by Chloe Mayer
I slipped back into the cottage and went upstairs to my room to carry on packing. The cottage looked bigger, but barer, wiped clean of memories. Although if I looked for her, I could still see her listening to the wireless in the sitting room, or running to answer the telephone when Grandma rang to check up on her, or reading a magazine while she nibbled on some crackers in the kitchen.
And I could see her slumped on the floor outside the bathroom, or gulping gin like it was a cool glass of water, or squeezing out through a crack in the door to crawl into the snow.
The new house would not have these moments waiting for me in the rooms, or around the corners. There was a sadness in that. But, if I was honest, there was a gladness in it, too. I supposed it meant I wouldn’t be hit with a vision of Mother like an unexpected punch to my stomach from the boys at school. I would be more in control of the memories that came into my mind. Like that night we baked a cake together, and the fairy tales she read to me every night.
I picked up a book from my shelf. A woman wrapped in white furs and diamonds that glittered like icicles looked out at me from the cover, along with a little boy wrapped up next to her in her sleigh. I put it into the empty box at my feet marked ‘BOOKS’. Was it silly to take these? I didn’t want to read them any more. But she’d held them, and loved them, and they were a gift that she gave to me every day.
I’d take them all.
42
‘Gerda! Sweet little Gerda, where have you been so long? And where have I been?’ Kai looked about him. ‘How cold it is, how empty, and how huge!’ And he held on to Gerda … Now the Snow Queen could return, it did not matter, for his right to freedom was written in brilliant pieces of ice.
From The Snow Queen
Daddy said he’d meant to come back to Bambury before now. But this year had been so busy, what with the move, and getting me settled into school, and his new job, that he couldn’t believe how the months had flown by. So now here we were, at the cemetery to pay our respects to Mother, and nearly at the year’s end.
We crunched through snow as we made our way across the churchyard. I felt it collapse and harden beneath my feet as my soles crushed the water out of it. It wasn’t at all like the strange stuff that buried the world last winter; it was just a couple of inches deep, but it seemed right somehow. A wintry sun made the day bright and sharp.
‘It’s nearly the anniversary,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it was better to come now?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’re right.’
‘Perhaps we should always come at this time? You know – just once a year, but … every year?’
‘Yes.’ He looked at me with a brief smile. ‘Yes. Let’s do that.’
We found her grave, and laid a bunch of yellow winter jasmine down in the snow. The headstone that loomed over the flowers didn’t say much, but it described her as a daughter, a wife, a mother. None of those words seemed to explain who she was. They just described her in relation to other people. I didn’t think of her that way. She was just herself.
When we started to feel the cold, we walked back towards the High Street. Daddy wanted to pop into the pub to catch up with his old friends before driving us home to Great Yarmouth.
I told him I’d join him later. Maybe he thought I had friends of my own I wanted to find in the village.
Instead, I walked down the lane, and slowed my step as I passed our old cottage. Different curtains hung at the windows but I couldn’t see anybody inside. I was surprised to find that when I trailed my hand along the fence it only came up to my waist now; I’d grown.
I pushed on, and went into the forest.
At first, I thought I’d walk all the way to where Hans fell, because that was close to where they found Mother. But once I was inside the woods, I realised I didn’t need to. Both of them were everywhere here. She wasn’t in the headstone in the cemetery; she’d been here the whole time. I remembered that when I was little, I thought I could see and feel magic in amongst these trees. Well, this was a sort of magic too, wasn’t it?
I took our old path towards the orchard. A stranger probably wouldn’t be able to see the track because of the snow, which was lighter in the forest, but had still dusted the ground through the trees.
I usually managed not to think about these woods, and who’d died in them. But today I would face it.
I’m a killer, I thought. I killed them all.
In the night-time, the monsters didn’t come to find me as often as they used to – things seemed to be different for me in Norfolk. Weeks could go by without me remembering. But now, here, I thought about who didn’t exist because of me.
I thought of Hans the woodchopper. Of course, this wasn’t in Detective Taylor’s report, but knowing about Hans’s true past explained why he’d wanted to escape. I had no way of knowing for sure, but my best guess was that he managed to swap uniforms with an infantryman at some point, either before or after he was captured. He might have ordered the real Hans Müller to hand over his identity. I often wondered what happened to the real Hans Müller. Was he sent off to a special PoW camp for SS officers in Wilhelm’s place? Probably not. The real Hans Müller would have talked, wouldn’t he? So maybe Hans had died somehow, and Wilhelm just saw an opportunity to take his uniform and papers. That was what I hoped had happened. But when Wilhelm saw, that autumn in Bambury in 1944, that the Germans were going to lose, he was afraid he’d be caught. I remember telling him what I’d heard on the wireless, about how Germany was losing and the war would soon be over. He must have feared interrogation or maybe even the threat of a war trial. That must be why he had to run. And then there was the petition, the sudden threat that stricter controls might be imposed on the PoWs.
I still didn’t know where he’d have gone. Was he really trying to get to Switzerland? How would he have crossed the Channel? Perhaps he’d have tried to get to Ireland to make his way from there to South America. That’s where the rest of the Nazis ended up, people said.
