The Snow Globe

by Judith Kinghorn

Later, when Mr. Forbes had appeared in the kitchen of the cottage, Stephen had been surprised. Not so much by the man’s appearance as the manner of it: for he hadn’t even knocked on the door, but had burst in—as though a baby had just been born.

  “Stephen,” he’d said, extending his hand, smiling, “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see anyone in my entire life.”

  When Stephen took hold of the hand, the man had pulled him to himself, hugging him tightly. It had been rather embarrassing. It wasn’t as though he’d returned from any war; he’d only been down in the valley.

  “I need to ask you something,” Mr. Forbes said, stepping back, and with unusually intense and glistening eyes. “I need to ask you if you love Daisy . . . and I need you to tell me the truth.”

  The truth. It wasn’t something Howard Forbes had been too extravagant with of late. But it was a question Stephen was able to answer unequivocally and without any hesitation.

  “Yes, sir,” said Stephen, looking the man in the eye, “I do. I love her.”

  Howard Forbes nodded. He rubbed his hands together. “Life is very short,” he said. “Too short for some . . .” He glanced up. “Could you do me a favor, Stephen? Could you come over to the house in . . .” He shook his head. “No, no—not the house. Could you meet me by the pond in . . . in, say, half an hour?”

  Stephen shrugged. “I suppose so,” he said. “Though I was hoping to catch up with—”

  But he’d gone.

  Then he was back: “Oh, and Stephen, no more sir, or Mr. Forbes, please. I think we’ve known each other long enough to dispense with formalities, don’t you? My name is Howard.”

  Stephen lifted his jacket from the hook on the back of the door, slipped the globe inside his pocket and headed out of the cottage. He hoped Mr. Forbes—he couldn’t possibly start calling the man Howard, he thought—wouldn’t keep him too long and he’d be able to find Daisy.

  Mabel and Howard stood together at Daisy’s bedroom window, watching their daughter as she waited beneath a luminous flickering sky.

  Mabel gripped Howard’s hand tighter. “I do wish he’d hurry up,” she said.

  “He’ll be there.”

  But Mabel was anxious. Doubt made her so. An unreliable father had made her so. The only person she’d ever been sure of was Howard, and, bizarrely, even through what they now referred to as the Wilderness Years.

  Mabel’s mouth twitched and then curved up at one side. They had come through it. They had come through their crisis, somehow held on and weathered their estrangement. They had made it to the other side of twenty-five years.

  Together, they had witnessed the dawn of a new century, the death of a queen and empress, and war; and cars and airplanes and telephones; the gramophone and the wireless. It was hard to imagine what else might be invented, or change. But the business, Forbes and Sons, a family business that had been there and grown over two centuries, was finished, or would be soon enough.

  Times had changed, fortunes had been made and lost, and would be made and lost again. It was, as her husband had said, the way of the world, and would continue to be so long after they were gone. Where their daughters’ lives would take them, how they and any future grandchildren might live, Mabel had no idea. The only thing she was certain of was that her heart belonged to the man at her side. He had been her love—her first love, her only love—and she knew now that he would be for the remainder of her days.

  Daisy knew. There was nothing she could do about it. Her life was bound to him, every perfect memory wrapped around him, each shining minute spent with him. And a future without him at its center was not a future she wished to contemplate.

  She wasn’t sure how her father knew Stephen was back, or how he knew Stephen would be at the lily pond at that time, but neither did she care. The only thing that mattered was that he was back. But did he still love her? So many months had passed since she’d read his words—as fresh and breathtaking to her now as the clear evening air: I love all of you . . . everything about you . . . But what had happened to that note? Had his precious words been destroyed, torn up and thrown onto a fire or into a wastebasket? Were they and the passion behind them lost—lost forever? It made her heart shrivel to think such a thing. And then she realized: They could never be lost, because they had been read, read and devoured and forever remembered by her: the person to whom they had been addressed.

  Sitting on the bench by the pond, Daisy smiled and stared upward, and with her gaze locked heavenward she contemplated the extraordinary and inexplicable nature of love and loves, so infinite, so varied, over millennia and centuries. What strange alchemy, she wondered, made two people know and understand they belonged with each other; that their lives could only ever be whole and complete together? Who or what had arranged such magnificent chemistry?

  Then an owl—singular, tremulous, connecting and clear—called out to her. The evergreens took on an ethereal glow and the infinitesimal stars began to appear. Diamonds in the sky, she thought. The universe never had been black-and-white. And like a revelation, a profound momentary connection during which she and the earth and the moon and the stars—and everything she had been and would be—fused and became one, she finally understood the smallness of her body and the greatness of her love.

  Sensing his nearness, she rose to her feet; hearing his footsteps, she turned. And desperate, trembling, weak with longing, and uttering only one word—his name—she stepped toward him and buried her face in his warmth. She held on to him tightly as they swayed, gently swayed, just as they had at sunrise.

  “Never let go of me.”

  “I have to,” he said. “But only for a moment, because I have something for you.”

  And with his eyes fixed on hers, he reached into his pocket, lifted her hand and placed the globe in her palm.

