Tilly knelt on the window seat and watched Magnus set off
down the white street. Her breath misted the glass and she wiped the blur away.
She could tell he was laughing, that he knew
that her eyes were following him: he was taking deliberately huge steps,
to exaggerate the depth of the snow. But really no exaggerating was
needed. Tilly had never in her life seen
it so deep. It lay in smooth round pillows, king-sized pillows. Bolster-sized pillows.
And more was falling all the time.
Long ago, when she was a small child, snow had seemed like
this: she remembered pushing through it, freshly fallen and light as feathers,
waist deep. This storm had to be more extreme than any of those yester-year
falls: that snow would have been barely knee-high to a tall man like Magnus.
He was making his way along in the road. The sidewalk was
hopelessly buried under its smooth, gently sloping quilt, but a single car -
they’d heard it - had gone by with chains as he was putting on his parka and
its tread was not entirely obliterated. Magnus was trying to keep within one of
the narrow, rather swerving, grooves it had created. He kept floundering out of
it, into snow that was almost to the top of his thighs. Once he did topple
right over. She saw only a kicking foot. But then he was up - a snowman - and
he turned and waved at her. His cheeks were pink and his toque, his eyebrows,
his beard, were white. His wide smile - she saw the flash of his teeth, the red
of lips - made him for a moment look dog-like. A huge and friendly Pyrenese,
grinning, his fur-mittened hand a paw. She waved back but wasn’t sure if he
could make her out, behind the glass. But he’d know she’d be watching. Then he
was gone around the corner.
The red brick of the houses opposite was muted to a fuzzy
pink, the snow clinging to the rough surface. Even as she watched, the tracks
of the car and of Magnus’s tumble were swiftly being erased. The world was
utterly silent and she quite alone, held within some sort of magic, held within
a secret. Now that Magnus was gone, it was as if she were the only creature
alive.
Tilly always loved extreme weather, noisy storms when the
world became something quite other, dark, wild and strange. Or, as now, blank,
white and silent. Absolutely anything might happen at such a time. Anything.
Something - amazing. The world was a
tabula rasa. And so still. The sense
of quiet was only intensified by the falling flakes. Silence sifting down into
silence.
She liked the variousness of life’s moments, and the speed
with which one succeeded another. An
hour ago all had been heat and colour, and fast movement, she and Magnus
clutching each other under the pile of Hudson Bay blankets, his gasping breath
loud in her ear. That, then, had been as real as the cold glass and the white
silence, now.
One of the woollen blankets was new and bright red. That
one had been a wedding present. The other was old and had been her father’s.
Washed many times, it was faded and felted, more pink than red, a blanket with
a history. She liked to think of her father, young, and sleeping under it,
far in the north, in the Yukon where she’d never been. Where he had died.
Her mother had told her how he wore a warm woolen hat in bed, it was so cold.
He’d have his Arctic sleeping bag over him too.
Tilly could call up no true memory that would allow her to
know him. But there was with Magnus - sometimes, only sometimes - a faint echo
of a warmth she’d forgotten and could almost catch. It was one of the many
reasons she loved her husband.
How she loved Magnus!
She particularly liked making love in the mornings, as
they had today, with the snow piled nearly half-way up the bedroom window,
giving the room a strange polar light, a Yukon light perhaps, and it being a
Saturday so she had any amount of time and a lazy day ahead. Though she knew he
would almost certainly go in to the lab later. Maybe he needn’t.
But then he had sat up and started to drag on his
nightshirt again, not to be cold in the chilly air of the room, while she
curled around behind him and hugged him and tried to haul him back under the
covers. She pressed her mouth against his bare back and inhaled his smell. But
he had wrestled himself away, pulled the nightshirt down and gone leaping
downstairs. She heard his bounding, descending steps and the thump as he jumped
the last three and landed. He always did that and he always was the one who
made them coffee. Then he’d come up and be cosy with her again. They would
drink their coffee together.
