The Snow-Woman

By Stella Gibbons

I suppose I was lonelier than I knew.

It's the 1960s, and Maude Barrington, now in her seventies, has kept life firmly at bay since the deaths of her three brothers in World War I. But when an unexpected visitor convinces Maude to visit old friends in France (and an old nemesis, who persistently calls her "the snow-woman"), she is

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean Street Press
• Release date: Jan 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913527808

Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons nació en Londres en 1902. Fue la mayor de tres hermanos. Sus padres, ejemplo de la clase media inglesa suburbana, le dieron una educación típicamente femenina. Su padre, un individuo bastante singular, ejercía como médico en los barrios...

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CHAPTER 1

The dry, gloomy afternoon had been refreshed by a shower. On my way back from the village at three, the pavements were gleaming under the March wind and the air was moist. The change did not last; when I looked out over London later on, lowering clouds were again suspended above the dark roof of the city.

That afternoon, five years ago, Lionel Crozier was coming to have tea with me.

Although we had kept up a fairly regular correspondence I had not seen him for nearly ten years. After the war—the second war—he had gone back to live in France, with Charles Handel, the art critic and historian, visiting England only occasionally on his journeys all over the world as Charles’s emissary.

I was not entirely pleased at the prospect of seeing Lionel again, and perhaps my ambivalent attitude expressed itself in slight nervousness: I told Millie, my maid, to show him straight into the back drawing-room as soon as he arrived.

She glanced at me in a little surprise, for I had repeated aloud an order that had settled, over the years, into a household custom, but she only said:

‘I’m making my coconut kisses, miss; Mr. Crozier always did like them. There was just enough coconut left. I did wonder if it would fill up my dozen, but we was all right.’

I smiled at her, noticing in her returning smile the remnants of the fragile prettiness which had been hers when she first came to us, as scullery-maid, in 1913.

‘I’d best be getting on with them, miss; they’re ever so indigestible eaten hot, and I’d like them to cool right down.’

She went out of the room. I can recall that prettiness perfectly in memory; it had been so delicate, with its crown of ash-blonde hair and its wild-flower skin. Poor Millie, I thought, sitting by the window in my back drawing-room that afternoon and looking out over my spectacular view of London; poor Millie. No strength of character.

Was Millie a little nervous too? She did not usually talk to me about her cooking, knowing that, unless some culinary experiment should fail noticeably, it does not interest me.

I expected that she would ‘have a word’, as she calls it, with Lionel when he arrived, and I was not surprised to hear, after his ring and her light step crossing the hall to answer it, the sound of their voices, in chat, in the hall.

But I was surprised to hear a third voice join in; younger and rather loud; a young woman’s.

My slight testiness increased to annoyance: had Lionel retained that irritating fault of an over-prolonged youth, his habit of bringing strangers, uninvited, to call on his old friends?

The question was partly answered when he walked into the room, wearing, in spite of being in his early sixties, clothes that even I could recognize as being in the extreme of contemporary male fashion, and followed by a young woman in the last stages of a pregnancy so obvious as to appear exaggerated.

I was, I confess, exceedingly annoyed. Modesty did not enter into my irritation, except on behalf of the girl herself—I wished, for her own sake, that she could have realized how unpleasing her appearance was in the eyes of a septuagenarian—but social considerations did. And why, why, I asked myself, must she wear a kind of Greek tunic ending above her knees, made of black stuff and divided into four sections by lines of a crude pink?

Lionel advanced with hands held out.

‘Maudie darling,’ he cried, ‘how divine to see you again! and not changed in the smallest detail except for your hair. Which I adore, at first sight. I simply adore. It’s like that frost you sprinkle on things at Christmas.’

I had to let my hands be taken and pressed, and felt relief that no attempt was made to kiss them. Silly, disloyal Lionel knew quite well when to stop, though he seldom put the knowledge to use.

I smiled and observed that he did not seem to have changed, either, and then I looked over his shoulder at the young woman.

‘Oh, of course’—and he turned his eyes away from my face, on which they had been fixed with a spoony expression—‘darling, this is Teddie, Teddie Parker, this is Miss Barrington, who’s known me since I was a very bad little boy indeed.’

She took a few steps towards me, slowly, because of her weight and size, and half put out her hand and mumbled ‘Good-afternoon’ from behind a hanging mass of hair that, in its colour, reminded me of the sovereigns and half sovereigns I used to see when I was a very little girl indeed, peeping from the purses of the grown-ups. These particular sovereigns had been in circulation long enough, I noticed, to become dingy.

‘Get that weight off your feet, dear girl,’ bustled Lionel, pressing her into the largest chair. She slowly settled herself into it and leant back, while I averted my eyes from her. My anger with Lionel was increasing.

