No Way Of Telling (6 page)

Amy did try, but the bale of hay sank into the snow like a rock and stuck, so she had to give up the idea of riding and pull again instead. It slithered along quite easily downhill, and again the sheep followed, trotting hurriedly down the broad furrows scooped out by the bales. Last of all came Mick, advancing and stopping as Amy told him. Before they reached home the air clouded and she saw snowflakes beginning to settle on her grandmother’s head and shoulders. They dragged the bales into the shed and Amy waited for just long enough to break open one of them and loosen the hay so that the ewes could have their reward, before hastening inside after Mrs Bowen and Mick.

“My feet are like icicles—and sopping wet. It’s that old snow in my boots. Oh look, Granny—it’s coming down thick—we were just in time!”

They were thankful as well as triumphant.

“What we need,” said Mrs Bowen, “is a good warm right through. The kettle’s on and we’ll have a cup of tea in half a minute. Take those stockings off, Amy—there’s a dry pair on the line for you. I don’t know why it should be so, but wet stockings put a chill in the marrow of a person’s bones quicker than anything else.”

It was a relief to be home, and home was so snug. They were pleased with themselves for bringing four of Mr Protheroe’s sheep down from the hill. Success made them almost forget about the stranger who had so much frightened them the night before.

Snow fell steadily. It fell without wind, without commotion, dropping quietly down as though it meant to go on for a long time and had no need to hurry.

The morning passed by in peaceful activity, accompanied by music from the radio, turned low enough not to interfere with conversation
;
as soon as a serial story began they switched it off. Amy had spread newspaper at one end of the scrubbed table and was polishing the brasses. At the other end Mrs Bowen kneaded dough. Presently she set it to rise. Then she wiped her hands on her apron.

“I think I’ll run my eye over the stores now, Amy, so as to satisfy my mind. Not that we’re short—I don’t mean that—but considering we may have to keep going on what we’ve got for we don’t quite know how long, it might be as well to make sure just what it is we
have
got.”

And opening the doors of the big cupboard that stood against the far wall of the front-kitchen, Mrs Bowen proceeded to count aloud the jars of bottled fruit and the tins of this and that ranged neatly inside. There were various canisters with names painted on them: lentils, rice, currants, sago. Mrs Bowen gave each one a shake in passing to judge how full it was.

“Plenty of lentils. Plenty of rice. Not much sago—well, that’s no hardship considering we neither of us care for it.”

“Don’t get any more sago, Granny—I hate it,” said Amy. “Why don’t you get something we both specially like instead, and then I’ll paint the name on the tin for you—crystallised ginger!”

“H’m—you’ll be lucky!” said her grandmother.

There were pots of jam and pots of marmalade. There was tea and sugar and dried milk. Other sorts of food supplies were kept in the cold side-kitchen but they both knew well enough what these were without the inconvenience of having to go and look: a ham, and the remains of a flitch of bacon done up in muslin against the flies, and one of Mrs Protheroe’s huge homemade cheeses, and several squares of Protheroe butter were all piled on to a wooden rack hung from hooks in the ceiling. There were strings of onions out in the side-kitchen, and bunches of herbs, and an earthenware crock partly full of salted runner-beans, and jars and jars of pickles. And in spite of it being now nearly the end of February they had still a few apples left—cookers on one shelf, eaters on another. Mrs Bowen knew all about providing food for long isolated winters: she had had years of practice.

“We shan’t go hungry, that’s a comfort,” she said as she closed the cupboard doors. “It’s only fresh milk we have to go without. I know we ought to keep a goat, Amy—it’s folly for us not to—only somehow I can’t bring myself to fancy the taste of goat’s milk.”

Amy went on polishing.

“I wonder who he was, Granny—that man.”

“Oh—him!”

Mrs Bowen came and sat down at the table facing Amy.

“I don’t suppose we shall ever know,” she said.

“Shan’t we? What if he stops for a day or two in the village? What if it turns out he’s old Mrs Hamer’s long-lost son?”

“Now Amy, that’s nothing but nonsense you’re talking—Mrs Hamer’s got no long-lost son that ever I’ve heard of.”

Amy rubbed the knob of the poker with extreme vigour, held it up, looked at it, twisted it this way and that to make it sparkle, and laid it down.

“You don’t suppose he’s a murderer, do you, Granny?”

