The hovering mist steeped the forest in a twilight in which the treetrunks, which resembled scaly bones, appeared to glow. As soon as Johnny set foot on the path between them he saw his breath. He ran along the path, searching for trees he could shake to dislodge snow from them, trying to run far enough to be out of sight of his family and lie in wait for them. But the trees wouldn't shake; when he threw his weight against a trunk, that didn't bring down even so much as a snowflake. For a moment he thought the others had sneaked behind him, and then he saw them approaching on the path, his father's eyes gleaming in the forest twilight, Margaret rubbing her arms with her mittened hands. She looked ready to suggest going home out of the cold, and so Johnny shouted "Let's play hide and seek. Daddy can be It."
Their father went to the nearest marker post, which was painted with a blue arrow, and stared brightly at them before closing his eyes. "You'll be found, I promise," he said in a voice like a wind through the trees. "Off you go."
When Johnny saw that his sister was staying near the post he raced on tiptoe into the forest. By the time his father had counted thirty aloud, johnny had run far enough for the path and his family to be invisible for treetrunks. He darted behind two trees which grew very close together, and crouched to peer between them. He heard his father shout "Fifty" to announce that he'd finished counting, a shout which sounded tiny in the silence. Johnny crouched lower, waiting to catch sight of his father. He was still watching, and listening for movements in the hush which felt as if it was pinned down by all the trees, when he sensed that his father or Margaret had crept behind him.
No, not them. Their breath on his neck wouldn't be so cold, and even if both of them were standing there, their presence wouldn't feel so large. He swung round, sprawling on fallen needles. There was nobody to be seen, only trees like an enormous cage, but for an instant he felt as if whatever he'd sensed at his back had just hidden behind all of them at once. It had to have been the twilight, and the breath on his neck must have been a stray breeze. All the same, he was glad when he heard his father shout "I see you, Gretel" and Margaret's squeak of dismay, because then he was able to dash back to the marker post without fear of being made It.
When Margaret began to count he ran off the path. Though she was almost shouting, her voice immediately sounded even smaller than his father's had. Johnny dodged away from his father, who was also heading deeper into the forest, and hid in the midst of a circle of five close trees. He saw his father vanish among the trees to his left, and could just hear Margaret still counting, and so surely he was wrong to feel as if he wasn't alone in his hiding place. He glanced all around him, and then up. Of course, the mist was as close as the treetops to him. The pale blur above the branches laden with snow made him think of a patch of a face — a face so huge that he was seeing too little of it to distinguish any features. The thought of a face as wide as the forest and hovering just above it sent him fleeing towards the marker post as soon as he heard Margaret stop counting.
"I see Johnny," she called almost at once, and beat him to the marker, though without much enthusiasm. When he skidded onto the path, kicking needles across it, she said "I don't want to play any more."
Now that she'd admitted it, he didn't need to. When he shrugged so as not to seem too eager she called "Dad, we've finished playing."
Perhaps Daddy thought she was trying to trick him, because he made no sound. Was he stealing towards them or standing as still as the forest? "We aren't playing any more," they shouted more or less in chorus, but the silence seemed to cut off their shouts as soon as the sound reached the first trees. "He's going to scare us," Margaret wailed.
Johnny couldn't tell if he shivered then or if the forest did. For a moment he thought the trees had somehow drawn together, then that something had inched towards him and Margaret between far too many trees. He could hardly see beyond the nearest trees because of the fog of his breath. When a figure appeared to his right, between trees so distant they resembled a solid scaly wall, he wasn't sure that he wanted to see what it looked like.
He sucked in a breath which tasted like a stream of ice, and saw that it was his father. It must have been the cold which had made him look different — the blurring of the air — but as he advanced deliberately towards the children, his face was so blank and pale that Johnny felt anxious for him. Then his father saw that Margaret was shivering, and an expression of concern developed on his face. "Is the cold getting to you?" he said. "We'd better speed up our progress."
"Can't we go home now?" Margaret said.
