I had done the washing up, and Maurice had dried while Judith played solitaire at the table. We were all glad of a change. And when the washing up was done, I took myself away from their company to the drawing room. The window looked out onto the part ofthe garden that was in the lee of the house. Here the snow did not drift so high. I opened a window, climbed out into the whiteness and walked across the snow. All the grief I had kept at bay for years by means of books and bookcases approached me now. On a bench sheltered by a tall hedge of yew I abandoned myself to a sorrow that was wide and deep as the snow itself, and as untainted. I cried for Miss Winter, for her ghost, for Adeline and Emmeline. For my sister, my mother and my father. Mostly, and most terribly, I cried for myself. My grief was that of the infant, newly severed from her other half; of the child bent over an old tin, making sudden, shocking sense of a few pieces of paper; and of a grown woman, sitting crying on a bench in the hallucinatory light and silence of the snow.
‘With a touch of brandy in it, I think,“ he said.
As for me, I spent two days writing up my final notes, but when that was done, I found I could not settle to reading. Even Sherlock Holmes could not reach me in the snowlocked landscape. Alone in my room I spent an hour examining my melancholy, trying to name what I thought was a new element in it. I realized that I missed Miss Winter. So, hopeful of human company, I made my way to the kitchen. Maurice was glad to play cards with me, even though I knew only children’s games. Then, when Judith’s nails were drying, I made the cocoa and tea with no milk, and later let Judith file and polish my own nails.
I sipped the cocoa slowly. There was milk—the doctor had brought it when he came with the farmer on the tractor.
Maurice pulled out a chair for me and began to stoke the fire.
On the fifth day I allowed myself to be overcome by a vast sorrow.
In this way, we three and the cat sat out the days, locked in with our dead, and with the old year seeming to linger on past its time.
The snow that had already deadened the telephone now reached the window ledges and drifted halfway up the doors. It separated us from the rest of the world as effectively as a prison key. Miss Winter had escaped; so had the woman Judith referred to as Emmeline, and whom I avoided naming. The rest of us, Judith, Maurice and I, were trapped.
Judith tucked a shawl around me, then started peeling potatoes for dinner. She and Maurice and the doctor made the occasional comment—what we could have for supper, whether the snow was lighter now, how long it would be before the telephone line was restored—and in making them, took it upon themselves to start the laborious process of cranking up life again after death had stopped us all in its tracks.
I listened to their voices and, after a time, joined in.
‘Oh dear,“ said Judith. ”Shall I bring cocoa?“
He didn’t know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. “I know,” he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.
When I came to myself Dr. Clifton was there. He put an arm around me. “I know,” he said. “I know.”
Little by little the comments melded together and became a conversation.
Miss Winter died and the snow kept falling. When Judith came she stood with me for a time at the window, and we watched the eerie illumination of the night sky. Then, when an alteration in the whiteness told us it was morning, she sent me to bed.
The snow had blockaded us into a sideways extension of time, and we each found our own way of enduring it. Judith, imperturbable, made vegetable soup, cleaned the kitchen cupboards out and, when she ran out of jobs, manicured her nails and did a face pack. Maurice, chafing at the confinement and the inactivity, played endless games of solitaire, but when he had to drink his tea black for lack of milk, Judith played rummy with him to distract him from the bitterness.
He led me inside, to warmth.
The cat was restless. It was the snow that put him out; he did not like this change in the appearance of his universe. He went from one windowsill to another in search of his lost world, and meowed urgently at Judith, Maurice and me, as though its restoration was in our hands. In comparison, the loss of his mistresses was a small matter that, if he noticed it at all, left him fundamentally undisturbed.
I awoke at the end of the afternoon.
