Christmas in the Snow (3 page)

‘Ha! Listen to this . . .’ Isobel laughed, reading from her own year-nine report card: ‘“Isobel is a likeable rogue.”’

‘Sounds like they had the measure of you,’ Allegra chuckled. ‘Who called you that?’

‘Mr Telfer.’

‘Oh God, Smellfer! Poor man, having you in his class!’ she guffawed. ‘Stacey Watkins always deliberately wore a purple lace bra under her white shirt, just to make him blush
when he had to tell her off about it, so God only knows how he coped with having
you
for a year.’

Isobel paused and frowned. ‘Well, I’m not sure he did. Didn’t he retire soon after?’

Allegra shrugged as she moved on to some other workbooks and scanned her academic progress with detached eyes; tall looping letters that filled two lines were repeated across pages and pages as
she finally learned to stop writing ‘d’ as ‘b’ and got her ‘j’ tail to hang below the line. Dark HB spiderwebs filled the corners – something she read as a
sign she’d finished ahead of the class, although the red pen marks through them suggested the teacher had thought otherwise. Flicking through the pages more quickly so that the contents
flashed past like a time-lapse film, she saw her struggle to write ‘3’ the right way round be resolved, only to hit a wall with division and the nine times table . . . And all the way
through, comments in red pen about ‘not concentrating’, ‘looking out of the window’, ‘giggling with the person next to you’, ‘can do better’,
‘try harder’, ‘take pride in your work’ . . .

‘Oh dear,’ Isobel groaned, rolling her eyes as she showed Allegra a history-test mark from year twelve.

‘Eleven per cent?’ Allegra asked in disbelief. ‘Iz, that is truly pathetic.’

‘Yeah, ’cos I’ve really needed to know about the repeal of the Corn Laws as an adult,’ Isobel replied ironically, before closing the book with a light slap and tossing it
dismissively on the floor beside her. ‘Honestly,
I
am so not going to be a tiger mum to Ferds. I will not give him a hard time if he can’t . . . I dunno, conjugate irregular
verbs or do fractions. I mean, half this stuff they make you learn you never even hear about again.’

Allegra paused. ‘Well, to be honest, Iz, we do use fractions in daily life, and I’ve always found it useful being able to speak French.’

‘Yes, but you’re not normal, Legs. What you do for a living, well, it’s not a realistic comparison, is it?’

Allegra sighed but didn’t reply. She was too used to her little sister always viewing her as the exception to the rule – professional success meant things like failure, despair,
disappointment, heartbreak never happened to her. Apparently.

She carried on flicking through the workbooks, following her own progress with curious detachment, trying to remember the girl she’d been when filling in these pages. But the rainbows and
pigs, which segued in middle school to arrow-shot hearts and bubble letters of boys’ names, struck no chord. She couldn’t remember being her. She couldn’t remember ever having
felt the carelessness that the consistent average of 45 per cent in the weekly tests suggested.

Only when she got to the senior-school books did bells start to ring. She remembered cracking geometry. And she saw how noticeably her writing tightened up: no more HB spiderwebs in the corners,
no more rainbows, a weekly test average that shot up from 45 per cent to nearer 90.

‘Oh my God, I’d forgotten about this. Look.’ Isobel turned her book round to show a home-made crossword, filled in with swear words. ‘I got double detention for that
– do you remember?’

‘No, but I’m not surprised.’

Isobel stuck out her tongue. ‘That’s such a knee-jerk response. You have no idea how hard it was coming up with the clues. I’m telling you, I worked harder than anyone on that
piece.’

Allegra tutted, pulling out some school photographs that had the telltale dark brown cardboard mounts but which their mother had never got round to framing.

Isobel, bored of reading about her academic failures, reached for the next box. It was heavy and rattled as she moved it, then pulled off the sellotape in long strips. The flaps opened and she
groaned, taking out a 1,000-piece jigsaw of a thatched cottage next to a stream; it was the kind of chocolate-box image that was usually found in charity stores and hospital gift shops. ‘I
don’t believe it. I clearly remember saying I never wanted to see this thing again.’

‘That’ll be why it’s taped shut in a box up here, then,’ Allegra murmured, staring at a photo of her and Isobel taken in the junior school, matching in their blue check
polyester school dresses, heads inclined towards one another, Allegra’s arm round Isobel’s shoulders, both of them missing several teeth. They had been, what – seven and eight
then? Maybe eight and nine?