I’d believed him to be a kind, brave woodchopper. And perhaps he was. Just because he ran doesn’t necessarily mean he was guilty, does it? He might have run in fear of the discovery he’d stolen an identity, rather than fear of what he’d done as an officer. Because there was goodness in him. His kindness towards me, and that beautiful kiss he shared with my mother. Those things were real, I was sure of it. But now I also knew he may have had another side altogether. Maybe it wasn’t the Troll, but Hans who was the monster all along.
Perhaps no one sees what’s right underneath their noses if only they’d really look. In the back of my mind, I dimly heard my mother’s voice reading to me: ‘Oh but Grandmother, what terrible big teeth you have!’
It was hard for me to think about Hans this way. To shine a new light on him and see he wasn’t really how I’d remembered him, when I looked at him under the harsh glare. I realised he had, in a way, still remained something of a fairy-tale character to me, even now.
How strange that I was only just figuring out that he wasn’t really a magical woodchopper-prince after all. I supposed human beings – all of us – are always more complicated than the cut-outs in the old stories. Real lives are so much messier, so much harder to understand.
Unlike fairy tales, that world of good and evil I used to love so much, life was as grey as the patch on Hans’s back. Evil was perhaps just as often made up of things unsaid, and actions not taken, and looking the other way. Everyone was capable of terrible things – I knew that better than anyone.
A fallen tree blocked the way so I scrambled over it. I remembered how my mother and I had both hurried to find this path once, after we’d come across the Troll in the forest.
Did it have a dark side too? For a while, once I was a bit older, I managed to convince myself it really was a predator of children because I remembered it watching those boys playing in the stream. But I knew now, in my heart of hearts, it wasn’t a monster; it was just waiting for them to leave so it could drink and wash.
&nbs
p; He, not it! I was thirteen now; time to put aside childish things. I had to admit to myself that he was human after all. He must have had a name, though I’d never learned it. They’d cremated him too, I’d heard, with the same sort of pauper’s funeral Hans was given.
My eyes suddenly watered, but I was coming closer to the orchard now, and I picked up my pace. The snow squashed by my shoes made a kind of ripping sound with each step. It had been years since I’d been here, but I recognised the individual trees now. I was very close.
I thought of that dark mirror sometimes; the one the Devil made, which shattered so that its evil shards were carried on the winds throughout the world. The tiny grains would pierce a human eye or a human heart and gradually turn to ice and make the person cold.
It seemed to me that it was like the Devil was simply planting seeds. Seeds that would grow – if left untreated – and push out the human warmth. Seeds of ice and snow.
It was just a story, of course, but – like most stories – it was also true. Probably, there were lots of people who had such seeds inside them. Seeds that made them cold or sick. I didn’t know enough about Hans’s life to know what planted his seed – what pushed him to join the SS and possibly commit horrors. War planted a seed in my father; I saw it damage him. And my birth planted a seed of darkness inside my mother that she never really recovered from. The mirrored shards in her heart and her eyes grew so big that she could no longer see joy in the world or her own place within it. If treated, perhaps these seeds could have been dug out before they took root. Daddy did not succumb to the ice, after all.
I had a seed inside me, too. But I was cold even before I killed Hans and the Troll. It must have been my mother who planted my seed in me. She was made of ice. And I was made of her. If she was the Snow Queen, then I was her boy made of snow.
The path seemed to peter out up ahead and there was now an unbroken wooden fence running around what used to be the orchard. Another PoW must have been brought in, because the job clearing away the dead trees had been finished. It was a field now. The wood cabin, the shed, was gone. There was just a smooth white blanket of snow laid out invitingly before me. I climbed over the fence and walked towards the place where the glade had been. My footprints would lead to the place where an oak stump once stood.
Mother was cold. But it occurred to me now that maybe she didn’t want to be. She spent her life waiting for love to find her, after all. She was the Snow Queen – I always knew that – but now I was wondering whether she was Gerda, too. The little girl who went to war against her. Maybe that’s what it was like for her. Maybe she was fighting a battle within herself, although she lost in the end.
I think she was looking for peace. And so she went to sleep in the snow. I hope she found what she was looking for.
But could there have been another way?
I wondered whether to launch my own battle, against my own cold heart. Kai was free of the Snow Queen in the end, and I wondered how it would feel for me to break away from the ice.
It all happened. Nothing would ever change that. But it was over now. Mother was dead and was never coming back. Hans was dead too, and the Troll, and even Farmer Dawson. But I wasn’t dead. I was still here.
As I crunched towards the centre of the vanished orchard – towards a glade filled with apple trees and sunlight that only I could see – I thought how everybody’s life is their very own story.
A lot of fairy tales are about paths and journeys. And as I walked through the snow and approached the glen it felt like I was coming to a crossroads. I must choose a path. And it felt very important that I choose the right one.
I did wrong here. I lied, and I watched a murder, and I let a man die alone in the bottom of a pit, and I’d stayed silent about all of it.
