The Big Snow

by David Park

  He stood still for a few seconds, smiling to himself and letting the thought warm him before deciding that he didn’t know how to do any of those things and so instead decided to return to his office and try the phone again. This time he got through but was immediately disappointed to hear that he was talking to a young woman and when he tried to get passed on to someone else, she said that all the lines were busy and she could help him with his query. Giving his full title, in the hope that she would realize who she was dealing with, he asked what were his instructions, only to be told in a most casual way that he should try to get all the children home safely and then close the school. She used the phrases ‘Use your own judgement’ and ‘depending on local conditions’ several times, and he knew the ball was being passed back to him. It was typical, he thought as he put the phone down. He had made a valiant and conscientious effort to keep his doors open, to deliver the education he was entrusted with, and at the end of the day no one gave a monkey’s. He allowed himself the luxury of a silent curse – a single ‘bloody’ (he tried never to go beyond that except in the most extreme of conditions) – as he nurtured the suspicion that the top men themselves were at that very moment ensconced at some fireside with a hot whiskey in their hands.

  Well, if that was the way they wanted it, so be it. But getting the children home wouldn’t be so easy – he’d have to make a list of names and addresses and deliver them to their doorsteps like parcels in the post. Suddenly the electricity went off and there was an excited squeal from Miss Lewis’s room. That settled it. It was Abandon Ship time but he knew too, that it was his duty to remain on board. Others who got more money than he did might have different sets of values but no one would ever be able to say that Terence Peel didn’t know how to fulfil his duty. After the last child had gone he’d return, sit in his office and man the phone. At the end of school he’d phone Academy Street again to let them know he was still there, then sign off. His imagination flared with images of Scott’s expedition to the South Pole, Captain Oates’s brave self-sacrifice and he knew that he, too, was such a man. His eyes moistened at this acknowledgment of his bravery and he savoured the challenge of the long trek home. Only the thought that there would be no one there to garland him with the wreaths of victory, or to listen to his tales of hazards overcome, diminished his pleasure.

  Returning to the classroom, where the noise level had risen considerably, he took a list of names and addresses, then in the quiet of his office worked out a route. Most of the children lived within a few hundred yards of the school and it seemed a relatively simple circuit to make. A couple of them had phones and he contacted their mothers to tell them what was happening, telling each of them that he was reluctantly closing the school as a result of higher instructions. He was glad that most of his pupils came from a better class of home where the mother didn’t work, so it looked as if he would be able to unload each child safely. Then after putting on his Wellingtons and clambering into his overcoat, stopping briefly to tell Norman his plan, he made his announcement to the pupils. Adopting his gravest tones, which he usually reserved for bereavements and heinous misdemeanours, he outlined the course of action and the detailed rules of engagement. Pupils would walk in twos and stay strictly together. They would line up in the sequence of their homes. He would lead and Miss Lewis would follow behind. There must be no straggling, no silly behaviour – unelaborated dangerous consequences could result. But he conjured up for himself pictures of lost and frozen children buried under squalls of snow, of himself carrying a small child to safety. Of his picture in the paper. Some of the children smiled in return, thinking that he was smiling at them.

  When the line was eventually formed in the right sequence and everyone had fastened coats and shouldered bags, they set off. Before the last pair of children had even left the steps to the front door, he heard Norman locking the school. It was starting to snow again, slowly, almost like an afterthought, and some of the children held up their hands to catch the flakes, squealing with excitement and frustration. He tried to silence them into conformity by a stern glance but the power of the snow was greater than any repression he could generate. All that was in his power was to get them home as quickly as possible and he strode out with his head held high and an admonition to the children not to dawdle. It reminded him of a scene in a film he couldn’t remember the name of, in which the wagon-train had been trapped in a valley by the first snows of winter and they had been rescued by the hero, who walked them to safety through a secret mountain pass. And as the children followed him up the middle of streets where the snow had been flattened a little, he felt proud of himself again and conscious of his impeccable devotion to duty. He had been irritated recently to hear of several appointments to principal-ship of disconcertingly young men, but it was a comfort to reassure himself now with the thought that, when hardy came to hardy, there was no substitute for experience and a cool head. A cool head under fire – that was the ticket. He glanced back at his train of children. Young men still wet behind the ears with long hair and pointy shoes. He called to some stragglers to keep up and gestured with his hand – a slow stylized sweep that he remembered from the film. They didn’t understand style. Not at all. Screen images flowed in and he illustrated the concept to those same young men by showing them how to hold a cigarette, how to light it then extinguish the match with a double shake of the wrist; how to give a sign-off salute with a flick of the fingers; how to spin a coin to a child or beggar.