“He didn’t murder us,” said Mrs Bowen, rather shortly.

“I just can’t help wondering who he was, that’s all. He was so different. And he was hurt. I think he’d broken his arm.”

“It couldn’t have been broken, Amy. When an arm gets broken the fingers don’t have any power in them. I distinctly remember he put that hand on the latch of the door and opened it—so it wasn’t a broken arm.”

There was a pause while the scene recurred to both of them, detailed and yet somehow remote.

“He stole our blankets and meat and our lantern, so he was a thief anyway,” said Amy, summing up.

“Well yes, there’s no denying he took what wasn’t his, and he took it without asking,” said Mrs Bowen.” And yet it struck me he didn’t know what he was doing half the time. He acted like he was in a daze. Those were funny sort of provisions he took, Amy—a jar of pickles and raw meat. He may have helped himself to a few apples, but they wouldn’t do much for him. There’s plenty more in our side-kitchen would have made better eating than that. What about all the bacon up there on the cratch—he’d have found it a lot easier to cook a bit of bacon than a leg of mutton. And there’s that pile of butter and a whole cheese not started—he missed to see them and all he had to do was raise his head.”

“Maybe he was in too big a hurry.”

“He was in a hurry right enough,” said Mrs Bowen. “And yet—there was a moment when I had the feeling—” She stopped and lifted her hands and let them drop with a helpless gesture.

“Go on, Granny—what kind of a feeling?”

“That’s what I can’t say. I don’t exactly know. Now Amy, quick—turn on the radio. Let’s hear what they have to tell us about the weather.”

The forecast gave warning of more snow expected, and the news that followed was chiefly about the widespread chaos already caused: roads blocked, trains at a standstill, buses overturned, people stranded in cars and lorries, expectant mothers rescued by helicopter.

“There’s many by the sound of it worse off than we are,” said Mrs Bowen.

That afternoon Amy found it hard to settle down. At first she thought it might be a good opportunity for writing a letter to her father, and she got her pen and ink and paper out of the table drawer, but after a line or two Australia seemed so very far away and the letter so dull that she left it lying on the table and wandered restlessly through the side-kitchen and into the shed, not allowing Mick to come with her for fear he should agitate the sheep. As soon as she appeared they raised their heads with nervous expectancy and took a few steps towards her.

“What is it you want?” she said, speaking aloud so as to accustom them to the sound of her voice. “You’ve got hay to eat, and shelter. I can’t give you water. It would freeze straight off. You’ll have to lick snow—that’s what sheep do in this sort of weather.”

It worried her whenever she thought of the fifth ewe—alone somewhere, struggling perhaps, hoping for help that never came. Snow was still falling, but thinly, and the air was brighter. After the heat of the front-kitchen the contrasting sharp cold was almost a relief. Amy looked in the hen-house. There were six eggs. An old speckled hen sitting fluffed up on a nesting-box cackled at her disagreeably, not liking to be disturbed. Two of the eggs were warm, just laid. She put all six safely in a bucket and looked round for the hacker meaning to chop some kindling, more as a way of occupying herself than to be useful for there were plenty of sticks chopped already. The cold was beginning to bite through her jersey. After a minute or so, failing to find the hacker, she went inside.

“Six eggs, Granny, and another one soon—unless that old speckledy hen’s just having a rest. Do you know where the hacker is?”

“Why, hanging up I suppose, where you put it last time you did some chopping,” said Mrs Bowen with a touch of severity. To forget to hang the hacker on its proper hook and to leave it instead lying carelessly on the ground was a well-known failing of Amy’s. “You’d better find it, Amy—it’s not going to do that hacker any good to have snow piled on top of it.”

Amy pulled on her leggings. Then she went into the side-kitchen and put on her coat and her boots, and then she stamped back into the front-kitchen and put on her scarf and her gloves. She felt cross with her boots because they were wet and clammy. Her mind refused to concentrate. So many worries kept flitting in and out and not one of them would stop for long enough to let her solve it: there was the ewe that was lost, and there was the hacker which she felt sure she had neither hung up nor left lying on the ground, and there was the difficulty of writing to her father, and the difficulty of giving Mick a run when there was nowhere for him to run except in the shed which was full of sheep. Amy sighed. Mrs Bowen, who was mending a pillowcase, looked up.

