub, I'll get back in time to visit her this evening and to phone Elin too.

But the tiny windows of each cottage remain empty, the streets abandoned.

After lunch, I close the door on The Red Lion, throw my bag in the car and realise I'll have to buy another can of antifreeze to dissolve the ice. Instead of walking to the shop though, I cross the road to stroke a sarsen stone or two first and walk some of the circle. I've come too far not to. Winter or summer, these megaliths are the roots of shadows, binding past, present and future. There's a part of me that belongs to the land – this land… what's left of it.

Wandering from one stone to the next and to the next, I trace a segment of their pattern across the landscape, and feel that Elin might almost be standing next to me, as she once did in this place a long time ago, and as of course part of her still is and always will be. The stones know the nature of time beyond any other knowing. It's one reason we're drawn to them.

And then, for the heck of it, I pull my collar up and strike out along Stone Avenue. One step and then another, on and away I walk, until, with Silbury Hill on my right, here's the road Elin and I once followed towards West Kennett. Crossing this, I notice a grass track leading back onto the downs.

A little further, I tell myself. I'll walk a few more minutes and then turn back.

The track would be muddy if it weren't semi-frozen, and it's semi-frozen despite being sheltered by a hedgerow and trees (hawthorn, ash, hazel, elder, horse chestnut and oak). Like the child I once was, I dig the toe of my shoe across the skin of an icy puddle to crack it, which is when, upon looking up again, I first see her.

She steps onto the path a hundred paces in front and takes the same direction I'm heading. To begin with, I figure she's thirteen or fourteen, and it's strange to see someone this age walking alone on such a track. Maybe she's meeting someone – a boyfriend – or walking a dog. I'd hate her to think I was stalking her, so slow my pace and consider turning round, but she slows her pace too and the distance between us remains the same.

Tucked to the side of the track, where she first appeared, is a fence stile linking with another path, and I wait here to let the distance between us grow. The temperature is dropping, and I'd do better to hurry back to the heater in my hire car and drive away, but am even less ready to do this now than before. There's a momentum to this day, to this place.

When I turn onto the track again, she's no further away. In fact, I can see her more clearly now, as if she's closer. And not only is she older than I first thought – maybe eighteen or nineteen – but there's something familiar about her walk.

She wears clogs, which always shape the way a person walks, and a calf-length olive green skirt with gilt embroidery along the hem, which somehow manages to catch fragments of the piss-weak winter light. For a coat she has a short maroon cape with a hood that's lowered despite the growing cold, and her hair is dark and long.

“Kate!” I shout, and immediately regret it. She's only eighteen or nineteen, so it can't be Kate. I stop, wave an abrupt apology at the girl who's turned to face me, and decide I have to scurry away to the car. “Sorry,” I call out. “Thought you were someone else.” And I too turn.

“Tom!” she calls after me.

SIXTEEN

We stand facing one another, a middle-aged man and this nineteen year old girl, and I want to reach out and stroke her face, to put my hands on her shoulders – to make sure she's real – but can't. Of course I can't.

“Kate,” I say. “But it can't be.” She has the widest eyes of glistening burnt umber and a flow of chestnut brown hair that hangs loose across her shoulders, and her lips, which have the fulness and glossiness of polished olives, are the pink of rose petals, even now on this winter afternoon.

She smiles, breaks into a short laugh and sighs. “You found me, Tom. You searched and searched. You spent twenty years looking, but you found me again. That's bloody incredible, you know. I can hardly believe it.”

I step back to look at her more fully, in case it's a quality of the insipid and grainy afternoon light that makes her seem so young. “But it can't be you. You can't be Kate. You haven't aged.”

She fans her fingers in front of her face, raises them to create an arch above her head, then sweeps them down again. “
Olé
,” she sings, accompanied by the castanet-click of her fingers.

“It's impossible,” I say.

She pouts. “Are you calling me impossible?”

And then something happens with the weak, watery light, because, for an instant, she shimmers. I'm reminded of a mirage on a hot summer's day and wonder why no one's ever commented about the mirages of frozen winter days before.

“We don't have long,” she tells me.

“I'm sorry. It's just…”

“I know. But I assure you I'm the Kate you've been looking for. No one else. People aren't like snakes, Tom. We don't really shed one skin for another as we grow from age to age, and there's always a part of us that's the person we've always been and will remain. I'm just amazed you managed to find me after all this time, and here of all places, and today of all days.”

I smile, then laugh, then shrug. “Kate. Kate, Kate, Kate.”

She reaches for my hand and we begin walking in the direction we were both heading before. Her hand is icy, so I draw it into the depths of my coat pocket, and we walk as we once walked over twenty years ago… by a river, or down a street, or through a park; swans or no swans. Except, our ages are all wrong, and the idea of this man (who I've become) walking with this girl (who she's remained) is too sad. My stomach churns and starts rising, until I swallow hard, let go of her hand and stop.