  ‘Orange Peel! Orange Peel!’ The cries came in young voices from somewhere to the left, perhaps from behind one of the tall garden hedges, but he didn’t turn his head or let his stare deviate from the road ahead. ‘Orange Peel! Orange Peel!’ It could be some former pupils emboldened by a couple of years’ distance in secondary school, or even a few reprobate refugees from his own school. He let the voices swirl round his head, trying to recognize the source, like a wine taster trying to establish the precise location of a particular flavour. When the voices called again he knew it was Blain and Leeman and he allowed himself a double ‘bloody’ as he repeated their names. He should have finished them off when he had the chance. He cursed himself this time and tried to increase his speed, to hurry the children on, but when he turned to signal them to greater speed he saw the smiles spreading across their faces and out of the corner of his eye he caught the first snowball arcing through the air. It broke a few feet short, ploofing silently into the bed of snow, but the second was more accurate and he had to use his hand like a tennis racket to beat it away. One of the children laughed loudly but he didn’t wait to see who it was before he called to Miss Lewis to take pole position and, like a traffic-control policeman, waved the column of children past him, urging them to hurry. Then as the last pair of children passed him he turned to where the unseen assailants lurked, and stood impassively with his hands on his hips. Cool under fire. Looking the enemy in the eye. It was the only way. The good shepherd protecting his sheep. He took a step forward and then there was the sound of scurry as the ambushers broke for better cover. He caught a glimpse of red hair through the thinning screen of privet and knew it was Blain. ‘Snow doesn’t last for ever!’ he shouted. ‘See you when it melts.’

  Satisfied that he had retrieved some of his dignity he set off again. Life was a permanent state of war. A cold war. He was pleased by how apposite the phrase was, encouraged by his ability as a wordsmith. As an antidote to his simmering irritation he constructed witty ripostes to the mandarins of Academy Street, devastating verbal put-downs which crushed their lily-livered spirits and sent them scurrying to their inner sanctums for shelter. He wished the powers that be could see him now, out in the field, on the front line. In charge. So by the time they had left off the last child and he had received a pleasing display of deference and gratitude from most of the mothers, his spirits were somewhat restored and despite the fact that it had started to snow heavily again, there was a satisfaction that he had discharged his duties honourably.

&
nbsp; ‘Right, Miss Lewis,’ he said, his tone jaunty and congratulatory, ‘we’ve done our bit. I’m returning to school now but I don’t think anyone would object if you were to head on home.’ He paused to accept an acknowledgment of his generosity.

  She looked at him from under her woollen blob of a hat and he noticed how flushed the walking had made her face, how shiny her brown eyes were. A flake of dampness glistened on her cheek. The wetness of her coat, the damp ends of her hair where it protruded from her hat, suddenly gave her a liquidity that flowed over the normal image he held of her. She told him that she would collect her things from school before accepting his kind offer and so they set off the way they had come, their heads bowed against the blown flurry of snow. Neither of them spoke and he touched her elbow to direct her by a different street when they approached the scene of their former ambush. Sometimes she moved slightly ahead of him and he found himself sneaking a fleeting glimpse of her nylons through the narrow vent in her coat, in the little gap between the top of her boots and the hem.

