At times, the seventeen months between Verity and her sister could feel like joyful minutes passing too quickly. At others they stretched, weighing her down with a guilty resentment.
Allegra rolled her eyes, puffed smoke and gave another cough, cleared her chest and the sound of it made Verity frown.
‘Have you got a cold coming? Or is it too many fags?’
Allegra didn’t reply. She removed a pack of tarot cards from the velvet bag, gave it a quick shuffle and turned one over. They were thin and worn at the edges.
‘See?’ Resting the cigarette on the lip of the overflowing ashtray, she nodded. ‘The Hanged Man.’
Verity thought he looked ridiculous in his bright red tights with his leg tucked up, his bland, upside-down face and yellow hair sticking out like straw. She never asked for an interpretation of the cards knowing she wouldn’t have long to wait for one.
‘Sacrifice!’ Allegra smiled broadly. ‘The cards don’t lie.’
These cards don’t have a choice.
Allegra carried on. ‘You could quite easily pick up some things for me. I have work to do, and you don’t. ’
‘How do you know I don’t have work to do?’ Verity began sorting dirty plates and mugs. ‘I need to go to the library for a start.’
‘In which case, what’s the problem? It’s on your way.’
‘It’s the principle. And shouldn’t you be setting us some work? We haven’t done any maths for weeks.’
‘Oh, maths. No one needs maths, not these days.’ Allegra dismissed arithmetic with a wave.
‘Everyone needs maths.’
Allegra had stopped listening. ‘It’ll be bloody freezing in the conservatory. I hope there’s some paraffin for the heater. God, it’s cold.’ She pulled the shawl closer to her body. ‘It ought to be warming up by now, it’s April for heaven’s sake.’
Verity squeezed washing-up liquid into the water. ‘It snowed in April the year Meredith was born. Nain said so.’
‘A freak of nature.’
‘Well, it feels like snow to me.’
‘Nonsense,’ Allegra said, gathering the cards and slipping them into her pocket. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Verity wasn’t so sure. She had a nose for the weather and made the most of what she – and probably her mother – viewed as her only accomplishment.
My mother had a cultivated, evasive eye which could, in a moment, become critical.
Nowhere in my description of her will you find a woman you will warm to. It is not my intention. I do not want you to love her. She was a woman who kept her counsel and who occasionally showed flashes of malice rendering her cold and unapproachable. In contrast, my father was a brash, egotistical man who began talking as he entered a room giving no one else a chance to order their thoughts or conjure a contradiction.
Mama began many of her sentences with a question which tended to confuse me since the answer was invariably self-evident.
‘Aren’t you resting?’
(Clearly not, since I am standing in front of you.)
‘Haven’t you finished yet?’
I would glance at my sewing, sense the implicit rebuke, and apologise.
Caught reading, she would ask if I was doing ‘that’ again, and before I could answer, inform me I was ruining both my eyes and my chances.
What chances these might be I was at a loss to understand.
And I had a brother. As befitted a son, he was sent away to school. There was, my father stated, no profit in educating a girl, as if I were an entry in one of his bank ledgers.
Two years older than me, my brother had been a cruel, sly child. Once, when I was seven, I found him in the garden, home from school and bored, deliberately picking the wing off a butterfly.
‘Please,’ I begged, ‘leave the poor thing alone.’
Held fast in his hand, the dying butterfly twitched.
My brother grinned and with a slow precise movement, tightened his finger and thumb on the other wing.
‘No!’ I ran at him and he dodged, grinned, and, running his tongue over his lips, pulled off the remaining wing.
‘It’s all yours,’ he said as he flicked the tiny, mutilated body in my direction.
When I told my mother she said I was making a fuss, to ignore the ways of boys, and reminded me that no one liked a tattle-tale.
As he grew older, my brother turned into a bully, arrogance making both his face and his intentions as ugly as they were clear. By the time I was seventeen, I had grown to fear him with his eyes that saw everything and understood nothing.
