On the Saturday, Sam went out to see that his father and his sister, Ruth, were still in the clear. He had battled his way through after the first heavy falls of snow and spent a day with the old man carving tunnels of communication between his father’s cottage, the big house he worked for and the lane that another parish council was responsible for, but the further falls had worried him.
There was something else. His father, now approaching seventy, a veteran of the Western Front of the First World War and the perilous coal mines in West Cumbria, had laboured alongside him to clear the snow. Sam had not worked with him since he had been a boy and forced to be his father’s unpaid apprentice - he was then a farm labourer - after school. The old man could still shift work. The raw heft of it still gave him a command, which he turned on his son, unspeakingly bringing up those earlier times of domination, authority, beating. Sam resented it and admired it and gave up.
This was the man who had wrecked his chances of a scholarship. Twice. This was the man who had, once, thrown a book of his into the fire. This was the man who had told him that books were no use. Yet now, side by side in the snow, father and son, the old man scooping and slinging the white spadefuls with relentless application, Sam realised that he was as near to him as ever he had been or would be. This was his father. Together in the remote and profoundly silent countryside, while they cut the packed snow, Sam observed him closely. I am this man’s son. However much harm he did me. He is in me. Together, we are making a path through the snow.
Ellen tried not to show that she was pleased that he had gone to see his father but she was. She would never have admitted it to anyone - she scarcely admitted it to herself - but days without Sam meant days when she could concentrate on Colin.
She had been lucky at the shops the previous evening. She had an unusual surplus of coupons left in the ration books and she had found the Co-op and Walter Wilson’s better stocked than usual. By dividing her custom between the two, though this was an embarrassment to which she would not normally have exposed herself, she managed quite legally to secure an extra tin of sliced pears, a second large tin of condensed milk, which Colin especially liked, and two bars of milk chocolate - one for Colin. And ten Players Full Strength. She was not being greedy, she told herself, because stocks were almost plentiful, she had the coupons to cover the goods and, anyway, Colin was not well and her half-brother and every visit to him was like taking a birthday party to him.
The fact that the streets were white banked under the few working lights, the road itself a black canal, the shops lit by paraffin lamps and candles, made the whole experience, to Ellen, one of magic. Wigton became a fantasy. The drifts of snow, the alleys dark between the white, sky so clear every star hard cut, shadows shuffling in yellow flickering light that made shops seem like Ali Baba caves, and the people, cold, perhaps even fearful some of them, but actors in this frozen exotic scene as they stepped out of unlit yards and followed the directions delivered by the tyrannising snow. Wigton had never been so wonderfully isolated and independent of all others and so loved by her.
She gave Sam an hour or so start, as if, guiltily, she were making sure she would not be caught out if he returned. She did not examine the guilt.
She went down the street with the provisions in a basket, her heart lifting at the prospect of seeing Colin. Grace understood and sympathised. It was almost heartbreaking for her to watch the care, the love, the zeal that Ellen brought to the straightforward task of preparing a tray to take up to her brother. Grace herself was still shaken by his arrival.
‘Did you get any fags?’
‘Let me put the tray down first.’
He glanced at what was a feast of treats but they could wait.
‘I’m gaspin’.’
‘You shouldn’t smoke so much. Not with that chest.’
‘It helps my chest - what do you know? It eases it up.’
‘There!’
‘Only ten!’
Ellen tightened her lips. ‘I brought ten yesterday.’
‘Ten doesn’t last long.’ He was almost gobbling the cigarette. ‘Not when you’re as badly as I am.’
His dip into pathos touched her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ll bring some more tomorrow morning.’
Now he was smoking. He lugged the smoke into his lungs in heaves of addicted pleasure.
‘I can contribute,’ he said, cautiously.
‘No, no.’
She looked at the tray, hoping for a comment. He took his time. Then he stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette. ‘Better be safe than sorry,’ he said, reproachfully, and stuck the stump behind his ear.
‘You like condensed milk on fruit, don’t you?’
‘Generally,’ said the young man. He took the brimful bowl and slurped a few spoonfuls of the sweet milk before attacking the tinned pears.
‘Very tasty,’ he pronounced, and Ellen beamed.
‘I knew you’d like them.’
‘Dad,’ he said, and paused, and licked the spoon, and paused again. ‘Our dad, sis, he used to love tinned fruit.’
‘Did he?’ The elation was plain on her face and Colin smiled.
‘You went to the flicks in Carlisle again yesterday with Sadie, didn’t you?’ His tone was not quite accusing. ‘What was it this time?’
‘Rebecca.’
‘What happens?’
Ellen told him the story succinctly but he was soon bored.
‘There’s Jane Russell coming on next week, it says in the Cumberland News. The Outlaw. I hope I’ll be better enough to go to that! There’s all this talk about her cleavage. Apparently it has to be seen.’
‘George Formby’s on as well.’
‘Damn George Formby.’
‘I thought you might like him. He comes from your part of the world.’
‘That means I can see through him. Ukuleles!’
Ellen produced the chocolate which he accepted quite civilly but deferred eating it and lit up the stump of cigarette.
‘I’m clapped out, sis,’ he said. ‘Just in my twenties and clapped out.’ He spluttered through the cigarette and banged his chest. ‘Your health,’ he said, ‘you’re nothing without your health.’ He felt so genuinely and deeply sorry for himself that he was generous. ‘Dad used to say you were nothing without your health. That’s what he would say about you. When he told me. “As long as she has her health,” he said, ‘I'll be satisfied.”‘
So he had talked about her - Colin had alluded to it and, she was well aware, fibbed now and then, fibbed to please, which was forgivable. But this sounded true. So he had thought about her. She choked down the feeling that welled in her throat.
‘Am I like him at all?’ she asked, finally summoning up the courage.
‘I’ve been thinking that over and over, sis,’ said Colin, snapping off two squares of chocolate. 'I’m coming to conclusions and when I get there I’ll tell you but one thing: we’ve both got his eyes. And his hair. Both of us have the same hair.’
He rolled back on the pillows, talk done for the moment. Ellen knew, even after their short experiences together, that to press him would be of no use.
He had fed well. He seemed to doze. She took the ravaged tray downstairs and went over what mattered. Same eyes. Same hair. Sam had always liked her hair.
He had talked about her.
By the time the thaw came she and Sam were deep in love. Better than before, she thought. Better than the snatched times, better than the honeymoon, better than the first year, better than they could have imagined. Shift work, Sam said, was not so bad after all, it gave them the freedom of the afternoon when Joe was at school.
It was a time of their lives. It was them, it was sex, it was relief, it was freedom for her - partly because of Colin - and the discovery of a father, it was the abandonment of Alex, it was fatalism for Sam, but a fierce accepting even joyous fatalism, and for Ellen it was the discovered way to have and to hold, to conquer and to keep. It was the time when all that was curled up and enfolded in the expectation of life uncurled, unfolded, undid the disciplined and oppressive instincts of years, and in that house in that small condemned yard in that thawing, bleak town, they knew that they loved each other and could do this, could do this, could do this.