Apart from the teeth, she didn’t think they had much changed. Isobel’s fair hair was more of a flaxen blonde back then, and of course her freckles were in full riot because the
picture had been taken in the summer, and Allegra’s hair was too short now for plaits. But both sisters still had the distinctive strong eyebrows that were enjoying a fashion moment, and
neither one of them had yet grown into their mouths, which threatened to touch ear to ear when they smiled. The little girls they’d once been still lived on inside them and yet . . .

‘But why would Mum even keep this? It was, like, the worst holiday in history. I don’t ever want to be reminded of it. I mean, it did not stop raining once.’

Allegra blinked at her sister with silent compassion. It wasn’t because of the rain that Isobel wanted to forget it, although she remembered all too clearly that fortnight camping in
Wales, when it had rained so hard that even the sheep tried to nose their way into the tent for shelter. There had been nothing to do but read and complete this jigsaw, and Allegra thought she
could still remember the prickly feeling of the tartan nylon-backed ‘camping carpet’ that covered the groundsheet in the living area. They had sat on it for hours, cross-legged like
they were now, buttering malt loaf in gloved hands and drinking tea from enamel cups as rain and hail pelted the tent like rubber bullets and their mother cried into a sleeping bag behind nylon
walls.

‘Starburst!’ Isobel picked up a large turquoise soft toy horse, with purple mane, holding it out and inspecting it for flaws. ‘I thought Mum binned her years ago.’

‘Apparently not,’ Allegra grinned, one eyebrow arched at her sister’s enduring excitement for the My Little Pony. She looked down at the next picture – still side by
side, Allegra’s arm still round Isobel’s shoulder, but where Allegra’s hair remained in plaits, her top button done up, Isobel’s had a faint pink-tinted streak and eyeliner
heavily ringed her blue eyes. It had happened by then.

She whipped her eyes away, hurriedly pushing the card-mounted photos back into the box. She had seen enough. Isobel was happily rifling through their old, most beloved toys, so she popped open
the metal clasps on a black ridged Samsonite suitcase. Inside was a carefully folded cache of baby clothes, most hand-sewn and hand-knitted, surprisingly little in pink. As the fifth generation of
only girls born to her mother’s line, any fascination with pink had long since worn off, and the mantra ‘You come from a long line of mothers’ was instilled early on. Both their
mother and grandmother had pointedly taught them how to change a fuse, light a barbecue, set a fire, bleed a radiator . . . The clear message being, they didn’t need boys round here.

Allegra held up a red hand-knitted cardigan. ‘Iz, check this out. Ferds would look great in this.’

Isobel looked up, gasping with delight at the sight of the cardigan and dropping Starburst without a second thought. ‘I remember that. Do you remember it?’

‘I think so. Granny made it, didn’t she?’

‘Granny must have made most of this stuff,’ Isobel said excitedly, rummaging through gingham baby playsuits and Aran jumpers, smocked dresses and print blouses, her eyes growing wide
with nostalgia. She held up a pale yellow cotton dress with pintucks on the front and baby-blue cross stay stitching. ‘Just look at the quality of
that
. It’s better than
anything you could find in Dior.’

Allegra knew Iz had never set foot in Dior in her life, and as far as she remembered, the label in their clothes had always been BHS.

She watched her sister revelling in these mementos of times past, wondering why she couldn’t feel the same excitement. For her, everything in front of them was tinged with sadness, showing
a selective view of how things had really been, these bite-sized chunks of their childhood preserving only their Sunday-best clothes and not the ones torn climbing trees in the park, showing the
childish love of rainbows in every crayon-coloured sky and not the darker, angrier doodles in red and black biro that had followed, a jigsaw that had been their only view in a cold, wet Welsh
field.

She had hoped there might be answers here, but their mother had doctored the past, airbrushing it into something prettier than it had really been, distilling it to just a few school books, baby
clothes and toys, the standard heirloom mainstays that were incontrovertible proof that they’d been just like everyone else after all. There was nothing here to suggest or, more importantly,
account for why their childhood had stopped as suddenly as a car slamming into a tree.

And now it was too late. Time had run out. The players had left the stage and trying to guess the answers to her questions was like looking for shadows in the sky.

