Authors: Emma Smith
She was puzzled, Amy could see, as well as stern; for if Amy had really intended to make her way down the stream, why speak of it in front of these men? And if it were not her intention, why speak of it at all?
“I’m sure I could do it, Granny.”
“I’ve said no, Amy. That’s enough.”
Amy bowed her head meekly and finished her cocoa. She hoped it
was
enough and that when the time came this conversation would be remembered.
Towards midday the snow stopped. The sky lifted away from the earth and the air cleared. Amy had been so immersed in her calculations she had scarcely noticed the morning go by. She sat at the table polishing brasses, already as bright as brass could be, and working out detail by detail her complicated plan of campaign, aware only vaguely of her grandmother opening or shutting the oven door, filling the kettle, making up the fire, rattling the poker; more aware of the presence of the two men, the stillness of the one and the restless movements of the other providing a background to all of her thoughts.
Now, with the feeling of having at last made her arrangements and being ready to begin to put them into practice, she looked up and there was the Inspector pulling his cap over his ears, zipping his jacket. Mr Nabb, however, continued to sit hunched on their oak chest, tying intricate knots in a piece of string. For some reason it had never occurred to Amy that one of them might set off as hunter and one stay behind. This being so, it was just as well she had changed her mind about going today. But her confidence was disturbed. She saw how easily a plan that counted on other people behaving in such and such a way could go wrong: they might behave differently. It was worrying.
“Don’t you mean to go with him?” she said to Mr Nabb.
He pulled the string at both ends and the knot in the middle magically disappeared.
“I’m staying here,” was all he said.
“Oh, I see.”
She wanted to ask him why he was staying. Was it so as to keep that eye of his on them, or because he had had enough of being out in the snow, or what? But the question was too difficult for Amy to phrase.
Instead she put on her wellingtons and coat and scarf and gloves and went outside to watch the Inspector fasten his skis. In spite of all doubts and fears it was still a wonderful sight to see him glide away, gathering speed. He was gone, disappearing into the trees at the bottom. She waited and presently there he was on the far side, smaller now, heading west up the valley that they had come skimming down as lightly as birds the day before yesterday. So that was all right—he was welcome to find whatever he might in that direction.
“What about the Inspector, Granny—isn’t he coming back for his dinner?”
“Wherever are your eyes, child? He took some food with him in his pocket—bread and cheese. I declare, Amy,” said Mrs Bowen kindly, “sometimes you seem to live in a world apart. You’ve no more idea of what’s going on round you than a bat in a barn. Though I’m not saying it’s such a bad thing, now and again—it’s one way of taking a holiday.”
Amy was alarmed to learn that her absent-mindedness had been so apparent, and she strove to make up for it, chattering on with unflagging vivacity throughout the meal.
“You’re clever with that string, aren’t you?” she said to Mr Nabb. “That was a conjuring trick you did, with the knot in the middle. Where did it go to? Will you show me how you did it? Will you do more tricks for me, after?”
But the others were unresponsive. Mr Nabb merely sucked in his soup more noisily, his expression of gloomy disapproval unchanged, while Mrs Bowen eyed her granddaughter with a growing uneasiness.
“I’m going outside to play, Granny, soon as I’ve done the dishes. I’m going to take a shovel up and make a snowman.”
“Don’t you go far then, Amy,” said Mrs Bowen, remindingly.
“Only just to the top of the hill—that’s all.”
“Well, you mind and see it’s no further.”
“I shan’t go far, Granny, I promise. You don’t have to worry yourself. Will you come up with me, Mr Nabb? Will you help me to make a snowman?”
But he shot her a glance so savage she was silenced.
It was not play at all, this part of her scheme, it was very exhausting work, for she had to make two snowmen—two men of snow, standing right on the summit, in the middle of the track that went between cottage and haystack, barring the way. This was her plan, the method by which she hoped to tell Bartolomeo—supposing he still was somewhere close at hand and supposing he did venture on another visit—that he must come no nearer. But would these two snowmen Amy wondered, stepping back to consider the results of all her hard labour, would they be unusual enough to stop him, to make him think: why
two?
