Snowfall Read online

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/hesterrowan

  Contents

  Hester Rowan

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hester Rowan

  Snowfall

  Hester Rowan

  Hester Rowan was born and brought up in rural Northamptonshire, one of the fortunate means-tested generation whose further education was free. She went from her village school via high school to London University, where she read history.

  She served for nine years as an education officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force, then worked variously as a teacher, a clerk in a shoe factory, a civil servant and in advertising. In the 1960s she opted out of conventional work and joined her partner in running a Norfolk village store and post office, where she began writing fiction in her spare time. Hester Rowan also wrote 10 crime novels as Sheila Radley.

  Chapter One

  I should never have come.

  Excitement had begun to stir the other passengers as the aircraft descended below the grey woolly muffler of cloud, and we could see the wintry earth for the first time since leaving England. ‘Look,’ cried the girl beside me to her friends, ‘the Alps! Aren’t they magnificent?’

  I looked too, and was not impressed. Television, I thought sourly, destroys our sense of wonder. I’d seen aerial views of the Alps, on film, sufficiently often for the peaks and valleys – far below and away to the south – to appear as familiar and unremarkable as the choppy icing-sugar landscape that always decorates the top of our family Christmas cake.

  But it was unfair to blame television for my disenchantment. Had Matt been beside me, as we had once planned, I would have bounced with excitement. How he had teased me, when he took me ski-ing at Aviemore the previous winter and I had exclaimed over the snowy steepness of the Cairngorms!

  ‘You poor innocent lowlander,’ he’d laughed, ‘these are hillocks, compared with the Alps. Tell you what, that’s where we’ll go next year – I’ll take you to my favourite village in the Austrian Tyrol. You’ll love it, Katy darling.’

  ‘Katy …’ I could hear his voice, deep and slow and warm, alive in my memory still although he had been dead for almost ten months. ‘Katy darling …’

  I turned my face to the window again, but now the only features I could see were Matt’s. I had been a fool to come. I might have known that this journey would revive all my grief.

  I had tried so hard, in the past few weeks, to put into practice the unsolicited advice my older friends had been giving me ever since Matt’s death: to Pull Myself Together, to Put the Past Behind Me, to Pick up the Threads, to Try to Forget. Presumably these clichés give some kind of comfort to those who utter them; to the bereaved they are meaningless, because impossible to obey. How could I forget Matt? How could I pull myself together when, because a part of me had died with him, I was no longer myself?

  But since I was fond of the friends who gave the advice, I tried to please them by appearing to take it. The banality of their chosen phrases did not lessen their affection and concern for me, and so for their sakes I did my best to hide my emotions. I couldn’t think of Matt without weeping, so I attempted not to think of him. I put my heart in cold storage, and I clamped the door.

  And it had worked, after a fashion. Bereavement is rather like having major surgery: in time one gets going again, even though parts that once seemed essential may be missing. But I realized now that for me to come alone on this trip that Matt and I were to have taken together, was about as sensible as it would be for a hospital patient to play squash before the stitches are removed.

  Back in London, it had seemed logical enough. Matt had been killed while climbing in his beloved Alps, and had been buried where he would have wished, in a climbers’ plot in the village cemetery below the mountain; and I felt a need to see his grave. It was as simple as that.

  But now that I was actually on my way – and not on a solitary, dignified pilgrimage but with a planeload of cheerful holidaymakers bound for the winter sports resorts – I knew that I shouldn’t have come. My emotional stability was far too superficial, too precarious. A visit to the place where Matt had died was bound to break down my newly-erected defences and emphasize my loneliness. But it was too late now to turn back.

  The aircraft landed at Munich and I trudged despondently after the other passengers, through customs clearance and out to the waiting coaches. Those of us who were going on to the Tyrol were driven through the February streets, black and wet with sleet, to the Hauptbahnhof.

  The railway terminus was like a vast cavern which had been declared the venue of an international skiers’ convention. Everyone seemed to be either wearing or carrying ski gear, and everyone looked happy. Winter-white faces smiled eagerly, turning in the direction of Alpine snow and sun, and bronzed faces grinned, invigorated, as they returned from the mountains.

  We boarded our train, and began the journey to Innsbruck. I had seen from a map that the train would go south from Munich before turning west along the narrow valley of the river Inn, and that the high Alps would gradually close in on either side. It had promised to be a spectacular part of the journey, but now that I was here I felt too depressed to care. Besides, the sleet of Munich had thickened to snow which blotted out the view, making the landscape no more dramatic than that of my native Berwickshire. It had snowed there too, when I was at home at Christmas.

  I had vowed that I wouldn’t think about home, or the events of my last visit. It was too painful. But better to think of that than to keep thinking of Matt who was dead …

  It had been two years since I was last at home for Christmas and New Year; over a year since I’d been home at all. When I first went to work in London I had been homesick and had returned whenever I could raise the fare – but once I met Matt, home was where he was. And then, for months after his death, I couldn’t bring myself to face my family.