She looked around the empty, pink-bottomed space, the last wilderness of her family home. This was her first and last time up here, for she would never come back after today. The new owners were
collecting the keys tomorrow and some other family’s history would seep into these walls.

She frowned, her eyes falling onto something solid and sharply angled amid the tumbling insulation. Reaching for her phone in her back pocket, she turned on the torch. What was that in the far
corner?

The beam of light found a box, half caved in, below the eaves.

‘There’s something over there.’

‘What?’ Isobel looked up from admiring a pair of black patent T-bar baby shoes. ‘Well, if you think I’m going over there to get it, think again,’ Iz grimaced,
scowling at the marshmallow sea that separated her from it.

‘No, it’s fine – I’ll go,’ Allegra said, pushing up the sleeves of her jumper.

‘Really? Is it worth the bother? It’s probably just a box of cables or light bulbs or something.’

‘Well, I’d better check to be sure, seeing as we won’t be coming back.’

Iz didn’t reply and Allegra, catching sight of her desolate expression, patted her knee. ‘You carry on going through the baby clothes.’

Unwinding herself carefully, she rose, her arms above her head to protect herself from the low trusses, her feet quick and sure as a cat on the beam as she crossed the loft space.

‘What’s in it?’ Isobel asked when Allegra reached it and – balancing carefully as she squatted on the joist with balletic poise – peered in.

Allegra gasped as her phone’s torch beam lit up the dark, dusty box. ‘Oh, Iz! I think . . . I think it’s a cuckoo clock!’

‘What? Let me see! Let me see!’ Isobel was up on her feet in a flash, sadly forgetting all about the low beams, and back down on her knees again in an instant, clutching her head in
her arms. ‘Owwww! Shit! Shitshitshit.’

‘Iz! Are you OK?’

‘No!’ Isobel wailed, pounding the ply with her fist for a few moments. Allegra waited for her to calm down.

‘You OK?’ she asked again a minute later.

‘No.’ Isobel’s reply was sullen, but she had stopped beating the floor at least.

‘Wait there. I’ll come back.’

‘Bring the clock!’ Isobel said, whipping up her head.

Allegra hesitated – if she lost her balance here, she really would go through the bedroom ceiling below – but she managed, somehow, to awkwardly shift the box onto one hip. It was
much heavier than she anticipated and only just fit under her arm as she tentatively made her way back.

‘Let me see,’ Allegra said, putting the box down gently and checking her sister’s hair for signs of a wound. ‘No, no, it looks OK. No blood. Are you feeling
OK?’

‘Yeah. You always had two heads, right?’

Isobel grinned as Allegra groaned. ‘You are such a drama queen.’

‘I know!’ Iz giggled. ‘Now show me that clock.’

Allegra pulled it out carefully. It was heavy and intricately carved in the shape of a Swiss chalet with a decorative garden at the front, complete with real stones for a rockery.

‘I love it!’ Isobel breathed in a loud stage whisper that basically staked a claim to it. She held out her hands and Allegra passed it over, herself peering at the various windows
and doors that were shuttered up for now. ‘Do you think it still works?’

‘How would I know?’

‘Legs, you know everything.’

‘I do not know everything.’

‘Well, you know everything
I
would ever need to know.’

Allegra gave up. ‘I’m sure there are specialists who could get it going again for us. It’s so beautiful,’ she said, trailing one finger lightly over the individually
tiled roof.

‘I know. I wonder what it’s doing up here. Why has Mum never brought it down?’

‘She must have forgotten about it. It is in just about the most inaccessible area of the house and you can’t see it from the ladder.’

‘Or maybe it was Dad’s?’ Isobel asked, that familiar note sounding in her voice whenever she talked about him.

‘Maybe.’

They were both quiet for a moment.

‘You should have it,’ Isobel said, thrusting it towards her.

‘Why me?’ Allegra frowned. ‘You clearly love it.’

‘Yes, but I always get everything.’

‘Because you have a beautiful home and a family who can make use of these things. Let’s face it, a cuckoo clock is hardly going to be appreciated in my flat.’ It was true. Her
flat in Poplar, bought with her first bonus, was never going to win any design awards, but it was a twelve-minute walk from the office and – not that she’d ever admit to Isobel –
it was the office that was her true home anyway; there was no room for cuckoo clocks there.