Would they have for Bartolomeo the meaning she meant them to have? And at the same time for Mr Nabb, toiling up the hill towards her now, would they be just snowmen with no meaning other than the amusement of a little girl playing by herself on a wintry afternoon?
“Hullo!” she called down to him, very friendly, and waited anxiously for what he would say. First he got his breath. Then he looked at her handiwork, then at her flushed cheeks, then back again.
“And what are those supposed to be?”
“Why, snowmen of course,” she said, surprised, ready to be suspicious. Was he trying to trap her into saying more than she meant to say?
“I’m glad you told me—I’d never have known it, else.”
Amy’s vision faded. She looked where he looked and saw what he saw: not the warning figures of Mr Nabb and Inspector Catcher sculpted in snow—almost too dangerously obvious, it had seemed to her—but instead two dingy lumpy piles of nothing in particular. Bartolomeo might stumble against them in the starlight and knock them over—that was all. She had worked with such desperation of purpose and for all the use it was going to be she might have saved herself the trouble. Was every plan of hers going to turn out so poorly?
“What did you want to go and make two for, anyway?” he asked her.
“I’d finished the other one, that’s why,” she answered lamely.
Her woollen gloves were soaking wet and the fingers inside them ached with cold. She felt the tears rise up, hot, into her eyes, tears of discouragement and vexation; tears of doubt. Had she set herself, in fact, a task that was impossible? Had she?
“You certainly get the view from here,” said Mr Nabb with grudging appreciation. He had lost interest in Amy’s snowmen and was scanning the huge deserted landscape that stretched below and around them. “I reckon you could just about see a fly move, and a couple of miles off at that.”
Again Amy felt the old sick squeeze of fear inside her. What he said was true. From the top of this, or any other hill, he would be able to see the movement of a fly a great distance away trying to escape; only the fly would really be a man, or perhaps a little girl.
With an effort she blotted the picture from her mind and caught at his sleeve.
“You can get a better view than this,” she said. “Further up, by that rock, see? Come on—I’ll show you.”
And she capered off to the right along the boney ridge like somebody giving way to a fit of high spirits, kicking the snow up in showers ahead of her, while Mick, affected by her exuberance, pranced alongside, tripping over, recovering himself, barking, shaking the white fluff from his muzzle. Mr Nabb trudged morosely in the rear.
“Look at us, Mr Nabb!” she called out, shrilly insistent. “Look at us!”
He looked and looked away again, annoyed by a display of such silliness. But Amy was satisfied: he had been made to notice so that if, in due course, the snow should be found to be trampled here along the ridge he would remember that it had been messed up during that afternoon—not later—by the girl and her dog playing the fool. It was probable even, Amy had reasoned, that remembering this neither he nor the Inspector would bother themselves to go again as far as the rock, but if they did they would still find no tell-tale footprints beyond it. This rock marked the point at which, invisibly, the path that led to Dintirion crossed over the summit. On its downward slope any faint indentations left by the corrugated tin of her toboggan would surely not show enough to catch the attention of pursuers.
Snow, Amy knew, could give away so much, and most of the morning’s concentrated thought had been devoted to the particular problem of footprints. They were the great betrayers. Often and often she had studied the marks of a fox or a pheasant or a blackbird or a hare when the creature itself had been gone for hours yet left its movements recorded as clearly as writing on the page of an exercise-book.
Mr Nabb was not inclined to linger. It was higher by the rock and therefore a slightly better point of vantage, but correspondingly more exposed. The air was like ice. He made sure in one glance that there was nothing new to be seen from here and immediately, ignoring Amy, turned back along the ridge. With his hunched and hurried walk, hands in pockets, elbows askew, he looked, thought Amy following behind, like a small black disappointed spider.
They reached the snowmen and as they passed by he let loose an idle swipe at one of them which knocked its head off, and a kick at the other, toppling it. Amy, indignant, cried out in protest but he took no notice; he paid her no attention at all until down in the shed, stamping his feet to get rid of the chunks of snow, he said:
“You’re a rum one, you are.”
“Me?” she said, startled.
“You—yes! I’ve had my eye on you and I’ll tell you what I think—you’re a funny sort of a child and that’s a fact.”
“Funny?”