This is no bedtime story, little girl. Do you have courage enough for both of us?
Two
Some days are too beautiful to be real.
The sky turns to silver and you know anything could happen. Verity decided to pretend the day was out of a storybook, she could mark the page and keep it for later. It was so cold she could barely breathe.
Her mother was right – it was far too cold for April.
My mother is always right.
For once she didn’t mind. Maybe it would snow after all.
The Pryce sisters’ favourite book was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and they knew it by heart. They were so fond of it they had a copy each. Snow was their favourite thing in the entire world and they loved it the way they loved their grandmother’s stories about it.
Mared could remember snow on Christmas day when she was a girl.
‘You should have seen it in nineteen twenty-seven,’ she told them. ‘Up by my friend Jenni Lloyd’s farm you couldn’t see the tops of the fence posts. Gethin and I were playing there and we had to stay over three nights. We built a snow house in Jenni’s mam’s garden.’
Verity and Meredith said it sounded like heaven.
‘Well, yes, it’s not all fun and games though. Not for the farmers. In forty-seven, when your mam was little, the snow was deep enough to bury sheep. It was still thick on the hills in March.’
She told them about the Big Freeze, the year Verity was born.
‘Your mother carried you right the way through that snow. It was so bad it made the news. Then, before Christmas, a blizzard blew in and the drifts were twenty-foot high. They said in town the sea froze. Lasted months that snow did.’
Mared said she thought Verity must have been able to sense it from the womb. ‘And then it snowed in April the year Meredith was born. It’s no wonder the pair of you are obsessed with the stuff.’
Verity eyed the sky, willing it to snow, wanting it to make everything clean and new. Shethought about the list in her pocket. If Mared still lived with them she would understand about the shopping. She wasn’t afraid to challenge Allegra. And she understood how annoying Meredith could be, even if she refused to take sides.
‘Sister love matters,’ she told them. ‘You have to look out for each other.’
Once Meredith was born, Verity was relegated by her mother from ‘pleasant little thing’ to the odd one. It made no difference. From the moment their eyes met, Verity loved her sister with all her heart and there was no jealousy, however hard Allegra had tried to cultivate it.
‘Meredith is so pretty,’ she insisted.
‘The prettiest baby ever,’ Verity agreed, quick as you like. ‘Far prettier than I am.’
Whenever she said things like this, she had an impression of confusion, as if she had found her mother out in some act she was slightly ashamed of.
By the age of nine months, Meredith could talk. (She could soon say whole sentences and from then on said the first thing that came into her mouth, which for the rest of her life would get her into no end of trouble.)
‘Pretty and clever!’ declared Allegra.
Out on the lane, Verity coasted to a stop. She leaned on the handlebars afraid she might cry.
It isn’t that children don’t understand adult feelings or motives. They understand them only too well. It’s because children don’t have the words they’re powerless.
I wa
nt my mother to be superior to us, the way mothers are supposed to be.
There were times Verity felt contempt for Allegra with her clichés and her silly tarot cards, her ability to be in a room and yet absent, hovering on the edges of conversations like a vaguely interested passer-by.
And I want my grandmother to come back.
When Mared left Gull House, Verity had been eleven. Like Meredith she was frightened by the idea of London, the word itself rounded with a threatening kind of purpose. In the intervening years, they’d visited only twice, Allegra complaining each time that she had better things to do.
Better than what, the sisters had wondered.
Neither of them thought much of London. It was too vast, too frantic and clamorous, as if it wanted to devour them.
London took her beloved grandmother and though she understood Mared had to look after her brother, whose dementia made him too vulnerable to live alone, Verity was bereft.
Allegra’s response to her mother’s defection had been outrage. She saw no difference between this and her husband abandoning her.
‘Everyone deserts me,’ she wailed.