Married mornings were joy. They loved each other
enormously and equally, and liked to tell each other so. She had no idea which
of them said it most. It seemed impossible that anyone else could have
experienced love as keenly as they did. If many, if any, other people felt like this, one of them would say, the world
would have to be an entirely different place. And it wasn’t. They had to be
unique.
She watched him, his big hands holding his mug, his hair
messy and a bit long at the back. It clumped just over the collar of the
striped nightshirt and he had to toss it back out of his eyes. His hair was
dark blond, his beard redder. Her hair was dark, almost black, and she liked it
short, clipped close to her head and tightly curly. They both enjoyed how
unlike they were, different versions of
human. They speculated how their babies would emerge - pale or dark.
Tall or small. Two of each type would be best. They had large family plans. So
far, she wasn’t pregnant but it was early days. They’d married in September.
She certainly would like to know she was pregnant by Christmas though.
Anyway, now she would get dressed and go out into the
white morning herself. She hopped across the cold floor to find her clothes.
*
She was only down their own block when it happened.
She was stumbling and laughing to herself at how tricky it
was to keep upright. She was floundering even more than Magnus had done, being
shorter and without even the car track he’d had, and - a person bumped right
into her. Neither of them could have seen the other until too late. It was
impossible to see a thing beyond two inches. She had been entirely alone in a
world of flying flakes and now she wasn’t.
It was a mild sort of bump, both people so bundled up, but
with footing so precarious, she fell. So did the other person, almost on top of
her but managing not to somehow. But she could feel what had to be a leg on top
of one of hers. She lay laughing: the snow prickled coldly on every side of
her. Her eye lashes were clotted with it and all she could see beside her was
whiteness, and above, the falling, swirling flakes.
Then a face, a man’s, loomed. The other person had
struggled to sit and his face was above hers. Eyes were looking, very startled,
into hers.
But she knew him!
She heard his voice: ‘Matilda!’
She had never heard him say her name before, but he
pronounced it as she used to imagine he might, his accent giving the ‘i’ an
‘ee’ sound.
*
It was a voice from a time long past.
There was a self she had been, before, a self she had
thought gone forever. She had been Matilda Quinn, Miss Quinn to her professors,
a student. That was the person who had known this face and this voice. Young. Young! Another person. Long, long ago,
it had been. Three whole years. She had been almost a child then.
It felt so very long ago. It was long ago, in the real and living way she had discovered that time
actually worked. Time was not lived at the same pace, not in her experience.
Some periods were stretched out, and passed, oh, so slowly. Whole seaons could
pool, and linger. But time could also telescope on itself. There were moments -
they felt like mere moments - when she leaped across a bank into another
chapter, as if into a boat that then sailed away. That had been how it felt to
her when she started to love Magnus: she at once stopped being a girl. Her old
self, a vague and dreaming shadow, was left behind, was a dwindling figure on a
receding shore. The new Tilly Stuart, a woman, seldom looked back at her.
It was that dwindled-away girl who had sat in the
front row of this man’s classes and gazed at him. He had been her professor and
she had loved him.
She had watched him and imagined things about him, even
dreamed of him, but she had never known if he ever really saw her, saw her as an individual, as pretty
or interesting. Perhaps he had? Sometimes his eyes would kindle a little and
flash in her direction, as if he did truly see her, as if he noticed how she
sat very still, always in the same place, alert to each expression of his face,
each word he spoke. Is a person watched aware of the watcher? Can intensity of
feeling be catching?
There were perhaps a hundred students in that class.
And now on this day of silent snow, when she had even felt
something hovering - magic, transporting, secret - his face hovered over hers.
It was not a position she was used to being in with anyone
but Magnus, a man’s skin so close: she could see the wetness on it of the
melting snow, how beads of moisture clung to his thick brows. She could see that he hadn’t shaved that
morning: a haze of dark stubble shadowed the lower part of his face. She could
see that he had wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. He was wearing a dark blue
knitted hat that looked home-made. ‘Matilda!’ He said her name again.
‘Mateelda.’ And he leaned down even closer. She felt his warm breath, smelled
coffee on it.
