The Texture of Snow (full story)
Photo credit: Ben Linge
The Texture of Snow
by Hannah Persaud
It is Valentine’s day when Carey leaves the Kensington townhouse that she shares with her husband to go the Cotswolds. She does not kiss Giles goodbye as he makes promises to join her later that evening. She drives fast, the convertible roof peeled back, Louis Vuitton scarf pressed against her newly blonde hair.
As she leaves the motorway her phone rings. For once she lets it go to answerphone, no way she could hold a conversation with the wind as it is and it feels good to let the phone ring out for a change, isn’t that what this is all about anyway, this house in the Cotswolds, a chance to get away from it all for a bit, reset the old stopwatch?
At least that’s the way Giles describes it. The blue sky of earlier is replaced with marshmallow clouds that hang in heavy clusters. The temperature drops and Carey presses the button that closes the roof, her fingers numb. Catching sight of herself in the rear-view mirror she barely recognises her reflection, cheeks flushed, hair curling its way out of the scarf in a bid for freedom. She pushes her hair down with her right hand and attempts to smooth it back under the edges of the fabric but it springs straight back out. Following a narrow road, she glimpses flashes of glimmering water on either side. Driving slowly she looks for the entrance on the left that Giles told her about, the gold-plated sign that announces the development that he’s invested in for them and their future.
‘You’ve got a nose for the finer things in life, you’ll find it,’ he said to her this morning. A larger lake emerges. Despite the cold there are people scattered around the edges of it in various stages of undress; a woman peeling her swimsuit down, pendulous breasts apparently unnoticed by others; a man wearing swimming trunks doing star jumps; a runner and her dog pausing at a café. A café! In the midst of Giles’s silent treatment Carey missed breakfast and her stomach rumbles. She swings in, parking in the only spot that’s remotely mud free. Stepping out, she’s aware of how out of place she looks in her Louboutin heels, in the dress that clings to her thighs and plunges boldly between her recently fake tanned breasts. Pulling her jacket close she turns the collar up and picks her way through the mud to the café, the smell of bacon causing her for a moment to consider ditching her recent vegetarian resolutions, another of Giles’s suggestions. Scanning the blackboard she notes the lack of choices – no Americanos, no lattes, not even a mocha.
‘I’ll have a white coffee and a mozzarella pesto panini please,’ she tells the boy at the counter, then steps aside to wait, allowing the woman and child behind her to shuffle up to the counter. When her order is ready, Carey takes it outside. She won’t eat in the Porsche. Giles doesn’t like crumbs in this car that is technically hers. She perches on the edge of a wooden picnic bench, shuffling as the damp cold seeps through her sheer tights to her thighs. Her phone vibrates with a voicemail. The coffee is strong and bitter and tastes of hazelnuts. It might be the best coffee she’s ever tasted. Cheese oozes from the panini.
‘Oops, dropped a bit,’ a man in a wetsuit interrupts, pointing to a piece of melted mozzarella that has fallen onto her Ralph Lauren jacket. Carey wipes it off with the napkin.
‘Thanks.’
‘Here to swim?’ he asks. He’s about her age, and now she looks at him properly, good looking in a sort of surfery windswept way. Not really her type but fit, definitely.
‘Not in my wildest dreams,’ she replies. A snowflake spirals out of the sky and lands on the table in front of her.
‘Guess it’s an acquired taste,’ the man replies. ‘Cold water swimming.’
‘Swimming’s not really my thing anyway,’ Carey says. When was the last time she swam, the Maldives back in 2016? Two or three years ago at least. Far too much hassle for the minimum of pleasure as far as she’s concerned – such a faff having to re-do her hair and make-up afterwards, not to mention the way the water washes weeks off her ever-bronze tan. She doesn’t get why anyone likes it really.
‘These people are crazy,’ she says out loud. Anyone can see that they’re only pretending to enjoy it as they emerge lobster pink and teeth chattering from the water. Another snowflake lands and then another. She lifts one on her perfect pink nail and examines the pattern. It’s astonishing to her that each snowflake in the world is different, shaped by the different temperatures and moisture levels they are exposed to, the ice crystal forming completely uniquely. Is being human similarly unique, each person shaped by every facet of experience, every moment, every touch? How will she know when she is complete?