She isolated herself, declared Mared a traitor and the few friends she had managed to make soon gave up on her. From time to time she found herself drawn to unsuitable men. (Any suitable ones soon ran a mile.) Allegra dared men to let her down and sooner or later they did.
Verity thought her mother, with the over-stated cool more suited to a teenager, probably missed Mared more than she would admit. Mared left and it was as if the clouds blowing across the sky stilled. When the wind picked up again, like Verity and her sister, the clouds had lost their way.
Hooking her foot underneath the pedal she set off again. She rode along the path, the thin river on one side, the flat grey sea on the other, the wheels of the bicycle ticking, her scarf flying. Pale colours surrounded her: a light-saturated sky – the sea tinged with milky blue. Gulls, the white of them as bright as clouds, followed her for a while before turning back to their own territory.
The tyres rumbled over stones and tufts of grass. As she left the path, the wheels bounced, hit the tarmac and the rumble became a swish. She pedalled over a bridge, past rows of houses, tall and ice cream coloured. Buildings reeled by: hotels, a dry-cleaners, a chemist, along the promenade, past the pier stretching out to the ocean collecting seaweed and barnacles. She cycled up a narrow street, pushing hard, her breath coming in short gasps.
The library was an elegant building and ought to have been on the seafront, preening alongside the grand hotels. Instead, it was squashed between two tall houses and somehow diminished. A steep gable reached above stone walls dressed with sandstone; sturdy wooden doors opened onto a lobby, the walls lined with glazed green tiles. Stairs led up to a reference department. The public area on the ground floor set an example by holding its breath, hushing the occupants into silence.
Verity was never without a book; she could walk and read, and never once trip up. She favoured folk tales, quirky novels laced with legend and old magic. For a rational child, her choices might have appeared odd. Her life was odd; the unreality of these made-up stories was the perfect antidote.
Lifting her books out of the bicycle basket Verity went inside. Warmth enfolded her and she took a long breath of contentment. She was at home in the library and could stay as long she liked. If she was quiet and didn’t bother anyone, no one bothered her. Naturally self-conscious and reflective, Verity found the library a kind place, expecting nothing more of her than that she appreciated what it had to offer. Nobody cared about any troubles she might have because nobody was aware of them.
‘Hello, Verity.’ Miss Jenkins, tall, thin and clever, regarded Verity with a mixture of affection and preoccupation. Her deep-set eyes reminded Verity of the bluebells in her grandmother’s garden. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m well, thanks, Miss Jenkins.’ Verity placed her books on the counter.
‘Excellent. No fines. Good girl.’
Verity never accumulated fines.
Miss Jenkins sighed. ‘No Mr Tallis today. I’ve hardly had a moment. I’m sure he can’t help having a cold, but it’s most inconvenient.’
Verity walked through the hushed room, running her eyes along the serried banks of books. From the high windows light fell in dusty bands. Someone coughed, another whispered – loud in the silence – and was instantly shushed.
Libraries are full of coughers. No wonder Mr Tallis has a cold. It’s a miracle we don’t all have one.
‘Have you read this?’ Miss Jenkins came up behind her. ‘Third part of her Arthurian Saga? Mary Stewart. You like her, don’t you?’
‘Oh, yes, I do.’ Verity ran her finger over the cover. ‘I’ve read the other ones.’
‘I thought so. I kept it for you. You’re lucky, it came in today; you’ll be the first to borrow it.’
With little money available for books, a newly published library copy was the next best thing. As Miss Jenkins date-stamped the pristine paper inside the cover, Verity experienced a thrill of pleasure.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said, a grin breaking out on her face.
‘It’s always a pleasure to encourage a serious reader, Verity.’ Miss Jenkins smiled back. ‘You should consider librarianship, you know. You could do a lot worse.’
I already have.
It was a secret she wasn’t ready to share. She couldn’t be sure Miss Jenkins might not let it slip to Allegra. The less her mother knew about her ambitions, the better.
‘I will.’