He was actually leaning on her.
And then he kissed her.
Time then played tricks. Or that was how it seemed later
when she tried to remember the sequence of it all. They were lying in the snow.
Then they were up on their feet and he was laughing.
He was excited.
She was too.
There was running, snow being tossed by flying feet. The
slamming of a door.
Then - somehow - how had time jumped to this? - they were
pulling off their clothes. They were inside a house, her house.
Though it wasn’t hers really, of course. That jolt of
truth brought Magnus into her mind’s eye for a dislocating second.
‘What a pleasant dwelling,’ her professor said. He was
kneeling on the rose and blue patterned persian rug, glancing, as he did so,
out into the hall they had hurried through, as if appreciating the polished
hardwood floor and the grandfather clock. Then his eyes did that glinting flash
at her, the way they’d sometimes done in class, only this time so close
that she could see a tiny reflection of herself in his pupils. He pulled off
his shirt, then gripped the ribbing at the bottom of her sweater, and whirled
it over her head.
‘It’s my parents-in-law’s house. They’re on sabbatical,’
she said. She had a flashing image of her father-in-law. They were in that
kindly man’s study because it was the room immediately inside the front door.
How puzzled he would be, were he to suddenly return. But Magnus and his father
were tiny figures of no consequence at this moment.
Her professor was naked. She placed her hands on him.
He was hers at last. How amazing that life had allowed her
this.
The weight of him was less than she was used to. His smell
was different too, and the way he moved,
which was slow, sensual, almost langorous. He was taking his time. Past
his shoulder she could see the snow still falling, piling higher and higher on
the outside sill. She bit his white shoulder, gently.
*
After he was gone, she walked slowly up the stairs, naked
still and carrying her clothes. In the bath, she lay back and found she could
hardly believe what had just happened. It seemed it couldn’t have. But she knew
it had.
Later, she straightened the persian rug.
Making herself a sandwich, she decided not to feel guilty.
What had happened had nothing to do with Magnus and her, with their life now.
It was a completion of something from the past.
She ate her sandwich standing up at the window. She wanted
to watch the snow filling in the double set of footprints on the steps.
She decided to picture her life as a text: what happened
in the study was a paragraph that could be bracketed off. An arrow could send
it safely back to that earlier chapter where it belonged. Even better, she
envisaged a text on a screen and her finger tapping, one light touch on the
delete button whisking it all away.
No, that was not in fact better. She didn’t want it gone,
just in its proper place. It should have happened back then. She’d think of it
like that. Because she did want to think of it.
*
By the time Magnus came home, he had assumed his
normal large and lively size in her mind and she hugged him and hugged him. ‘I
missed you,’ she said. ‘You were gone so long. Hours and hours.’
He laughed at her. ‘Not really! Tilly, it’s only two
o’clock. I left the lab early. I suddenly wanted to be here with you.’ He drew back and looked at her. ‘I suddenly
had such a queer feeling. As if I might
have dreamed our life. As if you might not really be here. Crazy.’ He laughed
again. ‘It must have been the snow. The whole world feels unreal. It’s felt
weird all day. I was the only person to go in today, too. It was kind of spooky
being alone in that great big building.’
‘But I am here. I’ve been here right along.’ She kissed both his cold cheeks and then his
warm pink mouth.
The whole rest of the day, the professor receded. He
became a tiny hot coal.
In the middle of the night she woke with a jolt. The snow
had stopped falling at last and the moon hung there, a pale, brilliant disk.
Its light fell in rectangles across
their bed. It bleached the colour out of the quilt.
She thought, ‘If I am pregnant, how will I know which man
is the father?’
She pictured millions of tiny sperms, wee tadpoles,
battling it out. Magnus’s, the professor’s. She thought, ‘Magnus is much
younger; his will be swifter.’
But she would never know for sure.
In the morning she stood in the window and stared out at
the snow banks. There was no sun, for which she was glad.
She needed the blank innocence of a white world for
longer.
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