Christmas in the Snow

by Karen Swan

  She hung up abruptly, without courtesies, kindness or kisses. ‘Iz, I’m so sorry but I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ Isobel groaned and rolled her eyes.

  ‘It’s the pitch we’re working on. Massive deal. Bob’s been in the office round the clock since Wednesday and his wife wants him home for lunch.’ She tutted, also glancing skywards momentarily. ‘She doesn’t appreciate that we’re not there on the numbers yet and the pitch is on Tuesday in Zurich.’

  ‘How selfish of her,’ Isobel said drily.

  Allegra arched an eyebrow. ‘I’ve got to go in.’

  ‘But you’ve got family commitments too! What’s this, right now?’ Isobel pulled the bottle out of Ferdy’s mouth as she indicated the tired, dark cafe, populated by strangers in bobbling-wool jumpers and sturdy boots. Ferdy instantly began to wail and she promptly stuck it back in. ‘And we’re supposed to finish going through the house together. You promised!’

  ‘Yes, but there’s only the loft left to do, isn’t there?’

  ‘Only the loft? Only the loft? That’s always where the best stuff is; it’s where people put all the things they can’t bear to throw out. God only knows what we’ll find up there. We’ll be in there for hours.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  ‘Come on, Legs. You know I can’t do it on my own. I won’t be able to bring myself to throw out anything and I’ll end up keeping everything, like one of those sad hoarders with boxes and plastic bags full of clothes in every room, and then Lloyd’ll leave me—’

  ‘Where is Lloyd?’

  ‘He’s still jet-lagged from Dubai.’

  Allegra aimed for a sympathetic face. She did Dubai for breakfast. ‘Look, Iz, I have loved doing this. Really I have,’ Allegra said, leaning forward with her hands across the table as she always did in meetings when making an ‘impassioned’ point. ‘I can’t tell you how much more relaxed I feel from that walk.’ She slapped a hand across her heart. ‘And it’s been just heavenly seeing little Ferds.’

  ‘You haven’t even held him yet.’ Isobel’s eyes showed she wasn’t fooled by Allegra’s lapse into mummy chat. Allegra usually only ever talked in bullet points and corporate speak.

  ‘That’s only because he was sleeping and now he’s feeding and I have to go.’ She reached for her bag, hanging on the back of the chair – a discreet navy Saint Laurent Besace filled with a tube of Touche Eclat, her passport and vitamin pills, unlike Isobel’s brightly coloured Orla Kiely vinyl satchel, which was stuffed with nappies, dummies, toys and a change of clothes. ‘Let’s meet up tomorrow, OK? I’m sure if we blitz it together, we’ll get it done in a couple of hours.’ Allegra bent down, kissing Ferdy lightly on the top of his head. He smelt sweet, like parsnip or talc, and she could feel him chomping down on the bottle with impressive strength. She kissed Isobel on the cheek, detecting the new scent of Pond’s moisturiser, now that Estée Lauder was a bit of a stretch. Kids weren’t cheap and she knew Lloyd was already stressing about school fees.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Ten a.m.’

  Allegra hesitated. ‘Two.’

  Isobel narrowed her eyes. ‘Twelve.’

  ‘Done.’ Allegra winked.

  ‘Ugh,’ Isobel groaned as she realized she’d been played. ‘Don’t forget your lucky leaf.’

  ‘My what?’

  Isobel jerked her chin towards the waxy-brown horse chestnut leaf lying like a hand on the table between them. ‘Put it in your purse. You said you’ve got this big deal going through – you’re going to need some luck.’

  Allegra went to say something – a dismissive refusal, a pithy putdown of her sister’s nostalgic sentimentality – but thought better of it. ‘Yes, you’re quite right. I need whatever luck I can get. Thanks.’ She opened out her large black caviar-leather wallet and slid it in the notes compartment across the back. It fit almost perfectly.

  She smiled, wondering whether her sister still read her horoscopes too. ‘See you at Mum’s, two o’clock tomorrow, then,’ she said, turning and marching quickly out of the cafe, past all the Saturday-sloppy regulars slurping cappuccinos and updating their Facebook statuses on their iPhones, her phone to her ear before she was even at the door. By the time Isobel had Ferdy strapped back into his buggy and was texting her that they had agreed twelve – twelve o’clock! – she was in a cab driving over Tower Bridge, and five minutes after that, she was striding through the silent marble lobby, flashing her security pass to the guards, a smile on her face as she jabbed the buttons to take her up the twenty storeys to the office, home again.