What would happen if I stopped being silent? What would happen if I told one more story? What would happen if I told the truth?
I could tell Daddy first. And it would be hard, and it would hurt him. But I was doing so much pretending – the way Mother had pretended – that maybe it was time to stop. We could go to the police station in Densford together.
I wondered what they would do to me when they heard my confession. They might charge me with all sorts of things – I’d looked it up in the school library once; murder, or manslaughter, or perverting the course of justice, or even preventing the burial of two bodies. But I was just a little boy back then; I was just nine. So perhaps they’d do none of those things. Perhaps Detective Taylor would just listen to me, and then gather together some officers to find Mr Higgins and the nice man.
He might take me back to the woods so I could show him the places, though. He might let me through the fence they’d built around the mine. And I’d finally return to Hans’s hole, which was empty now. I’d force myself to look down into the dark pit, and it would be like I had finally gone back for him.
And I could show the police where the Home Guard killed the Troll. Maybe the detectives would tell me his name, and at last I’d know him as the man he really was.
I wondered what else would happen to me if I did this. What would happen to my nightmares if the dead men were no longer a secret only I knew about? Neither of them were in the earth waiting for me any more – both had been brought up and turned into ashes. My mother was the only one in the ground now. I always thought they’d come up to take me, but maybe it would just be her who’d be waiting for me at the end.
My Snow Queen, my Gerda.
I sank down in the snow, and I could feel her there, and all around me. And I began to cry. And Hans and the Troll were there too, in the crumbling snow I scooped up in my hands, and in the distant trees, and in the wintry sky.
I took off my coat; I wanted to feel the cold. I wanted to feel close to her. Just for a little while, until it was time to go back to the village. And, I thought, if the police don’t lock me up, then I’ll come back here next winter. And the winter after that. And all the winters of my life.
And each time, I’ll kneel down in the snow, and push my hands down to feel the hard-packed earth lying beneath, and I’ll burrow with my fingers, so they go into the ground. Into the frozen earth that cradles my mother. It’ll be like we’re holding hands.
‘I’m here,’ I’ll say, or something like that.
And – just for a moment – she’ll come up and we’ll sit there together. And one day, when I’m old, she’ll come up to take me home.
The warmth penetrated to his heart and melted both the ice and the glass splinter in it … Kai burst into tears and wept so much the grains of glass in his eyes were washed away …
They took each other by the hand … Kai and Gerda looked into each other’s eyes and now they understood … There they sat, the two of them, grown-ups; and yet in their hearts children, and it was summer: a warm glorious summer day.
From The Snow Queen
Acknowledgements
I never used to understand long acknowledgements sections at the backs of novels; only one person wrote it. But now I know how silly that is, and how many people there are behind the scenes helping in every way, personally and professionally.
Firstly, I would like to thank the person who made everything happen and turned my crazy dreams into a reality: my brilliant agent, Felicity Blunt. Thank you so much for taking me on, for having faith in me, and for all your help – not just on the business side of things, but also your invaluable editorial guidance and your patience with my endless questions! There’s no one else I’d rather have on my side.
I’d also like to thank the rest of the team at Curtis Brown, particularly the unflappable Jessica Whitlum-Cooper, who is always ridiculously helpful, her predecessor Emma Herdman, for her early support, and Melissa Pimentel, for her work on translation rights.
Massive thanks and gratitude to publishing director Arzu Tahsin; an incredible editor who taught me the true value of a story that ends with a ‘happily-ever-after’ and (by giving me a book deal) gave me one of my own.
And many thanks to everyone else at Weidenfeld & Nicolson and Orion, especially Jennifer Kerslake, who went above and beyond anything I could have expected, as did Craig Lye, Paul Stark and Rebecca Gray, who have all been a delight to work with. I’d also like to thank copy-editor Sophie Hutton-Squire and artist Sinem Erkas for the truly beautiful cover design.
Thanks also to Penguin Random House for letting me quote from Eric Christian Haugaard’s evocative translation of The Snow Queen – and thanks to Hans Christian Andersen himself for inspiring me with such a beautiful, dark fairy tale. I used Victorian translations for the other tales quoted, and was struck by how little the wording has changed over the centuries because they’re so perfect.
And now to thank the people who were there helping me from the beginning, or very close to it, starting with the obscenely talented author Jane Harris, who is also a wonderful teacher and has been a mentor and inspiration to me.
I’ve also been inspired by my writer friends – Carys Lawton-Bryce, Anjali Deshpande, David Harley and Clare Cowburn Baker – who suffered through my early attempts at this book and helped me try to make it better. As did Sophie Wilson and Karl French.
And thanks also to Akie Kotabe, who was there when I wrote the first word, and the last, of that very first draft and who never stopped encouraging me.
Lucy Cohen, who made sure the reporters’ rota at work allowed me the time to write – and who never laughed at me for doing so – probably doesn’t realise how much her help has meant to me; this book would never have been finished without her kind support.
Shout out to Bernadette Hood and also Ray Stephens, who bored everyone he knows banging on about this book in the pub (hopefully this mention gets you some free drinks).