  “You found it . . .” She looked up at him again. “You found it and you’re here, and I thought you’d gone.”

  He said nothing. He took her head in his hands, lowered his face to hers and kissed her. And kissed her. And kissed her.

  Daisy would never be able to recall quite how long that first kiss between them lasted, though Stephen would always claim it had gone on until every one of Eden Hall’s lights had been extinguished. He would tell their children, and later, their grandchildren, how he’d had to wait eleven years—his age again—to kiss the girl he’d fallen in love with at eleven; that he’d danced with her as the sun rose and finally kissed her as it set. And each and every Christmas, when the globe came out, he’d tell the story again: about the late summer’s day he’d found a snow globe, and a mother, and got his girl.

  Acknowledgments

  Firstly, special thanks to Ellen Edwards, my editor, for her patience and good advice, and to all of the team at NAL/Penguin Random House; special thanks also to my agent, Deborah Schneider at Gelfman Schneider in New York, and to Sam Copeland at Rogers, Coleridge and White in London.

  Thank you to the lovely Jo Rees and Doug Kean, and to my friends and first readers—Harriett Jagger, Rivinia Ahearne, Dixie Jenks and Sophie Durlacher. Thanks also to Tim O’Kelly and my favorite bookshop: One Tree Books at Petersfield, Hampshire. Huge and heartfelt thanks to all of my readers, and to my friends and followers on Twitter and Facebook. And, as ever, I send my unending love to Bella, to Max and to Jeremy.

  Finally, I am forever indebted to my late agent and friend, Ali Gunn, who passed away in Switzerland as I was writing The Snow Globe. Her extraordinary passion for life and faith in me continue to be a source of inspiration and strength.

  JK

  HAMPSHIRE, ENGLAND

  SEPTEMBER 2014

  A CONVERSATION WITH

  JUDITH KINGHORN

  Q. The Snow Globe is your lightest novel to date, a sparkling dual love story and comedy of manners set a number of years after the Great War, when time had softened its immediate impact. What inspired you t
o go in this direction?

  A. My previous two novels are both set around the Great War and I wanted to move on from that time, and the 1920s very much appealed. I’ve always been drawn to that era and think the interwar years are a particularly fascinating time in history. It was a period of rapid progress and advancement for women, the beginning of the modern world, a time we’re able to recognize and relate to, and yet there also remained these rigidly old-fashioned rules and customs. And I suppose it’s that clash that’s so appealing to write about: the struggle between the “old guard,” those of a certain age who clung onto the traditions and fading glories of the past, and were appalled by what they perceived as a new morality; and a younger generation whose energy was reflected in the new freedoms, music and dancing and fashions. The desperation and defiance of those bright young things of the Roaring Twenties—who were determined to be seen and heard, to live life to the fullest—contrasts vividly with the years immediately before and during the Great War, so there’s a great deal for a writer to draw on.

  Q. You begin The Snow Globe with Agatha Christie’s famous disappearance. Can you tell us more about that incident in her life? Why did you decide to start there?

  A. I’d already decided to begin the novel after the general strike and in the weeks leading up to Christmas 1926 when I realized it coincided with Agatha Christie’s extraordinary eleven-day disappearance. When I made this connection and read about Christie’s husband’s infidelity, it seemed to offer the perfect opening for the novel, the themes of which are also infidelity and betrayal.

  The mystery of Agatha Christie’s disappearance began on the evening of Friday, December 3, 1926, at Styles, her Berkshire home. At around nine forty-five p.m., without any warning, and having first gone upstairs to kiss her sleeping daughter, Rosalind, Mrs. Christie drove away from the house. Her abandoned Morris Cowley motorcar was later found down a slope at Newlands Corner near Guildford in Surrey, but there was no sign of Mrs. Christie, nor any clues to what had happened to her.

  The story was international news, made the front page of the New York Times, and for eleven days conjecture buzzed. Some believed Mrs. Christie had drowned herself, others suggested the incident was a publicity stunt, and others still whispered of the possibility of murder and pointed fingers in the direction of her unfaithful husband, a former First World War fighter pilot. Such was the speculation that the home secretary of the time, William Joynson-Hicks, put pressure on the police to make faster progress, and the celebrated crime writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy L. Sayers were drawn into the puzzle. Conan Doyle, who was interested in the occult, took a discarded glove of Christie’s to a medium, while Sayers visited the scene of the disappearance (later using it in her novel Unnatural Death).

  Christie was eventually discovered, safe and well. Alone, and using an assumed name, that of her husband’s mistress, she had been staying at a spa hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire, since the day after her disappearance, oblivious, it seemed, to the news and national furor.

  The two most popular theories offered for Christie’s strange disappearance are that she was in the grip of a rare mental condition known as a fugue state, a period of out-of-body amnesia induced by stress, or that she had planned the whole thing to thwart her husband’s plans to spend a weekend with his mistress at a house close to where she abandoned her car. I tend to believe the latter.

  Q. In this novel, romantic love seems almost idealized. Despite miscommunications that keep the lovers apart, their feelings for each other are pure, certain, and uncomplicated—free from the confusion and doubt one tends to find in fiction with a contemporary setting. What made you want to depict love in this context?