‘One persons’ lunacy is another persons’ joy,’ the surfer man comments. She stands up. ‘I’m Matthew by the way,’ he says, holding out his hand. ‘Are you local?’
‘Just,’ she replies. ‘I’m moving into one of the houses in Water’s Edge today actually. I’ll be there part-time.’
Matthew whistles.
‘Nice for some’.
‘I’d better get off, things to unpack.’
‘Well if you change your mind about us being nutjobs you’ll find us here at Lake 32 most days. It can be intimidating at first but we have a lot of fun.’
‘I’ll remember that,’ she replies.
Back in the car she turns the heating up and revs the engine, edging cautiously across the mud and slush onto the road. It wasn’t true what she said about unpacking, there’s nothing for her to do, they chose their furniture and fittings months ago online, right down to the soft finishes – lilac blue blinds on all the windows and white Egyptian cotton for all the beds. White silk sheets beneath. She’d like to have had a chance to be in the house a bit before choosing, get a sense of what it needed, of how it would wrap itself around them – but Giles had hired an interior designer and wanted everything done quickly.
‘The quicker we get it decorated the faster we can enjoy it,’ he’d insisted. ‘It’s the end game that counts.’ It was hard to get excited about choosing everything online so Carey had simply signed off on the designers’ advice. And the boxes of things that they were moving down here have already been transferred and unpacked in preparation for their arrival. They’ve a wardrobe for every season, for Giles is nothing if not organised and forward thinking.
‘If you fail to plan you plan to fail,’ he says often. Food for the week they have planned to be here has already been delivered by the luxury restaurant Blacklock and stored safely away by the housekeeper they’ve employed to keep an eye on things when they’re not around. The elegantly wrapped parcels include everything needed to create perfect feasts at a moment’s notice. Not that Carey will eat much of any of it, the panini alone is probably more than her daily calorific allowance. An individual playlist comes with every meal to set the mood, along with candles.
The sky stoops so low that the treeline is partially obscured and it’s snowing heavily. The road is already white and the wheels struggle to gain traction. The wipers beat a mournful song as a gold sign glints through the snow swirl. It reminds her of childhood pillow fights with her brother, a nosebleed, once. Does he have children of his own now? She pulls in and follows the driveway halfway round in the wrong direction before realising. Doing a U-turn she checks herself, she’s not usually nostalgic about days gone by. At last she sees their house at the very end of the drive. Cormorant. It looks just like it does online, all wood and glass and angles and light, bi-fold doors opening onto a pine terrace that fronts the lake. It’s even more exquisite than she imagined. Parking the car she grabs her holdall from the boot and walks up to the front door, keys heavy in her smooth palm; something awakening inside her.
·
Carey has showered and unzipped herself from her dress and chosen a brand-new pair of brushed cotton pyjamas from the wardrobe. She wears them with a cashmere jumper and fur lined bootees that Giles bought when he was in Milan. His suggestion that she become vegetarian was rooted in health benefits not ideology and the rug in front of the fire consists of ten thousand rabbit skins hand sewn together. As a child she had a rabbit, Smudge. She shudders slightly as she crosses the rug to reach the sofa, imagining their little claws pawing at her ankles.
The view from in here is breathtaking, the whole room curated around the lake. A bird skids across the water as if it’s frozen, another bobs up and down beside the deck. Farther away, perched on a branch in the water a huge black bird sits, wide wings splayed. For all Carey knows about birds it may as well be a pterodactyl. She resolves to familiarise herself with the wildlife. To think that Giles almost pulled out of the purchase a week ago, furious that the delivery of his jet ski was refused by the site manager!
‘Because some idiot didn’t know how to control his jet ski we all have to suffer,’ was Giles’s take away from the conversation, though Carey suspected there was more to it, she’d read something in the small print about jet skis but hadn’t been paying attention. A bad habit that she’s been cultivating increasingly. But time has taught her that it’s easiest to nod and smile and the prospect of bringing a lawsuit against the management company was exciting enough to convince Giles to continue with the purchase anyway.