“If anything, I should be younger than you,” I tell her. “You don't think I'm some lonely old loser, do you? Some sort of creep? That's not who I am.”

“We're here together aren't we, Tom?”

“Then why haven't you aged? It doesn't seem right: us two, here now. I'm old enough to be… and you're…'

“Life's fickle like that. Though it depends how you look at things, I guess.” She reaches her hand out again. “You don't know how lucky you are. Take it or leave it.”

Nothing's changed about the shape or feel of her hands – her long, slender fingers; the smoothness of her skin; the cut of her fingernails – except she's icy cold and they're coloured with raw pink blotches. I rub each hand gently in turn, then bring them to my lips and blow warm air across her fingers. “Don't you have any gloves?” I say.

We walk in silence for a minute or two, until two becomes ten and ten becomes a swathe of the afternoon. That we now say nothing isn't odd or unsettling. In itself, this reunion is too big for words, and there's more integrity in remaining silent and soaking up the fact that this is happening than in risking the irrelevance of prattle. But it's also as if we're moving towards an even bigger moment, and she's leading me to that point.

Only once do I nearly forget who I am – who I've become – and begin easing her hand out my pocket to kiss her wrist and smell the scent of her skin, but she shakes her head to remind me that a lifetime has passed.

We walk across a landscape of interwoven earthworks – barrows, chalk figures, dykes, standing stones – and we're bridging the years, she and I. Emerging from the edge of yet another spinney, and skirting a hill, I recognise I've been to this place before and pause. Arriving at Grennard Hill, she ends the silence with a greeting.

“Hello, Tom.”

“Hello, Kate.”

It's a broad and frost-bitten landscape of skeletal plants and ice-burnt foliage. The moisture on fence wires and the tops of posts and along blades of grass are beginning to set with an opaque whiteness. The bleak season.

“I'm not just Kate,” she says.

But I must've misheard her.

“Why are you here, Tom?”

“I needed to know you were okay, Kate. I needed to see you again,” I tell her. “This probably sounds stupid, but I've had too many dreams in which you were… well, it's been hard not being sure that you're really okay.” Turning to face her, a strand of the corn dolly pokes though my shirt into my skin. “I've brought something with me,” and I pull it from my pocket by one end of the figure eight. “A surprise.”

“I remember that.”

“You gave it me. Instead of a ring.”

“I did. A lifetime ago.”

“Or yesterday.”

She takes it, examines it, then passes it back. “To everything there is a season, eh?”

Turn, turn, turn.

“I guess the truth is I haven't been able to fall out of love with you, Kate. Not properly. For almost twenty years I've loved two women. At times I've thought about you almost every day and wondered where you were, if you were okay, whether we'd meet again. And there's been other times – weeks or months, perhaps – when I thought I'd pushed you to the back of my mind, only to dream you back again, even with Elin lying by my side.”

“You always set too much store on the past, Tom.”

“Maybe.”

“And you put me on a pedestal, didn't you? I warned you against that, but you wouldn't listen. Always the idealist.”

“When I was with you I felt alive for the first time. I began breathing, and to know who I was and who I could be. And then I lost you.”

She nods.

“In London, after your party, I thought – I hoped – we might get back together, and it was everything I ever wanted, but something happened.”

“What happened?”

I tell her about Jo's death and how fragile Elin was, and how it would've been the shittiest of betrayals to cast her adrift, and I remind her of our meeting at Piccadilly Circus, and how we'd planned to go to a concert before that, but never did. “I'd have been even more lost if I hadn't stood by Elin, but I lost you again instead.” I stamp my feet against the freeze and try wiggling my toes. “All the same, I wish we could've kept in touch – the occasional Christmas card at least – it might've been easier.”

“Or harder.”

“It might've been harder. But it might've been easier. Maybe we could keep in touch better now?”

She raises her eyebrows. “Do you think it's because you lost your mum and your dad –”

“My mother's still alive.”

“You lost her as surely as you lost him. But you were never allowed to mourn any of that, and you wouldn't let yourself mourn Gazza either. You never really learned to cope with loss and to move on – not in a healthy way – only to wallow in what's past and to live in anticipation of losing what you cherish. You've never fallen out of love with me – the idea of me – because you've refused to let yourself. That's stubbornness, not love. But it is only the idea of me; you can't love who I've become because you haven't known me for twenty years. You don't know me.”

“Except we're not like snakes,” I say, trying to remember her earlier words. “We don't shed one skin for another. We don't change that much.”

“Perhaps. But I doubt whether our choices and values and tastes as teenagers remain unchanged after an extra twenty-odd years of experience, do you? That's what we're talking about here.”

I shrug, glance at her, then at the ground.

She says: “Did you need me to spit at you? To hurt you? To make you hate me before you could let me go?”