  Chapter Two

  Day One: Mother and Child

  ‘Oh my God, Legs, this place is a death trap,’ Isobel cried, her arms gripping the thick beam overhead as she cautiously placed one foot in front of the other like a tightrope walker and made her way over the joist to where Allegra was sitting on the small, square patch of plywood. Plumes of marshmallow-pink roof insulation billowed at her ankles, obscuring the joist from view, and she let out a whimper of worry. ‘I’m going to go through the ceiling, I know I am.’

  ‘No, you won’t. You’re nearly there,’ Allegra said reassuringly, as Isobel advanced in baby steps, her head bent awkwardly to the side of the beam as her lofty height worked against her for once.

  Isobel’s foot touched down on the relative safety of the ply and her hands fell from the beam and folded over her clattering heart instead. ‘Phew. Scary stuff.’

  ‘White knuckle.’ Allegra sat patiently as Isobel folded herself down into a cross-legged position like an origami model, her long, lean limbs jutting out at loose angles as she made herself comfortable on their little island in the sea of pink fluff.

  Isobel rubbed her nose with her forefinger. ‘Gah. This stuff always makes me sneeze and itch. Doesn’t it you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘I bet it’s ’cos of my hay fever.’

  ‘Maybe. Just try not to touch it.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s just like . . . in the atmosphere up here, isn’t it?’ Isobel said, rubbing her nose harder.

  Allegra scanned the loft distractedly. A single hot light bulb on the beam above where they sat drenched them in harsh light, but its strength couldn’t spread to the far corners of the space and she strained to make out silhouettes in the shadows.

  ‘So, this is the end of it,’ Isobel said, eyeing the small, neat pile of taped boxes and a 1980s hard suitcase that was bulging at the sides, a frill of lace peeking through. ‘Just this lot to sort through and then we’re done.’

  Allegra nodded with relief. She reckoned they’d be out of here in ninety minutes, tops, and she could get back to the office. ‘This is it.’

  Isobel grabbed her hand suddenly. ‘I’m so glad we’re doing this together, Legs. It’s the end of an era, isn’t it?’

  Allegra looked down at their blanched hands, feeling a knot of emotion rush at her like a tide and closing her throat. She nodded wordlessly. It wasn’t just an ending. It was the end – of their family, their childhoods, their lives where they had belonged only to each other.

  Even just being up here signalled a new dawn. As children, they’d never been allowed into the loft, their mother worrying unduly about them falling through the pink fluff and the plasterboard beneath it, into the bedroom below. But they weren’t children any more. Everything had changed, swapped round, and they were the adults now.

  With a quick sniff, Allegra pulled her hands away and climbed up onto her knees, pulling a tall box closer to her and slicing the yellow, crackling sellotape with her thumbnail. ‘Oh, now that’s what I call a good start,’ Allegra said with a relieved smile. ‘We can throw out the lot of these. They’re just old school books.’

  ‘No way!’ Isobel said excitedly, her hoarding instincts rushing to the fore as she plunged in her arm. She pulled out a clutch of school workbooks and reports, passing over those with Allegra’s handwriting and keeping her own.

  Allegra saw that they had her old name on �
� Allegra Johnson – and she felt her chest tighten. It was so unfamiliar now. She wondered whether it would feel as foreign if she said it out loud, but she didn’t dare make a sound. They were already in dangerous territory as it was, plunging through the past like this. They were here because they were losing their mother; the last thing she needed to do was remind Isobel about when they’d had a father. She began flicking through it briskly. It was her ‘morning’ book from year one – her second ever year of school – smiling, bemused, at the miles of crayon sketches of rainbows and bright pink stick people with hair that was seemingly always worn in bunches and feet that pointed outwards, Mary Poppins style. In year two, she had seemingly moved on to a craze for pigs – page after page was filled with profile images of them, their tails curling extravagantly, and even her friend – Codi – had drawn her renditions of pigs for her too, as gifts.