  When they reached the school he found the door locked and when he tried his key he realized that Norman had snibbed it on the Yale lock, for which he had no key with him. He stood on the steps, then shuffled round with exasperation. They were locked out and there was no way that he was trudging off into the blizzard to Norman’s house to try and retrieve it. There was nothing to be done but start the long trek home. He’d have to forgo the phone call but tried to calm himself by predicting that he’d get no further than the nobody girl he’d spoken to earlier. At the end of the day it was clear that no one gave a tinker’s curse. So why should he? People – dependable people like him – were always taken for granted, always passed over when it came time to dish out the big jobs. The snow was coming down in big feathery flakes as if the fat pillow of sky had been slit open and shaken empty. Well, there was nothing else to do but make the long journey home in the full face of the furious snow, so he wasn’t quite sure why he lingered a little on the steps, occasionally staring into the school.

  ‘I’ll see you get home,’ he said to Miss Lewis, clapping his hands together as a prelude to setting off, and refusing her grateful demurring by insisting that it was on his route. A principal’s responsibility didn’t end with his pupils. He reminded her of the morning’s news on the radio and its story of how a young woman’s body had been found. ‘Foul play is suspected’ – that was the phrase they had used.

  He thought of thanking her for turning up but the idea felt too undesirably personal and he replaced it with a swing of his arms and a steady saunter forth. The snow seemed thicker by the moment and in his mind the distance home grew with each step until it took on the demands of a polar expedition. If the electricity was off it would take him hours to get any heat into the house and he wasn’t sure if there were any candles. His spirits started to sag – there was little purpose to struggle if it wasn’t recompensed by reward or recognition. As his feet scrunched and pressed the snow he realized that this was the very thing that flawed life and made it so unfair.

  ‘Hard going, Mr Peel,’ Miss Lewis said, her head bowed and her hand holding the ends of her hat. She slipped a little and on impulse he offered her the crook of his arm, holding it out from his side like the handle on a cup. It was the duty of the strong to look after the weak. She took it and he felt the sudden weight of her on his shoulder. Together they plodded on, their eyes lowered to the ground for respite and he only realized that they had arrived at her gate when she disengaged her arm from his and began to fumble in her handbag for her key, holding the open bag at an angle so that the snow wouldn’t get in. ‘Hard going,’ he repeated, without really knowing why.

  ‘I’ve never seen the like of it,’ she said as she put the key in the lock. Thank you for seeing me home – it was very good of you.’

  ‘The least I could do in the circumstances,’ he said, touching the brim of his hat with the tip of a finger. The gesture was the most he had ever given her. He believed she would treasure it, remember it. Then he turned and shivered his shoulders against the renewed onslaught but before he had taken more than a few steps he heard her call, ‘Won’t you come in for a few minutes, Mr Peel, have a quick cup of tea, before you set off? Maybe give the snow a chance to die down?’

  He hesitated, torn between his lack of enthusiasm for the journey home and his reluctance to enter the personal world of one of his staff. The snow swirled between them. A few flakes entered the hall. She wouldn’t hold the door open much longer. Abnormal circumstances. A hot cup of tea suddenly assumed a strong attraction. What harm could it do? Better to be fortified against the struggle ahead, better to be prepared. And at the back of everything was the image of his own empty house, an image that had increasingly assumed a rather forlorn quality. Loneliness was not a word that he would ever admit to the descriptive profiles he liked to construct about himself, but over the last year he was more ready to acknowledge the absence of something. He told himself it was something to do with turning forty, with knowing that he had all the requisite skills to achieve something higher, with a momentary succumbing to frustration. Home was also solitary and, while there were times he appreciated that, it was without the audience that was required if he was fully to catch his own reflection, to portray the man he really was.