Made with eco-friendly technologies and renewable materials, the house is a masterpiece in design. Set in the centre of 180 man-made lakes covering 40 square miles, they’ve bought a slice of the United Kingdom’s largest marl lake system.
‘Supporting the future of wildlife,’ Giles proclaims loudly whenever anyone can hear. Anyone he deems important, at least. Setting down her glass of Bollinger and the remainder of the bottle on the crystal side table, Carey sinks back into the Plume Blanche sofa that Giles insisted on. At least, she tries to sink back, but the leather and lacquer finish is uncomfortable and the encrusted diamonds snag her skin. One of only fifty models in the world, it’s worth more than most two-bedroom flats. Carey shifts to the floor taking care to avoid the rabbit rug and tucks her feet under a floor cushion. Checks her voicemail.
‘Carey love, when are you coming to visit? I’ll make your favourite Victoria sponge and we can have a picnic if this weather improves, wouldn’t that be lovely? I went to dad’s grave today, paid our respects. Cleared it up a bit. Anyway, let me know love, talk soon. Mum.’
Carey reaches over to the bottle and refills her glass. She should have gone to dad’s funeral; she knows she should. But Giles had such a strop, the trip to Rome already booked and the opera tickets too. It’s small change to you, she wanted to tell him, it’s my dad who worked hard his whole life to look after me and my brother and my mum, his annual highlight a trip to the seaside. Even now the smell of fish and chips takes her back to sitting on a rough wall in the salt scented wind, her dad’s leg pressed against hers. She didn’t say that to Giles though, instead sending a vast bouquet of flowers that mum struggled to fit into her front room.
She sends a message to Giles letting him know that she’s arrived, then stands, stretching. The bubbles have gone to her head. Wandering the large minimalist rooms she gets the distinct sense that she’s not alone. The top floor offers a balcony that stretches the length of the house and Carey steps out onto it, the chill cutting straight through her clothes. The snow settles and mounts around the water’s edge; the deck below is a white pillow; the lakeside trees are monochrome. The strains of a piano filter eerily through the muffled silence. Moonlight Sonata, Carey would know it anywhere. Her fingers twitch involuntarily and she pushes her hands into fists as if by doing so she can crush her longing. The music pauses and then starts again, this time a tune she doesn’t recognise. Back inside the mobile rings and Carey goes to answer it, closing the door behind her.
‘Giles?’
‘Look darling, I presume you’ve seen the headlines…’
‘No I…’
‘Country bumpkin-fied already are we?’
‘I’ve been busy settling in, this place is…’
‘I’m in a bit of rush actually. Look, there’s a storm warning, blizzard coming in from the east, heavy snow forecast and it’s going to be difficult to get out of London before the roads clog up, I know I said I’d be down this evening but it’s looking unlikely…’
‘Oh.’ Carey looks around for her glass but she’s left it downstairs by the sink.
‘I’ll do my best to make it tomorrow but you never know, let’s play it by ear.’
‘It’s just…’
‘Look about this morning, that earring you found. You’re overreacting, it must be yours, you’re the only one darling, and you’ve got so much stuff it’s understandable that you’d forget what you own…’ Carey bites her lip. They are here again, the never-ending circle. She is tired of it. She takes a deep breath,
‘Giles, listen…’
You’re not exactly roughing it down there anyway,’ he interrupts, ‘and obviously I can’t control the weather.’ Carey walks to the back of the house and looks out of the window at the drive. Yes it’s snowing but he’s got the 4 x 4, designed for this, better suited to here than London. ‘You understand, right?’ he says. She sighs.
‘Sure.’
‘Happy valentines my love, there’s a gift for you in your bedside drawer. Send me a photo.’ He hangs up.