  ‘Ha! Listen to this . . .’ Isobel laughed, reading from her own year-nine report card: ‘“Isobel is a likeable rogue.”’

  ‘Sounds like they had the measure of you,’ Allegra chuckled. ‘Who called you that?’

  ‘Mr Telfer.’

  ‘Oh God, Smellfer! Poor man, having you in his class!’ she guffawed. ‘Stacey Watkins always deliberately wore a purple lace bra under her white shirt, just to make him blush when he had to tell her off about it, so God only knows how he coped with having you for a year.’

  Isobel paused and frowned. ‘Well, I’m not sure he did. Didn’t he retire soon after?’

  Allegra shrugged as she moved on to some other workbooks and scanned her academic progress with detached eyes; tall looping letters that filled two lines were repeated across pages and pages as she finally learned to stop writing ‘d’ as ‘b’ and got her ‘j’ tail to hang below the line. Dark HB spiderwebs filled the corners – something she read as a sign she’d finished ahead of the class, although the red pen marks through them suggested the teacher had thought otherwise. Flicking through the pages more quickly so that the contents flashed past like a time-lapse film, she saw her struggle to write ‘3’ the right way round be resolved, only to hit a wall with division and the nine times table . . . And all the way through, comments in red pen about ‘not concentrating’, ‘looking out of the window’, ‘giggling with the person next to you’, ‘can do better’, ‘try harder’, ‘take pride in your work’ . . .

  ‘Oh dear,’ Isobel groaned, rolling her eyes as she showed Allegra a history-test mark from year twelve.

  ‘Eleven per cent?’ Allegra asked in disbelief. ‘Iz, that is truly pathetic.’

  ‘Yeah, ’cos I’ve really needed to know about the repeal of the Corn Laws as an adult,’ Isobel replied ironically, before closing the book with a light slap and tossing it dismissively on the floor beside her. ‘Honestly, I am so not going to be a tiger mum to Ferds. I will not give him a hard time if he can’t . . . I dunno, conjugate irregular verbs or do fractions. I mean, half this stuff they make you learn you never even hear about again.’

  Allegra paused. ‘Well, to be honest, Iz, we do use fractions in daily life, and I’ve always found it useful being able to speak French.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re not normal, Legs. What you do for a living, well, it’s not a realistic comparison, is it?’

  Allegra sighed but didn’t reply. She was too used to her little sister always viewing her as the exception to the rule – professional success meant things like failure, despair, disappointment, heartbreak never happened to her. Apparently.

  She carried on flicking through the workbooks, following her own progress with curious detachment, trying to remember the girl she’d been when filling in these pages. But the rainbows and pigs, which segued in middle school to arrow-shot hearts and bubble letters of boys’ names, struck no chord. She couldn’t remember being her. She couldn’t remember ever having felt the carelessness that the consistent average of 45 per cent in the weekly tests suggested.

  Only when she got to the senior-school books did bells start to ring. She remembered cracking geometry. And she saw how noticeably her writing tightened up: no more HB spiderwebs in the corners, no more rainbows, a weekly test average that shot up from 45 per cent to nearer 90.

  ‘Oh my God, I’d forgotten about this. Look.’ Isobel turned her book round to show a home-made crossword, filled in with swear words. ‘I got double detention for that – do you remember?’

  ‘No, but I’m not surprised.’

  Isobel stuck out her tongue. ‘That’s such a knee-jerk response. You have no idea how hard it was coming up with the clues. I’m telling you, I worked harder than anyone on that piece.’

  Allegra tutted, pulling out some school photographs that had the telltale dark brown cardboard mounts but which their mother had never got round to framing.

  Isobel, bored of reading about her academic failures, reached for the next box. It was heavy and rattled as she moved it, then pulled off the sellotape in long strips. The flaps opened and she groaned, taking out a 1,000-piece jigsaw of a thatched cottage next to a stream; it was the kind of chocolate-box image that was usually found in charity stores and hospital gift shops. ‘I don’t believe it. I clearly remember saying I never wanted to see this thing again.’

  ‘That’ll be why it’s taped shut in a box up here, then,’ Allegra murmured, staring at a photo of her and Isobel taken in the junior school, matching in their blue check polyester school dresses, heads inclined towards one another, Allegra’s arm round Isobel’s shoulders, both of them missing several teeth. They had been, what – seven and eight then? Maybe eight and nine?