He was now rapturizing at the window. ‘Even the view! Just the same! No—no—it isn’t, though. All those bony white things sticking up.’

‘There has been a great deal of building in the last five years,’ I pointed out. ‘Do sit down, Lionel, and will you ring the bell for tea, please.’

I knew perfectly well that I spoke to him as if he were still thirteen, but how else could I speak? If he were not still thirteen, he was seventeen, and a tiresome seventeen at that.

But he lingered; presumably in order to sweep round dramatically as Millie came in with the tray. ‘Do I smell coconut?’ he cried. ‘Yes, I do—it is—they are—my own, my so-well-remembered and so long missed coconut kisses!’

Millie was smiling. Her eyes were fixed on the tray as she manoeuvred it skilfully and at last set it down, with its load of silver, on the walnut table which she keeps properly polished.

As it touched the wood she just lifted her eyes for an instant and allowed the smile to dwell on Lionel’s face,

The correctness of her manner gratified me, for an instant, in the midst of my irritation. She had benefited from the excellent domestic training at home, and had not forgotten it during those years that she had been away from us.

I caught her eye, and she went out of the room immediately.

I began to pour the tea.

The young woman was fussing. While I put more water into the pot from the spirit-kettle which I prefer to an electric one, and then awaited an opportunity to offer them bread and butter, I caught mutters about not wanting anything, accompanied by various repudiating gestures, and this was followed by a low question from Lionel, ‘Do you feel all right, child?’ which she answered by a violent jerk of her head. Finally he left her to peck at a piece of bread and butter undisturbed.

‘How is Charles?’ I enquired when he had asked if I would let him begin on the cakes at once, which he did.

‘Oh, it’s so sad, Maude. He’s getting old . . . Charles! One can hardly believe it. Just in these last few months. Crumbling and decaying under our very eyes. It makes us all so dreadfully sad.’

‘I really can’t believe he’s become old as quickly as that, Lionel . . .’ I said. ‘His nervous energy and health have always been unusually good, surely, and only last week I was reading an article by him in The Apollonian on the provenance of those two Courbets there has been so much discussion about . . . I thought it very good. He seems to be writing better than ever.’

‘Oh, he can still do his stuff, all right,’ said Lionel, staring at me gloomily with an expression that seemed to hint at some unspoken difficulty. ‘That’s . . . just the trouble.’

Fond as I was of Charles Handel, I did not wish to discuss any problems that might be troubling him in his old age. He was well-supported and cared for by a wife and a circle of devoted friends.

I also rather doubted if he had any difficulties; Lionel has always relished mystification and hinting; Jock and Harry and Edward used to tease him about it. They were all great teases.

Lionel’s own life has been full of broken friendships and the treacherous and ungrateful behaviour of those he considers himself to have ‘taken up and done everything for, but everything’. I concluded that the girl sitting silently in the background was yet another of these.

‘How long is it since you’ve seen Charles?’ he went on, rousing himself from his morose contemplation of my view. ‘I was trying to think, on our way here.’

‘Nearly twenty years. He dined here on the evening before he went back to France.’

‘And you’ve never seen Belair?’

‘No. I was to go there for a visit, you may remember, and then my father and mother—’

‘Took so long a-dying, didn’t they. Poor Maudie . . . ten years, wasn’t it? First your father and then . . . did you know Charles has given me a house?’

‘No.’ I could say no more; I was recovering from his comment on my parents’ deaths. I managed, however, to keep my eyes fixed on him in attention.

‘Yes, the one he built on that meadow just below Belair, where the gentians used to grow. Gave it me before I left this time for America. It appears he has left it me in his Will, but he wanted me to have it before he dies—which he thinks he may do any day now. It’s the latest bee in his bonnet,’ he ended irritably, and suddenly became silent.

One of his lifelong habits has been his inability to appear interested in any conversation for longer than some minutes. After his first silly gush of welcome and gossip there is a gradual failing in attention to what one is saying, and then this bored silence falls.

I began to feel it was time that I addressed a remark to the young woman, who had been sitting at my tea-table for nearly half an hour, with less attention being paid to her than is often given to a dog.

Accordingly, at the end of a conversation about the garden at Lionel’s house, Les Gentianes, and his good fortune in having secured the services of a gardener living in the village, I leant towards her, asking whether she knew France at all. (She might; her class seemed to get about everywhere nowadays.)

My question received, in answer, a silent movement of the head which might have been negative, and a mutter from Lionel—‘Do let her be, ducky.’

There have been many occasions when I have longed to order Lionel out of the room. This was one. There he sat, wearing a boldly-striped suit of youthful cut, and from the curious way in which his hair was trimmed, to the rose in his buttonhole, he seemed to me pathetic. Irritating, too, but chiefly pathetic.

Old monkeys please nobody, as George Moore once wrote. But some of them still try.