·
Carey is woken by the dawn through the window, she didn’t close the blinds. Her head thuds and her mouth is sandpaper. An empty champagne bottle is on her bedside table. Unable to face preparing a meal for herself last night, she hasn’t eaten since the cafe. Stretching out across the king-sized bed she pulls the pillow over her head, then, panicked, checks her messages and social media channels on her phone. Thankfully her last activities online were yesterday morning before she left London. No drunken tweets or maudlin posts this time. There’s a message from Giles sent at 3am. Where’s my photo? I want to see you wearing my gift with your gorgeous new blonde hair. Carey likes her natural deep copper brown hair colour, personally, but as with everything Giles managed to persuade her to try something different for a change. Dropping her phone to her side her fingers brush something and she picks it up, holding it in front of her. Giles’s valentine’s gift, red lingerie, laced with strategic holes.
In the shower Carey scrubs her skin as if she can wash away the traces of her hangover, water hot against her eyelids. Bloodshot eyes in the mirror taunt her. She decides not to put make up on, she should live with the consequences of her decisions. Something about this place makes her want to confront herself. Pulling on thermal layers and then a tracksuit, she goes downstairs, flicks the coffee machine on, finds a cup. Searches the drawers, the cupboards and the larder for the coffee capsules. To no avail. For fuck’s sake. There are literally seven three course meals and a fully stocked wine cellar, but no sign of coffee to be seen. Giles hates the stuff. Carey can live without food and possibly wine, but coffee is essential. Especially now. The Porsche is an outline of a snow-car, almost invisible.
Pulling on her goose-down jacket and snow boots, Carey tugs open the front door. Snow tumbles in. She’s not walked in snow since she was a child, the texture of snow ill-suited as it is to her attire. Pulling her gloves on she takes one step forward then another, red cheeks and snow-fights and hot chocolate-after memories spurring her on. A voice calls out.
‘Hello.’ Carey looks up to see an elderly woman standing in the doorway of the house next to her own.
‘Hi.’ She waves then lowers her hand, embarrassed.
‘Are you my new neighbour?’ The woman who must be in her eighties, is painfully thin and wearing a long velvet dressing gown, bare feet exposed.
‘Yes, I’m Carey. Pleased to meet you. Aren’t you cold?’ The woman smiles and thirty years crumble.
‘It’s refreshing don’t you think? I’m Sylvie,’ she replies. Carey shuffles from foot to foot aware of her toes going numb.
‘Look I’m sorry but I should get on.’
‘Are you there alone dear?’
‘No, Giles, my husband, he’s coming today.’ Recognition flashes across the woman’s face.
‘Ah yes, Giles. The jet ski delivery.’ Carey blushes. ‘There’s good reason why they’re banned. There was a man a while back who had one.’ Curiosity gets the better of Carey.
‘What happened?’
‘He was going too fast and something got stuck, he couldn’t release himself. He got crushed.’
‘He died?’ Carey asks. Sylvie nods.
‘A shock for all of us.’ Sylvie looks around as if he might appear from somewhere. ‘He’d only lived here a week as well. Of course they rebuilt the terrace.’ She nods towards Carey’s house. Inside Carey there’s a sliver of doubt.
‘He lived in our house?’
‘I’m sorry dear, that was thoughtless of me. Too much information Gerard always said. He was right of course, always was! God I miss that man.’ Sylvie’s eyes fill with tears and Carey turns away, conscious of the gaps within her own marriage. Sylvie clears her throat. ‘I’m sure you must get on, but you should come around for a drink later, if you’d like. I’ll play you my repertoire.’ Carey tries to push the image of the crushed man aside.
‘Was that you playing Moonlight Sonata yesterday? It was beautiful.’ Sylvie smiles.
‘I try. Not as good as I was. Do you play yourself?’ Carey shakes her head.
‘Not anymore, I used to though, as a child.’ Those piano lessons were hard earned by her father, they cost more than the weekly grocery budget though he’d never complained. A carpenter by day he’d taken on extra work at night to pay for them, helping at the farm. Good honest work that you could see the fruits of.
‘That’s a shame. So many people stop doing what they love.’ What was it Giles had said when he’d told her there was no room for her piano?
‘My house may seem large but every item has its place. There’s simply not room for it darling, why don’t you leave piano playing to the professionals.’ Shortly after Carey moved in Giles dedicated an un-used room to display his cycling trophies. Carey didn’t complain. She doesn’t tell Sylvie that there was an offer of a scholarship to Guildhall on the table that she turned down to be with Giles. Carey nods.