“No,” I say. “No.”

“It's time to let go, Tom. Forget those old promises we made one another. Release yourself. That was another lifetime. You have to live in the present. Don't hold anything back from Elin and your children.”

“You always had the right sort of smarts, Kate.”

“You know this stuff too, otherwise I couldn't begin to tell you. Sometimes we need to hear our most important truths from somebody else though. That's one of the reasons you're here, I guess.”

“It's not because I love Elin any less than I should. If I lost her, I'd feel the same. I know I would. I know it now. She's a part of me, as you were. But how can you ever get over losing someone you absolutely love? You can't. It's not stubbornness, Kate. It's more a matter of faith. Perhaps it's because we invest our idea of love with so much significance – as children, as lovers, as parents, and probably as grandparents – that it ends up defining us, and so of course we cling to it, in the same way we cling to life and who we are. The death of that sort of love – well, it's almost impossible to bear. That's the way it is. Maybe that was my mother's problem.” And when this rush of thoughts stop tumbling out into words, I put my hands together from relief and discover my fingers are turning numb too, with pink blotches flowering on the backs of my hands.

When we speak, our breath is mist. It hangs from our words.

“We have to learn to cope with death and loss, Tom, and to make the most of who we've got while they're with us. There's danger in anchoring yourself to the past, fearing the future, ignoring what's present. We have to mourn loss, grieve it, be angry and fight it by all means, but then we've got to move on and know that nothing's ever entirely lost. There's always something left to grow with. We have to make the most of what there is.” She pauses. “You know, there's no other meaning in life except the meaning we choose to make for ourselves. It's that simple. It can cripple us or fortify us.”

I cup my hands together and blow on them. What she's saying is as clear a truth of life as I'll ever get, and I shrug, smile, nod.

She places her hands on my shoulders and leans close, and I think she's going to kiss me. “Tom, Tom, Tom,” she whispers; “turn, turn, turn.”

“What?”

Taking a step back, she fans her hands across her face once more, shakes her hair down, then brings her arms above her head in a dancer's arch, and she turns. My nineteen-year-old Kate dances as she danced only one big yesterday away. She spins once, twice, three times, more, until she's creating a ripple in this world and until the sky starts spinning and shimmering as well.

“Turn!” she sings, and so I stretch my neck up to the lowest of skies and, on numb feet and across rough ground, begin spinning too.

Round and round and round.

I fall to earth first and she follows suit.

Shimmering.

Like a child I'm laughing fit to burst, but I'm panting like a middle-aged fart. “Out of condition,” I pant.

“Me too.” And her voice is different, and her hair's a shade coarser; less lustrous. She's different. Something's changed. She pushes a strand of hair behind one ear, and I see she's turned into an older Kate – a woman close to my age.

“Kate. You're you again.”

She places a hand against her face to feel her skin, wraps her arms around herself, then begins to stand, but stumbles, and I reach out to steady her.

“I've always been me. This is who I am. But I'm not just Kate.”

“What do you mean? You keep saying that.”

“Why are you here, Tom?”

“I told you. We just talked –”

“Why are you really here? Now and like this? How did you get here? Do you know how to find your way back?”

The freezing dampness in the air slides down the neck of my coat, wheedles its way into my socks and licks my ankles, the backs of my legs.

“Can't you remember? Where are you going to, Tom? Where are you heading?”

The trees are leafless and, but for a pinching iciness, the air is momentarily scentless.

How did I get here?

This is the place I once camped with Elin, with the spinney I gathered firewood from just fifty metres away; on a day of shadows, stones, trees and earth. At the edge of the spinney I notice a large Norway spruce –
Picea abies
– which must be about fourteen-years-old. I grew that tree from seed, raised it on the windowsill of our flat in Great Shentonbury, and must have travelled back here one day to plant it, as I told Elin I would.

“I…”

She puts a finger to my lips and says: “Ssh.”

The steely grey of the sky has given way to thicker snow clouds banking up, but through a gap in the clouds there's a full moon rising – a small, brilliant moon, brighter than any bauble – and we hobble down towards the wood.

“You're limping,” I say. “What's the matter? Are you alright?”

“You're limping too,” she points out, but rasps each word.

“I can't feel my toes.”

Her fingers are slips of ice, and she's sickly pallid in the fading light. Her lips have lost their colour and fullness – less like olives and more like pits – and her eyes are sunken and dull; even her hair hangs limp and dry. “You're not well,” I say.

“It's almost time,” is her reply, but her voice is a husk. “Time to let go. Little is ever entirely lost.”

“What's the matter?” I begin, but she winces and I stop.

She shakes her head and her chin is almost on her chest.

Twilight is collapsing and evening begins pulling a shroud tighter around us. I figure the trees might offer some protection from the wind that's picking up. Sanctuary.