“Whatever is the matter with you, Amy? You’re so jumpety.”

“I know I am. I feel I want to do something, only I don’t know what it is, and everything I get started on turns out to be wrong and just a nuisance. Perhaps I’ll take Mick out the front away from the ewes and clear a path for him there.”

But no sooner had Amy begun laboriously shovelling than she realised that snowflakes were no longer falling round her; the air was suddenly empty. All at once she knew exactly what it was she wanted to do. She flew into the cottage.

“It’s stopped snowing, Granny—and I’m going to make a toboggan, the way Ivor showed me. That’s what we need this weather, I’ve just thought—a toboggan!”

“Why Amy, what a good idea!” said Mrs Bowen, thankful that she should have hit on a cure for her fidgets.

“And when I’ve done it we’re going up to the haystack, me and Mick, to see if that old ewe’s there yet. Do you think she might be?”

“It’s worth a look,” said Mrs Bowen.

Amy put Mick to wait in the corner beyond the chopping-block while she was working.

“You sit still, Mick, until I’m ready—if you so much as wag your tail those ewes are bound to think you’re after them.”

From down behind the hen-house she dragged clear a sheet of corrugated tin left over from the time they had closed in the north end of the shed. Two winters ago she had stood by and watched Ivor Protheroe make his toboggan, and helped him whenever he let her, so she knew how it was done. Ivor had told her that corrugated tin made the best and fastest toboggans of all. He said it was a fact. He said he had proved it.

Amy stood on the tin in order to keep it firmly anchored while she banged away with a hammer, her object being first to fold in the two jagged corners and then to double over the last four inches at one end. It reminded her of hemming in needlework classes, only this was done not for neatness but for safety: Ivor had impressed upon her what awful consequences there would be if any raw edges or spiky points of tin were left sticking up in front.

By further banging and pulling she then managed to bend up another ten or twelve inches at right angles to form a kind of a prow. As an additional measure of prudence she muffled this upstanding front in a sack, which she tied on tightly with binder twine. Finally, for pulling she borrowed the side-kitchen clothes-line. It was finished! Amy stood back and contemplated her handiwork. Ivor would have done better, no doubt, but for her particular purpose this was good enough, Amy decided. Mindful of the sheep, she carried Mick several yards up the hill and told him to wait for her there while she went back to the shed and fetched her new toboggan.

Once again she toiled up the steep slippery slope, treading squarely in the furrows they had made that morning and which the recent fall of snow had blurred but by no means obliterated. By the time she reached the top the sun shone in a clear sky and the whole world was divided equally into a brilliant golden blue above and glittering golden white below: blue and gold and white, nothing more. She might have thought herself the sole form of life for miles except that a hare must have dashed erratically along the ridge only a few minutes earlier and vanished, leaving behind its message of scuffed-up prints. And the lonely mewing cry of a buzzard reached her faintly; she saw it half a mile further up the valley, turning loosely like a dry leaf in an eddy of air. The day was so bright with sun and snow she had to narrow her eyes.

“Oh Mick,” she cried, using one of her grandmother’s favourite expressions of delight, “isn’t it a sight for sinners!”

She rushed at Mick to chase him ahead of her down to the stack, and he bounded sideways and fell over, and sprang up and bounded on again. Amy followed running, but the toboggan came gliding behind her so swiftly and lightly over the top of the snow that it was hard to keep her ankles out of its way. So she stopped and straddling it rather awkwardly, sat down. She sat down—and in a flash, before she could even catch her breath, was away. The success took her by surprise. She almost hit the stack head-on, and then, swerving, nearly missed it altogether to go shooting on down the hill. Frantically she dug in both feet. The toboggan slewed round and came to a halt in a flurry of snow, facing back the way it had come. Mick danced round her, barking.

“It goes as fast as Ivor’s did,” she told him. “I’m not sure it doesn’t go a bit faster.”

But there was no ewe waiting for them in the lee of the stack and if it had not found its way there by now it probably never would. It must be stuck fast in a drift somewhere, and the thought of a plight so terrible damped Amy’s enjoyment. Soberly she hauled out two bales from under the plastic sheeting and, puffing and grunting, got them aboard her toboggan. There were about fourteen bales left, she reckoned, or perhaps a few more. Bent double she dragged her load to the brow of the hill.