  But by the time Christmas came, I longed to see them all again. The lighted shop windows in London, the rush of present-buying, the decorated stores and offices, the excitement of my girl-friends who were going home for the festivities, combined to remind me of my family’s happy Christmases past. I went up to Scotland laden with presents and nostalgia.

  I should have known better, of course. I should have realized that Christmas is a season that puts a considerable strain on the emotions. But as I began to help with the time-honoured trimmings – the tree, the candles, the holly, the tinsel – I found that I was hoping for a small miracle: that the observance of our family Christmas customs would restore me to happiness by recapturing some of the wonder and faith and mystery that I had experienced as a child.

  But the miracle didn’t happen. Family
togetherness no longer worked; or perhaps it never had, except in rose-tinted retrospect. The adults were over-spent and irritable, the children were over-excited and obstreperous. By the afternoon of Christmas Eve I knew that, for me, the magic had gone for good. As I helped to decorate the tree and listened to the choir of King’s College singing their nine carols, I was assailed with a sense of irremediable loss: not only of Matt, but of the last vestiges of my childhood. The firelight and the scent of the fir tree became suddenly so intolerably poignant that I had burst into uncontrollable tears.

  The train pulled up, jerking me sharply into the present. We had reached the Austrian border, and customs officers came through the carriages for a perfunctory look at our passports. I glanced idly through mine as I waited to hand it over. The photograph had been taken two summers ago, when I went with a girl-friend to Spain. I was a different person, then. I was twenty-three at the time, and no doubt thought myself completely adult; but in the photograph I looked, with my round face and long straight hair, incredibly young and naïve – Alice in Wonderland personified.

  Well, a good deal had happened to me since then; and Christmas at home had completed the process of disenchantment.

  By mid-afternoon on Christmas Day I could no longer bear the artificial jollity, and I had escaped for a solitary walk in the snow. I had hardly left the gate before I heard my name called, and saw my father tramping after me.

  For the first five minutes he talked about his veterinary practice, but I was not deceived. My mother, for all her obsessional preoccupation with the provision of food rather than the creation of domestic harmony, doesn’t miss much; my dramatic flood of tears had obviously been discussed. I could imagine that my father had tried to reassure her by saying, ‘Just wait till I get the chance, and I’ll have a wee chat with the lass’. I had always been his favourite. I’d always hung on his arm when we walked together, but not now.

  He cleared his throat, several times. Finally he said, ‘I’m glad you came, Katy. We missed you sorely last year.’

  What could I say to that? I certainly hadn’t missed them. I’d hardly given them a thought, once I’d posted their presents.

  ‘You were staying with friends?’ he went on awkwardly.

  My letters at the time had been necessarily evasive. ‘Er – no. No, I stayed in my own flat.’

  ‘But surely you weren’t by yourself, over Christmas?’

  ‘No. A friend spent Christmas with me.’

  There was a long pause. I hoped that he’d leave it at that, because I wasn’t going to lie about my relationship with Matt. I didn’t want to hurt my conventional, morally hide-bound father, but if he insisted on pursuing the subject I intended to tell him the truth.

  Pa made an audible effort to sound casual. ‘Would this by any chance be the young man you wrote to us about, the one who was killed in a climbing accident last spring?’

  ‘Yes, Matt Danby. We were in love.’

  ‘I see … I can understand your unhappiness, then. Poor Katy – I’m sorry, my dear. I thought that must have been how it was, from the tone of your letter. But as you hadn’t mentioned him before you told us about his death, I didn’t quite know whether you – er –’

  I hunched my shoulders against the snow, digging my hands further into my pockets. ‘But you guessed,’ I said flatly.

  My father stopped and turned towards me. His broad red face was puckered with cold, and the vertical furrows on either side of his nose looked deeper. The snowflakes melted almost as soon as they landed on his moustache, but they had settled on his tweed cap like a thick white pie-crust. He looked so woebegone that I longed to be able to throw my arms around him and reassure him that what he had guessed was not true.

  Instead, I looked down and made patterns in the snow with the toe of one of my fashionable, impractical boots. ‘I’d rather you didn’t tell Mother,’ I muttered. ‘I mean, there’s no point in upsetting her now that he’s dead.’ I looked up. ‘But if you want to know, yes: Matt and I were lovers, and when he was in England he lived with me in my flat.’

  ‘Oh … Katy …’

  Outraged morality would have been easier to bear than his anguished reproach. I turned away and tried to shrug it off: ‘Things are different in cities, Pa.’

  He shook his head. The cold had made his gentle brown eyes water, so that it seemed that he was crying. He was grieved enough for it, I knew that. ‘But they should not be different,’ he lamented. ‘Oh, Katy – how could you enter into a casual relationship like that?’