"Why, we haven't got anywhere yet. We've hours before it's dark." He turned along the path, walking so fast that the children had to trot in order to keep up with him. Johnny supposed that was meant to keep Margaret warm, or was his father in a hurry to be somewhere? His father's face had become expressionless yet purposeful, and Johnny wondered if it was possible to sleepwalk while you were awake.
Now they were almost at the point where the path began to curve out of the forest. Daddy left the path without breaking his stride and headed deeper into the forest, into the maze of pines which reminded Johnny of giants or insects, thin scaly bodies rising to bunches of legs with claws of ice beneath their blank white heads. Their stillness made the entire forest seem about to pounce. He would have followed his father if Margaret hadn't stopped on the path, protesting "Daddy, you'll get us lost."
"No need to be afraid." He twisted round and beckoned, his feet moving in an odd little dance as if he was unable to keep still. "This is the last place on earth I'd lose you. Quite the opposite."
"Mummy wouldn't want us to go where there aren't any paths."
"There are paths, believe me. You'll see." But her mentioning Mummy had affected him. At first he looked angry and then, as he glanced at the poised silent forest, his face cleared. "She ought to be here," he murmured. "It should be all of us."
He returned to the path so abruptly he might have been pushing himself away from something. He looked bewildered, and on the way to renewed blankness. "We'll go back for your mother."
"She'll be busy," Margaret told him.
His eyes gleamed a warning; then he smiled, so vaguely that he mightn't have known why. "Perfect," he said. "If we wait there'll be more to see."
As he led them along the path towards the moors he kept glancing behind him into the pines, though he appeared to have forgotten what he was looking for. Johnny didn't like to speak until they were well along the path. "What are we going to see if we wait?" he said at last. "More snow?"
His father beamed at him as if Johnny had solved a problem. "Snow like you've never seen," he said. "The winter to end all."
THIRTY-FOUR
It didn't start snowing for almost a week, and then only on television. Johnny saw it on the children's news, and shouted for them all to come and see. There were blizzards in the north of Scotland. Queues of sluggish vehicles turned even whiter in the seconds they were on the screen, their yellow headlights dimming; people masked with scarves leaned into the white wind so as to stay on their feet; a flock of sheep would have been indistinguishable from the blizzard except for their eyes. When a pine forest filled the screen Margaret thought for a dreamlike moment that it was Sterling Forest, all its colours swallowed up by white. "It's coming," Johnny cried.
"It won't be as bad as that here, will it, Mummy?"
"What's bad about it?" Johnny complained as if her saying so would keep it away, baby that he was. "It looks good. I thought you liked snow."
"Not that much."
"Let's wait and see what the forecast says," Mummy said.
That wouldn't be on for almost an hour. Margaret went up to her room. The floor above was dark; her father must have switched off the workroom light to help him imagine his story. She left her bedroom door open so as to have the rest of the house for company, and took down from the shelves in the corner by her overloaded wardrobe the big Grimm Brothers book.
She sat on the edge of the bed and opened the book on her lap. When she was Johnny's age she'd read it so often that if she held it any other way the pages sagged forward on the strip like a bandage to which they were glued. It fell open at the story of Hansel and Gretel, and she remembered the name her father had called her in the forest as some kind of joke. Perhaps she was too old for the story; the burning of the old woman seemed pointlessly violent and cruel. She tried the Hans Andersen book
instead, but that seemed even bleaker; the thought of the Snow Queen made her shiver. She left the books in Johnny's room and put on her headphones to listen to one of Ramona's tapes of Pile of Cows, the rock group from Leeds, until Mummy called "Dinner in five minutes."
Margaret was down in time to see the long-range forecast, and so was her father. The forecaster, an owlish man whose expression suggested that he was keeping a joke to himself, stood with his back to a map of Europe across which whiteness was crawling. The map turned into one of Britain, and it looked to Margaret as if a white claw was closing around the island. Blizzards were expected in the south of England by the weekend. "Why can't they be here?" Johnny complained.
"Suppose it's like that for weeks here, Mummy? How will we live?"
Her father gave Margaret a dazzling smile. "You'd be surprised."