Tucking the book into her shopping bag, Verity walked out into the chilly afternoon. She freewheeled down the hill and, drawing to a halt outside a small grocery shop, propped her bicycle against the wall.
‘Butter. Three tins of beans and the tea. Bacon, eggs, strawberry jam. Large bloomer. Milk.’ The woman behind the counter smiled. ‘That it, lovely?’
‘Tobacco and cigarette papers please, Mrs Trahaearn.’
‘Right you are.’
Verity swallowed, and her skin flamed. ‘And…’
‘It’s all right, cariad. I’ll tuck it under the rest.’
Verity watched as Mrs Trahaearn slipped the bottle of gin under the bread, packed the rest of the groceries into the shopping bag.
‘Can you put it on her account, please?’
Mrs Trahaearn hesitated and Verity felt her blush deepen.
‘Just this once, dear, but if you could ask your mam to pop by and settle the outstanding, I’d appreciate it.’
Verity nodded. Mrs Trahaearn dropped a couple of packets of Spangles into the bag. ‘For you and your sister.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘I know.’ Mrs Trahaearn winked.
Verity managed a smiled and thanked her. ‘Meredith will be pleased as well.’
‘You take care, cariad.’
Verity loaded the shopping into the basket. Above her, the town gulls screeched. As she cycled back along the path the sound followed her until, like an extended soundtrack, the house gulls took over and welcomed her home.
Three
Standing in the hall, Verity’s voice echoed up a wide staircase covered with a wine-red carpet held in place by brass stair rods.
‘Meri?’
To one side of the front door stood a hat stand and on the other, a Chinese umbrella holder. Light from the window above struck one of several mirrors. Mared was fond of mirrors; of the way they played with light, making spaces look bigger and brighter. Allegra simply loved her reflection, repeated to infinity. She couldn’t pass a mirror without looking at herself.
A long-case clock stood to attention next to a door leading into the tower room. It had fallen silent years before, the key lost and time stopped in the teatime past. A semi-circular table stood against the wall, piled with unopened envelopes, spare gloves, a sprig of dead leaves and neglect. Dull and finger-marked, her grandmother’s old telephone sat like a black frog.
Nain will be horrified when she see
s the state of this place.
Her grandmother had met her husband in London: two wartime Welsh exiles, a nurse and a doctor keeping their longing for home at bay while they waited out the war. When they married, Dylan was happy for them to make their life in Mared’s childhood home. Escaping to Wales for a brief honeymoon, his love for Gull House began the day he carried his new bride over the threshold.
Now that’s what you call a proper romance.
Calling her sister’s name again, Verity listened to the house creaking around her. She thought she heard a noise coming from the unused tower room – a soft thud and then silence.
In the kitchen, she unpacked the shopping, cut some slices of bread and buttered them, placed them on a plate. She lined the packets of Spangles next to it, like cutlery, and unscrewed the lid on the fresh pot of jam.
Meredith burst through the door smelling of dust and mischief.
‘You will never, ever guess what I found, not in a million years.’ Her eyes were glittering ice stars. Ignoring the buttered bread and sweets, with a reverence still managing to be a flourish, she placed a wooden box on the table. Painted on the lid were faded pink flowers surrounded by a washed-out turquoise border, tiny touches of gold paint still visible. ‘Behold and be blown away!’
Verity stared. ‘Where on earth did you find that?’
‘In the attic.’ Meredith grinned in triumph. As if it were a casket of precious gems, she stroked her fingers across the lid of the box.
‘Are you crazy, Meri? Which attic? I thought they were locked.’
‘Not the one above Rapunzel’s tower. There’s no lock. You just pull down the ladder.’
‘You know how dangerous it is up there.’ Verity was appalled. ‘That’s why Nain warned us to stay out. The floors aren’t safe.’
‘Rubbish. So long as you step on the joists it’s fine.’
‘What do you mean? Have you been up there before?’
‘Loads of times.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
Snow Sisters Page 2