The girl made no further sound or movement and he resumed the conversation, keeping it—skilfully, I must admit—skirting around names and situations which I should have preferred to avoid discussing. One particularly pointed allusion to his unhappy sister Frances finally convinced me that his precise object in coming was to anger and embarrass me.

I had not spoken Frances Crozier’s name aloud for many years.

Seeing that I was not going to be drawn into questioning him about her, he went on to talk about the trip to America, from which he was on his way home to France.

‘I spent a week getting Salter Blake to give up American Primitives,’ he informed me, and I said ‘Indeed?’, not knowing who Salter Blake might be, or, indeed, what Lionel meant.

‘An entire week,’ he went on impressively, ‘sitting up till four in the morning, night after night after night. I have never conceived such drinking!’

I observed that it must have been very bad for their livers.

‘Oh, Salter’s liver melted some years ago . . . you see, he had his doubts about the Mods. He’s always collected American Primitives.’

Mods. is Lionel’s name for contemporary painters and their work. He does not mean by it the young people who used to riot at seaside towns some years ago.

‘American Primitives are scarce, of course . . . but there’s still just a chance of picking up a terrific bargain; a wooden square from some top storey room in a shack buried away in Maine . . . (Maine’s a big county) . . . with Mom or Pop or Junior on it, painted round 1840, for a song. But you can’t buy the Mods for a song. They don’t starve in attics, they can hang out for the prices they want, and Blake’s a mean old dog. Said he wasn’t going to pay that money for something looking as if the painter’d upset the pot and paddled in it.’

‘Why should he, after all, Lionel?’ I leant forward, ostensibly to help myself to a lady-finger biscuit, but actually to observe the girl. She had been stirring uneasily, and her cheek, visible between her falling hair, was gleaming with sweat.

‘Sally MacGloire’s things actually are painted like that,’ added Lionel. ‘Nice little colourist, too.’

‘Surely one buys a picture because one likes it?’ I went on, not knowing fully what I was saying, for I was becoming increasingly apprehensive about my younger guest.

‘One buys as an investment, Maude. You are . . . out of touch, aren’t you?’

‘Instead of diamonds—I see. But . . . did . . . you . . .’ (she seemed to be bracing her body against her chair, as if resisting a spasm of some kind) ‘. . . succeed in persuading him, then? Surely, with . . . Charles’s authority and advice behind . . . you . . .’ I broke off.

‘Oh, yes—probably at the cost of my liver. Charles’s authority and advice, yes . . . Blake bought two Maxwells and a Heck and promised to consider a Teremkezi. Charles is pleased with me.’

I heard the words and meant to make some congratulatory comment, but I never made it. The state of the girl was now such that I must speak. Leaning forward while Lionel was actually still talking, and interrupting him in a manner that would ordinarily have been inconceivable to me:

‘I am afraid you are not feeling at all well,’ I said to her.

CHAPTER 2

Lionel turned quickly, exclaiming, ‘Oh my God.’

Glancing from her face to his, I detected his expression before he could control it, and I thought: He planned this, he hoped it would happen. I will never forgive him. Foolish words; at my age, one knows that such vows can fade. But I, too, was having to control myself. I turned again to the girl, who said loudly, almost shouted, ‘I should think you could see, couldn’t you?’

‘Now stay quiet; keep still,’ I told her. ‘Mr. Crozier will help you on to the sofa and I will telephone . . . how much time have we, do you think?’

She shook back her hair, and gasped out, ‘I don’t know . . . it’s coming ever so quickly . . .’ and the words ended in what seemed to me an appalling sound.

It reminded me of the bellowing of a cow, which I had heard throughout a seemingly interminable night, while I was staying with some friends in the country. It did not seem to be uttered by human vocal chords.

‘Where are you booked in?’ I urged her, when it ceased. Lionel had his hand on her shoulder and was gently kneading it and looking distressed—as if that were any help.

She shook her head distractedly, and Lionel, teetering in an irritating way on his heels, said in a disturbed tone:

‘The trouble is, she isn’t booked in anywhere.’

Then I did stare.

‘Do you mean to tell me’—I turned on the pallid, sweating young creature—‘that there’s no bed for you to go to—you aren’t under any doctor?’

She began to say something—I think it was a protest—when another spasm seized her, and, bending her head, she gripped the sides of the chair.

‘Of course she’s under a doctor,’ snapped Lionel. ‘She was going to have it at home, only now she’s walked out of her home, she’s left her husband.’ He rubbed one finger agitatedly below one eye, with his mouth open.

Before I could speak she got clumsily up from the chair and staggered over to my sofa (a legacy from Great-aunt Dorothea, and covered in dark green repp) and sank on to it, keeping her frightened eyes, visible between the masses of her hair, fixed upon his face.