  A belated sense of guilt made me flare with anger. ‘It wasn’t casual! I told you, we loved each other.’

  ‘But then why didn’t you marry?’ he asked, bewildered. ‘Oh – you’re not going to tell me that he was married already –?’

  ‘No he wasn’t!’ I drew a steadying breath of cold air. ‘Look, Pa, you mustn’t misunderstand: I’d already decided, long before I met Matt, that I don’t ever want to get married. And if you need to know why, I think that marriage is a commitment to raise a family, and I simply don’t want to have any children.’

  It’s not the most tactful thing to say to either of one’s parents. Pa took it like a blow, rocking back on his heels for an instant. He looked suddenly smaller, almost elderly.

  He nodded, sadly. ‘Yes, I can see your point. Children aren’t always the unmixed blessing that we sometimes like to pretend. They can bring a good deal of anguish, as well as joy.’

  I was ashamed of the double hurt I’d inflicted. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said lamely. ‘But you wouldn’t have wanted me to lie to you, would you?’

  He turned for home, shuffling through the snow like an old man. ‘No – no, I’m glad you didn’t do that. But I won’t lie either. I hoped that a girl of your upbringing would have more self-control than to – than to give way to your instincts. And you needn’t talk to me about love. After all, your mother and I –’

  I had let him ramble on. I’d heard it all before, when my elder brother had wanted to marry while he was still at university. My parents had been engaged for over three years, while they saved what they thought was the right amount of money to start married life on, and during all that time he had asked her for – and she had wanted to offer – nothing more than chaste kisses. Even though it was war time, and he went away to fight, they had remained true to their principles. I marvelled at their self-control, but I found their behaviour incomprehensible.

  ‘But things are different now, Pa.’ I tried to explain. ‘Times have changed. My generation is different from yours.’

  This had angered him, though I hadn’t meant it to. ‘Your generation is weak!’ he exploded. ‘You have no sense of honour and decency!’

  I should have let it pass, but I wanted to defend Matt as much as myself. ‘Honour and decency?’ I retorted. ‘All you’re talking about is social convention. And as for weakness – my generation has a different sense of priorities, thank goodness! We happen to think that it’s a lot more decent and civilized to make love rather than to go to war and kill people!’

  And so we had a row, a bitter slanging match in the course of which we said unforgivable things to each other about selfishness and hypocrisy. The result was that I had stormed back to the house, packed my case, and persuaded my brother to drive me to Berwick to catch the first train that went in the direction of London.

  Once there, I set about changing my whole way of life. I was no longer the Katy I had once been at home, nor yet the Katy who had loved and been loved by Matt Danby, and so I tried to start afresh: changed my flat, changed my job, had my hair cut and shaped to frame my thinner, sadder face. And then, as a necessary prelude to the attempt to come to terms with my new identity, I embarked on this journey to the Tyrol to see the place where Matt was buried.

  The snow had stopped by the time the train reached Innsbruck, but the sky was darkening towards evening and the mountains that surround the city were invisible. But the village of Kirchwald is situated to the south of th
e city, high up on a sloping plateau, and here on the open snowfields there was still half an hour of daylight left.

  A Volkswagen mini-bus had been sent from the Gasthof Alte Post to meet the train. As we approached the outskirts of the village, with the chains on the tyres biting deep into the snow on the final hill, I saw what I recognized as the cemetery – a walled plot of ground set back a little from the road, with an open gateway topped by a low bell tower.

  I knew that I had to visit it immediately, even before I checked in to the hotel. Already the upper snow slopes were turning a shadowy blue, and if I went to the hotel first the light would have gone completely. The mini-bus had already passed the cemetery, and was nearing the centre of the small village; I saw a chemist’s shop and asked the driver to drop me, pretending that I needed something for a sore throat and saying that I would walk on to the hotel.

  It wasn’t difficult to find Matt’s grave. Most of the walled cemetery was occupied by the graves of local people, surmounted by carved wooden crosses, but in one corner were several simple headstones incised with the names of men of different nationalities who had all died young. These must be the graves of the climbers who, like Matt, had been killed on the Nockspitze. His colleague at the London office of his firm, the man who had sought me out to break the news of Matt’s death, had told me that this was where he had been buried; the Vienna office would, he said, make arrangements for the erection of a headstone.

  And here it was. I had only to see the name MATTHEW, and I knew that this was it.

  I acknowledged now that one of the reasons why I had come was that, subconsciously, I had never been able to believe that he really was dead. I’d never admitted it to myself, but somewhere at the back of my mind had been an irrational hope that I would get to this village and find that everything Matt’s colleague had told me was untrue.

  Now, I had final proof.

  I closed my eyes, but I didn’t cry. I had trained myself too well, in the weeks since Christmas. The cold hard lump that had once been my heart rose painfully to my throat, but it didn’t dissolve. My defences remained intact. All I could feel was numbness, desolation.