  Apart from the teeth, she didn’t think they had much changed. Isobel’s fair hair was more of a flaxen blonde back then, and of course her freckles were in full riot because the picture had been taken in the summer, and Allegra’s hair was too short now for plaits. But both sisters still had the distinctive strong eyebrows that were enjoying a fashion moment, and neither one of them had yet grown into their mouths, which threatened to touch ear to ear when they smiled. The little girls they’d once been still lived on inside them and yet . . .

  ‘But why would Mum even keep this? It was, like, the worst holiday in history. I don’t ever want to be reminded of it. I mean, it did not stop raining once.’

  Allegra blinked at her sister with silent compassion. It wasn’t because of the rain that Isobel wanted to forget it, although she remembered all too clearly that fortnight camping in Wales, when it had rained so hard that even the sheep tried to nose their way into the tent for shelter. There had been nothing to do but read and complete this jigsaw, and Allegra thought she could still remember the prickly feeling of the tartan nylon-backed ‘camping carpet’ that covered the groundsheet in the living area. They had sat on it for hours, cross-legged like they were now, buttering malt loaf in gloved hands and drinking tea from enamel cups as rain and hail pelted the tent like rubber bullets and their mother cried into a sleeping bag behind nylon walls.

  ‘Starburst!’ Isobel picked up a large turquoise soft toy horse, with purple mane, holding it out and inspecting it for flaws. ‘I thought Mum binned her years ago.’

  ‘Apparently not,’ Allegra grinned, one eyebrow arched at her sister’s enduring excitement for the My Little Pony. She looked down at the next picture – still side by side, Allegra’s arm still round Isobel’s shoulder, but where Allegra’s hair remained in plaits, her top button done up, Isobel’s had a faint pink-tinted streak and eyeliner heavily ringed her blue eyes. It had happened by then.

  She whipped her eyes away, hurriedly pushing the card-mounted photos back into the box. She had seen enough. Isobel was happily rifling through their old, most beloved toys, so she popped open the metal clasps on a black ridged Samsonite suitcase. Inside was a carefully folded cache of baby clothes, most hand-sewn and hand-knitted, surprisingly little in pink. As the fifth generation of only girls born to her mother’s line, any fascination with pink had long since worn off, and the mantra ‘You come from a long line of mothers’ was instilled ea
rly on. Both their mother and grandmother had pointedly taught them how to change a fuse, light a barbecue, set a fire, bleed a radiator . . . The clear message being, they didn’t need boys round here.

  Allegra held up a red hand-knitted cardigan. ‘Iz, check this out. Ferds would look great in this.’

  Isobel looked up, gasping with delight at the sight of the cardigan and dropping Starburst without a second thought. ‘I remember that. Do you remember it?’

  ‘I think so. Granny made it, didn’t she?’

  ‘Granny must have made most of this stuff,’ Isobel said excitedly, rummaging through gingham baby playsuits and Aran jumpers, smocked dresses and print blouses, her eyes growing wide with nostalgia. She held up a pale yellow cotton dress with pintucks on the front and baby-blue cross stay stitching. ‘Just look at the quality of that. It’s better than anything you could find in Dior.’

  Allegra knew Iz had never set foot in Dior in her life, and as far as she remembered, the label in their clothes had always been BHS.

  She watched her sister revelling in these mementos of times past, wondering why she couldn’t feel the same excitement. For her, everything in front of them was tinged with sadness, showing a selective view of how things had really been, these bite-sized chunks of their childhood preserving only their Sunday-best clothes and not the ones torn climbing trees in the park, showing the childish love of rainbows in every crayon-coloured sky and not the darker, angrier doodles in red and black biro that had followed, a jigsaw that had been their only view in a cold, wet Welsh field.

  She had hoped there might be answers here, but their mother had doctored the past, airbrushing it into something prettier than it had really been, distilling it to just a few school books, baby clothes and toys, the standard heirloom mainstays that were incontrovertible proof that they’d been just like everyone else after all. There was nothing here to suggest or, more importantly, account for why their childhood had stopped as suddenly as a car slamming into a tree.