"I'll go into Leeds tomorrow to stock up on provisions. We've plenty of room in the freezer."
"Had enough pictures of snow?" Daddy said, and switched the television off. "They won't bring it any sooner."
Johnny thought they might, Margaret knew, though his expression only admitted that when he thought nobody was watching. As they took their places at the dining-table she said "I put my old fairy-tale books in your room. They're yours now."
He thanked her and cheered up at once. "The old stories never die," Daddy said.
After dinner Johnny kept parting the curtains to look for a snowfall until even his mother lost patience with him. He was making the house feel surrounded, Margaret thought — making the night outside feel almost solid, and pregnant with snow. It reminded her of last Saturday in the forest, when she had become acutely aware of the weight of snow on the branches and afraid they would give way, burying her and Johnny and her father. No longer liking snow as much as she used to must be part of growing up.
So many unfamiliar things were. At least Ramona had been through them too: feeling lonely when you didn't expect to, and wanting to cry for no reason, and finding your brother becoming more and more of a pain. The idea that as Margaret grew up, her feelings might keep growing bigger too, dismayed her. She could talk to her mother about the way her body would soon be changing, but she didn't like to mention her feelings, because they seemed somehow disloyal to the family. And now there was something else she couldn't tell her mother — that she was afraid the snow might catch her on the way back from Leeds.
She lay in bed that night feeling helpless and childish. She was being sillier than Johnny; she'd heard what the forecast had said. When she wakened in the morning she felt as if she hadn't slept. She stumbled to the window, her feet tangled in the duvet. Towards the horizon the moors were white as if the snow was waiting there; but the whiteness was mist like a huge lingering breath. She had a quick wash and ran downstairs to watch the forecast. Snow had closed over the southern tip of England and was inching northwards across Scotland. The map showed cold suns multiplying over the rest of the country, displaying their rays like wings. They made Margaret think of angels, new lights in the sky, Christmas, though they would be gone by then. All that mattered was that the forecast showed her mother would be safe.
Except that forecasts were sometimes wrong, she thought as she walked to school. She didn't know what to say. Johnny reached the school gates and turned to wait, and Margaret blurted "Will you come and meet us?"
Her mother looked puzzled. "Why, would you rather I did?"
"Not instead of Daddy. Can't you both come?"
"We'll try. If I'm home. I'm not going to the end of the earth, love, only Leeds. Maybe I'll get your father to help carry. That way I should be quicker." Her mother kissed her and Johnny and then Margaret again. "Don't wony, this will be my last trek."
Once he and Margaret were in the schoolyard, Johnny said "Why was mummy saying not to worry?"
"In case it's so crowded in Leeds that she isn't back in time to meet us," Margaret said, feeling as if he had stolen the reassurance she'd gained from sharing her anxiety with her mother, feeling the responsibility of being a big sister weigh her down. Johnny ran off to play with his friends, and she watched her mother becoming smaller and smaller as she walked downhill beneath a sky which was growing paler, frosting over.
Margaret had been looking forward to rehearsing the nativity play, but it wasn't as much fun as usual. She and Sarah and Rachel were people at the inn — the teacher's pet, Allie, having been chosen to play Mary despite groans of protest from all the other girls — and the children in Johnny's year were animals who came to the crib at the end. Ordinarily Margaret enjoyed remembering to speak up while she pretended to complain about the wine which Sarah had served her and which was really blackcurrant juice, but now she couldn't even take much pleasure in watching Johnny and his friends run squeaking into the school hall. When Mrs Hoggart asked her what was wrong she could only say "Nothing, miss" for Johnny's sake.
At lunchtime she played with Sarah and Rachel to distract herself, but she kept thinking that the schoolyard hubbub wasn't loud enough, as if it somehow concealed a silence. The bell rang at last, sending her class back to the hall to continue rehearsals. Margaret didn't have to sing a solo in any of the carols, but until Mrs Hoggart singled her out she thought she was losing herself in the choruses. "Try and keep up, Margaret," the teacher said. "We want your parents to be proud of you on the night, don't we?"