“Very funny, I think. Only I don’t mean the sort of funny that makes me want to laugh. More like the sort of funny that makes me wonder what’s going on.”
Amy leant against one of the posts that supported the shed because she felt in need of support herself, suddenly dizzy, as though the root of her breath had been cut away and she was left with only a puff of it in her mouth and no more to come. She feared and hated him: hated because she feared. In that moment of terrible weakness she longed to kill him and longed at the same moment to run away, anywhere, or to burst into tears, or best of all simply to vanish; and longing for all these things did none of them, only said, looking round at him with huge frightened eyes:
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr Nabb.”
“Oh, you don’t, don’t you! What about this morning, eh? Not a word to say for yourself—not one word this morning. You couldn’t hardly lift your head up, could you? I was watching. And then all of a sudden, what have we got?—talk, talk, talk! Mr Nabb this and Mr Nabb that—why, you even had your old granny guessing—I saw! One minute you’re moping around as good as deaf and dumb, and the moment after, what have we got?—all this talk, talk, talk stuff. And making out we was best of friends, and smiles and waves, and jumping up and down in the snow like a flea in a fit. Well now, that doesn’t make sense to me. That strikes me as very funny, that does. You’re a rum one, you are, like I said, and I don’t understand what’s behind it—but I shall! I’ll find out—you wait and see!”
Amy heard herself say, as though the words were spoken by somebody else in a dream:
“I don’t understand you either, Mr Nabb. It wasn’t very nice of you to go and spoil my snowmen back there. Why did you have to do it?”
“Why did you have to make them?” said he, roughly.
Amy’s arms tightened round the post.
“I was playing, that’s all.”
“Well, all right then, that’s what I was doing—playing, same as you.”
“Oh, no, you weren’t,” said Amy. She was trembling all over. “You did it so as to spoil my snowmen, that’s why you did it. I think you just like to spoil things.”
He took a step towards her. Mick began to growl.
“Never mind what I like,” he said in a voice choked by the bitterness of some old resentment. “I’ll tell you what I
don’t
like and that’s children, so you can cut it out, your pretty little angel-on-top-of-the-Christmas-tree act, because it’s not going to get you anywhere with me. I know about children, I’ve had experience. They’re crafty, they’re cunning. They’re always scheming, trying to make a monkey out of you—little devils, they are. I don’t like children, or their ways, or anything to do with them.”
Amy found herself alone in the shed. She sank down on the chopping-block and took Mick in her arms.
“Mick!” she said, almost sobbing. “Mick, oh Mick!”—over and over for no reason except simply the comfort of saying the name of something dear to her, something affectionate, while she held him warm and close.
The light was beginning to fade, the whiteness beyond the shed turned bluish, and in the air once again was the vague drifting movement of flakes coming down. So the lull had ended and soon it would be dark, with snow fading, and nothing certain, nothing safe.
“Oh, Mick—if only they’d go away. If only they’d never come.”
She got up wearily and pulled a bale of hay to pieces and scattered it at the far end of the shed; whatever happened the sheep had still to be fed and watered. Amy filled two buckets at the tap by the side-kitchen door and poured the water into an old zinc bath they were using as a drinking-trough, for she had decided it was less trouble for her to do this for the ewes than it was trouble for them to have to lick snow.
“Make haste before it freezes,” she urged them.
For freezing it was. The icicles hanging down like silver meat skewers from the roof of the shed were glitteringly dry, whereas this morning there had been occasional drips plip-plopping off them. So far their outside tap, heavily lagged with straw and sacking, had not frozen but if it did freeze there was another tap above the sink in the side-kitchen. And as for their actual water-supply, it came from a spring deep underground a little further up the hill and was unfailing, no matter how low the temperature or how dry the season. Winter or summer, they had never wanted for water—never wanted for food either. In all of her short life Amy had never wanted for anything until now. There had been—not perhaps plenty—but always enough; until now. And now for the first time it was not enough to have food and water and clothes and a bed and a good warm fire, and Mick and her grandmother, and sticks to chop and chickens to feed. She was afraid; and fear destroyed the security of her little world, destroyed the sufficiency of it. Because all that she had was no longer safe, it counted for nothing.