‘I’d love to come round later thank you.’
·
It takes Carey two hours to reach the café by the lake despite it being little more than three miles away. By the time she reaches it her hangover is almost cleared, the ends of her hair frozen crisp. The smell of the coffee is mouth-watering. She buys two coffees and a croissant and sits back at the table from yesterday, buttery layers dissolving on her tongue. It may be the best croissant she’s ever tasted.
‘Hey.’ Matthew sits down beside her. ‘You came back!’ He’s wearing a towelling robe and his hair is wet.
‘You’ve been swimming in this?’ she asks.
‘Yep. It’s frigging amazing. Life affirming.’ He grins. ‘Tempted yet?’ She laughs and it feels like something is thawing inside of her. ‘You know,’ he carries on. ‘There’s a difference between being alive and feeling alive.’ Carey blushes and changes the subject.
‘Do you know anything about a jet ski accident at Water’s Edge a while ago?’ she asks. He wrinkles his forehead in concentration and she notices a scar above his right eyebrow.
‘Actually I do, a couple of years ago some banker dude who just moved down out on the lake, hammered, lost control of the jet ski and smashed himself up proper good, but the worst thing was he took out a Bittern clutch too.’ Carey looks at him blankly.
‘They’re really rare birds and they were nesting. We hardly ever get them there.’
‘Is that why they banned the jet skiing then?’ Carey asks. Matthew laughs at her.
‘Nah. It was banned way before that guy killed himself. He just thought he could break the rules. Jet Skis can be awful for wildlife, disturb breeding colonies, ruin foraging banks, cause turbidity in shallow areas…the list goes on.’ There’s so much she has to learn if she’s going to live here. Carey thinks about Giles threatening to pull out of the purchase, of his casual misinterpretation of the facts. Of how his truth is always an alternate version.
An hour later she says goodbye, it’ll be getting dark by the time she gets back. Matthew offers her a lift but she declines. As she walks away a snowball breaks against her shoulder, showering her face with snow.
‘Gotcha,’ Matthew shouts.
‘Next time,’ she replies.
·
Back indoors she selects a roast chicken meal and unwraps it carefully. It feels like someone else is here again and her thoughts shift to the man who lived here who crashed his jet ski. When people die, does their residue linger? The world is full of things she’s not yet considered. When did Giles become her reference point?
Carey is not the person she once was. She is not yet the person she will become.
Once it’s all in the oven she checks her phone. Nothing from Giles. Music from the playlist filters through the speakers in every room. She pours herself a glass of wine then, watching the lake, she calls him. On the third ring he picks up, sounding distant.
‘Carey?’
‘You sound surprised.’
‘No no, I just, I meant to phone earlier.’ In the background Carey can hear the ruffling of something.
‘I guess you’re not going to make it down.’
‘Not today no, sorry babe, this blasted snow. Soon as I can though.’ Carey watches a murmuration of small dark birds make shapes in the sky. It’s classic Carey, knowing what a murmuration is but not what the names of the birds are. Knowing what a marriage is but nothing about love.
‘That’s okay’, Carey says, and it is.
‘Gotta go babe, deadline to make.’ His voice fades and Carey’s about to hang up but then she hears him again, talking to someone else.
‘Yeah she’s gone.’ There’s a woman laughing in the background. Carey realises something. She doesn’t care. She hangs up.
·
All night snowflakes fall from the sky, filling in the footprints between Sylvie and Carey’s houses. If her stiff fingers and hoarse voice did not tell her otherwise Carey could almost imagine that the evening never happened. She stands outside on the terrace in her pyjamas watching the sun lifting, ears ringing with songs and tunes she played on the piano. Her cheeks ache from laughing. A bird slips beneath the water in front of her and vanishes, no ripples. As if it were never there at all. Carey shifts her balance and pulls her cardigan closer, fiddles with a loose woollen thread. Metres from where it disappeared the bird resurfaces and Carey lets out the breath she has been holding, feeling foolish for worrying.
She makes a decision. Later she will call Giles, but for now she watches the lake morphing from red to orange to purple, snowflakes landing on her skin and her warmth melting them.
The End