I crossed the room without another word; to the door; without looking at either of them again.

From the corner of my eye I just saw him bending over, and heard him say something—I don’t know what—and then, actually, I saw him put his hand upon her grotesque tunic, as if to begin rolling it up or removing it, and I shut the door on the unbelievable sight.

Millie was hurrying across the hall, looking shocked and white. She had lost her head, as she invariably does in a crisis.

‘Oh, miss—what’s the matter?—it’s the baby, isn’t it?—I heard her—oh, miss—’ She was making confused, useless gestures with her hands, and her large eyes were staring at me in fear. ‘Oh, miss—please—’

‘There is no please about it. Go in there,’ and I re-opened the door, ‘and help. You know something about such matters, don’t you? I am going up to Mrs. Halliwell’s.’

‘Oh, miss—please—you don’t know—’

‘Don’t waste time. In you go.’

I did not raise my voice nor did I glance into the room, but stood holding the door ajar. Millie went past me, lowering her head as if she were hurrying into a storm, and I shut the door.

Going briskly up to my room I packed a nightgown and other requirements, put on my coat and hat, picked up my book from the bedside table and went downstairs and out of the house. I heard voices, and then another—I can only call it a bellow—as I passed through the hall, and I believe that Lionel came hurrying out towards the telephone, but I shut the door without looking at him.

I walked quickly up the sloping path of my front garden, noticing that the Poetaz narcissis were going to be unusually fine this year; the buds stood thick in the moist foliage and one or two were already in bloom. I prefer flowers while they are in bud, I think; the promise is unspoiled.

I walked up the hill to the row of old white cottages where Tessa Halliwell lives. She was the friend living nearest to me (yes, I suppose, even at that time, I looked on Tessa as a friend) and I did not want the fatigue of going over to Hampstead or down into London with my case of night things, because I was exhausted by my anger, as well as annoyingly tired, as usual, at the end of the day.

I derived something from Tessa’s friendship, though we had, then, nothing in common. I suppose I was lonelier than I knew. I could admire her unfailing energy and her good-nature, sloppy though the latter is, and I did; the fact that she is a fool, and not a lady, I had almost grown to overlook, in the five years we had known one another. I knew with what relish and amusement she would hear the tale I would have to tell.

One of the large pink lampshades she affects could be seen glowing between the undrawn curtains of her small drawing-room as I approached. Those houses are too small, of course. I could not endure to be shut up in such a box. But Tessa is well content with hers, because the rooms are suited by the clutter that she likes.

As I opened the small iron gate which shuts off her four square feet of paving and flower-filled tubs from the road, I saw her move into the lamplight, against the background of the pieces of Indian and Chinese embroidery, and the fans and little dark pictures and oddments picked up in junk shops that she likes to hang on her strawberry-pink walls.

Tessa, as usual at that time in the late afternoon, was wearing one of her Oriental coats, or robes, all of them in what I should not hesitate to call an advanced stage of decay. Loose gold threads hang from them and catch in things as she passes, and the silk that covers the wadding of the sleeves is rubbed and worn. She explains the retention of these things long after they should have been thrown away by saying that she has owned them so long that they are ‘not clothes, any more, but people’.

I have found it impossible, in my association with Tessa, to avoid some contagion from her fantasies. Of course I remain untouched by them inwardly, but, in order to keep on good terms with her—and I cannot endure her occasional scolding fits—I have had, to a certain extent, to talk her language. My parents would not believe their ears, could they hear me referring to one of Tessa’s robes as ‘the Persian Person’.

She caught sight of me through the window and at once began to gesticulate and make mouths. I drew closer, looking in, and saw that a dangling thread from the hem of her robe had become temporarily entangled with the flex of one of the lamps, a standard which, as she pulled impatiently at the obstacle, tottered behind her and threatened to fall on her.

I too gestured, warningly, and pointed over her shoulder, and at length she turned round, grasped the lamp just as it fell forward, and, having disentangled herself, finally appeared at the front door. She was laughing, as usual.

‘Oh . . . it’s grand to see someone. I phoned five people and everybody was out—come on in, love, don’t just stand there—oh dear, when I saw you waving about and frowning at me I suddenly thought of those concert-party turns where the kids point at the ghost behind the comic’s back and yell . . . and then I started to laugh and I couldn’t stop . . . what’s that for?’ she interrupted herself, pointing at my suitcase. ‘You running away from home? I thought you had an old flame coming to tea?’

Tessa would say this type of thing, and I had ceased to protest. I stepped into the warm little hall and she shut the door behind me.

‘I am running away from home,’ I said.

‘You are?’ Tessa almost stood on tiptoe, in a pair of slippers sharing, even to the dangling gold threads, many of the disadvantages of her People, and stared up at me through her extraordinary glasses, part of