  So now the idea of a shared cup of tea developed an appeal and for the moment papered over the thin little crack in his self-esteem. It was true that it would have been garnished with a greater sense of anticipation if Miss Morgan with her pert little nose and dark curls had offered the invitation, and if Miss Lewis’s sepia wallpaper hadn’t harboured all the appeal of a morgue. He hesitated again. A shift of wind wiped snow across his eyes and for a second it felt as if he was crying.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, blinking. ‘The snow is getting heavier, perhaps it would be more prudent to take shelter until it eases.’ Special circumstances. A bit like the war, when people had to hang together, and it wasn’t as if she was the type who would assume an undignified familiarity or seek to gain some future advantage. He could tell that by the very way she held open the door for him and self-consciously ushered him in, bowing her head briefly as he passed, then squeezing past him to show the way to the living room. Not for the first time he observed that she wasn’t really any type at all. Thirty-six years old – he knew that, as he knew all the personal details from their files – and there in the school since coming out of college. Part of the fittings. Efficient, reliable, colourless – he had never once heard a parent express either praise or criticism. She never had much to say and wasn’t part of the inner circle of women. He watched her shuffle ahead like a geisha and had a sudden impulse of pleasure from the remembered punishment that he was to bestow on Miss Morgan. He might even make her cry if he was in the mood, then be nice to her. He was vaguely aware of Miss Lewis apologizing for something but he wasn’t really listening and instead took off his hat and entered the room to which she had brought him.

  The walls were covered with red wallpaper woven with white flowers, and in every available space hung pictures of various sizes and types. For a second he wondered if he had come into the wrong room and when he glanced over his shoulder his sudden disorientation was increased by the glimpse of her shaking her hair free of her hat, little beads of water bursting free as if broken from a string of pearls. ‘Keep your coat on, Mr Peel,’ she said, while she quickly bundled into her pocket a pair of nylons that had been drying on the fireguard. Before they disappeared they seemed to sieve the air like the fluttering tails of kites. ‘At least the electric’s back on. I’ll get the kettle on before it goes off again. Have a seat there.’ She switched on the two-bar electric heater for him that sat in the tiled hearth. It smelled briefly of burning dust as she disappeared into the kitchen.

  He stared again at the pictures. He had never seen so many in one room. Alongside small framed landscapes were larger prints of what he vaguely recognized as Pre-Raphaelite work and scattered between them wer
e assorted postcards and pictures cut out of magazines. He wondered for a second if he had stumbled into a secret manifestation of mental instability and then the picture above the fireplace caught his eye. The sound of running water confirmed that she was still in the kitchen, allowing him to examine it more closely. It was of two young people kissing: they were from a much earlier period, perhaps even medieval. He wasn’t sure if it was entirely seemly. As a man of some knowledge of the world, he gauged that the kiss was either a prelude to something about to happen or a postscript to something that already had. ‘Roman de la Rose by Rossetti’ was printed below it. The lewdness was what might be expected from an Italian. But as he sat down again he wondered what possessed Miss Lewis to hang such a thing on open view, so he found it reassuring to hear her familiar voice calling to him to enquire whether he wanted tea or would like a nice cup of Bovril. He plumped for Bovril and in the seconds before she brought it in gazed round the rest of the room, looking for anything that might confirm his initial suspicion of festering instability. But although he disapproved of the number of books on the shelves and the brightly coloured cushions strewn across every chair and the settee, there was nothing quite as disturbing as the paintings.

  When she appeared, carrying two cups whose contents’ sweet, meaty smell infused the room, her concentrated gaze focused on preventing a spill, he was able to glance briefly at her and confirm that she looked as she always did. Perhaps she had inherited the room from a previous owner, perhaps it was merely some harmless eccentricity, and he resolved not to allude to the pictures or even indicate that he had noticed them. He was a tolerant man and after all, he told himself, what people did in the privacy of their own homes was their own business, so long as it wasn’t illegal or subversive. With a sudden pang of guilt he remembered the set of modestly mucky photographs that he had confiscated from a former pupil and that now lodged at home between the pages of his Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume 18. There was, too, the deck of nude playing cards, acquired in his youth on a holiday in the Isle of Man, with which, purely from nostalgia, he occasionally played a game of Patience. All human beings had their foibles, their moments of private weakness, but he resolved to remove both offending articles to the bin on his return home. No one should ever have the opportunity to rebuke him for a lack of self-discipline; it was up to him to set an example to others. He sipped the Bovril and let its taste linger on his tongue. But still, he’d had the cards for a long time. He liked the waxy feel of them in his hands, the soft flitting sound as he dealt them to himself, and when he glanced at Miss Lewis sitting opposite him he couldn’t help reflecting how different she looked from the fabulous creatures of those cards.