  A. In The Snow Globe I wanted to place older love alongside young, untested love. The young love is ideal and pure, without doubt or cynicism, whereas the married love is about compromise, forgiveness, and understanding. I think we all start out with that pure, idealized notion of love, that it will conquer all and prevail, and through the course of life we learn that in order for it to survive we have to be prepared to make sacrifices and compromises.

  In the novel, Daisy learns about love, its differing shades, and what it is and is not. She has grown up believing her parents’ marriage to be perfect and longs to be in love. From the moment she discovers the truth about her parents’ marriage, disillusionment and a cynicism she associates more with her sister Iris nudge at her. She believes—and for a while wants to believe—that she loves Stephen as a brother, but then, finally, has to acknowledge that her love for him is different. And it is the purity of that love—and her acknowledgment of it—that allows her to see clearly, begin to gain some self-knowledge and forgive. At the same time, Mabel has to forgive her husband for his infidelity in order to save her marriage and remember her love for him. And this is Mabel’s liberation also, because it frees her from anger and resentment.

  Q. Each of your novels has been set around an English country estate. What draws you to such places, and why do you think they are so appealing to readers?

  A. In part it’s due to a love of history and architecture, but it’s also to do with my love of literature. Many of my favorite novels are set in vividly depicted and often grand houses . . . Think of Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and every Jane Austen novel. Some inspiration, too, comes from my childhood, when I was taken to visit such places. Many of them remained unchanged from Victorian times, and I particularly remember going to a country house sale where there was a huge rusting sleigh in a coach house, and old-fashioned clothes and shoes and tiny sailor suits laid out in a nursery, all to go under the hammer. I think those country house sales—now, like the houses themselves, a thing of the past—had a profound impact on me and my imagination.

  I’m a member of the National Trust and English Heritage, and I still love to visit these places whenever I have the time. Each one has its own character, and they’ve all witnessed so much and have so many stories. Sometimes, I think their walls must exude a sort of whispering narrative, because whenever I come back from having been to visit one, I feel inspired and want to know more about who lived there. But my desire to know more isn’t confined to grand country houses: I’m the same with any old house, large or small. Buildings fascinate me because of the human stories they hold. For readers, I think films like Gosford Park and television dramas like Downton Abbey have undoubtedly increased the appeal of the country house as a setting.

  Q. You describe the tumult caused by the loss of empire and new technologies. Can you tell us more about how these changes led to the demise of the English country house and a way of life, and about the financial pressures felt by the moneyed class during this period?

  A. At the dawn of the twentieth century, country house life was still in its heyday. Securely landed families remained confident in the permanence of primogeniture, England ruled the waves, and one-third of the globe was shaded the pretty pink of empire. Even in the early summer of 1914 no one could imagine that those young men who sipped lemonade on lawns bathed in sunshine would be mowed down on the fields of Flanders.

  The First World War changed life for everyone, particularly the upper classes, and the impact of that war on the British country house was substantial. Those houses and estates that were requisitioned were badly treated, but, more important, many of them were left without any heir to hand on to. In 1916, Vanity Fair declared the British aristocracy altered forever. “The whole social fabric of Great Britain has been changed . . . When the boy dukes and earls grow up they will find their formerly important rank regarded as a quaint and curious survival of an ancient and outworn custom.”

  Not only were the heirs to these places lost, but the ranks of young men required to fulfill the roles of gardeners, gamekeepers, and outdoor servants were also lost. As a result, vast numbers of these houses and their once well-tended grounds fell into neglect and ruin, and, added to this, there was also what was generally known as
“the servant problem.”

  Ironically, the war that robbed women of husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers had also been the catalyst in providing them with the opportunity to work in new types of employment and better-paid positions. The growth in retail and new department stores offered shop work, and new business and technologies offered factory and office work, with better pay and conditions and shorter hours. Understandably, fewer and fewer chose to go into domestic service.

  By the mid-1920s, the age of the country house sale had well and truly begun. Stripped of their contents, these houses were no longer homes but expensive monuments to a faded past, and in order to avoid punitive taxes and death duties, hundreds of them were destroyed. (The total loss over the course of the twentieth century is more than one thousand.) Month after month, during the twenties and thirties, demolitions and what were then known as “smash-ups” destroyed hundreds of country houses in what Roy Strong called “black decades in our architectural history” in his book The Destruction of the Country House: 1875–1975.

  Like many people after the war, those houses that survived had to reinvent themselves—as schools, hospitals, health spas, offices, or homes for the elderly. Some were handed over to the National Trust and opened to the public, but a way of life had ended, and with it an old order and class system crumbled. The Second World War and demise of the British Empire hammered the final nails in the coffin.

  Q. The First World War ended one hundred years ago, and we’re seeing in the media many retrospectives and new analyses of the war’s origins and impact. The war has played a role in each of your novels. Has your thinking about it evolved?

  A. Though The Snow Globe is lighter and more humorous than my other novels, it’s set only eight years after the end of the war. Consequently, the effects of war are ever present. Every character in the novel is affected by it in some way.